Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker

  The nation-state, as terrorist, was more than happy to oblige in making pirate lives short, and indeed the 1726 confrontation between William Fly and Cotton Mather in Boston was only one scene in a ten-year drama. The Atlantic empires, led by Britain, organized an international campaign of terror to eradicate piracy, using the gallows in highly public displays of power. Between 1716 and 1726 rulers hanged pirates in London; Edinburgh; Saint Michael’s, the Azores; Cape Coast Castle, Africa; Salvador, Brazil; Curaçao; Antigua; Saint Kitts; Martinique; Kingston and Port Royal, Jamaica; the Bahama Islands; Bermuda; Charleston, South Carolina; Williamsburg, Virginia; New York; Providence, Rhode Island; and even Boston itself, where several pirates had already been executed in recent years. In all of these places authorities staged spectacular executions of those who had committed banditry by sea. Fly’s hanging was one of the last of these grisly scenes.

  Almost every hanging of pirates around the Atlantic had some of the drama created by Fly, his fellow pirates, and Mather. The penitents, like Cole, Greenville, and Condick, usually hoping for pardons, said what the authorities wanted them to say, and perhaps they meant it: do not use oaths; do not curse; do not take the Lord’s name in vain; do not sing bawdy songs; do not gamble; do not visit the house of the harlot; do not profane the Sabbath; do not give in to uncleanness and lust; do not be greedy. Instead, obey all authorities; respect your parents; “pay the just Deference to the Rulers”; “Stay in your Place & Station Contentedly.” A very few pirates did win pardons, but most, even the obedient and remorseful ones, did not.16

  But what stands out about these hangings—what certainly stood out to the authorities at the time—was the amount of disorder and resistance they created. In 1717 an unruly mob in Kingston, Jamaica, rescued one pirate from the gallows. Royal authorities all around the Atlantic feared the same event on other occasions and beefed up their military guard as protection against it. Many pirates, like Fly, refused their prescribed roles and used the occasion for one last act of subversion. An endless train of pirates walked defiantly to the gallows and taunted the higher powers when they got there. Facing the steps and the rope in the Bahamas in 1718, pirate Thomas Morris expressed a simple wish: to have been “a greater Plague to these Islands.” John Gow, who was a very strong man, broke the gallows rope at his hanging in 1726. He went to “ascend the ladder a second time, which he did with very little concern, dying with the same brutal ferocity which animated all his actions while alive.”17

  When Woodes Rogers, governor, captain general, and vice-admiralty judge of the Bahama Islands, prepared for a mass hanging of pirates in Providence in December 1718, he arranged to fly the infamous freebooter flag above the gallows, so that its grinning skull would look down on the place of execution. Fearful of a riot by the assembled crowd—many of whom had been pirates themselves—and, worse, of a rescue of the malefactors, Rogers deployed one hundred soldiers to escort Daniel Macarty and seven others to the gallows. They would be hanged for “Mutiny, Felony, Piracy.” One after another, the pirates made defiant speeches, “crying up a Pyrate’s Life to be the only Life for a Man of any Spirit.” Macarty spoke of “the time when there was many brave fellows on the Island that would not suffer him to dye like a dog.” But he acknowledged to the crowd that presently there was “too much power over their heads” for anyone to “attempt any Thing in his Favour.” After drinks, toasts, uncomplimentary reflections on the government, and one reprieve, the order was given to haul away the butts holding up the gallows, whereupon “the stage fell and the Eight swang off.”18

  In 1720, when eight members of the crew of Bartholomew Roberts were captured and tried in Virginia, they were rowdy and outrageous; they “behaved themselves with the greatest impudence at the Bar.” As soon as their trial was over, “they vented their imprecations on their Judges and all concerned in their prosecution, and vow’d if they were again at Liberty they would spare none alive that should fall into their hands.” They went to their deaths bidding defiance to mercy. As one observer explained, “They died as they lived, not showing any Sign of Repentance.” Indeed, “When they came to the Place of Execution one of them called for a Bottle of Wine, and taking a glass of it, he drank Damnation to the Governour and Confusion to the Colony, which the rest pledged.” The governor, Alexander Spotswood, was not amused by either the courtroom bluster or the gallows toast. He wrote, matter-of-factly, to another royal official: “I thought it necessary for the greater Terrour to hang up four of them in chains.”19

