If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

  Their appearance sparked panic. The African canoes sped back to the shore. At the fort the tiny handful of emaciated soldiers frantically prepared to fire the guns. But the pirates knew they could take their time. They were well out of range, and could expect little resistance. The three slave ships were outnumbered and outgunned, and even if their captains wanted to resist, they knew it was rare for the starving, disease-ridden crews of slavers to fight to defend their masters’ property. With the fire from the fort falling lamely short, all three quickly struck, or lowered, their colours, signalling surrender.

  The pirates didn’t even trouble to board them at first. Instead, the three ships were obliged to haul out their long boats and send delegations across. From the Princess a party of six was sent, headed by the second mate, John Stephenson. The pirate captain greeted them politely and quizzed them as to what the ship contained. Then boarding parties were dispatched and the looting began.

  Aboard the Princess the liquor store was the first target. We can imagine what Roberts experienced over the next few hours through the description of Captain William Snelgrave, an English slaver whose ship had been plundered by this very same crew just a few weeks before.

  They hoisted upon deck a great many half hogsheads of claret, and French brandy, knocked their heads out, and dipped cans and bowls into them to drink out of. And in their wantonness threw full buckets of each sort upon one another. As soon as they had emptied what was on the deck they hoisted up more. And in the evening washed the decks with what remained in the casks. As to bottled liquor of many sorts, they made such havoc of it, that in a few days they had not one bottle left. For they would not give themselves the trouble of drawing the cork out, but ... struck their necks off with a cutlass, by which means one in three was generally broke.

  Most of the pirates were soon drunk. They turned their attention next to any loose valuables. From Roberts’ commander, Captain Plumb, they took a £50 silver sword and a £4 silver watch. Then they ransacked the cabins of the senior officers, taking mainly items of clothing. Sartorial elegance was important to these men. Roberts and his shipmates had noticed immediately how well dressed the pirates were and their jewellery, embroidered silk vests and expensive white shirts rammed home a crude message to the impoverished seamen of the Princess - crime paid. Each of the boarding party was entitled to a new ‘shift of clothes’ from the prize. The effect was sometimes comical. ‘I could not refrain laughing when I saw the fellows,’ recalled one pirate victim in 1716, ‘for they had, in rummaging my cabin, met with a leather powder bag and puff, with which they had powdered themselves from head to foot, walked the decks with their hats under their arms, minced their oaths, and affected all the airs of a beau with an awkwardness that would have forced a smile from a cynic.’

  Next, the various specialists in the pirate crew came on board, one by one, and systematically stripped the ship of everything they needed. The cook helped himself to two casks of beef, the gunner looted the armoury and the carpenter looted his counterpart’s tool box. On one ship seized by pirates in 1720 we are told that nothing ‘was so much valued by the robbers as the doctor’s chest, for they were all poxed to a great degree’. Cut off from access to ports or shipyards, pirates had to acquire everything they needed for their daily lives in this way. But the Princess’s cargo itself was left virtually untouched. Consisting of bulky trade items such as metal bars and textiles, it was of little use to them.

  As the looting progressed a couple of Roberts’ shipmates sensed an opportunity. The pirates had sent only a small party aboard. If they could overpower them and run the Princess under the protection of the guns of the fort they would be free. Taking advantage of the pirates’ drunken state, they attacked, trusting their shipmates would leap to their aid. But the rest of the crew simply stood and watched, and they were quickly beaten into submission. Most, it seems, were less than enthusiastic about escaping. Indeed, for many, it was the pirates who represented salvation.

  Many of the men now plundering their vessel had themselves served previously on slave ships. They saw themselves as the avengers of common seamen and it was the custom of the pirates to place captured captains on trial. They quizzed the crew on how they had been treated and if they felt a captain had been brutal and tyrannical he was punished, sometimes to the cheers of their men. A particular favourite was ‘the sweat’, described by a captain taken prisoner in 1724:

  Between decks they stick candles round the mizzen-mast, and about 25 men surround it with points of swords, penknives, forks and compasses in each of their hands: Culprit enters the circle; the violin plays a merry jig; and he must run for about ten minutes, while each man runs his instrument into his posteriors.

