If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

  During the bleak North Atlantic winters there was no government at all and the population shrank to a little under 2,000 people, almost all of them men. During these months the island was notorious for its lawlessness. ‘Theft, murder, rape or disorders of any kind may be committed without control,’ wrote one visitor in 1715. In 1720 the residents of Petty Harbour complained to the government that they laboured ‘under severe difficulties for the want of administration and justice amongst us and in the winter season ... [we] are in danger of our lives from our servants whose debauched principles lead them to commit wilful and open murder upon their masters’.

  But the masters did little to help themselves, often selling their men vast quantities of rum as a means of driving them into debt. This was intended to bind the poor fishermen to their employers and so stem the steady drain of men from Newfoundland to New England where wages were higher and there was an abundant supply of cheap, fertile land. Many fishermen were reduced to virtual slavery as a result of the masters’ control of the supply, not just of alcohol, but all other commodities. Not surprisingly, many fled at the first opportunity. Provision ships and fishing vessels from New England were frequent visitors to the island and their captains were more than happy to ‘spirit’ men away, hiding them in casks when necessary. The pirates who came without fail each summer were on much the same mission and many of the impoverished fishermen of Newfoundland were equally happy to sign up for service beneath the black flag.

  In 1720 Roberts was helped by the fact that the two Royal Navy vessels that normally spent the summer in Newfoundland were late arriving. He also quickly built up his strength. He and his men had arrived off the east coast of the island about a week or two before the raid on Trepassey. They seized a number of vessels there, forcing several men to join their crew. Among them was an elderly fisherman from Dartmouth called Moses Reynolds who would spend three months with them and later give the authorities a detailed description of their activities during this time. He is the first source to refer to Roberts as ‘John’, and also provided an early example of the vengefulness that would become one of Roberts’ most marked characteristics.

  While off eastern Newfoundland, in the weeks before the raid on Trepassey, the pirates seized a ship from Bristol, whose captain had formerly traded out of Barbados. Captain Rogers, who had chased them off Barbados, had also come from Bristol, and, according to Reynolds, they decided to give the captain a beating, apparently seeing this as a way of exacting vicarious revenge on both ports. He was only saved when he told them the gossip on Barbados was that Rogers’ expedition against them had been successful and that the Good Fortune had been sunk. Why he said this is unclear - both Captain Rogers and Captain Graves had been open about their failure when they’d returned to Bridgetown. But the story so delighted the pirates that, ‘in their merriment’, they handed the captain back his ship and sent him on his way.

  About a week before the attack on Trepassey they mounted a smaller raid on the harbour of Ferryland. There they burnt the local admiral’s ship and one other. Roberts’ confidence was already high and he cheerfully informed his victims at Ferryland that he intended to sail to Trepassey. But, although the authorities had notice of his coming a day or two before his arrival, they ‘were so confounded that they could not put themselves in a posture of defence’, according to a press report.

  At Trepassey, Roberts achieved his ambition of acquiring a larger vessel, taking over a galley (a large ship with oar ports) from Bristol. He spent ten days converting it into a fighting ship, forcing carpenters from the other boats to work into service, and loaded it with 18 guns. He kept the Good Fortune as his support vessel and now had 30 guns under his command. A few days later he raided the small harbour of St Mary’s; after his experience at Barbados he may have been pursuing a policy of destroying ports in his rear. Then, at the start of July, he headed south-east towards the Grand Banks, the main fishing area, knowing that he had the shipping there at his mercy.

  The pirates quickly snapped up a number of large French fishing boats. Captain Johnson claimed Roberts seized nine or ten vessels and sank all of them apart from one. This would have meant the indiscriminate slaughter of their crews, and, again, Johnson was relying on the sensationalist reporting of the Boston Newsletter. Moses Reynolds, who was still with them, said they took ‘five or six’ ships, none of which they sunk, taking ‘only ... wine or brandy or ammunition’. Reynolds also noted that ‘they would not force or permit any French or any other nation to be with them, only English’.

