If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

  As they neared Edinburgh the main group, comprising seventeen men, was arrested. The authorities weren’t quite sure initially what to charge them with. But two of the men turned evidence against their colleagues and they were brought to trial for piracy at the Scottish High Court of the Admiralty in November 1720. Ten were found guilty, of whom nine swung on the gallows in the freezing winds of Leith sands for crimes they had committed far away in the tropical waters of Brazil and West Africa. Archibald Murray, the surgeon forced to serve with the pirates following the mutiny on the Buck, was a key witness, as were a number of officers from ships seized by Howel Davis at the start of 1719. Seven men were acquitted, the court accepting their claim that they were forced men.

  The trial record is an invaluable source for Roberts’ early career and for Howel Davis’s captaincy. It describes the mutiny on the Buck, the sojourn at Sierra Leone, the rampage down the African coast, the events at Princes Island and the pirates’ actions off Brazil and in the Caribbean. But there is one glaring omission. Nowhere in the entire eighty-two pages of handwritten notes is there a single reference to their desertion of Roberts at Devil’s Islands.

  There was no reason why the captured pirates would want to cover this up. They were claiming to have been forced men. The fact they had deserted Roberts could only count in their favour. Indeed, they attempted to portray the separation of the crew after the seizure of the Eagle as a desertion by themselves of the more hardened pirates who remained aboard the Royal Rover - a claim the court dismissed as an ‘affected story’.

  There is just one brief reference to their departure from Devil’s Islands. Summarising events prior to the defendants’ arrest, the prosecution said that when Roberts failed to return from his pursuit of the brigantine he was suspected of having ‘perished at sea’. The carpenter Richard Luntly, who was one of those found guilty, gave a similar account in a lengthy ‘Last Speech and Dying Words’ written just two days before he was executed. When Roberts didn’t come back that night, Luntly claimed, the quartermaster fitted out both the Royal Rover and the Sagrada Familia to go and find him. Only when this proved unsuccessful did they leave for Barbados.

  There is just one other account. It was given to the authorities in Barbados by John Watson, one of the forced men put aboard the Sea Nymph, and is the most detailed. After Roberts set off in the Good Fortune a group of pirates climbed to a high point to watch the chase, he said. They were able to see the brigantine. But then they ‘heard a noise as of a great gun’ and saw ‘a great smoke’. The Good Fortune never emerged from beneath the cliffs of the island. Assuming it was blown up and all the men lost, they left the islands just two days later.

  Is it possible Roberts and his men had entirely misunderstood events at Devil’s Island, that they were never betrayed and that Kennedy and the others genuinely believed them to be dead? It’s more complicated than this. There were deep divisions among the men that left Devil’s Island. The group that eventually remained on the Royal Rover was less eager to abandon a life of piracy and was hostile to Kennedy. So contemptuous and mistrustful of him were they that they considered throwing him overboard rather than allowing him to leave for Britain in the Eagle, fearing he would betray them when he got home. He was only allowed to go after swearing solemn oaths of fidelity.

  Roberts also had differences with Kennedy. The Irishman was one of the most fervent Jacobites in the crew. Passengers aboard the Sea Nymph, seized by Kennedy off Barbados, recalled him cursing King George and saying, ‘We have 32 sail of ships and will endeavour to place James III upon the throne.’ With Kennedy gone, this empty Jacobite bragging was no longer reported by captives among Roberts’ crew, and Roberts also abandoned the practice of giving his ships Jacobite names. It may well be he was hostile to Kennedy’s Jacobite politics - the result perhaps of a Baptist upbringing, or simply the anti-Irish prejudices of his youth - and this soured relations between them.

  Roberts did not place Kennedy in charge of the men left behind on Devil’s Islands. He took charge automatically because he was the most senior officer among them. When Roberts didn’t return immediately, Kennedy - anxious to break up the crew and to divide the treasure from the Sagrada Familia among a smaller number - probably pressed for a hasty departure, allying himself with powerful factions in the crew. Two days seems a very short time to have waited for Roberts.