  The drama played out again and again. When the fifty-two members of Roberts’s crew were hanged at Cape Coast Castle in 1722 before a concourse of Europeans and Africans, a group of pirates explained: “They were poor rogues, and so must be hanged while others, no less guilty in another Way, escaped.” They referred to the wealthy rogues who bilked sailors of their rightful wages and proper food and thereby turned many of them toward piracy. When it came time to execute the “old” pirates Magnes, Sympson, Sutton, Ashplant, and Hardy, “none of them, it was observed, appeared the least dejected.” Like Fly, they cursed the court and “walk’d to the Gallows without a Tear.” Hardy paused to complain that “he had seen many a Man hang’d, but this Way of the Hands being ty’d behind them, he was a Stranger to, and never saw before in his Life.” He had the temerity—or the humor—to suggest that the authorities did not even know how to carry out a proper execution!20 Here, as in other settings, the authorities displayed the Jolly Roger at the place of execution. Sail under it, they said, and you will die under it. And even the killing was not terror enough: the corpses of the pirates, like that of William Fly, were turned into a “Profitable and Serviceable Spectacle.” In this case they were distributed up and down the African coast to disseminate the message as broadly as possible.21

  Terror bred counterterror—tit for tat. In 1717, after Boston’s rulers hanged eight members of Black Sam Bellamy’s crew, pirates who were still at sea vowed to “kill every body they took belonging to New England.” Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard, and his crew burned a captured ship “because she belonged to Boston alledging the People of Boston had hanged some of the pirates.”22 When Bartholomew Roberts and his men learned that the governor and council of Nevis had executed some pirates in 1720, they were so outraged that they sailed into Basseterre’s harbor, set several vessels on fire, and offered a big bounty to anyone who would deliver the responsible officials to their clutches so that justice could be served. They made the same threat to avenge the pirates who had taunted Governor Spotswood at their hanging in Virginia. They made good on such bluster when they happened to take a French vessel carrying the governor of Martinique, who had also hanged some members of “the brotherhood.” Roberts took revenge by hanging the poor governor from his own yardarm. Thus did the pirates practice terror against the state terrorists. It was a war of nerves—one hanging for another—and constituted a cycle of violence.23

  But in truth pirates had practiced terror from the beginning, before the authorities had hanged any of them. They had their own reasons, and their own methods. Piracy was predicated on terror, as all contemporaries of freebooting well understood. Captain Charles Johnson, who knew this generation of pirates (some of them individually) and chronicled their exploits in vivid detail, called them “the Terror of the trading Part of the World.” Cotton Mather called them “Sea-Monsters who have been the Terror of them that haunt the sea.” Pirates practiced terror against those who organized the trade, and against those who carried it out. It all began when a pirate ship approached a prospective prize and raised the primary instrument of terror, the Jolly Roger, whose message was unmistakable: surrender or die.24

  Pirates used terror for several reasons: to avoid fighting; to force disclosure of information about where booty was hidden; and to punish ship captains. The first point to be emphasized is that pirates did not want to fight, no matter how bloodthirsty their image was in their own day and in ours. As Stanley Richards has written, “It was their am
bition to acquire plunder and live to enjoy the pleasures that it brought them. A battle might deprive them of that ease of life. Hence on the chance occasion when they had to go into action against another ship, it was looked upon by them as almost a repulsive necessity. They were after booty, not blood.”25

  They would nonetheless use the threat of violence to get the booty. The primary idea was to intimidate the crew of the ship under attack so that they would not defend their vessel. The tactic worked, as numerous merchant ship captains explained: “up goe the Pirate Colours, at sight whereof our men will defend their ship no longer,” wrote one. The raising of Jolly Roger “so much terrifyed” the crew of the Eagle that “the men not only refused to fight themselves but also hindered the officers” as they tried to do their “Duty of Defending” the ship. The frightened crew finally “ran into the hold” to hide. When Edward Low and his men sailed into Saint Michael’s, Azores, “He threaten’d all with present Death who resisted, which struck such a Terror to them, that they yielded themselves up a Prey to the Villains, without firing a Gun.” Why did crews refuse to defend their ships? They knew that if they did resist and were then overpowered, the pirates would probably torture them, to teach them—and other sailors—a lesson. Harsh treatment of those who resist, announced the Boston News-Letter in June 1718, “so intimidates our Sailors that they refuse to fight when the Pirates attack them.” After all, the pirates would ask: why are you risking your life to protect the property of merchants and ship captains who treat you so poorly?26

