by Frank Sherry
Blacks were also welcomed in pirate crews. Black crewmen aboard pirate vessels were often runaway slaves, but many others were taken as captives from prize ships and offered their freedom if they would join the pirates. The famed Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts had more than twenty blacks serving in his crew. Blackbeard had a favorite officer who was a runaway slave. Every himself, despite his many years as a slave trader, freed some black slaves whom he had bought in Madagascar to help crew his ship on her voyage to the Bahamas.
The pirate captain Robert Culliford acknowledged this overriding loyalty in 1697 when, operating off the west coast of India, he demanded that English officials ashore pay him and his men £10,000 as ransom for three ships he had captured from the East India Company. Wrote Culliford in a letter to the English officials: “We acknowledge no country, having sold our own, and as we are sure to be hanged if taken, we shall have no scruple in murdering and destroying if our demands are not granted in full.”
During this decade of the 1690s, the Madagascar pirates also developed many of their own peculiar styles, customs, and expressions—signs of their emergence as a separate community in the world. For example, “marooning” was initiated in these years as a specific pirate punishment reserved for traitors. The use of musicians beating loudly on drums and tooting mightily on horns as a pirate ship went into battle was also a peculiar pirate usage begun at this time. Pirates coined their own slang and code words. “On the account,” for example, was the code for setting out to go pirating. “Pieces of eight,” “peg leg,” “rum,” “punch,” and dozens more were words and expressions initiated or given currency by pirates.
At this time, too, pirates developed a universally recognized password to make themselves known to each other at sea. When two pirate ships met at sea, one would ask where the other hailed from. A pirate ship had only to reply “from the sea” in order to identify itself to another pirate. Pirate vessels that met like this would then exchange news and information freely.
The pirates of Madagascar even developed a distinctive cuisine (which consisted primarily of red-hot spiced stews).
The Madagascar pirates, like any maritime state, formed fleets that sailed together and cooperated with each other against their merchant enemies—as Henry Every and Thomas Tew had cooperated to capture the Mogul’s treasure ships.
As with the armed fleet of any authentic state, the pirates of Madagascar also flew the same or a similar flag. But this was not at first the famed black ensign with its grinning white skull and crossed bones.
In the beginning the Madagascar pirates used a red flag similar to the flags flown by the buccaneers and the privateer captains in the Caribbean. The red flag, symbolic of blood, had been used for many decades to signal a potential victim that if she offered resistance, she would receive no quarter when captured.
Henry Every had made a red flag with four silver chevrons his personal insignia, when he and his fellow mutineers had first set out for the East. He had run up an all-red standard before boarding the Mogul Gang-I-Sawai.
Although the red flag continued in use among many of the Madagascar pirates throughout the 1690s, the black flag began to replace it as the decade ran out.
According to some contemporary sources, even Henry Every switched from his original red flag after his battle with the Mogul ships—and began using a black ensign with a white skull in profile.
It is also said that Tew, on his final voyage, flew a black flag bearing the device, in white, of a muscular arm brandishing a cutlass.
But the first authenticated case of a pirate captain using a skull-and-crossbones motif—the classic Jolly Roger1—occurred in 1700 when the French pirate Emanuel Wynne flew such a black flag during an indecisive action against a Royal Navy man-of-war off the west coast of Africa.
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
In any event, the black flag with a skull or skeleton theme had all but replaced the earlier red pennant as the symbol of the pirate confederacy by the end of the 1690s.
Pirate captains, however, usually personalized the pirate flag by utilizing their own peculiar variations of the skull-and-crossbones theme. For example, the black flag of Bartholomew Roberts showed a full-length skeleton holding an hourglass. Blackbeard also used a skeleton, but added a bleeding red heart. The pirate captain Christopher Condent used three skulls side by side with crossbones. The variations were numerous, but the purpose was always the same: to identify pirates to their victims, and “to strike terror on all beholders,” as Defoe put it.
