George Phenney, who was keen to divorce his troublesome wife, tried to persuade Rogers to detain her in Nassau while he escaped to England but this came to nothing when she discovered her husband’s plan. After several difficult months the two of them left the island in November and returned to London, where, as Rogers anticipated, they conspired against him. Two years later Phenney moved to Virginia to take up the position of Surveyor General of Customs for the southern part of the American colonies.9
The one positive aspect of Rogers’ second term as Governor was the disappearance of the pirates. When he had first arrived at Nassau in August 1718 the number of pirates operating in the Caribbean and along the eastern shores of North America was between 1,500 and 2,000. This increased to between 1,800 and 2,400 in the years 1719 to 1722 but successful operations against some of the pirate companies had spread them further afield and, as we have seen, several pirate companies, such as those led by Bartholomew Roberts, had shifted their operations to the coast of West Africa. But from 1723 onwards there was a dramatic decline in pirate numbers. By 1724 there were no more than 500 or so pirates prowling around the coasts of the North Atlantic and by 1726 the total had dwindled to less than 200.10 The decline was due to the capture, trial and execution of pirate crews, and the deaths, usually violent, of their most prominent leaders. The historian Peter Earle has noted that, of the 55 pirate captains of the period whose fates are known, 26 were hanged, 6 were killed in action, 4 were drowned in shipwrecks, 4 were shot by their own men, one shot himself, one was set adrift in an open boat, and one retired to a life of poverty in Madagascar. Only 12 of those who surrendered were fortunate enough to live on after the end of their piratical careers.11
The response of the authorities to the pirate companies that were captured had been and continued to be as harsh as it was towards highwaymen, burglars or petty thieves. Marcus Rediker has estimated that no fewer than 400 and as many as 600 pirates were hanged in the years between 1716 and 1726.12 Mass hangings were not unusual. We have already noted the fifty-two men of Roberts’ company who were hanged at Cape Coast Castle. Of the fifty-eight pirates led by Matthew Luke who were captured by HMS Launceston in 1722, no fewer than 41 were hanged at Jamaica. Twenty-six of the thirty-six pirates captured by HMS Greyhound in 1723 were hanged. Eighteen of the nineteen men led by Lyne were hanged in 1726, and eleven of the sixteen men of Lowther’s crew were hanged at St Kitts in 1724. Hangings were always treated as public spectacles and provided grisly entertainment for the large crowds which gathered on the waterfront to hear the last words of the condemned men and watch them die. To further dissuade sailors from taking up piracy the bodies of well-known pirate leaders were hanged on gibbets at the entrance to harbours, in the same way that Calico Jack’s body had been put on display in Jamaica after his execution at Gallows Point. Five pirates taken by HMS Winchelsea in 1723 were hanged at the high-water mark at St John’s in Antigua, and afterwards the body of Finn, their leader, was hung in chains on Rat Island. After they had been hanged at Boston in 1724 the bodies of pirate quartermaster John Rose Archer and William White ‘were conveyed in boats down to an island where White was buried, and the quartermaster was hung up in irons to be a spectacle, and so a warning to others’.13 A naval or merchant seaman in the 1720s was likely to see the decaying bodies of pirates prominently displayed along the banks of the River Thames in London, at Leith Sands outside Edinburgh, at Newport, Rhode Island, in Boston harbour, at Charleston, South Carolina, at St Kitts, at Port Royal and at several other West Indian harbours.
