If A Pirate I Must Be... Page 8

  Du Tertre recorded that matelotage was common throughout the early French Antilles, not just among Buccaneers, as a response to the chronic shortage of women. ‘There are two types of families in the islands. The first consist of married persons and the others of boys who live together,’ he wrote. The early emigrants to both the English and French islands were almost all men. At this time there were relatively few slaves and Indians to rape and prostitute, since the slave trade in the Caribbean only took off in the second half of the seventeenth century, and, where they had not been annihilated, the Indians were fierce and hostile.

  Once a more formal French colonial administration was established in western Hispaniola (later Haiti) in the 1660s the authorities imported large numbers of prostitutes from France for ‘sale’ to the locals in what might be seen as a conscious bid to heterosexualise the wild Buccaneers. Other islands also encouraged female migration and by Roberts’ time a balance had been achieved between the sexes in the West Indies. But pirates of the Golden Age, to a greater extent even than the Buccaneers before them, lived a life largely cut off from conventional shore-based communities and from access to women. The frequency with which Roberts’ crew managed to seek out piratefriendly brothels during 1719 was unusual. They, like most pirate crews, spent the vast bulk of their time cooped up in a small wooden ship with only 200 other dandily dressed, testosterone-filled young pirates for company.

  There was just one crew in this period that included women-that of Jack Rackham, better known as Calico Jack, who had two female pirates on his ship; Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Bonny was Rackham’s lover and both she and Mary Read had originally gone to sea disguised as men seeking adventure. They were bold and fearless. According to Johnson, when finally they were captured they fought to the end, Read calling to the pirates cowering in the hold ‘to come up and fight like men ... Finding they did not stir [she] fired her arms down the hold amongst them, killing one and wounding others.’ After Rackham was sentenced to hang in November 1720 Bonny, visiting him for the last time, told him ‘she was sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hanged like a Dog’. Both she and Read escaped the gallows because they were pregnant (Bonny by Rackham, Read by another member of the crew).

  For most pirates Rackham’s short career and ignominious end merely confirmed their prejudice against having women on board. A recent study shows just 4 per cent of pirates were married and, in its isolation from the world of conventional domesticity, pirate culture was, in many ways, an extreme version of the sailors’ culture from which it grew.

  Sailors, too, were viewed as alien and apart by the rest of society. They were notoriously irreligious and rarely owned property, preferring to spend their money in wild drunken sprees. They were more likely to be married than pirates and they did not have the same taboo about having women on their ships. Even so, the majority were bachelors, and becoming pirates completed a process of separation from the norms and values of the rest of society. In their place pirates developed an almost mystical sense of brotherhood, a culture which was highly theatrical and full of ritual.

  They formed pacts with the Devil and pledged to blow up their ships and ‘all go to Hell together’ rather than be captured. When challenged to identify themselves they said simply that they were ‘from the seas’. And they swore friendship to each other by drinking a cocktail of sea water and gunpowder - a custom visitors to Madagascar in the early 1720s found the local people had adopted. They also discovered that one of the few English sentences the Madagascans had learned from the pirates was the intriguing ‘God Damn ye John, me love you’.

  There is an emotional intensity to pirate life that seeps through the dry, contemporary accounts. Captain Johnson tells the story of a pirate turned privateer who drowned rather than abandon his closest friend on a sinking vessel. And a contemporary French historian left the following curious description of Buccaneers preparing for battle: ‘They never engaged in combat without embracing each other as a sign of reconciliation. At such times one might see them thumping their chests, as if they wanted to arouse some remorse in their hearts, something they had become scarcely capable of.’ You sense it was a bitter and tangled emotional world these men inhabited.

  Item VI of Roberts’ Articles banned the men from bringing women on to the ship, on pain of death. This was, in part, because they would be a source of tension. But it’s telling that boys were also barred. Given the circumstances of the pirates’ lives it would be surprising if there were no homosexual undercurrents on the Royal Rover. It may well be that the sexual ambiguity Johnny Depp brings to the lead role in Pirates of the Caribbean is one of the more accurate elements of the film, and that Roberts’ men noticed something similar in their solitary new commander. It probably disturbed them less than his aversion to wine.

