If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

  The press was difficult to enforce on land. Men would hide or resist, particularly in the colonies. In Port Royal, Jamaica, the mob was ‘ready on all occasions, to knock any of the Officers of ye King’s Ships on the Head, who shall attempt doing their Duty [of impressment] there’, according to one official. But it was more effective at sea, and the press tenders often lurked in the Channel to seize men en masse from returning merchant ships, sending them straight back out to sea. ‘It is a very bad thing for a poor seaman when he is pressed in this manner,’ one sailor complained, ‘for if he have a wife and children he is not suffered to go to see them, nor to go and look after his wages,’

  It’s inconceivable Roberts went through his career without at some point serving in the Royal Navy, either voluntarily or as a forced recruit. Most sailors first took to the sea between the ages of twelve and sixteen and Roberts may have served initially as a ‘powder monkey’, ferrying gunpowder between the powder room and the guns during the War of the Grand Alliance. Service in the Royal Navy would have given him many things - experience of working in large, disciplined, wellorganised fighting vessels, a knowledge of the culture and operating methods of the Navy and perhaps an anger at the press and a resentment of brutal naval captains to go alongside his experiences in the merchant navy. Above all, it would have given him experience of combat.

  It may be that he had also served on privateers. These were freelancers who operated in times of war with ‘letters of marque’, or ‘commissions’, authorising them to attack enemy shipping. Discipline on privateers was slacker and the potential rewards for ordinary seamen in terms of prize money greater. Many were little more than pirates.

  If Roberts’ career had been dominated by war, it had been shaped too by the sudden arrival of peace. Following the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 the Royal Navy downsized from 49,860 men to 13,475 men in just two years. For a time this was partially compensated for by a post-war boom in trade. But by 1715 there was mass unemployment. Wages in the merchant navy were slashed in half and conditions of service deteriorated sharply.

  Records from Admiralty courts capture the tension of the period. One sailor in 1715 threatened to cut his captain’s ears off ‘and challenged him to go on shore and fight him’ during an argument about unpaid wages. Another, in 1721, told his captain he could ‘kiss his arse’ in response to an unpopular order. Such behaviour was generally brutally punished. A safer tactic was the ‘round robin’, a list of grievances signed by the entire crew in circular fashion so that no ringleaders could be identified. But these too were often ignored by captains who knew the scarcity of work left the men with little option but to knuckle under.

  Many crews felt they had no option but open revolt. Of the fiftyeight mutinies recorded on merchant vessels in the first half of the eighteenth century, forty-eight took place between 1715 and 1737 and twenty-one between 1718 and 1723. Most took place off West Africa or in the Caribbean and they were often brutal affairs. In 1725, during a mutiny aboard the George, Michael Moor declared he ‘would make the sun and moon shine through’ the bodies of the captain and senior officers. ‘Damn you, you Dogs, I’ll hang you when you are dead,’ he told them. Three of the officers were murdered and Moor placed a rope around the chief mate’s neck and hoisted his corpse upon deck. This mutiny, like many others, ended in the crew taking to piracy. But in the period after 1713, for the most part, sailors were powerless before the arithmetic of the labour market and Roberts’ own fate-a highly experienced and capable seaman reduced at the age of thirty-seven to serving as third mate in the least attractive branch of the merchant navy - was probably typical.

  This, then, was the man who stood upon the deck of the pirate ship that sweltering afternoon at Anamaboe in June 1719. Born between the folds of the hills in South Wales he had seen the world. He’d watched the dolphins chase the flying fish along the coasts of Africa. He’d seen hurricanes sweeping across the Caribbean. In all likelihood he’d weathered the storms about the two great Capes and voyaged into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. He’d listened to the roar of the broadsides in the sea battles against the French. He’d seen life and he’d seen death. But he had little to show for it. He had no wife or children and no permanent home. His few possessions were gathered together in a sea chest down in the hold of the Princess. And, at thirty-seven, he knew his best years as a seaman were behind him. It was common for sailors to slip back down the career ladder as their physical strength declined and all he had to look forward to was an old age of increasing hardship and deprivation. Aware of his own abilities, he could be forgiven for being an angry and a bitter man. It was only his temperament that prevented him enthusiastically embracing the life of a pirate.

