Pirates also loved to gamble, and although the practice was banned on Roberts’ ships it would be surprising if he was entirely successful in enforcing this rule. But, above all, pirates loved to drink. As the new sailing master, Henry Glasby, adapted to life among the pirates in the weeks after his capture he was staggered by the ferocious, incessant consumption of alcohol. They ‘loved drinking and mirth’, he later said, and there were many occasions when there were ‘all hands drunk, and nobody fit for duty’. A number of the men were so constantly inebriated - or ‘fuddled’ - that they were unable to take part in attacks. And Joseph Mansfield - the former highwayman they had recruited at Dominica - probably spoke for many when he said later ‘the love of drink and a lazy life’ were ‘stronger motives with him than gold’.
Glasby - a sober, disciplined personality, not unlike his new commander - was accustomed to heavy drinking on merchant ships. But this was something else. Unlike ordinary seamen pirates had access to fine wines and brandies. But their preference was always punch. Made from a combination of sugar, water, lime juice and rum, and sometimes nutmeg, it accompanied every aspect of pirate life. New recruits were plied with it and huge bowls were prepared every time a meeting was called. One pirate captive in 1724 noted that every man drank hot punch first thing in the morning, the look-out in the tops having it hauled up to him on a rope. However, their addiction to the drink did have one fortuitous side effect. The lime juice it contained meant that there are scarcely any references to pirates suffering from scurvy, which plagued most deep-sea sailors at this time.
Truly helpless alcoholics stood out and were disapproved of. Christopher Lang ‘was a drunken fellow and of no esteem among the gang, they abusing him and often calling him Drunken Dog’, one captive said. John Jessup was ‘so drunk they cut him often out of his share’. And, when at sea, Roberts’ men reined in their drinking slightly - otherwise they would have been unable to work their ships. But life aboard was not for the faint-hearted and, as he sat alone each evening, Glasby’s feelings were similar to those expressed by a captive taken by pirates off New England in 1722:
I soon found that any death was preferable to being linked with such a vile crew of miscreants, to whom it was sport to do mischief, where prodigious drinking, monstrous cursing and swearing, hideous blasphemies, and open defiance of heaven, and contempt of hell itself, was the constant employment, unless when sleep something abated the noise and revellings.
Glasby was soon determined to escape.
Roberts too was still repelled by the constant drunkenness of his men and knew that drink posed the greatest threat to their survival. His career can be seen as the struggle of an intelligent, disciplined man against the anarchy inherent in the pirate way of life and, by this time, his captaincy was evolving in unusual ways. He had abandoned Davis’s practice of dividing the crew into Lords and Commons. But, wisely, he had retained what Johnson called a ‘privy-council of half a dozen of the greatest bullies, such as were his competitors’ - men like Thomas Anstis, Valentine Ashplant and Little David, whom he was careful to keep close. His personal authority was growing. ‘Roberts, by better management than usual, became the chief director in everything of moment,’ wrote Johnson. He gained sole authority over the treatment of prisoners, which set him apart from other pirate captains, and used this to rein in the worst excesses of the crew, ‘a much more rash and mad set of fellows than himself’. You sense he sometimes pined for the company of educated men and he liked to invite captured captains to his cabin for a quiet drink and a chat, making sure they understood they owed their good treatment to him and to him alone. But he was under no illusion that this would save him if ever he were caught. ‘There is none of you but will hang me, I know, whenever you can clinch me within your power,’ he would tell his guests, with a wry smile, as they left.
His style of captaincy represented a radical departure from pirate tradition. At times he was autocratic to the point of being dictatorial. But alcohol was the one area where he found it impossible to stamp his authority. Indeed, his reluctance to ‘drink and roar at their rate’ irritated the men. In the highly communal world of the pirate ship, his refusal to get drunk, combined with his solitary and detached personality, aroused suspicion and hostility. But success eased tensions, and as the two pirate ships headed east they were laden with booty.
