If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

  Taking his pipe out of his mouth [he] said he had something to offer to the court in behalf of one of the prisoners, and spoke to this effect. ‘By God, Glasby shall not die; damn me if he shall.’ After this learned speech he sat down in his place, and resumed his pipe. This motion was loudly opposed by all the rest of the judges in equivalent terms, but Ashplant, who was resolute in his opinion, made another pathetical speech in the following manner. ‘God damn ye

  Gentlemen, I am as good a man as the best of you; damn my soul if ever I turned my back to any man in my life, or ever will by God. Glasby is an honest fellow, notwithstanding this misfortune, and I love him, Devil damn me if I don’t. I hope he’ll live and repent of what he has done. But, damn me, if he must die, I will die along with him.’ And thereupon he pulled out a pair of pistols and presented them to some of the learned judges upon the bench who, perceiving the argument so well supported, thought it reasonable Glasby should be acquitted, and so they all came over to his opinion and allowed it to be law.

  Glasby was probably as astonished as everyone else at his miraculous escape. Just why Ashplant should have formed such a violent attachment to him is unclear. It’s conceivable they were old acquaintances. But the episode is another example of the strangely intense emotions that swirled around within pirate ships. Roberts may also have been happy to see his sailing master spared.

  While Glasby was cleared the two men who had escaped with him were not so fortunate. Allowed only the liberty of choosing their own four-man firing squad, they were taken aboard the French sloop that had been seized that day, perhaps to avoid bringing bad luck on the pirates’ own vessel. There they were tied to the mast and shot dead.

  The day after the trial and execution the pirates captured Captain Cane, whose sloop they had seized at Cayenne in November 1719, for the second time. They believed he was complicit in Kennedy’s desertion and beat him savagely before stealing rum and sugar - the key ingredients of punch - from his ship. By contrast, when two days later they released Captain Dunne, the turtler they’d seized at Carriacou, he was generously rewarded for his services with sails, ropes, fishing lines, brandy, sugar, ‘a handkerchief with some spice in it’ and some calico ‘to make his wife a gown and petticoat’. With him they sent Moses Reynolds, the old Newfoundland fisherman who had been a prisoner with them since June. Reynolds was also given parting gifts, apparently in admiration for his steadfast refusal to sign their articles.

  Their thoughts now turned to their next move. At Tobago Roberts had gathered important intelligence. There was not a single British warship in the entire eastern Caribbean. HMS Rose and HMS Shark, normally based in Antigua, were undergoing a lengthy re-fit in the shipyards of Boston. And the Navy had suffered a major disaster during the summer - the loss of HMS Milford, the 30-gun ship normally based in Barbados, which had run aground on rocks during a storm as it convoyed a fleet of merchantmen from Jamaica around the western tip of Cuba on 18 June. Thirteen merchant vessels had gone down with her, with heavy loss of life. It would not be replaced until the following May. The pirates had a free run.

  They headed boldly for the British Leeward Islands. Antigua, Nevis, St Christophers and Montserrat were replacing Barbados as the centre of British power in the region at this time and their governor, Walter Hamilton, based in Antigua, was a determined enemy of pirates. But he was a beleaguered, forlorn figure. He had been in his post, on and off, for ten years and had pleaded repeatedly for the Admiralty to send him a ship of 36 or 40 guns ‘to protect the trade from these vermin’. But he’d been forced to make do with ships of 14 and 20 guns in which he had little faith. He described one as a ‘mere bauble’, unable to carry more than four or six guns ‘when it blows but anything hard’. With HMS Rose and HMS Shark both in New England he was now thrown back entirely on his own resources.

  Those who ought to have had the strongest interest in suppressing the pirates - the local planters - offered little help. The concentration of land in ever larger plantations over the previous quarter-century had squeezed out the poorer whites and left the island’s citizen militia undermanned. The plantation owners were reluctant to release their own servants for militia drill if it interfered with sugar production. And the island assemblies had economised on the construction of forts.

