Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

  As soon as he had realized that the battle with the men of the Eagle was lost, Lowther, with three of his men and a cabin boy, had fled the combat and had tried to find someplace to hide on the little island. But Blanquilla offered little refuge. A search party was sent ashore to hunt down the cruel captain of the Happy Delivery. Lowther must have realized that for him the war was over. He blew his brains out with a pistol rather than face the hangman. The searchers from the Eagle found his body on the beach of Blanquilla, a burst pistol at his side.

  Perhaps the deadliest of the last pirate captains, however, was the sinister Edward Low.

  Born in Westminster, England, Low was known, even in boyhood, as a bully and a thief. Unable to hold a job for any length of time, Low had worked as an ordinary seaman, a shipyard worker in Boston, and a log cutter in the Bay of Honduras. Time after time he had lost jobs when his evil temper landed him in trouble with the law. His final break with honest society, however, came sometime in 1721 in Honduras. During an argument with his employer, Low fired a musket and killed a bystander by mistake. He then fled to sea in a small boat with a dozen companions whom he talked into going pirating with him.

  Somehow Low and the others, operating in an open boat far out at sea, managed to overhaul a small merchant vessel, which they took for their own.

  According to Defoe, Low now made a black flag for himself and “declared War against the World.”

  But despite his grandiose declaration, Low was less than a rousing success as a pirate captain. Then he met Captain George Lowther of the Happy Delivery in the Grand Caymans sometime in the autumn of 1721. For the next nine months Low sailed in company with Lowther, acting as his lieutenant and learning his trade.

  In May 1722, Low—with forty-four men—went off on his own account in a ship taken off the coast of Virginia.

  Now, as captain of a formidable ship, which he named the Fancy, Low showed that he had learned his craft well from his mentor. Over the next year or more he ranged widely over the sea-lanes from New England to the West Indies, and as far eastward as the African coastal islands, taking at least ninety-three prizes and making a specialty of boldly charging into protected harbors and plundering anchored prizes. Eventually he gathered several ships under his command—and earned an unsurpassed reputation for cruelty.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Low’s cruelty was strangely deliberate and cold in nature. This was apparent, for example, in his treatment of blacks. Unlike most other pirate captains, Low did not welcome blacks aboard his ships. But at the same time he did not make this policy widely known. Instead, he often allowed free blacks to voluntarily sign ship’s articles. Then, when they were aboard and thought themselves full members of the crew, Low would clap them in irons to be sold into slavery when convenient.

  For some reason Low also had a particular hatred for New Englanders and Portuguese. Whenever he took a ship from New England, his practice was to strip the ship’s captain naked and to whip him around the deck, all the while nicking him with a cutlass in various parts of his body, often slitting the unfortunate’s nose. Sometimes when Low wearied of such sport, he simply put a pistol ball through his victim’s head “to put him out of his misery.”

  The atrocities he committed against Portuguese captives were even worse. Decapitation and disemboweling were among the milder treatments meted out to unfortunate Portuguese prisoners. One Portuguese captain had enraged Low by dropping a sack containing eleven thousand gold coins out of his cabin into the sea before Low could take them as booty. Screaming with rage, Low lashed the Portuguese captain to the mast of his own ship and then he had the man’s lips sliced off and broiled in a pan before his eyes.

  Low’s barbarous behavior inevitably rubbed off on his crew—who did not limit themselves to torturing only New Englanders and Portuguese. In one instance Low captured a French prize and took her crew prisoners aboard his ship. But his crewmen—apparently for sport—took the cook of the captured ship and bound him to the mast of the prize vessel, which they then set afire. The cook, they joked among themselves, “being a greasy Fellow, would fry well in the Fire.”