  Roberts decided to keep one of the French vessels, a sizeable ship of 220 tons, for his own use, loading it with 26 guns and naming it the Royal Fortune. He did not yet feel strong enough to man three vessels, or even two large ones, and so abandoned the Bristol galley he had taken such trouble to convert at Trepassey just a few days before, keeping the smaller Good Fortune as his consort. He now had 34 to 36 guns in total, more than he’d had on the Royal Rover prior to the desertion at Devil’s Islands.

  The pirates then headed out into the Atlantic, beyond the Banks, and parked themselves in the latitude of New England, a couple of hundred miles south-east of Newfoundland. Here they sat for around a week hoovering up not just fishing vessels but also large merchant ships passing between Britain and the New England ports. They took around a dozen prizes in all. From them they seized goods - particularly tobacco - and provisions. More importantly, they scooped up large numbers of men, some forced, others willing volunteers. Many were from the West Country and they would form an important block in Roberts’ crew from this time onwards.

  One of the ships taken at this time was the Samuel, a Londonbased ship headed for Boston under Captain Samuel Cary, seized on 13 July 1720. The Boston Newsletter later gave a lurid description of Cary’s ordeal which has become one of the best-known accounts of capture by pirates:

  The first thing the pirates did was to strip both passengers and seamen of all their money and clothes which they had on board, with a loaded pistol to every one’s breast ready to shoot him down who did not immediately give an account of both, and resign them up. The next thing they did was, with madness and rage, to tear up the hatches, enter the hold like a parcel of furies, where with axes, cutlasses etc., they cut, tore and broke open the trunks, boxes, cases and bales, and when any of the goods came upon deck which they did not like to carry with them aboard their ship, instead of tossing them into the hold again they threw them over-board into the sea.

  The usual method they had to open chests was by shooting a brace of bullets with a pistol into the key-hole to force them open. The pirates carried away from Captain Cary’s ship aboard their own 40 barrels of powder, two great guns, his cables etc. and to the value of about £9-10,000 sterling worth of the choicest goods he had on board. There was nothing heard among the pirates all the while, but cursing, swearing, damning and blaspheming to the greatest degree imaginable, and often saying they would not go to Hope Point [the pirates’ name for Execution Dock in Wapping] in the River of Thames to be hung up in gibbets a sun-drying as Kidd and

  Bradish’s company did, for if it should chance that they should be attacked by any superior power or force, which they could not master, they would immediately put fire with one of their pistols to their powder, and go all merrily to hell together!

  They ‘ridiculed and made mock’ at the King’s various offers of pardon for pirates, saying ‘they had not got money enough’ and would accept a pardon only when they had. Predictably the liquor store was one of the first targets and they ‘made themselves very merry ... with some hampers of fine wines’. Like Captain Snelgrave before him, Captain Cary noted their aversion to the use of corkscrews. ‘It seems they would not wait to untie them and pull out the corks with screws, but each man took his bottle and with his cutlass cut off the neck and put it to their mouths and drank it out.’

  Cary’s account is quoted in almost every modern book on pirates. Given that other elements in the Boston Newsletter�
�s report are exaggerated, it may be embellished, not just by the newspaper, but also by Cary himself, anxious, like most pirate victims, to dispel any suspicion of complicity. But Roberts’ men were clearly in aggressive mood. On a ship seized shortly afterwards the captain was ‘used barbarously’ because, like Captain Rogers in Barbados, he came from Bristol. On another they ‘abused several women’, according to the Boston Gazette. It’s not clear what this means. Pirates sometimes raped slaves and other non-Europeans they captured, but very rarely white women, and it’s likely the paper would have been more specific if this had been the crime.