  And it’s likely the story of an explosion recounted by Watson was a deception, since we know the Good Fortune did not blow up and there was no one else on the islands. Once out at sea the loyalist faction was outnumbered and isolated and eventually had to submit to the will of Kennedy and his supporters. All this Kennedy was able to achieve without ever explicitly presenting it as a desertion.

  Captain Johnson had excellent sources and was convinced Kennedy betrayed Roberts. And Roberts himself never wavered in this belief - despite the fact that he later captured Captain Cane for a second time and quizzed him about events on Devil’s Islands. He also met at least one of the men from the Royal Rover faction again, greeting him amicably and allowing him to rejoin the crew.

  Walter Kennedy himself did not face trial in Edinburgh. Having led his men to disaster in the Scottish Highlands he and a number of others quietly slipped away from the main group, although not before he’d had all his gold stolen by the Highlanders, he later claimed. Kennedy made his way to Ireland and from there to London, where he opened a brothel in Deptford.

  The deserters had benefited little from their betrayal. Twenty-one had been hanged and many of the others had lost their gold. Back on the Good Fortune, bobbing on the waves off Surinam, Bartholomew Roberts paid for his rash decisions at Devil’s Islands. When we next hear of the sloop and its depleted crew a few weeks later its captain is named as Thomas Anstis, the aggressive West Countryman passed over for the captaincy at Princes Island. Roberts had been deposed.

  5

  IN THE WILDERNESS

  WEST INDIES

  DECEMBER 1719-MAY 1720

  ‘THE TAKING OF PIRATES ... IS BUT A DRY BUSINESS, UNLESS THEY CATCH ’EM BY EXTRAORDINARY GOOD FORTUNE WITH A PRIZE FRESH IN THEIR MOUTHS’

  THE SWITCH IN COMMAND was achieved without violence. Pirates ‘often displaced Captains,’ Walter Kennedy later explained, ‘having a sort of commonwealth among them, but very rarely suffered any violence to be offered them, but held a respect for any one who had been their commander’. But it must have been a bitter pill for Roberts to swallow after his triumph at Pernambuco. Having tasted power, a man of his drive and ambition was not going to resign himself to a place in the shadows and he watched eagerly for any chance to regain his position. He would not have long to wait. The events at Devil’s Islands proved to be the start of a difficult few months for the crew of the Good Fortune and Anstis quickly revealed his limitations as a commander.

  Like Kennedy and his men a few weeks before, the Good Fortune headed for the Windward and Leeward Islands in the eastern Caribbean. Stretched in a chain at regular 20- to 30-mile intervals from the Virgin Islands to Trinidad, the archipelago formed one of the most beautiful waterways in the world - a series of vivid green emeralds, rising to densely forested volcanic peaks, each set in a frame of golden beaches, scattered across a sparkling blue sea. Set slightly apart from the rest, to the east, was the island of Barbados, the richest and most densely populated of the British colonies in the area. Barbados was often the first stop for ships coming from Europe, North America and Africa and the pirates, in desperate need of provisions, knew it would yield a plentiful supply of prizes.

  Pirate tactics were simple and exploited the limitations of navigation in this age. The captains of merchant ships were able to calculate their latitude - or north-south position - by measuring the angle of the shadow cast by the sun at midday. This was a comparatively simple technique that had been known since ancient times. But there was no method for calculating longitude - a ship’s east - west position. Parliament had offered a £20,000 prize to anyone who could so
lve the riddle in 1714, but it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that a practical method was found. In the meantime captains simply hit the line of latitude required as soon as possible and then sailed due east or west, depending on their destination. Ships sailing for Barbados hit the line of 13 degrees north and then sailed west. All the men of the Good Fortune had to do was park themselves a few miles due east of the island and wait for ships to sail into their net.

  The first to appear was the Essex, a two-masted schooner from Salem in New England, a welcome present on Christmas Day 1719. The pirates kept it for seven days, plundering it of pork, beer, bread, fish, butter, apples, cider, geese, fowls, running rigging, carpenter’s tools and large quantities of clothing. Two of the crew were forced to join the pirates. The captain reported the Good Fortune to have eight guns and forty men.

