Pirates: A History

by Travers, Tim

  Jacobean Pirates

  Of course, Drake was not the only Elizabethan privateer and pirate to operate at this time, since the High Court of the Admiralty happily issued some 100 ‘letters of reprisal’ every year, allowing English ships to take Spanish merchants and foreign traders opposed to England.11 Most of these ships sailed from the west country of England. But with the death of Elizabeth in 1603, the new monarch of England, James I, turned out to have very different ideas, since he saw pirates as the enemy of God and man alike. Great efforts were made in England to catch and hang pirates in the early seventeenth century, whether from England or Ireland or elsewhere, and as was often the case, the cheapest and most useful weapon against the pirates was the issuance of a General Pardon in 1612.12

  A significant victory in this area was the reformation of the English pirate Henry Mainwaring (1587-1653), who raided in the West Indies, took 400 crewmen from the cod fishery of Newfoundland, and captured Spanish ships. But in 1616 James I offered Mainwaring a pardon, allowing him to keep his booty. Mainwaring accepted this offer and instead turned pirate hunter. Mainwaring also wrote several books, the first of which he dedicated to James I in 1618, explaining how pirates could be suppressed. Mainwaring described which ports the pirates used, how they operated, and how the King could prevent and eradicate the pirates. Strangely enough, given his own history, Mainwaring counseled the king never to grant a pardon, because pirates would readily accept such an offer and then go back to being pirates. Further, the courts should never believe pirates who claimed to have been forced to join a pirate crew, since Mainwaring claimed that almost all sailors joined willingly enough. Mainwaring also thought that Ireland was the chief source of piracy, and advised that Irish pirates could be eliminated by hunting them down in their land-based hiding places, where they hid like conies (rabbits). Of interest was Mainwaring’s description of contemporary pirate methods – the pirate ship would lower its sails at dawn and wait for a merchant ship, and then clap on all sail and chase the merchant ship if it tried to flee. Or if the merchant ship foolishly sailed toward them, the pirates would use drags to pretend they could not sail any faster (as Drake did when capturing the Concepcion), and then suddenly turn on their victim. Mainwaring mentioned that pirates seldom used cannon, but preferred to board their targets. And, as expected, the pirates hoisted whatever flags enabled them to surprise their victims.13

  Other pirates of the Jacobean era included Peter Easton, who ended by accepting a generous offer of employment from the Duke of Savoy in 1613. Easton lived in princely style in Villefranche after marrying a lady of wealth from Nice. Then there was John Ward, who turned Barbary corsair, as did Simon Danziker, or Danzer, or Simon Simonson, a Fleming. Ward survived to live a drunken but successful life in Algiers, although still pining for England. As for Danziker, after a spectacular career, he was tricked ashore in Tunis in 1616, and killed. Further pirates included the Nutt brothers, operating out of the south and west of England in the early seventeenth century. John Nutt captured a ship at the entrance to Dungarvan harbour in Ireland in 1623, which contained a dozen women, whom the pirates abused. Nutt was apparently especially taken by the wife of a Cork saddler, since he took her to his cabin and there ‘had her a weke.’14 Ultimately, John Nutt and his brother Robert were pardoned in 1633 and retired from the game. Then the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century employed most sailors and so kept piracy in check, while a larger Royal Navy in the later seventeenth century, less corruption, and greater efforts by the courts, all reduced the pirate scourge, which had been particularly strong on the coasts of Ireland.15

  Yet still piracy continued – often practiced by sailors who were not paid properly, or who were cheated of their provisions onboard their merchant ships. It is also the case that sailors who became pirate captains were often of the Royal Navy rank of master, normally a warrant officer rank below that of lieutenant and other officers, but in charge of the key matter of navigation. In the merchant navy, it was the similar rank of mate that provided a large number of pirate captains. Probably frustration over the lack of promotion led to much of their piracy, while their maritime skills were sufficient to get them elected as pirate captains. This was the case with Henry Avery or Every, who was originally first mate of his ship, while Edward England was mate in his sloop, Howel Davis was chief mate of his snow, Bartholomew Roberts was second mate of his ship, George Lowther was second mate of his ship, and John Smith or Gow was second mate and gunner of his ship.16

  John Smith, Alias John Gow (Executed 1725)

