If A Pirate I Must Be... Read online

  Captain Johnson described him as a ‘bold, daring fellow, but very wicked and profligate’. At the Isle of May in the Cape Verde Islands in February 1719 he had been among a group of men who tortured the chief mate of one ship to get him to reveal the whereabouts of hidden money. They ‘beat and wounded him in a barbarous manner’, the mate later told Admiralty officials. They ‘then put a rope about his neck and drew him up under the main top and kept him hanging there about a minute and let him down again and then put a rope around his head and tied it across his ears and twisted it until he was almost blind and insensible’. This torture, known as ‘woolding’, had been a pirate favourite since Buccaneer days.

  Kennedy was not the only candidate for the captaincy of the Royal Rover. There was Thomas Anstis from Bridgewater in Somerset, illiterate, but a man who had quickly emerged as one of the dominant, and most ambitious, characters in the crew. There was Valentine Ashplant, a twenty-nine-year-old from the Minories in East London, a volatile and explosive personality, but a highly experienced seaman who had previously served as master on a brigantine (a two-masted vessel slightly larger than a sloop.) And then there was David Simpson, a thirty-three-year-old from North Berwick in Scotland, known ironically as ‘Little David’ because of his vast size, a harsh, brutal man who had the capacity to terrify many of his rivals into submission. But the crew chose none of these men. The man they chose was Bartholomew Roberts.

  It’s the most astonishing twist in Roberts’ entire story. Originally a reluctant recruit, he had been just six weeks among them. Captain Johnson said he was chosen because he ‘exceeded his fellows’ in ‘knowledge and boldness (pistol proof as they call it)’ and could ‘make those fear who do not love him’, the key requirements of a pirate leader. He puts a slightly unlikely speech into the mouth of John Dennis, one of the senior pirates:

  It is my advice that, while we are sober, we pitch upon a man of courage and skilled in navigation, one who, by his council and bravery, seems best able to defend this commonwealth, and ward us from the dangers and tempests of an unstable element, and the fatal consequences of anarchy: and such a one I take Roberts to be.

  The speech, said Captain Johnson, was loudly applauded and the choice was approved by both Lords and Commons.

  We have just one other explanation, but it’s perhaps more informative. It was given a couple of years later by Walter Kennedy, who said, ‘Roberts was chose not so much for his strength and courage (though he was large and stout, and most desperate) as for his cunning and knowledge of the seas, and quick guess at the bulk and force of any ship they came nigh.’ Kennedy’s and Captain Johnson’s explanations both point to an unmistakeable conclusion - that Roberts was already well known to the pirates at the time he was captured. He can have done little since - they’d taken only two ships and neither had required a fight. It’s significant that, at Anamaboe, the pirates had forcibly taken him, a thirty-seven-year-old third mate, while they left John Stephenson, the twenty-nine-year-old second mate. Roberts was clearly a familiar figure in the West African and Caribbean trades and the pirates already knew him to possess the qualities they looked for in a leader. He must also have had extensive experience in combat. Nothing else could explain so extraordinary a promotion.

  For some in the crew Roberts’ lack of experience as a pirate may have been a virtue. Pirate life was a process of constant negotiation, and occasionally conflict, between the captain, eager to increase his power, and the crew, fiercely jealous of their liberties. It may be senior members of the crew saw Davis’s death as an opportunity to rein in the power of the captain by appointing a comparatively weak candidate. It may also be that Roberts was a useful compromise candidate between powerful, competing blocs. But if they had chosen Roberts because they thought he could be manipulated and controlled they had misjudged their man. In time he would become a pirate leader like no other.

