Under the Black Flag

by David Cordingly

  Women were given the same treatment. When Mary Andrews refused to plead in 1721, she “by ancient law was liable to be pressed to death; but first having her thumbs drawn by the common executioner with a strong whipcord, she submitted to plead.”26 She was acquitted for lack of evidence. Not so Katharine Hayes, who was sentenced to death for the murder of one of her sons and for incestuously sleeping with her other son. She was ordered to be burned at Tyburn. Nine other people were executed the same day: three for sodomy, one for murder, two for burglary, one for felony, and two for highway robbery. It was usual for crowds of two or three thousand spectators to attend executions at Tyburn, but on this occasion so many people thronged the specially erected stands that the scaffolding broke and five or six people were crushed and many others suffered broken arms and legs.

  Katharine Hayes was drawn to Tyburn on a hurdle, and “to strike a proper terror in the spectators of so horrid a crime,” it was ordered that she was to be burned alive and not strangled first as was customary. There is a harrowing description of her last moments in the pages of the London Journal: “She was fastened to the stake by an iron collar round her neck, and an iron chain round her body, having an halter also about her neck, (running through the stake) which the executioner pulled when she began to shriek. In about an hour’s time she was reduced to ashes.”27

  The hanging of men for sodomy alongside murderers and highwaymen was unusual. Although the punishment for sodomy in the Royal Navy and in civilian life at this period was death, those convicted were more likely to be imprisoned or sentenced to stand in the pillory.

  Of the many wicked deeds attributed to pirates, there is one which has a secure foundation, and that is the marooning of victims on desert islands. It was particularly common among the pirates in the West Indies. In 1718 ten pirates were put on trial at Nassau, accused of combining together at an island called Green Cay, robbing a number of vessels, “and by force caused to be put ashore upon the said desolate island one James Kerr, merchant, and sundry others with him.”28 Roger Stevens of Bristol was attacked by pirates while en route to Jamaica in 1724. The pirates burned his ship and put the commander and boatswain ashore on the island of Rattan.29

  Marooning was also used among the pirates themselves as a punishment for certain offenses, such as deserting the ship or quarters in battle, or for stealing from other pirates. In the pirate code recorded in Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pirates (see this page to this page), the second of the eleven articles decreed that if any pirates defrauded the crew of money, jewels, or plate, they were to be punished with marooning. On one occasion Blackbeard made use of marooning as a means of ridding himself of some of his crew. Following a successful raid on Charleston, South Carolina, he decided to disband his fleet and keep the plunder for himself. He ran two of his ships aground and escaped in the sloop used as a tender to his warship Queen Anne’s Revenge. He then took seventeen of his crew and marooned them “upon a small sandy island, about a league from the main, where there was neither bird, beast or herb for their subsistence.…”30

  A description of privateers using marooning as a method of settling differences can be found in the deposition of Robert Dangerfield, which was recorded at Carolina in 1684. Dangerfield joined the crew of a barque commanded by Jeremy Rendell which set sail from Jamaica on a privateering voyage. They made for the Bay of Honduras, where a dispute arose among the crew. Rendell and three men were for going to the Bay of Campeche, but the rest of the crew, headed by John Graham, the ship’s doctor, were determined to head across the Atlantic to the coast of Guinea. The majority rule prevailed, and the unfortunate Rendell and his supporters were put ashore “upon an island, giving them a turtle net and a canoe with their arms to shift for themselves, the said island not being inhabited and about 10 leagues from the main or any other inhabited place.”31

  Although marooning could and sometimes did mean a slow death from starvation or exposure, it has acquired a romantic image which is far removed from the reality of the experience. Part of the reason for this is no doubt the association with islands, because islands have always had a powerful hold on people’s imagination. Most of us have memories of particular islands we have visited, but there are also the islands of legends and romance: the island of Crete, home of the Minotaur; those other Greek islands where Odysseus encountered the Sirens, the Cyclops, and Circe, the enchantress; the isle “full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs” created by Shakespeare in The Tempest; the island of Lilliput, where Gulliver found himself stranded and tied down on the beach; Coral Island; Treasure Island; and the island of Never Never Land, to which Peter Pan took Wendy, John, and Michael.

  In particular, there is the image conjured up by desert islands. What is curious about this image is that, far from being an island with nothing but desert sand, for most of us a desert island is a tropical island with sheltered bays and wooded hills; it is uninhabited, but it has palm trees and wild berries and parrots and goats. It would be lonely to be cast away on such an island, but it would be possible with some ingenuity to survive. This widely shared image is almost entirely due to a book which was first published in 1719 when its author was sixty years old. The full inscription on the title page of the first edition is as follows:

  The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on shore by Shipwreck, where-in all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself.

  Daniel Defoe’s most celebrated work is not about pirates, but about the physical and mental challenges faced by a young man who has run away to sea and after many adventures finds himself washed up on the beach of an uninhabited island. It is a complex work which addresses moral and spiritual dilemmas as well as the more basic problems of finding food and creating a shelter. Considered by many to be the first English novel, the book has been the subject of exhaustive study by scholars, but at a simple level it is an absorbing study of survival written with such conviction and attention to detail that we identify with the hero and find it hard to believe that it is a work of fiction.

