by Frank Sherry
In addition to the fighting qualities of their ships, pirates enjoyed another advantage in their encounters with merchant vessels: The crew of cargo ships seldom had any stomach for a fight in defense of a rich man’s merchandise. Sailors aboard merchant ships knew full well that if they resisted a pirate attack, the odds were that they would be killed, while surrender ensured their survival.
In contrast, pirates almost always fought furiously, aware that their survival, not to mention their enrichment, depended upon victory.
In addition to the superior fighting quality of their men and ships, the outlaws benefited from a number of very effective tactics that they had developed for use against merchant shipping.
Since the pirate aim was always to capture prey intact rather than to destroy it—and then to escape pursuit—pirates seldom tried to be heroes. They knew that battle was far from splendid and that a man struck by a musket ball in the kneecap would more than likely have to undergo the agony of having the surgeon saw his leg off at the knee. They had seen too many of their fellows blown to bits by cannonballs, or maimed by sword strokes, to regard combat as glorious. For pirates battle was always a last resort.
Pirates, therefore, had developed tactics aimed at capturing prey by means of speed, stealth, and threat.
Usually, as a pirate ship patrolled the sea-lanes, it would maintain a continuous sharp lookout for likely-looking prey. Virtually all pirate ships, when on the hunt, kept a sharp-eyed sailor perched high up on the mainmast; he thus had a view over the horizon for miles in every direction. Shorthanded merchant vessels often could not spare men to act as lookouts. For this reason, pirates almost always spotted potential victims before they were seen themselves. This gave the pirates in their swift ships the opportunity to close up rapidly and unobtrusively on their quarry.
Having closed the distance between themselves and their chosen victim, the pirates did not attack immediately. Instead they would now observe their victim carefully, trying to gauge her speed, possible armament, the kind of cargo she might be carrying, and—most important—whether she was likely to offer any serious opposition. This cat-and-mouse game might go on for days with the pirate ship usually continuing to better her position relative to the merchant. At some point, if the pirates decided to attack, the pirate vessel would suddenly pile on canvas and, with a surge of new speed, begin bearing down on her prey. Nine times out of ten, the swift pirate vessel would run down her victim in the open sea. At this point, having overtaken the quarry, the pirates would usually fire a warning shot and call upon the merchant to surrender. Almost always the victim, undermanned and underarmed and fully aware of the scores of cutlass-wielding bruisers crowding the pirate deck ready to board, struck her colors without resistance. Only if a prize refused to surrender would the pirates fire on it, and even then they fired first to disable masts and rigging. From a pirate’s point of view, there was no point in sinking a cargo they hoped to capture.
It was, of course, always a favorite pirate tactic to fly false colors. Most pirate ships possessed a variety of appropriate flags taken from previous victims. Sometimes clever pirates, flying false colors, would even enter harbors or trading-station anchorages, drop their own hooks, and, at their leisure, choose a victim. Later, the disguised predator would exit the harbor as if to continue her voyage. Instead, she might lie in wait over the horizon for the unsuspecting victim to appear.
Tactics of speed and maneuver were also crucial in evading pursuit. Pirate captains not only made it a practice after taking a prize to flee swiftly from the scene, they also sought to maneuver their vessels into areas—island groups or low-lying coasts—where natural features such as shallow bays, rocky coves, and tidal swamplands offered shelter from possible pursuers.
As a basic complement to their tactics of deception, rapid attack, and swift retreat, the pirates also employed deliberate terror. The purpose was to gain so terrible a reputation that victims would surrender without resistance.
Toward this end, pirates almost invariably made it a point to inflict a terrible vengeance on ships that refused a demand to surrender. One example of this was the awful carnage that Henry Every allowed his men to inflict on the passengers and crew of the Gang-I-Sawai.
Sometimes the terror that pirate captains employed took bizarre forms. One pirate captain made the master of a captured cargo vessel drink bottle after bottle of rum until the poor man toppled unconscious into the sea where, presumably, he drowned. In another instance, a pirate captain, in order to punish recalcitrant captives, made them run around and around his ship’s mainmast until they collapsed in exhaustion.
One of the most bizarre and cruel instances of pirate terror involved the punishment of a Captain Sawbridge, who was the master of an East Indiaman captured in 1696 by the pirate captain Dirk Chivers, for a time master of the famed Madagascar-based pirate vessel Charming Mary.
Chivers had burned Sawbridge’s ship after a deal to ransom the vessel and its cargo had gone awry. The distraught Captain Sawbridge had then berated Chivers so bitterly that the pirate captain ordered the merchant master’s lips sewn up with twine, using a sailing needle, to “stop his mouth from complaining.” Chivers had then put the unfortunate Sawbridge ashore where he soon died of such barbaric treatment. Needless to say, the story of Sawbridge’s horrible fate spread far and wide within a short time—and Chivers’s next victim no doubt surrendered his ship and cargo without audible complaint.
Such tales of pirate brutality—almost all of them true5—made it easier for pirates to gain their aims without a fight. When the black flag—itself an instrument of terror6—rose on the masthead of a pursuing vessel, most merchant captains were quick to strike their own colors. (Sometimes, however, merchants did fight, and there are a number of instances in the record when pirates backed off rather than face determined resistance. But such opposition was relatively rare.)
