Sailing east, the pirates had more luck with their next prize, a Royal African Company ship called the Onslow, which they came across riding at anchor in the mouth of the River Sestos on 8 August. At 410 tons it was one of the largest ships they ever encountered. It carried 26 guns and a crew of fifty and had room on board for up to 600 slaves. But - unusually - the bulk of the men were ashore when the pirates arrived and it surrendered meekly.
The Onslow should not have been there. Royal African Company ships were meant to make straight for Cape Coast Castle and the Onslow had only stopped so the captain, William Gee, could indulge in private trade. General Phipps, when he heard, was furious, and blamed the loss of the ship entirely on Gee’s ‘imprudence’. It had £9,000 worth of goods on board, the vast bulk of it trading items intended for delivery to Cape Coast Castle and the Royal African Company’s station at Whydah. They included guns, gunpowder, pewter crockery, cowry shells (used as currency at Whydah), hats, bells, beads and 240 mirrors, as well as large quantities of textiles and copper and iron bars. It was also carrying tobacco, pipes and malt spirits which, surprisingly, the Royal African Company provided for the slaves on their journey across to the Caribbean.
There were a number of passengers aboard, including a Captain Trengrove, who was coming out to run the gold mine the company was attempting to open up next to Cape Coast Castle. He had brought a number of miners with him, as well as his wife, Elizabeth. There were also a large number of soldiers and artisans intended for Cape Coast Castle and a clergyman called Roger Price. The pirates jokingly invited Price to join their crew, ‘promising he should do nothing for his money but make punch, and say prayers’, but he declined. Good naturedly, they returned almost all the goods they had stolen from him, although they kept a corkscrew, for which their need was obvious, and ‘three prayer books’, for which it was less so.
Roberts and Little David cast an eye over the cargo and quickly realised the real prize here was the ship itself. The Royal Fortune, by now, was ‘leaky and crazy’ - a term used to describe an old and decrepit ship. They exchanged it with Captain Gee for the Onslow and quickly set about making alterations, knocking down the bulkheads below deck and removing the quarterdeck to make it sleek, streamlined and easy to move around in times of battle, a classic pirate ship in every way. They mounted it with 40 guns and decided to keep the name Royal Fortune.
In contrast to the Liverpool men captured earlier, the employees of the Royal African Company were as eager as ever to turn pirate. While the alterations were being made Roberts called the captured crew together and asked, according to a witness, ‘whether they were willing to go with him, for that he would force nobody’. Initially there was much whispering and shuffling of feet, at which Roberts laughed and cried out, ‘These fellows want a show of force!’ He and Little David obligingly dragged a number of them off to sign the articles, after which they quickly became enthusiastic pirates. No sooner was this performance over than a number of the soldiers from the Onslow came forward and asked if they might also be allowed to join the pirates. A few months before the garrison being sent to the Royal African Company fort at Gambia had mutinied en masse and turned pirate. And the soldiers on the Onslow had had their ‘ears ... tickled’ by the sailors, who portrayed the pirates as ‘knights errant’ out ‘to relieve the distressed’. However, the pirates were unsure. A large group of landlubbers were of little use. They put them off with excuses for some time, but eventually agreed to accept them, ‘out of charity’. But the soldiers were only to be allowed a quarter-share of loot.
At least fifteen men joined from the Onslow. A number of them quickly revealed a bitter resentment towards their former officers. One, John Stephenson, was all ‘for cutting the chief mate’s ears off’. Another, Peter Lesley, got drunk and started ordering his former shipmates to throw the cargo overboard. Both had to be restrained by the pirates, anxious not to be distracted from the more serious business of plunder. Little David was forced to give Lesley a lesson in pirate etiquette, asking him ‘how he dare do this’, and pointing out that he, as quartermaster, was responsible for the goods on a prize. But Little David himself was also in aggressive mood. One captive recalled him being ‘particularly cruel beyond the rest of the pirates, driving them about with his cutlass and bragging he was as good a man as Roberts’. Another pirate, William Mead, approached Captain Trengrove’s wife Elizabeth, ‘swearing and cursing’ and ‘forced her hooped petticoat off’. On the advice of another pirate, she took refuge from him in the gun room.