  Roberts watched, detached and distant, as his men indulged themselves in Cayenne. A ship full of gold and a port full of whores - whatever activities they indulged in during the long periods between shore leave, for most pirates this was as good as it got. But, paradoxically, it was immediately after the capture of a rich prize that a pirate crew was at its most vulnerable. It was then that divisions emerged - between those who felt the time had come to retire and enjoy their riches and those who wished to continue. Trouble was soon brewing aboard the Royal Rover.

  At Cayenne the pirates seized a sloop from Rhode Island called the Princess captained by Edward Cane. Roberts now had grandiose ambitions. He decided to keep the Princess as a support vessel, or consort. He loaded it with ten cannon and several swivel guns, and renamed it the Good Fortune. He also planned to trade up, swapping the Royal Rover, which was leaky, for the larger and more powerful Sagrada Familia. The two ships would then raid shipping off Barbados for a few weeks, building up supplies and recruiting additional men, before heading to the East Indies. But then, one evening in a tavern in Cayenne, a group of Roberts’ men were overheard plotting mutiny.

  There were about forty involved in the conspiracy - a dangerous combination of forced men and more hardened pirates who felt they had pushed their luck for long enough. Their plan was to seize the Good Fortune and then make their escape. Roberts acted swiftly and decisively. The conspirators were clapped in irons and the three pirate ships - the Royal Rover, the Good Fortune and the Sagrada Familia - immediately set sail from Cayenne.

  Roberts wanted a location where he could confront the conspiracy free from distractions and hand out whatever punishments were deemed fit. He headed west for a group of bleak, deserted islands, known to the pirates as ‘The Triangle’, 30 miles to the west. Protected by high cliffs and swirling currents, they were more commonly known as the Devil’s Islands and would later be the location for the most notorious of the French penal settlements. Few ships attempted to land there, but Captain Cane, who was still being held captive, was familiar with the waters and was able to act as their pilot.

  The case was clear cut and a number of the men were immediately flogged. Many of the pirates wanted sterner punishments. ‘Some of them was for shooting us,‘ the carpenter Richard Luntly, who was among the accused, later recalled, ‘others not, and so they consented to put us away upon a desolate island.’ Luntly named the island where they were to be marooned as Esphealy, which was probably Eripice, the Indian name for one of the Devil’s Islands. But before this could happen they were saved by what must have seemed to the accused men a miraculous intervention, and what, for Roberts, was a catastrophe.

  Captain Cane of the Princess was the first in a long series of merchant captains who was suspiciously cooperative in his dealings with Roberts. This was partly born of fear. But there were many other reasons for men in his situation to collaborate. If they decided not to punish a captain, pirates could be very generous. One captain, captured by pirates in the Cape Verde Islands in 1722, recalled that that they kept a store of ‘linen, silk, spare hats, shoes, stockings, gold lace, and abundance of other goods’ to distribute as gifts to capt
ains they either knew or ‘took a present liking to’.

  It was gratifying to pirates’ egos and their sense of their own power to be able to distribute largesse in this way. But there were also practical reasons for developing relationships with merchant captains. Pirates often found themselves laden down with bulky items they could make no use of. Merchant captains had access to ports and markets. It didn’t take a genius to work out that they might be able to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement. It’s suspicious how often Bartholomew Roberts ran into the same captain more than once, and at times the exchange of goods was so extensive it felt more like trade than plunder. The authorities were always suspicious of captains seized by pirates and insisted on inspecting the holds of their ships, forcing them to hand over half of anything they had been given - even if their original cargo had been stolen. But there were substantial opportunities for profit for any captain who could slip into a quiet cove to unload. By this time the vast bulk of ships and their cargoes were also insured, which opened up further opportunities for fraud.