  Robinson Crusoe was first published in an edition of one thousand copies, and proved an immediate success. A second edition of a thousand was published within a fortnight of the first, and two further editions followed in rapid succession. Within a year it had been translated into French, German, and Dutch. In spite of some sniping by jealous critics, the book proved popular with the man and woman in the street, as well as in literary circles.32 It was highly praised by Dr. Johnson and Alexander Pope, and was a formative influence on Gulliver’s Travels and, a century later, on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In 1806 a clergyman wrote: “I have never known but one person of sense who disliked it. Rousseau, and after him all France, applauded it.”33

  The island of Juan Fernández in the Pacific Ocean, some 350 miles west of the coast of South America. It was here that Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe, was marooned between 1704 and 1709. The map comes from William Hack’s Waggoner of the South Seas of 1684 and was based on the information supplied by the buccaneer Basil Ringrose.

  While piracy does not feature prominently in the story, there are a number of other connections. Defoe himself was fascinated by pirates. He had once encountered Algerian pirates on a voyage from Harwich to Holland, and he made pirates the subject of several publications, notably The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the famous Captain Singleton, which was published in 1720. This was a work of fiction, but it was partly inspired by the career of Captain Avery, who appears in the story and was also the subject of The King of the Pirates, a popular biography which is considered by many scholars to be the work of Defoe. A further link between Robinson Crusoe and piracy is provided by the story of Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish seaman who spent four years marooned
on one of the islands of Juan Fernández off the coast of Chile. There is no doubt that Alexander Selkirk was the prototype for Robinson Crusoe; what is not certain is the extent to which Defoe was influenced by the Scottish seaman’s story. It is generally agreed that Defoe never met Selkirk, but it is relevant that a second edition of Captain Woodes Rogers’ account of rescuing the castaway sailor appeared in 1718, the year before Robinson Crusoe was published.

  Selkirk sailed with the buccaneer William Dampier on a privateering expedition to the South Seas. The two ships St. George and Cinque Ports left England in September 1703, and by February of the following year they had rounded Cape Horn and were sailing off the coast of Chile. After various unsatisfactory operations, the two ships parted company. The Cinque Ports, under the command of Captain Stradling and with Selkirk as sailing master, headed for the Juan Fernández Islands to careen and refit. They dropped anchor off Mas-a-Tierra, the largest of the islands, an occasional refuge for buccaneers and pirates, and the scene of a number of accidental and intentional maroonings over the years.

  Captain Stradling was an unpopular commander and had quarreled with Selkirk. When the order was given to set sail, Selkirk protested that the ship was unseaworthy, and demanded to be left on the island. Stradling took him at his word and sailed away without him. It was the beginning of October 1704.

  Selkirk was alone on the island until February 2, 1709, when a privateering expedition under the command of Captain Woodes Rogers dropped anchor in the bay. The seamen who went ashore in the ship’s pinnace encountered “a man clothed in goat’skins, who looked wilder than the first owners of them.”34 William Dampier, who was acting as pilot, recognized Selkirk and recommended him as an excellent seaman. Woodes Rogers agreed to appoint the castaway as mate of his ship the Duke. They set sail on February 12 and, after taking a number of prizes, headed for home. When Selkirk eventually landed in London on October 14, 1711, he had been away from England for more than eight years.

  The story of Selkirk’s solitary existence on the Juan Fernández Islands was told in Woodes Rogers’ book A Cruising Voyage Round the World, which came out in 1712. People were fascinated by the description of the island and Selkirk’s struggle to overcome the melancholy and fear of being alone in such a desolate place. In particular they admired his ingenuity. When he was put ashore, “He had with him his clothes and bedding, with a fire-lock, some powder, bullets, and tobacco, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, some practical pieces, and his mathematical instruments and books.”35 When his seaman’s clothes fell to pieces he stitched together a cap and coat from goatskins, using a nail in place of a needle. When rats chewed his feet at night, he tamed the wild cats of the island; they kept him company and solved the rat problem. He built two huts from branches covered with long grasses. He made fire by rubbing two sticks of pimento wood together upon his knee. Apart from the practical details, the story was also a moral tale, because Selkirk overcame his fears and his boredom by reading, and praying and singing psalms, “so that he said he was a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before.”36

  During the late summer of 1692 news began to reach England of a catastrophe on the island of Jamaica. It was reported that the town of Port Royal had been hit by an earthquake so violent that whole houses had been swallowed by the earth, and much of the town had sunk beneath the sea. It was said that two thirds of the inhabitants had been drowned or buried under timber and masonry, and that the graves in the submerged churchyard had opened up so that long-dead corpses were floating to and fro in the harbor. There were accounts of sailors using their boats to loot houses and strip the rings and valuables from the floating bodies. A local minister reported that “a company of lewd rogues whom they call privateers, fell to breaking open warehouses and houses deserted, to rob and rifle their neighbours whilst the earth trembled under them, and some of the houses fell on them in the act; and those audacious whores that remain still upon the place, are as impudent and as drunken as ever.”1 The opinion of many was that the catastrophe was the judgment of God on an evil and impenitent town, the home of pirates and prostitutes, and the wickedest port in Christendom.

