Under the Black Flag

by David Cordingly

  Roberts was cruising along the South American coast when his ship caught up with a fleet of forty-two Portuguese merchantmen off the Bay of Los Todos Santos. The merchantmen were waiting to be joined by two warships before setting off in convoy to Lisbon. Roberts coolly came alongside one of the ships and threatened to kill her crew if they made any signal of distress. Her captain was ordered to come aboard the pirate ship, where he was interrogated by Roberts.

  Having discovered that the richest ship in the fleet was a powerful vessel of forty guns and a crew of 150 men, Roberts immediately headed toward her. He took with him as his prisoner the Portuguese captain, and forced him to hail the intended victim and to invite her captain on board Roberts’ ship. The captain of the big merchant ship became suspicious and began clearing his ship for action. Roberts immediately fired a broadside at her, came alongside, flung out grappling hooks, and boarded her. After a brisk fight she surrendered. Meanwhile the other ships were desperately firing warning guns to attract the attention of the anchored warships. By the time they had set sail, though, Roberts had made off with his prize, which proved to be a major haul: 90,000 gold moidores, a cross set with diamonds which was intended for the King of Portugal, chains and jewels of considerable value, and a cargo of sugar, skins, and tobacco.

  It is curious that Bartholomew Roberts has never acquired the fame of Blackbeard or Captain Kidd, because he was infinitely more successful than either of them, and was a considerably more attractive figure. He was tall and dark, “of good natural parts and personal bravery,” and adopted a magisterial air.13 He dressed in some style, and was apparently fond of music. Unlike the vast majority of his fellow pirates, he abstained from heavy drinking, and he discouraged gambling on his ships. He was born near Haverfordwest in the southwest corner of Wales around 1682. He joined the merchant navy and eventually became second mate of the ship Princess of London. In November 1719 the Princess, under the command of Captain Plumb, set sail for the west coast of Africa to collect a cargo of slaves for the West Indies. On her arrival at Anaboe on the Guinea coast, the Princess was captured by pirates led by another Welshman, Howell Davis. A few weeks later Davis was killed and Roberts was elected as pirate captain in his place; in a remarkably short time he had impressed an unruly bunch of men with his abilities as a seaman and navigator, and was chosen above several other candidates for the post. Captain Johnson tells us that Roberts accepted the post, “saying that since he had dipped his hands in muddy water, and must be a pirate, it was better being a commander than a common man.”

  Not only was Robert a natural leader, but he also proved to be absolutely ruthless. His attacks were swift and savage, and he had no qualms about resorting to torture and murder to achieve his ends. During the course of the next three years he caused havoc among the merchant shipping on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1721, at the height of his career, Roberts commanded a squadron of four vessels. His flagship was the Royal Fortune of forty-two guns, a former French warship. His consorts were the thirty-gun brigantine Sea King, the French ship Ranger, and a small ship of sixteen guns which was used “as a store ship, to clean by.” The total number of men under his command at this time was 508.14

  Blackbeard was another pirate captain who operated with a squadron of three and sometimes four ships. In May 1718 the Governor of Bermuda reported that the pirates at sea in the area of New Providence included “one Tatch [Blackbeard] with whom is Major Bonnett of Barbados in a ship of 36 guns and 300 men, also in company with them a sloop of 12 guns and 115 men and two other ships.”15 Blackbeard’s flagship at this period was nearly as formidable as that of Bartholomew Roberts: she was a French Guineaman of thirty-six guns which Blackbeard had converted to a forty-gun warship, the equivalent of one of the Royal Navy’s fifth-rates (see this page).

  The most successful season in the career of Captain Vane was in 1718, when he was operating with two ships under his command: a brigantine of twelve guns and a large sloop of eight guns commanded by Captain Yeats. In October of that year, he captured eight ships on the coast of South Carolina, including a Guineaman from which he took ninety blacks.