  As for Roberts, his election as leader completed his gradual seduction by the pirate way of life. ‘Being daily regaled with music, drinking and the gaiety and diversions of his companions, [his] depraved propensities were quickly edged and strengthened, to the extinguishing of fear and conscience,’ wrote Captain Johnson - an explanation that sounds a little simplistic. Nothing else we know about Roberts suggests he found drinking attractive. Roberts himself claimed, according to Johnson, that he was motivated by a desire ‘to get rid of the disagreeable superiority of some masters he was acquainted with, and the love of novelty and change’. But it was his election as captain that was the key moment. ‘He changed his principles, as many besides him have done,’ wrote Johnson, because of ‘preferment’. It was power that was the attraction. Roberts accepted command with the memorable words: ‘I have dipped my hands in muddy water, and if a pirate I must be, ’tis better being a commander than a common man.’1

  Pirate life was highly theatrical and Roberts’ election was probably marked by an inauguration ceremony similar to that described by Johnson for pirate captains in the Indian Ocean at the start of the eighteenth century:

  They carry him a sword in a very solemn manner, make him some compliments, and desire he will take upon him the command, as he is the most capable among them ... On his accepting the office, he is led into the cabin of state, and placed at a table, where only one chair is set at the upper end, and one at the lower end of the table for the company’s quartermaster. The captain and he being placed, the latter succinctly tells him that the company having experience of his conduct and courage, do him the honour to elect him for their head ... Then the quartermaster takes up the sword ... puts it into his hand and says, ‘This is the commission under which you are to act, may you prove fortunate to yourself and us.’ The guns are then fired, shot and all; he is saluted with three cheers; and the ceremony is ended with an invitation from the captain to such as he thinks fit to have dine with him, and a large bowl of punch is ordered to every mess.

  Once this was over, other men were elected to fill the places of the officers killed with Davis. Then, finally, they could get down to the business of revenge.

  Walter Kennedy was chosen to lead a group of about thirty in an attack upon the fort at St Antonio. They brought the Royal Rover in as close as possible to provide covering fire and, with cannon balls flying over their heads, Kennedy and his men charged the ramparts. The explosions set the monkeys and the parrots in the forest behind frantically chattering and screeching and, amidst the smoke and confusion, the pirates managed to break through the main entrance - only to find the fort deserted. The Portuguese soldiers had deserted their posts and fled to the town.

  The pirates threw the guns into the sea and set fire to the fort. Many now wanted to burn St Antonio itself. But here for the first time Roberts exerted his authority. The town was protected by a long expanse of shallow water and was out of range of the Royal Rover’s guns. It was also surrounded by thick forests which would provide cover for the defenders. The pirates would inevitably sustain casualties for little gain, Roberts argued. This sensible advice prevailed. But still, they loaded around a dozen cannon on to a smaller boat and gave themselves the partial satisfaction of destroying several houses. Then, with night falling, they set two Portuguese ships alight and sailed out of the harbour by the light of the flames. It was less than three weeks since they’d first arrived.

  Roberts quickly drew a dividing line between his own captaincy and that of Davis by having the crew agree a new set of articles. Described by Johnson, who got his information from members of Roberts’ crew, they show the influence of his disciplined and slightly puritanical personality.

  ARTICLE I. Every man has a vote in affairs of moment; has equal title to the fresh provisions or strong liquors at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure unless a scarcity make it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment.

  ARTICLE II. Every man shall be called fairly in turn, by list, on board of prizes, because (over and above their proper share) they were on these occasions allowed a shift of clot
hes. But if they defrauded the company to the value of one dollar in plate, jewels or money, marooning was their punishment. If the robbery was only betwixt one another they contented themselves with slitting the ears and nose of him that was guilty, and set him on shore, not in an uninhabited place but somewhere where he was sure to encounter hardships.

  ARTICLE III. No person to game at cards or dice for money.

  ARTICLE IV. The lights and candles should be put out at eight at night. If any of the crew after that hour still remained inclined for drinking they were to do it on the open deck.

  ARTICLE V. To keep their piece, pistols and cutlass clean and fit for service.

  ARTICLE VI. No boy or woman to be allowed amongst them. If any man were found seducing any of the latter sex and carried her to sea disguised he was to suffer death.

  ARTICLE VII. To desert the ship, or their quarters in battle, was punished with death or marooning.

