THE WAR AGAINST HYDRARCHY
The freedoms of hydrarchy were self-consciously established and defended by pirates, not least because they knew that they would aid in recruitment and therefore in the reproduction of their oppositional culture. What they perhaps did not fully understand was that these same freedoms, once recognized by the ruling class, would fuel a campaign of terror to eliminate the alternative way of life, whether at sea or, more dangerously, ashore. Some among the powerful worried that pirates might “set up a sort of Commonwealth” in areas where no power would be able “to dispute it with them.” Colonial and metropolitan merchants and officials feared incipient separatism in Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Bermuda, North Carolina, the Bay of Campeche, and Honduras.48 Colonel Benjamin Bennet wrote of pirates to the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1718: “I fear they will soon multiply for so many are willing to joyn with them when taken.” And multiply they did: after the War of Spanish Succession, as working conditions in the merchant shipping industry rapidly deteriorated, seamen turned to the black flag by the thousands. Edward England’s crew took nine vessels off the coast of Africa in the spring of 1719, and found fifty-five out of the 143 tars ready to sign their articles. John Jessup swore that a jovial life among the pirates was better than working at the big slave-trading fort of Cape Coast Castle. Such desertion was common between 1716 and 1722, when, as one pirate told a merchant captain, “people were generally glad of an opportunity of entring with [the pirates].”49 The prospect of plunder and ready money, the food and the drink, the camaraderie, the equality and justice, and the promise of care for the injured—all of these must have been appealing. The attractions were perhaps best summarized by Bartholomew Roberts, who remarked that in the merchant service “there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour; in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and ease, Liberty and Power; and who would not ballance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower Look or two at choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one, shall be my motto.” When John Dryden rewrote The Tempest in 1667, he had one of his sailors announce, “A short life and a merry, I say.” Two generations later, the aphorism had taken on a subversive tone that now called forth the executioner.50
Hydrarchy was attacked because of the danger it posed to the increasingly valuable slave trade with Africa. A series of sailors’ mutinies shook the slave trade between 1716 and 1726, a logical outcome of the chronic complaints about food, discipline, and the general conditions of working life aboard the slave ships that left England for West Africa during those years. Sailors alleged in court that Captain Theodore Boucher of the slave ship Wanstead “did not allow victualls & liquor enough to support them & used them very barbarously and inhumanly in their diett.” Other sailors accused their captains of tyrannical discipline. Those who dared to object to shipboard conditions might find themselves “as Slaves linked and coupled by chains together & . . . fedd with Yams & Water the Usuall dyett for Slaves.”51
Some mutinous sailors, however, averted a fate of chains by seizing their vessels, raising the black flag, and establishing hydrarchy. After sick and starving soldiers and sailors seized the Royal Africa Company’s Gambia Castle in 1720, they renamed the vessel the Delivery and sailed away in triumph, not unlike the mutineers in Prince Rupert’s convoy near the Gambia in 1652.52 Lowther and his men may have been emboldened by the knowledge that the coast of West Africa had already become a favorite haunt of pirates, especially since the British government in 1718 had recaptured the Bahama Islands and reestablished royal authority in the place that had for years been the freebooters’ main base of operations in the Caribbean. Hundreds of pirates had headed for the coast of Africa, attacking poorly defended ships and claiming their cargo. The greatest and most successful assaults on merchants’ property had been carried out by a pirate convoy under the leadership of Bartholomew Roberts, which ranged up and down the African coast “sinking, burning, and destroying such Goods and Vessels as then happen’d in [its] Way.”53 Roberts’s interest lay in capturing not ships full of slaves but rather ships on their way to trade for slaves—“good Sailing Shipps well furnished with Ammunition, Provisions, & Stores of all Kinds, fitt for long Voyages.” He and his fellows also plundered the slave-trading forts, as a group of merchants explained: pirates “sometimes land at the chief Factories and carry off what they think fit.” Many a slave ship in the early eighteenth century was captured and converted to pirate duties, including the recently recovered Whydah, captained by Black Sam Bellamy.54
