If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

One of the pirates struck Captain Ousley so hard with the flat of his cutlass that it broke. Another man, John Philps, called Wingfield a ‘son of a bitch’ and told him ‘that he starved the men, and that it was such dogs as he put men on pirating’. When Wingfield, somewhat ungallantly, pointed out that ‘the captain was always victualler’, Philps ‘swore that if he spoke another word he would throw him overboard’. Another pirate stole all of Wingfield’s clothes and made a point of wearing them for the next week, parading backwards and forwards in front of him. The pirates were all for burning the ship, but Henry Glasby managed to persuade them not to. Taking Wingfield aside later he ‘expressed a great deal of sorrow for being among such a company of rogues’, and Wingfield observed that ‘he acted among them with reluctance and ... could not avoid it’.

  The pirates ransacked the Hannibal, throwing its cargo overboard and turning it into a storage vessel, or ‘hulk’, while they cleaned their own ships. The malignant air of the river estuary soon took its toll on the Hannibal’s crew. Captain Ousley was dead within a couple of weeks, and by the time the Hannibal finally limped back to the Gold Coast a few months later only Wingfield and six others were still alive.

  Shortly afterwards the pirates seized two more prizes, the Mercy and the Cornwall, both from Bristol. They had taken no one from the Hannibal - the crew was probably already too sickly to be worth bothering with - but these two ships yielded at least fifteen men. Most were forced. One tried, unsuccessfully, to gain his freedom by putting on a cod Irish accent, it now being common knowledge along the coast that Roberts and his men always refused Irishmen. But many of the new recruits were soon enthusiastic pirates.

  The pirates took the surgeons from both the Bristol ships. William Child from the Mercy was reluctant, later pointing out to an Admiralty court that ‘his being in a pirate ship was not only much against his inclination but his interest, having a good employ whereon to build, and friends to advance him in the world in an honest and reputable way of livelihood’. But the Cornwall’s surgeon, Peter Scudamore, was an altogether more intriguing character.

  Previously the pirates had a policy of changing their surgeons regularly and never forcing them to sign their articles. But Scudamore, who was thirty-five and from Bristol, actually asked to sign, and according to witnesses ‘gloried in being the first surgeon that had done so’. Afterwards he boasted he was now ‘as great a rogue as any of them’. For a man of his social standing this was extremely unusual. Scudamore also had navigational knowledge and had picked up a smattering of various languages. He was no run-of-the-mill ship’s surgeon and the life of a pirate had clearly captured his imagination. His captain later signed an affidavit stating that nine of the men taken from his ship were forced, but explicitly excluded Scudamore, who he said ‘was a great villain’. He was soon elected the pirates’ chief surgeon, and set about his work with zeal, stealing medicines from captured vessels and anything else that took his fancy.

  The pirates had now switched quartermasters, voting out Little David, whose brutality had alienated his shipmates, and replacing him with William Magness, a thirty-five-year-old from Minehead in Somerset. Magness, who had been taken from a sloop as the pirates left the West Indies earlier in the year and had risen fast through the ranks, was a less aggressive figure. But there were still a number of unreconciled, forced men in the crew, incessantly plotting their escape. At Old Calabar five of the Liverpool men seized in August formed a conspiracy to take one of the ships’ boats and slip away in the night. The vigilance of Roberts’ look-outs thwarted them. But a man from the Jeremiah and Ann, taken at Bermuda in April, did manage to get ashore and run away. The rumour among the crew was that he had given all his money to Roberts ‘to wink at it’.

  The incessant plotting was wearying for Roberts. It drained his energy and sapped the morale of the crew. It wouldn’t be surprising if he had accepted a bribe to be rid of a single malcontent. What he couldn’t tolerate were mass desertions. These stopovers, when the ships were careening, were always a difficult time. It had been the same at Cayenne, Carriacou and Hispaniola. The men were drunk. They had time on their hands. And it was easier for them to slip away on land than at sea.

