Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker

  Before, during, and after they died, these pirates said to their respectable contemporaries: whatever you fear—violence, destruction, the devil, death—we are that. We embrace it. We are the other. We are your nightmare. You have made us ugly, and we throw that ugliness in your face. The culture of pirates was deeply profane and blasphemous. Everything pirates did reflected their deep alienation from most aspects of European society. Unlike the generations of pirates before them, who called themselves privateers—in truth, anything but pirate for fear of the death penalty that soon came with the name—the freebooters of the early eighteenth century said yes, we are criminals, we are pirates, we are that name. Two men on the gallows in 1718 cried up, “A Pyrate’s Life to be the only Life a Man of any Spirit.” “Let us live while we can,” said another. “A merry Life and short one” was one of their mottoes.26

  They said these things with humor, but they also said them with rage. When asked to repent at his 1718 hanging, one pirate answered yes, “I do heartily repent; I repent I had not done more Mischief, and that we did not cut the Throats of them that took us, and [addressing the authorities] I am extreamly sorry that you an’t hanged as well as we.” Another pirate standing alongside him on the gallows piped up, “So do I.” “And I,” added a third. They “were all turned off, without making any other dying speeches.” Note that in this instance the last wish of the three pirates was not for an exchange of places, not for the execution of the members of the colonial ruling class who presided over the grim occasion and the saving of themselves, but rather for a drowning destruction of all. Some pirates, it seems, wanted the ship to go down with everyone aboard.27

  Yet the deepest meaning of piracy was revealed when in February 1722 the Royal Navy captured the two ships of Black Bart Roberts on the coast of West Africa, after crew members had tried to blow up the ship and “all go merrily to Hell together!” Knowing their gallows fate and wanting to protect the Jolly Roger, the pirates aboard one of the ships threw the colors “over-board, that they might not rise in Judgment, nor be display’d in Triumph over them” at the hanging. Pirates aboard the other ship did not succeed in throwing the flag overboard, and indeed it was taken by the naval officers of the Swallow and eventually featured on the gallows built at Cape Coast Castle, the infamous slave-trading factory where fifty-two members of Roberts’s crew met their end a month later. This particular flag “had the Figure of a Skeleton in it, and a Man pourtray’d with a flaming Sword in his Hand, intimating a Defiance of Death it self.”28 This was the meaning of the Jolly Roger, and perhaps of piracy altogether: a defiance of death itself.

  Conclusion: Blood and Gold

  IN ITS FINAL PHASE, the war turned savage. As naval captains and executioners killed more and more pirates, those who remained at large became more enraged, more desperate, more violent, and more cruel. The dialectic of terror with which I began this book reached a climax in carnage. The third and final stage in the history of pirates in the early eighteenth century commenced with the defeat and mass hanging of the pirates with Bartholomew Roberts at Cape Coast Castle in 1722 and ended in the near eradication of robbery at sea by 1726. The golden age had turned crimson.1

  If Bartholomew Roberts, who took on himself the “distribution of justice,” was the defining figure of the period between 1718 and 1722, the following phase was rather differently epitomized by the captaincy of Ned Low, who, after Roberts, probably captured more vessels than any other pirate commander. Low had worked as a merchant seaman out of London, a rigger in Boston, and a logwood cutter in Honduras. In late 1721 he led a mutiny aboard a small vessel, which launched a reign of terror that would last four years. In March 1724 Governor John Hart of Antigua provided a vivid account of Low and his murderous actions in a letter to the Council of Trade and Plantations. First he noted Low’s isolation, which is important for understanding his actions: “I do not hear that there are any more pirates, except a ship commanded by one Lowe with about fifty pirates in his crew.” Hart related that a portion of Low’s crew had recently been captured by Captain Humphrey Orme aboard HMS Winchelsea, brought to Antigua, and hanged. Hart continued that Low’s own quartermaster, Nicholas Lewis,

  gave a most terrible relation of his barbarity and bloodthirsty temper; and that particularly in the Bay of Honduras he murder’d forty five Spaniards in cold blood about twelve months past; and that some time before, he took a Portugueze ship bound home from Brazil; the Master of which had hung eleven thousand moydores of gold in a bag out of the cabbin window, and as soon as he was taken by the said Lowe, cutt the rope and lett them drop into the sea; for which Lowe cutt off the said Masters lipps and broyl’d them before his face, and afterwards murder’d the whole crew being thirty two persons.

