The pirates’ interest in this region lay not in capturing ships full of slaves—there would have been few big merchants in the Americas willing to trade with them anyway—but the ships themselves, which were on their way to trading for slaves. Several merchants pointed out that what pirates really wanted were “good Sailing Shipps well furnished with Ammunition, Provisions, & Stores of all Kinds, fitt for long Voyages.”28 Many sailors believed that slave ships—which were big, sturdy, seaworthy, and usually well armed with a variety of cannon—made the best pirate ships, or so suggested would-be mutineer Robert Sparks in a careful, somewhat elliptical comment to his fellow sailors aboard the Abingdon in 1719: “he believed that he could make the Ship go much better than she did.” How would he do this, wondered John Whitcomb. Sparkes answered, “by Ripping off the upper Deck, and then she would be a Ship fit for Business.” Mate John Bicknor asked “what business he meant.” Sparkes replied: “she would make a good Pirate Ship, for he believed, that she would be stiffer and go better.” Others apparently agreed, for several slave ships were captured and converted, including the shipwrecked and recently rediscovered Whydah, captained by Black Sam Bellamy and named for the slaving port in Benin.29
To make matters worse, pirates, as we saw in the biography of Walter Kennedy in chapter 3, did not restrict themselves to attacking only the shipping on the west coast of Africa. They also plundered the slave-trading fortresses, the vital nodes of human transshipment, as a group of merchants explained in a petition to the Admiralty in 720: pirates “sometimes land at the chief Factories and carry off what they think fit.” Howell Davis and his crew attacked, plundered, and destroyed Gambia Castle in 1719, the fort at Sierra Leone soon after, and finally the Por-tuguese fort on the Princes Islands. These were serious, destructive, disruptive assaults, driven, as we have seen, by revenge but also by the knowledge that the Portuguese often paid for slaves and goods in gold.30
Davis and his successor, Bartholomew Roberts, were, with their crews of hundreds of pirates, the greatest plague to African merchants and their property. Between 1719 and 1722 they ranged up and down the African coast, “sinking, burning, and destroying such Goods and Vessels as then happen’d in [their] Way.” As they sailed from Senegambia to the Gold Coast and back, the region most vital to British merchants in the 1720s, they “struck a Pannick into the Traders,” observed naval surgeon John Atkins, who spent several months on the coast. Another writer estimated in 1720 that pirates had already done more than £100,000 worth of damage on the coast of Africa, and the greatest period of plunder in the region, over the next two years, was yet to come! In 1724 an anonymous writer to the Board of Trade explained that pirates had taken “near 100 sail of Ships in the space of two years” in the African slave trade. Things got so bad for traders that in 1720 the Royal African Company was forced to announce that gratuities would be paid to officers and men injured in defense of vessels attacked by pirates, and that larger sums would be paid to their families in the event of their death.31
Figure 11. Captain Bartholomew and eleven captured merchant vessels off the coast of West Africa; Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (London, 1724).
