Outlaws of the Atlantic

by Marcus Rediker

  Contemporary estimates of the pirate population during the period under consideration placed the number between 1,000 and 2,000 at any one time. From records that describe the activities of pirate ships and from reports or projections of crew sizes, it appears that 1,800 to 2,400 Atlantic pirates prowled the seas between 1716 and 1718; 1,500 to 2,000 between 1719 and 1722; and 1,000 to 1,500, declining to fewer than 200, between 1723 and 1726. In the only estimate we have from the other side of the law, a band of pirates in 1716 claimed that “30 Company of them,” or roughly 2,400 men, plied the oceans of the globe. In all, some 4,500 to 5,500 men went, as they called it, “upon the account.” The pirates’ chief military enemy, the British Royal Navy, employed an average of only 13,000 men in any given year between 1716 and 1726.4

  These sea robbers followed lucrative trade and, like their predecessors, sought bases for their depredations in the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Bahama Islands, undefended and ungoverned by the crown, began in 1716 to attract pirates by the hundreds. By 1718 a torrent of complaints had moved George I to commission Woodes Rogers to lead an expedition to bring the islands under control. Rogers’s efforts largely succeeded, and pirates scattered to the unpeopled inlets of the Carolinas and to Africa. They had frequented African shores as early as 1691; by 1718, Madagascar served as both an entrepôt for booty and a spot for temporary settlement. At the mouth of the Sierra Leone River on Africa’s western coast, pirates stopped off for “whoring and drinking” and to unload goods. Theaters of operation among pirates shifted, however, according to the policing designs of the Royal Navy. Pirates favored the Caribbean’s small, unsettled cays and shallow waters, which proved hard to negotiate for men-of-war in chase. But generally, as one pirate noted, these rovers were “dispers’t into several parts of the World.” Sea robbers sought and usually found bases near major trade routes, as distant as possible from the powers of the state.5

  Backgrounds

  Almost all pirates had labored as merchant seamen, Royal Navy sailors, or privateersmen. The vast majority came from captured merchantmen as volunteers, for reasons suggested by Dr. Samuel Johnson’s observation that “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned. . . . A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”6 Dr. Johnson’s class condescension aside, he had a point. Incarceration on a ship did not differ essentially from incarceration in a jail. Merchant seamen had an extremely difficult lot in the early eighteenth century. They got a hard, close look at death. Disease and accidents were commonplace in their occupation, natural disasters threatened incessantly, rations were often meager, and discipline was brutal, even murderous on occasion. Peacetime wages were low, fraud and irregularities in the distribution of pay general. A prime purpose of eighteenth-century maritime laws was “to assure a ready supply of cheap, docile labor.” Merchant seamen also had to contend with impressment by the Royal Navy.7

  Some pirates had served in the navy, where conditions aboard ship were no less harsh. Food supplies often ran short, wages were low, mortality was high, discipline severe, and desertion consequently chronic. As one officer reported, the navy had trouble fighting pirates because the king’s ships were “so much disabled by sickness, death, and desertion of their seamen.”8 In 1722 the crown sent the Weymouth and the Swallow in search of a pirate convoy. Royal surgeon John Atkins, noting that merchant seamen were frequently pressed, underlined precisely what these sailors had to fear when he recorded that the “Weymouth, who brought out of England a Compliment [sic] of 240 Men,” had “at the end of the Voyage 280 dead upon her Books.” The same point was made by the captain of a man-of-war sent to Jamaica to guard against pirates in 1720–21. He faithfully recorded the names of the thirty-five seamen who died during the year of duty.9 Epidemics, consumption, and scurvy raged on royal ships, and the men were “caught in a machine from which there was no escape, bar desertion, incapacitation, or death.”10 Or piracy.

  Pirates who had served on privateering vessels knew well that such employment was far less onerous than on merchant or naval ships. Food was usually more plentiful, the pay considerably higher, and the work shifts generally shorter.11 Even so, owing to rigid discipline and other grievances, mutinies were not uncommon. On Woodes Rogers’s spectacularly successful privateering expedition of 1708–11, Peter Clark was thrown into irons for wishing himself “aboard a Pirate” and saying that “he should be glad that an Enemy, who could overpower us, was a-long-side of us.”12

  Most men became pirates when their merchant vessels were taken. Colonel Benjamin Bennet wrote to the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1718, setting forth his worries about freebooters in the West Indies: “I fear they will soon multiply for so many are willing to joyn with them when taken.” The seizure of a merchant ship was followed by a moment of great confrontational drama. The pirate captain or quartermaster asked the seamen of the captured vessel who among them would serve under black colors, and frequently several stepped forward. Many fewer pirates originated as mutineers who had boldly and collectively seized control of a merchant vessel. But regardless of their methods, pirates necessarily came from seafaring employments, whether the merchant service, the navy, or privateering. Piracy emphatically was not an option open to landlubbers, since sea robbers “entertain’d so contemptible a Notion of Landmen.”13 Men who became pirates were grimly familiar with the rigors of life at sea and with a single-sex community of work.

