Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

  As an extra precaution, Davis now seized the only other ship lying near King James in the anchorage: a small sloop. Acting in near silence, he and his men not only captured the sloop but also took her officers and crew on board the King James, securing them below in order to keep them from sounding any warning to the fort.

  Now, with all his plans laid, Davis returned to the fort bearing his gifts of liquor. While waiting for dinner to be served, Davis and the governor shared a bowl of punch and some light conversation.

  Suddenly Davis, still pleasant and civil in his demeanor, drew a cocked pistol from under his waistcoat and leveled it at his astonished host. Without raising his voice, Davis politely informed the governor that he was the prisoner of the pirate Captain Howell Davis. It is easy to imagine the incredulous governor with a glass of punch at his lips, staring over the glass at the pistol in Davis’s hand. Perhaps the governor is dumb with surprise. Perhaps he is not quite certain what he has just heard from the lips of this charming Welsh merchant. Is it a joke, perhaps? But when both the doctor and Davis’s first officer also drew pistols and aimed them, any doubts about the situation must have swiftly evaporated.

  With the governor now his captive, Davis—according to plan—ran to the window and fired his pistol. At this, his men lounging in the guardroom sprang into action. They surrounded the on-duty soldiers with their pistols cocked and ready. Disarming the soldiers and locking them in the guardroom, Davis’s men seized the cannons of the fort and opened the gates to the reinforcements from the King James.

  In a few minutes Howell Davis and his men had taken possession of one of the major forts belonging to the Royal African Company—and they had accomplished this feat without firing a shot, except for Davis’s signal.

  On the following day, while the men of the King James transferred plunder from the fort to their ship, they amused themselves by firing salutes to each other from the fort and their vessel. Although the loot from the fort was not as great as expected because most of the year’s receipts for the Gambia operation had recently been shipped home, the booty was nevertheless ample. It included some £2,000 in gold as well as large quantities of trade goods.

  Departing from Gambia, Davis sailed southward. He had not gone far when he encountered two other pirate ships. The masters of these ships, admiring Davis’s methods, joined with him under his command. The three pirates then attacked the company fort at Sierra Leone, and were completely successful.

  After the Sierra Leone victory, Davis and his consorts rested and repaired their ships for almost two months. Eventually, with Davis as commodore, the pirate squadron got under way again, continuing south along the coast, plundering whatever vessels came their way.

  Now Davis, sensing that the rough tactics of his companions were unsuitable to his own style, parted company with the other two ships. He sailed on alone into the Gulf of Guinea. Here he encountered a large merchant flying the Dutch flag. Although the merchant carried thirty guns—ten more than King James—Davis attacked, believing that her Dutch crew would surrender rather than fight. He soon discovered his mistake.

  The Dutch ship, a swift sailer, fought fiercely. She fired one broadside that killed nine of Davis’s men. It was an epic fight that went on for thirty-two hours—from 1:00 P.M. on the first day to 9:00 A.M. on the second. In the end it was the Dutch vessel that surrendered. Davis, whose own ship had been damaged in the fighting—and had started to leak in any case—decided to take possession of the Dutch vessel. He transferred his flag, much of his crew, and all the company’s loot to her. He then mounted guns from the King James in her—in addition to her own cannon. When he was done, Davis had transformed the Dutch merchant into a formidable brigand bearing thirty-two cannon and twenty-seven swivel guns. He renamed her the Royal Rover. Then, with the now-diminished King James as consort, he continued his voyage along the coast.

  At the trading station of Anamobu he captured three English slave ships, one of which he presented to the Dutch captain from whom he had just taken his new Royal Rover. The other two slavers he kept with him, probably intending to ransom them back to their masters at the first opportunity.

  On the very next day Davis captured another Dutch vessel. This one surrendered after a chase—and after he had emptied one broadside into her. Aboard this Dutch merchant, besides valuable cargo, Davis found £15,000 in sterling—making her the richest prize he had taken to date.