  With the two warships absent all four islands were extremely vulnerable - as Roberts well knew.

  The pirates made initially for Basseterre, the main port in St Christophers. It had been completely destroyed during the War of the Spanish Succession but was now being quickly rebuilt and had one of the most beautiful locations in the Caribbean. The fertile sugar plantations that surrounded the town were cradled by three gently sloping hills, beyond which the peak of Mt Misery, the island’s highest point, could just be discerned, constantly shrouded in cloud.

  As at Trepassey in Newfoundland, the authorities had advance warning of Roberts’ arrival. Lt General William Mathew, the senior military officer on St. Christophers, received word that there were pirates in the area on the evening of Saturday, 24 September. He immediately ordered the various batteries around the coast to keep their guns ‘ready and in order, and to be very watchful’. This proved unfortunate for Captain Dunne of the Relief, who tried to slip ashore in the north of the island the following morning to unload the goods the pirates had gifted him. He was spotted and promptly arrested. General Mathew was busy taking an inventory of Dunne’s sloop when, around 1 p.m. the following Tuesday, 27 September he received word that Roberts and his men had sailed brazenly into Basseterre. He immediately issued orders for the island militia to be mobilised and then rode as fast as he could to confront them.

  Mathew arrived to find ‘everything in confusion’, he reported to Governor Hamilton in Antigua a couple of days later. The pirates, flying ‘black flags etc’ had seized one ship and set two others on fire. The battery that was supposed to defend the town was ‘without powder or ball rammer’ and, in any case, had just two guns ‘fit for any service’.

  General Mathew managed to beg, borrow and steal eight barrels of gunpowder, four small cannons and a few cannon balls from the inhabitants of the town. Combining these with the two functioning cannons from the battery he subjected the pirates to ‘a small cannonading for about an hour’. But it was a farcical effort. ‘What with bad gunners, unsizable shot etc. we did them little hurt,’ he wrote.

  The two ships the pirates had set on fire were the Mary and Martha from Bristol and an un-named ship belonging to a Captain Andrew Hingston. Both captains were ashore when the pirates arrived. Packed with sugar, the Mary and Martha was blazing fiercely. But Hingston’s vessel was burning more slowly. There were 500 barrels of beef aboard and General Mathew was keen to try and save it, but found Hingston to be unenthusiastic. His ‘behaviour savoured much of knave or coward’, Mathew complained, perhaps suspecting the captain was more interested in collecting the insurance. Eventually Mathew sent his own men aboard and extinguished the fire.

  The third ship, the one the pirates had seized but not set alight, was the Mary of Boston, commanded by a Captain Henry Fowle. Fowle, also ashore when the pirates arrived, had gone out himself in a boat and begged Roberts to spare his vessel. Roberts agreed, but on condition Fowle stay with them overnight and write a note requesting provisions be prepared for them to collect the following morning. Fowle agreed and his letter was sent ashore that evening. In it Fowle wrote that he was being ‘treated very civilly’ and asked that ‘one dozen of sheep, one dozen of goats, two bullocks and what small stock you can get’, be got ready.

  With it was a second letter, written by Roberts himself and addressed to General Mathew. The original is lost, but a copy was made and sent to London. It is one of the few letters written by a pirate that survives from this era and in it we hear Roberts’ authentic voice:

  Royall Fortune

  Sept. 27th, 1720

  Gentlemen

  This comes expressly from me to lett you know that had you come off as you ought
to a done and drank a glass of wine with me and my company I should not a harmed the least vessell in your harbour. Farther, it is not your gunns you fired that affrighted me or hindred our coming on shore but the wind not proving to our expectation that hindred it. The Royall Rover you have already burnt and barbarously used some of our men but we have now a ship as good as her and for revenge you may assure yourselves here and here-after not to expect anything from our hands but what belongs to a pirate. Farther Gentleman, that poor fellow you how have in prison at Sandy Point [presumably Captain Dunne] is entirely ignorant and what he hath was gave him and so pray make conscience for once, let me begg you, and use that man as an honest man and not as a C[riminal?]. If we hear any otherwise you may expect not to have quarters to any of your Island.

