Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

  But the most famous and successful of all the buccaneers was a Welshman, Henry Morgan.

  In 1671 Morgan, like an independent contractor in service to England, led a devastating raid on Panama, Spain’s richest possession in the Caribbean. In the course of their invasion, Morgan and his men destroyed forts, desecrated churches, killed nuns, raped captive women, and tortured children as well as adults of both sexes in an attempt to force their victims to disclose hidden gold. The infuriated Spanish labeled Morgan an outright pirate and put a price on his head. But the English agreed with Morgan that he and his buccaneers were legal privateers. Subsequently the English even knighted Morgan—and Sir Henry Morgan, buccaneer, even became lieutenant governor of the island of Jamaica, which the English had seized from Spain in 1655 and which served thereafter as a base for English and American colonial privateers operating against Spanish America.2

  In the 1680s—as England’s sea power began to outstrip that of the Spanish empire—her own privateers, commissioned directly from her North American colonies and from England herself, began to outdo the buccaneers in the amount of damage they inflicted on the Spanish. Like sea wolves, these privateers plundered the rich Spanish fleets with regularity and near impunity, even though the Spanish patrolled their coasts with armed guard vessels and traveled the seas in bristling convoys.

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  Then, in the spring of 1689, the English and American privateers who had made the Spanish Main their hunting ground suffered a blow that struck them like a cannon shot.

  England’s new king, William III—William of Orange—the inexorable enemy of Louis XIV, made peace with England’s perennial enemy, Spain. Further, he brought England into the League of Augsburg—an alliance of Holland, Sweden, a number of German states, and Spain, against Louis XIV.

  Suddenly—and incredibly—England was allied to her historical antagonist, Spain, and at war with France.

  Known as King William’s War among the English and Americans, the conflict that now ensued shattered the old buccaneering brotherhood in the Caribbean. English and French buccaneers found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict.3

  In addition, several thousand English and American seamen who had made their careers in privateering against Spain now found themselves without employment.

  Some of these tough seafarers turned to privateering against the new enemy, France. But French cargoes were by no means as rich as Spain’s, and the French carried on far less commerce in the New World than Spain had. Moreover, French ships were far more difficult to capture than fat Spanish galleons and treasure convoys. Privateers thought twice before attacking French shipping in European waters since Louis XIV possessed a large and excellent battle fleet that made such actions extremely risky.

  Within a year after the peace with Spain, privateering as a profitable enterprise for English and colonial seafarers had been greatly diminished. The merchants and bankers who had previously financed privateering ventures against the Spanish were no longer willing to put capital into much riskier, and far less profitable, ventures against French shipping.

  (Ironically, as English privateering decreased, French privateering against English and allied shipping in the waters around England, Holland, and Spain became a serious threat to allied commerce. Operating from the relative safety of such Channel ports as Dunkirk, French privateers harried and captured allied merchantmen in coastal waters, while French men-of-war kept the Royal Navy at bay.)

  Deprived of their livelihoods, the thousands of English and American ex-privateers who now found themselves on the beach had only a few options open to them. They could return to merchant service. They could join the expanding Royal Navy. They could turn to piracy. Or they could find alternative employment ashore.

  Many, unhappily but out of necessity, did return to the merchant service, rejoining the sullen ranks of discontented seamen who endured the cruel existence that was the common lot of the merchant sailor. But a good number of these ex-privateers, accustomed to the free and easy life of their former employment, found it virtually impossible to tolerate the harsh conditions aboard a trading vessel. They often became insurgent spirits, preaching rebellion and anarchy aboard their vessels.

  For the Royal Navy, King William’s War ushered in a period of rapid growth. As a result, ordinary sailors were needed desperately aboard the new English men-of-war that were sailing forth to confront Louis. But few men volunteered. For ordinary seamen, service in the Royal Navy simply meant extraordinarily harsh discipline, little pay, an inequable share of any prize money—and great danger.

  Unable to attract recruits to its ranks, the Royal Navy had to resort to the hated practice of impressment. This was, essentially, the physical abduction of men for service aboard His Majesty’s ships. Impressment was bitterly hated by seamen, and at times the crews of merchant ships would resist violently when boarded by a naval press gang. Ordinary seamen feared forced recruitment not only because impressed men aboard a man-of-war were cruelly treated and often exposed to the most danger but also because forced recruitment into the navy usually meant that the families of impressed sailors would starve, since pay aboard a warship was low and, at best, intermittent.

  As a consequence of the Royal Navy’s impressment policy, desertions from men-of-war became epidemic—until the navy began to employ such barbarous methods as shackling and maiming crewmen to keep them from jumping ship.

  A few former privateers, beached by King William’s War and refusing to serve in the navy or the merchant fleet, turned to open piracy. But these were, for the most part, only the most desperate and reckless. For, despite the long history of piracy among English and colonial seamen, it was still a momentous decision to turn pirate. Privateering might not have been the most respectable of professions, but at least it carried a veneer of legality. But pirates were simply outlaws. Most ordinary seamen, resentful as they might be of cruel authority, angry as they might be over inequities in pay and treatment, and fearful as they might be of the cruel press gangs, still regarded open piracy as a game that was not worth the candle. The potential rewards of piracy, to most ordinary seamen, just did not seem equal to the risk involved.