The pirates threw the miners’ tools overboard - which probably didn’t bother the miners, though it angered Captain Trengrove. And they read the private correspondence intended for General Phipps at Cape Coast Castle, leaving letters scattered about the deck. At least some of the cargo was also thrown into the sea. The pirates were keen to take over their new ship as quickly as possible and couldn’t be bothered to carry everything across to the old Royal Fortune. At the same time they couldn’t be bothered to take everything out of their old ship and so, between what they left in the hold, and what was carried across from the Onslow, Captain Gee found he still had a decent cargo when he took over the pirate’s vessel. To the fury of General Phipps he promptly set off west as soon as he was released despite the ship’s leaky condition, dumping his passengers at Sierra Leone and heading for the West Indies. ‘It may be supposed that his designs are to make up his own bulk [trade on his own account] without any further regard to your interest,’ Phipps wrote to the Royal African Company board in London when he heard the news. Phipps was particularly upset at the loss of some silk shoes which were being sent out for his ‘little one’.
Roberts was now in the most powerful ship that he, or any other pirate of the age, ever acquired. He’d recruited perhaps fifty men since the desertion of the Good Fortune and, in terms of numbers, he was beginning to approach his former strength. But, as ever, there were rumblings of discontent within the crew, and Henry Glasby picked this moment to make yet another escape attempt. He was in touch with conspirators aboard the Ranger, the new consort. The plan was that he would request a transfer to their ship. They would then get the Old Standers aboard drunk and make their escape. But Roberts and Little David were suspicious. They put Glasby’s request for a transfer to a vote, and it was rejected, and so the plan was thwarted. But from this time on the Ranger, like the Good Fortune before it, was the focus of all conspiracies - whether by forced men or hardened pirates resentful at Roberts’ increasingly autocratic rule - and Roberts took care to spread the malcontents, particularly the Liverpool men, between the two vessels.
As they headed east the flat, featureless jungle was replaced by a scrubby, hilly landscape, signalling their arrival at the Gold Coast. At the end of August they seized a Dutch vessel called the Semm close to the port of Axim. The pirates had a policy of taking all Englishmen they found in foreign ships. But, although there were three Englishmen aboard, after the glut of men he’d taken from the Onslow, Roberts was relaxed and prepared to let them go. But one of them, a sprightly twenty-five-year-old from Exeter called Charles Bunce, turned and gave Roberts a low bow and wished him a ‘good voyage’. Again, it tickled Roberts’ sense of humour. ‘This fellow wants only a little encouragement!’ he laughed, and ordered all three Englishmen stopped. Bunce proved a lively presence aboard, and quickly acquired the nickname ‘Captain Bunce’ for his habit of prescribing the number of salutes that should be fired on various occasions. Even more useful to Roberts was a man called Robert Armstrong who, it turned out, had deserted from Captain Ogle’s ship, HMS Swallow, shortly before. Roberts now had someone on board who could advise him in detail on the strengths and weaknesses of his main adversary.
The pirates seized at least two other ships close to Axim, including a second Dutch vessel. By now they were just 50 miles from Cape Coast Castle and on 8 September General Phipps got word of their presence for the first time. In alarm, he quickly dispatched warnings to the forts and trading sta
tions to the east. All along the coast the shipping took fright, either anchoring beneath the forts for protection, or scattering out to sea, like a herd of antelope before an approaching leopard. The pirates sailed brazenly past Cape Coast Castle on 9 September and pounced on a Portuguese sloop which had been slow to heed Phipps’s warning at Tantumquerry a day or so later. By 19 September they were at Whydah. But the coast was empty. And at the end of September the two pirate ships slunk into the great, labyrinthine river estuary of Old Calabar to digest their prey at leisure.
