Under the Black Flag

by David Cordingly

  This riotous life was brought to an end when Morgan and the Governor, Sir Thomas Modyford, were recalled to England in 1671 following the sacking of Panama, and piracy against the Spanish could no longer be supported by the English court. After the earthquake twenty years later, many of the surviving inhabitants moved across the harbor to the town of Kingston and took their businesses with them. A section of the spit of land leading out to Port Royal had sunk beneath the sea, and for the next seventy years what remained of the town was an island. However, ferryboats from Kingston continued to ply to and fro across the harbor, and ships continued to anchor in the lee of the island. The Royal Navy used the town as a base, and slowly Port Royal recovered, though never to its former state. Pirates were no longer welcomed, and Governor Hamilton even issued commissions to privateers authorizing them “to seize, take and apprehend all Pyratical Ships and Vessels with their Commander, Officers and Crew.”8

  Port Royal became notorious not as a pirate haven but as a place where pirates were hanged. Charles Vane, whose men had viciously tortured the crews of two sloops off the Bahamas in 1718 and had attacked shipping up and down the Caribbean, was shipwrecked on a small island in the Bay of Honduras. He was eventually rescued by a ship bound for Jamaica, but was recognized by a former buccaneer and delivered up to the authorities. Vane was tried at a Vice-Admiralty Court held at Spanish Town on March 22, 1720. He was found guilty of piracy and hanged at Gallows Point, a bleak stretch of shore adjoining Port Royal where Calico Jack was also hanged in November of the same year.

  Further pirate executions continued to take place at Gallows Point. In May 1722 forty-one men of a crew of fifty-eight pirates were hanged there. John Eles, a carpenter at Port Royal, sent the council a bill for £25 for building five scaffolds for the execution of pirates between September 1724 and May 1725.9 Port Royal was still the scene of executions a century later. Captain Boteler of HMS Gloucester witnessed the hanging of twenty Spanish pirates in 1823:

  Early in the morning the Gloucester’s boats, manned and armed with a guard of marine drums and fifes, went up to Kingston, returning in procession towing the launch with the captain and nine pirates, the drums and fifes giving out the “Dead March in Saul,” “Adeste Fideles,” etc. The following morning the other ten were also executed—a fearful sight. No men could go to their death with less apparent concern. Before the captain first went up the ladder he called upon his men to remember they were before foreigners and to die like Spaniards.10

  Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean, was another island which acquired a legendary status as a haunt of pirates. Seamen returning from the East told stories of a tropical kingdom called Libertalia, where a community of pirates had devised their own laws, and lived like lords in unimaginable luxury. “They married the most beautiful of the negro women, not one or two, but as many as they liked; so that every one of them had as great a seraglio as the Grand Seignior at Constantinople: their slaves they employed in planting rice, in fishing, hunting, etc., besides which, they had abundance of others, who lived, as it were, under their protection.”11 As with many pirate legends, some of the stories were true, but the real picture was not as idyllic as it was painted.

  The huge island of Madagascar, larger than California and twice as big as Great Britain, had been put on the map by Portuguese explorers in 1506. Ships voyaging to and from India would sometimes anchor in its bays, and during the course of the seventeenth century it became a base for privateers and buccaneers who made use of the natural harbor at St. Mary’s Island (Ile Sainte Marie) on the northeast coast. In 1691 Adam Baldridge, a former buccaneer, arrived at the island and set up a trading post. He carried on a lucrative business for six years, supplying pirates and privateers with food and drink in exchange for looted gold, silver, silks, and slaves which were dispatched to merchants in New York. When Captain Kidd arrived at St. Mary’s Island in April 1698, Edward Welsh had taken the place of Baldridge as the resident trader.12

  At the southern end of Madagascar another pirate colony had been established at Fort Dauphin by Abraham Samuel around 1696. He had been quartermaster of a pirate ship and had put in to St. Mary’s Island with one of his prizes. Attacked by local natives, he fled to the abandoned French settlement at Fort Dauphin. Here he was welcomed by the natives, who hailed him as heir to the throne of their kingdom. Styling himself King Samuel, he set up in business as a trader and kept an armed bodyguard and a harem of wives. Another petty kingdom was ruled over by James Plantain, who called himself King of Ranter Bay, which was a few miles north of St. Mary’s Island. Like Samuel, Plantain lived “with many wives whom he kept in great subjection.… They were dressed in richest silks and some of them had diamond necklaces.”13

  It was from Madagascar that Henry Avery sailed in 1695 with a fleet of six ships and captured the Mogul’s great treasure ship the Ganj-i-Sawai. And it was to Madagascar that Thomas Tew sailed from Rhode Island and established a lucrative trade between the pirates and the merchants of New York and Boston. A visitor to the island in 1700 reported seeing seventeen pirate ships and reckoned there were fifteen hundred men living there.

