Cape Coast Castle itself was considerably grander than any of the other British forts along the coast. Built of stone, bleached white in the sun, it contained 28 guns, jutting aggressively out from the ramparts towards the sea, it having been built, like all the forts in Africa, for defence not against the Africans but against other Europeans. Below ground, cut from solid rock, were dark, gloomy dungeons, into which the slaves were lowered, up to a thousand at a time, to await shipment. ‘The keeping of the slaves thus underground is a good security to the garrison against any insurrection,’ wrote a French trader in 1682. Rather more compassionately, Atkins noted there was just a single iron grill ‘to let in light and air on those poor wretches’. Each was branded on the right breast with the letters ‘DY’, for ‘Duke of York’, the Royal African Company’s original founder, later King James II.
Above ground Phipps had spacious lodgings. They were linked directly to the chapel and the main hall, so he could overlook his employees both at prayer and at work. He also had a private bastion, or walkway, with ‘a very pleasant prospect to the sea’. From here he could watch ships coming down the coast and, with a telescope, identify the vessels anchored at El Mina, the main Dutch fort on the coast, which lay just nine miles to the east.
He spent his time firing off lengthy, cantankerous letters to London. Besides pirates, competition with independent traders - or interlopers - and with the Dutch were his main preoccupations. But he also moaned incessantly about the quality of the men sent out to serve him.
John Brooks, shipwright died on the 6th, and I can but observe to your honours that had he lived he would have been of little service being old and past his labour ...
... Edward Gold and Peter Roberts who came over in the Carlton under the denomination of brickmakers know nothing of the business having been only labourers ...
... What with the impertinence, ignorance and rascality of the factors and writers I am become a perfect slave.
The men beneath him were all ‘scoundrels’ and ‘idiots’, who shared the annoying habit of dying before they could pay off the debts he had taken such care to drive them into.
But he had one soft spot - his mulatta concubine, and the four little children he had had by her. It was common for Europeans on the coast to take local ‘wives’, and they tended to prefer women of mixed race. Phipps’ partner was the daughter of a Dutch soldier at El Mina. A merchant captain in the 1690s recalled watching the concubines of European traders dance ‘frenziedly’ to the sound of music played on elephant-tusk horns. ‘This is a pleasant way of marrying,’ he commented, ‘for they can turn them off and take others at pleasure, which makes them very careful to humour their husbands, in washing their linen, cleaning their chambers, and the charge of keeping them is little or nothing.’ But Phipps was an exception. He doted on his concubine and was forever trying to persuade her to return to England with him, without success. She went barefoot, Atkins wrote, and was always ‘fetished with chains and gobbets of gold at her ankles, her wrists, and her hair’ and felt she would ‘fit awkward’ in England. Although she went with him to chapel occasionally, she complied ‘without devotion ... being a strict adherent to the negrish customs’.
Phipps had, however, persuaded her to send their children - ‘of fair, flaxen hair and complexion’ - to school there. The oldest two had already gone. The youngest two, a boy and a girl, were still with him, and he was forever ordering clothes and other trinkets for them from London. When Atkins was there he was awaiting the arrival of a servant girl to wait on his daughter, along with some shoes, and some clothes to put his ‘boy in breeches’. Atkins was made very aware that Phipps set no store at all in the skills of surgeons like himself. Examining him one day when he fell ill, Atkins was disturbed to discover the old general wore African charms around his wrists and his neck.
Phipps’ ships would suffer grievously at Roberts’ hands over the next eight months. But as the general became acquainted with Captain Ogle and Captain Herdman in mid-June 1721, there was still no word of the pirates’ arrival on the coast. And so, on 26 June, HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth left Cape Coast Castle and set off east towards the Bight of Biafra.
By this time Roberts and his men were already at Sierra Leone, 1,000 miles to the west. They had hit the coast originally at the Senegal River, further north, where the trade - mainly tree gum rather than slaves - was dominated by the French. There they had been challenged by two small cruisers which the French kept at the mouth of the river to deter foreign ships. The pirates immediately raised their black flag, at which ‘their French hearts failed’, and they quickly surrendered, according to Captain Johnson. The two cruisers were found to contain 26 guns and 140 men between them and the pirates decided to take them with them, first dumping the crews on the African coast.
