Under the Black Flag

by David Cordingly

  Back in India the Great Mogul was outraged by the attack on his ship and threatened to drive the East India Company and all Englishmen out of his empire. Only by much diplomacy, and by promising to bring Avery and his crew to justice, were the British authorities able to repair the damage caused by this single act of piracy. But Avery himself was never caught. The popular belief was that he lived out his days in luxury on a tropical island, but it seems that he was swindled of most of his riches by merchants in the West Country and that he ended his days in poverty at the village of Bideford in Devon, “not being worth as much as would buy him a coffin.”47

  It was the play based on Avery’s life which did much to foster the legend of the pirate as a brave outlaw, and certainly encouraged the belief that Avery and his kind made their fortunes from their piratical exploits. The Successful Pirate was first performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 1713. Avery, thinly disguised as Arviragus, King of the island of Madagascar, was portrayed as a heroic character, who had once commanded a fire ship in the Dutch Wars but had subsequently declared war on mankind and become a pirate. He had established himself as a Royal Outlaw, and ruler over “a Race of Vagabonds, the Outcasts of the Earth.” In the first scene we learn that a ship from India has been captured and brought into the port of Laurentia. The ship is full of jewels and gold, and has on board the lovely Zaida, granddaughter of the Great Mogul, and a host of female retainers. Arviragus decrees that the spoils from the ship must be divided among his sailors, who have “ranged the globe with me, burnt, froze, starved.…” Zaida is in love with Aranes, a young man of noble birth in her company, but Arviragus wants her for himself. The situation is neatly solved at the end of the play when we learn that Aranes is the long-lost son of Arviragus. This gives Arviragus the opportunity to give up his throne to Aranes and Zaida, and “to quit Imperial sway and die a private man, as I was born.”

  The author of The Successful Pirate was Charles Johnson (not to be confused with the author of the General History of the Pirates), a second-rate dramatist whose regular output of a play a year for nineteen years was ridiculed by Alexander Pope and other writers of the time. He was accused of plagiarism and mocked for “the fatness of his person” and his habit of spending his days at Buttons Coffee House. In 1733 he married a rich young widow and took over a tavern in Covent Garden. He died on March 11, 1748, at the age of sixty-nine.48

  The Successful Pirate was the first in a long line of popular melodramas with piratical themes which entertained the theatergoing public in London during the course of the next 150 years. Some, like Black-beard, or The Captive Princess of 1798, were based loosely on historical characters. Others were pure fiction. The Red Rover, or The Mutiny of the Dolphin, which opened at the Adelphi Theatre on February 9, 1829, was based on one of the adventure stories of James Fenimore Cooper, and was adapted for the London stage by the hack playwright Edward Fitzball. One critic described the play as “arrant trash,” but it was generally agreed that the imperfections of the script were redeemed by the spirited acting of Frederick Yates, who played the part of the Red Rover. Yates was a former soldier who became manager of the Adelphi. His bold and athletic performance was ideally suited to the part of the pirate villain who terrorizes the seas and dies dramatically in the last scene, shot by his mutinous crew.

  Douglas Jerrold, author of the hugely popular Black Ey’d Susan, contributed a melodrama entitled Descart, The French Buccaneer, and Edward Fitzball produced another piratical piece entitled False Colours: or The Free Trader, which featured a pirate called Hawkset. The combined effect of all these works was to establish the pirate as a theatrical villain, alongside other stock villains such as brigands and bandits.

  Gilbert and Sullivan parodied these melodramas when they created The Pirates of Penzance. For copyright reasons this was first performed in New York on December 30, 1879,49 with the London premiere held at the Opera Comique in the Strand on April 3, 1880. With its witty libretto, colorful costumes, and some of Arthur Sullivan’s most memorable songs and choruses, The Pirates of Penzance immediately established itself as a favorite in the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire. The story is sheer nonsense and revolves around the mistake made by Ruth, “a pirate maid of all work,” when she apprentices Frederick, the hero, to a pirate instead of to a pilot. The pirates themselves are as genial and ineffective as the policemen who are sent to catch them, but a complicated plot ends happily with Frederick marrying the Major General’s pretty daughter, Mabel, and the pirates revealed as patriotic noblemen who will no more go a-pirating. In spite of its lighthearted approach to the subject, The Pirates of Penzance has had a considerable influence on the way many people view pirates today. For more than a hundred years it has been performed by amateur and professional companies around the world, and its cast of hearty and good-natured fellows have contributed to the illusion that pirates were really misunderstood ruffians who never meant to harm anyone.