The extensive damage caused by pirates to the African trade and the role its merchants played in suppression are demonstrated in the surviving papers of Humphrey Morice of London, one of the leading slave traders of the time. Morice would eventually become a member of Parliament and, in 1727–29, governor of the Bank of England (from which he would swindle £29,000). Between 1716 and 1732 (the year of his death), Morice was personally responsible for the shipment of almost twenty thousand Africans to the Americas. His small fleet of slave-trading vessels made sixty-two voyages during these years. Drawing on letters from ship captains such as William Snelgrave (whom we met in chapter 5) and slave-trading officials such as James Phipps, chief factor at Cape Coast Castle, and an unnamed naval officer, Morice kept a close watch on the pirates. In 1718 he redirected one of his vessels to Maryland to avoid the freebooters swarming about Jamaica, but eventually the pirates captured three of his ships: the Bird Galley, captained by Snelgrave, the Heroine, captained by Richard Blincoe (both in 1719), and the Princess, captained by Thomas Wickstead (in 1722).32
Morice carefully recorded the damage being done by pirates, all the better with which to make a case for naval action by the British government. To summarize the dismal situation, he did an accounting for the five months between April and August 1719, bringing together three lists: “An Acct of Shipps taken by Pirates at Sierraleone on the Coast of Africa in April 1719,” which was based on information sent to him in a letter by Captain Snelgrave on April 30, 1719; a second list merely entitled “Taken by said Pirates on the Gold Coast Whidah & Calabar”; and finally “A List of Ships taken at Gamba.” Much to Morice’s dismay, more than five hundred pirates sailed in “squadrons” with captains Howell Davis, Oliver LaBouche, Thomas Cocklyn, Edward England, Robert Sample, and a man known only as Lane, taking thirty-four ships in this brief period, several of which, like the Robert & James, they burned. He also gathered information from Captain John Daggs, who wrote to him in February 1720, “I was Informed att Barbados that the Pirates had taken upon the Coast of Guinea 38 Saile of Ships.” Another captain, Jabez Biglow, relayed the boast (which was probably true) of Edward England’s crew that they had (by April 1719) captured fifty vessels. In drawing up his own list, Morice made it his business to know the name of each ship and master taken and, no less, to know the names of the pirate captains, their vessels, and their strength in terms of cannon and number of men.33
Such information would lead Morice to draft two petitions, one (undated) to the King on behalf of “Planters Merch[an]ts & Traders concernd in the West Indies,” the other “The Memoriall of the Merchants of London Trading to Africa humbly Offered to the Rt. Hon.ble The Lords Commissioners for Executing the Office of Lord High Admirall of Great Brittaine &c.,” during the early months of 1720. In the former, Morice warned that pirates “are so encreased in number that they are become dangerous to your Majesties plantations as well as destructive to the navigation of the West Indies.” In the latter he expressed fear that pirates might in 1720 “do as much mischiefe as the others did the last year,” when he personally lost two vessels. In both petitions Morice argued for naval force, and indeed he did not merely argue. He used political connections (with, for example, MP John Jennings) to help dispatch men-of-war to the African coast to protect the slave trade against the “terrour of ye Pirates.” New tours began in 1719 and continued for several years.34
Merchants from Bristol, Liverpool, London, and many other British Atlantic ports, including those of the recently revitalized (though still declining) Royal African Company, formed a chorus around Morice, protesting their losses and demanding that Parliament take action to protect their trade, the plantation system, and the empire as a whole. Their cries fell on sympathetic ears. When two groups of merchants petitioned Parliament for relief in February 1721, at the very peak of Roberts’s depredations, the House of Commons ordered an immediate drafting of another bill for the suppression of piracy, which, with Prime Minister Robert Walpole’s assistance, was quickly passed.35
That same month a naval squadron under the leadership of Captain Challoner Ogle set sail for the African coast. (One crew member aboard one of the ships, the Weymouth, was Alexander Selkirk, the once-marooned sailor who was the prototype of Robinson Crusoe and who died on the voyage.) The convoy, led by the Swallow, arrived in Sierra Leone in April and Cape Coast Castle in June and began to patrol the coast. By January 1722 the Weymouth was disabled by sickness, but the Swallow eventually found and engaged the ships of Roberts, the first on February 5 and the second and larger of the two, on February 10. Many of the pirates were drunk, and in any case they were no match for naval artillery. After grapeshot killed Roberts and a cannonball blew away his ship’s mainmast, rendering it incapable of any offensive or defensiv
