by Frank Sherry
But then, as the crew sounded the seabed beneath them, the ocean became shallower each day, indicating that land could not be far off. With hope reborn, Royal Fortune plowed on. Then one day, as if announcing a miracle, the lookout sang out: “Land!” They had arrived at Surinam on the northern coast of South America. Roberts sent a boat ashore. Before sunset it returned with fresh water. Roberts and the House of Lords were saved.
Now, as if in vengeance for the suffering that he and his crew had just endured and escaped, Roberts—instead of trying for Africa again—went on a rampage from Barbados to Martinique—“and damn the Royal Navy.” With an almost contemptuous boldness, he swept across the Caribbean, capturing prize after prize—and eluding all efforts to catch him.
Roberts was also becoming—for the first time—cruel in his treatment of his prisoners. It was said that he had hanged a captured master from a yardarm, and that he had allowed his men to use prisoners for target practice. He was, they said, like a demon—or like a man who, believing deeply in sin and punishment, nevertheless sins, and then sins ever more heinously, begging the punishment he knows must fall upon him.
During this campaign, Roberts also took chances as never before.
In one incident reminiscent of his assault on Trepassey, Roberts sailed the Royal Fortune defiantly into the harbor of St. Kitt’s in the British Leeward Islands, ignoring the fire of the cannon from the island’s fortress. Insolently flying his own specially designed Jolly Roger, Roberts returned the fort’s fire while his men went about plundering the ships anchored in the harbor. He even sent a boat ashore to take some sheep from a meadow for fresh meat while the fortress guns fired impotently.2
During this period of almost uninterrupted onslaught in the Caribbean, Roberts attacked English and French shipping—and shore installations—with equal aggressiveness.
Not long after his impudent attack on St. Kitt’s, the governor of the French Leewards reported that Roberts had “seized, burned, or sunk, 15 French and English vessels and one Dutch interloper of 42 guns.” So great was the damage Roberts inflicted on French shipping around Martinique that the governor of that island appealed to the British governor of Barbados for help. (However, when the British governor of the Leeward Islands tried to order the Royal Navy man-of-war Rose, one of the ships that had arrived at Nassau harbor with Woodes Rogers, to chase down Roberts, the navy captain refused to obey.)
Despite the fact that he had no permanent base in the Caribbean and that he faced forces many times more powerful than his own, Roberts continued to range freely throughout the West Indies for many more months.
In the spring of 1721, however, having almost halted shipping in the Caribbean, and with the holds of his own and two captured ships bulging with loot, Roberts called together the House of Lords to decide their next move.
He pointed out that they had practically exhausted the Caribbean. He noted also that sooner or later their enemies would mount a concerted effort to hunt them down. At the same time, the American mainland to the north was more heavily defended than it ever had been before. Governor Spotswood of Virginia, for example, had recently planted batteries totaling fifty-four pieces of cannon to guard strategic places along his coast. Furthermore, although they had taken a great deal of loot over the past few months, their plunder was of no real use unless it could be turned into ready money. Since the ports of America and the Caribbean were now closed to pirate contraband, there was no point in seeking to sell their goods in those areas. But on the Guinea Coast of Africa, he pointed out, independent merchants still operated in defiance of the Royal African Company—and would pay hard cash for their plunder.
The House of Lords voted to return to Africa.
In April 1721 Roberts set sail for the Guinea Coast where his career had begun, and where—as he well knew—it might be destined to end.
19
Demon’s Destiny
This time Roberts made an easy passage eastward across the Atlantic, making landfall at Senegal. Then he took Royal Fortune and her two consorts south to the Royal African Company trading post at Sierra Leone. Here he anchored and ordered the fort to surrender. But the Royal African Company commander, a peppery old veteran trader named Plunket, refused—even though his supplies of gunpowder were too depleted for him to defend himself. Roberts began to bombard the fort with broadsides from Royal Fortune.