If the Jolly Roger was the symbol of a loose pirate confederacy, it was also an indication of the impulse toward unity and authentic statehood among the pirates of Madagascar. Still another indication of this impulse was their propensity to form an attachment for the land itself and to settle there as permanent residents.
Most of those who chose to settle down used the riches of their booty to establish themselves in comfortable houses “with harems to rival the seraglio of the Turk,” as Defoe put it. Some set themselves up as traders. Others became planters. Others simply enjoyed the luxury of uninterrupted ease. All of these new pirate settlers, however, lorded it over the natives because of their European firearms and their wealth.
A book published in 1729, Madagascar; Or Robert Drury’s Journal, purports to be an eyewitness account of how these ex-pirate settlers lived on Madagascar. The author, who calls himself an honest sailor, “never a pirate,” claimed he was wrecked on the island and held prisoner there for fifteen years. During this time, he says, he came to know many of the pirate settlers. Drury draws this picture of the life-style of a Dutch pirate named John Pro, who had taken up residence with a number of companions on the island: “John Pro lived in a very handsome manner. His house was furnished with pewter dishes, etc., a standing bed with curtains and other things of that nature except chairs, but a chest or two served for that purpose well enough. He had one house on purpose for his cook-room and cook-slave’s lodging, storehouse, and summer house; all these were enclosed in a palisade, as the great men’s houses are in this country, for he was rich and had many castles and slaves.”
Contemporary sources estimated that in the ten years following Captain Tew’s voyage to the Indian Ocean, as many as fifteen hundred pirates had made permanent homes for themselves on Madagascar and its nearby islands. Furthermore, these men had fathered any number of offspring whose primary loyalty was certainly not to the far-off Europe of their fathers or to the tribal hierarchy of their mothers.
It seemed to many observers of the day that there existed considerable potential for the ex-pirate settlers on Madagascar, together with their wives and children, to form a new nation, perpetually at war with the trading countries.
So likely did this scenario seem that a tale began to circulate in Europe about a pirate captain named Misson who had founded a socialist republic in Madagascar. According to the tale, the amazing Misson came from an old French family and had gone to sea as a boy, rising to become a keen ship’s officer. According to the story, while visiting Rome, Misson became friends with a Dominican priest named Caraccioli who decided to throw off his habit and go to sea with his good friend Misson.
Misson and Caraccioli thereafter underwent a series of hair-raising adventures, culminating in Misson’s becoming captain of his own ship, the Victoire, with Caraccioli serving as his first mate. These unusual pirates then set out to found a democracy where men could shake off “the yoak of Tyranny, and live in freedom.” Instead of a black flag, Misson’s ship flew a white flag on which was emblazoned the motto FOR GOD AND LIBERTY.
Although the tale says that Misson and his men took a number of prizes, it insists they never mistreated their captives, and in fact, took great delight in freeing the slaves aboard slave ships. The story tells how Misson and his liberty-loving crew arrived in Madagascar, where Captain Misson married the sister of a local queen, and Caraccioli her niece. Eventually they were supposed to have set up an ideal pirate colony on Madagascar,
which they named, fittingly enough, Libertatia and which was run on socialistic principles with all property held in common under a democratic government. But Libertatia came to an end when Misson’s ship foundered in a hurricane and he was drowned.
Although there is absolutely no evidence that a pirate named Misson ever existed, let alone his republic of Libertatia, the story does indicate that there was considerable contemporary disposition to believe that the pirates of Madagascar were, indeed, making themselves into a permanent force in the world. (The Misson story also makes it clear that whether people believed literally in Misson and Libertatia or not, they did grasp—however imperfectly and symbolically—that it was the freedom inherent in a pirate’s life that attracted men to the outlaw nation.)