They arrived at Sierra Leone on 12 June. At this time it was a backwater in the slave trade. But Cape Sierra Leone, combined with the broad estuary of the Rokel River, provided one of the few natural harbours in West Africa and the Royal African Company had a small fort there. The governor, an old Irishman called Robert Plunkett, was a grizzled veteran in the mould of General Phipps. He had been in Sierra Leone at least five years and his letters back to London rivaled those of his superior in their spleen and vindictiveness. He complained that his surgeon was a ‘morose, ignorant fellow’ and his writer ‘both fool and madman’, and felt Phipps was always short-changing him in the supplies he sent from Cape Coast Castle - the food ‘perishing ... the rum well-watered’. The ruins of his fort can still be seen today, the stone walls being slowly wrestled to the ground by the roots of giant trees, the guns lying scattered in the grass, their carriages long since rotted. It had been pillaged by Davis, Cocklyn and La Bouche during their stay in April 1719 and Plunkett had been taken prisoner. The legend on the coast was that they had spared his life in admiration for his ability to outswear them.
Roberts and his men decided not to storm the fort. Located on an island high up the river it contained little worth stealing, and Plunkett was clearly resolved to resist. Roberts knew that, if they left him alone, he would have little option but to leave them alone and, as ever, he was not interested in picking a fight for the sake of it. Instead, the pirates got to work converting the larger of the two French cruisers to be their new consort. They named it the Ranger and loaded it with around 30 guns. They elected as captain a Welshman called James Skyrm, who had been first mate on a sloop from St Christophers, captured the previous October. At the same time they careened the Royal Fortune. They were at Sierra Leone for more than six weeks and, as ever during these stopovers, they enjoyed themselves.
It was a hauntingly beautiful spot. The main watering hole was at a cove called Frenchman’s Bay and was one of the best-known in West Africa. ‘The water comes cascading down from the mountain, among an infinity of rocks, making no small amount of noise against the profound silence of these vast forests,’ wrote one visitor. The ‘sweet and clear’ waters gathered in a pool just yards from the sea, around which ‘large and handsome trees’ provided a ‘delectable shade’. All around stood high hills, almost 3,000 feet tall, which trapped the sound of thunder during the rainy season and sent it echoing around the bay. Down at the water’s edge it was possible to gather great clumps of oysters from the branches of mangrove trees at low tide. There were dangers too. HMS Swallow had stopped here in April en route to Cape Coast Castle and John Atkins saw a sailor, ‘mellow in drink’, almost eaten by a crocodile as he walked in the shallows. He saved himself only by ramming his fist down the animal’s throat.
As Howel Davis and his men had discovered two years before, it was one of the few places in the world where there was still a community of Englishmen prepared to welcome pirates. Plunkett and his men at the fort lived cheek by jowl with around thirty independent traders - ‘men who, in some part of their lives, have been either privateering, Buccaneering or pirating, and still retain and love the riots, and humours, common to that sort of life’, acco
rding to Johnson. The best known was John Leadstone, or ‘Old Crackers’, a former Buccaneer. ‘He keeps the best house in the place,’ wrote Johnson, ‘has two or three guns before his door, with which he salutes his friends (the pirates, when they put in), and lives a jovial life with them, all the while they are there.’ The traders kept African servants, both male and female - ‘the women so obedient that they are ready to prostitute themselves to whomsoever their masters shall command them’.
Again, there is no record of Roberts indulging. But his crew were not so reticent and some nights Roberts and Henry Glasby - still a prisoner on the Royal Fortune - were almost the only people left aboard. We can picture these two sober, solitary figures leaning on the ship’s rail, slightly apart, gazing into the tropical night and listening to the distant sound of the men’s revelry, an unspoken empathy between them.