We can picture them as they sped across the ocean. The Royal Fortune was perhaps 100 feet in length and 25 feet across, with a hold around 10 feet deep. It had three masts, each bearing two square-rigged sails. The Good Fortune was around two-thirds of its size, with one or at most two masts. They kept close company, the long boats occasionally passing between them, the sound of music and wild revelry drifting across the waves from time to time, alternating with periods of exhausted calm. By early August they had entered the tropics and, during the long, sultry afternoons, the pirates leant on the ship’s rail, watching the shoals of flying fish. Long-tailed white ‘tropic birds’ began to follow the ships as they neared land, and the appearance of two islands, shaped like women’s breasts and known to sailors as the ‘Two Paps’, signalled they were nearing their destination at the southern end of the Cape Verde Islands. But then disaster struck.
Somehow they missed Brava, where they had planned to careen - an act of sabotage perhaps by the new sailing master? South of the Cape Verde Islands the winds and currents switched once more towards the west and, before they knew it, the great clockwise swirl of the North Atlantic had carried them back out into mid-ocean with no chance of beating their way back. This was a catastrophe. They’d taken a couple of ships on their way south. One, a Portuguese vessel, yielded 700 moidores - equivalent to around £950. From another they took a French doctor, slitting one of his ears to force him to work for them. But they had taken no provisions to get them beyond the Cape Verde Islands. They worked on the assumption that their next meal was always just over the horizon. But there was not a sail in sight and they now had no choice but to continue westwards, hoping to reach South America before their food and water ran out.
They had just one hogshead of water - 63 gallons - for the 130 or so men aboard the two ships; this in a tropical climate where the only food they had was salted. Captain Johnson gave a pitiful description of their condition:
They continued their course and came to an allowance of one single mouthful of water for twenty-four hours; many of them drank their urine, or sea water, which, instead of allaying, gave them an inextinguishable thirst that killed them. Others pined and wasted a little more time in fluxes and apyrexies [fevers], so that they dropped away daily. Those that sustained the misery best, were such as almost starved themselves, forbearing all sorts of food, unless a mouthful or two of bread the whole day, so that those who survived were as weak as it was possible for men to be and alive.
He was exaggerating slightly to ram home a moral point - ‘With what face could wretches who had ravaged and made so many necessitous look up for relief?’ A captive who was with them at this point recorded only that they were ‘short of water’ and mentioned no deaths. But when finally they spotted land at some point towards the end of August they were in a desperate state, having travelled over 2,000 miles since missing the Cape Verde Islands. Dispatching a boat to fetch water, they found they were in the mouth of the Meriwinga River - now known as the Maroni River, which forms the border between French Guiana and Surinam. It was almost exactly the same spot where, eight months previously, they’d found themselves after adverse winds dragged them west from Devil’s Islands.
The pirates slaked their immediate thirst and then headed north-west to Tobago where they fully watered the two vessels. They then sailed to the Grenadines in the southern Windward Islands and on 4 September anchored once more at the lovely island of Carriacou where they had careened prior to their journey to Newfoundland. They were still in desperate need of provisions. But they found the lagoon at Carriacou swarming with giant turtles. There was a British sloop called the Relief the
re on a hunting expedition and the pirates forced its captain, Richard Dunne, to hand over his catch. They built fires on the beach and once more lounged in the shade of the palms, gorging themselves on the succulent meat, the sweet green juices running down their beards.
They stayed at Carriacou for two weeks, slowly regaining their strength. They careened their vessels and as Roberts sat on the sand, looking out over the turquoise sea, listening to the sound of his men carousing, he was able to reflect on an astonishing fifteen months. Within a few months of being captured he’d both become captain and pulled off the extraordinary coup at Pernambuco. He’d then suffered the disaster of Devil’s Islands, been demoted and come within a hair’s breadth of death or capture at Barbados. He’d then regained the captaincy and led the hugely successful campaign off Newfoundland, only to come close to destruction again crossing the Atlantic. Even by the standards of eighteenth-century pirates, whose lives contained more ups and downs than most, it had been a roller-coaster.
