If A Pirate I Must Be...

by Richard Sanders

  There were over a hundred men still alive on board, including twenty-three slaves and sixteen Frenchmen, taken when the new Ranger was seized at Whydah and still being held prisoner. It was decided to leave the wounded pirates aboard, along with the Frenchman and a skeleton crew from HMS Swallow, and to dispatch the Ranger to Princes Island. The remaining pirates, numbering around sixty, were stripped naked and shackled below decks on HMS Swallow, along with the slaves. Ogle’s men spent a couple of days getting the Ranger in a fit state to sail. Then, on 7 February, the two ships parted company, Swallow heading back towards Cape Lopez where Ogle knew Roberts would be awaiting the return of his consort. Two days later, on 9 February, Captain Ogle caught sight of the Royal Fortune and the abandoned old Ranger, still riding at anchor just where he had left them.

  Dusk was falling and Ogle, now confident of victory, decided to postpone his attack until the following day. The pirates had not spotted him. And he was delighted to note there were now three sails in the bay. This meant Roberts and his men had seized a prize, and would, at that moment, be plundering its liquor store.

  In fact the vessel riding at anchor alongside the two pirate ships was the Neptune under Captain Thomas Hill - the same ship the pirates had encountered as they left Whydah, and onto which they had loaded the crew of the Whydah sloop. Its presence at Cape Lopez is suspicious. Hill was on his way to the port of Cabinda further south and later claimed he had simply put in to get water. But the pirates had not robbed Hill the first time they encountered him and it’s likely they had reached an arrangement. Hill may have been bringing them supplies. Either way, as Ogle suspected, they were enjoying a party and when dawn broke on 10 February most of the pirates were either still drunk or nursing ferocious hangovers.

  This was the scenario that Roberts had always dreaded - an encounter with a powerful naval vessel when his crew was the worse for drink. They were in such a state that they didn’t see HMS Swallow initially as it began its approach that morning. They were ‘very easy in the bay’, recalled John Atkins, ‘and stayed so long that we doubted whether they would stir for us’.

  Roberts was in his cabin when the cry of ‘Sail ahoy!’ finally came. With him was Captain Hill from the Neptune and they were enjoying a breakfast of weak beer and salmagundi - a pirate speciality that included chunks of meat, pickled herrings, hard-boiled eggs and vegetables. In their befuddled state his men again failed to identify HMS Swallow. Some thought it was Portuguese, others a French slaver. But most believed it was the returning Ranger. Roberts, unconcerned, continued his breakfast. His men were debating how many guns they should fire as a salute to their returning consort when suddenly a look of horror passed across the face of David Armstrong, the deserter from HMS Swallow whom they had taken at Axim six months previously. Armstrong had recognised his old ship. He dashed down to Roberts’ cabin.

  It was probably at this moment, as Armstrong frantically gabbled the news, that Roberts realised he was going to die - if not that morning then on the gallows in the next few weeks. But if he felt fear he didn’t show it. Perhaps to displace his own tension, he cursed the trembling Armstrong for cowardice and, taking leave of Captain Hill, went up on deck. Hill took the opportunity to slip back quietly to his own ship.

  Looking through his telescope Roberts saw it was flying French colours, which was clearly a ruse. He ordered his men to battle stations. Many were terrified. At least one would spend the battle hiding in the ‘heads’ - the enclosed toilets at the front of the ship - and Roberts almost came to blows with others. But he himself kept his composure. If this was the end then he was determined to go out in style. He went below and dressed in ‘a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain round his neck, with a diamond cross hanging to it’, according to Johnson. He put on his sword and slung four pistols over his shoulders on a silk sling, in ‘the fashion of the pirates’. Then he went up on deck.

  The strategy he devised was characteristically bold. Armstrong told him HMS Swallow sailed best ‘upon a wind’, that is, with the wind coming from the side. With the wind directly behind them the Royal Fortune might be able to outrun it. The wind at that moment was blowing from the south, in the face of the approaching man-of-war. Roberts decided to sail straight towards Ogle’s ship, exchange broadsides, and then shoot out into open sea and try and make a run for it with the wind behind him. If badly damaged the ship would ground itself on the headland ‘and everyone to shift for himself among the Negroes’. If the worst came to the worst they would come alongside and blow both ships up. Roberts knew it was a desperate gamble. And he knew most of his men were drunk and unfit for service - ‘passively courageous’, in Johnson’s words. But he had little option.

