THE ROYAL ROVER WAS close to the port of Pernambuco (modern Recife) on the eastern tip of Brazil when the look out’s cry of ‘sail ahoy!’ punctured the sleepy tropical calm. The men ran to the edge of the ship, straining their eyes on the horizon. But their joy soon turned to apprehension. No sooner had the sail loomed into view than another appeared, then another, and another. Within a couple of hours Roberts, the novice pirate commander, found himself confronted with no fewer than thirty-eight ships - the entire Brazilian treasure fleet. To attack was clearly insanity. But, for Roberts, to sail away also carried grave risks.
By now they had been off the coast of Brazil for almost two months. The trip to South America had begun well. From Annobón they had sped across the Atlantic in just twenty-eight days, making landfall on Fernando de Noronha, a pin-prick of an island 200 miles off the Brazilian coast. But here their luck turned. They had planned to ‘wood and water’ in preparation for their assault on the Portuguese mainland. But when they arrived it was early September, the start of the dry season, and the pirates found the island barren and destitute. There was little food and they were able to fill only nine butts of water, equivalent to 675 gallons. They ‘boot-topped’ the Royal Rover - a type of partial careening, which involved shifting guns and other heavy items to one side to tilt the ship and enable a scrubbing of the hull just below the waterline. Then they set sail, heading south-west towards the main Portuguese settlements.
They had never planned a frontal assault on the treasure fleet. But they were certainly after gold and they made initially for Bahia, several hundred miles south of Pernambuco, through which most of Brazil’s gold flowed. The fleet sailed from here. But so did individual Brazilian ships, which traded directly with West Africa, exchanging gold, brandy and third-grade tobacco for slaves. And there were rich crumbs to be picked up in the coastal trade.
They sailed close enough that they could see the steep cliff that was Bahia’s distinctive feature, rising sharply from the port, up which a complex series of pullies and winches constantly transported goods to the upper town. Churches and monasteries jostled on the skyline and they could see numerous ships in the harbour. But for two weeks none emerged. Then they seized a small fishing vessel with two Indians in it. The Indians had dramatic news - the treasure fleet was due to sail any day.
Fearful of confronting it directly, the pirates pulled out to sea. When the fleet set sail they followed it northwards at a discreet distance, hoping to pick off stragglers. But when it suddenly loomed into view off Pernambuco, Brazil’s second city, it had come to a halt, waiting for ships to join it for the journey to Lisbon. It was also awaiting an escort of two 70-gun men-of-war.
As Roberts stood on the deck gazing at the fleet he knew he was confronting a decisive moment in his leadership. They were now well into October and almost three months had passed since they took their last prize, the Experiment, off the coast of Africa. In that time they’d travelled more than 4,000 miles. For a crew accustomed to success and warily eyeing its new captain to see what luck he would bring it was a long barren period.
With his quarry about to head out into the Atlantic, Roberts felt further delay was impossible. And, although technically the decision to attack or not was a collective one, it would be difficult for the pirates to go into battle if the man expected to lead them was reluctant. A pirate captain who showed little appetite for a fight could not expect to last long. Roberts opted for boldness - but he would also use cunning.
He ordered his men to conceal themselves. Then, under cover of French colours, he sailed up to one of the smallest ships in the fleet. He had a Portuguese pirate in his crew and, as he drew close, he ordered this man, quietly, to order the captain to come aboard, threatening to attack if he refused.
Taken by surprise, the Portuguese captain surrendered and came on board. According to Johnson, ‘Roberts saluted him after a friendly manner, telling him, that they were gentlemen of fortune, but that their business with him was only to be informed which was the richest ship in that fleet, and if he directed them right, he should be restored to his ship without molestation. Otherwise, he must expect immediate death.’
