by Frank Sherry
Musicians and such “sea artists” as navigators, sailing masters, carpenters, surgeons, and gunners were always the most valuable members of a pirate crew. No vessel ever seemed to have a sufficient number. For this reason captured sea artists were routinely forced into pirate service if they refused to volunteer.
For such forced men, accustomed to the strict discipline and straightforward command structure of honest vessels, life aboard a pirate ship often seemed at first like a cacophonous floating anarchy. At any hour of the day some men would be working, while others slept on deck or below and still others lolled around the deck, drinking, dancing, smoking and talking—in fact, doing pretty much whatever they fancied at the moment.
In reality, however, the “madhouse” atmosphere was not a symptom of breakdown. It was, instead, the certain sign of a well-functioning crew, for the purpose of the pirate enterprise was not to achieve a “shipshape” environment, but to ensure maximum personal liberty for each of its members.
While the commitment to personal liberty, always implicit in pirate laws and attitudes, seldom found expression in words, a few sea-outlaws did manage to verbalize their feelings on the subject. For example, according to Defoe, Bartholomew Roberts was accustomed to say: “Damnation to him who ever lived to wear a halter!”
A pirate captain named Charles Bellamy delivered himself of a magnificent skein of invective on the topic of freedom when the master of a captured cargo ship spurned Bellamy’s invitation to come pirating with him. Cried Bellamy to the honest skipper: “You are a devilish conscious rascal, damn ye! I am a free prince and have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships and an army of a hundred thousand men in the field. And this my conscience tells me; that there is no arguing with such sniveling puppies who allow superiors to kick them about the deck at pleasure, and pin their faith upon the pimp of a parson, a squab who neither practices or believes what he puts upon the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to.”
In the apocryphal story of the idealistic Captain Misson and his Madagascar republic of Libertatia, there were numerous expressions of that yearning for freedom.
In one pretty passage Misson even condemns the slave trade, which was then regarded as a perfectly legitimate activity:
“The trading for those of our own species could never be agreeable to the eyes of Divine Justice. No man had power of the liberty of another, and while those who profess a more enlightened knowledge of the deity sold men like beasts, they proved that their religion was no more than grimace and that they differed from the barbarians in name only, since their practice was in nothing more humane.”
Occasionally a physical act by an individual pirate illuminates more forcefully than words ever could the importance of personal liberty for pirates.
For example, one of Blackbeard’s officers, a black named Caesar who was probably an escaped slave, attempted to blow up his ship when it appeared that Blackbeard would be beaten in an engagement, preferring to die rather than fall into the hands of the authorities and—very likely—be returned to slavery.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that while freedom was of paramount significance to the men of the outlaw brotherhood, their definition of it was based on the collective experience of untutored, angry men, concerned with earthy, sensual values. For the ordinary pirate, illiterate and inarticulate, the hunger for liberty found expression in doing what he wished, behaving in ways that would be unthinkable aboard honest ships. The average pirate was a simple man, lusty in his tastes and not very discriminating in his pleasures. For him freedom did not mean the chance to cultivate his mind, to enjoy music, or to contemplate beauty. It meant gratification of his appetites, license to do as he pleased, and a general recognition of his equality with others. This was the coarsest and most sensual kind of liberty, but it was liberty nonetheless—and in pursuit of it pirates usually made life aboard their ships the reverse image of daily living aboard merchant or naval vessels.
For example, pirates all ate together and partook of the same fare. There was no such thing as an officers’ mess with special wines and foods aboard a pirate vessel.
The crew of a pirate ship worked only as much as was necessary to handle the ship. As a result they often omitted all but the most necessary maintenance. If, as sometimes happened, the ship became unseaworthy through neglect, pirates simply transferred to another ship. For them a ship was primarily a means to an end, not a property in itself.
On pirate ships men usually slept wherever they chose and whenever they chose. Aboard many brigand vessels regular watches were a matter of indifference except when the ship was on the prowl for prey, at which time their vigilance was famous.
Although forbidden on some ships by agreement, gambling with dice or cards was nevertheless a favorite pastime on many vessels, even though it quite often led to quarrels and bloodshed. Any pirate was free to call on the ship’s musicians to “give us a jig” at a pirate revel.
But it was the freedom to drink as much and as often as he liked that the ordinary sea outlaw prized above all others.
Pirates considered it their right to drink constantly, whether under sail or at anchor. Drunkenness was not only the great solace for the boredom that was so much a part of life aboard ship—the antidote for days of endless blue skies and empty ocean—it was also, for the ordinary pirate, the undeniable proof that he was, indeed, truly free. It was the keystone of his personal liberty.
No pirate captain—not even the teetotaler Bartholomew Roberts or the clever, abstemious Henry Every—ever dared to deny drink to a pirate crew, or even to curtail the worst of the drunken excesses common aboard all pirate ships.
Consequently, alcoholism was rampant among pirates, and many in the fraternity—even some famous captains—died of it. Captain Edward England died an alcoholic. Drinking contributed to Blackbeard’s grisly end. And drunkenness among Roberts’s crew led to their entrapment by Royal Navy forces.