It was through the use of such tactics as terror, speed, and maneuver that the Madagascar pirates were able to dominate the eastern seas in the 1690s, to the fury and chagrin of the officials of the East India Company.
The rage of the company was compounded by the knowledge that the pirates were bleeding the company to death not only because of superior fighting ability and tactics but also because they were, in effect, being financed by the merchants, and encouraged by the officials, of colonial America.
From the company’s point of view, profiteering in piracy within the American colonies was not only a scandal, it was a crime. Yet month after month the criminal collusion between the Madagascar pirates and their colonial supporters grew more brazen and more frustrating for the company.
In one instance of colonial impudence, a cabal of enterprising Bostonians set up a mint to stamp gold and silver, plundered from the East India Company ships, into coins.
Officials in Rhode Island, to protect the Red Sea Men who supplied luxury goods to colonial ladies of fashion, not only refused to enforce the Navigation Acts, they even refused to allow an Admiralty court to sit anywhere within the colony’s boundaries.
In Virginia, a judge, scandalized by the overt dealings of his fellow citizens with pirates, wrote: “If the pirates have not supplies and a market for the goods that they plunder and rob, they would never continue in these parts of the world.”
In faraway Madagascar, Adam Baldridge, the ex-pirate turned merchant and king of St. Mary’s Island, kept a diary that detailed the thriving commerce he carried on with colonial merchants.
In one entry Baldridge wrote: “Arrived the ship Charles, John Churcher, Master, Frederick Phillips, owner, sent to bring me certain sorts of goods, these being four pairs of pumps, six dozen worster stockings, three dozen speckled shirts, three dozen canvas trousers, twelve hats, some carpenters’ tools, two stills, one grindstone, two crosscut saws, one whipsaw, three jars of oil, two iron pots, three barrels of cannon powder, some books being catechisms, horn books, primers, and bibles, some garden seeds, and some cocks and hens. For th
ese goods I paid 1,100 pieces of eight, 34 slaves, 15 head of cattle and 57 bars of iron….”
The Frederick Phillips mentioned in Baldridge’s diary was by far the most active and most prominent of the colonial dealers in pirate goods.
A Dutch immigrant, Frederick Philipse (the correct spelling) was not only a merchant prince in New York City, he was also the owner of a huge and magnificent estate overlooking the Hudson River. He was a major benefactor of the Dutch Reformed Church, and had served for more than twenty years as a member of the City Council of New York.
Philipse and his son, Adolph, had no love for the English who had taken New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664. Nor had they any love for the East India Company, which, in their view, had unfairly excluded colonial merchants from the eastern trade. But the Philipses, father and son, had more than made up for any profit they might have lost because of the East India Company’s exclusiveness by supplying the company’s enemies, the Madagascar pirates, with everything from Bibles to hats—and all at a very healthy markup. (For example, Philipse regularly supplied the canny Adam Baldridge with copious amounts of rum bought in New York for two shillings a gallon and sold in St. Mary’s for £3 a gallon—a markup of 3,000 percent.)
Philipse and the many merchants like him who profited from the pirate trade could not have operated without the active cooperation of colonial officials. Governor Benjamin Fletcher, Captain Tew’s good friend, was of course the most notorious of the corrupt New World officials, but he was by no means the only one. In fact, the corruption epitomized by Fletcher had spread like a contagion.
In North Carolina it was generally known that Governor Seth Sothel, who had himself once been captured and held for ransom by Algerian pirates, would openly sell privateering commissions to pirates for as little as 20 guineas each. Moreover, Sothel let it be known he was always open for a deal in pirate booty.
William Markham, lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania from 1694 until William Penn himself arrived in 1699, and titular head of the Quakers of Philadelphia, was also such a good friend to pirates that a pamphleteer wrote of him: “These Quaker have a neat way of getting money by encouraging the pyrates, when they bring in a good store of gold, so that when Every’s men were here in 1697, the Quaking Justices were for letting them live quietly, or else they were bailed easily.”
Markham, in fact, liked pirates so well that he had allowed his daughter to marry one of Every’s men, a James Brown by name. Brown, as Markham’s son-in-law, later gained a seat in the Pennsylvania legislature.
One exemplary official who had not been corrupted was Edward Randolph, the royal surveyor of customs. Randolph, who struggled to enforce the Navigation Acts, complained in one of his reports that Governor Phips, of Massachusetts had threatened to drub him as a public nuisance because, by doing his duty, Randolph was interfering with the pirate trade. Furthermore, reported Randolph, the governor of Rhode Island, an illiterate named Caleb Carr, had “turned Rhode Island into a free port for pirates.”
Officials of the East India Company knew that it was the skein of corruption in the colonies that made possible the profits that energized the pirate nation in Madagascar.
Once again the East India Company sent an appeal to London. This time they implored the British government to halt the colonial trade in pirate goods by enforcing the Navigation Acts.
