Outlaws of the Atlantic

by Marcus Rediker

  Spotswood told no more than the simple truth when he expressed his fear of pirate vengeance, for the very names of pirate ships made the same threat. Edward Teach, whom Spotswood’s men cut off, called his vessel Queen Anne’s Revenge; other notorious craft were Stede Bonnet’s Revenge and John Cole’s New York Revenge’s Revenge.42 The foremost target of vengeance was the merchant captain. Frequently, “in a far distant latitude,” as one seaman put it, “unlimited power, bad views, ill nature and ill principles all concur[red]” in a ship’s commander. Here was a man “past all restraint” who often made life miserable for his crew.43 Spotswood also noted how pirates avenged the captain’s “correcting” of his sailors. In 1722, merchant captains Isham Randolph, Constantine Cane, and William Halladay petitioned Spotswood “in behalf of themselves and other Masters of Ships” for “some certain method . . . for punishing mutinous & disobedient Seamen.” They explained that captains faced great danger “in case of meeting with Pyrates, where we are sure to suffer all the tortures w[hi]ch such an abandoned crew can invent, upon the least intimation of our Striking any of our men.”44 Pirates acted the part of a floating mob with its own distinctive sense of popular justice.

  Upon seizing a merchantman, pirates often administered the “Distribution of Justice,” “enquiring into the Manner of the Commander’s Behaviour to their Men, and those, against whom Complaint was made” were “whipp’d and pickled.”45 Bartholomew Roberts’s crew considered such inquiry so important that they formally designated one of their men, George Willson, as the “Dispencer of Justice.” In 1724 merchant captain Richard Hawkins described another form of retribution, a torture known as the “Sweat”: “Between decks they stick Candles round the Mizen-Mast, and about twenty-five men surround it with Points of Swords, Penknives, Compasses, Forks &c in each of their hands: Culprit enters the Circle; the Violin plays a merry Jig; and he must run for about ten Minutes, while each man runs his Instrument into his Posteriors.”46 Many captured captains were “barbarously used,” and some were summarily executed. Pirate Philip Lyne carried this vengeance to its bloodiest extremity, confessing when apprehended in 1726 that “during the time of his Piracy” he “had killed 37 Masters of Vessels.”47 The search for vengeance was in many ways a fierce, embittered response to the violent, personal, and arbitrary authority wielded by the merchant captain.

  Still, the punishment of captains was not indiscriminate, for a captain who had been “an honest Fellow that never abused any Sailors” was often rewarded by pirates.48 The best description of pirates’ notions of justice comes from merchant captain William Snelgrave’s account of his capture in 1719. On April 1, Snelgrave’s ship was seized by Thomas Cocklyn’s crew of rovers at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. Cocklyn was soon joined by men captained by Oliver LaBouche and Howell Davis, and Snelgrave spent the next thirty days among 240 pirates.49

  The capture was effected when twelve pirates in a small boat came alongside Snelgrave’s ship, which was manned by forty-five sailors. Snelgrave ordered his crew to arms. They refused, but the pirate quartermaster, infuriated by the command, drew a pistol and then, Snelgrave testified, “with the but-end [he] endeavoured to beat out my Brains” until “some of my People . . . cried out aloud ‘For God sake don’t kill our Captain, for we never were with a better Man.’” The quartermaster, Snelgrave noted, “told me, ‘my Life was safe provided none of my People complained against me.’ I replied, ‘I was sure none of them could.’”50

  Snelgrave was taken to Cocklyn, who told him, “I am sorry you have met with bad usage after Quarter given, but ’tis the Fortune of War sometimes. . . . If you tell the truth, and your Men make no Complaints against you, you shall be kindly used.” Howell Davis, commander of the largest of the pirate ships, reprimanded Cocklyn’s men for their roughness and, by Snelgrave’s account, expressed himself “ashamed to hear how I had been used by them. That they should remember their reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base Merchants and cruel commanders of Ships. . . . No one of my People, even those that had entered with them gave me the least ill-character. . . . It was plain they loved me.”51

