by Travers, Tim
Sometimes, however, men actually wanted to leave their ships and be marooned. This was the case with four English sailors who apparently left a privateer of their own free will in 1687, and marooned themselves on the same Juan Fernandez Islands. They were rescued by a ship called the Welfare in October 1690.28 Much more common, though, was marooning as a malicious act. This happened in November 1715 when the third mate of the Anglesea, John Rolf, decided to take over the Anglesea at Buena Vista. Rolf succeeded, and put the master of the ship on a desolate island, where he died.29 A better known example occurred in 1698, when Joseph Bradish, the mate of the Adventure, together with others, took over the ship, complaining of lack of provisions, and sailed away, marooning the surgeon, the captain’s mate, and three others on an island they called Polonoys, six miles from Sumatra. Some others were left in a long boat at the same place.30
Naturally, the most famous of the marooned was Alexander Selkirk, the alleged model or prototype of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk sailed with William Dampier in 1703, as part of a privateering cruise by a two ship fleet on the coast of South America, hoping to capture the Spanish treasure fleet. The expedition was not a happy one, and to make matters worse, the captain of one of the ships, the Cinque Ports, died, leaving command in the hands of a twenty-one year-old first lieutenant called Thomas Stradling. Selkirk was the quartermaster on the Cinque Ports, and he argued bitterly with Stradling over the seaworthiness of the ship. Selkirk was so angry with Stradling, whom he detested, that he asked to be left behind on the Juan Fernandez Islands. He was put ashore with bedding, sea chest, provisions, tobacco, navigation instruments, books, powder and shot. At the last minute Selkirk changed his mind, gesticulating frantically from the shore, but Stradling would not take him onboard again. This was in October 1704, but it turned out that Selkirk was fortunate in his decision, since the Cinque Ports was wrecked soon after, and the eight survivors imprisoned by the Spanish. Meanwhile, Selkirk remained on his island for the next four and a half years until February 1709 when Captain Woodes Rogers, again with Dampier aboard, dropped anchor and was surprised to see smoke and a wildly waving individual. This was Selkirk ‘cloth’d in Goats-Skins who looked wilder than the first Owners of them’. Selkirk had lost the art of speech, but was healthy, and had trained young goats and the island cats to keep him company, and when depressed would ‘sing and dance with them.’ Selkirk was rescued, and appeared in the pages of Woodes Rogers’ book, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, published in 1712. Selkirk appropriately had become ‘a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before’, which was a kind of stamp of approval of his story.31
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe came out in 1719, and the coincidence of Selkirk’s and Robinson Crusoe’s stories strongly suggested that Defoe used Selkirk as his model for Crusoe. This was particularly the case because Defoe was clearly very interested in privateers and piracy, writing briefly on the pirates Gow and Avery, and fictionalising piracy in his books on Captain Singleton and the further adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Nevertheless, a recent book argues persuasively that the original model for Robinson Crusoe’s story of marooning was not Selkirk but Henry Pitman. It seems that Pitman was convicted of being involved in the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in England, and was transported to Barbados as a ten year convict. Despairing of his life, he and a few others escaped from Barbados in a small boat in 1687 and eventually wound up on the island of Salt Tortuga, off the coast of Venezuela. There they met with some pirates under the command of one Dutch Yanche or Yanky. This pirate had himself marooned some English buccaneers on Cow Island, close to Hispaniola, after arguments over prizes. Pitman found Yanky devious, and in fact Yanky and his crew sailed off to go raiding, leaving Pitman and his companions marooned on Salt Tortuga. Notably, Pitman bought an Indian from the pirates before they left, in order to use the Indian’s skill as a survivor – an obvious reference to Man Friday in Robinson Crusoe. Pitman was rescued from Salt Tortuga by a pirate ship after three months on the island, being readily accepted because he was a surgeon, although Pitman apparently left his seven companions behind. Ultimately, Pitman reached London, and wrote a slim book entitled A Relation of the great suffering and strange adventures of Henry Pitman, Chirurgeon, which was published in 1689. The connection between Pitman and Defoe is strengthened by the fact that Pitman’s book and Defoe’s book were published by the same publishing family in London, the Taylor family, at St Paul’s Churchyard, and round the corner in Paternoster Row, respectively. Finally, another connection is that Henry Pitman made his living after returning to London by mixing and selling medicines at Taylor’s publishing shop in St Paul’s Churchyard, where he very likely met Defoe.32
Women Pirates
In the Western world, piracy was normally the domain of men rather than women. There were a number of reasons for this, chief among them being that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women were thought to create considerable unrest on ships, leading to conflicts, fights, disorder, and murder. There was also a convention at the time that considered that women brought bad luck to a ship. Another reason for the absence of women pirates was that women were not considered to have the required physical strength to work a ship. It was also not easy for women to serve onboard a ship in disguise, since it was extremely difficult to hide their sex on a ship where privacy simply didn’t exist, although there are a few examples of some women who did serve on a ship.