  Nombre de Dios lies in the corner of a bay on the Isthmus of Panama. In the 1570s it was one of the principal treasure ports on the Spanish Main, that hot and humid stretch of the American coast which curves around the southern rim of the Caribbean Sea. Twice a year a fleet of Spanish galleons anchored in the bay and loaded up with gold and silver which had been carried thousands of miles by ship and by mule trains from the distant mountains of Peru and Bolivia.

  Unlike Panama and Cartagena and some of the other Spanish cities of Central America, Nombre de Dios had no fine buildings. It was a shantytown. Some two hundred houses and sheds, roughly constructed of wooden planks, crouched along the waterfront at the edge of the jungle. When the treasure ships arrived, the town swarmed with seamen and slaves and officials. At other times most of the houses lay empty.1 During the rainy season there were thunderstorms and tropical downpours. Mosquitoes, fevers, and tropical diseases flourished in the damp heat.

  Francis Drake, who was later to make his name as the greatest British seaman of the Elizabethan age, had paid a reconnaissance visit to the town in 1571. Disguised as a Spanish merchant, he inspected the harbor and noted the location of the King’s treasure-house. He had found a sheltered cove nearby which would provide a safe anchorage for any future expedition. He also made contact with some of the escaped black slaves called Cimaroons who lived in the surrounding jungle and were always ready to revenge themselves on the hated Spanish. In July 1572 he returned to Nombre de Dios.2 He had two small ships, the Pasco and the Swan, and a total of seventy-three men. He anchored his ships behind a headland to the east of the town. During the night he transferred his men into small pinnaces or canoes, and they set off around the headland and across the bay. They beached the canoes at 3:00 A.M. and made for the shore battery, which consisted of six guns and was guarded by one man. Having silenced the guns, Drake split his force in two. One group, led by his brother John, headed for the western side of the town to create a diversion, while Drake himself led the attack from the east and marched into the town with beating drums and the sounding of trumpets. There was panic from the inhabitants, who imagined they were being attacked by a huge force.

  But then things started to go wrong. A group of Spanish soldiers opened fire, killing an English trumpeter and hitting Drake in the thigh. He ignored the pain and led his men to the treasure-house on the waterfront, but the blood was pouring from his wound, and he left a trail behind him which, his companions later recalled, filled his footprints. They were preparing to force the doors of the treasure-house when a thunderstorm broke out, and as the full force of a tropical downpour deluged the streets, the attacking force had to take shelter. When the rain ceased, many of Drake’s men found that their guns and bows were useless because powder, matches, and bowstrings were soaked. Some of the men were inclined to give up, but Drake had no time for doubts: “I have brought you to the treasure house of the world,” he told them. “If you leave without it you may henceforth blame nobody but yourselves.”3 His resolution was in vain. When the doors of the treasure-house were
opened, it was found to be empty. The last treasure fleet had sailed only six weeks before and the next batch of treasure would not be brought from Panama until another fleet arrived in several months time. Drake was now so weak from loss of blood that he collapsed and had to be carried back to the pinnaces on the beach. The attack was a total failure.

  A lesser man than Drake would have abandoned the enterprise, but it was characteristic of his indomitable spirit that he decided to wait for the next Spanish fleet and make good use of the intervening weeks. Having recovered from his wound, he organized raids along the coast, and explored inland with the assistance of native guides. On February 11, 1573, he climbed a ridge at the top of which the Cimaroons had built a platform. From this vantage point Drake was able to take his first look at the distant Pacific Ocean. He prayed aloud that God would spare him to sail in an English ship upon that glistening sea.

