by Frank Sherry
Amazingly enough, Swallow’s crew had suffered no casualties during the battle, although the ship had received some damage that would have to be repaired before she returned to action.
After chaining his one hundred unwounded pirate prisoners—fifty-nine Englishmen, twenty-three blacks, and eighteen Frenchmen, according to Dr. Atkins—in the hold of Swallow, Captain Ogle sent the heavily damaged Great Ranger, with the wounded prisoners under guard, to Principe Island, two hundred or so miles to the north. He then set about repairing his own damage and refreshing his crew, which took some time. Several days passed before Ogle set off once more for Cape Lopez where Roberts still lay in hiding with Royal Fortune and the Little Ranger.
On the morning of February 10, Swallow arrived off the inlet where Roberts was anchored. Although it had been five days since Roberts had sent the Great Ranger after a supposed merchantman—and the ship had not returned—Roberts had professed to be unconcerned. He had made no move to find out what might have happened to the Great Ranger, nor had he changed his own anchorage. It was as if he had long expected what was now at hand, and was resolved to remain in this African coastal swamp to meet it.
When word was brought to Roberts that a strange sail had appeared, he calmly continued his breakfast of salmagundi in his cabin aboard the Royal Fortune.
Taking their cue from their captain, Roberts’s men seemed equally unconcerned about the approaching stranger. Many of them, according to later testimony, were still hung over from their usual drinking bout the night before—and they idly watched the oncoming vessel and speculated about her nationality and possible mission. Suddenly one of the crewmen—by coincidence a Royal Navy deserter who had once served on the Swallow—recognized the ship that was advancing toward them as the sixty-gun man-of-war he knew so well. He cried out his identification of the onrushing Swallow.
Immediately Roberts was up on deck.
Deadly calm, he issued orders for the men aboard the Little Ranger, anchored nearby, to come aboard Royal Fortune. He also ordered his men to arm themselves and to take up battle stations. He then slipped his cable. Royal Fortune slid away from her anchorage. It was 10:30 A.M.
Roberts ordered full sail crowded on. He indicated that, with full sail set, he would try to run before the wind in an effort to escape the oncoming Swallow. If Swallow managed to cut him off before he could make the open sea, he said, he would try to run Royal Fortune aground so that they could all escape into the jungle. And if that strategy miscarried, he would try to board the warship and then blow up both Royal Fortune and Swallow. He did not intend to hang.
Now Roberts did something that probably reveals his state of mind at this moment better than anything he said aloud: He went below and dressed himself in his best finery. He donned a crimson waistcoat, silk breeches, the hat festooned with the red ostrich feather, a gold chain, and a silk sling into which he jammed two ornate pistols. He then returned to the deck. His gaudy attire seemed to celebrate a destiny he saw rushing toward him in the shape of the hard-driving Swallow.
Now Roberts took an action that was wholly inexplicable—unless he was, in fact, deliberately seeking his own destruction.
Instead of trying to escape, as he had proposed, he directed his ship toward, rather than away from, the powerful Swallow. His amazed crew obeyed his orders, doubtless certain that their captain—the brazen pistol-proof Black Bart—had some method even to this madness.
At about 11:00 A.M. Royal Fortune and Swallow came within cannon range of each other. Suddenly Roberts ran from his station on the quarterdeck to the railing where the Royal Fortune’s guns were now ready to fire. He jumped onto one of the gun carriages the better to direct his ship’s fire. Royal Fortune and Swallow delivered almost-simultaneous broadsides. Both vessels shuddered beneath the blast of the cannon. Clouds of dense smoke rolled across their decks. Royal Fortune’s mizzen-topmast came crashing down.
When the smoke of the broadside cleared, the men of Royal Fortune saw that their captain seemed to be slumping over one of the guns. When the helmsman went to his aid, he saw that Black Bart was dead. A blast of grapeshot had torn away his throat. The helmsman, and many others among the hardened pirates in the House of Lords, burst into tears.