  Yours

  Bartholomew Roberts

  Here we see Roberts’ perception of himself - a gentleman highwayman, dispensing alternately vengeance and largesse to his victims, according to his own sense of honour and justice. The men ‘barbarously used’ were the six from the Royal Rover hanged on the neighbouring island of Nevis as Kennedy’s crew broke up in the early months of 1720. His desire for revenge on the governor confirms that he considered those who had stayed on the Royal Rover as less culpable for the desertion at Devil’s Islands than those who had gone to Britain with Kennedy. This is the only document from this middle period of Roberts’ career that features the name Bartholomew rather than John, and it was clearly the name he himself preferred to be known by.

  The two pirate vessels pulled away slightly from Basseterre overnight. At nine the next morning the sloop Good Fortune returned and dropped off Captain Fowle to fetch the provisions the pirates had requested. It then pulled away again. To his dismay Fowle found General Mathew was not prepared to meet the pirates’ demands and would not let him return to their ship. Overnight Mathew had managed to get the defences of Basseterre in order, bringing in thirteen large guns from nearby towns. When the Good Fortune returned about 11 a.m. it was met with cannon fire. ‘We had time to give her two rounds of all our guns of which seven hit her,’ wrote Mathew. It suffered damage to its sails and rigging and ‘one 24 pound ball took her in the bow. She made no return but got out as well as she could.’

  Shaken, the pirates fled to a small bay at the very southern tip of St Christophers, taking Fowle’s ship, the Mary, with them. None of them had been killed, but they were angry. Fowle knew they had piled timber in the cabin of his ship ready to set it on fire and expected to see it ablaze at any moment. But the pirates were feeling magnanimous. They guessed that Fowle had been prevented from returning and felt he was ‘an honest fellow that never abused any sailors’. They spared the Mary but plundered it of provisions and water, slashed the rigging, destroyed Fowle’s books and instruments, staved in the men’s sea chests and ‘left him and his men only with what they had on their backs’, according to a press report. But the substantial cargo of sugar was left largely intact.

  The pirates also took time to write a verse in chalk on the timbers:

  For our word’s sake we let thee go

  But to Creoles we are a foe.

  The term ‘Creole’ referred to Europeans and Africans born in the West Indies and Spanish America and the verse implies the pirates saw a distinction between Fowle, who was a New Englander, and the authorities in the Caribbean, who were the main focus of their antagonism. It was accompanied by ‘a death’s head and arm with a cutlass’. They had been in whimsical mood. When General Mathew recovered Captain Hingston’s ship at Basseterre he found that, before setting it alight, the pirates had chalked the enigmatic couplet:

  In thee I find

  Content of mind.

  From St Christophers the pirates headed for the island of Nevis, which lay immediately to the south-east, intending to pay the governor a visit in Charlestown ‘and burn the town about his ears for hanging the pirates there’. But the winds were against them and they were forced to turn northward again, sailing around the western coast of St Christophers, pursued all the while by General Mathew ‘with 70 horse and dragoons’ galloping along the shoreline. They were last seen heading towards the French island of St Bartholomew.

  Although they had sown terror and confusion at Basseterre the raid had been a failure for Roberts and his men. They’d got no provisions and had suffered damage to the Good Fortune. They had more luck at St Bartholomew, which the French shared with Carib Indians. The French settlement was tiny and easily intimidated and, like Cayenne in French Guiana, it had a Buccaneer tradition. ‘They met with much handsomer treatment,’ wrote Captain Johnson, ‘the governor not only supplying them with refreshments, but he and the chiefs caressing them in the most friendly manner. And the women, from so good an example, endeavoured to outvie each other in dress, and behaviour, to attract the good graces of such generous lovers, that paid well for their fortunes.’

