Villains of All Nations

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by Marcus Rediker


  JUDGE. The Devil you will.—Why then, gentlemen of the Jury, I think we have nothing to do but to proceed to Judgment.

  ATTORN. GEN. Right, my Lord; for if the Fellow should be suffer’d to speak, he may clear himself, and that’s an Affront to the Court.

  PRIS. Pray, my Lord, I hope your Lordship will consider—

  JUDGE. Consider!—How dare you talk of considering? —Sirrah, Sirrah, I never consider’d in all my Life. —I’ll make it Treason to consider.

  PRIS. But, I hope, your Lordship will hear some reason.

  JUDGE. D’ye hear how the Scoundrel prates?—What have we to do with Reason?—I’d have you to know, Raskal, we don’t sit here to hear Reason;—we go according to Law.—Is our dinner ready?

  ATTORN. GEN. Yes, my Lord.

  JUDGE. Then heark’ee, you Raskal at the Bar; hear me, Sirrah, hear me.—You must suffer for three Reasons: First, because it is not fit I should sit here as Judge, and no Body be hang’d. —Secondly, you must be hang’d, because you have a damn’d hanging look. —And thirdly, you must be hang’d because I am hungry; for know, Sirrah, that ’tis a Custom, that whenever the Judge’s Dinner is ready before the Tryal is over, the Prisoner is to be hang’d of Course. —There’s law for you, ye Dog.—So take him away Gaoler.

  The scene no doubt dissolves into hilarity, which is, of course, the point of the gallows humor; the pirates imagined their own deaths and found comedy in it, or, to put the same point another way, they displayed the creative stubbornness of life in the face of extinction. They were not pondering an abstract proposition. Show trials of sea robbers had been taking place with increasing frequency since 1717, and by 1722 scores of those who sailed under the black flag had already been “launched into eternity.” Their decaying bodies adorned the entrances to harbors around the Atlantic. We do not know if any of the members of Anstis’s crew had attended or actually been prosecuted in any of these earlier trials, but at the very least we know that the stories of the trials had gotten around. And besides, the pirates, as seamen, would have had courtroom experience as defendants or witnesses, in disputes over wages, desertion, salvage, or mutiny. In any case, the pirates knew exactly what they wished to parody: first and foremost their object was the English legal system—the judge, the attorney, the law itself, and the class system they represented. But the pirates also reserved a few humorous, profane words for others: sober people, God, nation, even themselves.

  The main purpose of the play was to expose—and satirize—England’s pride, its legal system, the embodiment and protector of liberty, which is shown by the pirates to be a machinery of death; hanging is mentioned a dozen times in a short dialogue. The fundamental class relationship is between the haughty, pretentious judge and the poor, honest sailor who stands accused of piracy. The judge is powerful enough to dispense with a trial altogether, arrogant enough to refuse to listen to reason, arbitrary enough to hang someone for no good cause, and gluttonous enough to put his next meal above someone’s life. The poor pirate is stripped of his voice, as the attorney general explains: “Right, my Lord; for if the Fellow should be suffer’d to speak, he may clear himself, and that’s an Affront to the Court.” The hanging is therefore a foregone conclusion, a product of unreason and vulgar class bias. The judge solemnly intones: “it is not fit I should sit here as Judge, and no Body be hang’d.” That is the purpose of the system, “So take him away Gaoler.” The roles have been reversed, and the world has turned topsy-turvy. The judge is now the criminal.

  The actors also make fun of the sober, straight-laced, and respectable type who drinks only “small-beer” and thereby brings great suspicion on himself in pirate society. They play with the popular saying about class fate: “He that’s born to hang need fear no drowning.” They poke fun at the pirate who seems to think that devotion to religion and nation can get him justice. With foolish hope, he asks to be tried “By G– and my Country.” They ridicule the supplicant, calling him “a sad sad dog.” But they go even further, showing that they know what they will do should they find themselves in court one day. They will, one after another, do as the poor prisoner does here; that is, claim to be “forced men.” George Bradley “forced me, an’t please your Honour.” And most of them will be hanged anyway.