  During the same period William Moody was cruising the Caribbean in the ship Rising Sun accompanied by a brigantine of eight guns commanded by Captain Frowd, and a sloop of eight guns. Writing from St. Christophers, where he had gone on a tour of inspection, Governor Hamilton reported that “they have taken, stranded, and burnt several vessels between this island and Santa Cruix.”16 It was Moody’s attacks which prompted Hamilton to demand that the authorities in England send out a Forty-gun warship to protect the islands.

  There are many other examples of pirates cruising together: Kentish and Edwards, Pyme and Sprigg, Napin and Nichols. In his analysis of the Anglo-American pirates, Marcus Rediker has traced the numerous connections among the pirate crews. He has calculated that more than 70 percent of the pirates active between 1716 and 1726 fitted into two groups, with interconnections within each group: one group stemmed from Captain Hornigold and the much-frequented pirate-rendezvous in the Bahamas; a second group developed from the chance meeting of the crews of George Lowther and Edward Low in 1722. Rediker makes the point that these connections ensured a social uniformity and a consciousness of kind among the pirates.17

  The exchanges of information at these meetings of pirates helps to explain the similarity in their rules of conduct and articles of association. It accounts for the comparatively rapid adoption of the piratical black flag among a group of men operating across thousands of miles of ocean, and it led to a form of teamwork which, however fragile and liable to fragmentation, could produce squadrons of pirates which were considerably more formidable than pirate crews operating on their own.

  While the majority of attacks were made by pirates in sailing ships, there was another method which was sometimes used, and that was to attack in open boats. When the Royal Navy made a boat attack, they invariably used the launches and longboats which they carried on deck, but the pirates and buccaneers operating in the West Indies preferred to use canoes stolen from local fishermen. These canoes were dugouts carved from tree trunks and fell into two categories. The larger and heavier canoe, called in Spanish piragua, which was variously corrupted to “perigua” and “perianger,” could carry up to twenty-five men and was either rowed or fitted with a single sail. The smaller version of the dugout was simply referred to as a canoe and could carry five or six people. There is a precise description of one of these in Basil Ringrose’s journal: “Here in the gulf it went very hard with us whensoever any wave dashed against the sides of our canoe, for it was nearly twenty-three feet in length and yet not quite one-foot-and-a-half in breadth where it was the broadest, so that we had only just room to sit down in her.”18

  The attack in open boats was a favorite tactic of the buccaneers of the late seventeenth century. Sir Henry Morgan used canoes in his devastating raids on Spanish coastal settlements, of which his attack on Portobello (see this page to this page) was the most spectacular example.19 Morgan selected canoes for the final approach along the coast because they were much harder to detect from the shore than a fleet of sailing ships. But in the journal of Basil Ringrose there is a remarkable incident when the buccaneers used canoes not simply as ferries but as fighting machines with which to attack a squadron of three Spanish warships within sight of Panama. The buccaneers approached the anchorage from the sea on April 23, 1680. There were sixty-eight of them spread between five canoes and two heavy piraguas. The warships had been warned of their presence in the area, and as soon as they spotted them, they weighed anchor and got under way. The buccaneers were exhausted by hours of paddling, but they succeeded in getting to windward of the ships.

  From their vulnerable and unstable canoes, the buccaneers began firing their long-barreled muskets with devastating accuracy. With the first volley they killed several men on the decks of the nearest ship as she swept past them. The flagship of the admiral of the squadron was the next to suffer the bucc
aneers’ onslaught. They succeeded in killing the man at the helm, which resulted in the ship swinging into the wind with her sails aback. The buccaneers came up under the stern of the vessel, keeping up a continuous fire with lethal effect as they did so. Every seaman who attempted to take over the helm was killed, and the mainsheet and brace (the ropes controlling the mainsail) were shot away.

  The third ship hastened to the admiral’s aid but was intercepted by one of the canoes and hotly engaged. When the first ship came about and attempted to assist, the buccaneers killed so many of her crew that there were hardly enough men left alive to work the ship. The buccaneers further disabled the flagship by wedging her rudder. With the admiral, the chief pilot, and two thirds of the crew killed, the survivors on the flagship surrendered. Two explosions on one of the other ships enabled the buccaneers to take her also. The third ship fled.