Despite the presence of four warships in the region Roberts’ rampage had been every bit as destructive as that of Davis two years previously, and General Phipps was seething. The two French men-of-war were further east. And HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth had not been on the coast at all. Instead they were careening on Princes Island, the small Portuguese colony where Howel Davis had been killed two years before. Events there were about to leave the authorities in a still more vulnerable position.
Swallow and Weymouth had arrived at Princes Island on 28 July, just as Roberts was beginning his rampage along the coast. They anchored on the south-western side of the bay at St. Antonio and, like Howel Davis two years before, immediately set about careening and taking in wood and water. As with Davis’s crew, the men soon began to enjoy themselves.
While the warships were on their sides the crew slept in tents ashore. This left them ‘more at their own wills and disposals than it is proper they should ever be trusted with’, wrote the surgeon, Atkins.
They were ‘ungovernable in their actions and appetites, pilfering from the Negroes, and debauching their wives’. They drank vast quantities of palm wine, many pawning their own clothes and possessions to buy it, and often ‘lay down in these inebriations’ semi-naked and slept in the open air, exposed to the elements. Atkins blamed these debauches, in part, for what happened next.
It was the habit of Europeans in the tropics to build their settlements in sheltered, leeward spots. This gave them protection from hurricanes and typhoons. But it also meant they were airless, muggy and oppressive, particularly in the rainy season. Ringed with densely forested mountains, St Antonio was typical. Captain Ogle had taken care to arrive before the rains. But in 1721 the rains came early - with fatal consequences.
‘Little winds, calm and rain,’ noted Ogle in his log for 10 August. It was the same the following day. ‘Much rain,’ he wrote on 25 August. Slowly the tops of the mountains disappeared beneath a thick bank of cloud and the air became heavy and humid. The sun remained ‘extraordinary’ hot during the day, wrote Atkins. But this was followed by chilly evenings and ‘prodigious dews’ in the night, ‘sufficient in a few hours to wet all the beds through a double tent’. Soon the men began to fall ill. ‘Both ships people began to be very sickly by the rains and damp ashore,’ Ogle noted on 26 August. He hired houses in the town as a temporary hospital and sent John Atkins to treat them.
Atkins noted the men were seized by ‘frenzies, convulsions and ... sweats’. Their temperatures soared and they raged with thirst, but insisted on wearing ‘two or three coats, to resist the coldness of the air that, to me, seemed more like the steam of a hot oven’. By now they’d finished careening HMS Swallow and it was upright again and back on the water. Atkins ordered those men still healthy to return on board and persuaded Ogle to stop working the men in the middle of the day.
By these measures he slowed the spread of the sickness among HMS Swallow’s crew. But by early September the bulk of the men from HMS Weymouth had already succumbed.
Atkins tried everything he knew. He bled them. He gave them laxatives. He gave them emetics to induce nausea and vomiting. He applied crushed beetles to their arms and legs to draw out blisters. He smeared the resin of spruce trees on to the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands. And he forced them to drink solutions made from ground sea shells and ‘hartshorn’ - the ground antlers of a hart - which he believed would help absorb excess liquids. But he merely added to their suffering. What the men had was malaria and what they needed was quinine, and Atkins could not know this. Most were dead within six days of falling ill.
By early September the men were dying in large numbers. Ogle proposed that they take quarters in the town and send for reinforcements from England. But Atkins was astute enough to realise that the only solution was to get away from the pestilential air of St Antonio as fast as possible. Ogle eventually agreed. But the more men fell sick, the slower the work of careening progressed. Then, on 5 September, they discovered a fracture in HMS Weymouth’s keel. It had run aground on a sandbar at Gambia earlier in the year and the damage was worse than they had realised. They were forced to carry out a makeshift repair, and it slowed them further. It wasn’t until 20 September, five dreadful weeks after the sickness had first broken out, that they were finally ready to leave. By then 100 men were dead and 200 sick. HMS Weymouth’s crew was so depleted that they had to borrow twenty slaves from another ship in the harbour in order to haul the anchor.