The colonial governors were in no doubt that the trials and executions of pirates were a deterrent and would lead to a decline in pirate attacks. The executions carried out by Rogers certainly marked the end of Nassau as a pirate headquarters. After the hanging of Calico Jack and his crew, Governor Lawes of Jamaica reported that the ‘trial of the pirates executed here which has had good effect these seas having been more free of late from such villains than for some time before’.14 After the hanging of Matthew Luke and his pirates he wrote, ‘I make no question but the example that has been made of these rogues will deter others in these parts.’15 And writing to Lord Carteret to inform him of the capture of pirates off New York by HMS Greyhound in 1723, Governor Burnet concluded, ‘This blow, with what they received from Captain Ogle will I hope clear the seas of these accomplished villains.’16
Although the warships of the British Navy played a prominent role in hunting down the pirates, it had taken some time for the Admiralty to respond to the pirate threat. It will be recalled that the pirates hanged by Rogers had been brought in by the former pirate Ben Hornigold. Calico Jack and his crew had been captured by Jonathan Barnet, a merchant sea captain. Stede Bonnet and his crew were taken by private vessels commanded by Colonel Rhett, and Charles Vane had been handed over to the Jamaican authorities by Captain Holford, a retired buccaneer. Not till May 1718 did the Admiralty specifically order the nine warships based at Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Virginia, New York and New England, ‘To correspond and act in concert against the pirates’.17 Even then some naval captains showed a marked reluctance to get involved. We have already seen how Rogers was deserted by the naval ships which had accompanied him to the Bahamas in spite of his strenuous demands that they stay while the islands were still under threat from pirates. And there is evidence to show that some naval captains preferred to use their ships for trading rather than to look for pirates among the dangerous shoals and coral reefs of the Caribbean.18 However, when the Royal Navy did go into action against the pirates it certainly achieved results, the most notable examples being the hunting down of Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts and HMS Greyhound’s actions off New York.
By 1726 all the leading pirate captains described in Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates and almost all those whose names featured in the newspapers or colonial office reports of the period had been executed, killed or had retired. This did not mean the end of piracy in the Caribbean. There were still occasional attacks on merchant vessels (usually by rogue elements of the Spanish coastguard) but pirates were no longer a serious threat to the trade of the region.
The only mention of pirates in the Council meetings and Assembly meetings called by Rogers during his second term as Governor appeared in ‘a Humble Address to the Kings most excellent Majesty’ which was drawn up by the Assembly on 30 October 1729. This thanked the King for appointing Woodes Rogers as Governor and pointed out that ‘the experience we formerly had of his justice, conduct and valour not only in the defence but in rescuing this island from pirates the worst of enemies, leaves us in no doubt, but that under his present administration these islands will soon be in as flourishing a condition as any of your Majesty’s colonies in America’.19 However, Rogers faced an uphill task to achieve the results he was hoping for. He was particularly concerned about the islands’ defences and on 26 November 1730, fifteen months after his arrival, he addressed the Assembly and warned the members that the fortifications were still in a very bad condition and the Bahamas were vulnerable to attack. There might be peace in Europe but he was concerned about a possible rupture with the Spanish or the French.
All Rogers’ efforts to improve the fortifications of the islands were hampered by the sinister alliance of John Colebrooke and John White. Colebrooke was in a powerful position as Speaker of the Assembly, while White, ‘being a great talker in the Council most of which were old inhabitants and illiterate, they two always being together consulted their measures with the Assembly so as to be continually pushing forward their own views, by which means they soon began to lord it over the people in a very haughty and imperious manner and to oppose the Governor in everything they could’.20
By the end of 1730 Rogers decided he must put an end to their machinations and on 1 December he suspended the meetings of the Assembly. This prompted Colebrooke to launch a personal attack on Rogers. He threatened to ask the King to replace their tyrannical and arbitrary governor with an h
onest governor, and he seized all the Assembly’s books and papers and refused to hand them over. A few weeks later Rogers wrote to the Council of Trade and Plantations to inform them that the state of his health obliged him to travel to South Carolina ‘for a change of air, from whence I hope to return in three weeks or a month’.21 By the beginning of April he was in Charleston and was soon sufficiently recovered to be planning a visit to Cat Island, which was considered to be more fertile than the other islands and might prove a suitable location for more plantations. He was back in Nassau by early May, accompanied by a lawyer who was made Attorney-General and who assisted him in bringing Colebrooke before a Grand Jury. Colebrooke had continued to stir up trouble but at a sessions held towards the end of May he was tried and found guilty of vexatious litigation and disturbing the public peace. He was fined £750 and ordered to be ‘confined during his Majesty’s pleasure’.