  As indeed they were. A considerable number of the men on the island imagined their deaths correctly. Six members of Anstis’s crew, including the one-handed leader John Fenn, were hanged at Antigua in May 1723. An unknown number, perhaps as many as a dozen, were executed in Curaçao in the same month and year. And in the following month, two more were “tuck’d up immediately” in Bermuda. One of these, it seems, was George Bradley, the very man who played the callous judge in the pirate skit and dished out death himself, no doubt to the roaring, ribald laughter of his fellows. One wonders if he thought of this and took strength from it as he stood on the gallows of Bermuda in June 1723. He would have known that his corpse would be hanged in chains in the harbor as a warning to sailors. He would have known that he would, in the end, be “set a Sun-drying like a Scare-crow.”12

  Pirates also used real courtrooms to express humor about their deadly situation. Job Bayley, facing death for piracy in a Charleston courtroom in 1718, was asked by the attorney general of South Carolina why he and his fellow freebooters fought Colonel William Rhett and the vessels sent by the government against them. Bayley probably brought a roar of laughter from those attending the trial when he answered, “We thought it had been a pirate.” The judge was not amused and ordered him hanged by the neck until “dead, dead, dead.”13

  Another pirate who had a sense of humor was John Walden. He sailed with Black Bart Roberts and was called “Miss Nanny” by his fellow pirates—“ironically it’s assumed from the Hardness of his Temper.” In 1722, when they captured a ship off the coast of West Africa and a gang of pirates began to weigh anchor, Walden promptly cut the cable and asked, why bother “straining in hot weather”? Turning to the captain of the merchant ship, Walden explained: “there are more Anchors at London, and besides, your ship is to be burnt.” As it happened, the “bold and daring” Walden lost a leg to a cannonball during the engagement, in which he and his comrades were captured. He knew he was to be hanged, but he was nonetheless “undaunted” during his trial, more concerned to rest the stump of his leg than to answer the court’s questions or defend himself. When the judge asked him what he would have done had the man-of-war proven to be an easily captured merchant ship, Walden answered with defiant humor, “I don’t know what I would have done.” He was hanged with fifty-one others.14

  Perhaps the best example of the profane, seditious, and comical attitude of pirates toward the British government, and perhaps all governments, came in 1721 when Philip Lyne and his rather rugged crew captured a ship with a master out of Boston. As they plundered the vessel, the freebooters came across copies of official documents, correspondence involving the Lords of the Admiralty. They immediately put the papers to good use: “the pyrates wip’d their backsides” with them, adding, for contemptuous good measure, “that they were the Lords of the Sea.”15

  Pirates poked fun not only at the government but also at the practices of the market and commercial society, as demonstrated by a different sort of drama that Captain George Lowther and his crew enacted in June 1721. When they encountered a French ship off the western end of Hispaniola, they promptly disguised their own vessel, putting away the Jolly Roger, their cutlasses and pistols, and sending a swarm of pirates belowdecks—in short, doing everything they could to make the appearance of a working merchant ship. Concealing their identities (and their weapons), they sent a party aboard the French ship, as was customary, to greet and fraternize, exchange news, and conduct business. John Massey, dressed finely as a merchant, led the way. He proceeded to stroll around the decks of the French ship, inspecting the brandy, the wine, the chintz cloth, and other cargo. He “ask’d the price of one Thing and then another, bidding Money for the greatest part of the Cargo.” Ha
ving taken stock of the ship and decided exactly what he wanted, he turned to the French captain and “whispered a Secret” in his ear: “they must have it all without Money.” The unsuspecting French captain must have been stunned but “presently understood his Meaning,” probably at the very moment when the other pirates pulled out their guns to enforce the suggested terms of trade. The poor captain “unwillingly agreed to the Bargain.” The pirates, probably doubled over with laughter, proceeded to haul away thirty casks of brandy, five hogsheads of wine, textiles, and “other valuable goods.” Thinking that the captain had perhaps been treated unfairly, Lowther made a parting gesture: he “generously return’d five Pounds back to the French Master for his Civilities.” To merchants and captains, the humor was cruel, but to pirates, who as common seamen had been frequently abused by these figures of power, it was a humorous moment of revenge.16