Once at sea the death rate abated slightly. But on HMS Weymouth the sickness seemed to have entered the very timbers of the ship and a trickle of men continued to die. They limped northward to seek help from General Phipps at Cape Coast Castle. But when Weymouth arrived there on 22 October, slightly ahead of Swallow, it was greeted with cannon fire, the jittery gunners mistaking them for Roberts and his men returning. It was the first indication they’d had of the havoc the pirates had wrought along the coast in their absence.
When finally Weymouth was allowed to anchor, fortunately unharmed, General Phipps was appalled by the state of the crew. ‘The ship’s company are so sickly and very weak that they have few hands enough to hoist the sails,’ he wrote. The death toll aboard the two ships had now risen to 160. Herdman mustered his men on 25 October and found he had fewer than sixty fit for service, having set out from England with a complement of 240. When HMS Swallow arrived a few days later it had just eighty healthy men out of an original crew of 274. The two French men-of-war appear to have left region by this time - certainly they played no further part in either Ogle’s or Roberts’ calculations. And, as Ogle, Herdman and Phipps conferred in the general’s spacious apartments overlooking the ocean, it was clear they were in a drastically more vulnerable position than they had been three months previously.
They compounded their problems with an error of judgement. The pirates had not been heard of since sailing past Whydah in mid-September. From this the three men concluded they had probably left the coast, most likely for Brazil or the East Indies. It was agreed Weymouth would stay at Cape Coast Castle while its men recovered. But on 10 November Swallow left the fort, heading not east after the pirates but west, beating against the wind, in order to replenish its crew by pressing men from the merchant ships along the Windward and Gold Coasts.
In fact, Roberts and his men were still holed up at Old Calabar, 750 miles to leeward. Since ships rarely travelled east to west along the coast, the failure to send HMS Swallow in pursuit of them meant it would be months before the men at Cape Coast Castle learned of their presence there. The pirates would be free to relax, careen their ships, and draw up plans for a further assault upon the coast.
Old Calabar was an ideal hiding place. Located in the south-east of what is now Nigeria, it was a labyrinth of narrow creeks and inlets. Green and grey parrots shrieked among the thick foliage of the river banks and the canoes of the local Africans, adorned with the skulls of ancestors, nosed their way through the thick, steaming mangrove swamps which clogged the upper river. Even by the standards of West Africa this place had a reputation for fearsome levels of mortality, particularly during the rainy season, which was only just ending. As at Sierra Leone, this didn’t bother the pirates. But it deterred other Europeans. Slaves from here also had a reputation for fits of despondency and for committing suicide (‘Ibos pend’ cor’ a yo’ - ‘The Ibo hang themselves’ - is still a phrase in Haiti), which further reduced trade. Finally, there was a sandba
r across the mouth of the river. This restricted access to a narrow and intricate channel and no ship could go up the river without a skilled pilot.
When they arrived at the end of September the pirates encountered a Captain Loan in a brigantine called the Joceline and pressed him into service as their guide. He took them over the bar and guided them to the upper river. ‘Here . . . they sat easy and divided the fruits of their dishonest industry, and drank and drove care away,’ wrote Captain Johnson. Captain Loan later claimed he’d had a good part of his cargo stolen. But it’s more likely that, as Johnson states, he was rewarded for his services and invited to join in the revelry. Certainly none of the men from his ship were forced, although two joined the pirates voluntarily.
Although a minor slaving centre, Old Calabar yielded a handful of prizes in the six weeks the pirates were there. As they caroused they sent a long boat downriver from time to time to look for ships coming over the bar, and any vessel straying into their lair was instantly devoured. One of the first, a 90-ton brigantine called the Hannibal, taken on 1 October, was a Royal African Company ship. Its commander, Captain Christopher Ousley, had on board a company factor called John Wingfield, and the pirates immediately recognised in both men the type of officers who had made their lives a misery as sailors on the slavers. They suffered accordingly.
If A Pirate I Must Be... Page 18