They knew that they were finished. Without their bold and brilliant leader, they were no match for a Royal Navy man-of-war. Roberts had not only been their captain, he had been the heart and brains of their whole enterprise. But they did not surrender.
With Swallow pouring fire into Royal Fortune, some members of the House of Lords took Roberts’s body, decked out in all its finery, and threw it overboard—in accordance with Roberts’s own longstanding and strict instructions.
Now the leaderless crew of the Royal Fortune (there was no second-in-command) tried to sail their ship out to the open sea to escape. It was a forlorn hope, but it was the only one they had. When one of the crewmen—a forced man—tried to persuade his fellows to surrender, the House of Lords, many of whom had served with Howell Davis as well as Roberts, rejected the idea. For them, as they well knew, surrender meant the noose.
But it soon became clear that the Royal Fortune, poorly handled, could not escape. Slowly Swallow closed on her. Although the pirates kept up a desultory fire, they made no wholehearted attempt to stand and fight. Nor did they try to run Royal Fortune aground, an alternative that Roberts himself had been considering. Instead, the House of Lords, having lost its brain, now lost its heart as well. As Swallow neared, Roberts’s crew began to drink. At 2:00 P.M.—three hours after Roberts’s death—the House of Lords, many of them too drunk to care any longer, surrendered.
A navy boarding party swung aboard the Royal Fortune to take possession of their prize and to take the pirates into custody. A search of the ship turned up a considerable quantity of gold dust and plunder stored in the ship’s hold. The navy men also retrieved Roberts’s papers—and his personal pirate flag.
By 7:00 P.M. all the prisoners had been taken aboard the Swallow and chained belowdecks with the prisoners captured earlier from the Great Ranger.
Captain Ogle now sailed off with his prisoners—254 of them in all—to Cape Coast Castle.
There Black Bart’s crew would be kept in irons in the underground slave dungeons beneath the castle until they could be put on trial for their crimes—not the least of which was their contempt and hatred for the Authority that would try them.
20
Saga’s End
So died Black Bart, not yet forty years old.
In a career that spanned not quite three years, he had captured more than four hundred ships—and he had, with audacity, demonic energy, and masterly seamanship, made his name a terror from Newfoundland to Brazil and the swampy Guinea Coast of Africa.
If he had sought vengeance against the world that rejected him, he had achieved his aim. And if he had also sought the punishment of God for sins committed in defiance of his own creed, then Black Bart had achieved this too.
In the aftermath of Roberts’s extinction, there were accolades and rewards for the victorious forces of law and order—and swift and certain punishment for the defeated followers of Black Bart.
Captain Chaloner Ogle of H.M.S. Swallow, the man who had finally put an end to Roberts, was knighted for his feat—the only man ever to receive such an honor for action against pirates. Ogle’s career flowered after his victory over Roberts. He was offered important commands and eventually rose to the rank of admiral.
Ogle’s officers and men also profited from their victory. The loot taken from the captured Royal Fortune, although less than had been expected, still amounted to a considerable sum when it was distributed as prize money among the crew and officers of Swallow. (It was said that Captain Ogle profited most of all, having appropriated for himself a significant quantity of gold dust that had been found in Roberts’s cabin.)
For Roberts’s crew—those who had survived both the battles with H.M.S. Swallow and their subsequent confinement in the dungeon o
f Cape Coast Castle—the day of reckoning came on March 28, 1722, when they were taken to the great hall of the castle to be tried for their crimes before a vice-admiralty court.
In the end, a total of 169 members of Roberts’s crew were brought to trial. Of the rest, some had died of wounds received in the battles. Others had perished under the harsh conditions of their captivity. A number were set free without trial. Among these were musicians, surgeons, and “sea artists” (such as sailing masters and blacksmiths) whom the court determined had been forced into service with Roberts. Also freed were the 18 Frenchmen who had served with Roberts. The court decided that it had no jurisdiction over these “foreigners”—and it set them at liberty. The remaining prisoners—including the 50 or so members of the House of Lords—went to trial.
