Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

  Roberts himself, it appears, began to realize as the years passed that he was unlikely ever to attain his dream of command. Judging by words later attributed to him, he seems to have ascribed the failure of his hopes to an inability to flatter and utter soft words to influential men—an inability to act the gentleman.

  Yet in spite of his frustration, Roberts continued to follow the sea, the only mistress he ever seems to have had, taking whatever berth offered, holding on to his faith, and awaiting fortune’s turn. So it was that on a hot day in June 1719, Roberts was serving as mate aboard the slave ship Princess, anchored at the Guinea Coast trading station of Anamabu, when fate, in the person of the daring Captain Howell Davis of the pirate vessel Royal Rover, plucked him from one world and dropped him into another.

  Although taken aboard the Royal Rover at the point of a pistol, Roberts was not treated as a captive by Davis and his crew. Instead, Captain Davis, much impressed with Roberts’s navigational skills and experience, tried hard to induce his fellow Welshman to join in his enterprise. But Roberts refused. He took no part in the life of the ship—and he made no effort to hide his contempt for the drunkenness and the lack of discipline aboard her. For Roberts, the free and democratic life as a member of a pirate crew exerted little attraction.

  Then the charismatic Howell Davis was killed. The crew of the Royal Rover, guided by some extraordinary instinct, offered Roberts the command of their ship.

  Suddenly the dream he had pursued all his life was within his grasp. Never mind that the ship was a floating anarchy of outlaws; it was a command. He could have his heart’s desire. But he knew it would cost him his soul, his salvation. It was the temptation of Lucifer that confronted him: Was it better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven? Like Lucifer, Roberts chose to rule. And like Lucifer, he knew himself damned.

  He himself later explained his decision in laconic words: “It is better to be a commander, than a common man, since I have dipped my hands in muddy water and must be a pirate.”

  He was—at last—a captain, and he knew his job. With characteristic energy, he moved immediately to impose some sense of discipline on the unruly crew of the Royal Rover—and to create an aura of authority about himself, which he deemed necessary for the good of his ship.

  He drew up new articles for the crew. Generally his aim was to regularize duties and eliminate the worst of the disorder. He made every man swear to obey his rules. (He knew better than to forbid drink to his crew, but he did manage to impose new rules that did much to curb the most atrocious of the alcoholic excesses.)

  It was also in these early days of his captaincy that Roberts began the practice of decking himself in the gentlemanly finery that soon became his trademark.

  To validate his authority, Roberts challenged any man of his crew who resented his regulations and his insistence on discipline to fight him with sword or pistol, making it clear, according to Defoe, that “he neither valued or feared any of them.”

  He soon made his men understand that as captain he expected to be obeyed and that he would not suffer fools gladly. If a man was inept, or merely slow to carry out orders, Roberts would fly into a fit of fury that usually cowed anyone within reach. Although these rages eventually became part of his legend among his crewmen, they were, in the beginning of his captaincy, the occasion for several deadly confrontations that almost cost Roberts both his command and his life.

  In one such incident, a crewman who had been drinking heavily offended Roberts with some abusive epithet. Roberts exploded at the insult. He pulled a pistol and shot the sailor to death where he stood. The dead man’s friends were infuriated. But they also feared their captain—and did nothing. But another friend of the dead man, who had been ashore at the time of the killing, was less reticent when he learned of the captain’s action. This sailor, Thomas Jones by name, cursed Roberts roundly and loudly and shouted out that Roberts himself ought to be put to death. Again Roberts flew into a rage. Drawing his captain’s sword, he plunged it into Jones’s body, wounding him severely but not mortally. Although bleeding profusely, Jones grabbed Roberts, threw him over a cannon, and beat him up “handsomely,” as Defoe puts it.

  When Roberts and his assailant were pried apart, a tumultuous argument ensued, with some of the crew believing Jones was justified in attacking the captain, and others backing Roberts.

