Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean

by David Cordingly

  Captain Bartholomew Sharp had taken over the leadership following the death of Captain Sawkins but his authority was under threat. According to Dampier he was ‘by general consent, displaced from being commander; the company being not satisfied either with his courage or his behaviour’. He was replaced by John Watling, a veteran privateer who was considered a stout seaman. On 12 January 1681, ten days after Watling had taken over command, three Spanish warships were sighted, heading towards the island. The buccaneers on board the Trinity fired guns to warn the men ashore. As soon as the shore party had got back on board they weighed anchor and stood out to sea. Deciding on this occasion that discretion was the better part of valour, the buccaneers did not engage the enemy but set a north-easterly course towards the coast of South America. They left behind on the island a Miskito Indian called Will ‘because he could not be found at this our sudden departure’. He had been in the woods hunting for goats. He would be marooned on the island for the next three years.

  Will was not the first castaway on Juan Fernández. While they were anchored off the island Ringrose was told by the pilot of the Trinity that, many years before, a ship had been wrecked in the vicinity and only one man had survived. He had lived alone on the island for five years before being rescued.13 Will would have been sorely missed by the buccaneers because they relied on the fishing and hunting skills of the Miskito Indians to supply them with food. Dampier devoted several pages of his journal to a description of this remarkable race. He described them as tall, well-made and strong, with long, copper-coloured faces, lank black hair and stern expressions. They came from the stretch of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua which is still labelled the Costa de Mosquitos on modern maps.14 Brought up as hunters from a young age, they became adept in the use of spears and bows and arrows. So expert were they at catching fish and turtles that one or two Miskito Indians in a ship could feed 100 men. They were also bold in a fight, proved excellent marksmen if they were supplied with guns, and had ‘extraordinary good eyes, and will descry a sail at sea farther, and see anything better than we’.15 They preferred to offer their skills to ships with English commanders and crews, having no love for the French, ‘and the Spaniards they hate mortally’.

  Within a week of leaving Juan Fernández the buccaneers had decided that their next objective would be the coastal town of Arica. This was the principal port for the silver mined in the region, and in particular the silver from the mountain at Potosí, which lay some 350 miles inland. The buccaneers had planned a raid on Arica the previous year but had been foiled by heavy seas which had prevented them from landing, and by the defensive precautions taken by the inhabitants, who had been warned of their coming. This time they hoped to take the town by surprise. On 27 January they anchored the Trinity forty miles south of their objective and set off in canoes. They landed at sunrise on a rocky coast a few miles away from Arica, which was a modest settlement of single-storey mud houses defended by a fort. What the buccaneers did not know was that 400 additional soldiers had been despatched from Lima and the town was now defended by 600 armed men and the fort by a further 300. Having left a party of men to guard the boats, ninety-two buccaneers, led by Captain Watling, marched towards the town. Their initial attack was ferocious ‘and filled every street with dead bodies’ but they were soon overwhelmed by the defenders, who threatened to cut off their retreat to the boats. Watling, two quartermasters and twenty-five other buccaneers were killed and eighteen others were gravely wounded. Choking and almost blinded by the dense clouds of dust raised by the guns of the fort, the survivors beat an ignominious retreat, chased by horsemen who kept up a continuous fire until they had launched their canoes and put to sea.

  The death of Watling enabled Bartholomew Sharp to resume command of the Trinity – until another mutiny took place. On 17 April they anchored near the Isla la Plata, a barren island on the equator not far from Guayaquil. Here the grumblings of the men came to a head. They were still divided between those who wished to abandon the privateering cruise and head home via the Caribbean, and those who wished to carry on with their coastal raids. The shortcomings of Captain Sharp as a leader continued to be a source of division among them. A council was held on board the Trinity and, in the words of Dampier, ‘we put it to the vote; and upon dividing, Captain Sharp’s party carried it. I, who had never been pleased with his management, though I had hitherto kept my mind to myself, now declared myself on the side of those that were out-voted.’16 This resulted in a major parting of the ways. Fifty-two men, including Dampier and the surgeon, Lionel Wafer, opted to leave the Trinity. Under the command of Captain John Cook they headed north in the ship’s launch and two canoes. They made for the Gulf of San Miguel, where they went ashore and marched across the Isthmus of Panama and back to the Caribbean.