  By mid-morning a thunderstorm was breaking around them. In the wind and driving rain the pirate ship sped towards HMS Swallow. At 11 a.m. the two ships closed, raised their true colours, and exchanged broadsides. HMS Swallow was almost untouched. The Royal Fortune lost its mizzen-mast and suffered damage to its rigging. But it was still sailing and was soon half a gunshot beyond HMS Swallow and heading out into open sea. Just for a moment it looked as if Roberts might have got away with it. But then the crew’s night of revelry took its toll. One man simply passed out on the deck having fired his gun. Many others were little better and the pirates’ steering was erratic. By now the storm was gaining in strength. One clap of thunder ‘seemed like the rattling of 10,000 small arms within three yards of our heads’, John Atkins later recalled, and the simultaneous bolt of lightening split the top of HMS Swallow’s main-mast. But, with the wind swirling around unpredictably, the warship was soon gaining ground once more on the Royal Fortune. At half past one, it came close enough to deliver another broadside. As the smoke cleared the men on HMS Swallow saw the pirate’s main-mast come crashing down. Shortly afterwards the pirates signalled surrender.

  As on the Ranger, the crew of the Royal Fortune immediately divided between those who felt they might stand some chance of acquittal at trial and those who knew only the gallows awaited them. James Philips, one of the Old Standers, went down to the powder room with a lighted match, swearing ‘let’s all go to Hell together’. But there he encountered a sentry - Stephen Thomas - placed by Henry Glasby. Philips ‘throwed [me] against the ladder at the hatchway, wounding [my] hand as [we] were struggling about the match,’ Thomas later recalled. At that moment Glasby appeared and, together, they were able to subdue him.

  Shortly afterwards HMS Swallow’s long boat arrived, commanded by Lieutenant Isaac Sun. Recalling the attempt to blow up the Ranger, Ogle had opted to keep his ship at a distance. Working with Glasby, whose ‘good character’ he’d been informed of beforehand, Sun quickly secured control of the Royal Fortune. But there was one final moment of farce as crewman Joseph Mansfield, the former highwayman, suddenly burst from the hold, blind drunk. ‘He came up vapouring with a cutlass to know who would go on board the prize,’ Glasby later recalled. ‘It was sometime before [we] could persuade him of the truth of [our] condition.’

  By 7 p.m. the entire crew was secured below decks on HMS Swallow, side by side with their colleagues from the Ranger. The pirates had suffered three dead and ten injured in this second battle, while HMS Swallow hadn’t suffered a single casualty in either engagement. ‘Discipline is an excellent path to victory,’ Atkins commented in his memoir. ‘The pirates, though singly fellows of courage’, lacked ‘a tie of order, some director to unite that force’. Defeat and capture would always ‘be the fate of such rabble’, he concluded. Naval discipline had won out over pirate bravado. But it was a harsh verdict on Roberts’ leadership. This pirate crew, more than any other, had possessed a ‘director’ and ‘a tie of order’. The problem was the pirates themselves, and their reluctance to submit themselves to his will.

  But Roberts himself was the one man Atkins was never able to speak to. As the Royal Fortune had sailed towards HMS Swallow that morning Roberts had taken his place close to the wheel ready
to direct operations. But as the smoke cleared after the first broadside the helmsman, John Stephenson, had noticed him apparently resting on the tackles of a gun. He ran over and swore at his captain to get up and fight like a man. But Roberts’ throat had been ripped out by grapeshot. The greatest of all pirates, the ‘Admiral of the Leeward Islands’, the scourge of three continents, was dead.

  At that moment they were within just a few miles of the spot where they had seized the Expectation back at the end of July 1719. Since then Roberts had taken around 400 ships - a figure which dwarfs that of any of his contemporaries. He had travelled around 35,000 miles. And he’d held together a larger crew for a longer period of time than any other pirate captain. But in the end he had lost his long battle with the anarchy of pirate life. For all the tensions within the crew Roberts was revered by his men and, although the battle raged on for three more hours, his death knocked the fight out of them. Ogle was in no doubt that, if he had been alive, Roberts would have blown up the Royal Fortune with everyone aboard rather than allow it to be taken.