In fact it was possible in the eighteenth century for women to accompany their husbands to sea in the Royal Navy if their husbands were of the rank of warrant officer or less. A very few captains in the Royal Navy also brought women onboard in peace time, although this was strictly illegal. It was much more common for women to enlist as soldiers on land, and many women were to be found in Napoleon’s army, either in official female units, or disguised as men, or as wives of senior officers. In the Royal Navy, it was rare for women to serve in disguise, but one example was William Prothero, a private marine onboard HMS Amazon, who was found to be a Welsh girl of 18 following her lover to sea. Another woman who started as a soldier, and became a sailor, was Mary Anne Talbot, born in 1778, one of the sixteen bastard children of Lord William Talbot. She became the mistress of Captain Bowen in 1792, who enlisted her as a foot boy called John Taylor in his regiment, and they sailed on HMS Crown, bound for Santo Domingo. There she became a drummer boy, and was present at the battle of Valenciennes, where Bowen was killed. Later she joined the French navy as a cabin boy, but was captured by HMS Brunswick where she served as a powder monkey. She was badly wounded in 1794, and wound up in London in 1796, where she was pressed by the Navy, but revealed her sex. She continued to wear sailor’s clothes, and found that her inheritance had been wasted by her guardian. After a spell in debtor’s prison, she became servant to a publisher, and died in 1808.33
Another woman who disguised herself was Hannah Snell. She served in the marines, and onboard Royal Navy ships. Born in 1723, she fell in love with a Dutch sailor, and married him, but he abandoned her when she was pregnant. The child died, and she enlisted in Fraser’s Regiment of Marines in 1746. She deserted, and joined HMS Swallow as an assistant steward and cook to the officers’ mess. She was wounded at the assault on Pondicherry in India, and allegedly used a native woman to dress her wounds, in order to maintain her disguise as a man. Snell enlisted on two ships, and continued to try to find her Dutch husband. Aboard these ships she was apparently nicknamed ‘Molly’ because of the smoothness of her face, and then ‘Hearty Jemmy’, on account of her popularity. Her disguise as a man still continued. Then she discovered that her Dutch husband had been executed in Genoa, and so she paid off from HMS Eltham and made a few appearances on stage in London, dressed in either her soldier or marine uniforms. Subsequently, she ran a pub in Wapping, London, called appropriately The Female Warrior. Snell married twice more, but then the strain of her life told on her, and she was judged to have become insane. She died at Bedlam Hospital for the insane i
n London in 1792, but was buried at Chelsea Hospital among the other soldiers, as she had wanted.34
Of course neither Talbot nor Snell were pirates, but they did demonstrate that it was possible for women to serve onboard ship in disguise. It is noteworthy that these two women served in roles that required courage but generally not physical strength. Celebrated as actual women pirates were Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Both women grew up in situations that required them to be dressed as men, and it was as men that they wound up on the pirate ship of ‘Calico Jack’ Rackam. Mary Read had served earlier in the infantry in Europe, and this stood her in good stead when she fought a duel in place of her lover on Rackam’s ship, and killed the sailor who was to fight her lover at a later hour. As a pirate she was an active participant on Rackam’s ship. Anne Bonny ran away from home with a poverty stricken sailor, and they sailed for Providence, hoping to pick up privateering work. Here she met Jack Rackam, abandoned her husband, and went onboard his ship. Read and Bonny wore men’s clothes onboard Rackam’s ship, but they also sometimes wore women’s clothes. Read and Bonny were captured off Jamaica in 1720, along with the rest of Rackam’s crew, and went to trial. As it happened, both were pregnant, and so escaped hanging for this reason (see Chapter 7).