  The remaining sixty-five men, including Basil Ringrose, William Dick and John Cox, stayed with Captain Sharp and the Trinity. They headed south. On 29 July 1681 they captured the ship El Santo Rosario, which proved to have on board a prize arguably more precious than gold or silver. It was a volume of Spanish charts covering the entire coast of Central and South America from Acapulco to Cape Horn with ‘a very accurate and exact description of all the ports, soundings, creeks, rivers, capes and coasts belonging to the South Seas’, together with sailing directions on how to work a ship into every port and harbour.17 The information contained in the volume was of such strategic value to an enemy of Spain that, according to Sharp, ‘They were going to throw it overboard but by good luck I saved it.’18 In fact the charts may well have saved the lives of Sharp and two of his associates.

  Having sailed the Trinity round Cape Horn and along the coast of Brazil to the West Indies, the buccaneers separated and by March 1682 most of them were back in England. When the Spanish ambassador in London learnt of their return he demanded that they be put on trial for piracy and murder. On 18 May Bartholomew Sharp, John Cox and William Williams were arrested and sent to Marshalsea Prison in Southwark. Sharp had already contacted the chartmaker William Hack and arranged for him to make copies of the Spanish charts, and for English translations to be made of the sailing directions. King Charles II had asked to see the charts and it seems likely that he or his advisers brought some influence to bear on the High Court of Admiralty, which acquitted Sharp and his shipmates of piracy on 10 June. Sharp subsequently dedicated a handsome presentation copy of the charts to the King and was rewarded with a captain’s commission in the Royal Navy. Instead of taking advantage of this he returned to the West Indies and resumed his old buccaneering life. When Admiral Benbow paid a visit to the island of St Thomas in 1699 during his search for the notorious Captain Kidd, he was informed by the Danish Governor that Captain Sharp, ‘the noted pirate’, was living there. Sharp would have been aged fifty-one at the time.

  Basil Ringrose did not live to see his journals published. He joined the crew of the 16-gun privateer Cygnet, commanded by Captain Charles Swan, which sailed from England in October 1683. Swan’s attempts to carry out legitimate trading with Spanish towns on the Pacific coast of South America were a total failure, so he joined several English and French buccaneer ships operating off the coast of Mexico. They had hoped to capture the Manila galleon but failed to sight the ship, which slipped past them and arrived safely in Acapulco. On 19 February 1686 Swan and his men captured the small town of Santa Pecaque, fifteen miles inland from the mouth of the Rio Grande de Santiago. A party of the buccaneers were returning from the town, leading horses laden with looted provisions, when they were ambushed by the Spaniards. When Captain Swan and the rest of his men arrived at the place of the ambush ‘he saw all his men that went out in the morning lying dead. They were stripped, and so cut and mangled, that he scarce knew one man.’19 Ringrose was among the dead. He was only thirty-three but he left a remarkable legacy of journals, sailing directions, maps and coastal profiles of the Pacific coast of South America.

  Dampier, who survived his years among the buccaneers without injury, was a
mong those members of Swan’s crew who arrived shortly after the ambush had taken place. Since leaving Captain Sharp and the Trinity in April 1681 he had spent a year cruising the Caribbean, lived several months in Virginia and then joined a buccaneer ship commanded by Captain John Cook which was bound for the Pacific. During an extended voyage which took them across the Atlantic to the Cape Verde Islands and the coast of Africa, the buccaneers captured a Danish slave ship of 36 guns which they took over and renamed the Batchelor’s Delight. They sailed her round Cape Horn and headed for the Juan Fernández islands. On 22 March 1684 they sighted the mountain peaks of the island and the next day dropped anchor close inshore in a bay at the southern end. Launching a canoe, they went ashore to look for Will the Miskito Indian.