  Just to be sure that his lordships did not think that Low was acting out of national or Protestant zeal against Spanish and Portuguese Catholic enemies, Hart added, “This Lowe is notorious also for his cruelty even to the subjects of the British Nation.” He concluded that “a greater monster never infested the seas,” and that a special proclamation should be issued “offering an ample reward to such as shou’d bring him in alive or dead.”2

  The special proclamation turned out to be unnecessary, for Low’s own crew rose up against him. Around the time of Hart’s letter, Francis Spriggs and others left him “on Account of the Barbarity he used toward those he took.” But some remained with him, sailing on, leaving behind a bloody wake until they too rebelled, throwing Low and his closest supporters into a boat, without provisions, and abandoning them to their fate on the open sea. And although representative of the last phase of piracy, Low was by no means the only captain who practiced violence on a greater scale than before. Indeed, almost all of the most violent pirate captains appeared in the final phase—Philip Roche, William Phillips, John Gow, and William Fly, all of whom murdered their captains (Gow and Fly killed other officers too) in the course of mutiny. And above (or below) all others stood Philip Lyne, who carried the pirates’ rage to its bloodiest limit. He boasted on the gallows that he had killed thirty-seven masters of vessels (he apparently kept a body count) as well as a number of their crew members, probably those who had dared to resist capture. As the violence of the pirates and the violence of the authorities against them swelled to a crescendo, the number of seamen willing to sail under the black flag declined, which in turn caused pirates to force more sailors aboard their vessels. This impressment of sorts led to several mutinies aboard the pirate ships (for example, Phillips and Fly), after which the pirates were taken and executed. When royal officials hanged Gow, Fly, Lyne, and Low (who was taken up by the French) in 1725 and 1726, the campaign of extermination came to a predictably bloody end. Pirates stood indicted as monsters, beasts, and “the common enemies of mankind.”3

  Figure 15. Ned Low in a hurricane; Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street Robbers, &c. (London, 1734).

  And yet, as we have seen, alongside this official view ran another, quite different one, in the pirates’ day and into our own. This was perhaps originally and most clearly expressed by Captain Charles Johnson in his book A General History of the Pyrates, the first volume of which was published in 1724, while pirates were still marauding on the high seas. According to Johnson, pirates were not simply the common enemy of mankind, neither brutes nor beasts of prey, but rather “Marine Heroes, the Scourge of Tyrants and Avarice, and the brave Asserters of Liberty.” He made the point with sarcasm, but the implication was clear: many of his contemporaries held precisely this view. Of Henry Avery, the “maritime Robin Hood,” Johnson wrote that there were among the people “Romantick Reports of his Greatness.” Cotton Mather acknowledged the same popular image as he battled against it. Pirates and highwaymen, Mather angrily preached, were “Monsters, whom we dignify with the title of Hero’s.” In the popular mind, the pirate was not “the common enemy of mankind” but rather the freest of mankind. This image proved th
at the law did not a criminal make.4

  The pirate, even in ignominious death, would be the stuff of legend—immediately. Walter Kennedy was motivated to turn pirate in 1718 by the stories of Henry Avery he had heard in his youth. Endless tales surrounded Edward Teach, the fearsome Blackbeard, whose villainous image suggested that he well understood his role in the play of early eighteenth-century life. A young Ben Franklin wrote, published, and hawked about the streets of Boston a ditty about Blackbeard not long after the larger-than-life character had been killed in fierce hand-to-hand combat, his head hung on the bowsprit of HMS Pearl as the vessel sailed from North Carolina back to Virginia. Bartholomew Roberts cut a dashing figure as he strolled about the decks of his ship “dressed in a crimson Damask Wastcoat and Breeches, a red Feather in his Hat, a Gold Chain round his Neck, with a Diamond Cross hanging to it.” He cut no less a figure in the conversation of the day. As an anonymous pirate explained to a man who resisted capture, “don’t you see says he them two Ships commanded by the famous Captain Roberts?” Even General Walter Hamilton of the West Indies referred to “the Great Pirate Roberts,” who was rumored far and wide to have engaged and defeated numerous men-of-war, all the while threatening to ruin the entire colonies. Ballads of “Black Barty” were written and sung in Roberts’s native Wales. And of course this was only the beginning. An entire romantic literature about pirates, for children and adults, has followed, as has a starry-eyed cinema.5

  As it happens, the duality of perception—pirate as monster, pirate as hero—is almost as old as piracy itself, originating in the days of Greek and Roman antiquity and lasting down to the present. As the classical scholar Philip de Souza has shown, the image of the pirate in ancient Greece—in, for example, the writing of the great poet Homer—emphasized heroism and contained relatively few negative connotations. This image changed dramatically with the Romans, who as part of their imperial design sought to project their sovereignty over the seas and thus developed and enshrined within their legal codes the phrase hostes humani generis to describe pirates—the very phrase used by Judge Nicholas Trott and other judges almost two millennia later. Thus the term pirate has been highly ideological from antiquity forward, functioning more or less as the maritime equivalent of barbarian—that is, anyone who was an enemy of the Romans. No matter who or what he actually was, the pirate was reduced to a criminal pure and simple, the very negation of imperial social order.6

  Pirates did not share this view, as expressed in a pithy and humorous way by an ancient sea robber who had been captured and brought before Alexander the Great, who asked him “what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea.” The pirate responded with “bold pride”: “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.” Augustine, who recorded the story in his City of God, considered it “an apt and true reply.” It would be repeated down through the centuries. A tradition developed in which smaller pirates were used as the idiom to expose and ridicule big pirates, such as those who ran governments and corporations. The dramatist John Gay used this approach in The Beggar’s Opera and Polly to attack Robert Walpole and his corrupt circle in the late 1720s. Captain Johnson was no stranger to the tactic, as his depiction of the principles of the pirates contrasted sharply with the base and venal ways of the British government. As if to make the point clear for anyone who might have missed it, royal officials and officers cheated naval sailors out of the prize money owed them after their brave and successful attacks against Blackbeard in 1719 and Roberts in 1722!7