  In the end, according to pirate custom, the matter was put to a vote. Roberts won. Jones, it was decided, had had no right to curse the captain in spite of the provocation of his friend’s death—and no right whatsoever to do violence to the captain of their ship. Jones was sentenced to receive two lashes from every member of the crew, as soon as he recovered from the wound that Roberts had given him. (Jones survived his punishment, and jumped ship with a handful of cronies soon thereafter.)

  If Roberts’s monumental rages, his fearlessness, and his seafaring skills soon won him the edgy respect of his men, his boldness in battle elicited their awe.

  Within a week after taking command of the Royal Rover, Roberts—already Black Bart to his crew—undertook a madly valiant act of vengeance. He sailed back to the island of Principe, where Howell Davis had been killed. He sailed the Rover right into the harbor, under the guns of the fort. Then, taking a force of armed men with him, Roberts went ashore and marched directly up a steep hill toward the fort. At this the flustered Portuguese, who had so far held their fire, unleashed a volley from their muskets at Roberts and his men. But the contemptuous Roberts and his determined pack of cutthroats kept on coming. The terrified Portuguese soldiers then fled their posts, abandoning guns and supplies in their haste to get away.

  Roberts coolly entered the fort. He ordered his men to spike the cannon and to throw them over the parapet into the sea, rendering the fort useless. Roberts then led his men back to their ship, taking with them anything that seemed of value. Shortly thereafter the Rover departed as swiftly as she had arrived. Roberts had his crew fire a few cannon shots into the town for good measure.

  Having avenged Davis, Roberts set sail southward along the Guinea Coast. Here he took a Dutch merchant ship and a slaver belonging to the Royal African Company.

  After these initial successes, and after a number of authority-establishing confrontations with his crew, Roberts felt sufficiently at ease in his new role as Black Bart to launch what many would regard as his personal war against the world.

  He began this whirlwind campaign with a stunning exploit of seamanship. He sailed the Royal Rover from the Guinea Coast of Africa westward across the Atlantic to the vast and wealthy Portuguese-held territory of Brazil—a voyage of 2,300 miles, accomplished in the incredible time of twenty-eight days. Moreover, he brought Royal Rover precisely to the destination he had chosen: the uninhabited island of Fernando de Noronha. Here he took on water, cleaned and repaired the Rover’s hull, and prepared to seek out Portuguese prizes in Brazilian waters.

  In September 1719, after cruising for a number of weeks off the coast of Brazil without locating a prize, Roberts encountered a fleet of forty-two Portuguese merchant vessels off the port of Bahia. The merchants, most of them carrying cargoes of gold, sugar, tobacco, wood, guns, and hides, were in the midst of forming a convoy for the long voyage across the Atlantic to Lisbon. Anchored nearby were two Portuguese warships slated to act as escorts to the convoy.

  Roberts never hesitated. With flags flying and all sail unfurled, the Royal Rover waded right into the merchant convoy and bore down on the largest of the cargo vessels. While the other Portuguese merchants fired their cannon and tried to signal to the two warships, Roberts brought the Royal Rover alongside her prey. Coolly ignoring the booming cannon of the other ships, Roberts’s men swung aboard their victim. They quickly overcame the token resistance put up by the captured vessel’s officers and crew. The men of the Royal Rover plundered the merchant with professional thoroughness and speed, transferring most of her cargo to their own ship. The loot included gold coins worth approximately £50,000.
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br />   Casting off from the plundered Portuguese vessel, Roberts made swiftly for the open sea. It was all over before the Portuguese warships could even weigh anchor to come to the aid of the convoy.

  Now, still skirting the coast of Brazil, Roberts headed northward, putting in at Devil’s Island off the coast of Guiana. Then a backwater Spanish possession—it did not become a French penal colony until 1852—Devil’s Island was a place where gentlemen of fortune could buy anything from rum to women, and where they could solace their cares undisturbed by Authority so long as their money lasted. Here Roberts and his crew spent several weeks in a prolonged bout of gambling, drinking, and fornication with captive and paid women.

