If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

  Charles Bunce, who had joined the crew at the same time as Armstrong the previous August, ‘declaimed against the gilded bates [temptations] of power, liberty and wealth, that had ensnared him among the pirates’. And the surgeon, Peter Scudamore, having finally seen ‘the folly and wickedness’ of his ways, persuaded the judges to grant him a couple of days reprieve, which he spent praying and reading the scriptures. He ‘seemed to have a deep sense of his sins’ and, on the gallows, sang the thirty-first psalm (‘Into thine hand I commit my spirit; thou has redeemed me, O Lord God of truth’) from beginning to end by himself before placing his head in the noose. Others were overwhelmed by their fate. Of William Williams, Atkins wrote only that he was ‘speechless at execution’.

  The men sent to the mines were forced to work in chains because Phipps didn’t trust them not to make an escape. They were lacking tools to carry out their work, having thrown them overboard from the Onslow. And their overseer, Captain Trengrove, whose wife they had abused on the Onslow, was probably not a particularly tender master. They were almost all dead within three months.

  The seventeen men referred to the Marshalsea in London were pressed into service on HMS Weymouth, on half rations, along with George Wilson and the other man granted the right to plead for a pardon. HMS Weymouth’s crew remained desperately sickly and Captain Herdman was also forced to buy fifty slaves from General Phipps to help man the ship. It left Cape Coast Castle on 1 May (‘for my own part I hope till Domesday,’ wrote Atkins), intending to return to Britain via the West Indies. But the pirates had brought with them ‘a new malignant distemper’ picked up in the dungeons. George Wilson died on 6 May, before they had even left the coast of Africa. And by the time HMS Weymouth reached Port Royal in Jamaica on 23 August just nine of the nineteen pirates were still alive.

  On 28 August Port Royal was hit by a powerful hurricane. More than forty ships sank in the harbour and a third of the town was destroyed, with considerable loss of life. HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth just survived, the crews frantically cutting down their masts as the storm raged to lower their centre of gravity. The pirates’ new Ranger was also still afloat when the wind finally eased. But the Royal Fortune and the old Ranger were dashed to pieces on the rocks, their skeleton crews - except for ‘a negro or two’, according to Lieutenant Sun - escaping at the last minute.

  The disaster forced the two warships to stay longer than they’d planned and more men died as epidemics raged across Jamaica in the wake of the hurricane. By the time they finally returned to England in April 1723 - more than two years after they had left - HMS Weymouth had buried 280 men, most of the original crew of 240 having died, as well as many of the men pressed to replace them. Just eight of the pirate prisoners aboard made it home. All were eventually granted a pardon, the Admiralty unable to find any additional evidence against them.

  Of Henry Glasby and the other fifty-five men acquitted we know nothing. It’s possible some of them were also pressed aboard HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth. They would certainly have had little option but to work their passage home and it’s a fair bet that a number died of diseases contracted in the dungeons at Cape Coast Castle before they made it to Britain. Arriving back in London they discovered that justice had also caught up with Walter Kennedy, who’d been betrayed by one of the prostitutes at the brothel he ran and arrested in early 1721. To save himself he quickly handed the authorities a list of names and addresses of his former shipmates living in London. It provides an interesting insight into the lives of retired pirates. Like footballers of the 1960s and 1970s, most seem to have become publicans. But they had almost all fled by the time the authorities arrived and it did Kennedy little good. He was sentenced to death on 3 July 1721. He gave a lengthy confession to the Ordinary of Newgate on the eve of his execution and apparently showed repentance, asking ‘to receive the Holy Sacrament in a private place, and not in the chapel, as he could there be more retired, and better lift up his Heart to God’. On 21 July 1721 he was taken to Execution Dock in Wapping, just a few yards from his birthplace. His courage failed him at the last moment. Standing on the gallows his knees buckled and he had to be revived with water before the execution could take place.