Faced with these options the Portuguese captain complied and pointed them towards the Sagrada Familia, a powerful vessel with 40 guns and 150 men belonging to the vice-admiral of the fleet. Roberts’ Royal Rover at this point had around 200 men but only 32 guns. Nevertheless, he headed straight for the ship, which sat slightly apart from the rest of the fleet. Again, he attempted a subterfuge. He ordered the captured Portuguese captain to invite the Sagrada Familia’s captain on board. The Sagrada Familia’s captain agreed but it was soon clear he was not fooled. In Johnson’s words, ‘By the bustle that immediately followed the pirates perceived they were discovered and that this was only a deceitful answer to gain time to put their ship in a posture of defence.’
For the first time Roberts would have to lead his men in the storming of a ship. He was facing a vessel more powerful than his own, in the midst of a large, hostile fleet, with two Portuguese men-of-war anchored nearby. And he was about to find that his Royal Navy experience only partly prepared him for the pirates’ unique way of fighting.
Pirates were street fighters. While the aim of conventional warships was the annihilation of the enemy, the aim of pirates was to capture prizes intact. Although their ships bristled with guns, they were reluctant to use them and rarely engaged in the artillery duels at distance which characterised conventional warfare at sea. Instead they sought to fight at close range and relied heavily on small arms, weapons that would kill men but preserve their vessel.
Pirates were one of the first groups to develop a ‘gun culture’. They went into battle festooned with pistols. Roberts wore four, dangling on the end of a silk sling hung over his shoulders. And, as Article XI of his articles showed, they also duelled with pistols. This was highly unusual at the time and considered rather ungentlemanly, most duels still being fought with swords alone. It suggests they had developed a degree of marksmanship, unlike conventional sailors who only used pistols at close range. Even more important were muskets. Living by hunting on the island of Hispaniola the early Buccaneers were famous for their shooting skills, and developed an unusual gun, five or six feet long, designed to maximise distance and accuracy. It was a talent they passed on to pirates of the Golden Age, and ‘Buccaneer guns’ were readily available to men like Roberts in the holds of captured slavers, where they were carried as trade goods.
We have only a brief description of the battle that followed. But we can piece together the likely course of events from other accounts of pirate attacks. As the Royal Rover closed on the Sagrada Familia Roberts’ sharpshooters raced up the rigging to the ‘fighting tops’ - the platforms high up on each of the three masts. From there they poured a torrent of fire into the enemy, targeting above all the helmsman and any officers on the quarter deck. At the same time Roberts primed his cannon and sprayed the Portuguese ship with grape shot.
As the Sagrada Familia reeled from this opening barrage Roberts’ men crowded towards the edge of the ship preparing to board, brandishing their cutlasses and yelling insults. A frontal assault of this type was costly in terms of casualties and the Royal Navy avoided it whenever possible. But it was unavoidable if a ship and its cargo were to be captured intact - and pirates were masters of the art. As the ships passed they ‘lashed’ the Portuguese vessel, throwing grappling hooks across and pulling tight on the ropes to draw the two ships together. They were now eyeball to eyeball with the enemy. Confronting them was a grim-faced line of men clutching pikes - fearsome weapons, eight feet long, topped with four-inch spikes - ready to thrust them into the bellies of the first borders as they leapt across. To counter this, the pirates had with them large quantities of primitive grenades and other ‘fireworks’ which they now hurled among the Sagrada Familia’s defenders. The effect was horrific. Shrapnel tore into flesh and some of the explosives spewed smoke and noxious smells to add to the t
error and confusion.
As the pikemen scattered the pirates leapt across the divide, clutching their cutlasses in their teeth to free their hands. They were led by either the boatswain or the quartermaster, Roberts remaining behind on the deck of the Royal Rover to direct operations. They fired their pistols at any defenders still standing. Then, as the Portuguese regrouped, they took their cutlasses in their hands and moved forward.
Broad and heavy, cutlasses were the classic pirate weapon. They were despised as crude meat cleavers by officers on conventional warships, who preferred the more dashing rapier. But for lopping off parts of your opponents’ anatomy there were no weapons to match them and in this sort of vicious, hand-to-hand combat they were invaluable.
