If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

  9

  AFRICA AGAIN

  THE ATLANTIC AND WEST AFRICA

  APRIL-JULY 1721

  ‘HE PINED WITH A VACUUM OF THE GUTS, AND DIED; LEAVING THIS ADVICE TO HIS COUNTRY MEN, RATHER TO RUN A REMOTE HAZARD OF BEING HANGED AT HOME, THAN CHOOSE A TRANSFER HITHER’

  THE PIRATES QUICKLY CAUGHT the trade winds and soon the stifling heat of the Caribbean gave way to the fresher breezes of the North Atlantic as they curved their way towards Africa. With the sails set and the wind behind them there was little to do aloft and life aboard quickly settled in to its normal rhythm. But this was no time to relax. They were travelling the main shipping routes and encountered a steady stream of prizes.

  On 9 April, just off Bermuda, they captured the Jeremiah and Anne, a Virginia-bound sloop that had come from London via the Cape Verde Islands. They took at least seven new men. Glasby observed with disgust that one of the new recruits ‘got so drunk with the pirates he was forced to be hoisted out with a tackle and into the [Royal] Fortune again in the same way’. Roberts told the captain ‘that he expected speedily to be joined by a ship of 46 guns, and that he would make Virginia a visit and revenge the death of the pirates which have been executed here’. This was a reference to the six men hanged by Governor Spotswood in early 1720 following Kennedy’s desertion, and the 46-gun ship was presumably the Puerto del Principe under Captain Norton, which was still making its way to New England at this point. The threat was bluster. It seems they planned to rendezvous with Norton off Africa, not America. But it succeeded in spreading panic along the North American coastline. Governor Spotswood wrote to London begging for a 40 or 50-gun warship to be sent out - ‘for there is not one of the guardships on this coast fit to encounter such a one as this Roberts has now under his command’ - and quickly erected batteries at the mouths of the James, York and Rappahanock Rivers.

  Eight days later, on 17 April, they seized a Dutch ship, the Prince Eugene, in mid-Atlantic. A Danish crewman later provided the most detailed description we have of the firepower aboard Roberts’ ships. The Royal Fortune now had 42 guns aboard. The largest were capable of firing 12-pound cannon balls, the smallest were four-pounders. The Good Fortune carried 18 guns, a mixture of four-pounders and sixpounders. This was broadly in line with Royal Navy warships of similar size. But both vessels also carried large numbers of smaller twoand three-pounders. The Royal Fortune had seven of these located in the tops of the main and foremast, while the Good Fortune had twelve on its quarterdeck. The Royal Fortune also had two swivel guns in the tops of its mizzen-mast. Any merchant ship offering resistance would be faced with a blizzard of fire, from the waterline to the mast-tops.

  Scudding across the Atlantic in the bright, spring sunshine Roberts had every reason to be confident. But then, at dawn on 20 April, three days after the capture of the Prince Eugene, he emerged from his cabin to find the sea around his ship empty. The Good Fortune had deserted overnight.

  For its captain, Thomas Anstis, this was revenge for his demotion following the battle off Barbados the year before. But he’d also been unhappy with Roberts’ treatment of the second ship. ‘What made Anstis a malcontent,’ Captain Johnson wrote, ‘was the inferiority he stood in, with respect to Roberts, who carried himself with a haughty and magisterial air, to him and his crew, he regarding the brigantine only as a tender [support ship], and, as such, left them no more than the refuse of their plunder.’ Johnson almost certainly got his version of events from members of Anstis’ crew - above all Thomas Lawrence Jones, the man whose mess-mate Roberts had murdered earlier in the year, who was in the Marshalsea Prison when Johnson was writing A General History.

  Jones was one of the ringleaders and the murder, and his subsequent beating was the catalyst for the desertion. Jones had won over Anstis and the other leading men and the decision was put to the rest of the Good Fortune’s crew just a few hours beforehand. Finding a majority in favour of deserting Roberts they ‘came to a resolution to bid a soft farewell’, and slipped away into the darkness shortly after midnight. They had planned to throw overboard anyone who resisted, but this proved unnecessary.

