Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean

by David Cordingly

  From Captain Johnson we learn that Bartholomew Roberts made a gallant figure on this, his last fight. He was dressed in a crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, with a red feather in his hat, a diamond cross hanging from a gold chain around his neck, a sword in his hand, and two pairs of pistols slung from his shoulders on a silk sling ‘according to the fashion of the pyrates’. He was killed in the first or second of the Swallow’s broadsides, struck in the throat by grapeshot. He collapsed across the rope tackles of a gun, and his body was thrown overboard ‘according to the repeated request he made in his lifetime’.21 The drama of the occasion was heightened by the weather. According to Captain Ogle’s logbook (and this is confirmed by the logs of the Swallow’s first and second lieutenants), around noon there was ‘much rain, lightning & thunder A small tornado about ½ past 10 clock the pyrates mainmast came by the board being shott just below the parrell The Mizn topmast ye same the first broadside …’. At 2 p.m. the pirates surrendered. Of the 152 men on board fifty-two were black.22 Only three pirates were killed in this action and again the Swallow had none killed or injured. Surgeon Atkins observed that the pirates, ‘tho’ singly fellows of courage’, were a contemptible enemy owing to their drunkenness and disorder.23

  Two days later the Swallow and her prize anchored at Cape Lopez. The Neptune had disappeared and it soon became apparent that her crew had plundered the Little Ranger, which had been left at anchor with no crew on board – Roberts had ordered all the pirates to join the Royal Fortune before she sailed into battle. The captured pirates were dismayed to find that they had been robbed of several thousand pounds of gold and gold dust stored in their sea chests.

  The weather continued to be stormy with heavy rain, more tornadoes and thunderstorms so fierce that on one occasion the Swallow’s fore topmast was split by a lightning strike. Atkins described the tornadoes as ‘fierce and violent gusts of wind that give warning for some hours by a gradual lowering and blackening of the sky to windward whence they come, accompanied with darkness, terrible shocks of thunder and lightning, and ends in rains and calms’.24 They stayed a week at Cape Lopez, replenishing their supply of water and heeling the Swallow so that they could scrub off the weed and barnacles. Apart from the weather it was a pleasant location. There were plenty of fish in the anchorage and grey parrots in the trees. The surrounding countryside was mostly savannah with wandering herds of buffalo. The local people were friendly and were pleased to trade goats, chickens and honey in exchange for linen, calico, pewter spoons and knives.

  On 18 February they set sail with the Royal Fortune and the Little Ranger. They called in at Principe to collect the French Ranger and on 16 March they anchored off Cape Coast Castle. The captured pirates were sent ashore and were presumably confined in the cells built to hold African slaves. These cells were underground vaults situated in the large quadrangle in the centre of the castle. They had iron gratings at the surface ‘to let in light and air on those poor wretches, the slaves, who are chained and confined there till the demand comes’.25 In the surrounding buildings, protected by massive walls and battlements, were lodgings for General Phipps and his officers, and for merchants, soldiers, miners and tradesmen. The castle had workshops for blacksmiths and coopers as well as a chapel and a large hall which would be the setting for the trial of the pirates

  The Weymouth had been patrolling the coast some eighty miles away and did not learn of the Swallow’s success until 25 March. When Captain Herdman received the news he immediately headed east and at 2 p.m. on 27 March the Weymouth anchored off the castle. Events now moved rapidly. Within a day of his arrival Captain Herdman was appointed President of the Admiralty Court which was convened to try the pirates. (Captain Ogle was disqualified from taking part because he was the captor of the pirates.) Captain Herdman was assisted in his deliberations by James Phipps, the governor of the castle; by Edward Hyde, who was Secretary of the Royal Africa Company; and by Lieutenant Barnsley and Lieutenant Fanshaw of the Weymouth; and two merchants, Mr Dodson and Mr Boye. Surgeon Atkins was appointed Register of the court and later claimed expenses for twenty-six days’ attendance. The task before the court was daunting. Two hundred and sixty-two men had been captured by the Swallow. Seventy-five of these were black Africans and they were excluded from the trial. Several men had died from their wounds, but this still left a total of 168 men to be cross-examined and their innocence or guilt determined. In terms of the numbers of men accused it was the largest pirate trial of the period, and it would also break records for the number of men found guilty and hanged.