  Many seamen, both ex-privateers and merchant sailors, at the outbreak of King William’s War, simply chose to give up the sea and to go into hiding rather than risk the press gangs of the Royal Navy. One contemporary writer, Henry Maydman, noted the phenomenon in these words: “Many men, when war is, do betake themselves to live with their friends in the inlands, and follow their occupations, and at the end of the wars, do return to their maritime lives, or wait to make slips into merchantmen.”

  As the brilliant seventeenth century entered its last decade then, it seemed that while King William’s War with France had severely curtailed the business of privateering, it was not likely to trigger an increase in outright piracy. In fact, in 1690 piracy was no more than a sporadic hazard of sea trading, an occasional crime to be punished severely, but hardly a threat to the maritime commerce of great nations. There was absolutely no sign that before the decade was half over, the world would see the start of the greatest outburst of piracy in history, a virtual pirate war against the world.

  But in fact, although few realized it, a series of singular events, political and economic realities, and social factors peculiar to the times were converging to make this explosion of piracy inevitable.

  Expansion of world commerce and colonial empires, as well as the formation of trading companies such as the British East India Company, had created huge merchant fleets. Thousands of seamen toiled aboard these ships—and virtually all these men, victims of the cruel conditions of the times, bore a smoldering hatred for their masters.

  For most of these ordinary seamen, who knew they would probably never earn a decent place in the society they enriched with their labor, the idea of loyalty to the nation had come to seem an absurdity comparable to the suggestion that the slave should love his overseer. Furthermore, as a
result of their history and past employment, many ordinary seamen—especially those English and American privateers left unemployed by England’s peace with Spain and war with France—had few scruples about the concept of piracy, even though they usually had paralyzing qualms about the great risks involved.

  The merchant ships of the seventeenth century, generally plying the sea-lanes singly, were extremely vulnerable to attack. At the same time, the fledgling naval forces of the day, while powerful enough to deal with outlaw vessels if and when they caught up with them, were insufficient to protect trading vessels on the open seas. Communications were slow and cumbersome. It could often take weeks for news of an attack on a merchant ship to become known, and by that time the attackers could have journeyed halfway around the world. It was therefore extremely difficult for naval forces to track down a pirate ship, provided that ship was handled by skilled seafarers.

  Furthermore, throughout this period there was a rough parity in armament and maritime technology between merchants and naval vessels on the one hand and sea raiders on the other. If there was mortal danger for a sailor in turning pirate, there was also a good chance that determined and capable men could gain the victory in any fight with warships or armed merchantmen.

  Finally, there was a powerful, irrepressible tide flowing among the seamen of the day, a force that would greatly abet the pirate outbreak: the craving to live in freedom. Denied, this universal hunger for freedom inevitably breaks out in some form of rebellion—as history has demonstrated again and again. And the thousands of disaffected, ordinary seamen who worked the ships of the world’s maritime and naval fleets had the capacity to turn their craving into action.

  In the last ten years of the century then, an array of circumstances had combined to create an explosive environment for those who followed the sea, as well as for those who employed them. It required only a spark to turn the widespread unrest among seafarers into an epidemic of piracy.

  The spark came in the form of electrifying news from the East: the 70-ton sloop Amity—a colonial marauder under Captain Thomas Tew of Newport, Rhode Island, mounting a mere eight guns—had voyaged through the Indian Ocean and had taken a huge haul of gold, silver, ivory, and precious goods from a ship of the Great Mogul of India.

  The story of Amity’s enterprise spread like a shipboard fire.

  For many years sailors had been hearing vague tales of the riches of the East. A few of them had even seen evidence of those riches in the cargoes of the ships of the East India Company. Now Captain Tew’s voyage in the Amity not only confirmed the existence of those riches but indicated the ease with which resolute mariners might obtain a share of that wealth. Suddenly there seemed an alternative to the merchant service, or to impressment into the navy, or to hiding out in some shore berth: A man might go east.

  All at once it seemed to many a resentful seafaring man that the outlaw life—piracy—might be worth the risk after all. If a defenseless sailor could have the skin flayed from his body for stealing a biscuit at sea, or hang for pinching a shilling ashore, why not hazard as much for a treasure? And why not—in pursuit of that treasure—live merrily and free in a ship that belonged only to those who sailed her? And why not, as free men under sail, take vengeance on the hated lords and masters of a cruel and disdainful civilization?

  As word of Amity’s Indian Ocean exploit spread, canny merchants and captains began to outfit ships for the east. Sailors from every port sought berths on these eastbound vessels—as did deserters from the Royal Navy and ex-buccaneers. Many sailors now made the decision to turn to outright piracy, and mutinies at sea increased dramatically as crews seized their ships and set sail for the Indian Ocean.

  Before the century turned, thousands of seamen had declared themselves sea outlaws—and the sporadic piracy of past ages had become a worldwide eruption.