  Anstis and the men in the Good Fortune headed straight back towards the Caribbean. Over the next few months they took a number of prizes and were soon a formidable crew in their own right, with well over 100 men. Like Roberts they bolstered their strength by adding a second ship. But Anstis proved rather less adept at containing the tensions within a large, successful pirate crew than Roberts and he was soon deposed by a one-handed pirate called John Fenn (sadly, it’s not recorded whether Fenn wore a hook). Shortly afterwards the crew voted to plead for a royal pardon and by the end of 1721 they were hunkered down on a deserted island off Cuba awaiting a response from London.

  This was a major blow. Roberts had lost perhaps a third of his strength, including a number of highly experienced men. And, although he didn’t know it at the time, at almost exactly the same moment that the Good Fortune was deserting, the Puerto del Principe had been captured by the authorities in New England. Captain Norton had taken it to Tarpaulin Cove in Massachusetts, ‘a by-place fit for roguery’, according to a colonial official, to dispose of the cargo. But the sheer quantity of goods being unloaded, including large numbers of slaves, aroused suspicion and the ship was seized, although Norton himself managed to escape. There would be no rendezvous off Africa and now, instead of ravaging the coast at the head of three large ships, as planned, Roberts was back down to one.

  But the Welshman was never one to be easily discouraged. He always showed extraordinary resolve and determination in these situations. He had been through far worse before and come through, and he knew he still had between 150 and 200 men under his command, perhaps a third of them loyal black slaves. He made a halfhearted pursuit of the Good Fortune but soon gave up and the Royal Fortune resumed its course towards Africa. Roberts was confident the slavers would be as full of willing recruits as ever and he was resolved to build up his strength once more.

  A few weeks later, close to the Cape Verde Islands, they seized an English galley called the Norman, bound from Liverpool to Antigua. For those in Roberts’ crew who may have been wavering in their commitment to life under the black flag the Norman’s captain, Samuel Norman, provided a timely reminder of the arbitrary power they had escaped in the merchant navy. Norman achieved notoriety the following year when he became one of the few eighteenth-century merchant captains accused of buggery. His fourteen-year-old cabin boy claimed he had ordered him to wash ‘his legs, thighs and privy parts’ and had then inserted his ‘yard’ into his ‘fundament’. The vast imbalance of power between captain and cabin boy meant such crimes were almost never reported and the cabin boy only spoke up on this occasion because he was encouraged by the rest of the crew. Even then the case never came to court. Norman was already an unpopular captain when Roberts encountered him and at least three men joined the pirates from his crew, including one glorying in the name of Thomas Withstandyenot.

  From the Cape Verde Islands the pirates turned eastward and at some point towards the end of May the vast bulk of the African continent loomed before them once more. For the men aboard - particularly the Newfoundlanders, many of whom had never sailed in African waters - it was a sobering moment. All sailors knew of the dreadful mortality these seas exacted on European ships. And, as they gazed at the endless, flat coastline they knew they were entering an environment very different from the bright specks of the Caribbean islands that they had flitted between for much of the last eighteen months, one that was far more alien and forbidding. Here European settlements were few and far between, and were confined to tiny, dilapidated forts, clinging to the periphery of the continent. Between lay vast tracts of land inhabited only by Africans, regarded by most Europeans as savages and cannibals. But for Roberts, the sight of the familiar old coastline through the soupy, humid atmosphere was welcome. There were no colonial governors, ready to fit out expeditions to hunt him down. And he knew fear of the locals
would make most of his men think twice before deserting.

  But the West African coastline was not quite the defenceless wilderness it had been when Howel Davies had ravaged it with Cocklyn and La Bouche two years earlier. In the autumn of 1719 the government in London had finally agreed to the frantic pleas of the slave traders for protection. Two fourth-rate men-of-war - HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth - had arrived off Africa just a few weeks before. Each had 50 guns and between them they carried 500 men - the sort of force Governor Hamilton in Antigua and Governor Spotswood in Virginia had been begging for for years. The French also now had two warships off West Africa, one of 50 guns and one of 24. Their job was not an enviable one. These four vessels had to patrol a disease-ridden coastline stretching 3,000 miles from Cape Verde in modern Senegal to Cape Lopez in modern Gabon. But for the first time Roberts would be confronted with ships that he had good reason to fear.