  It’s possible Roberts knew the pirate captain who had captured him. He was called Howel Davis and he came from Milford in Pembrokeshire, a few miles to the south of Roberts’ birthplace. He’d later lived in Bristol and, like Roberts, had served as a mate aboard the slavers.

  Davis was a bon viveur, a lover of wine and women, a romantic and, in some ways, attractive figure, far closer to the pirate stereotype than Roberts himself. He became involved in piracy after his ship, the Cadogan, was seized off Africa by the pirate Edward England. Some of England’s crew had previously served under the Cadogan’s skipper, Captain Skinner and, according to Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pirates, they wreaked a brutal revenge. ‘Ah, Captain Skinner! Is it you?’ cried his old boatswain on seeing him. ‘I am much in your debt, and now I shall pay you all in your own coin.’ They tied him up, then pelted him with glass bottles, ‘after which they whipped him about the deck, till they were weary, being deaf to all his prayers and entreaties’. Finally they shot him through the head.

  The story may be exaggerated. Although generally reliable about Roberts, Johnson occasionally repeated wild rumour in his chapters on other pirate leaders and we should not accept every tale of pirate atrocity that has come down to us at face value. Davis himself - and later, Roberts - never treated captains with this degree of brutality, and, far from repelling him, Davis’s encounter with England left him with a taste for a life of piracy. Shortly afterwards he made his way to the Caribbean, determined to enlist in a pirate crew.

  The Caribbean had been the heartland of Atlantic piracy for 150 years. It was men like Francis Drake and John Hawkins who first exposed both the fabulous wealth and the vulnerability of the Spanish superpower. In the seventeenth century the gentlemen adventurers of the Elizabethan era were replaced by one of the strangest groups ever to grace the history of the Americas. They originated on the island of Hispaniola, today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Spanish had abandoned their settlements in the impoverished north of Hispaniola in 1605 and it became a magnet for the flotsam and jetsam of the Caribbean - runaway slaves, escaped servants, mutinous soldiers and sailors; anyone with a reason to hide. They lived deep in the forests and survived by hunting pigs and the cattle which had been introduced by the Spanish, and had proliferated and run wild. They smoked the meat over an indigenous type of wooden barbecue known as a ‘boucan’, and so they became known as ‘Buccaneers’.

  Most were English or French Huguenots and they were united by an intense hatred of the Catholic Spanish. They called themselves the Brethren of the Coast and developed a unique society, democratic and egalitarian. They knew each other only by noms de guerre, each having undergone a baptism as they entered the tropics which they claimed freed them from all previous obligations. Their strangest practice was that of living in male couples. Together they would disappear into the forests for between six months and two years, emerging - unwashed, dressed in skins and covered in blood - only to sell meat and hides to passing ships.

  Harried by the Spanish, by the 1630s many of the Buccaneers were already turning to piracy. They carried with them on to the high seas the democratic culture of the forests. Captains were elected and booty divided in common - a stark contrast to Drake and Hawkins. But, li
ke Drake and Hawkins, these ragged bandits enjoyed the tacit support of the English, French and Dutch governments, who saw in them a cheap, risk-free way of prising open the Spanish monopoly in the New World.

  Between 1655 and 1671 the Buccaneers sacked eighteen cities, four towns and more than thirty-five villages around the Caribbean, as well as capturing countless ships. In the last great raid of this period, on Panama in 1671, the Buccaneer leader Henry Morgan sailed at the head of a confederation of no fewer than thirty-eight ships and 2,000 men, English, French and Dutch. They needed 175 mules to carry their booty back to the coast.

  But their success was their undoing. By the 1680s the Northern European powers had established formal colonies in the Americas and were more interested in trade than plunder. The Buccaneers had served their purpose and soon the British were hanging them with as much enthusiasm as the Spanish. When the great Buccaneer haven of Port Royal in Jamaica was destroyed by an earthquake in 1692 it marked the end of an era.