  The charges varied slightly according to which ship the men were serving on when captured, but in summary they were accused of being ‘wickedly united, and articled together for the annoyance and destruction of His Majesty’s trading subjects by sea’. They were also accused of ‘sinking, burning and destroying such goods, and vessels as then happened in your way’. And most seriously they were indicted as ‘traitors, robbers, pirates and common enemies of all mankind’ because they had hoisted a piratical flag and fired upon His Majesty’s ship Swallow with the intention of ‘distressing the said King’s ship and murdering His Majesty’s good subjects’.

  The full transcript of the trial is in the collections of the National Archives at Kew, and Captain Johnson reproduced much of the transcript in his General History of the Pyrates. The statements of the accused and of the witnesses provide a fascinating glimpse into the world of the pirates: who they were and where they came from; and how and why they found themselves on pirate ships. Almost all the men captured were former merchant seamen. There were a few men who had been pirates for three or four years, some of whom had served with Howell Davis, but the majority had joined the pirates voluntarily or involuntarily during Roberts’ recent cruises along the coast of West Africa. Apart from a group of eighteen Frenchmen and seven Dutch seamen, almost all the rest were British. Most came from major English ports such as London, Bristol and Plymouth but there were also men from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and the West Indies. Of the fifty-two men found guilty of piracy the average age was twenty-eight, a figure which is in line with several studies made of the pirates of this period, and is similar to the average age of men in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy.26 The oldest of the pirates was forty-five and the youngest was nineteen. A common thread running through the pirates’ statements is the emphasis on drink. Many men seem to have spent most of their time drunk. John Jaynson ‘was more busy at drinking than anything else’. Michael Lemmon was ‘as often drunk as the rest of the crew’. A witness said of Robert Devins that he never saw him sober or fit for any duty, and Joseph Mansfield admitted that it was drink that had drawn him into the company of the pirates, ‘the love of drink and a lazy life having been stronger motives with him than gold’.27

  In spite of the numbers involved, the members of the Admiralty Court made a point of questioning all the accused men individually and seem to have done their best to get evidence from eyewitnesses. At this period, and for decades to come, the response of the authorities to crimes against property was draconian. It was common for men and women to be hanged for a variety of petty crimes such as the theft of a silver tankard and a silver spoon, or the theft of three bedsheets and fifteen napkins. Highway robbery was invariably punished by death.28 Given this background the Admiralty Court showed considerable sympathy towards most of the poor seamen who came before them. Captain Herdman, in his role as President, particularly admonished the hard core of seasoned pirates who were on trial, for robbing honest and needy seamen ‘who are purchasing their livelihoods through hazards and difficulties’ and who were then forced to join the pirates ‘to their own and families ruin, removing them from their wives and children, and by that, from the means that should support them from misery and want’.29

  Anyone who could prove that he had been forced to join the pirates against his will and had refrained from taking an active role in robbing ships was acquitted. This particul
arly applied to those men with specialist skills useful to the pirates such as carpenters, caulkers and coopers. John Lane, a boatswain’s mate, was told by Bartholomew Roberts that ‘such men we want, and you shall go with us’. John Johnson was another skilled man and the pirates, ‘hearing he was a tailor and wanting such a man very much, did oblige him to continue on board them’. Nicholas Brattle, who played the fiddle and was one of four musicians captured, ‘was only made use of, as musick, which he dared not refuse’. All these men were acquitted.