The company also renewed its plea that a squadron of Royal Navy men-of-war be sent to clean out the pirate sanctuaries in Madagascar, and to drive the pirate fleets from the Indian Ocean. Company officials seemed to argue that detaching two or three warships from the European fleet was not likely to affect the war with France, while it was very likely that unless the Madagascar pirates were destroyed, England’s influence in the East, so painfully built up over the course of almost a century, might be dissipated entirely.
In response, London, with the ponderous caution characteristic of all governments, took some tentative first steps toward suppressing the illegal trade in pirate booty in the colonies.
The Council for Trade and Plantations sent official communications to governors suspected of collusion in the pirate trade, warning them that “the King has given orders to the Governors of the Colonies to prevent the sheltering of pirates under the severest of penalties.” The council’s communication then went on to warn each of the concerned governors that their colony was “named as a place of protection to such villains.”
At the same time, Edward Randolph had forwarded to the council a series of comprehensive and sensible recommendations for extirpation of the pirate trade in the colonies. The most important of these was his recommendation that the king replace corrupt governors with men committed to “regulating abuses in the plantation trade.”
But if there were encouraging signs in London that the government was at last prepared to take steps against the colonial merchants, the Admiralty absolutely refused the company’s request for a Royal Navy operation against the Madagascar pirates.7
King William’s War against Louis XIV, begun in 1689, had cost the Royal Navy dearly.
In the first stages of the war, France’s chief aim had been to topple England’s new Protestant king, William III, and to restore the deposed Catholic king, James II, the ally of Louis, to the English throne.
Toward this end, Louis had sent his powerful fleet to seek battle against the English. On July 10, 1690, seventy French warships had met a combined English and Dutch fleet of fifty-six ships off the southeast coast of England near the Isle of Wight. In the battle that ensued—called the Battle of Beachy Head by the English—the French had badly mauled the combined allied fleet. But, inexplicably, the French fleet had failed to pursue and destroy the fleeing allied ships. The English-Dutch fleet had managed to escape, although heavily damaged.
In the meantime, on land, the deposed King James had stirred up rebellion in Ireland but had been defeated in the Battle of the Boyne by the Protestants of Northern Ireland. He had then fled to the court of Louis XIV.
Languishing in Versailles, James continually entreated Louis to invade England in order to restore James to his throne.
In 1692, the third year of what had begun to seem an endless war, Louis agreed to attempt an invasion of the south coast of England, to be led militarily by James, and to be made possible by the French fleet.
In May 1692, the French fleet, under the Comte de Tourville who had won the Battle of Beachy Head two years earlier, went out to seek battle with the English and Dutch fleet as the necessary first step to invasion.
De Tourville’s fleet consisted of forty-four ships. Although James had boasted to Louis that the English ships would not fight against a French force that would be carrying James back to his throne in England, the Sun King was skeptical. He gave de Tourville direct orders to attack the combined English and Dutch fleet, even if some English ships defected in support of James. De Tourville was also reminded that his failure to follow up his victory at Beachy Head had allowed the defeated fleet to escape. De Tourville was determined that this time there would be no such failure.
On May 29, 1692, de Tourville sighted the enemy fleet, consisting of ninety-nine ships—a force that was, surprisingly, far greater than his own. Nevertheless, expecting English defections, mindful of Louis’s direct order to attack the enemy, and recalling his failure at Beachy Head, de Tourville attacked the allied fleet with his forty-four vessels. The French fought bravely and inflicted much damage on their enemy, but it was clear that they could not overcome the English and Dutch superiority in numbers. During the night, therefore, having fought well, the French began to withdraw toward their own ports. But the allied fleet pursued. At La Hogue allied ships caught and destroyed a dozen French ships. Another three ships were caught and burned off Cherbourg.
France had lost a third of her fleet, and the English and Dutch had proved to themselves that they could, after all, defeat Louis XIV.
Although by the following year the French Channel fleet once again numbered more th
an seventy ships, it never again reached the fighting capabilities it had enjoyed at Beachy Head. Further, after the battle of La Hogue, the French fleet never seriously contemplated invasion of England.
For the English, however, this fact was far from apparent as they looked across the Channel at their enemy. To the English, the French fleet still seemed perfectly capable of invasion. For this reason the Royal Navy remained concentrated in home waters to block such an effort.
Moreover, in 1693 the French fleet had inflicted a terrible commercial defeat on the English. Surprising a huge guarded convoy of four hundred ships near the Straits of Gibralter, the French had destroyed or captured one hundred of them, and had scattered the rest.
In addition, as the war dragged on, French privateers operating out of Dunkirk and other Channel ports increasingly bedeviled English and Dutch commercial shipping. The most redoubtable of these Gallic privateers was the famed Jean Bart, who before the war ended, would lead his flotilla of daring privateers in six all-out battles against allied convoys and who would capture a total of eighty-one prizes. Called “the French devil” by the Dutch, Bart and his fellow privateers, in the years following the Battle of La Hogue, inflicted far more damage on English and Dutch shipping than did the regular naval forces of France. Bart and other French privateers even had the temerity to raid the English coast. In one famous episode, Bart was captured by the English and imprisoned at Plymouth. But somehow he escaped from his cell, stole an open boat, and rowed himself across the Channel to the French coast to resume his depredations against English shipping.