  To think of the golden age of piracy is to imagine the gleaming object of desire, the precious metal that promised to reverse the fortunes of those who lived bitter and impoverished lives. Pirates wanted gold, and occasionally they got it. But they did not bury it. When pirates went ashore, “their first care was to find out a Tavern, where they might ease themselves of their Golden Luggage.” They did not believe in deferred gratification of any kind. Against what they saw as the forces of death, they wanted a better life, which suggests another meaning of the golden age, evoking the ancient Greek myth of Kronos, the island where all people lived in freedom, equality, harmony, and abundance. Pirates managed to make some part of the myth real, if only for a short time.8

  Pirates lost the clash with the rulers of their own day, but they have decisively won the debate ever after. They captured the good ship Popular Imagination, and three hundred years later they show no sign of surrendering it. They dared to imagine a different life, and they dared to try to live it. They could not resolve the contradictions of their times, and indeed some of them did gruesome things—they tortured, murdered, and committed atrocities. Much of this was a product of war, their declared war against the whole world and their undeclared class war against ship captains, merchants, and royal officials, but a portion of it was the gratuitous ferocity of angry men beyond control.

  We are fascinated by the violence, but the blood does hide the gold. We love pirates most of all because they were rebels. They challenged, in one way or another, the conventions of class, race, gender, and nation. They were poor and in low circumstances, but they expressed high ideals. Exploited and often abused by merchant captains, they abolished the wage, established a different discipline, practiced their own kind of democracy and equality, and provided an alternative model for running the deep-sea ship. Shadowed by the grim reaper, they stole his symbolism and laughed in his face. Pirates opposed the high and mighty of their day and by their actions became the villains of all nations. They relished the role, even though “a merry life and a short one” contained a cruel contradiction. The more that pirates built and enjoyed their merry, autonomous existence the more determined the authorities grew to destroy them. These outlaws led audacious, rebellious lives, and we should remember them as long as there are powerful people and oppressive circumstances to be resisted.9

  Notes

  Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Terrors

  1. Abel Boyer, ed., The Political State of Great Britain, 60 vols. (London, 1711–40), 28:272–73; Cotton Mather, The Vial Poured Out upon the Sea: A Remarkable Relation of Certain Pirates ... (Boston, 1726), 47–48, reprinted in Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives, ed. Daniel E. Williams (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1993), 110–17. See also Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (London, 1724, 1728; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 606–13 (hereafter cited as History of Pyrates). Throughout the book, italics are in the original unless otherwise noted. [back]

  2. Cotton Mather, The Tryals of Sixteen Persons for Piracy & c. (Boston, 1726), 14. Mather had written of another crew of pirates who had come to the gallows: “What are these PIRATES now, but so many Preachers of those things, which once they could not bear to hear the Servants of GOD Preach unto them?” See his Instructions to the Living, From the Condition of the Dead: A Brief Relation of Remarkables in the Shipwreck of above One Hundred Pirates (Boston, 1717), 40. [back]

  3. Boyer, ed., Political State, 33:272–73. Mather also recorded Fly’s threat: “He would advise Masters of Vessels to carry it well to their Men, lest they be put upon doing as he had done.” Mather, Vial Poured Out upon the Sea, 47–48. [back]

  4. Mather, Vial Poured Out upon the Sea, 112; Boston News-Letter, July 7, 1726. Condick, who was considered young, drunk, “stupid and insensible” at the time of his piracy, did indeed get a reprieve. See Benjamin Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing to Fall into the Hands of the Living God (Boston, 1726), 37. [back]

  5. History of Pyrates, 606. [back]

  6. Ibid., 606, 608. [back]

  7. See the excellent article by Daniel E. Williams, “Puritans and Pirates: A Confrontation between Cotton Mather and William Fly in 1726,” Early American Literature 22 (1987): 233–51. [back]

  8. Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing, 39. Jeremiah Bumsted, a “mechanic in moderate circu
mstances,” noted in his diary Fly’s refusal to cooperate with the ministers and concluded that he was “an unparraled instance of a hard heart.” See “Diary of Jeremiah Bumsted of Boston, 1722–1727,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 15 (1861): 309–10. [back]

  9. Mather, Vial Poured Out upon the Sea, 47, 21; Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). [back]

  10. Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing. Here I am drawing on comments by Noam Chomsky, “September 11th and Its Aftermath: Where Is the World Heading?” Public Lecture at the Music Academy, Chennai (Madras), India, November 10, 2001; available at http://www.flonnet.com/fl1824/nc.htm. [back]

  11. For the idea of the pirate as a modern antihero, see Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999). [back]

  12. For a broader view of mobile workers in the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early-nineteenth-century Atlantic, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). [back]