  Many times Roberts had sworn, ‘Damnation to him who ever lived to wear a halter!’ He, at least, had escaped hanging. He had left strict instructions that if he was killed at sea his body should be thrown overboard to prevent its being hung in chains. Stevenson wept over him for a time, as the pirates gathered round. And then they fulfilled their captain’s last wish, heaving his body over the rail and consigning it to the deep, still dressed in all its finery.

  12

  COMMON ENEMIES OF MANKIND

  WEST AFRICA

  FEBRUARY-APRIL 1722

  ‘HEAVEN, YOU FOOL ... DID YOU EVER HEAR OF ANY PIRATES GOING THITHER? GIVE ME HELL, IT’S A MERRIER PLACE. I’LL GIVE ROBERTS A SALUTE OF 13 GUNS AT THE ENTRANCE’

  THE JUDGE PLACED A black cap on his head, settled himself, and called on the prosecutor to begin proceedings. ‘An’t please your Lordship, and you Gentlemen of the Jury, here is a fellow before you that is a sad dog,’ the prosecutor began. ‘He has committed piracy upon the High Seas ... robbing and ravishing man, woman and child, plundering ships’ cargoes fore and aft, burning and sinking ship, bark and boat, as if the Devil had been in him.’

  ‘What have you to say?’ asked the judge, turning to the trembling prisoner. ‘Are you guilty, or not guilty?’

  ‘Not guilty, an’t please your Worship,’ he replied. ‘I am as honest a poor fellow as ever went between stem and stern of a ship, and can hand, reef, steer and clap two ends of a rope together, as well as any that ever crossed salt water. But I was taken ... and forced.’

  ‘Is our dinner ready?’ the judge suddenly barked, interrupting him. ‘Yes, my lord,’ replied the prosecutor. ‘Then, hark’ee, you rascal,’ the judge continued, addressing the prisoner once more. ‘You must suffer for three reasons. First, because it is not fit I should sit here as Judge and nobody be hanged. Secondly, you must be hanged because you have a damned hanging look. And, thirdly, you must be hanged because I am hungry . . . Take him away gaolor.’

  And with that judge, jury, prisoner and prosecutor all rolled about, howling with laughter. This was not an Admiralty courtroom, but a beach on a deserted Caribbean island. And these were not the men of Bartholomew Roberts, but of Thomas Anstis, who had deserted Roberts almost a year earlier. Still awaiting a response to their request for a pardon, they were whiling away the time on their hideaway off Cuba enacting a mockery of a trial, the judge sitting in a tree with a dirty tarpaulin wrapped around his shoulders as a robe.

  How Roberts’ men would have loved to be with them, lying on the sand, drinking rum in the shade of the palm trees one last time - poking fun at those who, for so long, had hunted them in vain. But at almost that very moment, thousands of miles away, they faced the dreadful reality of Admiralty justice. Manacled below decks in the hold of HMS Swallow, they were bound for Cape Coast Castle, where General Phipps awaited them in his laced suit.

  The 1,000-mile journey back to the Gold Coast was a nightmarish one for Captain Ogle and his men. It rained incessantly and the ships were buffeted continuously by typhoons which swirled out of nowhere and turned the sea into a seething cauldron, before disappearing just as suddenly. And the pirates were by no means resigned to their fate.

  Many were ‘impudently merry’, wrote Johnson, taking refuge in black humour. Still naked, and displaying a surprising knowledge of Greek mythology, they complained that Ogle’s men ‘had not left them a halfpenny to give old Charon, to ferry them over Styx’. Eyeing their meagre rations, they joked that they would not be heavy enough to hang once they got to Cape Coast Castle. Thomas Sutton, the gunner, was irritated to find himself chained to a man who prayed day and night. Eventually he exploded and asked him ‘what he proposed by so much noise and devotion’. ‘Heaven, I hope,’ the man replied.

  ‘Heaven, you fool,’ scoffed Sutton. ‘Did you ever hear of any pirates going thither? Give me Hell, it’s a merrier place. I’ll give Roberts a salute of 13 guns at the entrance.’ Many of the more hardened pirates were soon plotting escape.