  As an example of a merchant ship mate who became a pirate captain, there is considerable information about John Smith, who often used the alias John Gow, and about whom a number of depositions of the High Court of the Admiralty exist. Smith and a number of fellow mutineers were aboard a merchant ship called the George Galley in 1725, which sailed from Amsterdam to Santa Cruz and then to the Straits. During a quiet time, a number of the crew decided to take over the ship, and devised a watchword to start the mutiny. The watchword for the attack was ‘Who fires now’, and the response was simply, ‘The Dutch’. The plan was carefully worked out, in which three of the mutineers would kill the ship’s chief mate, the surgeon, and the master’s clerk respectively, using their knives, while the victims were asleep in their hammocks. A number of men were then to kill the master who was on deck. The watchword was duly given and the killing began, but it seems the throat cutting was not as efficient as it might have been. The chief mate was seen by one witness coming toward the main hatchway crying out, ‘I’m a dead man. One of the Dutch men has killed me.’ Another witness, Joseph Wheatley, later said that the chief mate, Mr. Jelfs, cried out in much the same words, ‘For God’s sake let me down into the Hold the Dutch man has struck me…’ Meanwhile, the wounded surgeon made it as far as the deck, but he then fell down and was thrown overboard. The master had not been finished off either, and was wounded only. He was heard to call out, ‘What’s the matter. What’s the matter.’ John Smith/Gow went down below decks to fetch a pair of pistols and either Smith, or another mutineer called Williams, shot the master, who cried out in French, ‘My God I am killed.’ He too was then thrown overboard. (The master was a Frenchman named Oliver Ferneau.) Then the unfortunate master’s clerk was shot by Williams, but managed to crawl forward, and begged for time to say his prayers. But the clerk was apparently not given any time, since Williams cursed him ‘God Damn yr Blood say your Prayers & be damned’, and immediately forced a young seventeen-year-old sailor, Michael Moor, to shoot the clerk, saying that if Moor did not shoot the clerk, he, Williams, would make the sun and moon to shine through Moor. So Moor shot the master’s clerk, and the unhappy clerk was in turn hoisted on the deck and thrown overboard.17

  Now the mutiny was complete, and Williams, who seems to have been the ringleader, came out of the master’s cabin carrying the master’s sword in his hand, and also the master’s watch. Williams gave the watch to Smith/Gow, and then slapped or struck the capstan with the sword, saying to John Smith, ‘Captain Smith you are welcome to the ship.’ Evidently Smith was the most experienced and most senior of the mutineers as a former mate, and was trusted to be a successful captain. However, after capturing a number of ships, Smith then headed to the Orkney Islands, where he is alleged to have had a sweetheart that he wanted to marry although the girl’s father had previously refused marriage on the grounds that Smith had no money and no prospects. Now Smith demonstrated to his sweetheart’s father that he was a ship’s captain and had prospects, and the happy pair was just about to wed when Smith was betrayed to the authorities. Smith abandoned his sweetheart, and instead planned to rob a few houses on the Orkneys before leaving, but a gale coming up, his ship was driven on the rocks of Calf Island in the Orkneys. Smith tried to bargain his way out, but he and his crew were taken prisoner by various means, and transported to Marshalsea prison in London. At their trial in London, Smith/Gow refused to plead, and had to be persuaded by the use of cords t
ightened around his thumbs, and then by the traditional threat of pressing with heavy stones on his chest. Smith gave in and pleaded not guilty, saying his pistol went off accidentally when the ship’s master, Ferneau, was shot. But the jury duly found Smith and eight others guilty of piracy, and they were all hung at Execution dock in Wapping, London.18

  By the late 1720s the Atlantic seas around England and Europe were more or less free of pirates, but there were other areas of the world where pirates flourished in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, namely the Caribbean.