  Following this interval at Devil’s Island, Roberts sailed boldly into the Caribbean, although he knew that the Royal Navy, to say nothing of French and Spanish warships, had recently been active in the area. He also knew—as all pirates did—that thanks to Woodes Rogers, pirates no longer had available to them their old sanctuaries in the Bahamas. But Roberts seemed indifferent to the dangers in these sunny waters. Making no effort to disguise the Royal Rover, he sailed insolently across the well-traveled sea-lanes of the Caribbean, hewing to a northward-tending course, as if challenging any warships on patrol to catch him if they could.

  To his crew—amazed at his defiant brass and dash—Roberts seemed touched with some special magic. He could take them anywhere. They began to think of Black Bart as “pistol proof.” Even Roberts’s rancor toward the civilized world began to rub off on his men. They took to calling themselves “The House of Lords,” addressing each other as “Your Lordship.”1

  But for all its boldness, Roberts’s foray into the Caribbean proved uneventful. The Royal Rover took only a few prizes in the course of her transit of the island-marked sea. The pirates had to fight no battles and they encountered no warships.

  Continuing their northward course from the Caribbean, Roberts and the House of Lords worked their way in slow progression along the Atlantic Coast. Here, too, only a few small prizes came their way.

  In June 1720, Roberts and the Royal Rover hove to outside the port of Trepassey in Newfoundland. It was almost exactly a year since Roberts had been taken, unwillingly, aboard the Royal Rover. Now, as a pirate captain whose brazen courage had made him known from Brazil to Africa to the American coast, he and the House of Lords were about to carry off one of the most audacious raids in pirate annals.

  In the harbor of Trepassey lay 22 merchant ships that were preparing to cross the Atlantic. Many of them were armed with cannon. Their crews numbered well over twelve hundred men. Also in the harbor were some 125 to 150 fishing boats, part of the great fleet that fished the prolific Atlantic waters off Newfoundland and the banks to the south.

  Roberts, outgunned and far outnumbered, plunged into the harbor with an almost manic recklessness. As a Boston newspaper later put it, the Royal Rover came charging into the harbor with “drums beating, trumpets sounding, English colors flying, and the pirate flag at the topmast with death’s head and cutlass.”

  This sudden appearance of the Rover with her grim flags flying and her deadly cannon visible in gunports—in contrast to the gay music being played by her band—must have seemed to many who saw it a work of the Devil. Panic spread aboard the anchored ships. Instead of defending themselves, their crews fled to the safety of the shore.

  Roberts and the House of Lords now began systematically to loot the anchored vessels as well as another four ships that blundered unknowingly into the harbor during the operation. Working methodically and at their ease, Roberts’s men stripped whatever was valuable, and salable, from the captive ships. Just to show that he meant business, Roberts sank a number of the fishing boats that were in the harbor.

  It was at Trepassey that Roberts also decided the time had come to change flagships. The Royal Rover was beginning to show her age, becoming leaky and encrusted with marine growth. Roberts chose one of the prizes he had taken in the harbor, a Bristol galley, as his new flagship—and rechristened her Royal Fortune.

  After completing the plundering of the Trepassey fleet, Roberts, in his new Royal Fortune, sailed out of the harbor as brazenly as he had entered it. The governor of New England, reporting later to London on the Trepassey raid, said of Roberts: “One cannot withhold admiration for his bravery and daring.”

  Now Roberts cruised off the Newfoundland banks, taking six more ships, all of them flying the French flag. One of these vessels attracted his eye. He thought she would make an even better flagship than the one he had already captured. Again he transferred his flag. He called his new flagship, too, Royal Fortune. She was a sleek, swift sailer—and with twenty-eight guns mounted in her, she was as formidable as she was swift.

  Now, in this newest Royal Fortune, Roberts set off southward again.