  He and his men traveled on through the swamps and jungle until they came in sight of Panama City. They saw the treasure ships from Peru arrive, and they waited while the treasure was unloaded and checked and packed onto the mules. Drake prepared an ambush some way along the mule trail, but again things went wrong. One of his men had got drunk and made a premature attack on a few donkeys carrying goods of no value, which warned off the mule train carrying the treasure. Five months of waiting had come to nothing.

  Drake refused to give up. He raided the town of Venta Cruces on the banks of the river Sagres. Then at last his luck turned. In March he met a group of French Huguenots led by Captain le Testu, a privateer from Le Havre, who informed him that three caravans of 190 mules were heading for Nombre de Dios. In the undergrowth some twenty miles from the town, the combined force of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and blacks pounced on the mule train. They found that every mule was carrying 300 pounds weight of silver. It was a massive haul, and exactly what Drake needed to restore the morale of his men and to justify the months of fighting through the jungle and surviving battles on land and at sea. Escaping the clutches of a Spanish flotilla which was cruising off the coast, Drake headed back to England with his plunder. The treasure he captured from the mule train and his other raids amounted to some fifteen tons of silver ingots and around £100,000 in gold coins.

  Drake was not a pirate in the sense that Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts were pirates, but he committed numerous acts of piracy. Like Nelson, he was intensely patriotic, and shared his passionate hatred for England’s enemies. In Nelson’s case the enemy was France, but for Drake it was Spain. When Drake attacked a Spanish ship or a Spanish town, he did so in the name of Queen Elizabeth and flew the English flag of St. George at the masthead of his ships. Ambitious and piratical by nature, he plundered and looted every Spanish vessel he could lay his hands on and made himself a rich man. He was bold and decisive in action, and yet displayed a remarkable sensitivity in his dealings with his men, who adored him, and with captured enemies, who regarded him with admiration. Coming from a family of seamen and farmers in Devon, he inevitably appeared a rough provincial among the polished courtiers who surrounded his Queen, but he overcame his humble beginnings by his unrivaled skills as a seaman and navigator, and by his extraordinary exploits on the Spanish Main.

  Drake sailed with his cousin John Hawkins on his voyages to Africa and the West Indies, and shared in his successes and failures, but it was the raid on the mule train which made his name. Three years after his return from Nombre de Dios, Drake embarked on a voyage which was to take him all around the world. He sailed on December 13,1577, in the Pelican, later to be renamed the Golden Hind. She was a small galleon, only one hundred feet in length overall and eighteen feet in the beam, but she was described by her pilot as a good sailer and “in a great measure stout and strong.”4 Four other vessels made up the fleet which set sail from Plymouth that winter. It took them two months to reach the South American coast near the river Plate. By the time they had weathered the Strait of Magellan in September 1578, three of the ships accompanying the Golden Hind had been abandoned or lost, and the fourth had lost contact with Drake during a storm and headed back to England.

  Drake pressed on, and as he cruised north along the coast of Chile, he made a series of raids on Spanish settlements and shipping. Off the port of Valparaiso he took a Spanish ship whose cargo included £8,000 in gold and 1,770 jars of wine. Further prizes (a “prize” was a ship captured by force, or threat of force, at sea or in harbor) yielded 4,000 ducats of silver, a chest of bullion, and an emerald-encrusted crucifix. And then on March 1, 1579, he intercepted the treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, which was en route from Lima to Panama. From his coastal raids he had learned that this great ship was a floating treasure store, laden with silver and gold from Peru. She was so heavily armed that she had acquired the nickname Cacafuego, which is usually translated as “Spitfire” but literally means “Shitfire.”