Plunket may have been “peppery,” but he was also, apparently, realistic. He struck his colors and the pirates came ashore. Angrily Roberts confronted Plunket and berated him for having so foolishly resisted. Plunket, an old Africa hand, responded with such a thunderstorm of oaths and curses that members of the House of Lords—all of them connoisseurs of profane language—burst into appreciative laughter and Roberts spared the old man’s life. But he looted the fort, nevertheless—and burned several empty slave ships that had been waiting for consignments.
Going on farther south, Roberts put in to one of those Guinea Coast enclaves frequented by free-lance traders. Here he stayed for approximately six weeks, conducting business and careening and refitting his ships.
While Roberts and the House of Lords were taking their ease among the interloper traders, word reached them that two formidable English warships, the Swallow and the Weymouth, both bearing sixty guns, were patrolling the coast, searching for Roberts.
Roberts declared that he was not at all worried about the presence of the two heavy men-of-war. After all, he had easily eluded warships in the past.
In late August 1721, having concluded his business among the traders and having refitted his vessels, Roberts set off once more, sailing along the eastward-curving coastline, plundering trading stations as he went, even capturing the Royal African Company’s frigate Onslow. Liking the captured frigate, he again transferred his flag to his latest prize, renaming her Royal Fortune.
Roberts, like a man who feared nothing, least of all the Royal Navy, plundered his way eastward until he reached the mouth of the Calabar River in what is now Nigeria. In this swampy low-lying delta region, he again careened and cleaned the ships of his little fleet.
While careened here, Roberts’s men attempted to trade with the local blacks. But the people of the region had been so brutalized by slave traders that they repelled attempts to contact them. The situation quickly escalated into a series of physical confrontations between the pirates and the natives who were trying to drive them back into the sea. Eventually the skirmishing became a battle. Roberts and his men, angered by what they considered ill-treatment from the blacks, fought fiercely, inflicting numerous casualties. As a result of this savage combat the name Black Bart became part of the tribal legends of that region.
Roberts continued his voyage for another four hundred miles along the now-southward-curving coast. Then, around Christmas, he decided to go north again.
He had learned from informants that the Royal Navy warships hunting him had had orders to return to their base at Sierra Leone by Christmastime. Clearly, if they had obeyed their orders, the two warships were no longer searching the coast. Roberts felt confident that he could head back north without encountering the men-of-war.
Nevertheless, he thought it prudent not to return along the coast he had just devastated. He chose a quicker and—as he thought—safer route, one that would guarantee evasion of the Swallow and the Weymouth. First he sailed due west into the open ocean. Then he changed course and sailed directly north to what is now the Ivory Coast. He arrived there in the New Year of 1722.
Here Roberts and his men rested for a few days, secure in the belief that the two Royal Navy ships were by now snug in their berths eight hundred miles away. But Roberts soon became restless again. He set off on another raid. Again he followed the coast to the east and to the south. This route, he thought, would widen even farther the already considerable distance between himself and the Royal Navy men-of-war.
What Roberts did not know, however, was that the two Royal Navy ships had not returned to their base. Th
ey were, in fact, at Cape Coast Castle in what is now Ghana—only three hundred miles to the east—and right in the path that Roberts was now traveling.
The Swallow and the Weymouth had had a horrendous cruise. Sickness, shortages of water, and mishaps of various kinds had plagued the two ships throughout their fruitless chase after Black Bart. Consequently, they had not been able to return to their base by Christmas as planned.
One half-comic incident during their cruise seemed to symbolize all the frustration and bad luck the two ships had encountered during their hunt for Roberts. They had put in to a large slaving station on the coast to obtain water. The local king had thereupon demanded a bribe from the masters of the two vessels. When it was explained that the ships belonged to the king of England and were not ordinary cargo vessels subject to local “duties,” the angry monarch swore: “By God, me King here!” He had then seized some sailors from the Weymouth, who had come ashore to get water, and demanded ransom for them. Eventually the ransom was paid and the water obtained, but much time had as usual been squandered.
Time was not the only thing the navy ships had lost. They had also lost more than one hundred crewmen to malaria and other illnesses. As a result, Captain Chaloner Ogle, commander of the two-ship patrol, had decided that before returning to Sierra Leone as planned, the Swallow and Weymouth would put in to Cape Coast Castle in order to press-gang crew replacements from merchant ships anchored in the roadstead.
