by Frank Sherry
Even before Porter’s successful sweep, the U.S. Navy had put an end to the career of one Charles Gibbs—an American ex-privateer who had put together a fleet of four pirate schooners and had been harrying commerce in the Gulf of Mexico and off Cuba. In October 1821 the Navy brig Enterprise, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Kearney, had encountered Gibbs and his flotilla in the act of looting three merchant vessels in Cuban waters. Kearney had immediately engaged Gibbs’s little fleet and, after a ferocious fight, had captured not only the pirate vessels but forty of the pirates. But Gibbs, with a number of his men, had managed to take refuge ashore. He remained a fugitive for the next ten years. He was finally caught in 1831—and hanged.
These actions of the U.S. Navy in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean sounded the death knell of piracy in the region, although petty and intermittent piracy has never been fully eradicated in those waters.
Pirates also continued to flourish in the China Sea long after piracy had all but ceased elsewhere in the world. Throughout the nineteenth century, and even into the early twentieth century, fleets of pirate junks, many of them based on Macao, disrupted commerce from Shanghai to Singapore. At one point during the middle of the nineteenth century, Chinese pirates were so numerous and well organized they fought battles on equal terms with gunboats of the Chinese government and even, on occasion, with the Royal Navy. There are still pirates in the South China Sea. But today they prey on helpless refugees from Vietnam, the sorrow-laden Boat People.
There are also piratical drug smugglers who operate in the waters around the Bahamas.
But such modern pirates are small-scale, mean creatures—unworthy descendants of Henry Every.
Despite the fact that piracy as a crime has never been completely suppressed in the world, the record makes it clear that after 1725 the maritime nations never again confronted a pirate captain of stature, or style, to equal the men of the outlaw nation.
But why did the great pirate outbreak of 1692–1725 come to an end when, and as, it did?
Some answers to that question come immediately to mind, along with some corresponding reservations.
First, the death of Bartholomew Roberts and the mass hangings of his crew at Cape Coast Castle no doubt dampened enthusiasm for piracy by underlining the determination of the maritime nations, especially England, to punish pirates to the full extent of the law instead of bribing them with pardons as had been done so often in the past. (Yet pirates had been hanged before without stopping piracy. There were, for example, Kidd, Vane, Rackam, Bonnet, and Every’s crew—to name just a few.)
Second, the loss of Madagascar and the Caribbean as bases of operation badly crippled the pirate brotherhood—as did the closing of American markets for pirate contraband. (Yet there were other havens that could have been used as bases: Zanzibar, South Africa, the Gulf of Mexico coast, and Brazil, to name just a few. But no serious attempt was made to reestablish a Republic of Rogues in any of those places. And there were certainly ports in South America, as well as enclaves of illegal merchants on the Guinea Coast, where pirates could have exchanged booty for rum, women, food, medicine, or any other commodity. But no effort was made to use these potential markets.)
Third, the determination of the Royal Navy from about 1720 onward to protect England’s mercantile fleet from pirates made it much more dangerous to locate and attack prey. (But pirate captains had evaded the Royal Navy in the past, and even the Royal Navy lacked the resources to guard all the sea-lanes all the time. Rich cargoes were still moving, virtually unguarded, over the sea-lanes of the world after 1725—and there would have been plenty of rich prizes for resolute pirate captains despite the Royal Navy. But no such resolute captains appeared.)
Fourth, laws were passed early in the eighteenth century that improved the outlook for ordinary seamen by furnishing them with pensions and medical care. The new laws also provided rewards to sailors who resisted pirate attacks. These changes in the sailor’s lot greatly reduced the incentives for the average sailor to become a pirate. (But despite such improvements, a sailor’s lot still remained pretty awful—and life aboard a ship, for many long decades after 1725, could still be a hell.)
Each of the causes cited here no doubt contributed—to a greater or lesser degree—to the cessation of the pirate war on the world.
But there was another, far more powerful, factor that contributed to the demise of the outlaw nation—and it had nothing to do with hangings, or loss of bases, or the Royal Navy, or even with improvements in the sailor’s life. It had to do with freedom.
As the first quarter of the eighteenth century came to an end, the western world was astir with new ideas about individual rights, social justice, and the worth of every human being. The Rights of Man idea was taking root. Already it was beginning to give impetus to invisible psychological shifts that would, later in the century, result in both the American and the French revolutions. But long before those climactic events occurred, the powerful new notion that all human beings, regardless of station, possessed “certain unalienable rights,” initiated social and legal changes that began to liberate the ordinary folk of the western world from the worst of the longstanding tyrannies imposed upon them by custom and by history.
Major revisions in the laws reflected these new attitudes and new social ideas. For example, torture was abolished as an approved method of extracting information. Capital punishment was reserved for heinous crimes. No longer could a man hang for stealing a loaf of bread. So-called “poor laws” were enacted to provide relief to the indigent. More humane treatment became the rule in workhouses and in prisons.