  But this proved only the beginning of what has become known to history as the Golden Age of Piracy. Far from retiring into decent obscurity, over the next thirty years the bandits of the Caribbean extended their activities down to Brazil, across to West Africa, and into the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. These men shared the strange, democratic culture of the Buccaneers. But they were true outlaws, preying on the shipping of all nations, and hunted by the ships of all nations - ‘the enemies of all mankind’, as they were legally defined.

  The two wars between 1689 and 1713 absorbed much surplus manpower. But each was followed by an explosion of piracy as navies downsized and the privateers were called in. After 1715 the Spanish compounded the problem by driving hundreds of logwood cutters out of the British settlement in the Bay of Campechy in Mexico. Another of those curious, all-male communities which dotted the early colonial Americas, the settlement was a haven for desperadoes of all kinds. Most instantly ‘turned pirates and infested our seas’, according to an exasperated British official.

  As Howel Davis looked about for a pirate crew to join in the early part of 1718 his eyes turned towards the Bahamas, the chain of hundreds of tiny islands which lay to the north-east of Cuba. A labyrinth of narrow channels, shifting cays and submerged sandbanks, they had replaced Hispaniola and Jamaica as the main pirate haven in the Caribbean. Although they were formally a British colony, there had been no government there since they were sacked by the Spanish ten years before and by 1718 it was estimated there were up to a thousand pirates living there, ‘all subjects of Great Britain and young, resolute wicked fellows’. The famous pirate Blackbeard, who would be killed off North America later that year, had initially been based here. There was even a sail-maker’s widow who made a living stitching black flags, for which she was paid in brandy.

  But when Howel Davis arrived looking for a crew to enlist in he found he was out of luck. Spurred into action by the frantic appeals of the British colonies in the region the government in London had finally decided to act against this nest of thieves.

  The man they’d chosen for the job was a former privateer, Captain Woodes Rogers, who had led a famous expedition around the world between 1708 and 1711. Rogers was as tough as any of the men he’d been sent to confront. In a battle off the coast of Mexico in 1709 he’d lost part of his upper jaw to a musket ball but continued to issue orders by scratching with a quill pen on a piece of paper while spitting blood and teeth over the deck. Probably no one else could have succeeded in taming the pirates of the Bahamas, certainly not with the pitiful resources given him and the limited assistance he received from the Royal Navy. But Rogers was a man of tireless energy and determination.

  He arrived at the ramshackle little town of Nassau on the main island of New Providence on 26 July 1718 with six ships and a company of soldiers. His policy was one of carrot and stick. With him he carried an Act of Grace from the King, offering a pardon to any pirate who surrendered before 5 September 1718. He was greeted by the sight of a ship blazing in the harbour and came under fire as some of the pirates hastily made their escape. But most were keen to accept the pardon. The majority had been privateers during the War of the Spanish Succession and they retained some of their old principles, a number of them refusing to attack English shipping. As Rogers came ashore they drew up their crews in two lines as a guard of honour, stretching from the port to the fort, and fired a salute over his head as he walked between them, by way of welcome.

  Rogers was a shrewd judge of character and he quickly recruited a number of the leading captains to hunt down their former colleagues. Before the end of the year he was hanging pirates at Nassau. Mounting the gallows on 12 December 1718 one of them, Dennis Macarty, remarked bitterly that ‘he knew the time when there were many brave fellows on the Island, who would not have suffered him to die like a Dog’. ‘He exhorted the people, who were at the foot of the walls, to have compassion on him,’ Johnson wrote, ‘but however willing, they saw too much power over their heads to attempt anything in his favour.’

  Rogers succeeded in temporarily reducing the level of piracy in the Caribbean. But within months many of those who had accepted the pardon were returning to their old profession, ‘like the dog to the vomit’. Rogers had managed to deprive the pirates of a secure haven in the Bahamas, which was no mean achievement. But in the long term the effect was simply to disperse them. It’s estimated there were soon over 2,000 pirates roaming the Atlantic, more than ever before.