  Will had seen the Batchelor’s Delight approaching under sail the previous day and, believing that she was an English vessel, he had killed three goats and dressed them with cabbage leaves ‘to treat us when we came ashore’. He was waiting to greet them when they landed on the beach. Among the shoregoing party was another Miskito Indian, called Robin. He was the first to leap ashore, and ‘running to his brother Mosquito man, threw himself flat on his face at his feet, who helping him up, and embracing him, fell flat with his face on the ground at Robin’s feet, and was by him taken up also’.20 There are echoes of this touching scene in Robinson Crusoe. It will be recalled that when Crusoe first met Man Friday and rescued him from being killed and eaten by a raiding party of ‘savages’, Friday prostrated himself at Crusoe’s feet and laid his head upon the ground. Friday, like the Miskito Indians, was tall and well-built, with long black hair which was straight rather than curly, and his skin was a dun olive colour.

  Dampier’s description of how Will survived his three solitary years would have provided Daniel Defoe with some useful material:

  He had with him his gun and a knife, with a small horn of powder, and a few shot; which being spent, he contrived a way of notching his knife, to saw the barrel of his gun into small pieces, wherewith he made a harpoon, lances, hooks and a long knife, heating the pieces first in the fire, which he struck with his gunflint, and a piece of the barrel of his gun, which he had hardened; having learnt to do that among the English.21

  With these home-made tools he had caught and killed seals and goats and fish. Half a mile from the sea he had built a small hut which he had lined with goat-skins, and in this he had constructed a bed out of branches which was raised two feet off the ground. The bedding for this was likewise made from goat-skins.

  With Will back on board, the Batchelor’s Delight headed north to the Galápagos Islands and then due east to Isla la Plata. It was there that they joined forces with Captain Swan and the Cygnet. For several months the two ships cruised together, making a number of raids on coastal towns and villages until 25 August 1685, when the ships parted company. Dampier elected to join the crew of the Cygnet because he knew Captain Swan intended to sail to the East Indies, ‘which was a way very agreeable to my inclination’. It took them fifty-two days to cross the Pacific to the island of Guam, and from there they sailed on to the island of Mindaneo in the Philippines. The subsequent wanderings of the Cygnet were recorded by Dampier but are not relevant here. Dampier left the crew at the Nicobar Islands and made his way home via Cape Town and the island of St Helena. He returned to England in September 1691. He was aged forty and had been away for twelve and a half years.

  While he wrote about earlier and later periods of his life, Dampier left no account of how he spent the next seven years. However, his more recent biographers have discovered that he left London for a few months to join an expedition which was planning to salvage Spanish treasure ships wrecked in the West Indies.22 Before leaving Europe the expedition was hijacked by Henry Avery, who was second mate of one of the four ships which had assembled in the harbour of La Corunna in Spain. Avery led a mutiny of eighty-five sailors, seized one of the ships and sailed off to the Indian Ocean. He subsequently became a pirate legend by capturing a ship belonging to the Great Mogul of India which carried a fabulously rich cargo of gold and silver. Dampier did not join the mutiny but on his return to London in February 1695 he had some difficulty in convincing the High Court of Admiralty that he had not assisted the mutineers. He was acquitted but failed in his attempt to recover his unpaid wages.

  During his travels with the buccaneers Dampier had managed to preserve his journals from rain and sea water by enclosing them in lengths of bamboo sealed at the ends with wax. Following advice from a number of eminent scholars and naturalists, he set about preparing his journals for publication. Early in 1697 he published the first of his books, A New Voyage Round the World. It was printed by James Knapton and dedicated to Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax and President of the Royal Society. The book was an immediate success; four editions were published within two years and it was translated into Dutch, French and German. In addition to its popular success the book made Dampier’s reputation. The wandering West Country seaman with a dubious past became a much respected travel writer with an enviable record as a navigator and explorer. He was invited to address a meeting of the Royal Society and Robert Hooke produced a summary of his book for the Society’s Transactions. On 6 August 1698 John Evelyn noted in his Diary, ‘I dined with Mr Pepys, where was Captain Dampier, who had been a famous buccaneer … He was now going abroad again by the King’s encouragement, who furnished a ship of 290 tons. He seemed a more modest man than one would imagine by relation of the crew he had assorted with.’23