A crew member called William Williams, who had been captured off Newfoundland, took the opportunity to escape but was later caught and subjected to two lashes from every member of the crew. Other than that, as Roberts had calculated, most of his men were ‘too much afraid of the negroes’ to attempt anything. He even gained a couple of recruits. One of them, William Davis, had deserted from a slaving galley shortly before and had lived among the Africans at Sierra Leone for a time. He’d been given an African wife, but had sold her for some punch, after which he fled to the Royal African Company’s fort for protection from her family. Governor Plunkett handed him back to them, telling them ‘he did not care if they took his head off’, but they opted to sell him instead and he was living as a virtual slave when Roberts arrived. He was a poor recruit, soon proving himself to be an ‘idle, good-for-nothing fellow’.
Roberts took no prizes at Sierra Leone. Two years before Davis, Cocklyn and La Bouche had captured thirteen vessels here. But it was now the rainy season and the estuary was known as a particularly unhealthy spot at this time - something that didn’t seem to worry Roberts and his seasoned men. But by the end of July he was impatient to move on. He had a new ship to fill with recruits. He’d also gained important intelligence from the traders at Sierra Leone.
Old Crackers and the others had told him of the arrival of HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth. But they’d also told him that the two Royal Navy vessels had no plans to return to this stretch of the coast until Christmas. The prevailing winds and currents along the African coast ran west to east. Ships rarely attempted to travel in the opposite direction. Instead, having reached their destination towards the Bight of Biafra, they tended to drop south of the equator to either Cape Lopez or the island of Annobón and then pick up the south-east trade winds.
The slavers used these to take them out into the Atlantic. HMS Weymouth and HMS Swallow would use them to take them back across the Gulf of Guinea to Gambia, before cruising east again. So long as he remained behind the two men-of-war as they made this circuit Roberts calculated that he was safe. The two French warships were also far to the east at this time. At the start of August the Royal Fortune and the Ranger sailed out of Sierra Leone knowing that they had the coast at their mercy.
10
KNIGHTS ERRANT
WEST AFRICA
AUGUST-DECEMBER 1721
‘HE ABUSED HIM, CALLING HIM A ... SON OF A BITCH, THAT HE STARVED THE MEN, AND THAT IT WAS SUCH DOGS AS HE AS PUT MEN ON PYRATING’
THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE began in the sixteenth century in West Central Africa - the region around the modern nations of Congo and Angola - and then spread north-west in a wave. At its peak in the second half of the eighteenth century slaves were being exported at a rate of 5,000 a year from areas as far north as Senegal and Gambia. By 1721 this wave had reached the Gold Coast, which was exporting 7,000 slaves a year. The area immediately to the east of it - known simply as the Slave Coast - was the most important supplier. The town of Whydah, in modern Benin, was the greatest slave port of the age, exporting 20,000 in peak years. The area immediately to the west of the Gold Coast was the frontier, the slave trade’s Wild West, only just being opened up by aggressive interlopers from Bristol and Liverpool. Comprising the modern nations of Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire, it was generally known as the Windward Coast. This was the region Roberts and his men were now entering.
As they edged their way cautiously eastwards the pirates were confronted with a flat, featureless landscape of endless jungle. The African villages, when they could be glimpsed between the trees, consisted of small gatherings of mud and wattle huts. The people painted themselves with a dark, reddish paint and sharpened their teeth. Few spoke English or Portuguese and they were generally regarded by Europeans as being less civilised than those of the Gold Coast. The Africans were equally wary of Europeans. John Atkins had met the local chief at Cape Mesurado - the site of modern Monrovia - when he’d passed this way three months before on HMS Swallow. He was distinguished by ‘an old hat and sailor’s jacket, [and] a greater number of thick brass rings on his fingers and toes than his attendants’. He came out to greet them in a canoe, but ‘seemed shy of entering the ship ... his town’s people having often suffered by the treachery of the ships’. Kidnapping - or ‘panyarring’ - was a plague here, Europeans often saving themselves the trouble of buying slaves by simply abducting the traders. The Royal African Company blamed Liverpool and Bristol interlopers, complaining they saw little need to build up a long-term relationship with the Africans.