e maneuver, the fight was over. The pirates took heavy casualties, a few escaped into the jungle, a select few were hanged aboard the Weymouth (to send a message), and a majority (more than 250) were captured and ordered to stand trial, if that’s what the proceedings at Cape Coast Castle can be called. The pirates were held in the dungeons where enslaved Africans were customarily chained, marked with burning irons, fed, and held for the arriving slave ships. The pirates were tried within Cape Coast Castle’s brick walls, which were fourteen feet thick and guarded by seventy-four mounted cannons, and fifty-two of them were executed and their chained corpses distributed along the coast in order to maximize the terror: nine at Cape Coast, four on the Windward Coast, two each at Acera, Calabar, and Whydah, and one at Winnebah. Another forty were sentenced to slavery, to work for the Royal African Company on ships or in gold mines; all of them apparently died in a matter of months. After his triumphant return to London, Challoner Ogle became, in May 1723, the first naval captain to be knighted for his actions against pirates. He was honored by King George I, whom Roberts and his fellow pirates had humorously ridiculed as “the turnip man.”36
The defeat of Roberts and the subsequent eradication of piracy off the coast of Africa represented a turning point in the slave trade and even in the larger history of capitalism. Piracy and the slave trade had been linked for centuries, especially in the Mediterranean, where freebooters were a main source in supplying labor. Now pirates had interfered with the trade, and at a crucial moment. The end of the War of Spanish Succession brought a rich and shiny prize for British merchants: the Asiento, which gave these traders the legal right to ship forty-eight hundred slaves a year, and the illegal right to ship many more, to Spanish America through the South Sea Company. This incentive, coupled with the final deregulation of the African slave trade in 1712, when the chartered Royal African Company lost its battle against the free traders who had already begun to supply most of the slaves to American plantations, dramatically increased the importance of the slave trade in the eyes of British merchants and the state.37
Pirates now had to be exterminated for the new trade to flourish, a point made by William Snelgrave, who published A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade, dedicated to “the Merchants of London, trading to the Coast of Guinea.” He divided the book into three sections, providing for his readers a “History of the late Conquest of the Kingdom of Whidaw by the King of Dahomè”; an account of the business practices and statistics of the slave trade; and “A Relation of the Author’s being taken by Pirates” and the dangers posed thereby. But by the time Snelgrave published his book in 1734, piracy was dead, defeated by the terror of hanging and enhanced naval patrols, though occasionally the corpse would twitch with a mutiny here, an act of piracy there. In the immediate aftermath of the suppression of piracy, Britain consolidated its dominance on the west coast of Africa. As James A. Rawley has written, “In the decade of the 1730s England had become the supreme slaving nation in the Atlantic world, a standing she occupied until 1807.” The slaves embarked on the trade had reached low points in 1720, 1721, and 1722, the years of greatest pirate activity, and surged upward immediately after their suppression, from 24,780 in 1720 to 47,030 in 1725 to a high of 49,130 in 1729. If the plantation capital of the Caribbean, allied with the merchant capital of the metropolis, killed the first generation of pirates—the buccaneers of the 1670s—and if the capital of the East India Company killed the pirates of the 1690s, when the company’s ships were hothouses of mutiny and rebellion, it was the African slave-trading capital that killed the pirates of the early eighteenth century. Pirates had ruptured the Middle Passage, and this would not be tolerated. By 1726 the maritime state had removed a major obstacle to the accumulation of capital in its ever-growing Atlantic system.38
The image of the pirate and the military-legal campaign against them intersected in the courtroom and on the gallows, where members of Roberts’s crew and hundreds of other pirates met their end. As we saw in chapter 1, and indeed throughout the book, executions of pirates were big events, and none was bigger than the execution of the most successful gang of pirates in recent memory. At this hanging as at others, multitudes of spectators gathered to hear official addresses, often a passionate sermon, and the last words of the condemned and to observe the villain’s end, his “awry Neck” and “Wet Pair of Breeches.”39 The condemned pirate was meant to be awestruck, as a minister explained: “fearfulness and horror should overwhelm him; a dreadful sound should be in his ears of the Destroyer coming on him; Trouble and anguish shall make him afraid.” He was to be silent, sober and sad, grave and serious, and consumed by sorrow and contrition. The place of execution afforded one last opportunity for the pirate to be orderly, to lament his transgression of the disciplinary institutions of church, family, and labor, and to prostrate himself before all authorities: God, minister, family, nation, and Crown. Some pirates complied, affirming the social order that they had, in their beastly criminality, undermined.40