  On the other hand the court was merciless towards those who were found guilty of actively plundering ships; or showed violence towards their shipmates; handled swords, cutlasses or pistols, or fired the guns when going into action. In the words of Captain Herdman, ‘To a trading nation, nothing can be so destructive as pyracy, or call for more exemplary punishment.’ And the punishment was indeed exemplary. Those found guilty were hanged in batches of between four and fourteen men within a day of their sentence being pronounced. The gallows were set up on the beach in front of the castle’s gates and between the high- and low-water marks. After the execution the Provost Marshal was directed to cut down the bodies, to secure them in chains and to hang them on ‘the gibbets already erected on the adjacent hillock’.

  Thomas Armstrong, the 34-year-old deserter from the Swallow, was executed in the manner reserved for naval deserters. On 24 April he was hanged from the fore yardarm of the Weymouth. He spent his last hour bewailing his sins, urging the spectators to lead an honest and good life and asking them to join him in singing two or three verses of Psalm 140. This psalm begins: ‘Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man: preserve me from the violent man.’ After this warning the psalm concludes with some reassuring words: ‘I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the afflicted, and the right of the poor. Surely the righteous shall give thanks unto thy name: the upright shall dwell in thy presence.’

  The trial lasted for four weeks. In a letter which he sent to the Admiralty a few months later Captain Ogle included a summary account of the fate of the men taken by the Swallow off Cape Lopez. Of the 262 men found alive on the pirate ships, seventy-five were black Africans excluded from the trial, nineteen died of their wounds before they came to trial, seventy-seven were acquitted, fifty-two were hanged, twenty were condemned to seven years’ servitude in the Cape Coast mines, seventeen were sentenced to imprisonment in London’s Marshalsea Prison and two had their execution ‘respited till the Kings pleasure is further known’.30

  Early in May 1722 the Swallow and Weymouth left Cape Coast and sailed across the Atlantic to Brazil and then north to the Caribbean. They called in at Barbados and then headed for Jamaica. On 24 August they dropped anchor in the harbour of Port Royal. Four days later a hurricane swept across the island, causing almost as much damage as the great earthquake and tidal wave of 1692 in which a whole section of the town had slid beneath the sea.

  Captain Ogle reported that the wind began to blow very hard at half past eight on the morning of 28 August. Lying at anchor in the harbour were nearly thirty merchant vessels as well as the Swallow, the Weymouth and two other warships, the Falkland and the sloop Happy. As the wind increased to hurricane force the crews of the naval vessels put out more anchors and then cut away their masts to prevent the ships heeling over. By eleven o’clock the harbour was lashed by torrential rain and Ogle reported ‘as much wind in my opinion as could possible blow out of the heavens’.31 Prodigious waves were throwing up tons of stones and rocks over the sea wall at the eastern end of the town and the streets of Port Royal were flooded to a depth of five feet. Apart from the naval vessels only two merchant ships and a sloop remained at anchor. The rest were blown ashore or sank on their moorings. The ships of Bartholomew Roberts came to a suitably violent end. ‘The Royal Fortune formerly called the Onslow, and Little Ranger pyrate prizes both drove ashore on the rocks under Salt Pan Hill and were cast all to pieces in less than an hour.’32

  The death toll of between 400 and 500 was not comparable with the 1692 earthquake, when more than 2,000 people died, but according to Ogle, ‘the island received more damage by this hurricane than ever was known’. In Kingston more than half the houses were destroyed.33 Sugar mills across the island were blown down, plantations were flattened and the streets of Port Royal were strewn with the wrecks of ships, the debris of buildings and dead bodies.

  15

  Back to the Bahamas

  Seven years later Woodes Rogers was faced with the aftermath of another hurricane when he returned to the Bahamas to take up his role as Governor for the second time. He had left England at the end of May 1729 and arrived in Nassau on 25 August after a stormy crossing of the Atlantic. At first sight the appearance of the harbour and the town was a considerable improvement on the scene which had greeted his squadron of warships and merchantmen back in 1718. This time there was no sign of any pirate ships or burnt-out and plundered hulks. Dominating the waterfront were the ramparts and bastions of Fort Nassau, which, when seen from a distance, appeared to be in good order. Many of the houses had lost their roofs or been badly damaged by the hurricane which had swept across the island three weeks before but rising up behind them was the steeply pitched roof and bell tower of the new church.