The Africans responded in kind. It was here that some of Howel Davis’s men had been murdered while ashore in May 1719, prompting him to seize a number of local men, string them from the yard-arm and use them for target practice by way of retaliation. Europeans rarely left their ships. Instead the locals sent smoke signals when they had goods to sell and the ships anchored off shore. The Africans rowed warily out to them, carrying slaves or ivory. They ‘will play for hours together in their canoes about the ship, before they dare venture’, wrote Atkins. Once they were on board the ships’ captains kept their crews heavily armed, gathered in the stern, in case of attack. As elsewhere along the African coast, the slave trade was creating a brutal, dog-eat-dog world among the Africans. ‘It is their villainies and robberies upon one another that enable them to carry on a slave trade with Europeans,’ Atkins commented cynically, ‘and as strength fluctuates, it is not infrequent for him who sells you slaves today, to be a few days hence sold himself at some neighbouring town.’
But Roberts was an old hand here. When the Africans tilted their heads back and put a drop of salt water in their eye on first meeting, he knew he was expected to reciprocate as ‘an engagement of peace and security’. For him this was an ideal hunting ground. There were no European forts. And although the Windward Coast was a minor source of slaves in itself, all ships bound for the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast had to pass this way. Fresh from Europe, they were still packed with trade goods, rather than slaves, which were a burden. More importantly, the bulk of their crews - Roberts’ real quarry - were still alive, having not yet been exposed to the mosquitoes of the African coast.
Roberts’ career had now come full circle. Having been liberated himself from the slavers two years before, he was now the liberator. The pirates hadn’t passed Cape Mesurado before they’d snapped up at least three prizes - the Martha, the Robinson and the Stanwich, all interlopers from Liverpool. On each Roberts lined the men up and invited them to join his crew, expecting the usual surge of willing recruits. But he was disappointed.
The pirates took at least fifteen men from the three ships. But they had to force most of them. By now David Simpson - ‘Little David’ - the quick-tempered, powerfully built Scot who had unsuccessfully challenged Roberts for the captaincy at Princes Island back in July 1719, was quartermaster. He beat many of the men on to the pirate ships. And when Roger Pye, a young sailor on the Stanwich, begged to be released on the grounds that he was newly married and had left his wife with child Simpson was deaf to his pleas. Henry Glasby intervened repeatedly and the captains of the Martha and the Stanwich both recor
ded that he was responsible ‘for what good usage they met with’. But he was powerless to prevent the men being taken.
Like Howel Davis before him, Roberts disliked forcing men. But he was always sceptical of those who claimed to be reluctant to join the pirates. He assumed they were putting on a show for witnesses, or, if genuine, that they would quickly be seduced by pirate life - as he himself had been. He was usually right. But the Liverpool men proved stubbornly resistant. Roger Gossuch from the Martha, in particular, irritated the pirates by remaining ‘melancholy’ and ‘meditating on Godly books’. They were an awkward presence within the crew from then on, providing a hard knot of malcontents always looking for an opportunity to escape. It was the first indication Roberts had that the boundaries of his world were narrowing and that, with four warships patrolling the African coast, life beneath the black flag no longer carried the same automatic appeal for men aboard the slavers.
The capture of the Stanwich yielded an intriguing encounter. The ship was captained by John Tarlton, part of a fast-rising dynasty of Liverpool slave merchants, who had on board a young doctor called George Wilson. When the ship was first captured Tarlton was unwell and sent Wilson aboard the Royal Fortune to speak to Roberts. Roberts took a shine to the young man. He instantly invited him to become his mess-mate - in other words to share his quarters and eat and sleep with him. Wilson replied that he had a wife and child, at which Roberts laughed. Whether Wilson moved into Roberts’ quarters we don’t know, but he certainly joined the crew, if only briefly. Two days later he was swept ashore at Cape Mesurado while rowing across to the Stanwich to fetch his chest. The pirates sailed on without him. Whether this was an accident or an escape was unclear. But it was not the last time Roberts and Wilson would meet.
If A Pirate I Must Be... Page 17