  ARTICLE VIII. No striking one another on board, but every man’s quarrels to be ended on shore at sword and pistol ... The Quarter-Master of the ship, when the parties will not come to any reconciliation, accompanies them on shore with what assistance he thinks proper, and turns the disputants back to back, at so many paces distance. At the word of command, they turn and fire immediately ... If both miss, they come to their cutlasses, and then he is declared victor who draws the first blood.

  ARTICLE IX. No man to talk of breaking up their way of living till each had shared a £l,000. If in order to do this any man should lose a limb or become a cripple in their service he was to have 800 pieces of eight out of the public stock and for lesser hurts proportionately.

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

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

  The outright ban on gambling was unique - other pirate articles simply attempted to limit it. The punishment of death for bringing a woman on board was unusually draconian. And Johnson believed that Article IV, requiring candles to be put out by eight at night, was intended by Roberts to check the crew’s ‘debauches’. Article XI offers a rare example of pirates observing the Sabbath.

  With his revenge complete, and the new machinery of government in place, Roberts soon had his first prize - a Dutch ship seized just south of Princes Island on 25 July 1719. But we know more about his second, the Experiment of London, taken two days later close to Cape Lopez in modern Gabon. The ship’s commander, Thomas Grant, was later interviewed by Admiralty officials, and his account provides further evidence of how unstable and unpredictable an element Walter Kennedy represented as Roberts struggled to establish his authority among the crew in the early months.

  As usual, the ship surrendered at the first sight of the black flag and Grant was summoned aboard the Royal Rover. He and Kennedy had met before and Kennedy bore a grudge. ‘Damn you, I know you and will sacrifice you,’ Kennedy shouted, according to the Admiralty transcript. ‘With his fist [Kennedy] struck the informant [Grant] with great violence upon his mouth which occasioned his nose and mouth to bleed. The informant believes that the said Kennedy would then have murdered him if some of the crew had not ordered the informant out of the way.’

  Kennedy was later seen running about the Royal Rover looking for Grant ‘with a naked cutlass in his hand’, and he was lucky to escape further injury. The pirates plundered the Experiment of 50 ounces of gold, sixteen moidores (a gold Portuguese coin worth one pound seven shillings), ten guineas and a number of other ‘movables of value’ that Grant had in his cabin. Kennedy then persuaded his shipmates to burn the ship, leaving the crew with little choice but to join the pirates. Grant would be a prisoner for almost four months.

  They cruised for a few more days without sighting a sail and then headed for Annobón, the smallest of the three Portuguese islands, just south of the equator. There they finished provisioning their ship, which had been interrupted at Princes Island. There were almost no Europeans on Annobón and Roberts dispensed with any pretence of being a man-of-war or privateer, simply forcing the governor to hand over supplies. The pirates were still planning to leave Africa and, with the ship fully stocked for an ocean crossing, the time had now come to decide on their next destination. This was always a subject of lengthy debate and, as the pirates crowded around in the steerage, two options were put forward - the East Indies and Brazil.

  Both offered the possibility of rich pickings. The Indian Ocean had been a popular destination with pirates ever since the capture of the Ganj-i-Sawai by the pirate Henry Avery off the mouth of the Red Sea in 1695. The Ganj-i-Sawai belonged to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb and was carrying wealthy pilgrims bound for Mecca. It was packed with gold, silver and jewels and yielded shares of £1,000 each for the 150-man crew, a fortune for men who had earned thirty shillings a month as ordinary seamen. There were also a number of ladies of the imperial court aboard with their serving women. Avery always denied they were mistreated. But a member of his crew later admitted ‘the most horrid barbarities’ were committed and sources suggest the crew embarked on an orgy of rape and plunder which lasted several days.

