Under the Black Flag

by David Cordingly

  The best pictorial evidence for the rig of the sloops operating in American waters in the early eighteenth century is an engraving entitled “Sloop off Boston Light.” It is by William Burgis and is dated 1729. Although intended as a portrait of the Boston lighthouse which was erected on Beacon Island in 1716, the picture clearly shows a British sloop at anchor. She has twelve guns and is flying a naval pennant from her masthead. W. A. Baker, in his book Sloops and Shallops, describes her rig as follows:

  Her loose-footed mainsail is of the short-gaff type with a long boom, and for headsails she has a staysail and jib; in light weather she probably carried a flying jib on the topmast stay as well. Although her standing yard is fitted with foot-ropes, the lower square sail may have been hoisted to the yard for setting, not furled upon the yard and let fall in the usual manner. A light square topsail would have been set flying on her topmast, which it may be noted, is fidded abaft the head of the lower mast.11

  Baker draws attention to the 1717 “View of New York” by William Burgis, which depicts some twenty sloops with various types of rig. He also quotes a description of a sloop which was found upside down off Cape Cod in 1729. This is particularly fascinating because it describes the colors which the vessel was painted: “Rhode Island built, with a blue Stern, two Cabbin Windows, her Counter painted yellow with two black ovals, and he thinks her sides were painted yellow, her Keel was about 40 feet, and her bottom Tallow’d. Her Counter had been Cork’d and Pey’d with Pitch over the Paint & not scrap’d off. Her Mouldings were all white. She had lost her mast, bowsprit and rudder.”12

  The frequent attacks on merchantmen in the Caribbean by buccaneers and French privateers in the years around 1700 led to a demand for vessels fast enough to escape capture. The result was that shipbuilders in Jamaica developed a sloop which acquired an enviable reputation for seaworthiness and speed. The Jamaica sloop was built of red cedar and had a low freeboard and a steeply raked mast.

  Similar in her lines and rig and equally renowned for her speed was the Bermuda sloop, which was built in considerable numbers and was much in demand by traders and privateers. Of the ten vessels provided with privateer commissions by the Governor of Jamaica in 1715, four are sloops, one is a galley, one a snow, and the remainder are not specified. Baker points out that the Bermuda sloop had many of the features shown in the plans of HMS Ferret. Certainly there is a strong resemblance between the Ferret and the drawing of a Bermuda sloop in Chapman’s famous volume of ship plans Architectura Navalis, which was published in 1768.

  From the existing evidence we cannot be certain exactly what type of sloop the pirates most frequently used, particularly as details are rarely given of their rig. However, we know that pirates needed vessels that were swift and well armed, so it would be reasonable to assume that many pirate sloops closely resembled the Bermuda sloops or the Jamaica sloops. By the time the pirates had fitted out these merchant vessels with more guns, they must have been almost indistinguishable from the naval sloops like HMS Ferret, and the sloop shown in the “View of Boston Light.”

  The word “ship” is used nowadays to describe any large, seagoing vessel, but in the days of sail it was a more precise term and described a sailing vessel which had three or more masts with square-rigged sails throughout. In the eighteenth century the great majority of warships and all the large merchant ships operated by the East and West India Companies were ships. Smaller vessels were rigged as brigs, brigantines, snows, sloops, and schooners.

  A large number of pirates, including many of the better-known pirate captains, used ships. Some of these were large and powerful vessels of 200 tons or more and armed with thirty or forty guns. The average size of merchant ships coming out from London in the early eighteenth century was between 150 and 200 tons; vessels from English provincial ports averaged around 100 tons; the coasting vessels sailing to and from harbors like Boston, Charleston, and Port Royal, Jamaica, were mostly between 20 and 50 tons.13 The pirate ships were therefore larger than many of their victims. However, the crucial difference between the pirates and the merchantmen lay in the number of guns and the size of the crews.