  Ages are known for 169 pirates active between 1716 and 1726. The range was 14 to 50 years, the mean 28.2, and the median 27; the 20–24 and 25–29 age categories had the highest concentrations, with 57 and 39 men, respectively. Almost three in five pirates were in their twenties. Compared with merchant seamen more broadly in the first half of the eighteenth century, there were fewer teenagers and more men in their thirties among the pirates, but not many. The age distribution among the outlaws was similar to that of the larger community of labor, suggesting that piracy held roughly equal attraction for sailors of all ages.14 Though evidence is sketchy, most pirates seem not to have been bound to land and home by familial ties or obligations. Wives and children were rarely mentioned in the records of trials of pirates, and pirate vessels, to forestall desertion, often would “take no Married Man.”15 Almost without exception, pirates, like the larger body of seafaring men, came from the lower class of humanity. They were, as a royal official condescendingly observed, “desperate Rogues” who could have little hope in life ashore.16 These traits served as bases of unity when men of the sea decided, in search of something better, to become pirates.

  Shipboard Order Remade

  These characteristics had a vital bearing on the ways pirates organized their daily activities. Contemporaries who claimed that pirates had “no regular command among them” mistook a different social order—different from the ordering of merchant, naval, and privateering vessels—for disorder.17 This social order, articulated in the organization of the pirate ship, was conceived and deliberately constructed by the pirates themselves. Its hallmark was a rough, improvised, but effective egalitarianism that placed authority in the collective hands of the crew. A core value in the broader culture of the common tar, egalitarianism was institutionalized aboard the pirate ship.

  A striking uniformity of rules and customs prevailed aboard pirate ships, each of which functioned under the terms of written articles, a compact drawn up at the beginning of a voyage or upon election of a new captain and agreed to by the crew. By these articles crews allocated authority, distributed plunder, and enforced discipline.18 These arrangements made the captain the creature of his crew. Demanding someone both bold of temper and skilled in navigation, the men elected their captain. They gave him few privileges. He “or any other Officer is allowed no more [food] than another man, nay, the Captain cannot keep his Cabbin to himself.”19 Some pirates “messed with the Captain, but withal no Body look’d on it, as
a Mark of Favour, or Distinction, for every one came and eat and drank with him at their Humour.” A merchant captain held captive by pirates noted with displeasure that crew members slept on the ship wherever they pleased, “the Captain himself not being allowed a Bed.”20 The determined reorganization of space and privilege aboard the ship was crucial to the remaking of maritime social relations.

  The crew granted the captain unquestioned authority “in fighting, chasing, or being chased,” but “in all other Matters whatsoever” he was “governed by a Majority.”21 As the majority elected, so did it depose. Captains were snatched from their positions for cowardice, cruelty, or refusing “to take and plunder English Vessels.”22 One captain incurred the class-conscious wrath of his crew for being too “gentleman-like.”23 Occasionally, a despotic captain was summarily executed. As pirate Francis Kennedy explained, most sea robbers, “having suffered formerly from the ill-treatment of their officers, provided carefully against any such evil” once they arranged their own command. The democratic selection of officers echoed similar demands within the New Model Army in the English Revolution and stood in stark, telling contrast to the near-dictatorial arrangement of command in the merchant service and the Royal Navy.24

  To prevent the misuse of authority, pirates delegated countervailing powers to the quartermaster, who was elected to represent and protect “the Interest of the Crew.”25 The quartermaster, who was not considered an officer in the merchant service, was elevated to a valued position of trust and authority. His tasks were to adjudicate minor disputes, to distribute food and money, and in some instances to lead the attacks on prize vessels. He served as a “civil Magistrate” and dispensed necessaries “with an Equality to them all,” carefully guarding against the galling and divisive use of privilege and preferment that characterized the distribution of the necessaries of life in other maritime occupations.26 The quartermaster often became the captain of a captured ship when the captor was overcrowded or divided by discord. This containment of authority within a dual and representative executive was a distinctive feature of social organization among pirates.27

  The decisions that had the greatest bearing on the welfare of the crew were generally reserved to the council, the highest authority on the pirate ship. Pirates drew upon an ancient custom, largely lapsed by the early modern era, in which the master consulted his entire crew in making crucial decisions. Freebooters also knew of the naval tradition, the council of war, in which the top officers in a ship or fleet met to plan strategy. But pirates democratized the naval custom. Their councils called together every man on the ship to determine such matters as where the best prizes could be taken and how disruptive dissension was to be resolved. Some crews continually used the council, “carrying every thing by a majority of votes”; others set up the council as a court. The decisions made by this body were sacrosanct, and even the boldest captain dared not challenge a council’s mandate.28

  The distribution of plunder was regulated explicitly by the ship’s articles, which allocated booty according to skills and duties. Pirates used the precapitalist share system to allocate their take. Captain and quartermaster received between one and a half and two shares; gunners, boatswains, mates, carpenters, and doctors, one and one-quarter or one and one-half; all others got one share each.29 This pay system represented a radical departure from practices in the merchant service, Royal Navy, or privateering. It leveled an elaborate hierarchy of pay ranks and decisively reduced the disparity between the top and bottom of the scale. Indeed, this must have been one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the early eighteenth century. The scheme revealingly indicates that pirates did not consider themselves wage laborers but rather risk-sharing partners. If, as a noted historian of piracy, Philip Gosse, suggested, “the pick of all seamen were pirates,”30 the equitable distribution of plunder and the conception of the partnership were the work of men who valued and respected the skills of their comrades. But not all booty was dispensed this way. A portion went into a “common fund” to provide for the men who sustained injury of lasting effect.31 The loss of eyesight or any appendage merited compensation. By this welfare system pirates attempted to guard against debilities caused by accidents, to protect skills, to enhance recruitment, and to promote loyalty within the group.