But as he looked about him he knew he was still the head of a considerable force. Captain Dunne of the Relief later said the Royal Fortune ‘had 28 guns on its upper and quarter deck and six swivel guns on its gunwale’. It also had six pairs of ‘organs’ - primitive, multiple-barrel guns that fired a number of musket balls simultaneously - which were mounted in the fighting tops. The smaller Good Fortune had six guns. The combined crews still numbered around 130 and this put Roberts a cut above most pirates operating in the Caribbean and made him more than a match for all but the largest ships the Royal Navy had on station in the region. And it would be a bold merchant captain who would set off in pursuit of him in the way Captain Graves and Captain Rogers had done from Barbados the previous February. The time for the authorities to crush Roberts was when he had been weak, between December 1719 and May 1720. They had missed their chance.
7
‘TO CREOLES WE ARE A FOE’
WEST INDIES
SEPTEMBER 1720-JANUARY 1721
‘YOU MAY ASSURE YOURSELVES HERE AND HEREAFTER NOT TO EXPECT ANYTHING FROM OUR HANDS BUT WHAT BELONGS TO A PIRATE’
ROBERTS NOW ENTERED A period of sustained success, a period in which he scooped up prize after prize and grew steadily in strength. It was a period of revenge on those who had hunted him in the past, and for a lifetime of petty slights and humiliations - and, for the traders of the eastern Caribbean, one of havoc and devastation. By the end of it his reputation as the greatest pirate of the age would be firmly established.
Roberts spent most of the next seven months in the Windward and Leeward Islands. He may have had a pre-existing grudge against the authorities there. ‘He used to say,’ Walter Kennedy claimed, ‘nothing from the King of England should content him, but the government of the Leeward Islands, and if he could not peaceably obtain them, he would e’re long hold them by force.’ Perhaps Roberts had bitter memories of the merchant captains and island governors in this part of the world from his time spent serving as mate aboard a sloop out of Barbados. But there were sound practical reasons for an ambitious pirate to base himself here. This was where most of the British and French colonies in the Caribbean were located, the most prosperous and fastest growing in the region.
The island of St Christophers (modern St Kitts) in the Leeward Islands, first settled in 1624, was the mother colony for both powers. For the early settlers it had the advantage that it was remote from the main centres of Spanish power on Hispaniola and Cuba - a function partly of geography, but also winds. The eighteenth-century mariner’s life was dominated by the concepts of ‘windward’ and ‘leeward’. Windward was the direction from which the wind was blowing, leeward the direction towards which it was blowing. In the eastern Caribbean the prevailing winds blew from the east. Hence the first islands they hit were known as the Windward Islands, and the more sheltered islands to the north-west were the Leeward Islands. Both were to windward of the main Spanish settlements and any ship approaching them from Cuba or Hispaniola had to beat against the wind. St Christophers was more easily reached from London than from Havana.
From St Christophers the English moved into Barbados in 1627, Nevis in 1628 and Montserrat and Antigua in 1632, while the French moved into Guadaloupe and Martinique in 1635. The first settlers lived by planting tobacco but the economy of the region was transformed with the arrival of sugar from the 1640s onwards. By the end of the century the English colonies had overtaken Brazil as the largest producers in the world and the plantation owners of the West Indies were the nouveaux riches of the age. ‘Splendour, dress, show, equipage, everything that can create an opinion of their importance is exerted to the utmost,’ wrote one observer; ‘an opulent West Indian vies in glare with a nobleman of the first degree.’
But their wealth brought them little contentment. The heat and humidity, the hurricanes and earthquakes, the ever-present threat of malaria and yellow fever and the terrifying levels of mortality - all combined to make the Caribbean an alarming, alien place to them even after almost a century of settlement. Virginians and New Englanders by this time were becoming Americans, creating a stable society of small farmers and traders. But the West Indian planters, perched precariously atop their rigidly hierarchical social structure, remained steadfastly English.