  The pirates took four men from the Samuel, leaving behind a fifth because he was Irish. One of them in particular attracted Roberts’ attention - the first mate, a Scot called Henry Glasby. Glasby was a highly experienced seaman and, most importantly, a skilled navigator. As a former mate, Roberts could navigate, but given his scanty education his abilities were probably limited. Navigation required a high level of both numeracy and literacy and, like Royal Navy captains, Roberts carried a ‘sailing master’ who took responsibility for plotting the ship’s course. Roberts had been using a man called Nicholas Thomas in this capacity when he first arrived at Newfoundland. He now had two ships and so needed two sailing masters. Glasby was a man of exceptional ability and Roberts was determined to add him to the crew. But, like most senior officers, Glasby had no interest at all in turning pirate. He tried to hide but the pirates found him, beat him and threw him aboard their vessel. He refused to sign the articles but was ‘cut and abused very much’. In the end he complied and this most reluctant of pirates would play a central role in Roberts’ story from this time on.

  Roberts’ thoughts were now turning to their next destination. The pirates told Captain Cary they were headed ‘to the Southward, to the Island of New Providence, possessed by Negroes, in South Latitude 17, which they say is a place of the Pirates’ General Rendezvous, where they have a Fortification and a great Magazine of Powder etc. where they intend to spend their money with the Portuguese Negro Women’. They were winding him up - there was no such island. But such whimsical notions were common among pirates. In their mind’s eye they had converted Madagascar into a pirate paradise and they often fantasised about establishing pirate kingdoms. A couple of years earlier one of Captain Bellamy’s men had urged him to set up a colony in North America to be peopled with Indians and ‘the discontented and desperate people of the neighbouring English and French colonies’. ‘Had they all united,’ wrote Captain Johnson, ‘and settled in some of those Islands, they might, by this time, have been honoured with the name of Commonwealth, and no power in those parts of the world could have been able to dispute it with them.’

  These were no more than fantasies. The anarchic, centrifugal impulses within pirate crews were such that it was all captains like Roberts could do to hold their own men together, never mind form a confederation of pirate crews. But this didn’t prevent the authorities indulging in lurid fantasies of their own. In their darkest moments they conjured up ghastly visions of a pirate-slave alliance that would rise up to overwhelm the civilisation of the New World. ‘The negro men’, warned Governor Bennet of Bermuda in 1718, ‘are grown so very impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their rising [and] ... should fear their joining with the pirates.’ As they began to receive reports of his activities off Newfoundland, Bartholomew Roberts was terrifying to the authorities because he seemed the type of intelligent, able leader who might be able to harness pirate energies and make such dark fantasies reality.

  In fact, Roberts and his men were headed not for a pirate utopia, but for Africa. By now Roberts’s crew numbered around 130 men. But he was keen to build up his strength further and, like Howel Davis before him, he knew the warm waters of the Gulf of Guinea, clogged with crowded, disease-ridden slavers, were a perfect recruiting ground. The winds and the currents of the North Atlantic move in a great, clockwise swirl and, from their position south-east of Newfoundland, the African coast was just a few weeks sailing away. They set sail around 19 July, bound initially for the island of Brava at the southern end of the Cape Verde islands, where they intended to careen before beginning their assault on the mainland.

  On long voyages like this life aboard quickly settled into a rhythm. Like the merchant ships they came from, pirates operated a watch system. Normally the presence of large numbers of slaves eased the workload, perhaps sparing some of the more senior pirates from the need to stand shifts. But they had lost most of their slaves at Devil’s Islands and, as they headed east, their daily routine was closer to that of a conventional ship than at any other time in Roberts’ pirate career.

  The crews on the two ships were divided into a ‘starboard’ and a ‘larboard’ watch, which took alternating four-hour shifts. While one watch worked, the other rested, although generally both were on deck during the afternoon. The first shift began at noon and a senior officer kept time using an hour glass, ringing a bell every half hour. ‘Eight bells’ signalled the changing of the watch. The ‘dog watch’, between 4 and 8 p.m., was divided into two, two-hour shifts so that the shifts served by each watch alternated every day.