  Ringrose went on board the two captured ships to see what condition they were in. The combined effect of the explosions and the shooting on the first ship was appalling: “… such a miserable sight I never saw in my life, for not one man there was found but was either killed, desperately wounded, or horribly burnt with powder, insomuch that their black skins were turned white in several places, the powder having torn it from their flesh and bones.”20 On the admiral’s ship there were only twenty-five men alive out of a complement of eighty-six: “Their blood ran down the decks in whole streams, scarce one place in the ship was found that was free from blood.”21

  Boat attacks were rarely used by the early-eighteenth-century pirates, but they were occasionally reported. In April 1713 Lieutenant Governor Pulleine of Bermuda wrote that the islands had become “a retreat for three sets of pirates, who committed their depredations in open boats, with about five and twenty men in a boat.”22 Twelve years later the sloop Snapper of New Providence, commanded by Thomas Petty, was sailing in the same waters. The weather was calm, and as he was approaching Ragged Island in the Bahamas, he was attacked by Spanish pirates who rowed alongside his vessel in a piragua. They were led by Captain Augustin Blanco, who captured the sloop and took it to a nearby island, where they landed and robbed a local family. A similar incident was reported in the Boston Gazette of November 1, 1725, which noted that the sloop Dove of Boston was attacked by a “pirate periangar of 22 men of several nations commanded by St. Jago Dedwanies.”

  The pirates always had the advantage when approaching a victim. They could follow a ship for hours or days at a safe distance while they worked out her potential strength in terms of guns and crew. If she proved to be a powerful Indiaman or a man-of-war, the pirates would veer away and seek a weaker victim. If the vessel appeared vulnerable, the pirates had a choice: they could take her by surprise, or they could make a frontal attack.

  The simplest method of catching a victim off guard was to use false flags, a ruse de guerre which naval ships frequently adopted in time of war. Before the advent of radio or Morse code signaling, the only way that a sailing ship out at sea could identify the nationality of another vessel was by her flags. By 1700 the design of national flags was well established, and an experienced seaman was able to identify the ships of all the seafaring nations by the colors flying at their mastheads or ensign staffs.

  Pirates had flags of their own, which were red or black and emblazoned with skulls and other symbols, but they also collected a variety of other flags. When they wished to hide their identity, they simply flew an appropriate national flag. It is interesting to note that British pirates had no qualms about flying the Union flag or the St. George’s flag, and frequently did so. In October 1723 Walter Moor, commander of the sloop Eagle, discovered Lowther’s pirate ship on the beach of the deserted island of Blanco, where he had gone to careen after attacking the Princes Galley. Moor had to hoist his own colors and fire a gun at the pirate sloop “to oblige her to show her colours, and she answered with hoisting a Saint George’s flag at the topmast head.”23 Sam Bellamy flew the King’s ensign and pennant from the masts of the Whydah when attacking the Irish pink Mary Anne. When Bartholomew Roberts was hunted down by HMS Swallow in 1721, he was ready for all comers with “an English ensign jack and Dutch pennant and ye black flag hoisted at the mizen peak.”24

  On a previous occasion Roberts deliberately deceived the shipping off Martinique by flying Dutch flags and making the signals normally used by Dutch ships arriving from the Guinea coast with black slaves. The ruse enabled him to capture fourteen French sloops which came out to meet him with large sums of money on board for trading slaves. In March 1723 Captain Low performed the classic procedure with false flags when he encountered a Spanish merchant ship in the Bay of Honduras: the pirates “hoisted up Spanish colours, and continued them till they drew near the sloop, then they hauled them down, hoisted their black flag, fired a broadside and boarded her.”25

  For more than two centuries a black flag with a white skull and crossbones emblazoned on it has been the symbol for pirates throughout the Western world. In this form it appears in all the pirate stories from Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson, and the artists took their lead from the writers. The masterful pictures in Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates and N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations to the 1911 edition of Treasure Island no doubt helped to fix the image in people’s minds, and it was constantly reinforced by its use on the stage and screen. W. S. Gilbert’s stage directions in The Pirates of Penzance instruct the pirate king to unfold a black flag with the skull and crossbones as he sings the verse which begins, “Oh better far to live and die/Under the brave black flag I fly.” The 1926 silent film The Black Pirate with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., begins and ends with a shot of the traditional pirate flag billowing in the wind. Almost every pirate film has used the same motif to a greater or lesser extent.