  Captain Plumb of the Princess and the other two captains taken that day were lucky. There is no record of their being mistreated. But their encounter with the pirates cost them more than half of their men.

  The pirate captain ‘asked which of them would enter with him and told them that he would make gentleman of them all’, the second mate, John Stephenson, later told the Admiralty. He met with an enthusiastic response. One of the first to join the pirate crew was John Eshwell, the Princess’s carpenter. He ‘took an oath to be true to them’, John Stephenson said, and seemed euphoric at his escape from the slaver, placing ribbons in his hat and putting on his best suit of clothes. He plundered Captain Plumb’s cabin, and forced open Stephenson’s sea chest, taking two hats ‘of the value of ten shillings’.

  A total of thirty-four other men followed him from the three ships. Some were coy. Not wanting to appear too enthusiastic in front of witnesses, they feigned reluctance. But the pirates were old hands at this game and were happy to oblige with a pantomime of force, beating them softly aboard with the flats of their cutlasses, winking as they swore and cursed. Most were as openly enthusiastic as Eshwell. For the pirates West Africa was one vast recruitment centre. A Royal Navy captain sailing these same waters a year later reported to the Admiralty that ‘the men in general [were] ripe for piracy’. He left it for ‘their lordships to judge ... whether it be occasioned by the masters’ ill usage or their own natural inclinations’.

  But Bartholomew Roberts was not one of those who clamoured to take up the pirates’ offer. The man who would become the greatest of all pirate captains was initially a reluctant recruit.

  Officers were generally less willing to turn pirate than the common men. They had more to lose, less to gain. But mates like Roberts occupied a strange, ambiguous position in the power structure of the ship. Although officers by rank, they were closer to the crew in terms of class. They’d usually risen from being common sailors and were often more experienced seamen than their captain, which could make for a prickly relationship. Many were to be found among the leaders of mutinies and it would not have surprised anyone had Roberts accepted the pirate offer. It was another, more intangible factor, that inclined him against it - that of temperament.

  Much of what we know about Roberts comes from a book entitled A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, written in 1724 by Captain Charles Johnson. Johnson’s identity is a mystery. But he had superb sources - including members of Roberts’ crew - and there is some speculation he may even have been a pirate himself. He had an ambivalent attitude to his subject matter, veering continuously between admiration for their bravery and daring, and moral condemnation. His book is the bible of pirate historians and it devotes more space to Roberts than to any of his contemporaries. Johnson provides us with a vivid portrait of Roberts’ personality. He makes clear that he was a sober, somewhat solitary man. He disliked alcohol - highly unusual among sailors - and preferred tea, which he drank constantly. And he had little taste for gratuitous violence. Above all, he was disciplined and intelligent. He couldn’t have been more different from the pirate stereotype and, as he watched the pirates steadily drink themselves into a stupor as they looted the Princess, it’s likely he felt a visceral revulsion against the
apparent anarchy of pirate life.

  But pirates were always desperately short of skilled officers. The middle-aged Welshman begged, pleaded and wept. But the pirate captain was adamant. Men ‘he wanted [and] men he would have’, he declared, ‘for he intended to fight a piracy that gave no quarter’. Roberts was dragged aboard to join his more enthusiastic shipmates. As the sun set on 6 June 1719 he had swapped slaving for piracy.

  1

  THE BAPTIST AND THE PIRATE

  ‘HE MADE A SHORT SPEECH, THE SUM OF WHICH WAS A DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST THE WHOLE WORLD’

  BARTHOLOMEW ROBERTS WAS BORN in the village of Casnewydd Bach, or Little Newcastle, in Pembrokeshire, in the damp, windswept south-western corner of Wales, in around 1682. It would be hard to imagine more of a backwater. A visitor in the early nineteenth century described it as ‘a mean village, consisting of a few straggling houses, and a church of the very meanest fashion’, and it was no more impressive in Roberts’ day. The south of Pembrokeshire was agriculturally rich and English-speaking. But Roberts was raised in the poorer, more rugged, Welsh-speaking north.

