If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

  Admiralty Courts were regulated by the Act for the Most Successful Suppression of Piracy, passed in 1700. This had stripped pirates of the right to trial by jury, the government having found juries in the colonies were reluctant to convict them. Instead they were tried by a seven-man panel of officials and naval officers. Besides Herdman, the court at Cape Coast Castle would consist of Lt Barnsely and Lt Fanshaw from HMS Weymouth, Edward Hyde, the Royal African Company’s secretary, Henry Dodson and Francis Boye, both merchants, and, of course, General Phipps, who wasn’t going to miss his chance to exact revenge on the men who had so humiliated him over the previous eight months.

  The castle buzzed with excitement, its normal population of fifty to a hundred men swollen by the arrival of the two men-of-war, the numerous witnesses, and curious onlookers who’d flocked from all along the coast. At least half a dozen ships bobbed in the road, their flags and pennants fluttering in the bright sunlight. The crew of HMS Swallow told and re-told the story of their double victory over the pirates, and men from other vessels swapped tales of their own suffering at the hands of Roberts and his men. Down in the African village the bemused fishermen went about their daily lives, perhaps stealing the occasional look at the curious Africans the pirates had brought with them, whose language they did not understand, but who had ranged thousands of miles over the oceans as slaves and as pirates and whose story would have been the most interesting of all - if only someone had troubled to write it down.

  It took almost two weeks to get all the pirates ashore. By now they had finally given up all hope of escape. The mood among most of them had changed, wrote Johnson, ‘and from vain insolent jesting they became serious and devout, begging for good books, and joining in public prayers and singing of psalms, twice at least every day’. Crowded together with slaves awaiting sale in the dungeons, their conditions were appalling. But preparations for the trial moved with brisk efficiency.

  On 28 March 1722 the court assembled in the Great Hall of the castle, the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks audible through the high windows, the sea breeze doing little to dispel the intense, suffocating heat that left accusers and accused, along with those in the gallery, immediately drenched in sweat.

  There was little discussion over the fate of the pirates’ slaves. Ogle had taken seventy-five from the Royal Fortune and the new Ranger. The court took the view they were chattels rather than active agents in their own destiny and it was decided they would be sold. But the court agonised for some time over how to try the pirates themselves. Many of their crimes over the previous eight months had been committed against ships of the Royal African Company. This, technically, made General Phipps and the other company merchants ineligible to try them, since they were interested parties. Initially, therefore, it was decided to confine the evidence to the pirates’ actions against HMS Swallow. But since both ships had resisted Ogle’s ship this meant almost all the men would be found guilty. Many had only joined the pirates a month before and some were clearly forced. It was therefore decided to look at the behaviour of each man throughout their pirate careers. ‘Such evidence, though it might want the form, still conveyed the reason of the law,’ the court argued. In practice, General Phipps and his fellow merchants were trying the pirates for crimes committed against themselves.

  Ogle had captured a total of 166 white pirates. Fifteen had died - many of their wounds - in the dreadful conditions in the hold of HMS Swallow en route to Cape Coast Castle and a further four died in the dungeons immediately after arriving. A total of 147 men therefore stood trial. Of these, eighty-seven had joined the pirates since they had returned to the coast of Africa the previous June. Twenty-three had joined in the year prior to that. Twenty-four had been taken off Newfoundland in the summer of 1720 and four during the first year of Roberts’ captaincy. Just nine remained from the days of Howel Davis. All but five were British.

  The pirates were summoned up from the dungeons one by one. Starved, emaciated and dressed in rags, they formed a pitiful procession. A number had hideous injuries from the final battles against HMS Swallow. Only a small handful retained their swagger. John Walden - ‘Miss Nanny’ - demanded a stool on which to rest the stump of the leg he’d lost when the Ranger was taken. He ‘appeared undaunted though his wounds were great’, according to the court record, and he was ‘careless‘ of defending himself. Another Old Stander, John Coleman, defiantly admitted going aboard prizes, declaring ‘if he must be hanged for it, God’s will be done, ‘twas not of his seeking’. But most pleaded for mercy, in almost all cases basing their defence on the argument that they had been forced.