  It is said that a bizarre accident that occurred at the height of Low’s piratical career made his appearance as hideous as his character. According to the story, during a battle a member of Low’s crew slashed at a victim with his cutlass and missed, slicing open his captain’s jaw instead. Low’s surgeon, drunk and incompetent, did his best to repair his captain’s face by stitching up the jagged wound that gaped from Low’s lower lip to his ears, like some gigantic bloody grin. After the job was done, however, Low complained of the doctor’s poor stitchwork, whereupon the drunken medical man punched Low so hard in the face that all the stitches came loose again. The surgeon, according to Defoe, “then bid him sew up his Chops himself and be damned.” The result was that ever after Low carried a scar on his face in the shape of a perpetual evil grin.

  Whether the tale of Low’s horrible face is true or not, it reflects the general belief that he was a monster. Even other pirates wondered at his heedless, maniacal cruelty—and expressed the fear that it would ensure the final demise of the sweet trade by stiffening the forces of law in their determination to put an end to piracy once and for all.

  In June 1723, however, Low met his match. Cruising in the Fancy, with a consort, the Ranger, under the command of one of his lieutenants, Charles Harris, Low encountered a guard ship from New York, H.M.S. Greyhound.

  Thinking her a potential prize, the two pirate vessels bore down on Greyhound. The man-of-war, a formidable vessel with sixty cannon and a well-trained crew, adopted the tactic that H.M.S. Swallow had used so effectively two years earlier against Bartholomew Roberts’s lieutenant, James Skyrme, in the Great Ranger: She pretended to flee from the chasing pirates, but allowed them to close within cannon range.

  Then, just as Swallow had done, Greyhound came about and loosed a series of broadsides at the pirates. Ranger’s main yardarm was soon shot away, leaving her crippled. Now Low, so terrible when torturing defenseless merchants, left his damaged consort to the mercies of the warship. Turning tail, he ran before the wind and fled from the scene as soon as possible. H.M.S. Greyhound took the officers and crew of Ranger into custody. Charles Harris and twenty-seven members of his crew went to the gallows.

  As for Low himself, there is no positive evidence of his fate after his escape from Greyhound. One story says that he went to Brazil and continued pirating until he retired. Other stories say that he lost Fancy in battle but took another ship, which he called, with characteristic sarcasm, Merry Christmas—and that this ship sank in a storm with all hands. Other stories say that Low was finally the victim of a mutiny and was set adrift in a small open boat, and that he was rescued by a French warship and subsequently hanged in Martinique.

  Whatever his final end may have been, it is certain that his cruel career came to a halt sometime after 1723. For he was never heard of again. It is also certain that if it was death that put an end to his career, no one wept at his demise, or offered a prayer for the repose of his savage soul.

  But even the closing out of Edward Low’s career did not mark the final end of the once-proud pirate brotherhood that had terrorized the maritime world for more than thirty years.

  In far-off Madagascar—once fearfully looked upon as the embryo homeland of an emergent pirate nation—King John Plantain had achieved his ambition to make himself sovereign over all of the great island.

  Although pirate ships had been chased from eastern waters, Plantain had continued to flourish during the 1720s. After defeating his archenemy, King Dick, and consolidating his power as king of the northern half of Madagascar, Plantain had—probably in 1723 or 1724—launched a war against the native chieftain of Port Dauphin, whose name is now unknown but who was then Plantain’s only rival for the overlordship of Madagascar. For eighteen months Plantain had beseiged Port Dauphin. Finally the place had fallen to him—and he had proclaimed himself truly “King o
f Madagascar.”

  As sole ruler of his domain, however, Plantain had then fallen into the trap that awaits all who wield absolute power: He became corrupt, capricious, and cruel. Although his half-caste wife, Holy Eleanora, remained at his side, she had been unable to curb his excesses. Blind like any tyrant to his own vulnerability, and convinced, like most white Europeans of this time, that darker-skinned people were necessarily inferior creatures, Plantain had set himself up as a slave trader, selling native captives and offenders against his realm to the slave ships that called from time to time at his kingdom.

  In time King John Plantain’s subjects had begun to mutter against their sovereign’s cruel practices. Plantain, with his native canniness, had sensed a serious rebellion being prepared against him.