On 14 October 1731 Rogers wrote to London for the last time. He enclosed details of the trial of Colebrooke and the relevant proceedings of the Council and Assembly. He said that he was sending his son to England to explain the urgent need to repair the fortifications to prevent the islands becoming an easy prey to their powerful neighbours. The Council of Trade and Plantations received no further communications from the Bahamas for the next nine months. On 20 July 1732 a brief statement was sent to the Duke of Newcastle which began:
Whereas it pleased Almighty God to take unto himself the soul of Woodes Rogers Esqr. our late Governr. on the fiveteenth day of this Instant.
We the President and the rest of his Majestys Council for these Bahama Islands being on this Occasion Assembled in Council have thought fit to Acquaint yr. Lordship therewith, which with all Possible Submission we now do …22
No records have survived to indicate the cause and circumstances of Woodes Rogers’ death. All we know is that he died at the age of fifty-three. Did he succumb to one of the tropical diseases which caused the death of so many in the West Indies? Were his son and daughter present at his deathbed and his funeral in Nassau? Was he buried beside the church built by his predecessor or within the walls of the fort which he had restored and had struggled to maintain in good order? There was no mention of his death in the London newspapers but the September issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine contained the following information: ‘Came Advice of the Death of Woods Rogers, Esq; Governour of the Bahama Islands July 16. He, and Capt. Cook lately drowned, made a cruizing Voyage to the South Seas and round the Globe in the Duke and Dutchess, in the Wars of Q. Anne.’23
It is strange but not inappropriate that the death of Captain Edward Cooke, who, like Rogers, had published an account of their circumnavigation, should be recorded in the same issue of the same magazine. Where and exactly when Cooke was drowned is not known. Rogers had made his will on 26 May 1729, shortly before setting off for the Bahamas, and it was proved in London on 24 November 1732. The probate act described him as ‘late of the parish of St Margaret, Westminster, but dying at the Bahama Islands, a widower’.24 He left his estate to his son William and his daughter Sarah. His son became a member of the Council of the Bahamas the following year and then went out to the Guinea Coast as a merchant for the Royal Africa Company. He died in 1735 at Whydah, a victim of one of the tropical diseases which had killed Alexander Selkirk in the same region fourteen years earlier.
Epilogue
The death of Woodes Rogers may have passed almost unnoticed in London, but his name would live on long after the names of the civil servants in Whitehall and the other colonial governors of his day had been forgotten. This was partly due to his voyage round the world and his capture of the Manila galleon. His expedition in the Duke and Dutchess may not have been as successful as it has sometimes been portrayed but it gave Rogers a buccaneering image and linked him with Drake, Cavendish, Anson and other plunderers of Spanish ships in the Pacific. His other claim to fame was the restoration of law and order in the Bahamas – an achievement which for many years was reflected in the islands’ motto: Expulsit pirates, restituta commercia (Pirates expelled, commerce restored).1 But it was his rescue of Alexander Selkirk, and his description of how Selkirk survived his solitary years on Juan Fernández, which ensured that Rogers achieved a measure of immortality out of all proportion to his own exploits.
This was due to the publication on 23 April 1719 of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s masterpiece.2 The book proved instantly popular among all classes of the reading public in London and beyond. The initial edition of 1,000 copies was followed by a second edition on 9 May and a third edition on 6 June. A fourth edition came out shortly before the publication in August 1719 of Defoe’s rapidly compiled sequel, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Within a year the book had been published in French, Dutch and German. Generally regarded by literary critics as the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe is a study of survival, written with such conviction and attention to detail that it is hard to believe it is a work of fiction. It has a universal appeal and has been admired for different reasons by people as various as Benjamin Franklin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and Virginia Woolf. As Coleridge famously pointed out, Crusoe is a representative of humanity in general, ‘the person for whom every reader could substitute himself’,3 and a more recent commentator has observed that Crusoe, in common with a few other characters such as Don Quixote, Hamlet and Faust, has ‘passed into the collective understanding of western humanity’.4