  Once again, it wasn’t just the forced men who were conspiring. Cabals were also being formed among the more hardened pirates, chafing under Roberts’ increasingly authoritarian rule. This was a problem that was intensifying with time and Roberts knew that it was now a real threat to his power. But he was in a quandary. If he were to turn his men into an efficient fighting force that could sustain itself over time and withstand the assaults of the authorities, then he had to rein in their anarchic impulses, above all their incessant drinking. But to do that he had no choice but to become more dictatorial and autocratic. This clashed with the democratic traditions of pirate culture, the liberty and freedom which had drawn most of his men to the pirate way of life in the first place, and so provoked discontent. It was a dilemma he never fully resolved.

  He was also having problems with the local Africans. Known as the ‘Efik’, they were an aggressive, entrepreneurial people. An English trader in 1714 described them as ‘the greatest thieves in the world ... They would ... steal slaves out of the port-holes that they had sold us the day before and sell them again to the other ships.’ At that time they were still relatively unfamiliar with Europeans and the trader was surrounded by a crowd shouting ‘Bacarada Oh! - White Man!’ - every time he went ashore. But in 1719 the region had been visited by the pirate Edward England, whose men, according to Johnson, ‘lived there very wantonly for several weeks, making free with the negro women, and committing such outrageous acts, that they came to an open rupture with the natives, several of whom they killed, and one of their towns they set on fire’. This may well have occurred at Old Calabar itself. It was certainly nearby and word of the outrage spread along the coast.

  It was another indication of the pirates’ shrinking world. Even Africans were now hostile. When Roberts and his men tried to buy supplies they were refused. The Efik had worked out their new visitors were the same breed as Edward England and wanted nothing to do with them. In retaliation the pirates launched an attack on the main African town, forty men landing under cover of fire from the ships’ guns. The Efik drew up in a body of men, 2,000 strong, to confront them. They managed to kill two or three of the pirates. But when the others continued to advance they fled, with heavy losses. The pirates set fire to the town and returned to their ships. This obviously made any further stay in the river difficult. With the mutinous mutterings within the crew growing louder, Roberts was soon keen to be back out to sea.

  At some point in November he forced Captain Loan to pilot them back down the river. Before parting Henry Glasby took the opportunity to slip ‘two or three moidores’ into Loan’s hand ‘to carry to his wife’. Then the Royal Fortune and the Ranger sailed out into the Bight of Biafra.

  The plan was to drop south of the equator and pick up the south-east trade winds to carry them back towards the main trading areas further west along the African coast. But, having failed to trade at Old Calabar, they first needed to make a couple of stops to obtain supplies.

  The pirates headed initially to Cape Lopez. The king there liked to dress in European style with ‘hat, wig and breeches’ and was a figure of amusement to visiting sailors, but rather more welcoming than the men of OId Calabar. Cape Lopez was a popular watering hole with European ships before they headed west and they were also able to buy wood, ready chopped by the local people.

  On 14 December, immediately before or after this stop, the pirates seized a Dutch ship called the Gertruycht a few miles off the mouth of the River Gabon. They found two British men aboard. One, a drummer, they forced to join them. The other they left because he was Irish. The pirates irritated the Dutch mate by taking ‘some very good sausages [and] ludicrously stringing them about their necks for a time, and then throwing them away’. They left the Dutch with just enough food to get back to El Mina on the Go
ld Coast.

  They then headed for the island of Annobón to take in additional supplies. By this time Roberts was so nervous of the mutinous impulses within his crew that he took the unusual step of allowing only one man in each mess ashore at a time - effectively keeping the other men behind as hostages. He finally set off across the Gulf of Guinea around Christmas 1721, preparing for another rampage.

  The sickness suffered by HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth at Princes Island had had one unforeseen consequence. It had drastically weakened the two Royal Navy ships. But by forcing them to divert to Cape Coast Castle it had also thrown out Roberts’ calculations. He was working on the assumption that they were now back at Sierra Leone, as Old Crackers and the other traders had told him in July. But they weren’t. They were on the Gold Coast. Captain Ogle and Captain Herdman may not have known where Roberts was. But he now didn’t know where they were.