Rattling in their chains and blinking like owls in daylight after their confinement in the underground cells of the castle, these defendants were brought before the tribunal and pleaded, to a man, that they had been forced into piracy. For many of them, especially the hard-bitten House of Lords, this was a defense that would not stand up to scrutiny and they knew it. Still, it was the only plea they could make under the circumstances. Doubtless they hoped that if they exhibited sufficient contrition during their trial, the court just might believe that they had been forced aboard Roberts’s ship.
For this reason even the House of Lords muted their customary blasphemy and sarcastic banter during the trial.
The trial itself was fair by the standards of the day. Sitting as judges on the court were four officials of the Royal African Company, including its director general, James Phipps, and the skipper of the H.M.S. Weymouth, Captain Mungo Herdman. The court allowed all the accused to speak if they wished, and allowed the defendants to tell their stories in their own words. Unlike the magistrates who would have tried the defendants in England, these court officers were knowledgeable about pirates. They were well aware of conditions that sometimes caused seamen to end up in pirate crews. They were sympathetic—but they could not be fooled, either, by invented excuses for piracy. Thus they made it clear that they were prepared to acquit any of the defendants who could verify, by testimony of witnesses or documentation, that they had indeed been forced into piracy—as all of them claimed—but would grant no leniency to those who had chosen the outlaw life of their own free will.
In the end 74 of the 169 accused men were able to satisfy the court that they were truly “forced men.” These defendants were set free. The rest—95 of them—were convicted. The punishments handed out by the court varied widely.
Twenty of those convicted were sentenced to seven years’ hard labor in the Royal Africa Company mines—a sentence none of them survived.
A total of seventeen other men were sentenced to varying prison terms in England. (But thirteen of these men never served their sentences, having died on the journey back.)
The court condemned fifty-four men to death. Most of these were the hardcore elite House of Lords. Among those sentenced to death was Captain Skyrme of the Great Ranger, who, despite the loss of his leg in the battle with Swallow, had survived to keep his date with the hangman. (Two of those originally condemned to hang were later reprieved and given long prison terms instead.)
With their trial over, the House of Lords—all of them now condemned to death—reverted to their true selves. Reclaiming their self-appointed titles, they affected unconcern with their fate. They would go to the gallows jauntily, figuratively thumbing their noses at the Authority that would hang them, as if by mocking the law, they were asserting their free status as members of the pirate brotherhood. Despite their chains, their actions implied, they were still free men in their hearts.
This attitude had been demonstrated most trenchantly in a sardonic little exchange that took place between one tough, unrepentant pirate, Lord Sutton, and another prisoner who had been loudly expressing his contrition for his crimes. Lord Sutton protested vehemently when the contrite man, who was chained next to Sutton, began to intone prayers for forgiveness from a devotional book.
“What,” Lord Sutton demanded, “do you propose by so much noise and devotion?”
“Heaven, I hope,” the contrite prisoner responded.
“Heaven, you fool?” exclaimed Lord Sutton. “Did you ever hear of any pirate going there? Give me Hell, it’s a merrier place. I’ll give Roberts a salute of 13 guns at entrance.” Lord Sutton then asked the guard to take either the prisoner or his prayer book away. “Because he is disturbing the peace.”
The executions of those sentenced to hang were carried out over a period of approximately two weeks. Beginning on April 4 or 5, small groups of the condemned men were taken every other day or so from their dungeon prisons beneath Cape Coast Castle to the scaffold that had been erected outside the castle walls. Proceeding on foot, with their hands tied behind their backs, the condemned men, guarded by Royal African Company soldiers, had to make their way to the gallows through a crowd of Royal African Company employees, slave dealers, sailors, and curiosity seekers, both men and women.
The members of the House of Lords made this last journey with no outward diminution of their cockiness. According to the Swallow’s surgeon, Dr. Atkins, who was a close observer of the executions, the condemned men—even in their last moments—showed no repentance for their crimes. Said one of them, according to the doctor: “We are poor rogues, and so must be hanged, while others, no less guilty in another way, escaped.”