  The articles also regulated discipline aboard ship, though “discipline” is perhaps a misnomer for a system of rules that left large ranges of behavior uncontrolled. Less arbitrary than that of the merchant service and less codified than that of the navy, discipline among pirates always depended on a collective sense of transgression. Many misdeeds were accorded “what Punishment the Captain and Majority of the Company shall think fit,” and it is noteworthy that pirates did not often resort to the whip. Their discipline, if no less severe in certain cases, was generally tolerant of behavior that provoked punishment in other maritime occupations. Three major methods of discipline were employed, all conditioned by the fact that pirate ships were crowded; an average crew numbered near eighty on a 250-ton vessel. The articles of Bartholomew Roberts’s ship revealed one tactic for maintaining order: “No striking one another on board, but every Man’s Quarrels to be ended on Shore at Sword and Pistol.” The antagonists were to fight a duel with pistols, but if both missed their first shots (which, given the state of pistol manufacture in their day, they probably did), they then seized swords, and the first to draw blood was declared the victor. By taking such conflicts off the ship (and symbolically off the sea), this practice promoted harmony in the crowded quarters below decks.32 The ideal of harmony was also reflected when pirates made a crew member the “Governor of an Island.” Men who were incorrigibly disruptive or who transgressed important rules were marooned. For defrauding his mates by taking more than a proper share of plunder, for deserting or malingering during battle, for keeping secrets from the crew, or for stealing, a pirate risked being deposited “where he was sure to encounter Hardships.”33 The ultimate method of maintaining order was execution. This penalty was stipulated (although apparently never enforced) for bringing on board “a Boy or a Woman” or for meddling with a “prudent Woman” on a prize ship, but was invoked to punish a captain who abused his authority.34

  Some crews attempted to circumvent disciplinary problems by taking “no Body against their Wills.”35 By the same logic, they would keep no unwilling person. The confession of pirate Edward Davis in 1718 indicates that oaths of honor were used to cement the loyalty of new members: “at first the old Pirates were a little shy of the new ones, . . . yet in a short time the New Men being sworn to be faithful, and not to cheat the Company to the Value of a Piece of Eight, they all consulted and acted together with great unanimity, and no distinction was made between Old and New.”36 Yet for all their efforts to blunt the cutting edge of authority and to maintain harmony and cohesion, conflict could not always be contained. Occasionally upon election of a new captain, men who favored other leadership drew up new articles and sailed away from their former mates.37 The social organization constructed by pirates, although flexible, was unable to accommodate severe, sustained conflict. Those who had experienced the claustrophobic and authoritarian world of the merchant ship cherished the freedom to separate. The egalitarian and collective exercise of authority by pirates had both negative and positive effects. Although it produced a chronic instability, it also guaranteed continuity. The very process by which new crews were established helped to ensure a social uniformity and, as we shall see, a consciousness of kind among pirates.38

  One important mechanism in this continuity can be seen by charting the connections among pirate crews. The accompanying diagram of connections among Atlantic pirate crews, arranged according to vessel captaincy, demonstrates that by splintering, by sailing in consorts, or by other associations, roughly 3,600 pirates—more than 70 percent of all those active between 1716 and 1726—fit into two main lines of genealogical descent. Captain Benjamin Hornigold and the pirate ren
dezvous in the Bahamas stood at the origin of an intricate lineage that ended with the hanging of John Phillips’s crew in June 1724. The second line, spawned in the chance meeting of the lately mutinous crews of George Lowther and Edward Low in 1722, culminated in the executions of William Fly and his men in July 1726. It was primarily within and through this network that the social organization of the pirate ship took on its significance, transmitting and preserving customs and meanings and helping to structure and perpetuate the pirates’ social world.39

  Justice

  Pirates constructed that world in defiant contradistinction to the ways of the world they left behind, in particular to its salient figures of power, the merchant captain and the royal official, and to the system of authority those figures represented and enforced. When eight pirates were tried in Boston in 1718, merchant captain Thomas Checkley told of the capture of his ship by pirates who “pretended,” he said, “to be Robbin Hoods Men.”40 Eric Hobsbawm has defined social banditry as a “universal and virtually unchanging phenomenon,” an “endemic peasant protest against oppression and poverty: a cry for vengeance on the rich and the oppressors.” Its goal is “a traditional world in which men are justly dealt with, not a new and perfect world”; Hobsbawm calls its advocates “revolutionary traditionalists.”41 Pirates, of course, were not peasants, but they fit Hobsbawm’s formulation in every other respect. Of special importance was their “cry for vengeance.”