  Perhaps he had wearied of war. Perhaps power over his benighted subjects no longer seemed so heady. Perhaps, having conquered one kingdom, he now began to yearn for another. Perhaps he merely decided that he was no longer willing to risk his life, or the lives of his beloved Holy Eleanora and their children, to maintain his throne.

  Whatever the case, King John Plantain, sometime toward the end of the 1720s, made up his mind to forsake his hard-won kingdom.

  He ordered a sloop built for his use. Then, with Holy Eleanora and his children and all the ill-gotten riches he could cram aboard his boat, he departed his realm. He first made for Johanna Island off Madagascar’s northwest coast. Here he reverted to his earlier career as a pirate and looted an Indian ship in the harbor. Plantain then set sail eastward into the vast Indian Ocean.

  Some say he fetched up on the Malabar Coast and ended his days peacefully. Others say he served a prince in India. But there is no solid evidence of his eventual destiny. Whatever the truth, the pirate king of Madagascar disappeared from the world into fable, where he probably belonged anyway.

  After the departure of its pirate king, Madagascar declined into a squalid pesthole where native tribes fought each other for possession of the ruins. Within a decade, all trace of Plantain’s kingdom had vanished. Vestiges of the outlaw nation, however, lingered on. English names and the use of English words persisted among the natives for another thirty to forty years. The half-caste progeny of the pirate lords who had once ruled the great island were also present in Madagascar past 1750. But when the last of these light-skinned speakers of pidgin English died, the final traces of the pirate nation died also.

  Meanwhile, as John Plantain fled his island, another island—halfway across the world—welcomed back the man who had wrested it from its pirate conquerers: the indomitable Woodes Rogers.

  Since Rogers had departed his Bahamas colony to return to England in 1721, the island of New Providence, once called the Republic of Rogues, had become a peaceful plantation colony. The shantytown of Nassau, where Blackbeard had plied his trade and Calico Jack Rackam had wooed and won the tempestuous Anne Bonny, had turned into a thriving port city where respectable merchants conducted honest business and cargo vessels anchored unmolested under the guns of the formidable fort that Governor Rogers had built.

  Although Nassau was a real town now, its waterfront was still crowded with taverns where reformed veterans of the sweet trade talked nostalgically of the good old days before Woodes Rogers had tamed the lords of Nassau.

  If the years had changed Nassau, however, they had not much altered Woodes Rogers.

  After returning to England and finding that his efforts in the Bahamas had earned him only a pile of debts and the ingratitude of both his nation and his partners in the Bahamas colony scheme, Rogers had set out to restore his honor and his fortune. Although thrown into debtors’ prison because he had been unable to pay the bills he had incurred as governor of the Bahamas, Rogers had remained as undaunted by poverty as he had been by the threats of the pirate captain Charles Vane.

  Relentlessly he had pleaded his case in high places. With the help of friends and—apparently—by selling family properties, he had managed to extricate himself from the worst of his poverty.

  Then in 1726, after the Admiralty had turned an unsympathetic ear to his plea for a just recompense for his labors in the Bahamas, the army had come forward to do him justice. He had been granted the rank of an infantry captain and placed on half pay. The king had also come forward to grant him a pension for his work on behalf of the nation. In 1728, with his honor intact and his purse revived, Rogers had been reappointed governor of the Bahamas, where pirates had not been seen for years.

  In 1729 he returned to Nassau again, this time accompanied by his family and at an annual salary of £400. When he resumed his labors as governor, he was presented with the official seal of the colony, which bore this motto in Latin: “The Pirates Expelled, Trade Restored.” The seal pictured a pirate fleet retreating. It was a truthful representation.1

  The pirate war against the world was over.

  There would never be another Black Bart.

  Epilogue

  Of course piracy, as a crime at sea, continued long after Bartholomew Roberts, Blackbeard, and Kidd had become the stuff of legend and fiction. But after the great outbreak of 1692–1725, piracy steadily diminished as a factor affecting the commerce of nations.

  Pirates themselves also seemed to diminish after the great outbreak, becoming steadily meaner in spirit until they were mere caricatures of the men who sailed the Pirate Round.