As pirates with Bartholomew Roberts and other captains sailed from Senegambia to the Gold Coast and back again, disturbing the region most vital to British merchants in the 1720s, they “struck a Pannick into the Traders,” in the words of naval surgeon John Atkins, who spent several months on the coast. One writer estimated in 1720 that pirates had already done a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of damage on the coast of Africa. An anonymous writer to the Board of Trade asserted in 1724 that pirates had taken “near 100 sail of Ships in the space of two years” in the African slave trade.55 Other estimates ran even higher. Merchants in Bristol, Liverpool, and London began to protest their losses, screaming to Parliament about the disorder plaguing the lucrative slave trade and demanding naval protection for their property. Their cries fell on sympathetic ears. When a group of merchants petitioned Parliament for relief in early 1722, the House of Commons ordered the immediate drafting of a bill for the suppression of piracy, which was, with Robert Walpole’s assistance, quickly passed. Soon a naval squadron under the leadership of Captain Challoner Ogle was fitted out to sail to the African coast, where it arrived later in 1722, engaged the ships of Bartholomew Roberts, and defeated them. More than a hundred pirates were killed in battle, while others escaped into the jungle; scores were captured and ordered to stand trial. They were taken to Cape Coast Castle, the centerpiece of the British slave trade, where slaves awaiting ships were chained, confined, and “marked with a burning iron upon the right breast, D. Y. Duke of York.” Within Cape Coast Castle’s brick walls, fourteen feet thick and guarded by seventy-four mounted cannons, a gang of pirates were executed, and their chained corpses distributed and hanged along the coast in order to maximize the terror: nine at Cape Coast, four on the Windward coast, two each at Acera, Calabar, and Whydah, and one at Winnebah. Thirty-one others were hanged at sea, aboard the Weymouth. Another forty were sentenced to slavery, forced to work for the Royal African Company on ships or in gold mines; all of them apparently died within a matter of months.56 After his triumphant return to London, Challoner Ogle became, in May 1723, the first naval captain to be knighted for his actions against pirates. He was honored by King George I, whom Roberts and his fellow pirates had ridiculed as the “turnip man.”57
The defeat of Roberts and the subsequent destruction of piracy off the coast of Africa represented another turning point in the history of capitalism, largely because piracy and the slave trade had long been linked, in the experiences of war, commerce, and imperial expansion. The conflict between pirates and slave traders on the coast of West Africa dated back to the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713, when thousands of sailors had been demobilized from the Royal Navy, causing wages to plummet, food to deteriorate, and the lash to fly among workers in the merchant shipping industry, which in turn moved sailors to cast their lot with the Jolly Roger. The end of the war brought a prize for British merchants: the Assiento, which gave these traders the legal right to ship 4,800 slaves a year (and the illegal right to ship many more) to Spanish America through the South Sea Company. This incentive, coupled with the final deregulation of the African slave trade in 1712, when the chartered Royal African Company had lost its battle against the free traders who had already begun to supply most of the slaves to American plantations, increased dramatically the importance of the slave trade in the eyes of British merchants.58
Pirate Bartholomew Roberts off the coast of West Africa. Captain Charles Johnson, A General
History of the Pyrates (1724).