  HMS Swallow made initially for Princes Island, with the Royal Fortune and the old Ranger, now manned by Ogle’s own men, following in its wake. There it collected the new Ranger, with the Frenchmen and the wounded pirates from the first battle aboard. The vast bulk of the prisoners remained aboard HMS Swallow, which was grossly overcrowded with close to 400 men. But Captain Ogle placed a number of slaves aboard the Royal Fortune, along with ‘three or four wounded’ and Peter Scudamore, the surgeon taken by the pirates at Old Calabar, who was to tend them. It’s a mark of the instant respect that was afforded to someone of Peter Scudamore’s social position that he was not kept chained below. It was assumed he was a forced man and he ate with the officers on board the ship. But they had misjudged him.

  Close to the island of St Thomas, HMS Swallow lost contact with the three former pirate ships in a typhoon. Aboard the Royal Fortune Scudamore saw his chance and immediately began plotting with the slaves, talking to them in ‘a smattering he had in the Angolan language’. He proposed ‘they demolish the white men, and afterwards go down to Angola and raise another company’, a witness later said. ‘Better venturing to do this,’ he argued to the other pirates, ‘than to proceed to Cape Coast, and be hanged like a dog, and sun dried.’ Scudamore knew that, once back at Cape Coast Castle, there would be plenty of evidence against him. And he was now fantasising of becoming captain of an all-black crew. ‘Having lived a long time in this piratical way’, wrote Johnson, the slaves were ‘as ripe for mischief as any’, and quickly agreed. But Scudamore was betrayed by one of his fellow pirates, hoping to curry favour ahead of the trial. The plan was thwarted, Scudamore was stripped of his privileges and clapped in irons.

  Aboard HMS Swallow there was also a conspiracy brewing. At its heart were a group of Old Standers, including Valentine Ashplant and William Magness, the quartermaster. They passed messages by means of a mulatto boy, who had been allowed to attend them, and proved sympathetic. But on the night of the planned rising Roberts’ intimate friend, George Wilson, who was chained next to Ashplant, overheard them plotting. Also keen to ingratiate himself, he instantly betrayed the plot to Captain Ogle. Ogle ordered an inspection of the prisoners and found Ashplant, Magness and the others had managed to loosen their shackles. They were clapped back in irons and thereafter were kept under even closer guard, Ogle taking the precaution of keeping the gun room strongly barricaded.

  It was with enormous relief that Captain Ogle finally pulled in to Cape Coast Castle on 15 March and with even greater relief that he saw his three prizes arrive a couple of weeks later, having got lost and initially hit the coast close to Sestos, almost 750 miles to the west. Ogle was greeted by an ecstatic General Phipps, whose letters to London were soon brimming with the ‘joyful’ news and gushing with praise for the ‘gallant behaviour and good conduct’ of Captain Ogle, whose bravery had destroyed ‘the arch pirate Roberts’ and his ‘nest of villains’. When the three prize
s arrived at the start of April, Phipps quickly went aboard and started scavenging for any goods he could find from the company ships they had plundered, salvaging some tallow, sails, water casks, three slaves and ‘some cloths, which had suffered a little’.

  Ogle immediately began transferring men from the hold of HMS Swallow to the cavernous, stone dungeons beneath the castle. The day after his arrival the Hannibal, the company ship the pirates had taken at Old Calabar five months earlier, finally limped home in a pitiful condition. As they were rowed across to the castle the chained pirates could see the face of John Wingfield, the company factor who John Philps had called a ‘son of a bitch’, glowering down at them over the ship’s rail. There would be no shortage of witnesses against them. Captain Traherne from the King Solomon was also here, as was Captain Sharp of the Elizabeth, and the two Dutch captains of the Flushingham and the Gertruycht. There were passengers and crew too from all of these ships, and from the Onslow, including Captain Trengrove and his wife, Elizabeth, whose hooped petticoat William Mead had forced off back in August.

  On 26 March HMS Weymouth arrived, having been patrolling the coast to the west, the crew still in a desperately sickly condition. Captain Herdman had learned of Ogle’s success a couple of days before at Cape Three Points. It was agreed Herdman would be president of the court, Ogle obliged to take the role of prosecutor since the pirates’ actions against HMS Swallow would form an important part of the case against them.