  11

  DEFIANCE OF DEATH ITSELF

  WEST AFRICA

  JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1722

  ‘I SHALL HAVE THE SATISFACTION OF SITTING UPON HIS COURT MARTIAL IN MY LACED SUIT’

  THE ROYAL FORTUNE AND the Ranger hit land at Cape Lahou on the modern Cote d’Ivoire, at the eastern end of the Windward Coast, intending to rampage eastward along the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast. Roberts believed this placed him several hundred miles ahead of HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth at Sierra Leone. In fact, the two warships were on the other side of him, to Leeward, just a couple of hundred miles away and directly in the path the pirates intended to take.

  HMS Weymouth remained in a desperately weak condition. Alexander Selkirk, the original Robinson Crusoe, had died a sad, obscure death off El Mina on 13 December and the ship still had no more than seventy men fit for service. It had not strayed far from Cape Coast Castle over the previous two months. But HMS Swallow was approaching its former strength having recruited numerous men from the slavers to replace those who had died. Few needed to be pressed; according to Atkins - they were ‘escaping to us themselves from ill treatment (they said), bad or short diet’, although he noted that ‘more again, on the same pretence, took on with the pirates’. Had Roberts arrived just two weeks earlier he’d have landed right on top of HMS Swallow as it patrolled the Windward Coast. But Captain Ogle’s ship was now headed back towards Cape Coast Castle.

  By now the pirates had a new flag, which they raised from their mizzen peak, to accompany the representation of Roberts which flew from the bowsprit. It was an elaborate design. On the left was a full-length skeleton clutching crossed-bones in one hand and an hour-glass in the other, a ‘dart‘ by its side, and ‘underneath a heart dropping three drops of blood’, according to Johnson. On the right, confronting the skeleton, was a figure clutching a flaming sword, ‘intimating a defiance of death itself’. Like the first flag, it was made of black silk.

  On the first day of 1722 the pirates seized a ship called the Tarlton close to Cape Lahou. It was from Liverpool and captained by Thomas Tarlton, brother of the John Tarlton whose ship the Stanwich they had captured back in August. They forced six men, who, like the other Liverpool men, were reluctant recruits. One even fell to his knees and begged to be released, but Roberts merely mocked him for his ‘crocodile tears’.

  A day later, a few miles to the east, they seized the Elizabeth, a London ship under the command of Captain John Sharp. Like the Tarlton, it fell without a shot fired, but the boarding party was an aggressive one. A number of reluctant recruits were beaten aboard the pirates’ ships. And when the ship’s surgeon tried to intervene to prevent them stealing some of his property they threatened to ‘cut his ears off’. The surgeon reported that they barged into the captain’s cabin, hung up their cutlasses, ‘and fell to drinking and swearing, the vices he saw they were all enamoured of’. Despite the theft of a corkscrew from the Onslow the previous year, he noted they were still ‘knocking off the heads of bottles’ with their cutlasses. Henry Glasby again took advantage of the chaos to have a quiet chat with Captain Sharp, telling him ‘how miserable his condition was with such a crew, lamenting very much’.

  There was a pleasant surprise awaiting Roberts aboard the Elizabeth. Travelling as a passenger was George Wilson, the young surgeon from the Stanwich that Roberts had taken such a shine to the previous August. Despite the strong suspicion Wilson had deserted the pirates on that occasion Roberts was delighted to see him, and the relationship he formed with the young surgeon over the next few weeks is revealing of the inner impulses and passions which drove him.

  ‘God Damn you! What, are you here again?’ Roberts shouted across with a grin when he first spotted Wilson aboard the Elizabeth. He ordered that he be brought across in the first boat and Wilson, apparently equally pleased to see Roberts, hastily borrowed a shirt and drawers from the ship’s surgeon to be more presentable. Once aboard the Royal Fortune Roberts greeted Wilson warmly and gave him a laced hat and shirt, the small matter of his apparent desertion in August quietly forgotten.

  Wilson had had various adventures since his last meeting with Roberts. After being washed ashore at Cape Mesurado he’d lived in a wretched state among the Africans for five months. During that time Thomas Tarlton, the captain of the ship the pirates had captured the day before, had anchored nearby. Wilson had sent word of his desperate condition and begged him to at least send some food. Tarlton, firmly convinced Wilson had deserted his brother on the Stanwich and joined the pirates willingly, refused. Wilson was eventually rescued by a French ship which took him to Sestos, from where he was picked up by Captain Sharp in the Elizabeth.