  Pirates also used violence to force prisoners, especially ship captains, to disclose the whereabouts of loot, to “confess what money was on board.” Pirates told one captain that they would “throw him over board with a double headed Shot about his neck” if he concealed any money. They told another, if we catch you in “one Lye, we’ll Damn you and your Vessel also.” Some tried to hide valuables and got caught. Roberts and his crew brought the chief mate of a captured vessel “to the Gear, and whipt him within an Inch of his Life, by reason he had conceal’d two Gold Rings in his Pocket.” In this practice of violence, pirates were no different from naval or privateering ships, who used the same methods. Indeed, a portion of pirate terror was the standard issue of war making, which pirates undertook without the approval of any nation-state.27

  Pirates also practiced violence against the prize ship’s cargo, destroying massive amounts of property in the most furious and wanton ways, as once-captured ship captains never grew tired of recounting. They descended into the holds of ships like “a Parcel of Furies,” slashing boxes and bales of goods with their cutlasses, throwing valuable goods overboard, and laughing uproariously as they did so. They also destroyed a large number of ships, cutting away their masts, setting them afire, and sinking them, partly because they did not want news of their presence to spread from ship to ship to shore, but also because they wanted to destroy the property of merchants and ship captains they considered their enemies. They practiced indirect terror against the owners of mercantile property.28

  The pirates’ penchant for terror even seems to have had an intimidating effect on the officers and sailors of the British Royal Navy. From 1717 onward colonial officials and merchants voiced a chorus of complaints that His Majesty’s Ships seemed none too eager to engage the freebooters who were so dramatically disrupting trade. Merchants especially grumbled that naval vessels would rather trade than fight pirates. In Jamaica, “the Captains of the Men of War station[ed] there [were] unwilling to hazard the King’s Ships against such desperate Fellows, as the Pirates are reported to be.” Governor Woodes Rogers of the Bahamas and Governor Archibald Hamilton and the assembly of Antigua complained that Captain Whitney of HMS Rose was told to go after Roberts and his consorts but refused to do so. Captain Cornwall of HMS Sheerness was accused of “neglecting or refusing to go in quest of other pirates.” Captain Upton of HMS London was sent to the Indian Ocean to fight pirates, but once he encountered Edward England, he chose to sail away. Captain Thomas Matthews of HMS Lion apparently preferred illegal trading to the more dangerous duty of fighting. He was accused of collaborating and exchanging goods with pirates at Madagascar. Pirate Captain Edward Taylor saw the pattern and mocked the Royal Navy in a short speech to his crew in 1723: “Damne my Blood God forgive me for swearing here’s a Squadron of Men of War sent to look after us but they don’t much care for the seeing of us they are more upon the trading account but however lets stand by one another and take Care of ourselves.”29

  How did this dialectic of violence between pirates and the nation-state develop? What were its causes? How did piracy itself erupt in 1716? And how did it decline after 1726? Why did pirates express such rage—and seek such vengeance—against ship captains and royal officials? And why did they “cry up a Pyrate’s Life to be the only Life for a Man of any Spirit”?

  These fundamental questions are addressed in the pages that follow as we explore the social and cultural history of early-eighteenth-century pirates, those outlaws who made the last great moment in the golden age of piracy. We will see that the early-eighteenth-century pirate ship was a world turned upside down, made so by the articles of agreement that established the rules and customs of the pirates’ alternative social order. Pirates “distributed justice,” elected their officers, divided their loot equally, and established a different discipline. They limited the authority of the captain, resisted many of the practices of capitalist merchant shipping industry, and maintained a multicultural, multiracial, and multinational social order. They demonstrated quite clearly—and subversively—that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy.