Besides Read and Bonny, an earlier female pirate was the Irish smuggler and pirate, Grace O’Malley. She was born around 1530 in Connaught, on the west coast of Ireland. Her father was a local chieftain, who possessed castles and a fleet of ships that were used for trading, smuggling and piracy. It seems that Grace grew up sailing in her father’s ships, and cut her hair short and dressed in boy’s clothes to show that she was familiar with the sea. Her nickname, ‘Granuaille’ meant ‘bald’, since she had cut her hair short. Grace married twice, probably both times for economic as well as romantic reasons, and produced four children. Her first husband was killed, but her second husband lived at Rockfleet Castle in County Mayo, commanding Clew Bay. Grace operated from Rockfleet Castle and Clew Bay for the rest of her life, where the O’Malleys possessed some twenty ships, most of them being galleys. These galleys were propelled by thirty oars, and had onboard some 100 musket men. Another source relates that the O’Malleys owned three galleys with 200 fighting men, meaning that each galley had sixty odd musket men onboard. Presumably these galleys stayed close to shore, but they certainly raided locally and also took passing merchant ships. In the early 1570s, Grace created too much trouble with her raids, and a government force led by Captain William Martin launched a punitive raid on Clew Bay and Rockfleet Castle in 1574. Apparently, Grace compelled Martin to retreat, but in 1577 on a plundering raid against the lands of the Earl of Desmond (surely an over-ambitious plan), Grace was captured and spent time in Limerick jail. Lord Justice Drury described her as ‘a woman that hath … been a great spoiler, and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea to spoil this province.’35
In 1588, Grace O’Malley reportedly helped massacre Spanish sailors who came off the wreck of their ship, the El Gran Grin, in Clew Bay, after the Spanish Armada failed. It seems that Sir Richard Bingham, governor of Connaught in 1588, was responsible for ordering most of the slaughter of these Spanish sailors. It was also Bingham who held a low opinion of Grace, and impounded her fleet. Grace was now in poor financial condition, since her second husband had died in 1583, and she appealed to Queen Elizabeth. Bingham meanwhile arrested her brother and one of her sons, and so she went to England, meeting Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich Palace in September 1593. This must have been an interesting occasion, although nothing is recorded of the meeting except for a suspect ballad or two. Judging by later events, Grace probably bought safety from Bingham by promising to fight the Queen’s enemies. The Queen instructed Bingham to provide for Grace, and he did release her son and brother, but continued to be hostile until he retired in 1597, when Grace’s fortunes improved. She died in 1603, and it is relevant that Grace’s son supported the English crown and was made Viscount Mayo in 1627.36
Grace O’Malley was very much a woman, chieftain, and pirate of her time, often embroiled in regional battles, and profiting from trading and raiding until she came up against the Queen’s governor, Bingham. Similar to Grace’s story were the female Chinese pirates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who raided locally, and operated according to the cultural norms of the time (see Chapters 9 and 10). In general, female pirates in the Western world in the golden age of piracy (1680s to 1720s) were very scarce, as might be expected because of the social restrictions of the day, and it is interesting that some pirate captains even attempted to control the presence of women onboard. It is well known that one of Roberts’ rules read, ‘No Boy or Woman to be allow’d amongst them. If any Man were found seducing any of the latter Sex, and carried her to Sea, disguised, he was to suffer Death.’ According to Johnson this rule was less to protect women (and boys) than to prevent discord onboard, and he cynically wrote that the sentry put to protect any woman captured, actually reserved her favours for himself. This apparently happened to the captive Elizabeth Trengrove onboard Roberts’ ship in August 1721. Another pirate, Captain Phillips, stated more ambiguously that ‘If at any time you meet with a prudent Woman (i.e. not a prostitute or a loose woman), that man who offers to meddle with her, without her Consent, shall suffer present Death.’ Presumably, a less respectable woman could be handled as desired by the crew. On the other hand, the rules of Captain Lowther had nothing to say about women, and it is known that the Red Sea pirates badly mistreated their female captives.37