  The most obviously guilty and the most obviously innocent were among the first to be tried. On 31 March, the air cleared by a thunderstorm, the court rattled through sixteen of the Old Standers in one day. Fourteen were found guilty, six of whom were immediately sentenced to hang, the court anxious to remove any ringleaders who might yet attempt an uprising. These six can be viewed as the very core of the crew - William Magness, the quartermaster, Thomas Sutton, the gunner, Little David, Valentine Ashplant, and two other Old Standers called Christopher Moody and Richard Hardy. ‘It is your aggravation, that ye have been the chiefs and rulers in these licentious and lawless practices,’ said Captain Herdman, passing sentence. They were executed three days later. General Phipps ordered their bodies to be hung ‘in gibbets on the most eminent hills around this place, very conspicuous to the shipping as it passes’. As the trial progressed in the sweltering heat over the next few weeks their rotting bodies were also visible to the pirates as they were dragged from the dungeons for trial and emerged blinking into the courtyard of the castle on their way to the Great Hall.

  One of the men tried with them, John Dennis, attempted a plea bargain with the court. Dennis had been with the crew since Howel Davis’s time. He knew the crew inside out and offered to distinguish the forced men from the real pirates. Herdman, Phipps and the others conferred, but eventually turned him down. They didn’t trust him. More importantly, they didn’t need him. They had Henry Glasby.

  Glasby was brought up from the dungeons for trial on 2 April. At first glance he was in a dangerous situation. He had been with the pirates for more than eighteen months and, as sailing master aboard the Royal Fortune, was one of their most senior men. But Captain Traherne of the King Solomon made clear that he was master in name only. The pirates ‘did as they would . . . never observing him’, he said. Witness after witness testified that he was a prisoner, that he had striven to rein in the excesses of the pirates, and that, when he could, he had returned stolen goods to their owners. He was ‘civil beyond any of them’, said John Wingfield. Acquitted pirates testified Roberts had never required him to play any military role, his responsibilities being restricted to sailing the vessel. Speaking for himself, he told the story of his two escape attempts in the Caribbean, and said that ‘Roberts after this was ever jealous of him and never committed his secrets or private designs to him’. Acquitting him, the court noted ‘that his evidence would be of great use . . . for trying the remaining prisoners’.

  For so long a prisoner among the pirates, Glasby was now the arbiter of their fate. Again and again he was called, and again and again it was his voice, above all, that decided whether a man lived or died. He strove to be fair. Twenty-four times he spoke in favour of men. Isaac Russell ‘was forced out of the Lloyd Galley’ and had ‘feigned sickness’ to avoid being made boatswain’s mate, and had often told him ‘it was a wicked life they all led’, he said. George Ogle ‘was a quiet fellow, not swearing or cursing like most of them, and rather melancholy’. Both escaped the hangman. Glasby identified all of those who had conspired with him to run away, and many of them too were acquitted. But he spoke against far more - forty-six in total. ‘He was looked on as a brisk hand among them,’ he said of Marcus Johnson, a description which was usually enough to send a man to the gallows. He ridiculed the defence of many that Roberts had forced them to take their turn aboard prizes. The
y went ‘willingly, very willingly’, he insisted, crowding aboard the boats ‘sometimes as almost to sink them’. The pirates cast sour, bitter glances at him as they were hauled back down to the dungeons after sentencing.

  The most hostile evidence came from the pirates’ victims. Captain Traherne identified each of the men who had been in the boarding party that seized the King Solomon, and also helped secure guilty verdicts against five of his own crew - despite the fact they had been with the pirates only a month. Samuel Fletcher, he said, ‘was always grumbling when ordered to any duty, and several times wished to God Almighty they might meet the pirates’. Fletcher pointed out this was true of most of the King Solomon’s crew, but to no avail.

