Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker

  25. Governor Hamilton to Council of Trade, October 3, 1720, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1574–1739, CD-ROM, consultant editors Karen Ordahl Kupperman, John C. Appleby, and Mandy Banton (London: Routledge, published in association with the Public Record Office, 2000), item 251, vol. 32 (1720–21), 165 (hereafter cited as CSPC). My emphasis on the slave trade is not meant to deny the many other reasons—recently (and insightfully) explicated by Peter Earle—the naval campaign against pirates improved after 1718. See Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars (London: Methuen, 2003), 184–88. [back]

  26. Parker v. Boucher (1719), High Court of Admiralty Papers (HCA) 24/132, Public Record Office, London; Wise v. Beekman (1716), HCA 24/131; Willis, quoted in Pirate Wars, by Earle, 169. For other instances of conflicts that ended up in court, see Coleman v. Seamen (1718) and Desbrough v. Christian (1720), HCA 24/132; Povey v. Bigelow (1722), HCA 24/134; and Wistridge v. Chapman (1722), HCA 24/135. [back]

  27. History of Pyrates, 309, 70, 115–16; Information of Alexander Thompson (1723), HCA 1/55, f. 23; see also Petition of John Massey and George Lowther (1721), CO 28/17, f. 199. [back]

  28. “Proceedings of the Court held on the Coast of Africa upon Trying of 100 Pirates taken by his Ma[jes]ties Ship Swallow” (1722), HCA 1/99, ff. 4–6; see also John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies (London, 1735), 91, 186–87; Stanley Richards, Black Bart (Llandybie, Wales: Christopher Davies, 1966), 73. [back]

  29. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 150; American Weekly Mercury, March 30, 1721; History of Pyrates, 172–73, 195; Proceedings of the Court at Jamaica, January 19, 1720, CO 137/14, ff. 28–30; Petition of John Massey and George Lowther, July 22, 1721, CO 28/17, ff. 197–99. [back]

  30. “The Memoriall of the Merchants of London Trading to Africa” (1720), Admiralty Papers (ADM) 1/3810, Public Record Office, London. [back]

  31. Boston Gazette, June 13, 1720; “Anonymous Paper relating to the Sugar and Tobacco Trade” (1724), CO 388/24, ff. 186–87; Richards, Black Bart, 72. [back]

  32. “Humphry Morice,” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1959–60), 13:941; David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Transatlantic Slave-Trade: A Data Base on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Humphrey Morice to Captain Stephen Bull, December 4, 1718; [an unknown naval officer aboard the Scarborough] to Humphrey Morice, September 20, 1724; the Humphrey Morice Papers from the Bank of England, Slave Trade Journals and Papers (Marlboro, Wiltshire, England: Adam Mathew Publications, 1998), microfilm. [back]

  33. William Snelgrave to Humphrey Morice, April 30, 1719; John Daggs to Humphrey Morice, February 6, 1720; “Account of Jabez Biglow” (1719); all in Morice Papers. [back]

  34. “To the Kings most Excellt Majesty the Humble Petition of the Planters Merchts & Traders concernd in the West Indies” (no date, but probably late 1718); “The Memoriall of the Merchants of London Trading to Africa humbly Offered to the Rt. Hon.ble The Lords Commissioners for Executing the Office of Lord High Admirall of Great Brittaine &c.” (no date, but probably February 1720, after the end of the War of the Quadruple Alliance). Morice wrote to Snelgrave on November 24, 1719: “the men of Warr are ready to proceed from here with the first fair wind, as Sir John Jennings told me this day at the House of Commons” (Morice Papers). [back]

  35. Richards, Black Bart, 63; Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1930), 3:453. [back]

  36. Atkins, Voyage, 98; James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 155; Boston Gazette, August 27, 1722; New-England Courant, September 3, 1722; “Proceedings,” HCA 1/99, f. 98; Richards, Black Bart, 107. [back]