The death of Blackbeard after boarding a Royal Navy sloop in the Chesapeake Bay in 1718 captures the sheer gore of these encounters. ‘The sea was tinctured with blood around the vessel,’ wrote Captain Johnson. ‘Blackbeard received a shot into his body ... yet he stood his ground and fought with great fury till he received five and twenty wounds.’ He fell after a blow from a broad sword ‘cut off his head, laying it flat on his shoulder.’ Blackbeard was unlucky in encountering a disciplined and determined naval crew. Few merchant ships could withstand the fury of a pirate assault, and the Sagrada Familia was no exception, despite being better armed than most. ‘The dispute was hot and warm,’ wrote Johnson, ‘wherein many of the Portuguese fell, and two only of the pirates.’ Within half an hour the battle was over.
Roberts’ crew had little time to enjoy the victory. The Royal Rover was in the ‘utmost danger’, Walter Kennedy later recalled, ‘well nigh surrounded by the whole Portuguese fleet’ with two 70-gun warships bearing down on it. Flight was the obvious option. But that would mean abandoning the prize. Instead Roberts turned the Royal Rover directly towards the lead warship and prepared once more for battle.
The odds were now overwhelmingly against them and, rather than be captured, the pirates were preparing to go down in a blaze of glory. They were saved by ‘the cowardice of the Portuguese’, according to Kennedy. Confronted by the Royal Rover the lead warship ‘ignominiously declined’ to do battle. It ‘tarried’, waiting for the second warship. By the time it arrived the Royal Rover had made its escape, taking the Sagrada Familia with it. The Portuguese pursued them northwards. But ‘they had as good sent a cow after a hare’, the pirate carpenter Richard Luntly later wrote.
It was a stunning victory. But it was only as they examined their booty that the full scale of what they had achieved dawned on the pirates. The Portuguese ship contained 40,000 gold moidores, equivalent to £54,000 in money of the day. In addition there were ‘chains and trinkets of considerable value, particularly a cross set with diamonds designed for the King of Portugal’ as well as sugar, skins, tobacco and some timber. A contemporary press report put the total value of the prize at £150,000. This may have been an exaggeration. But even if we assume a lower figure of £100,000 it amounted to shares of almost £500 per man - more than an ordinary seaman could expect to earn in a lifetime.
Roberts showed compassion towards his vanquished foe. Like Howel Davis five months before with the crew of the Marquis del Campo, he spared the survivors aboard the Sagrada Familia, despite the fact they had resisted. So slow were the Portuguese men-of-war to pursue him that Roberts had time to load most of them into the smaller Portuguese prize, which was left behind. The remainder he took with him as he headed north.
‘Elated with their booty,’ Johnson wrote, ‘they had nothing now to think of but some safe retreat, where they might give themselves up to all the pleasures that luxury and wantonness could bestow.’ They voted to head for the port of Cayenne in French Guiana on the north-eastern coast of South America, taking the Sagrada Familia with them so they might plunder it at leisure.
It was a journey of 1600 miles. But the winds and currents were with them and it was a pleasant voyage. We can picture the men as they lounged on deck in the shade of awnings hung from the rigging, watching the jungle-fringed coastline of north-eastern Brazil scud by. They smoked, they drank punch - the passion of all pirates - and ordered their musicians to play for them, dancing jigs and reels on the hatchways in the cool of the evening. Most chose to sleep in the open, enjoying the fine weather - a pleasant alternative to the fetid air below decks where the pirates normally slung their hammocks between the guns. They fell asleep gazing up into the tropical night, listening to the waves breaking on the bow and the sails billowing in the wind, giddy with their unlikely victory.
For Roberts the change in his circumstances was breathtaking. He’d gone from being an ageing, lowly officer on a mid-sized slaver to the unquestioned commander of the largest, most powerful, and now richest pirate crew in the Atlantic. And it had happened virtually overnight. His own share of the loot from the Sagrada Familia was around £1,000. He must have remembered with a wry smile his initial reluctance to join Howel Davis’s crew. The victory at Pernambuco was very much his victory. He’d shown himself a good student of Howel Davis in his use of cunning and subterfuge. But he’d combined this with an astonishing boldness and courage. It was a combination that would become his trademark and in time make Bartholomew Roberts the greatest of all pirate captains.