Pirates drank almost anything alcoholic. But rum was always a favorite. Its original name was “rumbullion,” and it was described by the sailors who first drank it in Barbados as “a hott, hellish, and terrible liquor.” The pirates often called it “kill devil.”
Pirates were fond of mixing rum with wine, tea, lime juice, sugar, and spices to make a drink to which they gave the name “punch.” They also enjoyed a blend of beer, gin, sherry, raw eggs, and spices, which for some reason they called “rumfustian.” Drinking bouts of two or three days with such concoctions were a popular recreation when the ship lay at anchor.
Despite the ravages that alcohol inflicted on the health of individual outlaws and on the efficiency of a crew, drinking was the most visible manifestation of the general pirate credo that a man should take whatever pleasure he could in the present moment—and let tomorrow take care of itself.
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Even Bartholomew Roberts—who was far from a thoughtless or debauched man—subscribed to the eat, drink and be merry philosophy. Said Roberts, upon his election as captain of his ship: “A merry life, and a short one, shall be my motto.”
While the right to drink himself into stupor when and as he pleased was the most important of the personal liberties the ordinary pirate demanded in his daily life, sexual freedom ran a close second.
Although the era of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was far from puritanical in matters of sex, most of the working poor of the time had little leisure—or inclination—for sexual experiences beyond those sanctioned by church, state, and custom. The licentious pursuits of the age were mainly the occupation of the rich—and of criminals like the rebellious brotherhood of sea outlaws.
In the enclaves on Madagascar, pirates made free with native women. Often—like Baldridge and other settlers in the place—they would “marry” several of them at the same time. At one time on Madagascar, the bastard offspring of pirate fathers seem to have grown so numerous that they almost comprised a separ
ate social class among the natives.
Among many pirate crews it was the custom, when they careened their ships on remote beaches, to sweeten this necessary interval with orgies of drinking and sex with prostitutes and captive women.
One such famous orgy took place in October 1718, when Blackbeard and his crew met the pirate captain Charles Vane and his men on Ocracoke Island off the North Carolina coast—and enjoyed a weeklong carousal with local whores especially brought in for the occasion.
Wise captains made it their business to hold such parties for their men at regular intervals. Bartholomew Roberts, who was not himself a man to engage in lascivious play, nevertheless gave his crew a period of several weeks’ rest and relaxation at Devil’s Island—later to become the French penal colony. The party featured the varied ministrations of dozens of prostitutes as well as copious amounts of liquor.
Even Henry Every—who always appears too calculating and too cold-blooded to abandon himself even to the briefest of sexual urges—allowed his men to carry off the harem girls and the chaste Muslim wives discovered aboard the Gang-I-Sawai. While it is difficult to imagine Every approving the salacious turmoil that marked his ship’s voyage of escape after the capture and sack of the Gang-I-Sawai, it is even more difficult to imagine him trying to halt the orgiastic revels of his crew.
The terrifying giant Blackbeard is supposed to have serially “married” fourteen wives—all of them teenage beauties. Reportedly, Blackbeard was also in the habit of sharing whatever wife happened to be nearby at the time with any members of his crew who had particularly pleased him.
Although the evidence from contemporary sources clearly indicates that the sexual liberty that pirates demanded and enjoyed was overwhelmingly heterosexual in nature, the circumstances of shipboard life in the age of sail would seem to imply the existence of at least some, possibly intermittent, homosexuality.
Not only were crewmen crowded together physically, and without women for long periods of time, the crews of the day also contained many boys. In honest service, these youngsters—usually only twelve or thirteen years of age—were apprenticed to the ship’s officers and to craftsmen such as carpenters, to learn their trade. Many of these young apprentices found their way aboard pirate vessels when their older fellow crewmen mutinied and went on the account, or when sea outlaws captured them.
Thus boys were almost always present aboard pirate vessels, where they occupied the same apprentice niches they had formerly occupied aboard honest ships. In battle these apprentices played a most important role: They fed the powder and shot to gunners, a circumstance that earned them the nickname “powder monkeys.”
The rosters of almost all pirate ships listed at least a few powder monkeys. Given human nature then, it is possible to infer that homosexuality was not entirely absent from pirate ships, despite the lack of any solid evidence for its presence.3
While the opportunity to enjoy the widest possible personal freedom was clearly the primary reason for turning pirate, a secondary reason was almost as important: the chance to take vengeance on the cruel and unjust society that most pirates had left behind. Almost all the seaborne outlaws of the era shared a profound hatred for Authority. From time to time this pervasive hatred emerged in words—usually directed toward the masters of captured ships. For pirates, these honest captains were usually the most visible representatives of that Authority they loathed.
One of these honest masters, George Roberts of the merchant sloop Dolphin, recounted the hate-filled invective that the pirate captain John Russel hurled at him while boarding his ship: “You dog! You son of a bitch! You speckle-shirted dog! I’ll drub you, you dog, within an inch of your life and that inch, too!”
A similar raging abhorrence of Authority was more eloquently expressed in the speech of denunciation that pirate captain Charles Bellamy directed toward the merchant master who had scorned his invitation to join the outlaw brotherhood.