  Full of high spirits, Davis now released the two slave ships to their masters, but only after he had recruited another thirty-five hands from their crews. He also released his latest Dutch prize after stowing all her valuable cargo aboard Royal Rover.

  Finally, he decided that the King James was now too unseaworthy to continue. Accordingly he brought her crew aboard the Rover and abandoned King James.

  Now Davis, with a powerful, swift-sailing ship served by a crew that was as tough, numerous, and bold as any on the Guinea Coast, continued his southward voyage, fetching up at the Portuguese island of Principe, located approximately 150 miles off the coast of what is now Gabon.

  This time Davis employed a variation of his merchant act.

  Flying Royal Navy ensigns and donning an appropriate uniform, Davis told the Portuguese officials who came out to the roadstead to greet him that his ship was an English man-of-war in pursuit of pirates who had lately been active in the area. As usual, his open demeanor and his sheer brazenness convinced the Portuguese that he was what he claimed to be. The island’s fort fired a salute in honor of its English visitor. Davis had the Rover return the salute.

  Davis and his officers were invited ashore where they were received by a military escort and taken to the house of the governor, who treated them with all the courtesy and hospitality due the Royal Navy. During his visit to the governor’s home, Davis—as usual—spent much of his time surreptitiously reconnoitering the defenses of the fort.

  Back aboard the Royal Rover, Davis was busy planning his coup against the fort when a fat French merchant ship came into the harbor. True to his piratical calling, Davis could not resist this opportunity. He and his men—notwithstanding their pose as English sailors—immediately boarded the Frenchman and plundered her cargo. This unexpected and brutal action planted some considerable doubt in the Portuguese governor’s mind about the true identity of Captain Howell Davis. But Davis, with sublime self-confidence, buttressed by the invincible charm of a natural mountebank, airily explained that he had boarded the Frenchman because she had been trading with pirates—and it was his duty to punish her officers and crew for this illegality. He had, therefore, confiscated her illegal cargo. It was this act of confiscation, Davis said, that the governor must have misinterpreted as looting. The governor commended Davis for his zeal.

  But his doubts must have remained unassuaged, for the governor did not invite Davis and his officers to dine—as Davis had expected. Such an invitation was essential if Davis was to seize the governor and sack the island.

  Davis was undaunted, however. If the governor would not invite him to dinner, he would arrange a banquet on board the Royal Rover for the governor and his chief officials. During the festivities they would be seized and held hostage—and forced to have the fort opened to Davis and his men. Accordingly, Davis dispatched his invitation—and was gratified when the governor and his staff accepted.

  Unknown to Davis, however, the governor was now on to him. An officer aboard the plundered French ship had somehow discovered both Davis’s true identity and his plan. Contriving to get ashore, the Frenchman had told his tale to the governor.

  That worthy man was not entirely devoid of Davis’s kind of brass. Thus, when Davis suggested that as a mark of honor he would personally escort the governor to the shipboard banquet, the governor expressed his delight and agreed.

  On the night of the festivities, therefore, the unsuspecting Davis went happily to pick up his guests in the ship’s boat. Perhaps Davis intended to spring his trap even before he got the governor well aboard t
he Royal Rover. Instead it was Davis who was trapped. The governor greeted him affably and invited Davis and his men to come ashore for a drink before they all returned to the Rover. Davis agreed. But no sooner had his party landed than soldiers hidden in the underbrush near the shore opened up with a deadly fusillade of musket fire.

  Although mortally wounded in the stomach by the first blast, Davis nevertheless drew his pistols and fought back furiously. He managed to kill at least two of his assailants before he himself fell dead on the beach, his smoking pistols still in his hands.

  Only one member of Davis’s landing party escaped the ambush. Leaping into the water of the harbor, he swam back to the Royal Rover, where he blurted out the news that their daring commander had been treacherously shot down.

  Immediately, Royal Rover weighed anchor and made for the safety of the open sea.

  Having outrun any pursuit, Davis’s men held a council to decide how they should proceed now that the cunning Davis was dead.