  John Wingfield from the Hannibal gave evidence against twenty-two men and spoke in favour of just four. William Davies ‘was but ill charactered even among the worst of them’, he said. The boatswain William Main ‘very active on all piratical occasions’. Richard Hardy ‘robbed his ship [and] broke the hinges of a box to get the gold out’. Elizabeth Trengrove took the stand and pointed an accusing figure at William Mead as the man who had forced her hooped petticoat off aboard the Onslow.

  The surgeon, Peter Scudamore, was summoned on 5 April and found himself confronted with a battery of hostile witnesses, all ridiculing his claim to be a forced man. ‘There was no force used to compel him,’ said Glasby, contemptuously. Captain Traherne and Captain Sharp both accused him of stealing medicines and surgeon’s tools from their ships. Most damningly, his fellow prisoners from the Royal Fortune described his attempt to incite an uprising among the slaves during the passage from Cape Lopez. Scudamore admitted he had spoken ‘a few foolish words’ during the voyage, but claimed they were hypothetical - he was merely pointing out that the slaves could have taken the ship if they had wanted to. In whispering to the slaves ‘in the Angolan language’, he was merely passing the time, ‘trying his skill to tell twenty, he being incapable of further talk’. The court was unimpressed and sentenced him to hang.

  Two days later George Wilson was brought from the dungeons. His case proved more complex than any other, Wilson demanding the right to cross examine witnesses at length. He claimed his supposed ‘intimacy’ with Roberts was merely a ruse. If he paid Roberts ‘undue compliments and deference he did it with intention to ingratiate himself, and gain a good treatment from him . . . This was no more than what every prisoner endeavoured and practiced that had any regard to their own interest.’ He urged also his youth in excuse for his ‘rashness’. His case dragged on so long it was eventually adjourned until 17 April, enabling the court to get on with trying the other pirates. When he was recalled he was found guilty. But his betrayal of the proposed rising by the Old Standers aboard HMS Swallow saved him from immediate execution, the court granting him the right to return to England to plead for a royal pardon.

  All the time John Atkins sat scribbling in a corner. He had been appointed court registrar on thirty shillings a day and the entire proceedings are recorded in his meticulous hand. Stretching to 184 pages, they provide us with a unique portrait of the inner workings and dayto-day life of a pirate crew. Not only are we given potted biographies of every man, but we learn of their different ranks, of how they organised the system of turns aboard prizes, of how booty was divided and how decisions were taken, of their punishments and rewards, and of how they spent their leisure time. It provides us with a mass of incidental detail, unavailable for any other pirate crew, freeing us from dependence on sensationalist and not always reliable secondary sources. From it, one fact emerges very clearly - this, the most prolific of all pirate crews, killed startlingly few people. Of their 400 prizes they had to fight for just two - the Sagrada Familia off Brazil in October 1719, and the Puerto del Principe off Dominica in January 1721. Other than in battle they never killed a single officer, crew member or passenger from any of the ships they captured - to their cost, since many went on to testify against them.

  There were certainly thugs aboard, like Little David and Miss Nanny. Captives were beaten and ‘drubbed’ and some of the pirates took a sadistic pleasure in threatening and terrorising their victims. But the pressure from new recruits to punish their former captains was generally resisted. And, having heard hours of testimony, Phipps, Herdman and the rest of the judges were sceptical of many of the claims of mistreatment by ‘forced’ men. Usually this was a ‘pretence’ or ‘complotment’ for the benefit of witnesses, they concluded. And when men were genuinely reluctant, a beating was the worst they received. For all the tales of men having ‘a pistol clapped to their breast’, no one was ever executed for refusing to join Roberts’ crew.

  There was much wanton destruction of property, particularly aboard vessels belonging to the Royal African Company. But many of the ships taken by Roberts went on to complete a successful slaving voyage. The Martha, taken in August 1721, unloaded 114 slaves in Nevis five months later while the King Solomon sailed for Jamaica in June 1722 laden with 300 slaves. As often as not the cargo of trade goods was left intact and at times it feels almost as if Roberts was taxing the ships he captured as much as plundering them. At Whydah he took just eight pounds of gold from each ship, although some were carrying far larger amounts.

  Roberts’ men committed one truly barbaric act - the grotesque slaughter of the slaves at Whydah. To this might be added the attack on the African town at Old Calabar, and the use of Africans for target practice by Howel Davis’s men immediately prior to Roberts’ capture. For them, the lives of Africans were worth less than those of Europeans. But in this they were creatures of their time and no different from the law-abiding community of slave traders and plantation owners they preyed upon. The judges at Cape Coast Castle were not particularly concerned with the massacre at Whydah. For them it was just another crime against property, and it barely featured in the trial. Roberts’ men stood accused of being ‘traitors, robbers and pirates and common enemies of mankind’. Not one of them was on trial for murder.

  But this was more than enough to send them to the gallows. When the trial concluded after little more than three weeks on 20 April a total of seventy-two men had been sentenced to hang. A further seventeen were referred to the Marshalsea prison in London for further examination. And George Wilson and one other were found guilty, but permitted to plead for a royal pardon. Of the seventy-two condemned men, twenty had their sentences commuted to seven years’ service in the mines at Cape Coast Castle - an effective death sentence given the conditions there. This left just fifty-six men acquitted, most of them among the newer recruits. It was the greatest slaughter of pirates ever carried out by the Admiralty.

  POSTSCRIPT

  ‘THEY WERE POOR ROGUES, THEY SAID, AND SO HANGED WHILE OTHERS, NO LESS GUILTY IN ANOTHER WAY, ESCAPED’

  ROBERTS’ MEN WERE HANGED in batches within days of being sentenced. Most were executed at Cape Coast Castle, but small groups were hanged in forts and stations up and down the West African coast. The bodies of eighteen were tarred and left hanging in gibbets. ‘We hope the example that has been made of this gang will be a means to affright and deter all others from pursuing such vile practices on this coast,’ wrote General Phipps, ‘and that the trade thereby will be secured free and undisturbed from the depredations of such miscreants for some time to come.’

  The versatile John Atkins now took the role of ‘ordinary’, or chaplain, accompanying the men to their deaths and trying to coax lastminute repentances from them. He gave Captain Johnson a detailed description of the executions. Atkins had little luck with the first six, the hard-core group hanged on 3 April while the trial was still in its early stages. According to Johnson, they continued to see themselves as rebels against an unjust social order. ‘They all exclaimed against the severity of the court, and were so hardened as to curse, and wish the same justice might overtake all the members of it, as had been dealt to them . . . They were poor rogues, they said, and so hanged while others, no less guilty in another way, escaped.’

  A
s with all Admiralty executions, the hangings were carried out at the water’s edge within the tide marks. It was a grisly spectacle. The ‘drop’, which broke a prisoner’s neck, was not perfected until the nineteenth century. In the 1720s prisoners were simply pushed from a ladder and died through slow strangulation, kicking and writhing, their faces swelling, their tongues protruding and their eyes popping. At Execution Dock in Wapping pirates’ friends often came along and pulled on their legs to hasten the process. Without this assistance it could take as long as forty-five minutes and as death neared prisoners soiled themselves and their bodies entered into violent spasms. But these six men walked ‘to the gallows without a tear . . . showing as much concern as a man would express at travelling a bad road’. Richard Hardy chided the inexperienced soldiers when they tied his hands behind his back rather than in front, as was standard practice. And Little David’s last moments were taken up abusing a woman he had recognized in the crowd. He had slept with her three times and was indignant the ‘bitch . . . was come to see him hanged’. ‘The same abandoned and reprobate temper that had carried them through their rogueries, abided with them to the last,’ Johnson commented.

  But most of the others were contrite. David Armstrong, as a deserter from HMS Swallow, was hanged separately from the others aboard HMS Weymouth on 24 April. ‘His last hour was spent in lamenting and bewailing his sins in general, exhorting the spectators to an honest and good life . . . In the end he desired they would join with him in singing two or three latter verses of the 140th psalm [‘Thou art my Lord: hear the voice of my supplications’]; and, that being concluded, he was, at the firing of a gun, triced up at the foreyard arm.’