After extolling his own free life, Bellamy switched gears to excoriate a hypocritical society, crying out: “Damn you! You are a squeaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security. For the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by their knavery. But damn ye, altogether! Damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls! They villify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference: they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage; had ye not better make one of us, than sneak after the arses of those villains for employment?”
Some pirate captains conveyed this desire for vengeance even in the names of their ships: Vengeance, Black Revenge, Revenge’s Revenge, Holy Vengeance, New York’s Revenge, Sudden Death, Defiance, Black Joke. The black flag itself, with its skull and crossbones, spoke of hatred and retribution.
Lust for vengeance permeated pirate life. Most ordinary pirates, illiterate and far from poetic, satisfied this lust as they did all others: by straightforward physical action.
For example, whenever pirates took a prize, they immediately asked the crew of the captured ship if the captain of the vessel had treated them well. If the crew complained of the captain’s cruelty, it was the usual practice to strip the clothing from the captured master’s back, tie him up to the mainmast, and give him a dozen or more stripes with a tarred rope’s end.
Such mistreatment of captive officers differed greatly from the deliberate tortures that pirates utilized almost as a matter of course to force captives to reveal the location of their valuables. It also differed markedly from the terror tactics employed to induce prey to surrender rather than fight. The mistreatment of captive masters and officers was a passionate discharge of the rancor that the sea outlaws felt toward a detested and feared civilization as personified by a cruel ship’s captain.
An incident that took place in 1719, reported by Defoe, trenchantly illustrates the long-lived animosity that ordinary pirates harbored toward brutal masters. According to Defoe’s account, it happened that off the west coast of Africa a pirate ship took the merchant vessel Cadogan whereupon the pirate captain ordered the captive ship’s master to come aboard.
When the merchant master complied, Defoe says, “the Person that he first cast his Eye upon, proved to be his former Boatswain, who stared him in the Face like his evil Genius, and accosted him in the following manner: ‘Ah, Captain Skinner! Is it you? The only Man I wish’d to see; I am deeply in your Debt and now I shall pay you all in your own Coin.’ The poor Man trembled every Joint, when he found into what Company he had got, and dreaded the Event, which he had Reason enough to do; for the Boatswain immediately called to his Consorts, lay hold of the Captain, and made him fast to the Windlass, and there pelted him with empty Glass Bottles, which broke upon his Body and cut him in a sad Manner; afterwards they whipp’d him about the Deck, til they were weary then told him, because he was a good Master to his Men, he should have an easy Death, and so shot him thro’ the Head, and tumbled him overboard into the Sea.”
Even captains who had not inflicted cruel discipline on their men often became objects of pirate brutality because they were viewed as representatives of the society that pirates despised and feared.
An account by the English merchant captain William Snelgrave, who spent three weeks as a prisoner of pirates, tells how the outlaws tortured a French captain because, they said, the man did not strike his colors when ordered to do so. Reported Snelgrave: “They put a Rope about his Neck and hoisted him up and down several times to the Main yardarm, til he was almost dead.”
Pirate cruelty to shipmasters sometimes took even more bizarre and horrible forms. One report tells of pirates who filled a captive’s mouth with oakum, a flammable caulking material, and set it afire, inflicting a terrible agony on their victim.
If captains were the favorite, they were by no means the only targets of pirate vengeance. Any prisoner
who seemed to represent Authority might find himself singled out for brutal treatment. Priests and monks were often victimized in this way not only because they represented Authority but also because pirates associated them with Spain and Portugal, the most implacable enemies of piracy.
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In some instances captives, especially clergy, were subjected to a treatment called “sweating”: made to run around the mizzenmast for a long period of time while being jabbed with cutlasses and struck by tarred ropes.4
Pirates also expressed their hatred of Authority by jeering at the civilization they despised, feared, and fought against. Examples of their rancorous mockery abound.
Though many pirate ships bore such names as Revenge, others carried names intended to ridicule the values and the religion of honest society: Prophet Daniel, Happy Delivery, Most Holy Trinity, Blessings, Mayflower, Childhood, Amity, Merry Christmas, Morning Star, Peace, Black Angel, Charming Mary—and dozens of others in a similar vein.
Another illustration of the ridicule that pirates directed toward the society they hated can be found in the names they often gave themselves. Senior members of Bartholomew Roberts’s crew, for example, referred to themselves as “The House of Lords,” and addressed each other as “Your Lordship.”
Sometimes the derision was expressed by outright mockery. When, after taking the Cabo, John Taylor turned the doughty Portuguese ex-viceroy Dom Luis over to the French authorities, he took the trouble to send the Portuguese grandee ashore with a burlesque guard of honor, a sardonic salute, and longboat decorated like a viceregal barge.
Numerous pirates went to the gallows jeering at the court that had condemned them. “Give me Hell,” said one unrepentant brigand. “It’s a merrier place!”
The derision could take more subtle forms was well. It was, for example, a usual pirate practice to accept with solemn sincerity the royal amnesties that were periodically offered to ordinary pirates by colonial and naval authorities, to make great show of “repentance” for past crimes—and then, when convenient, revert once again to the old life on the account.