  5

  Buccaneers of the Caribbean

  Before the buccaneers commenced their activities in the West Indies in the early 1600s, pirates were already raiding in the Caribbean and elsewhere. One particularly brutal pirate was Jacques Sores, a fanatical Huguenot (Protestant) from Normandy. Sores attacked Havana in Cuba in July 1555 with a fleet of three ships and some 200 men. Expecting to find treasure, Sores was disappointed to seize only one emerald ring and a silver plate from the small fort in Havana. The Spanish governor offered to ransom the town of Havana, but changed his mind in the night, and attacked Sores with a few Spaniards, 220 slaves and a number of Indians. The attack did not succeed, and an enraged Sores killed his own Spanish prisoners, hung large numbers of slaves by their heels, burnt the town, and brutally ravaged the surrounding countryside. Entering the church in Havana, Sores and his soldiers desecrated the altar and gave the vestments to his soldiers as cloaks. Leaving the West Indies after this exploit, Sores became involved in the French religious wars, fighting against the French Catholics with much violence. Perhaps his most infamous deed was to capture a Portuguese ship off the Canaries in July 1570, carrying forty Jesuit missionaries among its passengers. Leading the assault to board the ship, in his Protestant zeal Sores threw the missionaries overboard, both alive and dead, together with their holy images, bibles and relics. He also massacred the 500 passengers and crew, allowing only six to live. Still, Sores did not have long to continue his career – he died in 1570. It is of interest that Sores’ earlier commander, Francois Le Clerc, another Norman, had lost his leg in action some time in the 1540s, but was fitted with a wooden leg. He was therefore named Pie de Palo (Peg Leg), but despite this continued to attack Spanish possessions, and eventually died hunting Spanish treasure ships in the Azores in 1563.1

  The French assault on the Spanish continued in the early seventeenth century with the emergence of the buccaneers in the West Indies. The word ‘buccaneer’ refers to those pirates and privateers who attacked Spanish ships and towns primarily in the West Indies, but later came to refer to other areas as well, such as the Pacific coast of South America. The word itself comes from the boucan or barbecue, a kind of grill on which the Arawak Indians roasted their meat, poultry and fish. Boucan can also refer to the place where the Indians dried and salted their meat. The ‘boucaniers’ were originally groups of mainly French hunters who lived on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), hunting the wild cattle and pigs to be found on the island, which had been left by the early Spanish settlers. These ‘boucaniers’ or buccaneers, from around 1605 initially sold dried meat and hides to passing ships, before turning to piracy. They were also strong enemies of the Spanish, and were soon joined by an eclectic mix of all nations – runaway slaves, deserters, indentured servants fleeing from rough usage in English and French colonies, failed or dispossessed planters, social and political refugees, marooned sailors, and anyone else who sought to escape the law. The buccaneers were described as being:

  …dressed in shirts and pantaloons of coarse linen cloth, which they steeped in the blood of the animals they slaughtered. They wore round caps, boots of hogskin drawn over their feet, and belts of raw hide, in which they stuck their sabres and knives. They also armed themselves with firelocks [matchlocks], which threw a couple of balls, each weighing two ounces … They chased and slaughtered horned cattle and trafficked with the flesh, and their favourite food was raw marrow from the bones of the beasts which they shot.2

  The buccaneers’ life style was curious – they hunted in small groups of six to eight, but lived in two man ‘marriages’ called matelotages. These ‘marriages’ were arrangements of convenience, and the two men shared a hut, their dogs, their possessions, and protected each other. They drank brandy like water, lived rough, and when one died, the other inherited all that the deceased owned. There may have been homosexual relationships involved, but they also pursued women whenever possible, as Esquemeling (a French surgeon who accompanied the buccaneers and wrote of them) observed, ‘the service of Venus is not forgotten’. Sometimes the buccaneers were able to afford a servant, and one episode has a young servant complaining that Sunday was a day of rest, at which his buccaneer master thrashed him and roared, ‘Get on, you bugger; my commands are these – six days shalt thou collect hides, and the seventh shalt thou bring them to the beach.’3

  The buccaneers were content enough with their life in the early seventeenth century, but the Spanish made the mistake of trying to rid Hispaniola of the buccaneers by conducting inland sweeps in the 1630s, with the idea of killing the cattle and hogs on which the buccaneers survived. However, this only drove the buccaneers to the coasts of Hispaniola and into piracy against passing Spanish ships. The buccaneers first used canoes for their attacks, and then one-masted sloops. Their technique was to surprise the Spanish ships if possible, but if not, to use their formidable hunting skills to pick off the crew on deck, and then sail or row around to the stern and jam the rudder. After this, the buccaneers would board and fight ferociously until their aim was achieved. Some buccaneers moved onto the nearby island of Tortuga (meaning turtle, since it resembled one), and by the mid seventeenth century, others had moved on again to Port Royal, Jamaica.