  Even large merchant ships sailed with surprisingly small crews. Arthur Middleton, in his book Tobacco Coast, reproduces a detailed list of the ships in the tobacco fleet which sailed from Virginia to England on June 9, 1700. There were fifty-seven ships in the convoy, and the largest crew consisted of eighteen men, the smallest of ten men. The most heavily armed ship had ten guns, while the average number of guns per ship was six.14 These figures are similar to those in an interesting list which appears in Johnson’s General History of the Pirates. This gives details of nine ships which were taken by Captain England in the pirate ship Royal James on the west coast of Africa in the spring of 1719. The vessels ranged from a twelve-gun ship down to a two-gun sloop, with an average of four to six guns per ship. The average size of crew was sixteen men per ship.

  These figures are in marked contrast to those of the pirate ships that preyed on them. Very few pirate ships had crews of fewer than 30; many had 150 to 200. This gave the pirates an overwhelming superiority when they came to boarding a victim, and no doubt the sight of more than 100 pirates armed to the teeth was enough to persuade most captains to surrender. However, the large numbers were not determined only by the need to outnumber the victim’s crew in hand-to-hand fighting. A pirate ship, like a man-of-war, needed a large crew to work the guns.

  A naval fifth-rate ship with thirty-two guns, for instance, had a total complement of 220 men. A fourth-rate ship of forty-four guns had a complement of 250 to 280 men. This puts the large crews of the pirate ships into perspective. There was no point in a pirate captain acquiring a ship of twenty guns and adding ten more if he did not have enough men to fire them. All except the very smallest of the guns mounted on gun carriages required a team of four to six men to load, aim, fire, and haul them back into position after the recoil. In addition, there had to be men to operate the smaller swivel guns and men to work the ship.

  Henry Bostock, master of the sloop Margaret, was taken by Black-beard off Crab Island on December 5, 1717. He was detained on board the pirate’s ship for eight hours, and when he was interviewed a fortnight later, he was able to provide some useful details. Bostock reckoned “the ship to be as he thinks Dutch built, was a French Guinea man (he heard on board) that she had then thirty six guns mounted, that she was very full of men, he believes three hundred, that they told him they had taken her six or seven weeks before, that they did not seem to want provisions.”15

  Blackbeard and Hornigold had captured the ship in latitude 24 in the West Indies while she was en route for the French island of Martinique. Blackbeard took her over as his own ship, and named her the Queen Anne’s Revenge. He must have trained his crew remarkably well, because shortly after acquiring the ship, he encountered HMS Scarborough, a fifth-rate ship of thirty-two guns, “who engaged him for some hours, but she finding the pirate well manned, and having tried her strength, gave over the engagement, and returned to Barbados, the place of her station.”16

  The following year Blackbeard carried out a remarkable raid on the town of Charleston, South Carolina. He sailed up to the harbor bar in the Queen Anne’s Revenge, accompanied by three pirate sloops. For five days he blockaded the harbor, plundered any ships which came his way, and held the town to ransom. According to the report which Governor Johnson sent to London, the pirates:

  … appeared in sight of the town, took our pilot boat and afterwards 8 or 9 sail with several of the best inhabitants of this place on board and then sent me word if I did not immediately send them a chest of medicines they would put every prisoner to death, which for their sakes being complied with after plundering them of all they had were sent ashore almost naked. This company is commanded by one Teach alias Blackbeard has a ship of 40 odd guns under him and 3 sloops tenders besides and are in all above 400 men.17

  One of the vessels in Blackbeard’s flotilla on this occasion was the Adve
nture of ten guns. It was on board this relatively small sloop that Blackbeard fought his last battle when he was cornered by Lieutenant Maynard in Ocracoke Inlet in November 1718.

  The only pirate ships which were comparable in size and force to Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge were the ships of Bartholomew Roberts, William Moody, and Henry Avery. We have already seen that Roberts commanded a number of vessels. A Danish seaman who was a prisoner of Roberts gave a remarkably detailed account of the armament and crew of Roberts’ largest ship, the first Royal Fortune:

  … that the said Roberts ship is manned with about 180 white men and about 48 French Creole negros and has mounted 12, 8-pounders; 4, 12-pounders; 12, 6-pounders; 6, 8-pounders; and 8, 4-pounders; and in her main and foremast has 7 guns, 2 & 3-pounders, and 2 swivel guns upon her mizen.18

  The London-born pirate William Moody, who was attacking shipping in the West Indies in 1718, commanded a ship called the Rising Sun. According to the deposition of John Brown, whose brigantine was captured by Moody while she was at anchor in the Bay of Caroline, the pirate ship was “mounted with thirty five guns, including swivel guns, having on board one hundred and thirty men.”19

  Lower down the scale, but nevertheless formidable ships in terms of firepower, were the commands of William Kidd, Edward England, Edward Low, and Sam Bellamy.