Such measures, while exceedingly limited by current standards, nevertheless resulted in a sudden improvement in the lives of most ordinary people. The oppressive weight of Authority, which so limited and burdened the lives of the great majority in the seventeenth century—and against which the pirates had rebelled—began to lighten perceptively as the eighteenth century ripened.
Furthermore, as the American colonists began in the eighteenth century to push inland from the Atlantic Coast and discovered that more people were needed to work the new lands, immigration to the New World—and escape from the Old—was encouraged.
Freedom was no longer reserved to the rich and to the rebellious.
And so the wellsprings of piracy began to dry up. Reforms were beginning to create reasonable hope for tolerable liberty at home, and there were new opportunities to live free in the colonies. The sea was no longer the only refuge open to the oppressed. Nor was the desperate act of nautical rebellion known as piracy any longer the sovereign route to liberty for seafarers.
And so the pirate brotherhood—the piracy of the great outbreak, fueled by the hunger for freedom—withered away.
It had lasted just thirty-three years. Yet the outlaw fraternity of that era has left an ineradicable imprint on the world. The pirates of the great outbreak remain alive for us in our novels, plays, movies, and stories. Although the swashbuckling outlaw, with his buried treasure and eye patch, is largely a myth that obscures the real pirate rebel at war with his society, the fictional pirate does express—even if inadvertently—some of the genuine flavor of piracy.
There is still, even after two and a half centuries, something so fundamental and compelling in the way the brigands of the outlaw nation lived that it continues to come through to us today. Tales of pirate life call forth in most of us a yearning for a life of adventure under sail, upon a boundless ocean, where the horizon changes every day and there are no responsibilities to hinder us.
Clearly the brigands of Madagascar and New Providence still speak to us. They tell us, even across the centuries, that if men are denied the chance to live in freedom, they will make their own freedom, even if the specific shape of that freedom may not be beautiful or idealistic. For to be free is also to be free to commit sin, to do wrong, to indulge in excesses, and the free pirates of the outlaw brotherhood, most of them simple sailing men, committed the
sins of sailors: drunkenness, whoring, thievery, and—too often—cruelty and murder. Yet, for all that, it was the yearning for freedom that lay at the heart of pirate life and that is what still calls to us.
But the sea rebels of 250 years ago affected more than our literature and our psyches. They also profoundly affected our history.
Because the pirate raiders of 1692–1725 severely damaged the national wealth of maritime countries, the governments of those countries undertook to back private merchants with military and naval strength—as, for example, the British government did with the East India Company and the Royal African Company. Soon protection of trade by armed fleets became national policy not only for England but for every maritime state. Sea commerce was seen as fundamental to national power.
The pirates also forced the trading nations to cooperate with each other against sea brigands. From this essential collaboration the maritime countries learned to forge rules among themselves for civilized behavior at sea. Laws were formulated to regulate international commerce. By degrees governments came to regard international agreements as the proper method for safeguarding the freedom of the seas. Such international cooperation, initiated first in response to the threat of piracy, did much to advance maritime intercourse on all levels. Thus, in an irony of history, the pirate nation, by the very success of its predatory war against the world, helped to further the establishment of international laws that made another pirate war impossible.
One of the most important consequences of the pirate outbreak of 1692–1725 was the redefinition of the Royal Navy’s role in the world. Prior to the pirate war, the Royal Navy had been, for the most part, a small, defense-oriented force. Although England in the seventeenth century disposed of a vast oceangoing fleet, this fleet was not an armed professional fleet of a nation. It was rather a conglomeration of individually owned ships. The Royal Navy, the maritime force of the state, was not only small, it was usually confined to home waters in time of war and allowed to rot at anchor in time of peace.
But all that began to change during the pirate war as the British government came to understand that national interest and overseas trade were synonymous. Called upon not only to fight the king’s enemies but also to protect British mercantile interests, the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century became the most professional naval force in the world, as well as the largest, on perpetual patrol in every sea and ocean.
And so, paradoxically, the pirate rebellion against Authority helped convert the Royal Navy into the instrument that created the British Empire—an Authority that ultimately came to embrace much of the globe and to exercise dominion over all its seas.
Black Bart would have honored the irony in that with his bitter laughter.
Notes
Our Lady of the Cape
1. It is always extremely difficult to assess with accuracy the value of money used in a past age. It is even more difficult to express the value of past currencies in terms of money circulating today. However, since much of the story of the pirate war involves the plundering of rich cargoes, it is important that the reader obtain at least some general idea of the worth of pirate booty, based on the purchasing power of modern currencies. For this reason I have worked out an admittedly makeshift method for estimating the worth of the English pound—the currency in which the value of booty was most often expressed—during the era covered by this story. Based on contemporary prices, a worker in the London of 1720 would seem to have required about 15 shillings a week to provide the bare minimum of food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities for his family. To provide the same today would require at least $150 per week. This would mean that the shilling of 1720 was probably worth at least $10 in today’s purchasing power—and the pound worth something like $200.
By this rough reckoning, then, the loot from the Cabo could have exceeded $160 million in today’s purchasing power. Throughout this story I have valued the English pound of the era at approximately $200, but the reader is earnestly cautioned to regard that figure as far more indicative than real.