In addition to the Misson story, there is other evidence that contemporaries recognized the potential nationhood of the Madagascar pirates. For example, throughout this period, Parliament received numerous appeals from merchants, investors in the East India Company, and owners and masters of cargo vessels, calling on the government to root out the Madagascar outlaws. One such petition, after noting that the Madagascar pirates are “a formidable Body” and have become “a manifest Obstruction to Trade and Scandal to our Nation and Religion, being most of them English, at least four-Fifths,” goes on to warn that if the present generation of pirates on Madagascar should become extinct, “their Children will have the same Inclination to Madagascar, as these have to England, and will not have any such Affection for England.” The petition goes on to say that it is therefore “a very desirable and necessary Thing,” that the Madagascar pirates be “suppressed in Time,” that is, before their children turn pirate too.
Defoe, although writing at a later date, also recognized that the pirates of this era had developed many of the hallmarks of a state. Noting that Rome itself was “no more at first than a Refuge for Thieves and Outlaws,” Defoe wrote: “If the Progress of our Pyrates had been equal to their Beginning; had they all united, and settled in some of those Islands, they might, by this Time, have been honored with the Name of a Commonwealth, and no Power in those Parts of the World could have been able to dispute it with them.”
To contemporaries who witnessed the enormous explosion of piracy in the 1690s, the seaborne outlaws of Madagascar must not only have seemed on the brink of establishing themselves as a nation, they must also have seemed invincible on their island.
In fact, the contemporary impression was not far off. From their Madagascar bastions, the pirates could scoff at both threats of punishment and promises of pardon. With the Royal Navy occupied with King William’s War, the pirate flotillas feared no seaborne force. Financed by the merchants of colonial America, pirate captains lacked for nothing.
From the Mozambique Channel to the Red Sea to the western coast of India itself, the ships of an emerging outlaw nation roamed with near impunity, pursuing a relentless war with the trading nations.
The rich and powerful British East India Company soon found itself desperately engaged in this enormous combat—and fighting for its very life.
6
The Rage of Rich Men Balked
On the last day of the year 1600, Queen Elizabeth I proclaimed the formation of a new company of merchant adventurers.
Speaking from her throne in a quavering voice, the ailing old queen, who had been monarch for forty-two years, granted her “Royal Assent and License” to an association of merchants so that they “of their own Adventures, costs and charges, as well as for the honor of this our realm of England as for the increase of our navigation and advancement of trade of merchandise…might adventure and set forth one or more voyage, with convenient number of Ships and Pinnances, by way of traffic and merchandise to the East Indies.”
With Elizabeth’s words was born the East India Company, a most peculiar institution that would—over the ensuing 250 years—enrich its backers, fight private wars, represent British prestige and power in much of Asia, and finally deliver India to the British Empire.
The company to which Good Queen Bess granted her royal license that last day of the sixteenth century actually grew out of a series of events that began in 1578. In that year the great Sir Francis Drake, on one of the marauding voyages that the queen herself had helped to finance, captured a Portuguese ship homeward bound from Indian waters. Not only was the ship’s hold stuffed full of treasure from her eastern trading, she also carried records of previous voyages that told of even richer cargoes.
Then, in 1591, an English merchant named Ralph Fitch wrote a report on an eight-year journey he had taken through India and the Malay Peninsula. His story confirmed the immense wealth of those nations. Finally, when an English sea captain, James Lancaster, returned home from an eastern voyage in 1594, bringing back further word of the profits that Spain and the Portuguese were reaping in the East, London merchants, whose appetites had already been thoroughly whetted, resolved to obtain a share of the rich East India trade. A hundred merchants put up a total of £30,000 and formed the East India Company. They then sought royal permission for their endeavor. The charter they received from Elizabeth gave their company a monopoly of the “trade and traffic to the East Indies.”
The company’s first endeavor took place in 1601 when it sent a convoy of four vessels—Red Dragon, Hector, Ascension, and Susan—to Java and Sumatra. The convoy returned home more than two years later with an invaluable cargo of pepper and spices.