One of the “poor rogues,” Lord Hardy, complained bitterly about the “irregularity” of being hanged with his hands tied behind his back.
Another, Lord Sympson, on his way to the rope, spotted a woman in the watching crowd who had been a passenger on a ship captured by Roberts. “By God,” cried Lord Sympson, pointing with his chin toward the lady in question, “I have lain with that bitch three times—and now she comes to see me hanged!” The crowd laughed.
Dr. Atkins recorded the names, birthplaces, and ages of the executed men. The oldest pirate hanged was forty-five, the youngest nineteen. Only four of those hanged were over forty—and only four were twenty or under. The veteran pirates of the House of Lords, despite their long years of pirating, averaged only thirty years of age.
The last batch of the condemned—fourteen of them—went to the gallows on April 20, 1722.
The bodies of eighteen of the executed men—those considered the most outrageous wrongdoers—were preserved by dipping them in tar. Then they were hung from gibbets visible to all approaching ships. It was the same fate that Captain Kidd had suffered a generation earlier.
With the death of Black Bart, and the execution of the House of Lords, the final defeat of piracy was sealed.
But even now a handful of pirate captains carried on a last-ditch combat on the sea-lanes against the forces of law and order.
As happens with most lost causes, these last adherents of the defeated outlaw nation fought with special fury and cruelty.
George Lowther was one who made his career in these last days. Little is known of Lowther’s history until June 1721 when he was serving as mate aboard the Royal African Company ship Gambia Castle. While the ship was operating off the Guinea Coast, Lowther seized control of her, set her captain adrift, and ran up the Jolly Roger on her mainmast. Renaming the ship Happy Delivery, Lowther—with fifty men who had joined his mutiny—set sail for the West Indies.
After taking a number of prizes in the Caribbean, Lowther and Happy Delivery became the object of a Royal Navy hunt. To escape the navy’s pursuit, Lowther made for the North American coast. He soon captured a number of prizes off New York and New England.
For Lowther, mistreatment of prisoners became common practice. He claimed he tortured captives only to make them reveal where they had hidden their gold. But stories of his cruelty indicate a strong streak of sadism in his makeup. For example, one of his favorite tortures was to place burning hempen matches between the fingers of his captives and to allow them to sear the flesh to the bone.
It is said that he would smile throughout this grisly procedure, enjoying the smell of burning flesh and the screams of his victims.
Because he was operating in the twilight of the pirate brotherhood when pirate-hunting men-of-war actually outnumbered outlaw vessels, Lowther could not remain long in any one location without attracting the attention of warships. It was his custom, therefore, to keep constantly on the move. Thus, he had left New England waters and was sailing off the coast of South Carolina in the autumn of 1722 when he attacked a merchant vessel that resisted so fiercely that Happy Delivery, her rigging and rudder badly damaged, ran aground on the beach.
Although Lowther managed to refloat Happy Delivery before any warships came upon her, his pirating was at an end—at least temporarily. He and his men sailed their badly wounded ship to an isolated inlet on the coast of North Carolina. Here they had to spend the bitter winter of 1722–23, living in makeshift tents on shore while they worked to repair their ship.
By the following summer, however, Lowther and Happy Delivery were back in business, operating off Newfoundland with some success. But when the weather turned cool again, Lowther steered south. This time he was heading for the Caribbean to hunt Spanish prey.
After arriving in the West Indies, Lowther careened Happy Delivery on the little-known island of Blanquilla, northeast of Tortuga. While his ship was careened, she was spotted and recognized as a pirate by an English sloop out of Barbados, the Eagle. The Eagle immediately attacked the vulnerable pirates. Caught by surprise, Lowther and his men resisted fiercely. But they were overwhelmed. About thirty-five of the outlaws were killed. The rest were taken as prisoners aboard the Eagle, but Lowther was not among them.