Yet many pirates, as we have seen, refused to play the game; recall the pirates in Virginia who used the occasion of their hanging in 1720 to taunt the governor, pirates such as William Fly who in 1726 vented his rage against ship captains. A pirate facing execution in London in 1715, wrote the Reverend Paul Lorrain, rejected all admonitions and offered to kick the minister “downstairs.” This fellow seemed to have “no Sense nor Principles of any Religion whatsoever, that could restrain him from Evil: And tho’ one wou’d have thought he should have grown more rational and considerate at the approach of Death, yet he still retain’d his harden’d Temper and Irreligious and Impious Humour, who would neither hear the Word of GOD, nor make confession of, nor indeed seem’d in the least Sorry for his Sins.” These pirates continued to oppose the authorities and attack the social order.41 The impenitent and notorious were often hanged in chains, made “to stand like Marks or Fatal Rocks and Sands, to warn others from the same Shipwreck and ruin for the Future.” The disorderly body that had allowed its lusts to rule and its temper to rage was put on display as a dead animal’s carcass, now infused with symbolic power, carefully placed “within the Flux and Reflux of the Sea.”42
Cotton Mather summed up the situation in 1726. Pirates, he said, were “Guilty of all Sins.” Their detestable way of living “banished every Social Vertue.” Having escaped the disciplinary effects of church, family, and labor, the pirate was denounced as bereft of wisdom and reason, possessed by madness, rage, temper, drink, and lust, behaving like a wild beast, and sowing massive disorder on distant but strategically important seas, especially the west coast of Africa. Stripped of all human characteristics, the pirate was now a wild fragment of nature that could be tamed only by death. According to the King’s attorney, the pirate “can claim the protection of no Prince, the privilege of no Country, the benefit of no Law; he is denied common humanity and the very rights of Nature.” Another added that pirates “have no country, but by their Guilt, separate themselves, renouncing the benefit of all lawful Society.” The pirate’s enemies had slowly but thoroughly disconnected him from the social order, showing him to be the enemy of all individuals, property owners, the colony, the empire, the King, the British nation, the world of nations, and all mankind. It remained for the pirate to be “hanged like a dog” and his corpse put on public display so that everyone could learn the lessons of property and order.43
Did the hanging work? It is impossible to be sure, but Admiral Edward Vernon, stationed in the West Indies, certainly thought so. In 1720 he wrote that “the fear of a Halter may effect what the fear of the Lord is ineffectual for among such abandoned Wretches.” Five months later he added that the hanging of three pirates in Jamaica “has already made a great alteration in the behaviour of the Sea fareing People, who are become very Civill, and there has not been one Riot among them since which was their daily practice before.” Another month later he observed, “These punishments have made a Wonderful reformation here.” At the same time the pun
ishments incited more violence and intensified the dialectic of terror. As more and more pirates were hanged, and as the likelihood of death for anyone who went “upon the account” increased, pirates responded by intensifying their commitment to each other, “one and all.” And they did so with a laugh.44
8. “Defiance of Death Itself”
I BEGIN THE FINAL CHAPTER with tales of apocalypse, two stories told by men who had been captured by pirates. Samuel Cary, commander and probably the owner of a “rich ship” named the Samuel, which sailed out of London, gave the first account to an editor at the Boston News-Letter. His vessel had carried a cargo worth £8,000–9,000 until taken on July 13, 1720, off the coast of Newfoundland by the pirate crew of Black Bart Roberts. Captain Richard Hawkins told the second story, an “account of the Pirates in America,” to a periodical called The Political State of Great Britain, recounting his capture in the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean on March 22, 1724, by Francis Spriggs and his gang of freebooters. Hawkins’s cargo (logwood from Central America) was less lucrative, but his story was no less dramatic.
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