  Operating off New England, he captured a series of English ships, among them the sloop Samuel en route from London to Boston. In addition to its cargo, the Samuel carried a number of passengers whom the House of Lords robbed of all their money and valuables, threatening to kill any who held anything back. These passengers later gave eye-witness accounts to a newspaper called The Boston News Letter, which printed them in detail. According to the News Letter’s story, the pirates behaved “like a parcel of furies, breaking open every bale, and packing-case aboard the Samuel in their search for plunder.”

  In addition to stealing approximately £10,000 worth of cargo, the pirates stripped the Samuel of sails, guns, powder, and rope. Uttering fearful curses, they tore open every locker and searched every possible hiding place on the ship, looking for hidden gold or jewelry. They then—wantonly, according to the News Letter—threw everything they did not want into the sea.

  Although they did not find any hidden treasure in their search of the Samuel, the pirates did find Samuel’s chief mate, Harry Glasby, hiding below—and they dragged him up on deck. Glasby, who was a skilled and experienced sailing master, was then taken by force aboard the Royal Fortune. This was a notable action because Roberts rarely impressed any captives into his crew. Roberts must have been in dire need of another sailing master to have done something so much against his usual practice.

  The News Letter account of the assault on the Samuel also made it clear that the pirates—no doubt reflecting the attitude of their Black Captain—had only contempt for the forces of law and order. They swore to the captain of the Samuel that they would never accept pardons, “may the King and Parliament be damned with their Act of Grace.” They might look for a pardon, they mocked, only when they had each gained a fortune of “seven or eight hundred pounds.”

  They also scoffed at the notion that they might be captured and hanged. As one member of the House of Lords put it to the captain of the Samuel: “If we are captured, we will set fire to the powder with a pistol, and all go merrily to Hell together.”

  Clearly Roberts’s own demonic spirit had by now taken full control of the Royal Fortune and those who sailed in her.

  Continuing on his southward rampage, Roberts—in September 1720—was back in the Caribbean, despite the fact that by now he was the most sought-after pirate in the world—and despite the squadrons of English, French, and Spanish warships that had made these waters extremely dangerous for sea outlaws.

  Roberts, however, had no intention of remaining there long. It was actually his plan, after taking on fresh water and supplies at the little island of Désirade (Deseada) in the Lesser Antilles, to sail due east across the Atlantic to Africa where he intended to resume operations off the Guinea Coast.

  Accordingly, as soon as the Royal Fortune was fully provisioned at Désirade, Roberts set sail for the Cape Verde Islands. But far out on the Atlantic, the Royal Fortune was beset by contrary winds that drove her far north of her course. Roberts tried to beat southward in the face of prevailing southerly winds, but he was unable to make any headway toward his destination. Roberts finally had to admit failure.

  He now decided that since they were far out
on the Atlantic and unable to make any nearby landfall that would be safe for them, there was no other option but to return to the Caribbean and await more favorable winds to take them to Africa. It was a dangerous choice to make. It was entirely possible that Roberts and his men would exhaust their supplies of water and food before they sighted land again. But Roberts, always prepared to rush toward whatever destiny lay ahead of him, made the decision to return without a second thought. Bringing Royal Fortune about on a reversal of course, he began the long journey back to the Caribbean.

  Riding the prevailing trade winds toward the southwest, Roberts and his men could only hope they would make landfall before the ship’s meager supply of water—a mere sixty-three gallons for 124 men—ran out.

  Over the following weeks, as the Royal Fortune crept to the southwest on an empty endless ocean, the water dwindled. Eventually each man was allowed only one mouthful every twenty-four hours. Now, under the broiling sun, men began to go mad. “Many of them drank their urine,” says Defoe, “or sea water, which instead of allaying, gave them an inextinguishable thirst, that killed them.” They began to die of dysentery and fever, “fluxes” and “apyrexies,” according to Defoe. Finally the water was completely gone. Roberts, it seemed, had found the doom he had been seeking.