This initial success in the spice trade, however, was short-lived. English merchants soon encountered vicious opposition from the Dutch and Portuguese who were already firmly established in the East. English trading stations in Indonesia came under attack by the Dutch. By 1623 the Dutch had driven the English out of most of the Indonesian Archipelago, except for a single trading station in Java. Indonesia was to remain a Dutch stronghold thereafter.
In India, however, the East India Company fared much better. In 1612 company ships had defeated a Portuguese force in battle off the coast of India—and had won trading concessions from the Mogul Empire. Trading stations were established in Surat, Madras, and Bombay. The company was soon busily engaged in a lucrative trade in cotton and silk, indigo, saltpeter, and spices.
In the wake of Parliament’s victory over the Royalists and the Stuarts in the civil strife of the mid-century, the East India Company, which had long received the favor of the Stuarts, seemed on the verge of losing the monopoly that had been granted to it by royal license. But Cromwell, who understood the value for England of the company’s presence in the East, renewed its charter in 1657 despite the company’s Royalist antecedents.
With the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660, the company entered a new and prolonged period of prosperity.
By 1669 it employed some thirty vessels and more than three thousand sailors in its service, importing more than £180,000 worth of goods to England annually. A decade later the goods imported to England in the company’s East Indiaman vessels, with their distinctive black-and-white hulls, amounted to more than £1 million per year. In the 1680s the company paid its shareholders annual dividends that ranged from a low of 30 percent to a high of 40 percent. During this decade, too, the value of company shares rose to £500 each—more than five times their original worth.
When the fateful decade of the 1690s opened therefore, the directors of the East India Company, discreetly ensconced in the company’s London headquarters—an unpretentious four-story house in Leadenhall Street—could survey their company’s condition with some satisfaction.
The company had succeeded in planting itself firmly in India. Its trading posts—many of them considerable establishments by now, with warehouses, loading docks, and living quarters for dozens of employees, including armed guards—dotted the western coast of India. Company ships, both those owned by the company and those under charter, plowed the Indian Ocean in ever-increasing numbers, making the company by far the most visible and influential European presence in those vast waters.
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sp; But the East India Company remained dependent upon toleration by Aurangzeb, the Great Mogul, whose distaste for and suspicion of European merchants and their crass culture was a very real hazard of trading in India.
Aurangzeb, whose own wealth and autocratic power dwarfed that of any contemporary European monarch, was openly contemptuous of the greedy European traders in his domain. At the same time he was skeptical of their motives, sensing that the company—as an independent force in his realm—harbored political ambitions that might one day threaten the throne. To remind the company who it was that ruled India, Aurangzeb would, from time to time, harass the company’s representatives by restricting their activities, or by imposing new taxes upon them, or even by threatening to expel the company entirely. (On some occasions in the past Aurangzeb’s tactics had actually led to armed clashes between the Great Mogul’s soldiers and the private troops of the company.)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
For the most part the company regarded Aurangzeb’s suspicious harassment as the price of doing business within the Mogul Empire. However, the company had recently concluded a new trade agreement with Aurangzeb in which the Great Mogul had renewed the company’s trading privileges—and many of the company agents in India, aware of their dependence on the Great Mogul’s tolerance, sincerely hoped that the new treaty would lead to better relations with Aurangzeb in the future.
But Aurangzeb in fact remained deeply distrustful of the Englishmen who worked so busily enriching themselves in the tiny commercial enclaves he had granted to them. Nor were the Great Mogul’s misgivings entirely without foundation.
In 1685 the company had restructured its Indian operation, naming one of its prominent members, Sir John Child, as the first “Captain-General and Admiral” for India. (This very martial title must have grated sorely upon Aurangzeb’s sense of his own majesty, even if he dismissed it as pretentious strutting.) The company had also granted Sir John extraordinary powers to decide company policy on the spot, without resorting to London for permission or confirmation of his actions. In addition, the company had begun to coin its own money in India, a haughty act that probably would have called forth suppression from Aurangzeb’s government if the company money had been able to compete with the Great Mogul’s own coin.