  Captain Cane was unusually helpful. ‘He complimented them at an odd rate,’ Johnson wrote, ‘telling them they were welcome to his sloop and cargo, and wished that the vessel had been larger and the loading richer for their sakes.’ Having piloted them to Devil’s Islands, he informed them that he had set out from Rhode Island in company with a brigantine, laden with provisions for the South American coast, which was due to arrive any day. It was at this moment, in the midst of the pirates’ deliberations over the punishment of the conspirators at Devil’s Islands, that the brigantine loomed into view.

  Roberts now revealed the flip side of the boldness which had served him so well at Pernambuco - an impulsiveness that could border on recklessness. Reluctant to entrust the mission to anyone else, he leapt into Cane’s sloop, now the Good Fortune, and set off in pursuit with forty to fifty men. Walter Kennedy, who by now had been elected Lieutenant, took command of those left behind. In his haste Roberts failed to check what supplies the sloop had on board. They quickly lost sight of the brigantine. Worse, contrary winds and currents swept them far to the west. After eight days they found themselves around 100 miles from Devil’s Islands and chronically short of food and water. They came to anchor and lowered a group of men in the long boat to row back and summon the others to their assistance. But this too proved to be rash. The following day the Good Fortune ran out of water and they realised they had no means of supplying themselves - despite the fact they were within sight of land - until either the boat or one of the other ships returned. With the sun blazing down they were soon raging with thirst. Eventually they were forced to tear up the floor of the cabin to build a raft to paddle ashore and fetch water.

  When finally the long boat returned it brought catastrophic news. The islands were empty. Kennedy and the entire crew had deserted with both ships and all of the gold. Roberts cursed and raved. But many of his men cast sour glances at him. To tear off in pursuit of a minor prize, leaving behind a fortune in treasure at a time when the crew was riven with dissension, was insanity. At a stroke all the prestige and authority he’d gained by the victory at Pernambuco was undone. They were now back in the same situation as Howel Davis immediately following the original mutiny aboard the Buck at Hispaniola just over a year before - a small crew in a sloop. They passed a resolution that never again would they allow an Irishman in their ranks. But it was feeble revenge on the man who was now speeding northwards with their gold.

  Kennedy had perhaps 140 men under his command - including the forty conspirators whose attempted mutiny at Cayenne had now been quietly forgotten. He kept the Royal Rover, handing the Sagrada Familia to Captain Cane as reward for his cooperation. It took some time to bring the company to any decision, Johnson wrote. ‘Some of them were for pursuing the old game, but the greater part of them seemed to have inclinations to turn from these evil courses, and get home privately ... Therefore they agreed to break up, and every man to shift for himself.’

  Kennedy and his men split up gradually over the course of the next month, during which time they took at least three ships. The first was a snow (a two-masted vessel, slightly larger than a sloop) called the Sea Nymph from New York which they seized just west of Barbados on 15 December. They took beef, pork, butter, flour and biscuits from it, and gave the captain tobacco, sugar, around ten slaves and even some guns in return. When they released him a few days later twenty of the pirates went with him, Kennedy telling the captain they were forced men that he was freeing. It was a description the authorities on Barbados, where they were landed a few days later, were apparently happy to accept.

  The second was the West River Merchant, bound for Virginia from London, a particularly easy prize since its captain, Luke Knott, was a Quaker and carried no arms aboard. When they released him eight of the pirates went with him, slipping ashore in Virginia in small boats before Knott docked. The last was the Eagle, another New York vessel bound for Barbados. It was after seizing this that the remainder of the crew divided. Kennedy kept the Eagle for himself and headed across the Atlantic towards Britain with around fifty men. A similar number - around half of them black - stayed with the Royal Rover and headed for the Danish colony of St Thomas just east of Puerto Rico, a notorious pirate haven. En route they dropped off six of their number on the small British island of Anguilla, north of Antigua.