  The pirate captain Bartholomew Roberts, writing almost thirty years later, used these words to describe the motives that lured men to piracy at this time: “In an honest service there is thin rations, low wages, and hard labor; in this, plenty, satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking? No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.”

  One of those who joined the eastward invasion was to become the most famous, and one of the most successful, of all the captains who ever flew a pirate flag. He was an Englishman named Henry Every, alias John Avery, alias “Long Ben” Avery, called in his time “the Arch-Pirate.”

  If it was Captain Thomas Tew, the Newport privateer, who fired the opening shots in the pirate war, it was Henry Every, the Arch-Pirate, who touched off the first full broadside.

  4

  The Very Model of a Pirate Villain

  In May 1694, when King William’s War against Louis XIV was in its fifth indecisive year, the English privateer Charles II lay at anchor in the port of La Coruña, in Spain.

  A swift-sailing, well-armed fighting ship, the Charles II carried forty-six cannon and a crew of 120 tough veterans of privateering campaigns in the Caribbean. She had been chartered in Bristol by the Spanish government, England’s new ally against the French.1 Her mission was to intercept French smugglers operating in Spain’s Caribbean colonies.

  It was not much of a charter, for there was little chance that French smugglers, even if they could be caught, would yield much plunder. Prize money, therefore, would be meager. On the other hand, privateering ventures had become scarcer than sober sailors since the war with France had commenced. For that reason any seafarer who wanted to avoid service in the navy or aboard a merchant ship was glad to take whatever privateering berth presented itself, even if it was only a punitive expedition against smugglers. Recruiters, therefore, had had no trouble signing men aboard the Charles II.

  The Charles II, however, was not a happy ship.

  Although her crewmen—as employees of the Spanish government—had been promised regular pay (in addition to shares in any booty they might capture from French smugglers), they had received no salary since signing aboard and they were grumbling openly.

  But despite the complaints of the crew, the commander of the Charles II, a certain Captain Gibson, did nothing to improve the situation. According to that omniscient chronicler Daniel Defoe, Captain Gibson was a man “mightily addicted to Punch,” and usually drank himself into a stupor each night. It is likely that Gibson was too drunk or hung over most of the time to know, or care, about the plummeting morale of his crew.

  Further aggravating the unhappiness aboard the Charles II was the fact that neither Captain Gibson nor the Spanish government seemed in any hurry to speed her on her mission to the Caribbean where her disaffected crew would at least get a chance to obtain some plunder. Although it was months since Spanish officials had chartered her, the Charles II had still gotten no farther than the port of La Coruña where, as the month of May waned, she was delayed again, waiting this time to take on additional passengers and stores for the long voyage across the Atlantic, while her crew seethed with resentment.

  If Captain Gibson was unaware of—or unconcerned with—the tension aboard his ship, there was one officer of the Charles II who was very much aware of it. This was the ship’s forty-year-old sailing master, or first officer, Henry Every, who was soon to become the most celebrated pirate of his time.

  According to contemporaries, Every was a man of middle height, stocky, with a tendency to run to fat. Clean-shaven, as the fashion was, he had a florid complexion—one that would redden, rather than tan, in the sun—and cold eyes that looked out upon the world with unswerving directness from under heavy lids. In dress he was far from a dandy, usually favoring a rather plain costume by the standards of the time: a tricorn hat, breeches and buckled shoes, and a plain, longish waistcoat that did not flatter his somewhat corpulent figure.

  Every more than compensated for his physical shortcomings, however, with an intimidating pers
onality, a cunning intelligence, and a frigid and ruthless competence that caused other men to defer to him. Although Every’s associates acknowledged his courage and his daring in action, all recognized that it was his capacity to contrive clever plans and then to execute them with cold, undeviating purposefulness, that truly set Every apart from the simple men who sailed with him.

  The incidents of Every’s career reveal him as one of that rarest of human creatures: a completely selfish man. He seems to have known at all times exactly what he wanted, and exactly what to do to obtain what he wanted. Nor did he scruple at any wrongdoing to achieve his ends. He was a man who always maintained control of himself. He did not drink, for example, although he operated in an environment in which drunkenness was a way of life. He seldom betrayed anger either, although he would occasionally feign it for effect. Self-disciplined himself, Every overflowed with contempt for the weak-minded and ignorant men around him. Yet he managed to hide his disdain behind a mask of good nature in order to get these simpler souls to do his will.

  (At least one contemporary source says that Every was often “insolent” and that he gave himself the airs of a monarch. As if to underscore this judgment, he is depicted in some old woodcuts wearing fancy clothing and accompanied by a black slave who holds a parasol over his head to shield him from the sun. Given the character of Every that comes through in his career, however, it seems highly unlikely that he ever really adopted such royal airs. It is far more probable that, if he ever did behave in this manner, it was a pose he employed to achieve some devious purpose of his own. Other contemporary illustrations show a rather portly, heavy-lidded Every with a cynical half smile on his face. These portraits seem much more characteristic of the man. It is easy to imagine the smile of this Every turning into a snarl. It is also easy to imagine the man depicted in these illustrations speaking soothing, convincing words in a soft, velvety voice—and then cocking his pistols and coolly blowing his hearer’s brains out.)