  On going ashore Rogers soon discovered that conditions on the island were not much better than they had been when he had left the place in 1721. So many people had gone down with ‘an ague and fever’ that the Assembly had not been able to sit for several weeks.1 The island’s defences were in a parlous state. The wooden gun carriages of the fifteen guns in Fort Nassau were so rotten that three of them collapsed when a salute was fired to mark Rogers’ arrival. The carriages of the twenty-four guns brought out from the Tower of London by Phenney had disintegrated, leaving the gun barrels lying uselessly on the ground. The timber guard room and officers’ rooms built by Rogers had been demolished by the recent hurricane, while the magazine, prison and cook room built under the ramparts were so badly decayed that they were unusable, ‘so that it is thought best to fill up under the ramparts and make them solid for a support to the outer wall’.2 The Independent Company, which comprised the garrison and was the island’s only defence force, numbered no more than 110 men including the officers. This might have been sufficient to repel a pirate raid if the guns had been serviceable, but would have had little chance against a serious invasion mounted by France or Spain.

  A recent survey of the trade of the islands carried out by George Phenney at the request of London suggested that the island was nearly self-sufficient in food and produce. Local turtles and fruit were bartered for provisions with traders in South Carolina. The natural produce of New Providence was listed as: large sugar canes; the finest cotton in the world; mahogany, cedar and pine suitable for ship building; lignum vitae, brown ebony and various dye woods; a variety of fruits, ‘the pineapples here being the best kind in America’; and hats made by the local women from palm leaves, small quantities of which were exported.3 The reality behind Phenney’s optimistic report was that the Bahamas were languishing far behind Britain’s other West Indian colonies. Only 800 acres of land were under cultivation on New Providence. New settlers had failed to materialise in significant numbers and the population remained tiny. A census carried out in 1731 revealed that the total population of New Providence, Harbour Island and Eleuthera was 1,388. Of the 1,042 people living on New Providence there were 409 black slaves, and the white population consisted of 190 males, 135 females and 308 children.4 This compared with Barbados, which had a population of around 61,000 (16,000 whites and 45,000 blacks) and Jamaica with 62,000 (7,000 whites and 55,000 blacks).5 Both these islands had thriving sugar-cane plantations, with Jamaica exporting 10,249 tons of sugar to Britain in 1725.6 It is no wonder that the Board of Trade took little interest in the reports received from the Bahamas.

  Rogers had brought out to Nassau his 22-year-old son William, and also two men he hoped would assist him in governing the islands. John Colebrooke,
who was to be appointed Speaker of the new Assembly, was a former merchant with considerable experience of wheeler-dealing in Europe. He was variously described as being ‘of pleasant conversation and good sense’ and ‘a cunning man and perfect master in the art of stock-jobbing’.7 He was accompanied by John White, a long-time associate of his who was shortly to become the islands’ Treasurer and Chief Justice. These two would form an alliance which would seriously undermine Rogers’ authority and make his life a misery.

  The day following his arrival Rogers convened a Council meeting at which George Phenney was present. The superseded governor handed over the great seal of the islands and Rogers produced the communion silver and furnishings for the church which he had brought over with him. These were a gift from the King and included a silver chalice, paten, small flagons and an alms dish; a large bible and two prayer books; and a cushion and altar frontal of crimson damask with silk fringes. A month later, on 29 September, the first Assembly was held. It consisted of twenty-four members and included representatives from Eleuthera and Harbour Island. During the next few months various Acts were passed to improve the appearance of Nassau and help the economy of the islands. The public highways were to be cleared and a straight street was to be constructed from east to west in Nassau ‘with a space left in the middle of the town for a square’. Measures were agreed to prevent the stealing of fruit and to stop the destruction of trees whose timber could be used for shipbuilding; the planting of cotton was to be encouraged; cattle were to be restrained from damaging crops and plantations; and an Act was passed ‘for the encouragement of foreigners and strangers settling in these islands’.8