  Snelgrave’s men may not have loved him, but they surely did respect him. Indeed, Snelgrave’s character proved so respectable that the pirates proposed to give him a captured ship with full cargo and to sell the goods for him. Then they would capture a Portuguese slaver, sell the slaves, and give the proceeds to Snelgrave so that he could “return with a large sum of Money to London, and bid the Merchants defiance.”52 Pirates hoped to show these merchants that good fortunes befell good captains. The proposal was “unanimously approved” by the pirates, but fearing a charge of complicity, Snelgrave hesitated to accept it. Davis then interceded, saying that he favored “allowing every Body to go to the Devil in their own way” and that he knew Snelgrave feared for “his Reputation.” The refusal was graciously accepted, Snelgrave claiming that “the Tide being turned, they were as kind to me, as they had been at first severe.”53

  Snelgrave related another revealing episode. While he remained in pirate hands, a decrepit schooner belonging to the Royal African Company sailed into the Sierra Leone and was taken by his captors. Simon Jones, a member of Cocklyn’s crew, urged his mates to burn the ship, since he had been poorly treated while in the company’s employ. The pirates were about to do so when another of them, James Stubbs, protested that such action would only “serve the Company’s interests,” since the ship was worth but little. He also pointed out that “the poor People that now belong to her, and have been on so long a voyage, will lose their Wages, which I am sure is Three times the Value of the Vessel.” The pirates concurred and returned the ship to its crew, who “came safe home to England in it.” Captain Snelgrave also returned to England soon after this incident, but eleven of his seamen remained behind as pirates.54 Snelgrave’s experience revealed how pirates attempted to intervene against—and modify—the standard brutalities that marked the social relations of production in merchant shipping. That they sometimes chose to do so with brutalities of their own shows how they could not escape the system of which they were a part.

  Snelgrave seems to have been an exceptionally decent captain. Pirates like Howell Davis claimed that abusive treatment by masters of merchantmen contributed mightily to their willingness to become sea robbers. John Archer, whose unusually long career as a pirate dated from 1718, when he sailed with Edward Teach, uttered a final protest before his execution in 1724: “I could wish that Masters of Vessels would not use their Men with so much Severity, as many of them do, which exposes us to great Temptations.”55 William Fly, facing the gallows for murder and piracy in 1726, angrily announced, “I can’t charge myself,—I shan’t own myself Guilty of any Murder,—Our Captain and his Mate used us Barbarously. We poor Men can’t have Justice done us. There is nothing said to our Commanders, let them never so much abuse us, and use us like Dogs.”56 To pirates revenge was justice; punishment was meted out to barbarous captains, as befitted the captains’ crimes.

  Terror

  Sea robbers who fell into the hands of the state received the full force of penalties for crimes against property. The official view of piracy as crime was outlined in 1718 by Vice-Admiralty judge Nicholas Trott in his charge to the jury in the trial of Stede Bonnet and thirty-three members of his crew at Charleston, South Carolina. Declaring that “the Sea was given by God for the use of Men, and is subject to Dominion and Property, as well as the Land,” Trott observed of the accused that “the Law of Nations never granted to them a Power to change the Right of Property.” Pirates on trial were denied benefit of clergy, were “called Hostis Humani Generis, with whom neither Faith nor Oath” were to be kept, and were regarded as “Brutes, and Beasts of Prey.” Turning from the jury to the accused, Trott circumspectly surmised that “no further Good or Benefit can be expected from you but by the Example of your Deaths.”57

  The insistence on obtaining this final benefit locked royal officials and pirates i
nto a system of reciprocal terror. As royal authorities offered bounties for captured pirates, so too did pirates “offer any price” for certain officials.58 In Virginia in 1720, one of six pirates facing the gallows “called for a Bottle of Wine, and taking a Glass of it, he Drank Damnation to the Governour and Confusion to the Colony, which the rest pledged.” Not to be outdone, Governor Spotswood thought it “necessary for the greater Terrour to hang up four of them in Chains.”59 Pirates demonstrated an antinomian disdain for state authority when George I extended general pardons for piracy in 1717 and 1718. Some accepted the grace but refused to reform; others “seem’d to slight it,” and the most defiant “used the King’s Proclamation with great contempt, and tore it into pieces.”60 One pirate crew downed its punch, proclaiming, “Curse the King and all the Higher Powers.”61 The social relations of piracy were marked by vigorous, often violent, antipathy toward traditional authority. The pervasive antiauthoritarianism of the culture of the common seafarer found many expressions beneath the Jolly Roger.