Roberts, sailing eastward to raid the bustling slave port of Whydah on the Nigerian coast, was then, without knowing it, heading directly for the warships who had spent six maddening months fruitlessly pursuing him.
Now Roberts had another piece of bad luck.
Although he sailed right past Cape Coast Castle where Swallow and Weymouth lay at anchor, he never saw the two warships. He was too far out to sea to make them out in the roadstead. He continued on eastward toward Whydah, secure in the belief that the Royal Navy warships were many leagues away to the north.
But the men-of-war soon learned of Roberts’s presence in the neighborhood. A fishing boat had recognized Royal Fortune and her consorts out at sea and had brought the news to Captain Ogle aboard Swallow. Without waiting for Weymouth, which was still short of crewmen, Ogle had Swallow prepared for sea duty. He went in pursuit of Roberts as soon as she was ready.
On January 11, 1722—still unaware of the danger now closely pursuing him—Roberts reached Whydah, where he captured eleven slave ships without firing a shot. In accordance with custom, he allowed the captains of these vessels buy them back for a ransom of £500 each. (One captain, however, refused to pay. The infuriated House of Lords then set the ship on fire—against Roberts’s specific orders—forcing the chained slaves on board to leap over the side and risk the sharks or remain aboard and be burned to death.)
On January 13, still at Whydah, Roberts intercepted an overland message from Cape Coast Castle to the Royal African company’s agent in Whydah. The message said H.M.S. Swallow was in pursuit of the pirates and would soon be at Whydah.
Roberts immediately put to sea.
Roberts’s crew had a pretty good idea where their pistol-proof captain was taking them: the tiny island of Annobón, whose impenetrable swamps would afford them shelter and camouflage that even the Royal Navy could not pierce.
AFTER A PORTRAIT IN THE NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, LONDON
But now, it seemed, Nemesis—or was it Roberts’s own demon at work?—was beginning to catch up with Black Bart. Perverse winds prevented his pirate fleet from reaching Annobón. Instead they had to take shelter in a vast region of swamp and lagoons near an area called Cape Lopez. Here Roberts anchored his ships—and waited.
PEABODY MUSEUM OF SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS
Meanwhile Captain Ogle in Swallow had reached Whydah two days after Roberts had left. But this time Ogle was determined to chase the elusive Roberts down. Guessing correctly that the pirate captain had sought safety in the maze of inlets in the Cape Lopez region, Ogle ordered Swallow to the south. On February 5, 1722, he arrived off Cape Lopez and began a careful search of the silent swamps and inlets.
Now, as the pirate fleet lay anchored in the hidden marsh channels of Cape Lopez, Roberts and his men began to commit a series of inexplicable errors and misjudgments that in retrospect seemed designed, like the steady progression of a Greek tragedy, to bring about a confrontation between Swallow and the pirates.
As Ogle glided past this boggy land, searching its maze of silent jungle and waterways for his quarry, someone aboard one of Roberts’s anchored vessels fired a gun that boomed across the vast swamps and set thousands of marsh birds flying and cackling. Now Ogle could be sure that he had guessed right: Roberts had indeed taken refuge in these bogs.
Directing his search toward the source of the noise, Ogle, whose ship was still standing well off the cape, at last made out his quarry in his spyglass: Roberts’s own ship, Royal Fortune, and her two consorts, the Great Ranger, and the Little Ranger, half hidden within the swamps of the cape. Now Ogle could mull over his next move. Time, he knew, was at last on his side.
Ironically, it may have been Roberts himself who had ordered the firing of the gun that had attracted Swallow to his location, for it appears that Roberts had sighted Swallow long before she had spotted him. But for some reason—was it a mistake or some deliberate act of self-destruction?—Roberts had identified the man-of-war as a large merchantman and may have ordered the gun fired to gain her attention. (Interloping traders and black kings often used a cannon shot as a signal to merchants that they had goods available for trade.) Perhaps he hoped to lure her closer so he could capture her. But why would Roberts, knowing that a warship was in the area seeking him, resort to such a dangerous stratagem? Was he now set upon some private ritual of expiation? Had he decided that it was time for Black Bart to meet his end and release Bartholomew Roberts? Or was it simply a mistake born of arrogance?
