Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker

  5. Information of Thomas Grant (1721), HCA 1/54, f. 120. [back]

  6. History of Pyrates, 206–7; Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 35, 39. [back]

  7. History of Pyrates, 209; Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 39; Examination of Cannady, HCA 1/54, f. 122. [back]

  8. Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 39. [back]

  9. Ibid., 37, 35. [back]

  10. Ibid., 37. [back]

  11. I have, over the years, constructed a database of 778 pirates (774 men and 4 women) from documents of all varieties (as found in these endnotes); I recorded individual pirates by name, dates of activity, age, former occupation, class, family background, and miscellaneous details. Biographical data indicate that 173 of the 178 for whom a labor background is known came from one of these employments; at least 161 had been in the merchant service, and some had served in more than one of these seafaring occupations. See History of Pyrates, 116, 196, 215–16; Snelgrave, New Account, 203; Deposition of Richard Simes, in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1574–1739, CD-ROM, consultant editors Karen Ordahl Kupperman, John C. Appleby, and Mandy Banton (London: Routledge, published in association with the Public Record Office, 2000), item 501 v, vol. 32 (1720–21), 319 (hereafter cited as CSPC), and Deposition of John Wickstead, Master of the ship Prince’s, Gould St. Blowers, second mate, John Crawford, surgeon, and Benjamin Flint, September 18, 1723, CSPC, item 754 iv, vol. 33 (1722–23), 365. [back]

  12. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London, 1791), 86. [back]

  13. Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968): 379, 375–76, 406; Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 246–47, 257, 262–68; History of Pyrates, 244, 359; A.G. Course, The Merchant Navy: A Social History (London: F. Muller, 1963), 61; Samuel Cox to the Council of Trade and Plantations, August 23, 1721, CSPC, item 621, vol. 32 (1720–21), 392–93; Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1962), 144, 154–55; Nathaniel Uring, The Voyages and Travels of Captain Nathaniel Uring, ed. Alfred Dewar (1726; reprint, London: Cassell, 1928), xxviii, 176–78; Arthur Pierce Middleton, Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake in the Colonial Era (Newport News, Va.: Mariners’ Museum, 1953), 8, 13, 15, 18, 271, 281; Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), 249, 264; John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies (London, 1735; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1970), 261; G.T. Crook, ed., The Complete Newgate Calendar (London: Navarre Society, 1926), 3:57–58; S. Charles Hill, “Notes on Piracy in Eastern Waters,” Indian Antiquary 46 (1927): 130; Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 126; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). [back]

  14. Governor Lowther to the Council of Trade and Plantations, July 20, 1717, CSPC, item 661, vol. 29 (1716–17), 350–51; Morris, Government and Labor, 247; Lemisch, “Jack Tar,” 379; Davis, English Shipping, 133–37; R.D. Merriman, ed., Queen Anne’s Navy Documents Concerning the Administration of the Navy of Queen Anne, 1702–1714 (London: Navy Records Society, 1961), 170–72, 174, 221–22, 250; Lloyd, British Seaman, 44–46, 124–49; Peter Kemp, The British Sailor: A Social History of the Lower Deck (London: Dent, 1970), chaps. 4, 5; Arthur N. Gilbert, “Buggery and the British Navy, 1700–1861,” Journal of Social History 10 (1976): 72–98. [back]

  15. Atkins, Voyage to Guinea, 139, 187; The Historical Register, Containing an Impartial Relation of All Transactions ... (London, 1722), 7:344. [back]

  16. Merriman, Queen Anne’s Navy, 171; Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 474–77; History of Pyrates, 138; Trial of Robert Deal (1721), Colonial Office Papers (CO) 137/14, ff. 22–25, Public Record Office, London. Lloyd, in British Seaman, 44, estimates that half of all men pressed between 1600 and 1800 died at sea. [back]

  17. Course, Merchant Navy, 84; Lloyd, British Seaman, 57; “The Memoriall of the Merchants of London Trading to Africa” (1720), Admiralty Papers (ADM) 1/3810, Public Record Office, London; Atkins, Voyage to Guinea, 226. For examples of early-eighteenth-century privateering voyages, see Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea (London, 1712), v–vi, 14–16; Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage round the World, ed. G.E. Manwaring (1712; reprint, New York: Longmans, Green, 1928), xiv, xxv; George Shelvocke, A Voyage round the World (London, 1726), 34–36, 38, 46, 157, 214, 217; William Betagh, A Voyage round the World (London, 1728), 4. [back]