  Dampier’s fame led to his appointment as the commander of a naval expedition of discovery to New Guinea and Australia. His ill-fated voyage in HMS Roebuck, and his equally disastrous voyage to the Pacific in command of the St George and the Cinque Ports, will be discussed later. Both voyages demonstrated all too clearly his failings as a leader but they did not undermine his standing as a navigator. On returning to England in 1707 he found that the Bristol backers of a new expedition to capture the Acapulco galleon wished to make use of his skills and his experience. This time he would not be the commander of the expedition but would be employed as pilot for the South Seas, a role for which he was uniquely well qualified.

  2

  The Sea Captain

  The commander of the new expedition was Captain Woodes Rogers. He was the son of a sea captain and was twenty-nine years old when his two ships set sail from Bristol. He had many of the leadership qualities which Dampier so lacked. The author of a book of voyages published in 1767 described him as ‘a bold, active, indefatigable officer’ and noted that his most singular talent was ‘a peculiar art he had of maintaining his authority over his seamen, and his readiness in finding out expedients in the most difficult conjunctures’.1 In his journals and letters Rogers comes across as a frank and forthright seafaring man who faced storms, mutinies, sea battles, personal injuries and financial setbacks with admirable fortitude and resolution. However, recent research has revealed flaws in his character which had been generally overlooked.2 He seems to have had an exceedingly hot temper and sometimes resorted to violent language, threatening to cut people’s throats and bloody their noses. On one occasion he was so enraged by the behaviour of a naval officer that he struck him on the head with a pistol. Another time he challenged a naval officer to a duel. His brave leadership in the taking of Guayaquil was questioned in some quarters and he was described by one embittered officer as ‘a dead weight to all our undertakings’.3 In his defence it should be pointed out that he often found himself in stressful situations which would have tested and provoked the calmest of men.

  Rogers’ family came originally from Poole, a small but prosperous seaport in Dorset, on the south coast of England. His father, who owned his own ship and had shares in a number of other ventures, was a successful operator in the triangular trade on which the prosperity of Poole was based. Situated at the head of the largest natural harbour in Europe, the port had established a flourishing trade with North America, and in particular with the Newfoundl
and cod fisheries. Ships sailed from Poole to Newfoundland with cargoes of salt and provisions; they exchanged these for dried and salted fish and sailed back across the Atlantic to Spanish and Portuguese ports where they sold the fish and returned to Poole with cargoes of wine, brandy and olive oil.

  In addition to his voyages across the Atlantic Rogers’ father may also have travelled around the coast of Africa, probably in connection with the slave trade. In his Discourse of Winds, published in 1699, Dampier acknowledged his debt to a Captain Rogers for his description of the coast from the Cape of Good Hope to the Red Sea. Elsewhere in the same book Dampier included an account of the bushmen of South Africa ‘as I received it from my ingenious friend Capt Rogers who is lately gone to that place: and hath been there several times before’.4

  Captain Woodes Rogers senior and his wife Frances had three children while they were living in Poole. Woodes Rogers was the eldest and was born in 1679. His sister Mary was born a year later and his younger brother John (who would later accompany Woodes on his voyage to the South Seas) was born in 1688. Nothing is known of the children’s education and upbringing. Around 1696 the family moved to Bristol, where they had a house in the parish of St Mary Redcliffe. On 30 November 1697 the eighteen-year-old Woodes Rogers was apprenticed as a mariner to John Yeamans of Bristol and his wife Thomasina. His seafaring experience during the next few years has not been recorded but an examination of the most common destinations of Bristol ships of the period suggests that he would have made frequent sailings to Ireland and the Continent. He must have made at least one crossing of the Atlantic to the fishing grounds of the Newfoundland Banks because in A Cruising Voyage Round the World he noted the great variety of fish in the waters around the island of Juan Fernández, including crawfish and gropers ‘and other good fish in so great plenty anywhere near the shore, that I never saw the like, but at the best fishing season in Newfoundland’.5