  On coming aboard the Royal Fortune Wilson immediately caught sight of Thomas Tarlton, who was still a prisoner on the pirate ship, and flew into a rage. On hearing the story Roberts instantly took upon himself ‘the correction of Mr. Tarlton’, who, until then, had been treated well, and began ‘beating and misusing him grievously’. Tarlton was later hidden by the other Liverpool men aboard to spare him further abuse.

  A number of witnesses later testified that Roberts and Wilson soon became ‘intimate’, even swearing a suicide pact together. ‘They two [used] often to say that if they should meet with any of the Turnip Man’s ships [an insulting term for King George I] ... they would blow up and go to hell together,’ one claimed. Roberts’ attachment is all the more striking because Wilson was lazy in his work and unpopular with the rest of the crew - so much so that, on one occasion, Roberts himself threatened to cut Wilson’s ears off, chiding him ‘that he was a double rogue, to be there a second time’.

  In this era it was common for men to show emotions and express affection for each other in a way that would later be regarded as inappropriate. But Roberts and Wilson hardly knew each other. In total, their relationship would last for no longer than six weeks. They had no time to develop a deep and profound friendship and it’s hard to see what their ‘intimacy’ was based on if it wasn’t physical.

  By 5 January the pirates had reached Assinie on the boundary between the Windward Coast and the Gold Coast, where they took a small Royal African Company ship called the Diligence. Once again, they showed a particular hostility to the company’s ships. Having thoroughly plundered it they sank it, leaving the crew with little option but to join them. Many were far from reluctant. One, a man called John Jessup, had originally been on the Onslow and had declined to join the pirates when it was taken in August. But five months in the service of the Royal African Company had changed his mind. His captain later testified that ‘he ... got drunk with the pirates and continued on a jovial life, swearing ’twas better being among them than at Cape Coast Castle’. The new recruits also included two slaves whom the Royal African Company had trained as seamen.

  The next day, close to Cape Apollonia, they came across another Royal African Company ship, the King Solomon, a sizeable vessel of 200 tons laden with goods and provisions for Cape Coast Castle. Its captain, Joseph Traherne, was keen to resist. The King Solomon had 12 guns and a crew of more than thirty and the pirates sent across
a long boat with just twenty men to seize it. Traherne grabbed a musket and fired on them, shouting to his men it was a ‘shame they should be taken by half their number, without any repulse’. But the men stared sullenly at him and threw their guns to the ground, leaving him with no option but to surrender. Climbing aboard, the pirates were furious that Traherne had even contemplated resistance. ‘Don’t you see them two ships?’ shouted one, gesturing to the Royal Fortune and the Ranger, anchored three miles away. They were ‘commanded by the famous Captain Roberts’, he told him, as if this were explanation enough why resistance was futile.

  As on the Onslow back in August, the pirates quickly found themselves inundated with volunteers, including soldiers bound for Cape Coast Castle. At least nine were accepted. As on the Onslow, many were clamouring for revenge. One, John Divine, who turned out to be a ex-pirate himself, showed the pirates his ‘allowance’, or rations, ‘to incense them against’ Captain Traherne. ‘It was their time before, but now it was his,’ Divine was heard to mutter, menacingly, to some of his former officers. As on the Onslow, the pirates restrained them. But they planned to burn the ship. One of the boarding party decked himself out in Traherne’s wig and clothes, ordered a bottle of wine, and merrily took the wheel to pilot the King Solomon over to the two waiting pirate vessels so it could first be plundered at leisure. But there Roberts’ colder, more calculating personality asserted itself.

  Roberts reached an accommodation with Traherne, who, it seems, paid a ransom to save not just his ship but also his cargo, which included a full-length mirror, intended as a gift for an African king. The pirates stripped it of everything else, from cables and sails to a backgammon set, taken by Peter Scudamore, the volunteer surgeon from Old Calabar.

  As the King Solomon was being plundered its mate was astute enough to take note of the simmering tensions between the two pirate ships. Watching the pirate Isaac Hynde force two men on to the Ranger, he heard him say, ‘the [Royal] Fortune had men enough, and [we] must have as many’. It was clear that the two ships saw themselves as much as competitors as collaborators.