  Captain Kidd’s ship was the Adventure Galley, of 287 tons. She was built at Deptford in 1695, had a crew of 152, and carried thirty-four guns.20 Like a number of ships at this particular period, she had oarports for sweeps (the long oars which could be employed in calms), which explains why she was called a galley, though she was in every other respect like a conventional three-masted ship. She would have looked very similar to the English ship the Charles Galley which was drawn and painted by the van de Veldes. The Charles Galley was built in 1676 for service in the Mediterranean against the Barbary pirates. She had thirty-two guns and her length on the keel was 114 feet, her breadth was 28 feet and 6 inches, and her depth was 8 feet and 7 inches. She was classed as a fourth-rate when she was launched.

  Edward England’s ship had twenty-six mounted guns and four swivel guns, and in 1718 “had on board about one hundred and thirty white men and about fifty others, Spaniards, Negroes and Indians.”21 Edward Low’s ship the Fortune had twenty-eight guns and a crew of eighty men.

  Perhaps the most interesting of the pirate ships is Sam Bellamy’s Whydah. Her wreck was discovered off Cape Cod in 1984, and at the present time she is the only pirate ship to have been firmly identified. Archaeological excavation of the site has unearthed some fascinating material, and this, together with documentary research, has provided a vivid picture of the ship and her crew. The Whydah was named after the trading post of that name on the Gold Coast of west Africa. She was built in England, was commissioned in 1716, and was employed in the slave trade. She was a three-masted ship of 300 tons and about 100 feet in length. When captured by Bellamy, she was armed with ten guns, but the pirates converted her into a twenty-eight-gun ship with eighteen mounted guns and ten swivel guns. Twenty-seven guns have already been recovered from the wreck. There are five six-pounder guns, fifteen four-pounders, and seven three-pounders. In addition to a large quantity of round shot (cannonballs), the archaeologists have recovered bag shot, bar shot, expanding bar shot, and sixteen iron grenades.22

  The pirate schooner, the favorite vessel of so many writers of fiction, appeared comparatively late on the scene. Although the Dutch were using two-masted vessels with fore-and-aft sails as yachts during the seventeenth century, the word “schooner” does not appear until 1717, when it is mentioned in two issues of the Boston News Letter. One of the earliest reports of pirates using a schooner appears a few years later. In August 1723 the Boston Gazette reported that Captain John Philmore, commander of a Cape Ann schooner, was taken by John Phillips in a pirate schooner off Newfoundland. In October of the same year the sloop Content, commanded by Captain George Barrow, was captured off Barbados by a pirate schooner of four guns and twenty-five men. But these reports are unusual, and it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the schooner rig became firmly established along the eastern seaboard of North America. By 1800 there were pilot schooners, naval schooners, and dozens of merchant schooners and fishing schooners. Among the most famous types were the Chesapeake Bay schooner, the Marblehead schooner, and the Grand Banks schooner, but by the time these fine craft appeared on the scene the great age of piracy in the Caribbean and along the North American coast was over.

  However, occasional reports of pirate attacks in the Caribbean persisted in the nineteenth century, and it may have been these which caught the attention of the fiction writers. Two attacks, for instance, were widely reported and later published in book form. The first was the case of Aaron Smith, who was tried for piracy at the Old Bailey in December 1822. Smith was accused of seizing two merchant ships off Cuba, but was able to prove in his defense that he had been captured by pirates the year before and forced to go along with them. After his acquittal he wrote a sensational account of his adventures entitled The Atrocities of the Pirates: being a faithful narrative of the unparalleled sufferings endured by the author during his captivity among the pirates of the Island of Cuba; with an account of the excesses and barbarities of those inhuman freebooters. Published in 1824, the narrative contains the most gruesome descriptions of pirate tortures. The vessel used by the pirates who captured Smith was a schooner.