  It has long been a commonplace among historians that nearly all pirates managed to escape their crimes with their booty and their lives.17 Although this may have been true for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when England, France, and the Netherlands supported or tolerated piratical attacks against Spain, it is false for the period under study here, when the numbers of pirates hanged were extraordinary by any measure. In a time when royal mercy and pardons in England routinely commuted death penalties to lesser sentences, especially one or another form of bound labor (after the Transportation Act of 1718), pirates rarely had their sentences lessened and instead were hanged in huge numbers and high percentages.18 Between 1716 and 1726, no fewer than 418 were hanged, and in truth the actual number was probably one-third to one-half higher. This means that roughly one in every ten pirates came to an end on the gallows, a greater portion than many other groups of capital convicts, and vastly greater than what most historians have long believed. When we add the many hundreds of pirates who died in battle, in prison, by suicide, by disease, or by accident, it would seem that at least one in four died or was killed, and the number may have been as high as one in two. Premature death was therefore the pirate’s lot; his was most decidedly not a romantic occupation. Cotton Mather wrote that “most [pirates] seemed to have no Thought of Returning from their Wicked Courses.” Governor Walter Hamilton of Antigua saw that many pirates “seem’d resolved to live and dye by their Calling, or for it, as their Fate is likely to be.” Captain Charles Johnson explained that most pirates did not live long enough to enjoy whatever riches they may have plundered. The state’s campaign of extermination against them would have been visible to the eye of any seaman as he sailed into almost any port city during these years: in a prominent place dangled a gibbeted corpse of one who had sailed under the black flag, crows picking at the rotting flesh and bleaching bones.19

  The omnipresence of death, the apocalyptic impulse, the heterodox belief, the gallows humor, and the centrality of these in the consciousness and culture of pirates show up in their symbolism, especially in the best-known emblem of piracy in this era or any other, the notorious black flag, which they called Old Roger or the Jolly Roger. A point to be emphasized is the significance of flags to the maritime world of the early eighteenth century. A dazzling array of flags, colors, standards, jacks, pennants, ensigns, and banners, especially those signifying nation and empire, were the most important means of communication among seafaring craft of all kinds. They were, at the most fundamental level, markers of property and sovereign power among the nations in oceanic zones of tremendous uncertainty. Pirates doubly defied the nationalist logic of this situation—first by forming themselves of the “outcasts of all nations” (mixing together the seafarers of all countries, as suggested earlier), and second by attacking vessels regardless of the flag flying at the mainmast, making all nations and their shipping equal prey. Every pirate ship worth its salt had a complete set of national flags, all the better with which to confuse prospective prizes and even naval vessels that might wish to chase them. But when pirates created a flag of their own, as they did for the first time in the early eighteenth century, they made a new declaration: they would use colors to symbolize the solidarity of a gang of proletarian outlaws, thousands strong and self-organized in daring ways, in violent opposition to the all-powerful nation-states of the day. By flying the skull and the crossbones, they announced themselves as “the Villains of all Nations.”

  The collective creation and affirmation of the black flag, as discussed briefly in chapter 4, was bound up in ritual on a pirate ship. In their founding moment, after a mutiny or when the crew of an overcrowded vessel split and formed a new pirate ship, the crew came together in a council to elect their captain, draw up their articles, and declare to be true to each other and their flag, all amid merriment, festivity, eating, drinking, and the firing of cannon. One group of pirates “us’d to say [of their black flag] they would live and die under it,” and many others, as we saw at the outset of this chapter, agreed. Like Francis Spriggs and his crew, they swore never to allow the Jolly Roger to be struck. Those who were overcome by force and captured tried to throw their colors overboard to keep them out of the hands of authorities.20

  Contemporaneous descriptions suggest that the Jolly Roger was similar from ship to ship. Here are a few examples. The pirates aboard the Revenge (captained by Charles Martel) in 1716 “let fly her Jack, Ensign and Pendant, in which was the Figure of a Man, with a Sword in his Hand, and an Hour-Glass before him, with a Death’s Head and Bones. In the Jack and Pendant were only the Head and Bones.” When the freebooters who had sailed with Captain John Phillips were hanged in Boston in 1724, the authorities placed at one end of the gallows “their own dark Flag, in the middle of which [was] an Anatomy, and at one side of it a Dart in a Heart, with Drops of Blood proceeding from it; on the other side an Hour-glass, the sight dismal.” Captain Richard Hawkins, whom we have already met, wrote in 1724 that Spriggs’s crew “hoisted Jolly Roger, (for so they call their black Ensign, in the Middle of which is a large white Skeleton, with a Dart in one Hand, striking a Bleeding Heart, and in the other an Hour Glass).”21