  Having broken up into small groups, the deserters intended to melt quietly away. But melting quietly away was something pirates were peculiarly bad at. The fate of the eight men who slipped ashore in Virginia on Captain Knott’s ship was typical. ‘As soon as they came ashore their first care was to find out a Tavern, and ease themselves of some of their Golden Luggage,’ the Weekly Journal in London reported. ‘They quickly found a place to their minds, where, for some time they profusely treated all that came into their company.’ They took a shine to some of the servant girls and paid their masters £30 each to release them. ‘This extravagant way of living,’ the Weekly Journal continued, ‘soon discovered that they were not passengers from London, as they pretended, but rather pirates. Accordingly they were seized and committed.’

  At the time they seized Knott’s ship the pirates still had with them a handful of prisoners from the Sagrada Famlia. These were freed into Knott’s hands, and they now gave evidence against the captured pirates in Virginia. The authorities managed to recover ‘two thousand pounds sterling in silver and gold’ from the pirates, as well as ‘three Negro men and a boy’, who were described as part of the pirates’ booty. Of the eight arrested, six were defiant. They ‘appeared the most profligate wretches I ever heard of’, complained Alexander Spotswood, the governor of Virginia. ‘They behaved with the greatest impudence at the bar. They were no sooner taken from it than they vented their imprecations on their Judges and all concerned in the prosecution, and vowed if they were again at liberty they would spare none alive that should fall in to their hands.’ On the gallows, according to the Weekly Journal, ‘one of them called for a bottle of wine and taking a glass of it, drank damnation to the Governor and confusion to the colony, which the rest pledged’. The remaining two pirates showed what Spotswood called ‘a just abhorrence for their past crimes’ and were pardoned. Of those executed Spotswood ‘thought it necessary for the greater terror to hang up four of them in chains’. This meant their bodies were covered in tar and then placed in iron gibbets and left to rot at prominent places along the coast as a warning to other pirates.

  Captain Knott provided a rare example of a ship’s master who not only swiftly informed the authorities of their presence but also handed over the substantial quantities of sugar, tobacco and gold that the pirates had given him. He even forced his crew to give back individual gifts they’d received. Governor Spotswood was keen that Knott’s honesty be rewarded. ‘When masters of ships are so honest as to discover and yield up what is thus given them in lieu of their own privates losses, I cannot but recommend them to his Majesty’s favour that some c
onsideration may be had of their suffering and damages,’ he wrote to London. After due consideration the government awarded Knott £230 ‘as our gift and bounty’, making it clear this should not be seen as a precedent. The goods Knott handed over were worth £800. He’d also been forced to abandon his career in the merchant navy in the face of threats from the pirates to ‘torture him to death if ever he should fall into their hands’. It seems unlikely other merchant captains saw the government’s ‘bounty’ as any great incentive to honesty in the future.

  The men who went to St Thomas attempted to sell the Royal Rover to the Danish governor. Negotiations were proceeding when a detachment of British soldiers arrived, hunting down deserters, and the men were forced to flee, leaving behind substantial quantities of sugar, tobacco, iron and gunpowder on board the ship, as well as ‘fifteen negroes’. The pirates managed to escape. But the six men they had left on Anguilla were quickly captured, the authorities giving short shrift to their claim to be shipwrecked mariners. They were taken to Nevis, found guilty and hanged. One of them was black, which suggests that some, at least, of the Africans among Roberts’ crew were not regarded as slaves, at least by the authorities.

  Kennedy and the group in the Eagle washed up on the west coast of Scotland a few weeks later. Illiterate and unable to navigate, he had been aiming for Ireland but missed and had been ‘tossed about by hard storms of wind for several days’, according to Johnson. Coming ashore, they ‘alarmed the country wherever they came, drinking and roaring at such a rate that the people shut themselves up in their houses in some places, not daring to venture out among so many mad fellows. In other villages they treated the whole town, squandering their money away ... This expensive manner of living procured two of their drunken stragglers to be knocked on the head, they being found murdered in the road, and their money taken from them.’