The Royal Rover and the Sagrada Familia arrived at Cayenne in the middle of November 1719. It was a stark contrast with the grandeur of Bahia. There was a small fort and a Jesuit mission - but little else. The streets were unpaved and the houses mostly made of wood. An earth rampart ran around the town.
Europeans had originally been drawn to this part of South America by the publication in 1596 of Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana. Raleigh claimed the jungles of the interior were rich in gold. But the tales proved to be false and by the early 1700s French Guiana was already acquiring a reputation as a ‘green hell’ and a ‘white man’s grave’. Built between two rivers as they flowed into the sea, Cayenne was effectively an island and the land was low and marshy. It was ‘an uncomfortable place to live’, a French visitor had written a few years before, ‘because of the long rainy season every year, the scorching close air night and day, which dispirits a man, and the heavy showers and vapours, exhaled from the swampy grounds, which ... occasion diseases in men and beasts’. November was renowned as the most unhealthy month of the year.
In 1719 there were no more than a few hundred whites in the town and it was the only European settlement of any size in the whole colony. Sugar plantations, which dominated much of the Caribbean, had failed to take off and the Indian population was more significant than that of African slaves - always a sign of economic backwardness at this time. Of the small number of whites who had settled there many were former Buccaneers. Despairing of ever making a profit from it, the French later turned French Guiana into the notorious penal colony immortalised in the film Papillon.
Located over 800 miles from the nearest European settlements in the Caribbean, for the pirates Cayenne was an ideal backwater. It must have been obvious to the authorities who their visitors were. If the sight of the Sagrada Familia bobbing in the bay wasn’t enough, they offloaded a number of prisoners here, including Captain Grant of the Experiment, who had been with them since his capture off Africa at the end of July. But it wasn’t every day a ship full of gold fell into your lap. Roberts made a gift of the diamond-studded cross which they had seized at Pernambuco to the governor, Claude Guillouet d’Orvilliers. Thereafter the pirates ‘found the civilest reception imaginable, not only from the governor and factory, but their wives, who exchanged wares and drove a considerable trade with them’, wrote Captain Johnson. Pirates always spent money like water and the people of Cayenne were more than happy to take advantage.
Spreading out among the ramshackle taverns and brothels, the pirates could now get down to a serious orgy of drinking and debauchery. This was the fourth time in less than a year this crew had come ashore to indulge its carnal appetites. On the previous three occa
sions - at St Nicholas in the Cape Verde Islands in January, at Sierra Leone in April and at Princes Island in July - it had been their captain, Howel Davis, who led the way. But Roberts was less enthusiastic. He had no interest in wine and, his men quickly realised, very little in women. It may well be that, as they set off for their nights on the town, some of the crew cast knowing looks at the tall, dark thirty-seven-year-old bachelor who preferred to remain behind on the ship.
Within the context of pirate culture they may not have regarded their captain’s behaviour as particularly odd. The early Buccaneers preferred each other’s company to that of women, and a tradition of violent misogyny had continued among the pirates of the Caribbean into Roberts’ day - a misogyny that probably concealed a degree of hearty homosexuality.
The Buccaneers referred to their partner as their matelot and their practice of living in male couples was known as matelotage. ‘It is the general and solemn custom amongst them all to seek out ... a comrade or companion, whom we may call partner ... with whom they join the whole stock of what they possess,’ wrote the Buccaneer Alexander Exquemelin, who arrived in the Buccaneer haven of Tortuga on Hispaniola in 1666. Together they would ‘go into the woods to hunt for wild-bulls and cows. They commonly remain there the space of a whole twelve month or two years, without returning home.’
The contemporary historian Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, also writing in the 1660s, made it clear that matelotage was more than a purely economic arrangement. Matelots would sometimes continue to live together, he wrote, even after one of them had married, ‘but the jealousy which arises, and the problems resulting either from the indiscretion of the matelot or the imprudence of the woman compelled the governors to ban this arrangement’.
If A Pirate I Must Be... Page 7