  It is therefore surprising to discover that the skull and crossbones device was only one of many symbols originally associated with piracy. In the great age of piracy in the early eighteenth century a variety of images appear on pirate flags, including bleeding hearts, blazing balls, hourglasses, spears, cutlasses, and whole skeletons. Red or “bloody” flags are mentioned as often as black flags until the middle of the eighteenth century.

  What all the pirate flags had in common (and this applied to the Barbary pirates as much as the Anglo-American pirates) was their need to strike terror in the minds of the merchant seamen who were their victims. Often the devices on the flags formed what Marcus Rediker has described as a “triad of interlocking symbols—death, violence, limited time,” to underline the message that the pirates expected immediate surrender or the consequences would be fatal.

  There has been some debate about the earliest use of recognizable flags by pirates. A skull, or what was more commonly referred to as a “death’s-head,” with crossed bones underneath it, has been an accepted symbol for death since medieval times. It frequently appears on tombs in churches and cathedrals, and on gravestones in country churchyards, sometimes giving rise to the mistaken belief that the occupant of the grave must have been a pirate. Ship’s captains sometimes used the symbol in their logbooks when recording the deaths of members of the crew. At some time between 1700 and 1720 it was adopted by a number of pirates as a menacing symbol, often in conjunction with an hourglass or weapons. During the height of the pirate era individual pirate captains created their own versions of the flag. Bartholomew Roberts ordered his men to produce a flag showing his own figure standing on two skulls representing a Barbadian’s head and a Martinican’s head; this was to indicate his rage at the attempts of the authorities in those islands to capture him. Calico Jack had a death’s-head above crossed cutlasses.

  By 1730 the skull and crossbones on a black flag seem to have edged out the other symbols and been adopted by English, French, and Spanish pirates operating in the West Indies. Before that date, however, there are examples of plain red or plain black flags being used according to a generally understood color symbolism: black for death and red for battle. Although Francis Drake usually flew the En
glish flag of St. George on his ships, it is recorded that when he raided Cartagena in 1585 he was “flying black banners and streamers, menacing war to the death.” Basil Ringrose’s account of his voyage with the buccaneers led by Captain Bartholomew Sharp includes an incident in January 1681. The buccaneers, in their captured prize the Trinidad, encountered three Spanish warships off the islands of Juan Fernández. “As soon as they saw us, they instantly put out their bloody flags, and we, to show them that we were not as yet daunted, did the same with ours.”

  There was an alternative meaning to the plain red and black flags. A French flag book of 1721 includes hand-colored engravings of pirate flags, including a black flag with various insignia, and a plain red flag alongside a red pennant. Under the red flags is written “Pavillon nomme Sansquartier” (“Flag called No Quarter”). The idea that a red flag could mean no quarter is confirmed by Captain Richard Hawkins, who was captured by pirates in 1724. He later described how “they all came on deck and hoisted Jolly Roger (for so they call their black ensign, in the middle of which is a large white skeleton with a dart in one hand, striking a bleeding heart, and in the other an hourglass). When they fight under Jolly Roger, they give quarter, which they do not when they fight under the red or bloody flag.”

  There is no mention of black pirate flags or death’s-heads in Exquemelin’s classic work The Buccaneers of America. On the few occasions when any mention is made of flags at sea, the English buccaneers are recorded as sailing under English colors, and this includes Sir Henry Morgan, who, in spite of his reputation as a pirate, always regarded himself as an English privateer. There is, however, an interesting passage in Basil Ringrose’s journal which describes the flags used by the crews of the various ships when they marched on the town of Santa Maria in April 1680. There were some three hundred buccaneers, and they must have made a colorful sight as they headed inland: