Under the Black Flag

by David Cordingly

  X. The captain and quartermaster to receive two shares of a prize: the master, boatswain, and gunner, one share and a half, and other officers one and a quarter.

  XI. The musicians to have rest on the Sabbath Day, but the other six days and nights, none without special favour.

  There is no mention in this code, or indeed in the codes drawn up by other pirate companies, of homosexuality. Since it is hard to believe that the pirates were ever prudish about such matters, we must assume either that homosexuality was never an issue among them, or that it was so widely practiced and tolerated that it was not necessary to include it in any code of conduct.

  Until recently the image of the pirate as a lusty womanizer was so powerful that any suggestion that pirates might be gay was unthinkable. However, the macho image was seriously dented by a book published in 1983 with the arresting title Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, and the subtitle English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean. However, it covers a considerably wider canvas, being a sweeping survey of attitudes to homosexuality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain and her overseas colonies. Written by B. R. Burg, professor of history at Arizona State University, the book examines court cases, county records, newspaper reports, Restoration plays, Pepys’ diaries, accounts of voyages, and an impressive array of works on social history, the West Indies, and piracy. The resulting picture of sexual activity in England and the West Indies among all classes from aristocrats to beggars and vagabonds is remarkable for its graphic detail and illuminating examples.

  Less convincing are Professor Burg’s examination of homosexual activity among seamen and the parallels he draws with recent studies of homosexuality among all-male prison populations. He draws attention to the unequal proportion of men and women on the Caribbean islands: in 1661 the ratio of white men to white women on Jamaica was six to one; on Barbados in 1673 there were 9,274 white men to 3,800 white women; there was a similar ratio of two white men to every white woman on Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat during the same decade. Burg suggests that this led to men resorting to homosexual practices. He comes to the same conclusions regarding the communities of hunters and buccaneers on the island of Hispaniola, and the all-male crews of pirate ships:

  If freedom from social and behavioral constraints increased sexual activity for buccaneers as it apparently does for convicts, then the West Indian sea rovers surely made the most of their liberty.… They gloried in the freedom or licence they enjoyed as buccaneers, and, if research on modern convicts does in fact provide clues to pirate behaviour, it seems likely enough that their joy in exercising their wills was not confined only to the non-sexual phases of their lives. Life experiences of buccaneers before they sailed under the pirate flag may also have acted to increase incidence and frequency of homosexual acts.37

  It is an interesting theory and there may be some truth in it, but there is little evidence to prove things one way or the other. Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America has numerous examples of the buccaneers “giving themselves to all manner of debauchery with strumpets and wine,” but nothing to back up Burg’s thesis. The journal of Basil Ringrose is equally devoid of information on the subject, and so is Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pirates. Where Burg is on firmer ground is in the possibility of sexual relations between the captains of ships and their young servants and cabin boys. The nature of command inevitably isolated the captain from his men and from the easy fraternization with whores which most sailors indulged in whenever their vessel was in port, and there is evidence to show that some captains attempted sexual relations with young members of their crew. Among the papers of the High Court of Admiralty there is a case that was heard before a judge in chambers involving a fourteen-year-old boy, Richard Mandervell. While his ship was at anchor in Oporto in 1722 the captain, Samuel Norman, ordered the boy to bring a pail of water and to wash him. The captain then “had the carnal use of him & was then guilty of the crime commonly called buggery or sodomy & he twice afterwards used the Informant in the same way whilst the said ship lay in the river of Oporto.”38

  Homosexuality was a frequent practice among the thousands of Chinese pirates who cruised the South China coast in the early years of the nineteenth century. Professor Dian Murray, who has made a detailed study of the Chinese pirates based on research in the archives in Taiwan and Beijing, has found fifty documented cases among the testimonials of men tried for piracy between 1796 and 1800.39 When pirate gangs needed new recruits, it was not unusual to take captives and force them to join the pirate community by means of sexual assaults. The pirate leader Ya-tsung initiated three male captives into piracy by sodomizing them, and several other pirate leaders made catamites of handsome boys. As Murray points out, it is difficult to know to what extent homosexuality was willingly practiced between the participants, and to what extent it was forced on captives by pirate leaders.