  It happened that there was aboard the Royal Rover another Welshman, a tall, dark-eyed, unsmiling man who had been serving as third mate aboard one of the slave ships Howell Davis had captured at the trading station of Anamabu.

  Some of Davis’s crew now remembered that there had been something about this man that their fallen leader had liked. Perhaps it was merely the fact that the mate was a Welshman like Davis himself. Or perhaps Davis had sensed in this dour thirty-seven-year-old officer some quality that might prove useful to the company. In any event, Davis—who had never before forced a man to join him—had taken his fellow Welshman aboard the Royal Rover at the point of a pistol.

  The grim mate from the slaver had, however, kept himself aloof from the crew, letting it be known that he had no intention of turning pirate. Yet somehow his personality had registered profoundly on the men of the Royal Rover. Despite the dark-eyed mate’s cool demeanor toward them, they respected him—and they recognized his quality.

  Now, at the crew’s council following the death of Davis, one grizzled old member of the Rover’s complement suggested that the Welshman from the slaver, despite his glowering and his tee-totaling, might make a fitting successor to the dashing, exuberant Howell Davis.

  The perceptive crewman made his nomination in these words: “Should a captain be so saucy as to exceed prescription at any time, why down with him! It will be a Caution after he is dead to his successors of what fatal Consequences any sort of assuming may be. However, it is my Advice, that, while we are sober, we pitch upon a Man of Courage and skilled in Navigation, one who by his Counsel and Bravery seems best able to defend the Commonwealth and ward us from the Dangers and Tempests of an instable Element, and the fatal Consequence of Anarchy; and such a one I take Roberts to be. A Fellow, I think, in all Respects worthy of your Esteem and Favor.”

  The rest of the crew, with only one dissenting vote, hailed the somber mate as their new captain.

  And he, suddenly moved by some ferocious want that caused him to turn his back on all he believed in, accepted.

  So began the piratical career of Bartholomew Roberts, the most formidable—and strangest—of all the captains who ever flew the black flag.

  18

  The Black Captain

  He had about him a brooding, Celtic look: black hair, eyes like night, a swarthy face, bleak and clean-shaven.

  Defoe calls his aspect “black”—and says he derived his pirate name from this somber quality. “Black Bart,” his crew—and soon the world—called him.

  As his meteoric and doom-driven career exploded across the vast oceans he traveled, it became clear, both to those who loved him and to those who hated him, that the blackness about him was more than physical. There was darkness in his soul as well. He believed in God and the Devil—and therefore in Sin and in Hell. He seemed to know that he had committed sins beyond forgiveness—and that therefore the Fire must be his destiny.

  This knowledge—that he had forfeited Heaven—created a void in his soul, a Despair that sought pain and punishment. As much as the world condemned him, he condemned himself more.

  It was as if Roberts knew that only in Hell could he finally still the self-hate that howled within him—and that to find Hell, he must rush madly through his days, seeking over every horizon for the doom he yearned for.

  Yet if he could not forgive himself, he could not forgive the unjust world either—and so he punished it with all the wild energy he could muster.

  To many who sailed with him during the incandescent months of his career, Roberts seemed touched with some strange and splendid madness that transformed him into a Demonic Prince who rode the wind seeking vengeance and his own destruction.

  Described as tall and slim, he is depicted in one contemporary illustration as a dandy. In the drawing he is dressed in a crimson damask waistcoat, breeches, and a broad hat festooned with a red ostrich feather. He wears a diamond-studded cross on a thick gold chain around his neck. Two pairs of pistols are jammed into a silk sash draped over his shoulder. He stands with one sturdy leg forward, a naked sword in his right hand, as if challenging the world to combat.

  Even this peacock dandyism—which he adopted only after his pirate career began—seems to have been basically an expression of the demonic self he had loosed when he became Black Bart, captain of the Royal Rover.