Pirates now had to be exterminated in order for the new trade to flourish, a point that was made by the slave-trading merchant captain William Snelgrave, who published A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade, dedicated to “the Merchants of London, trading to the Coast of Guinea.” He divided the book into three sections, providing for his readers a “History of the late Conquest of the Kingdom of Whidaw by the King of Dahomè”; an account of the business practices and statistics of the slave trade; and “A Relation of the Author’s being taken by Pirates” and the dangers posed thereby. But by the time Snelgrave published his book, in 1734, the pirate was dead, defeated by the terror of hanging and enhanced naval patrols, though occasionally the corpse would twitch with a mutiny here or an act of piracy there. In the immediate aftermath of the suppression of piracy, Britain established its dominance on the western coast of Africa. As James A. Rawley has written, “In the decade of the 1730s England had become the supreme slaving nation in the Atlantic world, a standing she occupied until 1807.” There was a sharp jump of almost 27 percent in slave-trade exports over the previous pirate-infested decade.59 If the plantation capital of the Caribbean, allied with the merchant capital of the metropolis, killed the first generation of pirates—the buccaneers of the 1670s—and if the capital of the East India Company killed the pirates of the 1690s, when the company’s ships were hothouses of mutiny and rebellion, it was African slave-trading capital that killed the pirates of the early eighteenth century. Hydrarchy from below was a deadly enemy to hydrarchy from above, as pirates had ruptured the middle passage. By 1726 the maritime state had removed a major obstacle to the accumulation of capital in its ever-growing Atlantic system.60
It was not many years earlier that English and other, mostly Protestant European rulers had turned pirates loose on the riches of other realms. Now they and their former national enemies discovered common interests in an orderly Atlantic system of capitalism, in which trade would flow without attack and capital accumulate without disruption—unless, of course, the attacks and disruptions were the results of war declared by the rulers themselves. By the 1720s, thousands of pirates had deeply damaged world shipping. They had also self-consciously built an autonomous, democratic, egalitarian social order of their own, a subversive alternative to the prevailing ways of the merchant, naval, and privateering ship and a counterculture to the civilization of Atlantic capitalism with its expropriation and exploitation, terror and slavery. Whigs and Tories alike responded by repeating the repressions of the 1690s and erecting gallows for pirates and the waterfront folk who dealt with them. Merchants petitioned Parliament, whose members obliged them with deadly new legislation; meanwhile, Prime Minister Robert Walpole took an active, personal interest in putting an end to piracy, as did scores of other officials, newspaper correspondents, and clergymen. They denounced pirates as sea monsters, vicious beasts, and a many-headed hydra—all creatures that, pace Bacon, lived beyond the bounds of human society. Their violent rhetoric demanded and legitimated the use of the gallows. The pirates and their living alternative were clearly marked for extinction. Hundreds were hanged, and their bodies left to dangle in the port cities of the world as a reminder that the maritime state would not tolerate a challenge from below.61
The sailors’ hydrarchy was defeated in the 1720s, the hydra beheaded. But it would not die. The volatile, serpentine tradition of maritime radicalism would appear again and again in the decades to come, slithering quietly belowdecks, across the docks, and onto the shore, biding its time, then rearing its heads unexpectedly in mutinies, strikes, riots, urban insurrections, slave revolts, and revolutions. John Place, for example, would help in October 1748 to organize a mutiny aboard the H.M.S. Chesterfield, off the coast of West Africa, not far from Cape Coast Castle. He had been there before. He had sailed as a pirate with Black Bart Roberts, suffered capture by Captain Challoner Ogle in 1722, and somehow escaped the mass executions. When the time came, a quarter of a century later, for know-how about mutiny and an alternative social order, Place was the man of the moment. The authorities hanged him this time, but they could not kill the subversive tradition that lived in tales, in action, in sullenly silent memory, on the lower decks of the Chesterfield and countless other vessels. The Martinican poet Aimé Césaire captured this survival of resistance when he wrote, “It is this stubborn serpent’s crawling out of the shipwreck.”62
CHAPTER SIX
“The Outcasts of the Nations of the Earth”
AT THE HEART of the New York Conspiracy of 1741 lay a love story. The lovers were John Gwin (or Quin), “a fellow of suspicious character” rumored to be a soldier at Fort George, and “Negro Peg,” “a notorious prostitute” who lived at John Hughson’s waterfront tavern on the west side of Manhattan. Gwin paid Peg’s board at Hughson’s and joined her there many a night, climbing on top of a shed and through her open window. During one of these late-night meetings he gave her a ring, a pair of earrings, and a locket with four diamonds. Eventually Peg bore his child, whose color was a matter of considerable gossip and debate around town. Some said the baby was white; others insisted that it was black.1