  But if piracy—after 1725—became the shabby trade of a relatively few petty thieves and psychotics, privateering remained a respectable pursuit for enterprising seamen for many decades.

  For example, French privateers based in Guadaloupe and Martinique preyed so effectively on slave ships bound for the British colonies in the mid-eighteenth century that they almost put an end to the slave trade.

  During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress commissioned almost anything that would float—whalers, traders, fishing smacks, and even yachts—as privateers against the British fleet. In all, Congress and its constituent states commissioned more than 2,500 privateers, and the Americans captured 2,300 prizes from the British, losing fewer than half that number to the enemy. Yet as effective as the privateers may have been against commerce, they were all but useless against the Royal Navy. As a consequence, the British had no trouble controlling major colonial ports such as New York, Boston, and Charleston. Control of the ports by the Royal Navy meant that the British could move troops as they chose, could resupply easily, and could bring military pressure to bear where and when they chose. It was only when a French fleet blocked the British from relieving Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown that the Americans won their war for independence.

  The French also utilized privateers during their revolution. Between 1793 and 1796, French privateers seized some 2,100 English vessels. But French privateering came to an end during the long struggle known as the Napoleonic Wars. During this era the Royal Navy developed effective convoy tactics, fast frigate escorts, and matchless gunnery skills—all of which made the lone-wolf privateer all but obsolete.

  The fledgling United States, however, continued to rely on privateers during the War of 1812—and for several decades thereafter. The U.S. brig Yankee, for example, was credited with destroying or capturing some $5 million worth of English shipping and cargo during that time.

  By the 1840s the navies of the world had become permanent, professional forces possessed of advanced technologies in the hands of highly trained crews. Privateers no longer had a place in the strategic dispositions of such armed fleets. In 1856, by the Declaration of Paris, Britain and most other European countries agreed to ban the use of privateers in their navies. (The United States, however, did not formally agree to the ban until 1890, although for all practical purposes privateering had ceased long before then.)

  Although the pirates of the nineteenth century (as differentiated from the privateers of the time) were as a rule nasty, unglamorous figures, a few of them did attain some notoriety. One of these was Jean Laffite.

  Born in France in 177
9, Laffite made a business of capturing slave ships in the West Indies during the first decade of the nineteenth century, and then auctioning their human cargoes to the highest bidders at his island base in Barataria Bay south of New Orleans. Laffite’s racket came to an end in 1814, however, when an American expeditionary force destroyed his operation. But it was only a year later that Laffite became a hero of sorts when his ships helped General Andrew Jackson defeat a British invasion force at the Battle of New Orleans. Laffite received a presidential pardon as a reward for his services during the battle.

  But Laffite was far less a hero than he was a crook. He was soon back at his old racket of stealing slave ships and selling their cargo. This time, instead of operating out of an offshore island, he set up his business at Galveston, then part of Mexico. James Bowie, inventor of the Bowie knife, was one of Laffite’s valued customers. Bowie would buy stolen slaves from the French pirate at a dollar a pound and then smuggle them to American cotton states where he was paid from $500 to $1,000 for each slave delivered. In 1821, Laffite’s Galveston market was captured and shut down by an American warship, notwithstanding that it was in Mexican territory. Laffite then sailed off into the Caribbean—and was not heard from again.

  In the 1820s the U.S. Congress sent a special West India squadron under the command of Commodore David Porter to put an end to a plague of petty pirates who were attacking shipping in the Caribbean. Porter sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, with a force of eight fast-sailing schooners of shallow draft, a paddle-wheel steamer, and five flat-bottomed barges designed to navigate the shallow reefs and banks of the Caribbean islands. Porter’s squadron worked in cooperation with six American warships already in the area.

  In April 1823 Porter caught one of the most notorious of the pirates at large in the islands. He was the Cuban brigand known as Diabolito, whom Porter took after a bloody battle in which seventy of the Cuban’s men were killed. Over the next two years, Porter’s squadron captured hundreds of the minor villains who operated in the West Indies—and swept the Caribbean clean of pirates.