  Community

  At the Charleston trial over which Trott presided, Richard Allen, attorney general of South Carolina, told the jury that “pirates prey upon all Mankind, their own Species and Fellow-Creatures without Distinction of Nations or Religions.”62 Allen was right in claiming that pirates did not respect nationality in their plunders, but he was wrong in claiming that they did not respect their “Fellow-Creatures.” Pirates did not prey on one another. Rather, they consistently expressed in numerous and subtle ways a highly developed consciousness of kind. Here we turn from the external social relations of piracy to the internal in order to examine this consciousness of kind—in a sense, a strategy for survival—and the collectivistic ethos it expressed.

  Pirates showed a recurrent willingness to join forces at sea and in port. In April 1719, when Howell Davis and crew sailed into the Sierra Leone River, the pirates captained by Thomas Cocklyn were wary until they saw on the approaching ship “her Black Flag”; then “immediately they were easy in their minds, and a little time after,” the crews “saluted one another with their Cannon.” Other crews exchanged similar greetings and, like Davis and Cocklyn, who combined their powers, frequently invoked an unwritten code of hospitality to forge spontaneous alliances.63

  This communitarian urge was perhaps most evident in the pirate strongholds of Madagascar and Sierra Leone. Sea robbers occasionally chose more sedentary lifeways on various thinly populated islands, and they contributed a notorious number of men to the community of logwood cutters at the Bay of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1718 a royal official complained of a “nest of pirates” in the Bahamas “who already esteem themselves a community, and to have one common interest.”64

  To perpetuate such community, it was necessary to minimize conflict not only on each ship but also among separate bands of pirates. Indeed, one of the strongest indicators of consciousness of kind is the manifest absence of discord between different pirate crews. To some extent, this was even a transnational matter: French, Dutch, Spanish, and Anglo-American pirates usually cooperated peaceably, only occasionally exchanging fire. Pirate crews consistently refused to attack one another.65

  In no way was the pirate sense of fraternity, which Spotswood and others noted, more forcefully expressed than in the threats and acts of revenge taken by pirates. Theirs was truly a case of hanging together or being hanged separately. In April 1717, the pirate ship Whidah was wrecked near Boston. Most of its crew perished; the survivors were jailed. In July, Thomas Fox, a Boston ship captain, was taken by pirates who “Questioned him whether anything was done to the Pyrates in Boston Goall,” promising “that if the Prisoners Suffered they would Kill every Body they took belonging to New England.”66 Shortly after this incident, Teach’s sea rovers captured a merchant vessel and, “because she belonged to Boston, [Teach] alledging the People of Boston had hanged some of the Pirates, so burnt her.” Teach declared that all Boston ships deserved a similar fate.67 Charles Vane, reputedly a most fearsome pirate, “would give no quarter to the Bermudians” and punished them and “cut away their masts upon account of one Thomas Brown who was (some time) detain’d in these Islands upon suspicion of piracy.” Brown apparently planned to sail as Vane’s consort until foiled by his capture.68

  In September 1720, pirates captained by Bartholomew Roberts “openly and in the daytime burnt and destroyed . . . vessels in the Road of Basseterre [St. Kitts] and had the audaciousness to insult H.M. Fort,” avenging the execution of “their comrades at Nevis.” Roberts then sent word to the governor that “they would Come and Burn the Town [Sandy Point] about his Ears for hanging the Pyrates there.”69 In 1721 Spotswood relayed information to the Council of Trade and Plantations that Roberts “said he expected to be joined by another ship and would then visit Virginia, and avenge the pirates who have been executed here.”70 The credibility of the threat was confirmed by the unanimous resolution of the Virginia Executive Council that “the Country be put into an immediate posture of Defense.” Lookouts and beacons were quickly provided and communications with neighboring colonies effected. “Near 60 Cannon,” Spotswood later reported, were “mounted on sundry Substantial Batteries.”71