  The primary symbolism of the flag was straightforward. Pirates intended its symbols—death, violence, and limited time—to terrify their prey, to say, unequivocally, to merchantmen that their time was short, they must surrender immediately, or they would die a bloody death. The idea was to intimidate the crew of the ship under attack so that they would not defend their vessel. Five men who mutinied and captured their ship in 1721 “sail’d away down the Coast” of West Africa, “making a black Flag, which they merrily said, would be as good as fifty men more, i.e. would carry as much Terror.” They knew whereof they spoke, as numerous merchant ship captains would attest in recounting their capture by pirates (see chapter 1). The sailors knew that if they did resist and were then overpowered, they would probably be tortured and killed, to teach them—and other sailors—a lesson. When a vessel of unknown origins and intentions bore down on a merchantman and finally raised the Jolly Roger at the mainmast, it was a chilling moment, a time of terror understood by all.

  The pirate flag also conveyed a second set of meanings, which were commentaries on life and death at sea in this era. All of the chosen symbols on the black colors were rooted in the Christian cultures from which most of the pirates came. And even though both sailors and freebooters were quite irreligious (as ministers never ceased to point out in their gallows sermons), they nonetheless played with these godly symbols, drew on their power, manipulated and inverted them, and gave them new meanings derived from their own maritime experience. If the Jolly Roger symbolized the pirate as predator, it simultaneously and eloquently bespoke the pirate’s own consciousness of himself as preyed upon in turn.

  Pirates did not invent their symbols. All were common in the gravestone art of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The skull, the crossbones, the skeleton, the hourglass, the dart, and even the color black suggested, in the Christian worldview, mortality, the transitoriness of life, and the swift passage of time. The skeleton
, which was apparently assimilated from pagan into Christian iconography, represented the all-sovereign “King of Death,” the “Grim Reaper,” or “Father Time,” who was depicted with a sword (or more commonly a scythe) and an hourglass.22

  Pirates put their own profane touches on these religious symbols. One subtle way of doing so was to leave off the death’s-head the customary wings that were intended to carry the soul of the departed to heaven. Pirates, as we saw earlier, declared a different destination, and indeed they filled their flag with Satanic implications, calling it not only Jolly Roger but Old Roger, which was a popular name for the devil. The skeleton or anatomy on the pirate flag was, in one of the representational meanings of the day, a depiction of the devil himself. A Jolly Roger, therefore, was a merry devil and more; a “roger,” in the cant of the eighteenth-century urban underworld, was “a man’s yard” (penis), and “to roger” was to copulate, which meant that the Jolly Roger was also a happy phallus. Thus did life shadow death and Eros follow its twin, Thanatos. The pirates jested with fear and dread, with death itself.23

  Figure 14. Death’s-heads drawn in the log of Captain Jacob Bevan; Jacob Bevan, “A Voyage to St. Jago,” Sloane MS 854, f. 166, courtesy of the British Library.

  The death’s-head had a particular meaning to seafaring people because ship captains used it “as a marginal sign in their logs to indicate the record of a death.”24 The skull and crossbones drawn in the captain’s log were one of the few lasting marks of the common sailor who died at sea, who was promptly sewn up into an old canvas sail and dumped overboard to become “food for the fishes of the deep.” The “anatomy” had a similar social meaning: it signified in this period “a living being reduced to ‘skin and bone’; a withered or emaciated creature, a ‘walking skeleton,’” the “withered lifeless form” of the human being, which is, as we have seen, precisely what many sailors, routinely denied “the necessaries of life,” considered themselves to be. Living as they did in a shipboard regime of harsh, even brutal discipline, insufficient food, and hence regular, often preventable death, sailors who became pirates put the symbols of death, violence, and transient time on their flag. Common seamen thus escaped from a deadly system and marked the occasion, with irony and humor, by placing the symbol of “King Death” on their flag.25

 

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