  As the letters and reports from eyewitnesses reached England, it became clear that all the stories were true. A massive earthquake had hit Jamaica between eleven and twelve noon on June 7, 1692, and shaken the whole town of Port Royal. Two further tremors followed, and the ground moved in a series of undulations which caused the sand in the unpaved streets to rise and fall like waves. Brick and stone buildings, including the church, collapsed, and the wharf next to the harbor and two entire streets with all their houses and shops slid beneath the sea. A tidal wave followed in the wake of the earthquake and swept through the town. “Nothing else was seen but the dead and dying, and heard but shrieks and cries.”2 More than two thousand people died that day, and a further two thousand died later from the wounds they received or from disease and fever. There were so few people left alive that for a long time the bodies drifted in the tide or lay unburied on the rocks and beaches where they were thrown by the waves. John Pike, a joiner, wrote to his brother and told him that his house had sunk beneath the sea. “I lost my wife, my son, a ’prentice, a white-maid and 6 slaves and all that ever I had in the world. My land where I was ready to raise five houses, and had room to raise ten more, is all sunk, a good sloop may sail over it as well as over the Point.”3

  The town which was so devastated by the earthquake had been one of the richest and busiest ports in the Americas. The English, who had captured Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, built a fort at the end of the narrow strip of land which curves out into the blue waters of the Caribbean on the southern shores of the island. The spit of land formed a great natural harbor, and the fort was well placed to protect it from attack. Within four years there were two hundred houses clustered around the fort, as well as workshops and storehouses. Port Royal, as the town was named on the Restoration of Charles II, became a thriving center for trade from England and the American colonies. It also became one of the major slave ports in the West Indies, and in the period between 1671 and 1679 nearly 12,000 black Africans were landed from slave ships anchored in the harbor. By 1680 there were 2,850 people, white and black, living in the town.4 These included carpenters, goldsmiths, pewterers, sailmakers, shipwrights, and seamen. Above all there were the merchants, who lived “to the height of splendour, in full ease and plenty, being sumptuously arrayed, and attended on and served by their negro slaves.”5

  Much of the town looked very like Bristol or Boston or any busy English or American port of the period. The houses of brick and timber were huddled close together along roads and alleys with familiar English names: Thames Street, Lime Street, Queen Street, Smith’s Alley, and Fishers Row. There was an Anglican church, a Roman Catholic chapel, a Quaker meetinghouse, and two prisons. There were also a large number of taverns and brothels, and “a crew of vile strumpets and common prostitutes.”6 The largest whorehouse was run by John Starr and had twenty-one white and two black women. The most celebrated of Port Royal’s whores was Mary Carleton. She was born in Canterbury around 1634 and was a teenage criminal before she went on the London stage, where she had a play called The German Princess written specially for her. She was arrested for theft and bigamy in 1671, and transported for life to Jamaica. She set herself up as a prostitute in Port Royal, where she lived a scandalous life for two years. She was described as being “as common as a barber’s chair: no sooner was one out, but another was in. Cunning, crafty, subtle, and hot in the pursuit of her intended designs.”7

  Where Port Royal differed from Bristol or London was, of course, in the climate, and also in the number of buccaneers and pirates who frequented the bars and taverns. The tropical conditions which were so pleasant on the slopes of the Blue Mountains above Kingston could be roasting on calm days, and the occasional storms and hurricanes caused much damage to houses and shipping alike. But it was the buccaneers who gave the town its wicked r
eputation and who brought it so much wealth. The governors of the island actively encouraged them to use Port Royal as a base, hoping that the presence of heavily armed ships would discourage the Spanish and French from attempting to capture the island. The policy proved remarkably successful. There were no serious attempts to attack Jamaica, and the merchants and shopkeepers of Port Royal grew rich on the plunder brought in from the raids on Spanish ships and towns.

  The arrangement also suited the pirates. Jamaica was well placed as a base from which to launch attacks on the Spanish settlements in Central America or on the ships passing to and fro among the West Indian islands. Port Royal provided them with a fine harbor where they could moor their vessels, and the facilities to careen and repair them. During the 1660s the pirates had a field day. This was the period when Henry Morgan based himself at Port Royal and launched his attacks on Portobello, Maracaibo, and Panama. His raid on Portobello alone yielded treasure on a fabulous scale, most of which was squandered in the taverns and whorehouses of Port Royal. The prodigality of the buccaneers became legendary and was described vividly by Charles Leslie in the history of Jamaica which he published in 1740:

  Wine and women drained their wealth to such a degree that, in a little time, some of them became reduced to beggary. They have been known to spend 2 or 3,000 pieces of eight in one night; and one gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They used to buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street, and oblige everyone that passed to drink.