  There was one distant echo of the havoc wrought on the African coast by Bartholomew Roberts. In October 1748, twenty-seven years later, the crew of a Royal Navy warship called the Chesterfield mutinied off Cape Coast Castle. One of the ringleaders was identified as ‘John Place ... a murderer and an ex-pirate who had sailed with Bartholomew Roberts’. There was no John Place among the men acquitted at the trial in 1722. But it’s quite possible that he was known by a different name at that time, or had left the crew earlier. If he was one of Roberts’ men then he met the same fate as so many of his former shipmates, hanged at Cape Coast Castle.

  Roberts had taken piracy to a new level. His capture of the Sagrada Familia off Brazil was one of the most daring and audacious of the age. And he had shown extraordinary resilience and determination in rebuilding his crew following the disaster at Devil’s Islands. In the period between June 1720 and January 1722 he wrought havoc on a scale unmatched by any other pirate of the period, covering extraordinary distances between Newfoundland, West Africa and the Caribbean. But his death in the thunderstorm off Cape Lopez on 10 February 1722 proved a turning point in the history of the Atlantic. Thereafter piracy went into rapid decline. The experiences of Thomas Anstis and the men who had deserted Roberts aboard the Good Fortune in April 1721 were typical.

  By August 1722, they had received no response to their request for a royal pardon and reluctantly put to sea again. They plundered shipping in the West Indies for several more months. But their numbers were dwindling and the crew was riven with factions. The one-handed Captain Fenn and a number of others were captured while on shore at Tobago in April 1723. Five - including Fenn - were hanged. Anstis managed to escape to sea with the remainder of the crew - around a dozen men - but they mutinied shortly afterwards and he was shot while lying in his hammock.

  Anstis’s death marked the final end of a crew which had existed continuously, in one form or another, since Howel Davis’s mutiny aboard the Buck in September 1718, more than four and a half years before. This period marked the high point of the Golden Age of Piracy. It has been estimated that between 1716 and 1726 pirates seized 2,400 ships - a figure roughly equivalent to the total English losses in the War of the Spanish Succession between 1702 and 1714 - and that, in the peak years of 1719-22, there were consistently well over 2,000 pirates prowling the oceans. The crew led by Howel Davis, Bartholomew Roberts, Thomas Anstis and John Fenn took more than 500 of these ships and around 700 men served in it at one time or another.

  But by 1723 the balance in the war on pirates was finally tipping in favour of the Royal Navy. Not only were there now warships patrolling the coast of West Africa, but the Admiralty had finally acceded to the desperate pleas of the Caribbean colonies for greater protection, dispatching a series of 40-gun ships. The pirates were running out of places to hide. And, as the risk-reward ratio tilted against life under the black flag, captains like Anstis and Fenn were increasingly dependent on unreliable, forced men. By 1724 the number of pirates roaming the Atlantic had dropped to 500. By 1725 it was 200 and after 1726 they disappeared altogether.

  It had been Bartholomew Roberts’ misfortune to live at the wrong time. Had he been born fifty or a hundred years earlier a man of his energy, drive and ability might have been a national hero. But by the 1720s such opportunities were closed to a man of his class and - like the outlaws of the Wild West 150 years later - the pirates of the Caribbean were being hemmed in by the slowly encroaching forces of civilisation.

  It was pressure from slave-trading and plantation-owning interests that finally brought the Golden Age of Piracy to an end. They had provided both the bulk of pirates’ prey and the bulk of their crews, and they were the main beneficiaries from their suppression.

  The activities of Roberts and others had helped depress
the number of slaves exported from Africa between 1720 and 1722. But following his death the number leapt from 24,780 in 1720 to 47,030 in 1725. The average number of slaves carried across the Atlantic increased from 33,000 a year in the first quarter of the eighteenth century to 45,000 in the second quarter, to 66,000 in the third quarter. Slave imports to mainland North America more than tripled in this period. The destruction of piracy was just one factor among many behind this dramatic increase. But piracy had been the grit in the oyster of the fabulously lucrative triangular trade between Britain, Africa and the New World. With its destruction the last major obstacle was removed. The defeat of men like Roberts had achieved one thing above all - it created a world safe for slavery.

  At a distance of three hundred years Roberts is a morally ambiguous figure - a thief, certainly, a killer, occasionally, but never the ruthless cut-throat of pirate myth. Even the massacre at Whydah was committed against his orders. If we remove the lens of eighteenth century disapproval and view him dispassionately, he was no more brutal than many of his law-abiding contemporaries. And his crimes pale into insignificance besides those of seventeenth-century Buccaneers like Henry Morgan, whose brutality was given a sharper edge by the national and religious antagonisms of his day. Roberts and other pirates of the Golden Age owe their bloodthirsty reputation to one fact, and one fact alone - unlike their predecessors, they stole from Englishmen. There can be no doubt Bartholomew Roberts was responsible for a greater quantity of human suffering during his career as a slaver than his career as a pirate.

  In the decades following his death Roberts was quietly forgotten. The more theatrical Blackbeard lived on much longer in the popular imagination, as did Captain Kidd, whose highly political trial in 1701 was much publicised. But in a more oblique way Roberts’ memory survived to influence our perception of pirates. Roberts was by far the most important character in Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pirates. Johnson admitted his description of pirate culture in general was largely based on Roberts, since he knew so much more about him than any of his contemporaries. And the General History was the bible for later novelists. They took Johnson’s description, stripped it of the subtleties of democracy and egalitarianism, and added their own liberal dose of brutality and bravado, and created the pantomime stereotype that we live with today. If we doubt the hidden influence of Roberts, just look at the names of the pirates in Walter Scott’s The Pirate - Fletcher, Goffe, Bunce, Harry Glasby. They are all taken from Roberts’ crew. In Treasure Island Roberts even gets a direct mention in Long John Silver’s description of the surgeon that took his leg off, who must surely be Peter Scudamore:

  It was a master surgeon him that ampytated me - out of college and all - Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog, and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle. That was Roberts’ men, that was, and comed of changing names to their ships - Royal Fortune and so on. Now, what a ship was christened, so let her stay, I says.

  There remains one final mystery to resolve - that of Roberts’ missing treasure. Although the period since Kennedy’s desertion at Devil’s Islands two years before had yielded no spectacular prizes, the sheer number of ships Roberts had captured led many to assume that he and his men had accumulated huge quantities of gold and money. As soon as HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth arrived in the West Indies in August 1722 wild rumours began to circulate that they were carrying a fortune in captured booty aboard. Captain Ogle had ‘barred up all the hatches . . . intending it for a secret until his arrival in England’, the Boston Gazette reported. The speculation was that Ogle’s share alone amounted to £100,000. In fact, the figure was far, far smaller than this - at least according to the official Admiralty figures. Ogle informed the Admiralty that he found just £3,000 worth of gold aboard the Royal Fortune. Combined with money from the sale of the new Ranger and various recovered goods, this yielded total prize money of £5,364.

  This did not account for all of Roberts’ treasure. After the final battle the pirates on the Royal Fortune informed Ogle that there was a further ‘£4,000 or £5,000’ on board the old Ranger, still back at Cape Lopez. Roberts had not permitted the men in the new Ranger to take it with them when they set off in pursuit of HMS Swallow on 5 February. And he hadn’t had time to take it himself that morning. Ogle returned to Cape Lopez a few days later to recover the gold and receive the thanks of Captain Hill of the Neptune, the ship that had been with the pirates when he’d arrived on 9 February, for his liberation. But he found the old Ranger riding alone at anchor, deserted, ‘all the men’s chests . . . broke open and rifled’, and Captain Hill and the Neptune nowhere to be seen. Ogle ordered a thorough search of the ship but it yielded just ten ounces of gold - around £40.

  The tale of the old Ranger’s treasure is puzzling. If there was £4,000 to £5,000 on the consort, how is it there was only £3,000 on the Royal Fortune, Roberts’ the main ship? When John Atkins wrote his memoirs some years later he recalled that the buzz on HMS Swallow following the search of the Royal Fortune was that the quantity of gold found was not £3,000 - but £8,000 to £10,000. This would make a lot more sense, since the pirates had taken £5,600 worth of gold at Whydah alone. Was Ogle cooking the books?

  He was certainly ruthless in his efforts to maximise his personal profit. By law he was obliged to share the prize money with his men. In addition, the government was obliged to pay a bounty - or ‘head money’ - to every man aboard out of public funds. In this instance it came to £1,940. In practice the government often reneged on its obligation to pay head money, and captains often cheated their crews of their share of the prize money - and this was precisely what happened in the case of HMS Swallow. The government granted the whole prize to Ogle himself, and asked him to pay the head money to his crew from it. Ogle’s response was to quietly ignore them, and keep everything for himself.

  It was only with the publication of Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pirates in May 1724, with its vivid description of HMS Swallow’s destruction of Roberts and his crew, that Ogle’s men became aware that they were entitled to a reward. They instantly petitioned the Treasury for the head money. The Treasury chased up Ogle to hand the money over, which he finally did, with great reluctance, in April 1725 - a full three years after the battle. The crew then petitioned for a share of the prize money itself. This time Ogle dug his heels in. The King, he pointed out, had burdened him with a knighthood - ‘which must necessarily have increased my expense’. He therefore needed all of the remaining £3,147 to live in a manner befitting his ‘new rank in the world’. This argument can’t have cut much ice with his former crew. But it did with the Admiralty and the case was quietly dropped.

  It’s likely Roberts’ crew was carrying £10,000 to £15,000 on the eve of its capture. This is still surprisingly small. The figure is a testimony to the pirates’ ability to squander money during stopovers at places like St Bartholomew and Sierra Leone. But it also reveals a profound truth about pirates of the Golden Age. They loved gold and they loved jewels. But it was the pirate existence — ‘drink and a lazy life’ in Joseph Mansfield’s words - that drew them above all. Prizes like the Sagrada Familia, which yielded around £100,000, were rare. Most pirates lived hand to mouth. Roberts himself gave the most accurate and, via the pen of Captain Johnson, most eloquent, description that we have of the lure of piracy:

  In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour; in this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst is only a sour look or two at choking. No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.

  ‘A merry life and a short one’ was a formula often placed in the mouths of pirates, and sailors generally, by writers of the age. Roberts himself had certainly hoped for more and, with no interest in wine and women, he had probably been rather more careful to save his money than many others. But the passage captures perfectly the attitude of his men.
It was the promise of freedom that drew them. It was their great strength and, as Roberts knew to his cost, their great weakness.

  There was one final twist to the saga of Roberts’ treasure. After leaving Cape Lopez with the money from the old Ranger Captain Hill and the Neptune did not disappear. They continued south and picked up 400 slaves at the port of Cabinda. They then headed across the Atlantic and, on 23 August, pulled in to Port Royal in Jamaica, where they were probably alarmed to see HMS Swallow already at anchor. Captain Hill and his slaves survived the hurricane a few days later and he spent several weeks at the port, selling his cargo. Port Royal was a tiny place. It’s inconceivable Captain Ogle and Captain Hill did not meet. And it’s inconceivable that the subject of the missing treasure was not raised. But there is no record of Hill ever being asked to account for it. Doubtless the two men reached a mutually beneficial arrangement, one they didn’t feel the need to inform the authorities of, or their own crews. When he died twenty-nine years later Captain Ogle was Admiral of the Fleet, and the money he’d acquired one way and another following the defeat of Roberts doubtless greased his path.

  It is a fitting image on which to finish; the slaver and the rising Royal Navy captain enjoying a conspiratorial drink together in a Port Royal tavern, dividing the legacy of the pirates between them. This was where power now lay in the Atlantic world.

  APPENDIX 1: ROBERTS’ SHIPS, CREW AND PRIZES

  SHIPS

  Bartholomew Roberts initially commanded just one ship, the Royal Rover. But from June 1720 onwards he always operated with two ships. In all he commanded nine vessels - the Royal Rover, three Royal Fortunes, two Good Fortunes, two Rangers and one vessel whose name was not recorded.