  18. History of Pyrates, 347–48, 373; Trial of John Fillmore and Edward Cheeseman (1724), in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. John Franklin Jameson (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 323–30; Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 474. [back]

  19. Jeremiah Dummer to the Council of Trade and Plantations, February 25, 1720, CSPC, item 578, vol. 31 (1719–20), 365; George Henderson, An Account of the British Settlement of Honduras (London, 1811), 70; William Dampier, “Mr. Dampier’s Voyages to the Bay of Campeachy,” in A Collection of Voyages, 4th ed. (London, 1729), 89; “A Voyage to Guinea, Antego, Bay of Campeachy, Cuba, Barbadoes, &c., 1714–1723,” Add. MS 39,946, British Library; Malachy Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (London, 1755?). See also Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars (London: Methuen, 2003), 161. [back]

  20. Colonel Benjamin Bennett to Council of Trade and Plantations, May 31, 1718, and July 30, 1717, CO 37/10, f. 18; History of Pyrates, 228; Governor Sir N. Lawes to the Council of Trade and Plantations, September 1, 1718, CSPC, item 681, vol. 30 (1717–18), 345. [back]

  21. On mutinies in this era, see Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, appendix E, “Mutiny at Sea, 1700–1750,” 308–11. [back]

  22. History of Pyrates, 115–16; R. A. Brock, ed., The Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood (Virginia Historical Society, Collections, n.s., 2 [Richmond, 1882]), 2:249; Snelgrave, New Account, 203; “Proceedings of the Court held on the Coast of Africa upon Trying of 100 Pirates taken by his Ma[jes]ties Ship Swallow” (1722), HCA 1/99, f. 26. [back]

  23. “Proceedings of the Court,” HCA 1/99, ff. 138, 81, 24. [back]

  24. Trial of Simon Van Vorst and Others (1717), in Privateering and Piracy, ed. Jameson, 304, 307, 308; Evidence of Matthew Parry (1724), “Rhode Island of Providence Plantation: Tryals of 10 Persons Brought in by the Judge,” HCA 1/99, f. 5; Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy (Boston, 1718), 13, 19. For an example of skilled men who were forced, see Deposition of George Barrow, Master of the sloop Content, and John Jackson, a passenger, CSPC, item 754 iii, vol. 33 (1722–23), 364–65. [back]

  25. See n. 11. [back]

  26. Only 26 in the sample of 778 are known to have been married. In pirate confessions, regrets were often expressed to parents but seldom to wives or children. See Cotton Mather, Useful Remarks: An Essay upon Remarkables in the Way of Wicked Men: A Sermon on the Tragical End, unto which the Way of Twenty-Six Pirates Brought Them; At New Port on Rhode-Island, July 19, 1723 (New London, Conn., 1723), 38–42; and Trials of Eight Persons, 24, 25. The quotation is in John Barnard’s Ashton’s Memorial: An History of the Strange Adventures, and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip Ashton (Boston, 1725), 3. [back]

  27. Peter Haywood to Council of Trade and Plantations, December 3, 1716, CO 137/12; Crook, Complete Newgate Calendar, 304. See also Lemisch, “Jack Tar,” 377, and Davis, English Shipping, 114. Biographical data show that 91 of 96 known class backgrounds among pirates were of low status. [back]

  28. See n. 11. [back]

  29. Walter Hamilton to Council of Trade and Plantations, January 6, 1718, CO 152/12, f. 211; Boston Gazette, July 6, 1725; Captain Candler to Josiah Burchett, May 12, 1717, CO 152/12, f. 32; James Vernon to Council of Trade and Plantations, December 21, 1697, CSPC, item 115, vol. 16
(1697–98), 70;Tryals of Thirty-Six Persons for Piracy (Boston, 1723), 3; Clive Senior, A Nation of Pirates: English Piracy in Its Heyday (London: David and Charles Abbott, 1976), 22; Kenneth Kinkor, “From the Seas! Black Men under the Black Flag,” American Prospects (1995): 27–29. [back]