  Life in an all-male community did not necessarily lead to widespread homosexual activity. In The Wooden World, his masterly study of the Georgian Navy, Nicholas Rodger concludes that the vast majority of the young seamen were “of vigorously heterosexual inclination.”40 Senior officers make no mention in their correspondence of homosexuality being a problem, and everything suggests that it was not a major issue. During the course of the Seven Years War (1756–63) there were only eleven courts-martial for sodomy. Four of the cases led to acquittals, and the remaining seven convictions were on the lesser charges of indecency. Professor Burg’s arguments concerning gay pirates are ingenious, but it seems likely that the percentage of pirates who were actively homosexual was similar to that in the Royal Navy, and reflected the proportion of homosexuals in the population at large.

  The Princes Galley was nearing the end of a voyage which had taken her from London to the west coast of Africa. There she had picked up black slaves and set her course across the Atlantic to the southeastern corner of the Caribbean. On September 14, 1723, she was approaching the island of Barbados when her crew were alarmed to discover that a vessel was heading their way with a black flag flying at her masthead. As she drew closer, they saw that she was a sloop armed with eight guns on her main deck and ten swivel guns mounted along the rails. There were between thirty and forty pirates on board.1

  John Wickstead, the forty-five-year-old captain of the Princes Galley, decided that his ship was no match for the pirates. He set more sail and endeavored to escape, but the heavily laden merchant ship was unable to throw off the pirate sloop, which gained on her steadily and began firing her guns. At eight o’clock in the evening the pirates came alongside and the chase was over. Captain Wickstead was ordered to send a boat across. The merchant ship’s longboat was hoisted over the side and rowed across to the pirate ship. Several pirates jumped into the boat and were ferried back to the Princes Galley.

  The next twenty-four hours were a nightmare for Wickstead and his crew. John Crawford, the ship’s surgeon, who was twenty five, and the second mate, Goldsmith Blowers, twenty-four, were held down while lighted fuses were put between their fingers to force them to reveal the whereabouts of the gold. The pirates were soon in possession of more than fifty-four ounces of gold, and proceeded to ransack the ship. They seized the gunpowder, pistols, the gunner’s stores and bosun’s stores. They removed two quarterdeck guns and two swivel guns and sent them across to the pirate sloop. Eleven black slaves valued at £500 were brought up from the hold and taken by the pirates.

  Two seamen with specialist skills were forced to join the pirate crew: they were William Gibbons, the surgeon’s mate, and James Sedgwick, the carpenter’s mate. Two other members of the merchant ship’s crew, Robert Corp and Henry Wynn, decided to join the pirates of their own accord. When they were later tried for piracy, a witness told the Admiralty Court that he “saw the said Henry Wynn voluntarily sign a paper which the said pirates called their Articles of Regulation.”2

  Having stripped the Princes Galley of everything of value, the pirates, who were led by George Lowther
, sailed away. Captain Wickstead was left to make his way to Barbados with the remnants of his crew.

  A similar attack had taken place three years earlier in the cold, gray waters of the North Atlantic. The merchant ship Samuel had left the port of London on May 29, 1720, bound for Boston with a cargo of ironware, forty-five barrels of gunpowder, and an assortment of English goods in bales and trunks. She had a crew of ten men to work the ship, and carried several passengers. She was commanded by Captain Samuel Cary, who was later able to provide a detailed account of the incident.3

  On July 13 the Samuel was forty miles east of the banks of Newfoundland when two ships hove in sight. Captain Cary watched their approach with increasing concern, and his worst fears were confirmed when the two ships fired their guns and hoisted pirate flags. The larger vessel was a three-masted ship of about 220 tons and was armed with twenty-six guns. From her main topmast head she flew a black flag on which a skull and a cutlass were clearly visible. The smaller vessel was an 80-ton sloop of ten guns flying a Union flag emblazoned with four blazing balls. Captain Cary reckoned that there were about one hundred men on board each of the vessels, which meant that he and his crew were outnumbered by twenty to one. The Samuel had only six guns mounted on carriages, so she was completely outgunned as well.