  But just as Fletcher Christian and the mutineers of HMS Bounty found that life on Pitcairn Island with their Tahitian girls deteriorated into a grim struggle for survival, so the pirate kingdoms on Madagascar fell apart. There were internal rivalries and disputes with the native peoples, and tropical diseases took their toll. When Captain Woodes Rogers visited Cape Town in 1711, he spoke to an Englishman and an Irishman who had spent several years with the Madagascar pirates. “They told me that those miserable wretches, who had made such a noise in the world, were now dwindled to between 60 or 70, most of them very poor and despicable, even to the natives, among whom they had married.”14

  Another part of the world which was much frequented by buccaneers and pirates was along the shores of Central America. In the Bay of Campeche and the Bay of Honduras were communities of logwood cutters. Many pirates found a temporary refuge among these men, and the logwood cutters themselves often joined the crews of the privateers and pirates who waged intermittent war on the Spanish settlers of the region.

  Captain Nathaniel Uring spent four or five months among the logwood cutters who lived and worked on the banks of the River Belize in the Bay of Honduras. He did not enjoy the experience. He described the log cutters as “a rude, drunken crew, some of which have been pirates, and most of them sailors; their chief delight is in drinking.”15 They drank rum punch, wine, ale, or cider by the barrel until they were senseless; then, when they woke up, they would start drinking again. Sometimes they spent a week in this fashion, scarcely moving from the spot. It was the same with the logwood cutters of the Bay of Campeche, except that they were more active and noisier. According to Dampier, they waited until the ships came in from Jamaica to collect the logwood, and then they went aboard the ships and spent £30 or £40 on bouts of drinking and carousing. These bouts would last for three or four days at a time and were enlivened by the firing of the ship’s guns, the necessary accompaniment whenever toasting someone’s health.16

  The logwood cutters had a reputation not unlike that of the original buccaneers who hunted cattle on the island of Hispaniola: hard men earning a difficult living in primitive conditions, unfettered by the constraints of civilized society. There were other similarities. Just as the Spanish drove out the hunters from Hispaniola and created a bunch of marauding pirates seeking revenge, so were the logwood cutters forced into piracy. Writing to the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1720, Jeremiah Dummer reported that, following the Treaty of Utrecht, the Spanish had seized the ships involved in the logwood trade in the bays of Campeche and Honduras and had so disrupted the trade that “the mariners who were employed in it to the number of 3000, have since turned pirates and infested all our seas.”17

  The situation was not quite as simple as that. As Captain Uring noted, many of the logwood cutters were former pirates, and it is evident that some men took time off from cut
ting logs to plunder passing merchantmen or to raid Indian villages along the coast. Moreover, it is unlikely that there were more than 1,000 men involved in the logwood trade. Dampier worked for a year among the logwood cutters in 1676, and reckoned there were 260 or 270 men in the area around the Laguna de Terminos, the principal center for the trade.18

  It is little wonder that the logwood cutters took to drink or to piracy, because life on the Bay of Campeche was not pleasant. Most of the area consisted of mangrove swamps and mosquito-infested lakes and lagoons. The waters swarmed with alligators. Unpleasant parasites like guinea worms burrowed into the skin of feet and ankles, and everywhere there were biting and stinging flies. The men built themselves primitive huts on the banks of creeks where the logwood trees grew. They slept on wooden frames three feet off the ground because in the rainy season the whole area became flooded. They would climb off their beds into two feet of water and spend the day loading logs into canoes and taking them to where they could be collected by the ships. In the dry season they cut down the trees. This was hard work; the trees were five or six feet in circumference, and sometimes needed to be brought down by being blasted with gunpowder. The trunk was then cut into logs, and the bark was stripped off to expose the reddish brown heart. From this was extracted the valuable red stain used for dyeing cloth. The wood of the logwood tree (Haematoxylon campechianum) was also used for medicinal purposes.

  Dampier reckoned the logwood trade to be one of the most profitable in England, but it never matched the profits of the slave trade or the tobacco trade. According to a government report, in the four years 1713 to 1716, some 4,965 tons of logwood were exported to England at not less than £60,000 per annum.19 By comparison the colonies of Virginia and Maryland were together exporting 70,000 hogsheads of tobacco to England each year valued at £300,000 per annum. Log cutting was always a minor industry carried on by a few hundred ex-seamen and pirates in a remote corner of the globe.