  It was as though, by wearing their finery, Roberts was proclaiming his scorn for the powerful of the world who had made the rules of the game—rules that, as Black Bart, he defied with unquenchable fury and undeniable success. Dressed in his gaudy apparel, he declared his equality with, and freedom from, the “gentlefolk” who wanted Black Bart dead—and in so doing he also soothed the wounds Bartholomew Roberts had carried with him all his life because he had been born poor and thus, for all his intelligence, rendered forever inferior. Decked out in his stolen raiment, Black Bart was the avenger of Bartholomew Roberts.

  This strangest and deadliest of all pirate captains was born in Pembroke, Wales, in 1682, the son of indigent but “respectable” parents who gave him a strict religious upbringing.

  No drinking or dancing or swearing was allowed in his parents’ home. The Sabbath was always stringently observed with prayer and church services in which hellfire, iniquity, and salvation were prominent themes.

  From boyhood, Bartholomew Roberts absorbed the austere piety of his parents into his very bones. Their conception of righteousness stayed with him all his days. Even when he began to follow the sea, he remained faithful to his upbringing. From time immemorial it had been the practice of seamen to get drunk, to curse each other and God, and to laugh at preachers. But Roberts was a teetotaler who read the Bible, did not swear, and kept holy the Sabbath day by prayer and by refraining from labor.

  Like many of the sons of the genteel poor of Wales, he had gone to sea as a lad, serving first as a cabin boy on a merchant vessel. “Smart and lively,” he learned navigation and ship-handling and rose quickly from the ranks of ordinary seamen to become a mate. After service in the War of the Spanish Succession, he signed on as a mate aboard a sloop trading out of Barbados.

  By the time he was in his mid-thirties, Roberts had earned a well-deserved reputation as a master mariner. Yet despite his proven ability, he was still only a ship’s officer, with little prospect of achieving a command of his own—a goal that virtually all ship’s officers of the day yearned after.

  In that era, to become a ship’s master was also to become firmly established as a member of the middle class. A ship’s captain, unlike other officers aboard a merchant vessel, was not a mere servant of the owner but his trusted agent. The captain was responsible not only for navigating the ship but also for maintaining the business interests of the ship’s owner while the vessel was far removed from the owner’s control. The captain was a trusted man, a man of honor whose word was considered as good as a gentleman’s. A ship’s captain could bind the ship’s owners for debt, make decisions in their stead regarding cargoes and prices, and had the pow
er to represent the owners before any tribunal—in any port in the world.

  Usually a ship’s master was also a part owner of his vessel and its cargo. Most owners gave—or sold—their captains a substantial share of a ship in order to ensure the captain’s concern for preserving both the ship and its profitability. Many ship’s masters earned fortunes by their voyages. Many also became valued business and social associates of the wealthy and powerful.

  Bartholomew Roberts, with his outstanding professional capacity, nurtured a fierce ambition to become captain of his own ship. After more than twenty years’ service as a second-in-command, he longed not only for the money and status that a captaincy would confer upon him but also for the freedom it would bring him. As captain of his own ship, he would no longer have to endure incompetence, no longer have to defer to lesser men. He would no longer have to bow and bob before men who possessed far less wit and quality than he. He would gain the recognition he deserved. He would at last be free to become what he knew he was meant to be: one of the elite.

  Yet in that age, ability and desire were never sufficient by themselves to secure command of a ship. A mate might win the respect of the captains he served under and earn a great reputation among his peers. But it was not the respect and goodwill of peers that counted, but rather the good opinion of the merchant princes who owned ships—and who backed, with their fortunes, what were often perilous wagers against the sea.

  For such men, gambling fortunes on each voyage, a man like Bartholomew Roberts, for all his skill and seamanship, seemed somehow risky. Roberts made such men uneasy with his restless energy and his moodiness, and especially with his scarcely disguised contempt for more cautious, steadier men. He seemed to most shipowners who came in contact with him not merely imprudent—which was bad enough—but unstable, even a little dangerous, a man who might do almost anything if the moon or tides were wrong. Most shipowners thought that such a man might serve very well as a chief mate, but only a fool would ever entrust a ship and its cargo to such a restive spirit. The shipping business was gamble enough, most merchants felt, without lengthening the odds by employing a Bartholomew Roberts as captain.