  Starved of supplies and geographically isolated from Britain’s other Caribbean colonies, in September 1718 Rogers fitted out two sloops, the Buck and the Mumvil Trader, to buy goods and provisions from the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Hispaniola. This was illegal - officially Spanish colonies were allowed to trade only with the mother country - and the two ships were heavily armed. They were crewed with a combination of men brought across from Britain by Rogers and former pirates who’d taken up the pardon. Howel Davis, thwarted in his bid to join a pirate crew and now out of work, also found a berth.

  A few days later, off the coast of Hispaniola, the Buck’s young surgeon, twenty-one-year-old Archibald Murray, was rudely awakened one morning by a blow from the flat of a cutlass. He looked up to see a number of the crew staring menacingly down at him. He leapt out of his hammock and ran to the captain’s cabin, telling him ‘he suspected that the crew had mutinied and they designed to have him in their power’. There were two pistols lying by the captain’s bed and Murray picked them up. Handing one to the captain, he took up guard by the door. But when the mutineers barged in a few moments later the captain, slightly embarrassed, was forced to point out the guns were not actually loaded and the two men had no option but to surrender.

  The mutineers - Davis among them - soon had both sloops under their command. They put the two captains and various other men who were reluctant to turn pirate aboard the Mumvil Trader and dispatched it to the Bahamas, although Murray himself, who was invaluable to them as a surgeon, was forced to stay. The remaining mutineers aboard the Buck then filled a large bowl of punch and convened a council of war. ‘It was proposed to choose a commander,’ Captain Johnson wrote. ‘The election was soon over, for it fell upon Davis by a great majority ... He made a short speech, the sum of which was a declaration of war against the whole world.’ And so was born what would prove the most successful pirate crew in the history of the Caribbean.

  Davis soon showed his ability as a commander. Spotting a French ship off Cuba a few days later, he ordered his men to attack. They were reluctant. The French vessel had 24 guns and around sixty men. The Buck was a mere sloop. Sloops were the standard vessel for small-time pirates operating in the Caribbean at this time. They varied greatly but were rarely more than 65 feet in length, 20 feet across, with a depth in the hold of around 9 feet. They had just one or, at most, two masts and rarely carried more than 12 guns. Packed with pirates they were sufficient to terrify most merchant men into submission. But the Frenchman was better armed than most and Davis and hi
s men were clearly outgunned. Davis decided to use cunning.

  They’d taken a smaller French ship of 12 guns shortly before. He ordered the prisoners to put on white shirts and come up on the deck of this earlier prize and to hoist a dirty tarpaulin, which was the nearest thing they had to a black flag. Davis then boldly sailed the Buck alongside the larger French ship and raised his own black flag. The French captain, ‘much surprised, called to Davis, telling him, they wondered at his impudence in venturing to come so near them’, and ordered him to surrender. In reply, Davis ordered him to surrender, telling the Frenchman he was just waiting for his consort to come up before attacking, and warned him he would show no mercy if he resisted. At this point Davis’s men aboard the first French prize fired a gun and the French captain, seeing the dirty tarpaulin and believing it to be a second pirate ship, struck his colours. Davis ordered him to come on board the Buck with twenty of his men and quickly clapped them in irons.

  This set the tone for Davis’s pirate career, which was marked as much by intelligence and cunning as brute force, qualities Roberts would later observe and imitate. Shortly afterwards the Buck headed across the Atlantic to St Nicholas in the Cape Verde Islands, owned by the Portuguese. There, posing as English privateers, they spent five weeks carousing with the local women before heading for the nearby Isle of May, where they took a number of prizes. By now the Buck was becoming crowded and Davis decided to ‘trade up’, switching to a ship from Liverpool that he’d taken, renaming it the King James and loading it with 26 guns. He then sailed for the coast of Africa, his crew now seventy strong. Arriving at Gambia he captured the small Royal African Company fort in the river there before heading down to Sierra Leone.