As a final note, the lack of women onboard pirate ships is sometimes cited as a reason for pirate homosexuality.38 Yet there is a lack of evidence on this score, although one or two items tend to suggest that in Western piracy there was some homosexuality. In their buccaneer voyage in the Pacific in 1680–1681, Bartholomew Sharp recorded in his journal that in January 1681 William Cooke accused Edmund Cooke of buggering him, ‘… his Master had oft times Buggered him in England … in Jamaica … and once in these seas before Panama.’ The captain put Edmund Cooke in irons, although this event may have been connected to a power struggle onboard for the captaincy of the ship. In any case, Sharp does not add any comment, which suggests he did not find the problem very unusual.39 That homosexuality existed is evident, as in the case of the cabin boy Richard Mandervell, who in 1721 accused his master, Samuel Norman, of forcing him to wash the partly dressed Norman onboard ship at Oporto. Norman apparently called Mandervell ‘Son of a Bitch’ when he objected.40 As mentioned elsewhere, the system of matelotage in Hispaniola, among the cattle hunters of the island, and in the logwood camps of Campeche, whereby two men shared all their possessions, hunted together, lived together, and left each other their goods upon death, suggests some may have been in homosexual relationships (see Chapter 5). Among the Barbary corsairs, European observers, often priests, certainly emphasised homosexual relationships in Algiers, although the horror they expressed stemmed partly from their desire to paint the situation in Algiers in the darkest colours in order to arouse publicity to help free the Christian slaves held there. One lurid story of the Barbary corsairs comes from a Christian priest who suggested in 1647 that young Christian captive boys were:
…purchased at great price by the Turks to serve them in their abominable sins, and no sooner do they have them in their power, [then] by dressing them up and caressing them, they persuade them to make themselves Turks. But if by chance someone does not consent to their uncontrolled desires, they treat him badly, using force to induce him into sin; they keep him locked up, so that he does not see nor frequent [other] Christians, and many others they circumcise by force.41
Finally, Chinese pirates in the early eighteenth century apparently used homosexuality to recruit young pirates to their junk fleets, while the question of homosexuality, although forbidden by the authorities, seems to have been a more open matter among Chinese pirates (see Chapter 9).
Overall, though, the question of homosexuality among western pirates rem
ains an undecided issue due to lack of sufficient evidence. Many pirates sailed together on a long term basis, such as John Swann and Robert Culliford, but that does not prove a homosexual relationship.
Drink and Food
Whether pirates were men or women, what did they have to eat and drink? Pirates were notorious for heavy bouts of drinking alcohol, and usually drank anything they could get their hands on, whether it was plundered wine, brandy, cider or beer. When Captain Snelgrave, commander of a slave ship, entered the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, his ship was captured by the pirates Thomas Cocklyn, Howel Davis, and the Frenchman La Buze (or La Bouche). Snelgrave watched as the pirates:
…hoisted upon Deck a great many half hogsheads of Claret and French Brandy; knock’d their Heads out, and dipp’d Canns and Bowls into them to drink out of; And in their Wantoness threw full Buckets upon one another. And in the evening washed the Decks with what remained in the Casks. As to bottled Liquor, they would not give themselves the trouble of drawing the Cork out, but nick’d the Bottles, as they called it, that is, struck their necks off with a Cutlace; by which means one in three was generally broke.
Logwood cutters in Campeche (on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico), were renowned for their drinking bouts, punctuating each toast with a cannon shot. Another scenario that provided for communal drinking was when pirates would gather to take a vote onboard their ship, they would usually first prepare a bowl of punch and then get down to decision making. For example, when the pirate Howel Davis was elected as commander, the election system required that ‘a counsel of war was called over a large bowl of punch, at which it was proposed to choose a commander …’ In the same way, when a decision had to be made over shipmates who had broken the rules of the pirate crew, as in the case of Roberts’ crew ‘a large bowl of rum punch was made, and placed upon the table, the pipes and tobacco being ready, the judicial proceedings began …’ After capturing a ship, pirates would often celebrate, for example Captain Spriggs’ men spent the day ‘in boisterous mirth, roaring and drinking of healths …’ Later on, Spriggs’ crew captured Captain Hawkins’ ship for the second time, in the evening, when the pirates were ‘most of ‘em drunk, as is usual at this time of night …’42