  30. American Weekly Mercury, March 17, 1720; History of Pyrates, 82. [back]

  31. Information of Joseph Smith and Information of John Webley (1721), HCA 1/18, f. 35; Information of William Voisy (1721), HCA 1/55, f. 12. For a trial involving Native American pirates, see The Trials of Five Persons for Piracy, Felony, and Robbery (Boston, 1726). The record of relations between pirates and people of African descent is ambiguous, even contradictory. A substantial minority of pirates had worked in the slave trade and had therefore been part of the machinery of enslavement and transportation. Even though many pirates were black, when they took prize vessels, as they did near African and New World ports, slaves were sometimes part of the captured “cargo” and were in turn treated as such—traded or sold as if commodities like any other. Pirate captains known to have traded in slaves included Edward Taylor, Charles Martel, Edward Condent, Christopher Brown, and James Plantain. Pirates also occasionally committed atrocities against the slaves they took. [back]

  32. Testimony of Richard Hawkins (1724), in The Political State of Great Britain, ed. Abel Boyer (London, 1711–40), 28:153; Boston News-Letter, June 17, 1717; The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet and Other Pirates (London, 1719), 46; History of Pyrates, 173, 427, 595. See also Boston News-Letter, April 29, 1717. [back]

  33. Boston News-Letter, April 4, 1723. [back]

  34. John Gay, Polly: An Opera (London, 1729). [back]

  35. R. Reynall Bellamy, ed., Ramblin’ Jack: The Journal of Captain John Cremer (London: J. Cape, 1936), 144; Hugh F. Rankin, The Golden Age of Piracy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 82. See Virginia Council to the Board of Trade, August 11, 1715, CO 5/1317. [back]

  36. History of Pyrates, 273; Lieutenant Governor Bennett to the Council of Trade and Plantations, May 31, 1718, CSPC, item 551, vol. 30 (1717–18), 260. [back]

  37. H. Ross, “Some Notes on the Pirates and Slavers around Sierra Leone and the West Coast of Africa, 1680–1723,” Sierra Leone Studies 11 (1928), 16–53; History of Pyrates, 131; L.G. Carr Laughton, “Shantying and Shanties,” Mariner’s Mirror 9 (1923): 48–50; Trial of John McPherson and others, Proceedings of the Court of Admiralty, Philadelphia, 1731; “Proceedings of the Court,” HCA 1/99, f. 3; Information of Henry Hull (1729), HCA 1/56, ff. 29–30; Information of William Snelgrave (1721), HCA 1/54, f. 128. [back]

  38. Snelgrave, New Account, 219–20; History of Pyrates, 95. [back]

  39. Stephen Smith to the governor of Jamaica, September 23, 1716, CO 137/12, f. 86; Colonel Bennett to the Council of Trade and Plantations, March 29, 1718, CO 27/10, f. 29; Information of Joseph Hollett (1721), HCA 1/55, f. 11; “Proceedings of the Court,” HCA 1/99, f. 116. [back]

  40. Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Baer, “‘Captain John Avery,’” 1–26; David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates (New York: Random House, 1995); Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999). [back]

  41. Piracy Destroy’d (London, 1700), 3, 10, 4; Edward Vernon to Josiah Burchett, August 16, 1720, Edward Vernon Letter-Book, January–December 1720, Add. MS 40812, British Library, London. [back]

  42. Morris, Government and Labor, 252–58. [back]

  43. “Proceedings of the Court,” HCA 1/99, f. 158; History of Pyrates, 656. [back]

  44. “Proceedings of the Court held on the Coast of Africa upon Trying of 100 Pirates taken by his Ma[jes]ties Ship Swallow” (1722), HCA 1/99, f. 116; Edward Vernon to Josiah Burchett, August 12, 1721, Vernon Letter-Book, Add. MS 40813, f. 128; Woodes Rogers to Council of Trade and Plantations, May 29, 1719, CO 23/11; Memorial of Samuel Buck (1720), CO 23/1, f. 103. A quantitative measure of the reduced work done by pirates lies in the ton-per-man ratios often used to compute seafaring productivity. For the ports of Jamaica (1729–31), Barbados (1696–98), and Charleston (1735–39) respectively, merchant seamen in vessels of more than 150 tons handled 8.6, 10.7, and 12.0 tons per man. Pirates, by more general calculations, handled only 3.1 tons per man. See James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 201–3. [back]