  With the arrival of HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth off the African coast a colourful new set of characters enter Roberts’ story. Swallow - the lead British vessel - was commanded by Captain Chaloner Ogle. At forty years old he was almost exactly the same age as Roberts, but his life could not have followed a more different trajectory. He came from a naval family and, while Roberts had laboured for years as a common seaman, Ogle had entered the Royal Navy in July 1697 as a ‘king’s letter-boy’. This was a fast-track traineeship for officers, introduced by King Charles II in 1661 as a means of encouraging ‘the families of better sort among our subjects’ to send their sons to sea. By the age of twenty-one Ogle was a lieutenant and he received his first command the following year, serving with distinction in the Mediterranean throughout the War of the Spanish Succession. He was a rising star.

  The captain of HMS Weymouth was an able young commander called Mungo Herdman. Serving under Herdman as first mate was a morose, solitary, forty-five-year-old Scot called Alexander Selkirk. Seventeen years earlier Selkirk had been marooned on the deserted island of Juan Fernández off Chile after falling out with his shipmates during a privateering mission to the South Seas. He lived there alone for more than four years. When his ammunition ran out he hunted goats with knives fashioned from the iron hoops of barrels washed up on the sea shore, leaping from rock to rock in his bare feet. By the time he was rescued by Captain Woodes Rogers - later governor of the Bahamas - in 1709 he had almost lost the power of speech. He was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.

  Aboard HMS Swallow was a thirty-six-year-old surgeon called John Atkins. An intelligent, thoughtful man, Atkins later wrote a lengthy memoir of the voyage. He was prone to philosophical digressions, likening the departure from Land’s End - ‘shooting into an Abyss of Waters’ - to death - a ‘launch into a greater Abyss; eternity’. But he was also a perceptive and in many ways enlightened observer of what he saw in Africa. He dismissed the conventional wisdom that Africans were cannibals, which he saw as a myth created to ‘justify dispossession’. And he was a rare critic of slavery, at least in the form it took in the West Indies. The plantation owners used slaves as ‘beasts of burden’, he wrote, feeding them the same diet as horses. As a result he felt it was ‘inhumanity’ to take Africans from their homeland. He was also an acerbic critic of the Royal African Company, which served as the representative of the British Crown in West Africa and was about to find itself locked in an epic, eight-month struggle with Roberts and his men.

  The Royal African Company had been established in 1672 and granted a monopoly of all Britain’s trade with Africa. The monopoly had been ended in 1698 and since then the company had been in freefall. Nevertheless it was still obliged to maintain forts along the African coast to protect the trade. The burden was crippling it, and the company’s treatment of its staff and sailors made it a particular object of hatred to the pirates. Atkins left a vivid description of the appalling conditions at Cape Coast Castle, the company’s main base in Africa, where HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth arrived on 18 June 1721. Located on the Gold Coast, at the heart of the slave-trading region, it contained ‘merchants, factors, writers, miners, artificers and soldiers’, Atkins wrote. ‘Excepting the first rank, who are the council for managing affairs, [they] are all of them together a company of white negroes, who are entirely resigned to the Governor’s commands, according to the strictest rules and discipline and subjection.’ Salaries were scarcely enough to keep them from starving, and they were forced to borrow from the company, turning them, like the fishermen of Newfoundland, into debt slaves. For those who somehow managed to avoid this, the governor had a series of fines at his disposal. ‘They are all liable to be mulcted for drunkenness, swearing, neglects and lying out of the castle, even for not going to church.’ For more serious misdemeanours punishments ranged from confinement in the dungeons, to ‘drubbing’ and ‘the wooden horse’ - a torture whereby a man was forced to sit astride the angle of a three-sided length of wood for hours on end, with weights attached to his legs.

  Mortality rates were horrific, worse even than those on the slaving ships. During the course of 1719 a total of sixty-nine new employees were sent out to the Gold Coast. Of these almost half were dead within four months and almost two thirds within a year. Just three weeks before Atkins arrived at Cape Coast Castle a ship pulled in to the company’s station at Whydah carrying a rare phenomenon on the African coast - an entire family. The new surgeon, Dr Levens, had brought out with him his wife, his two children and a maid. All five were dead within six weeks, along with the majority of their fellow passengers.