2.After sharing out their plunder, Taylor and his men remained active in the Indian Ocean. However, as wanted men, they eventually departed eastern waters and made for Panama. In July 1723 they arrived at Portobelo. After discreet negotiations with the Spanish governor, which very likely included a substantial bribe, the rich pirates found themselves welcomed to Panama as free men, recipients of the Spanish king’s clemency. Taylor himself, although now a wealthy man, remained wedded to the sea. He spent the rest of his life as an obscure, but very well-to-do, captain of a patrol vessel in Spanish service. None of Taylor’s crew ever faced charges for the rape of the Cabo.
One: The Opening Gun
1. What we know about the pirates of this age is derived from relatively few sources. Pirates, for obvious reasons, did not seek notoriety. If a pirate made a big strike, as John Taylor did, and managed to avoid the hangman’s rope, he was more likely to take his swag and seek obscurity than he was to write his memoirs. Furthermore, most pirates, like most seafaring men of the age, were illiterate. Nor did pirate vessels sail with recording secretaries aboard.
Nevertheless, historians have been able to dig up a fair amount of significant, reliable information about pirates from such sources as the records of Admiralty trials, accounts of pardoned pirates, the testimony of ship’s officers who escaped from pirate captivity, reports by naval officers, and—most notably—from a remarkable book first published in London in 1724. This book was A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, by a writer who signed himself “Captain Charles Johnson.” The book, clearly based on personal knowledge of, and contact with, the pirates of the age, as well as with pirate victims and prosecuting authorities, was tremendously successful. It went through at least four editions before 1730, and has gone through more than sixty editions since it first appeared. The General History rings with the authentic sound of the speech of eighteenth-century sailing men. Its narrative is filled with detail that could only have come from a man who made it his business to obtain firsthand knowledge of his subject. It is now generally acknowledged that the author of the General History was really the stupendously energetic novelist and chronicler of his times Daniel Defoe, the creator of Robinson Crusoe and a man who utilized many pseudonyms, among them Captain Charles Johnson. Defoe is plainly fascinated by the pirates whose careers he chronicles. While he does not condone their actions, he does try to understand their motives. His narrative, spikey with telling detail, is also liberally studded with observations regarding the characters of specific pirates and the significance of the pirate phenomenon for the world of his time. Throughout this telling of the pirate story, we will be quoting descriptions, observations, and conversations from Defoe’s engrossing and rich narrative.
Although Defoe’s General History of the pirates was published with woodcut illustrations that purported to show what the pirates described in the narrative looked like, the fact is that there are no reliable portraits of the pirates of the years of the great outbreak. The reason is very simple: All the pirates were either dead or in hiding. They were not available for sketch artists, so the drawings in Defoe’s book are not actual portraiture. Instead they attempt to portray the “character traits” of the pirates—peculiarities that set them apart from each other and from honest seafarers. Thus, for example, the great pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts, who thought himself as good as any “gentleman,” is depicted as a dandy in a plumed hat, while the “Arch-Pirate” Henry Every, who reportedly “gave himself the airs of a monarch,” is shown with a servant or a slave holding a parasol over his head to shield him from the sun—a royal affectation. Nevertheless, even though we have no faithful depiction of their features, we are able to infer what the chief actors in this story probably looked like, and what was most likely in their minds as they went about their careers, thanks to the written descriptions of them and the pungent assessments of their careers and characters found in Defo
e and other sources.
2. Careening was an essential activity in the age of sail and wooden ships. The hulls of wooden vessels—especially those that sailed in warm, tropical seas—became quickly fouled with marine growth, which checked speed. In addition, a tropical pest called the teredo worm could bore through the bottom, causing serious leaks, if the ship was not properly cared for. To resist the teredo worm, ships of this period were usually sheathed with double timbers on their bottoms. But even so, this sheathing had to be repaired periodically where worm damage had occurred. To repair the sheathing and to scrape clean the bottom of the ship, mariners resorted to an operation they called “careening.” The ship was run up on a sandy shore and emptied of cargo and heavy equipment, such as cannon. She was then pulled over on her side for cleaning and sheathing. The scraped bottom was often smeared with a noxious, oily paste of tar, tallow, and sulfur. This mixture kept the worm and marine growths off for a time—and added to speed. Pirates—and privateers, too—depended greatly on speed not only in the attack but also to get away quickly with their loot. For this reason they were even more conscientious than their enemies—merchants and naval vessels—in keeping their hulls clean. However, pirates were never more vulnerable than when careened. It was for this reason that they sought out little-frequented coves, hidden inlets, and guarded harbors to lay up. Many such places became known as “pirate lairs”—and the largest of them were sometimes so popular among sea brigands that they became veritable pirate bases.
When Captain Tew put into St. Mary’s he knew exactly what he was doing. This little island had long been used by merchant vessels, bound to and from India, as a safe haven, a place where fresh water could be found, and where ship traffic was so light that careening could usually be accomplished without fear of interruption by another vessel—friend or foe.