  There were perhaps 500 or 600 buccaneers, and their rise to significance owed something to the decline of Spain, and the emergence of non-Spanish colonies in the West Indies such as St Kitts, St Thomas, Barbados, Nevis, Antigua, Curacao, Hispaniola, Tortuga, and Jamaica. Political rulers with an interest in the West Indies such as Cromwell, Charles II, and Louis XIV, also played a part by intervening in the area. The same situation arose with Dutch independence from Spain. All of these factors gave a window of opportunity to adventurers and interlopers, such as Pierre Le Grand, who, according to Esquemeling, managed to surprise and board a large Spanish galleon in 1665. Having killed the deck watch, Le Grand and crew burst into the captain’s cabin, where the officers were playing cards. Le Grand held a pistol to the captain’s chest, and demanded surrender, causing the captain understandably to cry out, ‘Jesus bless us! Are these devils or what are they?’ After this, according to Esquemeling, Pierre Le Grand did not stay in the West Indies, but simply sailed home to Dieppe in Normandy on the ship he had taken, using some captured Spaniards to supplement his crew. Pierre Le Grand then retired from piracy.4

  Le Vasseur

  Before this, the Frenchman Le Vasseur, yet another Norman and strong Protestant, and a military engineer, arrived on Tortuga in 1642. He was originally sent to Tortuga by the governor of the French colonies, so at that time he did not qualify as a pirate. Yet Le Vasseur had ambitions, and soon began to operate independently. Among other things, he built a fort on top of a steep hill on Tortuga with a good supply of cannon and ammunition, and a difficult approach path. This path changed half way up from a stairway to an iron ladder with rungs, which could be raised and lowered from the top. With wry humour, Le Vasseur called this formidable fort his ‘Dove cot’. In 1643 Le Vasseur and his men turned back a large Spanish force, and impressed by this feat, lawless buccaneers were soon attracted to Tortuga. Le Vasseur refused French rule, took a percentage of all buccaneer booty, taxed the cow hides that came in from Hispaniola, and became very wealthy. Unfortunately, Le Vasseur’s character began to change for the worse, and he built an iron cage at his fort, nicknamed the ‘little hell’, where he imprisoned his enemies and in which one could neither stand up n
or lie down. One incident involving a silver Madonna emphasised his independence from France. When he obtained this valuable icon from one of the buccaneers, the French governor requested the piece, but Le Vasseur sent a wooden Madonna instead, remarking that Catholics were too spiritual to notice any difference. Finally, two of Le Vasseur’s own followers murdered him in 1653, ostensibly over a mistress that Le Vasseur claimed for himself. The next year the Spanish captured Tortuga, only to abandon it later, allowing the French back in again in 1660. But Tortuga remained a pirate hang out, and became home to one of the most notorious pirates, the Frenchman L’Olonnais.5

  L’Olonnais

  L’Olonnais was so named because he came from Les Sables d’Olonne (the sands of Olonne), in Brittany, France. His real name was Jean Nau, but he became known as one of the cruelest pirates of the Caribbean. L’Olonnais established himself on Tortuga as the first of the large scale buccaneers in the early 1660s. What was different about L’Olonnais was that he successfully started raiding Spanish towns and ports ashore, although he also took Spanish ships when possible. Another thing that was different about L’Olonnais was that he tortured captives more brutally than most, to make them confess where their treasure and valuables were hidden. Stories abound concerning L’Olonnais’ cruelty. According to Esquemeling, if his captives would not confess where their valuables were to be found, he would cut them to pieces with his cutlass, and pull out their tongues. Other tortures included burning with matches, or tying a cord about the prisoner’s head and twisting it with a stick ‘till his eyes shoot out’, or putting the victim on a rack, and if the unfortunate prisoner did not immediately answer his questions, L’Olonnais would ‘hack the man to pieces with his cutlass and lick the blood from the blade with his tongue, wishing it might have been the last Spaniard in the world he had thus killed.’ Perhaps the most infamous of L’Olonnais’ exploits took place on a raid on Nicaragua. Trying to discover ways to avoid a Spanish ambush, L’Olonnais cut open one of the prisoners with his cutlass, tore the living heart out of his body, bit and gnawed at it, saying to the rest, ‘I will serve you all alike if you show me not another way.’6