  Even without slaves the pirates’ lives were easier than those of merchant sailors. They were not racing to keep to a tight schedule. And, as on Royal Navy vessels, the extra men needed for a fighting ship eased the general workload. On merchant ships sailors were obliged to spend hours on general maintenance - mending ropes, sewing sails and, in tropical waters, endlessly scraping, sanding, oiling and painting the timbers to keep the ship’s wooden body from decaying. But Roberts’ men could largely neglect repairs, knowing they could always steal equipment from their next prize and, when necessary, take a new ship.

  The pirates were better fed since their store room was constantly replenished, even if the requirements of conservation meant they suffered the same drab diet as other sailors when at sea - salt beef and pork, ship’s biscuits, flour, oatmeal, dried peas, butter, suet, cheese and salted cod. The one-legged, one-eyed veterans who served as cooks were probably no more accomplished on pirate vessels than their counterparts in the Royal Navy. But pirates could, at least, be sure that there were no extra helpings for the officers. ‘At meals the quartermaster overlooks the cook to see the provisions equally distributed to each mess,’ wrote one pirate captive in 1724. Like all sailors they supplemented their rations with as much fresh food as possible. They may well have fished for sharks, although it’s unlikely they adopted the slavers’ practice of using ‘dead negroes’ as bait - if only for want of dead negroes.

  One pirate captive, taken off the Cape Verde islands in 1722, recalled a tranquil moment one day when the ship was at anchor: ‘Nobody had anything to do, but the lookers-out at the top mast head; the mate of the watch, the quartermaster of the watch, helmsman & co. being gone down to drink a dram, I suppose, or to smoke a pipe of tobacco, or the like.’ Life aboard the Royal Fortune and the Good Fortune followed a similarly relaxed rhythm and Roberts’ men filled their leisure in a variety of ways.

  As item XI of Roberts’ articles showed, his ships carried musicians. They were mainly recruited from the slavers where it was their job to provide accompaniment for the curious practice of ‘dancing the slaves’, described by the captain of a slave ship in the 1690s: ‘We often at sea, in the evenings, would let the slaves come up into the sun to air themselves, and make them jump and dance for an hour or two to our bag-pipes, harp and fiddle, by which exercise to preserve them in health.’ This grim dance of death provides a stark contrast to the scene aboard a pirate ship described by a pirate captive in the Indian Ocean in 1720. The pirates would practise with their weapons on deck, he wrote, ‘while their musicians play divers airs so that the days pass very agreeably’.

  Roberts’ crew included at least a drummer, a trumpeter, an oboe player and a fiddler. They played on the raised poop deck at the rear of the ship in times of battle, as when the Good Fortune sailed into the harbour at
Trepassey. They also played at celebrations and were expected to be on hand whenever the crew felt the need of them, other than Sundays. Like cooks, many musicians were invalids. Their fiddler, James White, was described as ‘decrepit and ill-shapen, unfit for any purpose with them but music’.

  It would be fascinating to hear the music produced by these racially hybrid pirate crews. The songs sung by conventional sailors to accompany such strenuous physical activities as raising the anchor, setting the sails and working the pumps bore a strong resemblance to African work songs with their use of call and response patterns. The famous rhyme in Treasure Island, which the evidence suggests may be authentic, was one:

  Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest

  Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

  Drink and the Devil had done for the rest,

  Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

  A single voice sang the first and third lines, the men singing the second and fourth together as they pulled on the ropes or windlass. ‘Sailors’ laments’ have also been described as an early form of the blues. If sailors’ music generally bore a strong African influence, this was heightened further among pirate musicians who lived side by side with large numbers of slaves for such lengthy periods of time and were largely cut off from the musical influences of their homelands. Pirate ships were one of the earliest crucibles for the great fusing of African and European music which would be such a feature of the musical life of the Americas for the next three hundred years.