  They then headed briefly for Tobago, a few miles to the south. They seized a small French sloop that was hunting for turtles in the area, liberating, on a whim, two boys, an Indian and a mulatto, who were serving aboard as slaves or servants. Then, on 10 January 1720 they attacked a sloop called the Phillipa from Barbados. The boarding party approached it in a long boat and the Phillipa’s captain, Daniel Graves, ‘sick and lame with the gout’ at the time, ordered his men ‘to fire at them and kill them’. At this the pirates identified themselves as ‘Englishmen and marooners’ and threatened to murder every man aboard if they did not surrender. The crew wisely complied and the Phillipa was plundered of two cannons, 15 small arms, two pairs of pistols, a 60-gallon cask of rum, a hogshead of bread, some sugar and, once more, large quantities of clothes. The pirates also took three white sailors and ‘six negro men’, one of whom was identified as ‘Kent a ship carpenter’. Captain Graves received only a rope and a couple of small sails in return.

  They were back in the latitude of Barbados by 12 February when they took a ship called the Benjamin, en route from New York. They took bread, bacon and pork, giving the captain four barrels of old flour, a piece of old sail and ‘three live hogs’ in return. Their lack of generosity contrasted with Kennedy’s following his desertion at Devil’s Islands and reflected their straitened circumstances. On releasing the Benjamin three days later they threatened to kill the captain if he did not divert to the Leeward Islands - a threat he ignored, sailing in to Barbados the following day and giving a full description of the Good Fortune to the authorities. He told them the pirates had six guns and seventy men.

  Over the next few days the Good Fortune took at least three more vessels off Barbados, including a sloop called the Joseph, whose captain they gifted a set of surgeon’s instruments. But Anstis was pushing his luck. By 1720 a pirate could not stay bobbing on the waves indefinitely in one of the Caribbean’s busiest shipping channels. This was no backwater and, unlike West Africa and Brazil, there was a substantial Royal Navy presence in the region.

  This was a comparatively recent innovation. Until the midseventeenth century it had not been regarded as the Royal Navy’s duty to defend merchant shipping and the Navy’s ships had generally kept to home waters in peace time. But by the early eighteenth century there was a general recognition that Britain’s wealth and power depended on her ability to trade - and Britain’s possessions in the New World were the jewel in the crown of the country’s burgeoning mercantile empire.

  When the Good Fortune arrived off Barbados in the winter of 1719-20, the Navy had eleven ships on station in the Caribbean and North American mainland colonies, carrying a combined total of 288 guns and 1,485 men. The bulk of these were in the West Indies. And although most of the firepower was concentrated in Jamaica, far to the west, there were three vessels on station in the Eastern Caribbean: HMS Rose (with 20 guns and 115 men) and HMS Shark (14 guns and 80 men), both stationed in the Leeward Islands, and HMS Milford (30 guns and 155 men), stationed in Barbados. This was a substantial force and HMS Milford alone was more than powerful enough to blow the Good Fortune out of the water.

  But the Royal Navy in the Caribbean was always weaker in reality than it appeared on paper. Captains were hobbled by a series of petty, penny-pinching rules from the Admiralty. They were obliged to return to England to take in provisions because supplies in the West Indies were more expensive. They were forbidden from hiring houses on shore to treat their sick men. Worst of all, in the years immediately after the arrival of peace in 1713, they had been forbidden from careening for fear it would damage the ships. This fatally slowed them. By 1720 some of the more absurd restrictions had been removed. But Navy ships remained fish out of water in the Caribbean compared to their pirate adversaries, who were superbly adapted to the tropical environment.

  Sickness and disease were a major problem. It’s estimated between 12 and 15 per cent of all European emigrants to the West Indies died within a year of arriving, and figures for the Royal Navy were, if anything, worse. As late as the 1780s one in seven seamen in the region could expect to die during the course of a calendar year. The main killers were malaria, yellow fever and dysentery, but dropsy, leprosy, yaws (a type of syphilis) and hookworm all took their toll. Pirates do not seem to have died in quite the same numbers. They were generally ‘seasoned’ men who had already spent time in the tropics and acquired a level of immunity. And their greater leisure and more ample provisions meant they were probably healthier, despite the extraordinary quantity of alcohol they drank.