  The 1670 Hearth Tax assessment for Little Newcastle reveals a ‘George Robert’, who was either Roberts’ father or grandfather. He had just one hearth, but it was made clear he was not a pauper, like many others in the village. A will by ‘William Robert’, certainly a relative and quite possibly Bartholomew’s brother, written in Welsh in 1744, shows he had cash and cattle to dispose of - at least £45 and eight oxen, as well as a horse and saddle. He was described as a ‘yeoman’, indicating a farmer of some standing. But he was unable to write, signing only with a mark. Bartholomew himself was literate, but it’s unlikely he’d had more than the most rudimentary education.

  The family, then, was middle class, but in the context of a backward, rural society that was poor even by the standards of late seventeenth-century Britain. ‘The vulgar here are most miserable and low as the rich are happy and high, both to an extreme,’ wrote a visitor in 1684. Ireland lay just 50 miles across the St George’s Channel and Pembrokeshire was subject to periodic waves of immigration, the Irish providing an impoverished, often resented bottom tier of the population.

  The economy was dominated by cattle-rearing. George Owen, a local aristocrat, left a description of what may well have been Roberts’ own childhood:

  I have by good account numbered 3,000 young people to be brought up continually in herding of cattle within this shire who are put to this idle education when they are first come to be ten or twelve years of age ... They are forced to endure the heat of the sun in his greatest extremity, to parch and burn their faces, hands, legs, feet and breasts, in such sort as they seem more like tawny Moors than people of this land, and then the cold, frost, snow, hail, rain and wind. They are so tormented, having the skin of their legs, hands, face and feet all in chinks and chaps.

  Roberts grew up with such a swarthy Welsh complexion that Captain Johnson described him as a ‘black man’. Owen described the farming people of Pembrokeshire as ‘very mean and simple, short of growth, broad and shrubbye, unacceptable in sight’. Roberts, described later in life as ‘tall’, ‘large and stout’, must have stood out as he grew to manhood.

  By the 1740s at least some of the Robert family of Little Newcastle were fervent Baptists, playing a prominent role in the local chapel. It’s likely Bartholomew Roberts was raised in the same faith and that this helped shape his disciplined, slightly puritanical personality. Little Newcastle had a Baptist meeting house as early as 1697 and we can be sure there was Baptist preaching in the area prior to this date during Bartholomew’s childhood. He’d certainly have received little pastoral care from the established church. According to the Churchwarden’s report of 1684 the parish church in Little Newcastle was very much ‘out of repair’ and there had ‘not been one sermon preached within ye said parish church ... within this three years last past’.

  Bartholomew was not his real name. For a period in the middle part of his career as a pirate the records generally refer to him as ‘John Roberts’. In the eighteenth century John was a common name among the Robert family of Little Newcastle and this was probably the name he was christened with. Pirates often adopted aliases and he may have taken the name ‘Bartholomew’ in honour of Bartholomew Sharp, a well known Buccaneer of the 1680s. One name he was never known by was ‘Black Bart’. This was the title of a poem written in the twentieth century by the Welsh poet I.D. Hooson, which portrays Roberts, entirely inaccurately, as a British hero preying primarily on the Spanish. Over the years a strange confusion has arisen and this is now the name by which Roberts is referred to in all modern history books. Hooson was presumably picking up on Captain Johnson’s description of Roberts’ ‘black’ complexion. But this pantomime nickname was never applied to him in his own lifetime.