  For, as it happened, there were not merely two kinds of terror, the terror of the gallows and the terror of the Jolly Roger, but three. To understand William Fly and his dispute with the ministers of Boston, to understand the gallows drama repeated in one Atlantic port after another, and, most important, to understand the very explosion of piracy in the eighteenth century, we must attend to what Fly said of “Bad Usage,” of how his captain and mate used and abused him and his brother tars, treating them “barbarously,” as if they were “dogs.” He was talking about the violent disciplinary regime of the eighteenth-century deep-sea sailing ship, the ordinary and pervasive violence of labor discipline as practiced by the ship captain as he moved the commodities that were the lifeblood of the capitalist world economy. Even though there is no surviving evidence to show exactly what Captain Green did to Fly and the other sailors aboard the Elizabeth to produce the rage, the mutiny, the murder, and the decision to turn pirate, it is not hard to imagine. The High Court of Admiralty records for this period are replete with bloody accounts of lashings, tortures, and killings.30 Fly was talking about the ship captain as terrorist.

  The 1726 encounter between Fly and Mather in Boston was unusually combative, but it was not uncommon. Indeed, in this era Fly and others like him were the “Villains of all Nations.” Made up of all nations, and attacking the commerce of the world without respect for nation or property, pirates produced a strange and fascinating drama, an eighteenth-century morality play full of overlarge characters, complicated plots, twists and turns, and even unexpected outcomes. One such outcome occurred when Fly won his argument with Mather. As it happened, the “stupid” and “impenitent” pirate was able to convince the self-righteous minister of at least one primary cause of piracy. During his execution sermon, Mather made it a point to address the ship captains in the crowd, telling them in no uncertain terms that they must hereafter avoid being “too like the Devil in their Barbarous Usage of the Men that are under them and lay them under Temptations to do Desperate Things.”31

  2. The Political Arithmetic of Piracy

  THE OUTBURST OF PIRACY following the War of Spanish Succession (1702–13) took no one by surprise. A group of Virginia merchants, for instance, wrote to the Admiralty as early as 1713, setting forth “the apprehensions they have of Pyrates molesti
ng their trade in the time of Peace.” Edmund Dummer, a merchant responsible for the mail packet trade to the West Indies, believed that the “cursed trade” of privateering would in times of peace “breed so many pirates that ... we shall be in more danger from them than we are now from the enemy,” France and Spain. What were the circumstances that made such an outburst not only likely but also predictable? More specifically, how did these circumstances—the organization and growth of the Atlantic economy—appear to the sailor who did its labor and who might or might not make the fateful decision to “go upon the account”? What would an experienced deep-sea sailor have known of the world in 1716, the moment when piracy would erupt on a massive scale? And once it erupted, would it indeed cause more danger to English shipping than had France and Spain in wartime? To answer these questions we will survey what someone in the early eighteenth century might have called the political arithmetic of economic life—the global realities of empire, commerce, war, and peace, all of which depended in some important measure on the ebbs and flows of the maritime labor market and the work of sailors in the deep-sea trades. Out of this complex array of forces would climb the pirate, with a dagger between his teeth.1

  The sailor knew that most of the lands surrounding the Atlantic, and most of the port cities to which he sailed, belonged to five nations that had become imperial powers—Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and England. The Spanish and the Portuguese had claimed large parts of the New World in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and these lands were now home to two-thirds of the roughly 1.3 million Europeans and 1 million people of African descent who in 1700 lived alongside uncounted millions of Native Americans. The Dutch, who had few people but many ships, had become masters of the seas in the seventeenth century. The new challengers for global economic power were the French and the English, both of whom came relatively late to imperial adventure but prospered. In Spain colonial commerce and things maritime were handled by the House of Trade and the Council of the Indies; in Portugal, by the Overseas Council; in the Netherlands, by the Dutch West India Company; in France, by the Ministry of Marine Affairs; and in England, by the Privy Council, the Board of Trade, and the Council of Trade and Plantations. Operating from the great port cities of Seville, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and London, and linking the peoples, cultures, and economies of Europe and Africa to the Americas, all managed “factories-at-a-distance” through seafaring means. The sailor’s labor was essential to the task.2