  In 1723 pirate captain Francis Spriggs vowed to find a Captain Moore “and put him to death for being the cause of the death of [pirate] Lowther,” and, shortly after, similarly pledged to go “in quest of Captain Solgard,” who had overpowered a pirate ship commanded by Charles Harris.72 In January 1724, Lieutenant Governor Charles Hope of Bermuda wrote to the Board of Trade that he found it difficult to procure trial evidence against pirates because residents “feared that this very execution wou’d make our vessels fare the worse for it, when they happen’d to fall into pirate hands.”73 The threats of revenge were sometimes effective.

  Pirates also affirmed their unity symbolically. Some evidence indicates that sea robbers may have had a sense of belonging to a separate, in some manner exclusive, speech community. Philip Ashton, who spent sixteen months among pirates in 1722–23 noted that “according to the Pirates usual Custom, and in their proper Dialect, asked me, If I would sign their Articles.”74 Many sources suggest that cursing, swearing, and blaspheming were defining traits of this style of speech, perhaps to an even greater extent than among the larger population of seafaring men. For example, near the Sierra Leone River, a British official named Plunkett pretended to cooperate with, but then attacked, the pirates with Bartholomew Roberts. Plunkett was captured, and Roberts

  upon the first sight of Plunkett swore at him like any Devil, for his Irish Impudence in daring to resist him. Old Plunkett, finding he had got into bad Company, fell a swearing and cursing as fast or faster than Roberts; which made the rest of the Pirates laugh heartily, desiring Roberts to sit down and hold his Peace, for he had no Share in the Pallaver with Plunkett at all. So that by meer Dint of Cursing and Damning, Old Plunkett . . . sav’d his life.75

  The symbolic connectedness, or consciousness of kind, extended to the domain of language.

  The Black Flag

  Certainly the best-known symbol of piracy is the flag, the Jolly Roger. Less known and appreciated is the fact that the flag was very widely used. No fewer, and probably a great many more, than 2,500 men sailed under it.76 So general an adoption indicates an advanced state of group identification. The Jolly Roger was described as a “black Ensign, in the Middle of which is a large white Skeleton with a Dart in one hand striking a bleeding Heart, and in the other an Hour Glass.”77 Although there was considerable variation in particulars among these flags, there was also a general uniformity of chosen images. The flag’s background was black, adorned with white representational figures. The most common symbol was the human skull, or “death’s head,” sometimes isolated but more frequently the most prominent feature of an entire skeleton. Other recurring items were a weapon—cutlass, sword, or dart—and an hourglass.78

  Captain Jacob Bevan drew these skulls and crossbones in his ship’s log to indicate the d
eath of two of his seamen. On February 22, 1686, Bevan noted that a storm “kild 2 of our men out Right and broke our 3d Mat[e]s arme, our mans thigh and 5 more men brused.” The symbol of the death’s head was appropriated by pirates and used to emblazon the Jolly Roger, the notorious pirate flag. (British Library)

  The flag was intended to terrify the pirates’ prey, but its triad of interlocking symbols—death, violence, limited time—simultaneously pointed to meaningful parts of the seaman’s experience and eloquently bespoke the pirates’ own consciousness of themselves as preyed upon in turn. Pirates seized the symbol of mortality from ship captains who used the skull “as a marginal sign in their logs to indicate the record of a death.”79 Seamen who became pirates escaped from one closed system only to find themselves encased in another. But as pirates—and, some believed, only as pirates—these men were able to fight back beneath the somber colors of “King Death” against those captains, merchants, and officials who waved banners of authority.80 Moreover, pirates self-righteously perceived their situation and the excesses of these powerful figures through a collectivistic ethos that had been forged in the struggle for survival.