  Equally sensational was the story of Lucretia Parker, who witnessed a bloodthirsty attack by pirates while she was on board an English sloop en route from St. Johns to Antigua. The story was published in New York in 1826 under the title Piratical Barbarity or the Female Captive. Again, the pirates’ vessel was a schooner. Perhaps it was one of these accounts which inspired Captain Marryat’s story The Pirate, which was first published in 1836. It was one of more than fifteen sea stories by Marryat, who turned to writing after an adventurous and distinguished career in the Royal Navy. Apart from Masterman Ready and Mr. Midshipman Easy, his work is little known today, but he had many admirers in Victorian England. Marryat’s book contains a wonderfully detailed and evocative picture of the pirate schooner Avenger as she lies at anchor in the calm waters of a small bay on the western coast of Africa:

  There she lay in motionless beauty, her low sides were painted black, with one small, narrow riband of red—her raking masts were clean scraped—her topmasts, her crosstrees, caps, and even running-blocks, were painted in pure white. Awnings were spread fore and aft to protect the crew from the powerful rays of the sun; her ropes were hauled taut; and in every point she wore the appearance of being under the control of seamanship and strict discipline. Through the clear smooth water her copper shone brightly; and as you looked over her taffrail down into the calm blue sea, you could plainly discover the sandy bottom beneath her and the anchor which then lay under her counter.

  The schooner Avenger was formerly a slave ship, but had been taken over by Captain Cain and a murderous crew of pirates. She was armed with a long brass thirty-two-pounder gun amidships and had eight brass guns of smaller caliber mounted on each side of her decks. Her ropes were of manila hemp, her decks of narrow fir planks, and her bulwarks were painted bright green. Muskets and boarding pikes were ready to hand beside the mainmast.

  The Avenger appears to have been the model for a succession of pirate ships in works of fiction, all of which have black painted hulls and a rakish air. The closest in appearance is the pirate ship in R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island, an adventure story for boys which first came out in 1858. A junior version of Robinson Crusoe, it tells how three boys learn to survive when they are stranded on a deserted Pacific island. After several months alone they sight a sailing ship offshore. To their horror, they observe that “the flag at the schooner’s peak was black, with a Death’s-head and cross-bones upon it.” Ralph, the narrator, is captured by the pirates and spends several weeks on board the schooner, which is described with as
much loving detail as Captain Marryat’s Avenger. Like the Avenger, the vessel is in immaculate condition with snow-white sails and polished brass: “everything from the single narrow red stripe on her low, black hull to the trucks on her tapering masts, evinced an amount of care and strict discipline that would have done credit to a ship of the Royal Navy.”

  Twenty-five years after the publication of Coral Island, the most famous of all the pirate vessels of fiction appeared on the scene. The Hispaniola, the star of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, is another schooner. She is a vessel of 200 tons (exactly the same tonnage as the Avenger) and was bought at Bristol by Squire Trelawney. She sets sail for the West Indies and proves well able to cope with the heavy weather she encounters during the crossing of the Atlantic. Soon after she has dropped anchor off Treasure Island, the Hispaniola is seized by the pirates led by Long John Silver. Jim Hawkins gives Silver the slip and sets out to explore the island. After an encounter with the marooned seaman Ben Gunn, he returns to the beach: “the anchorage, under the lee of Skeleton Island, lay still and leaden as when we entered it. The Hispaniola, in that unbroken mirror, was exactly portrayed from the truck to the waterline, the Jolly Roger hanging from her peak.”

  Again there are echoes of Marryat in the description, though Stevenson never mentioned him as a source. He said that he drew on reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, Washington Irving, and “the great Captain Johnson’s History of the Notorious Pirates.”

  The children who spend their summer holidays playing pirates in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons sail thirteen-foot dinghies, but in Peter Duck, which was published in 1932, the action revolves around a schooner on a treasure-hunting voyage to the West Indies. The children sail on the Wild Cat but are chased by a pirate schooner called the Viper. Like the majority of fictional pirate ships, she is painted black.