  37. Rawley, Transatlantic Slave Trade, 162. [back]

  38. Ibid., 164, 165; Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 150; Eltis et al., Transatlantic Slave-Trade (for embarked slaves). Both Douglas C. North and Gary B. Walton emphasize the destruction of piracy as a major cause of the advance in productivity in eighteenth-century shipping. See North, “Sources of Productivity Change in Ocean Shipping, 1600–1850,” Journal of Political Economy 76 (1968): 953–70, and Walton, “Sources of Productivity Change in Colonial American Shipping,” Economic History Review 67 (1968): 67–78. [back]

  39. Boston News-Letter, May 28, 1724, June 7, 1714, July 29, 1717, July 28, 1718, August 18, 1718, April 4, 1723; Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes, 37; On executions, see Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing, 37; Mather, Useful Remarks, 42; Trials of Eight, 14; American Weekly Mercury, March 17, 1720, January 31, March 30, April 27, 1721, June 11, 1724; Trials of Five Persons, 34; Boston Gazette, June 13, 1720, March 21, 1726; Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 598. [back]

  40. Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing, 19; Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes, 18; Mather, Useful Remarks, 33; Mather, Vial Poured Out, 49; New-England Courant, July 22, 1723. [back]

  41. American Weekly Mercury, March 17, 1720; Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 37, 600, 603; History of Pyrates, 144, 185, 264, 186, 660, 286; Mather, Vial Poured Out, 47, 16, 20, 44; Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing, 37; Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes, 19, 32; Boston News-Letter, July 7, 1726; Tryals of Bonnet, 9; Abel Boyer, ed., The Political State of Great Britain (London, 1711–40), 32:272; Mather, Vial Poured Out, 47; Lorrain, quoted in “In Contrast to History of Pyrates: The Rev. Paul Lorrain, Historian of Crime,” by Lincoln B. Faller, Huntington Library Quarterly 60 (1976): 69. [back]

  42. Boston News-Letter, July 7, 1726, May 8, 1721, May 28, 1724; Tryals of Bonnet, 34; Mather, Vial Poured Out, 43, 49–50; Mather, Useful Remarks, 20; Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing, 39; American Weekly Mercury, March 17, 1720; Boston Gazette, August 27, 1722, June 1, 1724; Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 603; Boston News-Letter, March 14, 1720, February 20, 1721; History of Pyrates, 264; Trials of Eight, 14; Tryals of Thirty-Six, 14; New-England Courant, September 2–10, 1722. Pirates who were executed in a single place were often placed in chains and strategically spread in several harbors. The best example of this practice is related in the Boston Gazette of August 27, 1722: chained corpses were placed in five spots. [back]

  43. Trials of Eight, 6, emphasis added; Tryals of Thirty-Six, 3. Mather, Instructions to the Living, 11, 23; Barnard, Ashton’s Memorial, 62; Mather, Useful Remarks, 20. [back]

  44. Edward Vernon to Nicholas Lawes, October 31, 1720; Edward Vernon to Josiah Burchett, March 7, 1721; Edward Vernon to Josiah Burchett, April 18, 1721; all in Edward Vernon’s Letter-Book, Add. MS 40813, British Library, London. [back]

  Chapter 8: “Defiance of Death Itself”

  1. Boston News-Letter, August 22, 1720. [back]

  2. Abel Boyer, ed., The Political State of Great Britain (London, 1711–40), 33:149–53. [back]

  3. Governor Walter Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, October 3, 1720, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1574–1739, CD-ROM, consultant editors Karen Ordahl Kupperman, John C. Appleby, and Mandy Banton (London: Routledge, published in association with the Public Record Office, 2000), item 251, vol. 32 (1720–21), 165 (hereafter cited as CSPC); John Barnard, Ashton’s Memorial: An History of the Strange Adventures, and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip Ashton (Boston, 1725), 239; Arthur L. Hayward, ed., Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (London, 1735; reprint, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), 596; Tryals of Thirty-Six Persons for Piracy (Boston, 1723), 9; 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), 244 (hereafter cited as History of Pyrates). [back]