Whatever his state of mind, Roberts acted as if he were sure that the vessel now standing offshore was, in fact, a merchant—possible prey—for he sent the Great Ranger out to take her. This, too, was an inexplicable deviation from Roberts’s usual procedure. Normally he commanded in an action of this kind.
Meanwhile, aboard Swallow, Captain Ogle saw with satisfaction that the pirate ship Great Ranger was coming out to meet him. Now he would have an opportunity to employ a stratagem he had been contemplating for picking the pirates off one at a time. Ogle brought Swallow about and made for the open sea as if fleeing the pirate. In fact, it was his design to lure Great Ranger away from sight and sound of her companions—and then to engage her far out at sea.
Toward this end, Ogle piled on sail and drove Swallow out of sight of land. Gradually, however, he allowed the pirate vessel to close the gap. After a chase that lasted for hours, Great Ranger had closed within musket range of Swallow. Now, for the first time, the Great Ranger’s captain, James Skyrme, who had been flying a variety of flags, apparently in the hope of disguising his purpose, finally ran up his Jolly Roger. He ordered his men to combat stations. Then he let fly at Swallow with his bow cannon.
Suddenly Swallow turned to starboard and delivered a shattering broadside at her pursuer. The pirates for the first time realized, to their horror, that they faced a powerful warship rather than a fat merchant.
Captain Skyrme hesitated. He did not immediately reply to Swallow’s broadside. He seemed unsure what to do. He hauled his Jolly Roger down as if about to fly. But then he seemed to change his mind. The Jolly Roger fluttered up the mast again. The pirate had decided to fight. Great Ranger delivered a broadside of her own at Swallow. Now the pirate crew, cheering wildly and brandishing their cutlasses, crowded to the deck, shouting curses at the men of Swallow—while their captain maneuvered to bring Great Ranger alongside the navy ship so that his cutthroats could board her.
But the well-trained gun crews aboard the Swallow were not daunted. They kept up a rapid cannon and small-arms barrage that the pirates
could not match. Great Ranger’s main topmast was shot away. Many pirates were wounded. Skyrme himself had one of his legs shot off. But there was no sign of surrender by either ship. They pounded each other for hours on the rolling Atlantic swell under the burning tropical sun.
Skyrme, despite his terrible wound, continued to direct the battle for the Great Ranger. His aim was to position his ship so that his men could board Swallow. More than once as the ships maneuvered close in to each other, the pirates had an opportunity to do this, but they could not bring themselves to face the tremendous fire from the navy ship.
By three o’clock in the afternoon the Great Ranger was so badly battered, and her crew so badly mauled, that she could no longer fight effectively. Nor could she escape. Skyrme saw that the game was up. He surrendered. But before he did so, he ordered his Jolly Roger thrown into the ocean, thinking it might be used as evidence against him in a future Admiralty court.
Not all Skyrme’s men agreed with his decision to surrender. One of them, a member of the House of Lords named John Morris, fired his pistol into a barrel of gunpowder in the ship’s magazine with the aim of blowing the Great Ranger to Hell. But the gunpowder barrel was more than half empty. The explosion that Morris achieved did little damage to the ship, although Morris himself was burned to death, and its flash inflicted severe burns on several others who had been with Morris in the magazine.
The boarding party from Swallow found that ten pirates had been killed and twenty had been wounded—many of them as severely as Skyrme himself. The rest, approximately one hundred, were exhausted, unable to fight anymore. Blackened with powder and smoke, they lay unmoving on the debris-strewn decks.
The Swallow’s surgeon, Dr. John Atkins, patched up the wounded pirates as best he could, while the navy boarding party took the unwounded prisoners back to Swallow and chained them below. The navy men searched every corner of the Great Ranger looking for the pirate booty they had expected to find in abundance. Disappointed, they had to settle for whatever they could strip from their prisoners, including such petty items as shoes and clothing.