  Roberts may have been driven from Little Newcastle by shortage of land. The late seventeenth century was a period of steady population growth and the English had abolished ‘gavelkind’ - the traditional Welsh practice of dividing up inheritances amongst all the sons in the family - in the Act of Union of 1535. Perhaps William Robert, the man who left behind the Welsh-language will, was the older brother and inherited the family farm. Or perhaps Roberts simply had a romantic, roving frame of mind and was eager to escape the drudgery of rural life. Pembrokeshire had a tradition of sending its sons to sea and it’s likely that as a child Roberts was regaled with tales of piracy. In the latter part of the sixteenth century and the early part of the seventeenth south-western Britain was infested with pirates, particularly the Welsh coastline from Cardiff to Milford Haven. Small-scale, generally local, piracy was an extension of the wrecking and smuggling industries, preying on the everyday goods being shuttled to and from the tiny ports along the coast. It enjoyed widespread popular support and often had sponsors among the local gentry. John Callis, the most famous Welsh pirate of the time, often sold his ill-gotten gains in the village of Carew in Milford Haven, just a few miles south of Little Newcastle. Piracy in British waters was stamped out in the early seventeenth century. But tales of hidden coves and desperate cut-throats doubtless lingered in local folklore and helped fill the dark evenings of Roberts’ youth.

  Although Little Newcastle itself was an inland village there were plenty of opportunities for a young man wanting to make his living at sea. A few miles to the north lay the port of Fishguard which sent fishing vessels out into the Irish Sea. More likely he looked south to the town of Haverfordwest in the Milford Haven estuary. With a population of over 2,000 it was rapidly becoming one of the most important trading centres in Wales. From here fleets of small coastal vessels exported the product of South Wales’s primitive but rapidly expanding coal industry. Most went to Bristol and from Bristol the whole world was open to a young man.

  His date and place of birth aside, all we know about Roberts prior to his capture at Anamaboe is that at some point shortly before he had served as mate aboard a sloop out of Barbados. By then he would have already been an experienced deep-sea sailor and accustomed to a life of ceaseless, unremitting toil. His existence at sea was governed by the ‘watch system’, which required the crew to work in alternating, four-hour shifts. The late seventeenth-century mariner Edward Barlow left a vivid description of what this life of constant sleep deprivation meant.

  When we went to take our rest, we were not to lie still above four hours; and many times when it blew hard were not sure to lie one hour, yea, often we were called up before we had slept half an hour and forced to go up into the maintop or foretop to take in our topsails, half awake and half asleep, with one shoe on and the other off, not having time to put it on: always sleeping in our clothes for readiness; and in stormy weather when the ship rolled and tumbled as though some great millstone were rolling up one hill and down another, we had much ado to hold ourselves fast by the small ropes from falling by the board; and being gotten up into the tops, there we must haul and pull to make fast the sail, seeing nothing but air above us a
nd water beneath us, and that so raging as though every wave would make a grave for us: and many times in nights so dark that we could not see one another, and blowing so hard that we could not hear one another speak, being close to one another.

  It’s unlikely Roberts had spent his entire career on merchant ships. For much of his life Britain had been at war against France, in the War of the Grand Alliance from 1689 to 1697 and the War of the Spanish Succession from 1702 to 1713. Both required a massive expansion in the manpower of the Royal Navy.

  It was common for sailors to switch constantly between merchant ships and the Royal Navy. In times of peace there was little to choose between them. Wages were broadly similar. And while the workload was less on naval vessels, because of the larger crews needed on fighting ships, the discipline was harsher, if less erratic. But this changed dramatically in times of war. The massive influx of men into the Royal Navy, and consequent shortage of sailors, meant wages on merchant ships doubled. In the Royal Navy they remained static and the crew’s share of any prize money was generally a pittance. ‘Who would serve his King and Country and fight and be knock’d o’ the head at 24 shillings per month that can have 50 shillings without that hazard?’ asked Daniel Defoe, rhetorically, in 1697. Not surprisingly, men weren’t exactly clamouring to do their patriotic duty, and the authorities were forced to resort to the press gang.