  The pirates hailed the Samuel and ordered her captain to hoist out his boat and come on board the pirate ship. Captain Cary did as he was told and learned that the pirates were commanded by the formidable Welshman Bartholomew Roberts. For the past month Roberts had been cruising the coast of North America, leaving behind him a trail of destruction. In one harbor alone he had plundered and burned no less than seventeen vessels.

  The pirates swarmed on board the Samuel and began taking the ship apart. They tore open the hatches and attacked the cargo like madmen, cutting open bales, trunks, and boxes with their boarding axes and cutlasses. Some of the goods they carried off to their ship, but much of the cargo they hacked to pieces and threw overboard. They took two of the mounted guns and all the spare rigging and stores, but they threw the anchor cables over the side. They carried off forty barrels of gunpowder and commandeered the ship’s boat. All this was done “with incessant cursing and swearing, more like fiends than men.”4 Captain Cary was told that the pirates had no intention of accepting the King’s Pardon, and if they should ever be overpowered, they would set fire to the gunpowder with a pistol, “and go all merrily to Hell together.”

  When they had finished looting the Samuel, the pirates turned their attention to the crew. All except one Irishman and the captain were forced at pistol point to leave the ship and join the pirates. The pirates were debating whether to sink or burn the merchant ship when they spotted another ship on the horizon and abandoned the Samuel in order to give chase. Captain Cary was left with one seaman and three passengers. With their assistance he sailed to Boston and reported the attack to Joseph Hiller, the public notary.

  These two attacks are typical of dozens of raids which took place in the Caribbean and North American waters in the early eighteenth century. The two incidents have a number of features in common: in the first place, the victims did not attempt to resist the pirates; in the second place, the pirates did not disguise their hostile intentions during their approach. It was not uncommon for pirates to catch their victims off guard by using the flags of a friendly nation, but in the majority of cases the pirates flew a version of the piratical black flag from the masthead and bore down on the victim with their guns firing. Having forced the victim to heave to, the pirates would not immediately come alongside and board the merchant ship; it was common practice to demand that the captain of the merchant ship launch a boat and come across to the pirate ship. No doubt the purpose of this was to find out what the ship was carrying, and then to hold the captain hostage while the pirates looted his ship.

  Another common feature of the attacks was that the pirates took their time over looting the ships. It is often said that the essence of a pirate attack was to hit and run. This was certainly a feature of attacks by the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, and it is a characteristic of most of today’s pirate attacks in Indonesian waters, when the pirates may be on board the victim’s ship for no more than nine or ten minutes. However, this was not the case in the West Indies during the great age of piracy. According to Captain Cary, the pirates spent forty-eight hours plundering the Samuel, and the pirates who attacked the Princes Galley were also in no hurry.

  The pirates had every reason to take their time. Most attacks took place out of sight of land, and in the days before the invention of radio there was no way the victims could call for help. Even when the attack took place in or near a harbor and the alarm was raised, the chances of getting help were remote. In the year 1715, for instance, there were only four naval warships and two naval sloops to patrol the entire Caribbean Sea—an area which extended more than two thousand miles from east to west and fifteen hundred miles from north to south, and included several hundred islands.5 Consequently the pirates had a field day. There is a note of despair in the report sent to London from the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Nicholas Lawes, in June 1718: “It is with great concern that I must still acquaint your Lordships of the daily complaints I receive of piracies and robberies committed in these parts, insomuch that there is hardly one ship or vessel, coming in or going out of this, island that is not plundered.”6 The Governor and Council of South Carolina echoed his views and requested “that a ship of war be sent to our assistance and protection, without which our trade must be inevitably ruined.”7