  The risk of death from disease made the Caribbean an unpopular posting and captains compensated for it in other ways. ‘By dear experience we know [they] love trading better than fighting,’ noted the New England Courant bitterly in 1722. Royal Navy captains were notorious for indulging in a whole range of money-making schemes to the detriment of their duties. In June 1718 Governor Nicholas Lawes of Jamaica wrote to the Council of Trade and Plantations complaining that piracy was rife around the island. ‘This in great measure I impute to the neglect of the Commanders of HM ships of war,’ he fulminated. The Ludlow Castle, he claimed, had sailed for the Spanish colonies within six days of arriving ‘full of merchandise, without giving me the least notice thereof ... and I am still altogether a stranger when that ship is to return. The Winchelsea has not been here since my arrival. I am given to understand she is likewise a trading on the Spanish coast. And the Diamond sailed about ten days ago full of goods (as I am informed) for the coast of New Spain.’

  By the following January the situation had not improved and the seas around Jamaica was still infested by pirates. ‘I must leave it to the commanders of HM ships to give an account on what service they have been employed ever since my arrival here,’ Lawes concluded. ‘All I shall say is had they been stationed in guarding our coast and cruising in proper places it might probably have prevented the mischief that has happened to us.’ Their activities not only left the island defenceless but also provided unfair competition to legitimate traders since the Navy captains had a free labour force at their disposal. Jamaican seamen ‘have not bread for want of employment, which is the chief occasion of so many of them going a pirating’, Lawes complained.

  Antagonism between colonial governors and Navy captains was endemic. Governor Alexander Spotswood in Virginia and Governor Walter Hamilton in the Leeward Islands, both tireless enemies of piracy, were exasperated by the lethargy of the captains on their station. And Governor Woodes Rogers in the Bahamas even challenged Captain Hildesley of the Flamborough to a duel at one point, although it was never fought. In theory governors had considerable authority over Navy captains, if not absolute control. In practice the captains were contemptuous of civilian officials and reluctant to obey their orders. The fact that few of the small-scale pirates in the Caribbean carried much gold or other valuables on board meant there was little incentive to track them down. As one contemporary pointed out, ‘the taking of pirates ... is but a dry business, unless they catch ’em by extraordinary good fortune with a prize fresh in their mouths’.

  Between 1715 and 1720 the Royal Navy achieved just one significant su
ccess against the pirates - the defeat of Blackbeard off North Carolina in November 1718 by Captain Maynard in the Jane. Originally from Bristol, Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach, had terrorised the Caribbean and North American coast for two years. A former privateer during the War of the Spanish Succession, he got his name from his long, thick beard, which he tied in ringlets and to which he attached burning matches when he went into battle, giving him a demonic appearance. Although better known, he was far less successful than Roberts would be and owes his fame to the fact that he actively cultivated a terrifying image and was later the subject of a successful play. Even his defeat was achieved largely at the prompting of Governor Spotswood of Virginia. Other than that the pirates were able to operate with extraordinary freedom. As Captain Johnson acidly commented;

  ’Tis strange that a few pirates should ravage the seas for years without ever being light upon by any of our ships of war, when, in the mean time, they [the pirates] shall take fleets of ships. It looks as if one was much more diligent in their affairs than the other.

  When the Good Fortune arrived in the Windward and Leeward Islands in the winter of 1719-20 the Navy was distracted by the outbreak of the short-lived War of the Quadruple Alliance against Spain. All three local ships were away from their station, Milford and Shark on convoy duty while Rose had been stranded in Jamaica by an outbreak of sickness among the crew.

  However, Barbados was not defenceless. By chance there were two other Royal Navy ships in Bridgetown - HMS Squirrel and HMS Rye, both normally based in North America. Squirrel was there to convoy a fleet of merchantmen north. Rye had been driven south to avoid floating ice as the rivers of Virginia thawed following an unusually cold winter. Between them they carried 40 guns and 215 men, easily enough to overwhelm the Good Fortune which, at that moment, was bobbing on the waves a few miles to the east. For all its ineptness the Navy had a golden opportunity to stamp out this particular pirate crew before it could gather strength again. But the men of the Good Fortune were saved as the result of a bizarre decision by the authorities in Barbados.