  Avery’s success sparked a gold rush. The island of Madagascar became the base for the pirates flocking to the region and was soon the subject of numerous myths and legends. Captain Johnson wrote of a French pirate called Captain Mission who flew a white flag emblazoned with the words ‘For God and Liberty!’ and set up a utopian, egalitarian community called Libertalia where men of all nations and colours lived in peace and harmony. Sadly, this is the only entirely fictitious chapter in Johnson’s General History of the Pirates. There was more of Mr Kurtz and the Heart of Darkness to some of the real pirate kings who established themselves deep in the jungles of Madagascar. According to one visitor, James Plantain, who ruled at Ranter Bay, ‘took a great many wives and servants, whom he kept in great subjection; and after the English manner called them Moll, Kate, Sue or Peggy. These women were dressed in richest silks, and some of them had diamond necklaces.’ But the story of Captain Mission captures the mythical status Madagascar had acquired as a pirate haven by the early eighteenth century. And whether the pirates there were debauched despots or utopian idealists, the island exerted a powerful pull on the imaginations of pirates and seamen alike as they gossiped in the f’o’csles and taverns of the Atlantic world.

  But by the second decade of the century it was in decline. Many of the pirate settlements on the island had been over-run by natives. And, pressured by their trading partners in the east, the European East India Companies had taken steps to stamp out piracy in the region. When Woodes Rogers, later Governor of the Bahamas, visited Madagascar in 1711 he reported that ‘those miserable wretches, who had made such a noise in the world, were now dwindled to between 60 and 70, most of them very poor and despicable, even to the natives, among whom they are married’. Roberts and his men were also aware that their former comrades Cocklyn and La Bouche were headed in that direction and would provide stiff competition.

  It turned out Madagascar was on the brink of a brief renaissance as a pirate haven. In April 1721 La Bouche seized the Portuguese East Indiaman Nostra Senhora de Cabo at Réunion. It proved to be one of the richest prizes in the history of piracy, carrying a fortune in diamonds. It enabled him to briefly retire, although he was later hanged by the French authorities.

  But Brazil was an attractive alternative. Portugal’s only colony in the Americas, it had become wealthy initially through the cultivation of sugar, which it pioneered in the New World. When sugar prices collapsed towards the end of the seventeenth century it was saved by the discovery of gold in the province of Minas Gerais in the early 1690s. By 1709, 30,000 people had flocked to the region and its rivers teemed with African slaves, sifting and panning in the river beds for their white masters. By 1719 Brazil was the largest gold producer in the wor
ld, dispatching 27 tons a year to Lisbon - and that was just the amount declared to the royal tax collectors. The bulk of it ended up in London, traded by the Portuguese in exchange for manufactured goods.

  Gold was in the process of transforming Brazil from an archipelago of isolated coastal settlements into a sub-continent. Combined with the earlier sugar boom it had spawned a society that was rich but backward and decadent. The main city of Bahia, now Salvador do Bahia, was reputed to have a church for every day of the year. It was equally rich in mulatta - mixed-race - prostitutes. Brazilians were notorious for their dependence on slaves, who heavily outnumbered the white population and were imported to Bahia at a rate of 11,000 a year. ‘The rich people’, wrote a French visitor at this time, ‘would be ashamed to make use of the Legs which nature has given us to walk ... [They] lazily cause themselves to be carried in beds of fine cotton, hanging by the ends to a pole, which two blacks carry on their heads or shoulders.’

  All of which spelt rich pickings to the pirates and, when the vote was taken, it was Brazil they decided to head for. At the start of August 1719 they set their sails, picked up the south-east trade winds and headed out into the Atlantic, ‘resolved’, in the words of Walter Kennedy, ‘to make their fortunes at once, or to be all killed’.

  4

  TRIUMPH AND DISASTER

  SOUTH AMERICA

  AUGUST-DECEMBER 1719

  ‘ELATED WITH THEIR BOOTY, THEY HAD NOTHING NOW TO THINK OF BUT SOME SAFE RETREAT, WHERE THEY MIGHT GIVE THEM- SELVES UP TO ALL THE PLEASURES THAT LUXURY AND WANTONNESS COULD BESTOW’