To what extent was Rogers’ account of Selkirk’s adventures responsible for Defoe’s memorable creation? In his book of 1712 A Cruising Voyage Round the World Rogers provided what has come to be accepted as the definitive account of Selkirk’s experiences on Juan Fernández, and it is worth noting that a second edition was published in 1718, the year before Defoe’s novel was published. There was also Edward Cooke’s account in A Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World, which covers much of the same ground as Rogers’ book. And there was the article in The Englishman by Richard Steele which added some additional information gleaned from his interview with Selkirk. Within a few months after the return of the Bristol ships with the captured Manila galleon, we can assume that Selkirk’s story was well known in London. Defoe, with his keen interest in voyages and travel, and the South Seas in particular, would certainly have taken a close interest in the story. The American academic Arthur Secord (who persuasively argued the case that another castaway was the model for Crusoe) was in no doubt that ‘when Londoners talked of desert island adventures they naturally thought of Selkirk. Not only was his case the most recent one, but it had also been given much wider publicity than any of the others, through the interest aroused by his return.’ And he concluded that ‘Selkirk undoubtedly furnished Defoe with the central theme of the story’.5
It is not surprising, therefore, that for a long time it was taken for granted that Selkirk’s marooning not only provided the original idea for Robinson Crusoe but that Selkirk was the model and prototype for Crusoe. The similarities were obvious: they both hunted goats on foot when the powder for their guns ran out; they both wore clothes made from goat-skins; they both built two huts from tree branches and assigned separate purposes for each one; they both ingeniously adapted the tools and equipment they had at their disposal. After an early period of despair Selkirk recovered and kept up his spirits by singing psalms and reciting from the Bible and in doing so made himself a better person – as did Crusoe. They both attempted to impose order on their existence by marking trees to note the passing days. Selkirk hid in a tree to prevent his discovery by Spaniards who landed on the island and might have enslaved him, and Crusoe did the same. And although the location of Crusoe’s island was thousands of miles from Juan Fernández, the landscape and topography of his island were very similar to descriptions which Defoe would have read of Juan Fernández.
The similarities are offset by a number of differences in the stories of Selkirk and Crusoe. These have led to what Glyn Williams has described as ‘the thickets of scholarship tha
t surround the issue of the sources used by Defoe’.6 The discussion has been most intense among Defoe scholars but doubts were expressed as early as the 1820s by Sir Walter Scott, who wrote, ‘The assistance which De Foe derived from Selkirk’s history seems of a very meagre kind. It is not certain that he was obliged to the real hermit of Juan Fernandez even for the original hint …’7 Scott does acknowledge that Defoe probably borrowed from Rogers’ account the abundance of goats, the clothing made from their skins and the circumstance of the two huts. John Robert Moore, who was for many years considered the leading expert on Defoe, echoed this view when he wrote, ‘It has often been supposed that Crusoe was almost identical with Alexander Selkirk, but the influence of the Selkirk story on Robinson Crusoe has been greatly exaggerated.’8
It has to be said that some of the differences between Selkirk’s story and Crusoe’s story are considerable. Selkirk was marooned after an argument with his captain but Crusoe was shipwrecked in a storm and cast on to the beach. Selkirk was a castaway on Juan Fernández for four years and four months, while Crusoe was on his island for twenty-eight years. Selkirk had an extremely limited supply of tools and equipment at his disposal but Crusoe was able to make numerous journeys out to his wrecked ship and recovered ships biscuit, Dutch cheeses, rice, rum, rigging, sails, an arsenal of weapons with powder and shot, the carpenter’s chest, ‘three bags full of nails and spikes, a great screw-jack, a dozen or so hatchets, and above all, that most useful thing called a grindstone’. Crusoe is constantly trying to improve his situation by growing corn, by attempting to make baskets and pots, and by carrying out improvements to the safety and appearance of his dwelling, but Selkirk remains in his crude huts and is content to rely on goats, fish, turtles and the turnips and cabbage trees already available on the island. Crusoe hopes to escape from his island by making a canoe, but Selkirk feels he has no alternative but to await rescue by the ship of a friendly nation. Selkirk had no human companions during his time on the island, but Crusoe was joined by Man Friday, who plays an important part in the last part of the book. Perhaps the most significant difference is the geographical setting of the two islands. Juan Fernández (Isla Róbinson Crusoe) is of course in the Pacific and is some 400 miles away from the mainland of South America. Crusoe’s island is on the Atlantic coast of Venezuela, near the mouth of the River Orinoco, and is close enough to the mainland to receive visits from native ‘savages’ who have rowed across in canoes.
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