  Cape Coast Castle generally contained between fifty and a hundred white men, crowded together in cramped, insanitary quarters. The numbers at the lesser forts strung out along the coast were much smaller, often less than five, and conditions there were even worse. ‘I have ... visited your forts at Anamaboe, Winneba, Tantumquerry and Accra,’ the company’s chief surgeon wrote to the board in London in 1725, ‘and indeed they more resemble haunted houses than garrisoned forts, having one ghost above stairs and perhaps 2 or 3 at most below, spinning out a life that is a real burden to them, in miserable conditions.’

  ‘I observed,’ recalled Atkins, ‘most of our factors to have dwindled much from the genteel air they brought; wear no cane nor snuff-box, [are] idle in matters of business, have lank bodies, a pale visage, their pockets sewn up, or of no use, and their tongues tied.’ Many took refuge in drink, and senior officials didn’t hesitate to ascribe the high mortality among their employees to their own debaucheries. The governor at James Fort in Gambia in the 1730s described one man who ‘died a martyr to rum; for when he was not able to lift a mug to his mouth, he made shift to suck it through a pipe, and died with a pipe and a mug full of Bumbo close to his pillow’.

  The writers - or clerks - were often in their teens. Atkins recalled visiting the office of ‘Poor T-d ... a youth well recommended’, at Cape Coast Castle one day. ‘A negro woman came bawling about his ears for a plantain he had stole from her. He would feign have concealed the meaning of her music, but at length I understood it was the only morsel he had eat for three days past, one night’s debauch, and several mulcts having run him out of pocket.’ ‘Poor T-d’ was dead before Atkins left the fort. ‘He pined with a vacuum of the guts, and died; leaving this advice to his countrymen, rather to run a remote hazard of being hanged at home, than choose a transfer hither.’

  There were compensations. In 1727 one trader wrote a lengthy eulogy to the greater sexual freedom of African society. He recalled being given a concubine for the night by a minor local king. ‘At midnight we went to bed, and in that situation I soon forgot the complexion of my bedfellow, and obeyed the dictates of all-powerful nature. Greater pleasure I never found, and during my stay, if paradise is to be found in the enjoyment of a woman, I was then in the possession of it.’ This more relaxed attitude to sex, he claimed, was responsible for the total absence ‘of those detestable and unnatural crimes of sodomy and bestiality, so much practised among Christians’.

  Bu
t this was small consolation for the almost certain death that awaited. Like the sailors aboard the slavers, many of the soldiers and artisans at the forts were effectively conscripts, dragged half-conscious from the bars and brothels of London, Liverpool and Bristol, unaware of the dreadful rates of mortality that awaited them precisely because so few returned to tell the tale. Further up the ladder, those who went out as traders were playing a game of Russian roulette, hoping they could fight off the malaria and the dysentery long enough to return home rich men. It was almost always a miscalculation and they weren’t among the best and the brightest that Britain had to offer. As one historian put it: ‘One might guess that a good many men entering the African service had already failed at some other job.’

  There were rare exceptions, men who, through sheer dint of their ability to stay alive while all those around them dropped like flies, attained an almost mythical stature. Such a man was General Phipps, the Governor of Cape Coast Castle, the company’s senior official in Africa, whose duel with Roberts over the coming months would be a very personal one. He’d somehow managed to survive almost twenty years in the job and reigned supreme, the ‘first person’ in all things at the fort, according to Atkins. The absolute power he wielded in his ‘petty sovereignty’ and the ‘fawning submission of the Negroes’ had made him ‘haughty towards all under him’. He resided ‘forever within his battlements’ like a giant in his ‘enchanted castle’. On the rare occasions when he invited guests to dinner he had developed the strange habit of taking the food, uninvited, from their plates. You had to ‘keep a good look-out, or lose your dinner’, wrote Atkins, ‘though he knows there is no victuals anywhere else’.

  In the midst of the poverty and squalor of the coast Phipps lived like a king. His salary was £2,000 a year. This compared with £300 a year for the best-paid factors, or traders, and on top of this he was able to trade on his own account. Atkins noted that, although meat was a rarity at the castle, Phipps never went short, supplying himself both from trading vessels and the surrounding African villages. He also had a large ‘orchard’ or ‘garden’, almost ten miles in circumference, close by, which provided oranges, lemons, limes, citrons, guavas, paw paws, plantains, bananas, coconuts, cinnamon, tamarinds, pineapples, Indian cabbage and some European crops. Little of this found its way to the plates of his employees.