  Their reception provided welcome relief to many in Roberts’ crew. Although they had sped away from Carriacou prior to Newfoundland in search of ‘wine and women’, this was the first time they had been able to indulge their libidos since leaving Cayenne ten months previously, and no doubt they squandered much of what they had gained over the previous few months. Once again, there is no record of Roberts partaking of these pleasures.

  At St Christophers we are given a name for the first time of the man captaining the Good Fortune, the pirates’ smaller vessel. He was Montigny La Palisse, a Frenchman from St Malo. It’s surprising they’d chosen a foreigner. As Moses Reynolds had observed at Newfoundland, Roberts’ men strove to keep the crew ‘English’ (a term that incorporated Welsh and Scots) and at Carriacou Captain Dunne of the Relief also noted that the pirates were ‘mostly Englishmen’. La Palisse was democratically elected. But he may well have had the backing of Roberts, keen to see someone without a strong personal following in this post. Having a second vessel strengthened Roberts, but it also created a rival centre of power and managing the relationship with his subordinate captain was to be one of the main challenges facing him from now on.

  From St Bartholomew the pirates headed north and spent the next five or six weeks plundering the shipping lanes between the West Indies and Europe and North America. By 30 October they were close to Bermuda, where they took a brigantine called the Thomas. They forced the captain and most of his men to join their crew, leaving only the ship’s owner, Thomas Bennett, and a sailor whose arm they had broken aboard. At midnight they set the Thomas adrift to fend for itself. But then they took pity and sent the Good Fortune’s long boat across, telling Bennett they would not leave him to ‘perish in the sea’. Bennett and the injured sailor were taken aboard the Royal Fortune, where Bennett remained a prisoner for the next three months.

  Bennett later provided the authorities with descriptions of a number of men among Roberts’ crew whom he believed had been forced. His intention was that these could be used in their defence if they should ever be captured and brought to trial. In fact a number of these men went on to become hardened pirates and the descriptions provide a snapshot of Roberts’ crew at this time.

  Thomas Wills of Bideford [Devon] ... aged about twenty six years, very much pock broken, about five foot three inches

  John Carter of Bideford aforesaid aged about twenty three years of a very fresh complexion about five foot two inches

  James Harris of Bideford aforesaid, aged about twenty seven years, fresh complexion, middle sized

  William Williams a Cornish man aged about 26 years, a short thick man, very swarthy

  Lesby, a North Briton [Scot] aged about 28 years, a tall thin man, much pock fritten

  Seerden of Piscataqua in New England, cooper, aged about 35 years, red haired and very much pock broken. Middle sized

  As throughout this period in and around the Caribbean, none of their prizes yielded a spectacular haul of treasure. Many were sizeable trading ships but their bulky cargoes were of little use to the pirates. And although they often carried stashes of cash or
gold for trading purposes, these rarely amounted to more than a few hundred or at the very most a few thousand pounds. They were useful primarily for the food, drink and equipment they provided, items which enabled the pirates to continue with their everyday lives, and, above all, for new recruits.

  The crew was growing steadily and at some point in the autumn of 1720 Roberts traded up once more, swapping the Royal Fortune they’d taken on the banks of Newfoundland for a large French prize from Martinique. It was bigger, but in other respects it wasn’t a great exchange. The new ship - which they also named the Royal Fortune - was soon reported to be leaky. Despite this Roberts and his men continued to cover extraordinary distances. Even in this period, which saw no ocean crossings, they covered well over 1,000 miles in travelling from St Christophers to Bermuda. And in early November they turned south again, sailing a further 2,500 miles or so to Surinam on the northern coast of South America. From there they travelled 500 miles to Tobago to water.

  It was at Tobago that the pirates were told for the first time of the Governor of Martinique’s attempt to capture them at Carriacou just before their trip to Newfoundland, which they had so narrowly escaped. The governor had merely been doing his job. But the pirates quickly worked themselves up into a lather of indignation and Roberts, filled with entirely unreasonable rage, swore revenge. Until now their efforts in the Caribbean had been focussed on the British colonies. But, as the New Year dawned, they turned their sights on the French.