  Chapter 4: “The New Government of the Ship”

  1. Barnaby Slush, The Navy Royal: or a Sea-Cook Turn’d Projector (London, 1709), viii. [back]

  2. S. Charles Hill, “Episodes of Piracy in Eastern Waters,” Indian Antiquary 49 (1920): 37; Arthur L. Hayward, ed., Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (London, 1735; reprint, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), 37. [back]

  3. William Betagh, A Voyage round the World (London, 1728), 148; G.T. Crook, ed., The Complete Newgate Calendar (London: Navarre Society, 1926), 3:60. [back]

  4. See what must rank as one of the best books written on piracy, Robert C. Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 147–51. In the eighteenth century piracy was colored less by religious and national antagonism than in the seventeenth century, when hatred for Catholic Spain had energized a great many buccaneers. [back]

  5. P.K. Kemp and Christopher Lloyd, Brethren of the Coast: Buccaneers of the South (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1960); Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); C.H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century (London, 1910; reprint, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966), 71, 73; J.S. Bromley, “Outlaws at Sea, 1660–1720: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity among the Caribbean Freebooters,” in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montreal: Concordia University, 1985), 3. For an amplification of some of these points, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), chap. 5. [back]

  6. See A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1952), chap. 1; F. Graus, “Social Utopias in the Middle Ages,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 3–19; William McFee, The Law of the Sea (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951), 50, 54, 59, 72. [back]

  7. Kemp and Lloyd, Brethren of the Coast, 3; Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 62, 176; Alexander Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America (Amsterdam, 1678; reprint, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1993). [back]

  8. Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Pirates continued to lead what they called the marooning life into the 1720s. See Examination of Thomas Jones, February 1724, High Court of Admiralty Papers (HCA) 1/55, f. 52, Public Record Office, London. [back]

  9. Christopher Hill, “Radical Pirates?” in The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism, ed. Margaret Jacob and James Jacob (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 20; William Dampier, A New Voyage around the World (London, 1697), 219–20; Kemp and Lloyd, Brethren of the Coast, 17; Bromley, “Outlaws at Sea,” 6, 8, 9. [back]

  10. “Simsons Voyage,” Sloane MSS 86, British Library, London, 43; Bromley, “Outlaws at Sea,” 17; Marcus Rediker, “The Common Seaman in the Histories of Capitalism and the Working Class,” International Journal of Maritime History 1 (1989): 352–53. [back]

  11. Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (London, 1724, 1728; reprint, Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 167, 211–13, 298, 307–8, 321 (hereafter cited as History of Pyrates); Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 37; Information of Alexander Thompson (1723), HCA 1/55, f. 23; William Snelgra
ve, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade (London, 1734), 220; “Trial of William Phillips and Others” (1724), in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. John Franklin Jameson (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 337; Hugh F. Rankin, The Golden Age of Piracy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 31. [back]

  12. History of Pyrates, 213. [back]

  13. Clement Downing, A Compendious History of the Indian Wars (1737; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 99; History of Pyrates, 121, 139, 167–68, 195, 208, 214, 340, 352; Snelgrave, New Account, 199; Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy (Boston, 1718), 24; Abel Boyer, ed., The Political State of Great Britain, 60 vols. (London, 1711–40), 28:152; George Roberts [Daniel Defoe?], The Four Years Voyages of Captain George Roberts (London, 1726), 39. [back]

  14. “Proceedings of the Court held on the Coast of Africa upon Trying of 100 Pirates taken by his Ma[jes]ties Ship Swallow,” 1722, HCA 1/99, f. 10; Snelgrave, New Account, 217; History of Pyrates, 213–14; Downing, Compendious History, 99. [back]

  15. History of Pyrates, 139; Hayward, ed., Remarkable Criminals, 37; Boyer, ed., Political State, 28:153; B.R. Burg, “Legitimacy and Authority: A Case Study of Pirate Commanders in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” American Neptune 37 (1977): 40–49. [back]