John Gwin had long been a regular at Hughson’s, and not only because he visited Peg. He often showed up with “a good booty”—speckled linen, stockings, even a worsted cap full of silver coins—that he gave to the tall, gaunt Hughson, who in turn fenced the purloined goods. Gwin’s friends at the tavern were always glad to see him, for they knew of the man’s generosity. Since aliases were common along the waterfront, where strangers and their secrets came and went with the tides, they also knew that Gwin and Peg were called by other names: Gwin, an African American slave, was known as Caesar, at least to his owner, John Vaarck. “Negro Peg” was the twenty-one- or twenty-two-year-old Margaret Kerry, though she was also known as the “Newfoundland Irish beauty.” Another thing tavern-goers knew was that Gwin and Peg were deeply involved in plotting what was later called the “most horrible and destructive plot that was ever yet known in these northern parts of America.” For it was at Hughson’s that they and dozens of others planned a “general insurrection” to capture the city of New York.2
Saint Patrick’s Day, 1741, was a day for remembering that Saint Patrick had abolished slavery in Ireland. A revolutionary arsonist named Quack set fire to New York City’s Fort George, the chief military installation of the colony and one of the greatest fortifications in all of British America. The fire smoldered all night and on the following day exploded into billowing bursts of ocher and orange. Violent March winds carried the flames from the governor’s mansion to the Church of England chapel, the army barracks, and the office of the general secretary of the province. Flying sparks and burning debris wafted above the wooden houses that sat just beyond the walls of the fort, threatening the city with conflagration. A shift in the winds and a sudden rain shower halted the spread of the blaze, but the damage had been done: the very heart of royal authority in this important Atlantic port now lay hollow and smoldering in ashes.
A view of Fort George and the city of New York, 1735. I. N. Phelps-Stokes Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
It was the first and most destructive of thirteen fires that would terrorize the city of eleven thousand in the coming weeks. When Cuffee, a slave owned by city eminence Adolph Philipse, was seen leaving the premises of the tenth fire, the cry went up that “the negroes were rising.” A vast dragnet caught almost two hundred people, black and white, many of whom would be investigated and tried over the next several months. Peg, Hughson, and others were charged with “conspiring, confederating and combining with divers negroes and others to burn the City of New-York and also to kill and destroy the inhabitants thereof.” The conspiracy had been organized by soldiers, sailors, and slaves from Ireland, the Caribbean, and Africa, whom the officials called “the outcasts of the nations of the earth.�
�3 Disrespected by the mercantile oligarchy of New York, they were not without a mutuality of respect among themselves.
The outcasts had met regularly at Hughson’s, where they exercised “the hopes and promises of paradise.” Here the dispossessed of all colors feasted, danced, sang, took oaths, and planned their resistance. The enslaved Bastian remembered a table overflowing with “veal, ducks, geese, a quarter of mutton and fowls” from the butcher shops in which several of the conspirators worked. Others recalled the raucous, joyous fiddling, dancing, and singing for which Hughson’s was famous around town. Yet others emphasized the subversive conversation, followed by solemn oaths: Gwin asking a recruit “whether he would join along with them to become their own masters”; Cuffee saying “that a great many people had too much, and others too little”; Hughson announcing that “the country was not good, too many gentlemen here, and made negroes work hard.” At Hughson’s tavern, the rebels practiced a simple communism. Those who had no money were entertained “at free cost”; they “could have victuals and drink for nothing.” Hughson told them, “You shall always be welcome to my house, come at any time.” Bastian, exiled for his role in the rebellion, fondly recalled, “We always had a good supper and never wanted for liquor.” Here, once again, was a world turned upside down, a place where Africans and Irish were kings, as they would be in the larger society after the uprising. In New York, they believed, “there should be a motley government as well as motley subjects.”4
New York’s people in ruffles were terrified of the conspiracy, for reasons both local and global. A severe winter had made the city’s poor workers more miserable and more restive than usual. Trade, the lifeblood of New York, had stagnated in recent years, deepening divisions within the ruling class and creating an opening for revolt from below. Danger had also threatened from afar after the merchant mountebank Robert Jenkins waved his severed ear before the astonished bigwigs of Parliament, who then declared war against Spain (the aptly named War of Jenkins’ Ear, 1739) and required the rulers of New York to supply both food and six hundred recruits (nearly one in six of the city’s able-bodied white men) for the war effort. Imperial authorities had thus depleted New York’s food supply as well as its defenses against French and Iroquois aggression from the north, Spanish privateers from the south, and domestic rebels from within.
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