They sought the comfort of familiar objects and strove ludicrously to replicate the lifestyle of English country squires in the sweltering heat of the Caribbean. They wore wigs and waistcoats and enveloped themselves at night in curtains to protect themselves from the noxious breezes. They built brick houses in the ‘English style’, tall and narrow with glass windows rather than shutters - claustrophobic and stuffy. They ate vast meals of roast beef - imported, salted, from Britain - in the middle of the afternoon, followed by prodigious drinking bouts lasting late into the night. And they bored visitors rigid with their endless small talk about the price of sugar and the wickedness of the slaves. To visitors from New England they cut ridiculous figures, with their ‘carbuncled faces, slender legs and thighs and large prominent bellies’. Most kept black mistresses, rearing what one governor of the Leeward Islands called a ‘slavish sooty race’ of mulattoes through their ‘unnatural and monstrous lusts’.
Above all, the plantation owners lived in perpetual terror that the chained captives on whom their fortunes rested would one day rise up and rebel. On Barbados by 1713 there were 45,000 slaves, and on the British Leeward Islands by 1720 there were 37,000. They outnumbered the white population by more than three to one and the slightest whiff of revolt provoked punishments of such savagery that they leave the modern reader bewildered at their sadistic ingenuity. A French priest visiting Barbados in 1700 described seeing men ‘put into iron cages that prevent any movement and in which they are hung up to branches of trees and left to die of hunger and despair’. Other slaves were killed by being passed alive through the cane mills. For lesser offences they were whipped and beaten, their limbs cut off and their tongues torn out. Melted wax was poured into their wounds. One plantation overseer in Jamaica in 1678 observed an execution that was far from atypical in its barbarity:
His legs and arms were first broken in pieces with stakes, after which he was fastened upon his back to the ground. A fire was made first to his feet and burned up by degrees. I heard him speak several words when the fire consumed all his lower parts as far as his navel.
The fire was upon his breast (he was burning near 3 hours) before he died.
Only through such terror did the planters believe they could find security.
But for the governments in London and Paris these were dream colonies. They complemented but did not compete with the home economies - satisfying the demand for sugar, yet relying entirely on imports for all their needs. For Roberts the significance of this was simple - almost everything produced or consumed in the islands had to be transported by ship. Where Drake and the Buccaneers who followed him were the maritime equivalent of bank robbers, aiming for the occasional, spectacular bullion heist, Roberts and his contemp
oraries were muggers, preying on the everyday activity - the steady, vibrant hum - of an ultimately far wealthier mercantile empire.
But before he could begin his assault Roberts had to deal with unrest in the crew. While at Carriacou seven men escaped in a captured sloop, taking £800 in gold with them. Then, a few days later, Henry Glasby, the new sailing master, disappeared, along with two other men, one white and one black. A search party was immediately dispatched. Trying to hide on Carriacou would be futile - the island was only a few miles across. More likely they were frantically paddling to one of the nearby islands in a makeshift canoe when the pirate long boat drew effortlessly level and the search party silently levelled their muskets. They were dragged back and the machinery of pirate justice quickly swung into motion.
By the time their trial began the pirates had left Carriacou, sailing northwards towards the island of Dominica. There they watered and, on 19 September, seized a French sloop ‘laded with claret, white wine and brandy’, according to Captain Dunne of the Relief, who was still with them. The trial took place immediately afterwards and was well lubricated with alcohol.
The pirates crowded round, grim faced, in the dark, humid steerage. Judges were appointed and a jury of twelve men was formed. Bowls of punch were filled, pipes prepared, and then the three terrified men were dragged out. Articles of indictment against them were read. The men begged and pleaded for mercy. But the case was clear cut and the judges were about to pronounce sentence of death when there was a dramatic intervention from Valentine Ashplant, one of the senior men. Johnson described the scene:
If A Pirate I Must Be... Page 12