  Another common feature of pirate attacks was that much of the loot which was stolen consisted of ship’s gear and what might be termed “household goods.” This is a point which does not come across in pirate stories of fiction. The single objective of Long John Silver and his cronies was treasure. Real pirates were certainly interested in treasure, which was the motivating force behind most pirate raids, but they also needed food and drink as well as ropes and sails for their ships. Unlike the merchant ships on which they preyed, they were not able to go into harbor and overhaul their ships in a dockyard; nor did they have ready access to ships’ chandlers and sailmakers. Repairs had to be carried out at sea or in a secluded bay or river estuary far from civilization, and they were therefore ruthless in stripping their prizes of essential equipment. When the snow Restoration was attacked in August 1717, the pirates took all the goods and provisions on board as well as “sails, pump-bolts, log-lines, needles, twine, kettle, frying pan.”8 The sloop Content, which was taken near Barbados in October 1723, was looted of “fourteen boxes of candles, and two boxes of soap, together with a flying-jib, flying-jib-boom, flying-jib-halliards, main halliards, anchor and cable and several carpenters tools.”9

  The two attacks described at the beginning of this chapter do differ in one important respect, and that is in the size of the force brought to bear on the victims. In the case of the Samuel, the pirates attacked in two heavily armed ships manned by a total of two hundred men, while the Princes Galley was taken by a single pirate ship with a crew estimated at between thirty and forty men. A study of seventy-six attacks which took place between 1715 and 1720 in American and West Indian waters shows that fifty-three of the incidents involved a single pirate ship; in nineteen incidents there were two pirate vessels involved; and in four cases there were three or more vessels involved.10 In other words, in the great majority of attacks (72 percent) a single pirate ship was a sufficient threat to persuade the captain of a merchant ship to surrender.

  It is perhaps not surprising to find that pirate captains who restricted their attacking force to a single ship rarely captured merchant ships of any great size. In 1719 Edward England rampaged down the west African coast in the Royal James and took more than a dozen ships; the largest of these was the Bentworth of Bristol, with twelve guns and thirty men. Most of them were small four- to six-gun merchant ships with crews of fourteen to eighteen men. John Rackam (Calico Jack) caused considerable alar
m at one time in the West Indies, but his targets were relatively small vessels. In 1720, for instance, he entered Providence Roads and took a twelve-ton sloop armed with four mounted guns on deck and two swivel guns. A year later he was plundering shipping along the coast of Jamaica, where he took three merchant sloops, a schooner, and seven fishing boats (these would have been open canoes of the type still used by Jamaican fishermen).11

  While most victims of attacks by single pirate ships were small merchantmen, there was one conspicuous exception. In March 1717 Sam Bellamy was cruising the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola (Haiti) in the sloop Sultana, of fourteen guns, when a large merchant ship hove in sight. She was the slave ship Whydah, heading back to England after a voyage which had taken her from London to Africa for slaves and ivory, and then across the Atlantic to Jamaica.12 Bellamy chased her for three days and finally caught up with her near Long Island in the Bahamas. Apart from firing two chase guns, the Whydah offered no resistance and was soon in the hands of the pirates. Bellamy and his men found themselves in possession of one of the richest hauls ever made by pirates: her cargo included ivory, indigo, sugar, Jesuits’ bark (cinchona, used for making quinine), and gold and silver later valued at between £20,000 and £30,000. Bellamy had no hesitation in taking over the Whydah for his own use. With the addition often guns from the Sultana, he became the captain of a twenty-eight-gun ship which could have taken on any merchant ship trading in the Caribbean.

  The most successful pirate captains in the early eighteenth century were those who carried out their attacks with two or more vessels; they acquired the largest ships for their own use and they notched up the highest score of victims. Bartholomew Roberts heads the list. He is reputed to have taken four hundred vessels during his piratical career, and this figure seems to be borne out by reports from colonial governors, by newspaper accounts, and by the depositions of his victims. Roberts, also known as Black Bart, was a remarkable pirate captain. He comes across as a stern, disciplined man with a natural flair for leadership and the ability to make bold decisions. His most successful raid took place on the coast of Brazil, and for sheer audacity can be compared with Drake’s attack on Cádiz and Morgan’s raid on Portobello.