  4. History of Pyrates, 241. [back]

  5. Alexander Spotswood to Board of Trade, December 22, 1718, Colonial Office Papers (CO) 5/1318, Public Record Office, London; “Proceedings of the Cour
t held on the Coast of Africa,” High Court of Admiralty Papers (HCA) 1/99, f. 158, Public Record Office, London; Stanley Richards, Black Bart (Llandybie, Wales: Christopher Davies, 1966), 90; History of Pyrates, 83, 245; Solgard, quoted in The Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630–1730, by George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmonds (Salem, Mass.: Marine Research Society, 1923), 293; John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1844),2:227. [back]

  6. William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade (London, 1734; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1971), 210, 270; Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy (Boston, 1718), 10; Tryals of Thirty-Six Persons, 5. [back]

  7. Barnard, Ashton’s Memorial, 62; Council Journal, May 27, 1719, in The Colonial Records of North Carolina, ed. William L. Saunders (Raleigh, N.C.: P.M. Hale, 1886), 2:342; Benjamin Colman, It Is a Fearful Thing to Fall into the Hands of the Living God (Boston, 1726), 36; History of Pyrates, 312; Snelgrave, New Account, 227; [John Fillmore], “A Narrative of the Singular Sufferings of John Fillmore and Others on Board the Noted Pirate Vessel Commanded by Captain Phillips,” Buffalo Historical Society, Publications 10 (1907): 33. [back]

  8. History of Pyrates, 246. [back]

  9. The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet and Other Pirates (London, 1719), 15; Captain Mathew Musson to the Council of Trade and Plantations, July 5, 1717, CSPC, item 635, vol. 29 (1716–17), 338; Proceedings of the Court in Jamaica, January 19, 1720, CO 137/14, f. 28; History of Pyrates, 307; Information of Joseph Hollet (1721), HCA 1/55, f. 40. [back]

  10. History of Pyrates, 292. [back]

  11. A thrum cap was made of rough woolen or hempen strands like those used in making a mop. A crow was a grappling hook. A handspike was a wooden pin used to move the windlass or capstan. [back]

  12. Governor John Hope to Council of Trade and Plantations, January 14, 1724, CO 37/11, f. 37; Governor John Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, March 25, 1724, CSPC, item 102, vol. 34 (1724–25), 72. [back]

  13. Tryals of Bonnet, 15. [back]

  14. History of Pyrates, 231, 269–71. [back]

  15. Quoted in The Pirate Wars, by Peter Earle (London: Methuen, 2003), 170. [back]

  16. History of Pyrates, 308. [back]

  17. See, for example, Charles Grey, Pirates of the Eastern Seas, 1618–1723: A Lurid Page of History, ed. George MacMunn (1933; reprint, Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1971), 16; Patrick Pringle’s Jolly Roger (New York: Norton, 1953), 104; Richards, Black Bart , 17; and Hugh F. Rankin, The Golden Age of Piracy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 22–23. [back]

  18. J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). [back]

  19. Governor Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, October 3, 1720; Cotton Mather, Useful Remarks: An Essay upon Remarkables in the Way of Wicked Men: A Sermon on the Tragical End, unto which the Way of Twenty-Six Pirates Brought Them; At New Port on Rhode-Island, July 19, 1723 (New London, Conn., 1723), 42; History of Pyrates, 35. In accumulating piecemeal evidence about pirates and their fates, I have found that another six hundred, at a minimum, died or were killed. [back]

  20. New-England Courant, July 22, 1723; History of Pyrates, 302. [back]

  21. Boyer, ed., Political State, 28:152. Pirates also occasionally used red or “bloody” flags. [back]

  22. For an overview of English antecedents and New England gravestone art, see Allen I. Ludwig, Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650–1815 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966). [back]

  23. Captain Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, ed. Eric Partridge (1785; reprint, New York: Dorset Press, 1992); for “roger” and “to roger,” see 289. [back]

  24. S. Charles Hill, “Episodes of Piracy in Eastern Waters,” Indian Antiquary 49 (1920): 37. [back]

  25. Snelgrave, New Account, 236. [back]

  26. History of Pyrates, 628, 244. See Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 232–37. When I presented this chapter to the Comparative History Seminar at Cornell University in January 2003, Ray Craib responded to this paragraph by asking whether pirate culture had a touch of Sid Vicious in it. Jeff Cowie wondered whether a better analogy might be Niggaz with Attitude (NWA). Both were right. [back]