  Drake had offered a reward of a gold chain to the man who first spotted the Spanish galleon. The reward was won by his young nephew John, who was on the lookout in the maintop or crow’s nest of the Golden Hind. Drake decided to employ a tactic much used by pirates throughout the ages, which was to disguise his ship as a slow, harmless merchantman. His crew were ordered to battle stations, and all sail was set, but he reduced the speed of his ship by towing astern cables and mattresses and a line of heavy pots. San Juan de Antón, the captain of the Cacafuego, was completely fooled. When the ships came within hailing distance, as was traditional when two ships met at sea, he demanded to know the name and destination of Drake’s ship. “Strike sail” was the shout across the water, “or we will send you to the bottom.” The Spanish captain naturally refused to strike and ordered the Englishman to come aboard and surrender. A trumpet sounded from the Golden Hind, and a line of armed men appeared above her deck rail. The first bombardment from her guns brought down the mizzenmast of the Spanish ship, and this was followed by a withering fire of arrows and musket shot which enabled the English ship’s pinnace to come alongside the Cacafuego with a boarding party. The Spanish captain was taken prisoner and surrendered his ship. He was treated with courtesy by Drake, who told him not to distress himself, for such were the fortunes of war.

  Drake took his prize to a secluded stretch of coast where he and his men took stock of the Cacafuego’s cargo. The ship’s hold was packed with treasure. According to one contemporary report, there was “a great quantity of jewels and precious stones. 13 chests of royals of plate, 80 lb of gold, and 26 tons of uncoined silver.”5 In the ship’s register, the gold and silver listed in the name of the King of Spain and other individuals was valued at 362,000 pesos. There was also a large quantity of unregistered treasure which the Spanish captain valued at 400,000 pesos. The total sum of 762,000 pesos would be worth nearly £12 million today. Drake had captured one of the richest prizes of all time. It took his men six days to transfer the treasure to the Golden Hind, and while this was being done, he invited San Juan and his passengers to dine with him, showed them around his ship, and proudly displayed the charts and drawings which he and his officers had made of the coasts they had navigated. He told San Juan de Antón that he had come “to rob by command of the Queen of England and carried the arms she had given him and her commission.”6

  Before he parted from the Cacafuego, Drake gave a letter of safe conduct to her captain and distributed gifts to him and his men. This was a generous gesture toward a beaten enemy, but did nothing to lessen the rage and alarm of the Spanish authorities when they learned the full scale of the damage inflicted by the English pirate. Up and down the coast of America, Spanish ships were on the lookout for him, and Drake wisely decided to call an end to his looting and headed west into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. He miraculously survived storms, attacks by hostile islanders, and the grounding of his ship on a coral reef among the islands of Indonesia, and arrived back at Plymouth on September 26, 1580, after a voyage lasting two years and nine months.

  The Golden Hind was the second ship in history to
sail around the world, and since Magellan died during his pioneering voyage, Drake was the first commander to complete the circumnavigation. It was an epic achievement, and Drake became a national hero. The Spanish Ambassador demanded compensation for “the plunders committed by this vile corsair,” but his protests were ignored. Drake spent six hours with Queen Elizabeth at Richmond Palace, recounting the details of his voyage, and was later knighted by her on the deck of his ship at Deptford. Although an official inventory was taken of Drake’s plunder and some five tons of silver were deposited in the Tower of London, it is difficult to calculate the total value of the treasure which was looted during those months on the coast of South America. The Queen authorized Drake to keep £10,000 for himself and to distribute £8,000 among his crew. The shareholders who had backed the voyage (and they included the Queen) received a handsome return on their investment. The total value of the treasure in 1580 was probably around £500,000, which would be worth more than £68 million today.

  When Drake made his first raid in the Caribbean, the Spanish had been sending gold and silver back to Europe for nearly fifty years. The saga of Spain’s conquest of the New World had begun with Christopher Columbus. On October 12, 1492, he had stepped ashore on an island in the Bahamas after a voyage of seventy days across the Atlantic. From the Bahamas he sailed south to Cuba and east to Hispaniola (now Haiti) before sailing back to Spain to report on his discoveries. His second voyage took him to Dominica and along the chain of West Indian islands to Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and Jamaica, where he landed in St. Ann’s Bay on May 5, 1494. The mountainous islands of Jamaica and Hispaniola were to become the principal bases for buccaneer raids, and would play a key role in the history of piracy.