  27. History of Pyrates, 43. [back]

  28. Ibid., 245, 240. [back]

  Conclusion: Blood and Gold

  1. Hugh Rankin notes that “as more pirates were captured and hanged, the greater cruelty was practiced by those who were still alive.” See his Golden Age of Piracy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 146. [back]

  2. Governor John Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, March 25, 1724, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1574–1739, CD-ROM, consultant editors Karen Ordahl Kupperman, John C. Appleby, and Mandy Banton (London: Routledge, published in association with the Public Record Office, 2000), item 102, vol. 34 (1724–25), 72. See also Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (1724, 1728; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 323–27 (hereafter cited as History of Pyrates); Abel Boyer, ed., The Political State of Great Britain (London, 1711–40), 27:616, where one of Hart’s charges is repeated: Low was “also notorious for his Cruelties even to the British Subjects that fall into his Hands.” [back]

  3. Boston News-Letter, October 1, 1724; George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630–1730 (Salem, Mass.: Marine Research Society, 1923), 217; Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars (London: Methuen, 2003), 268; Trial of John Fillmore and Edward Cheesman (1724), in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. John Franklin Jameson (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 329. Charles Vane, another violent captain, was also resisted by his own crew and eventually overthrown. Vane once ordered a man hanged until nearly dead, cut down, and beaten, whereupon one of his own crew members intervened and “contradicted it, being (as he said) too great a Cruelty.” See Deposition of Nathaniel Catling (1718), Colonial Office Papers (CO) 37/10, f. 41, Public Record Office, London. [back]

  4. History of Pyrates 588; Cotton Mather, 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), 44. [back]

  5. Arthur L. Hayward, ed., Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (London, 1735; reprint, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), 35; History of Pyrates, 243; “Proceedings of the Court held on the Coast of Africa,” High Court of Admiralty (HCA) 1/99, f. 105; Governor Walter Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, May 19, 1721, CO 152/14, f. 25; Boston News-Letter, March 2 and May 7, 1719; Stanley Richards, Black Bart (Llandybie, Wales: Christopher Davies, 1966), 13. [back]

  6. Philip de Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21, 113, 137, 193, 212, 216, 241–42; Henry A. Ormerod, Piracy in the Ancient World (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1924; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 13–15. [back]

  7. Augustine, De Civitate Dei (City of God), trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1993), bk. 4, chap. 4. On prize money, see two letters from Captain George Gordon to Josiah Burchett, September 8 and 14, 1721, Admiralty Papers (ADM) 1/1826, Public Record Office, London; Richards, Black Bart, 108. Ironically, after Walpole read about the bilking of the seamen in Johnson’s History of Pyrates, he intervened personally to pay them. See the American Weekly Mercury, July 1, 1725. [back]

  8. American Weekly Mercury, March 17, 1720; Richards, Black Bart, 96. Peter Earle wrote of pirate plunder: “what they chiefly sought aboard a prize were those things which would enable them to maintain their ships and sustain themselves and their wa
y of life, the life itself being as or more important than the dream of returning home rich.” See his Pirate Wars, 177. On the golden age of Kronos, see Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), chap. 2. [back]

  9. For an account of the ways in which the struggles of sailors and pirates were linked to radical movements around the Atlantic over a longer time, 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]

  Acknowledgments

  I have been working on this book on and off since 1976, when I took up the subject of pirates in a graduate research seminar with Michael Zuckerman at the University of Pennsylvania. The research resulted in a published essay in 1981, and I have been a captive of pirates ever since. Rarely has a week gone by without a journalist, an underwater archaeologist, a novelist, a museum professional, a filmmaker, or a rabid enthusiast contacting me to talk about them. I have come to realize that the cultural appetite for pirates is immense, which in turn encouraged me to write this book, summarizing what I have learned about these outlaws over many years. My first thanks are to Mike for pointing me seaward, toward the dark flag on the horizon, and giving me a push.