  Driven out of the Bay of Campeche, many of the logwood cutters headed for the Bahamas. The harbor at Nassau on the island of New Providence became the headquarters for another community of pirates, and acted as a meeting point for pirate ships operating throughout the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. Their unofficial leader was Captain Jennings, “a man of good understanding and good estate.” According to Johnson’s General History of the Pirates, the pirate captains based at Nassau in 1716 included Benjamin Hornigold, Edward Teach, John Martel, James Fife, Christopher Winter, Nicholas Brown, Paul Williams, Charles Bellamy, Oliver la Bouche, Major Penner, Edward England, T. Burgess, Thomas Cocklyn, R. Sample, and Charles Vane. Others who used Nassau’s fine natural harbor as a rendezvous were Stede Bonnet, Howell Davis, Nichols, Miller, Napin, Fox, Porter, Macarty, Bunce, Leslie, John Rackam, and Mary Read and Anne Bonny.

  The authorities were seriously alarmed by what was constantly referred to as a “nest of pirates.” Reports of pirate attacks in the West Indies multiplied, and in London a report from the Council of Trade and Plantations warned that the Bahamas were so lacking in any form of defense that most of the inhabitants had fled, exposing the islands “to be plundered and ravaged by pirates, and in danger of being lost from Our Crown of Great Britain.”20

  On September 3, 1717, Mr. Secretary Addison reported that the King had ordered three measures to be taken against the pirates in the West Indies: the first was the sending of three warships to the Caribbean; the second was the issuing of a proclamation which assured His Majesty’s pardon to those pirates who surrendered themselves; the third was the appointment of a governor of the Bahamas “who will be enabled to drive the pirates from their lodgement at Harbour Island and Providence.”21

  The man selected for this task was Captain Woodes Rogers, who was one of the heroes of the war against the pirates. Woodes Rogers was the son of a sea captain and was born in Bristol in 1679. He trained as a seaman but seems to have occupied a prominent position in the social life of Bristol. In 1705 he married Sarah, the daughter of Admiral Sir William Whetstone and in the same year was made a freeman of his native city.22 In 1708 he organized and took command of a privateering voyage which was to take him around the world. The voyage was sponsored by the Mayor and corporation of Bristol, and Woodes Rogers had a commission from the Lord High Admiral to attack French and Spanish ships. He also secured the services of the fifty-six-year-old William Dampier as his pilot; the former buccaneer and explorer was an excellent choice as he had already circumnavigated the globe twice and was a highly experienced navigator. The expedition’s two ships were the Duke, of 310 tons and thirty guns, and the 260-ton Dutchess. They set sail on August 2, 1708, and headed south for the Canary Islands.

  Woodes Rogers proved a tough and capable commander. He put down several mutinies, survived storms and calms, and attacked and captured some twenty ships. In one pitched battle off the coast of California he was badly wounded: “I was shot thro’ the left cheek, the bullet struck away great part of my upper jaw, and several of my teeth, part of which dropt down upon the deck where I fell.”23 A few days later, during an engagement with a massive 900-ton Spanish ship of sixty guns, he was hit again, this time by a wood splinter which cut through his ankle and knocked out part of his heel bone. He resolutely continued to give orders and to keep control of his sometimes unruly crews.

  The expedition returned to England in 1711 with a rich haul of gold bullion, precious stones, and silks plundered from the vessels taken en route. The total value of the plunder was reckoned at £800,000. Two thirds of this went to the owners and sponsors, and the other third was divided among the officers and crew. Woodes Rogers wrote a candid and seamanlike account of his voyage, which was published in 1712 under the title A Cruising Voyage Round the World. It was widely read, and three editions were published within a few years of its first appearance. With his face badly scarred, and no doubt still limping from his wounded ankle, Captain Rogers returned to his family and his house in Queen Square, Bristol.

  This was the man chosen to take up the post of Governor of the Bahamas. It was little wonder that the merchants of London and Bristol informed the King that they considered him “as a person every way qualified for such an undertaking.”24 His brief was to use whatever means he thought necessary to suppress piracy. He also took with him a Royal Pardon from the King which was to be granted to any pirates who surrendered to him before September 5, 1718.

  Rogers set sail on April 11, 1718, on board the Delicia, a former East Indiaman, accompanied by HMS Milford and HMS Rose and two sloops. He arrived at the island of New Providence on July 26 to find a French ship burning in the harbor of Nassau. Pirates commanded by Vane had set the ship alight in order to drive out HMS Rose, which had pressed ahead of the squadron and arrived the previous evening. As the Delicia and HMS Milford sailed in, Vane decided that the odds were too great and fled. He fired his guns in a gesture of defiance and flew a black flag from the masthead of his sloop.

  The new Governor landed and took possession of the fort, “where I read His Majesty’s Commission in the presence of my officers, soldiers and about 300 of the people here, who received me under arms and readily surrendered, showing then many tokens of joy for the re-introduction of Government.”25 There was much to be done. He began by forming a council and appointed a secretary-general and a chief justice. He ordered repairs to the fort, which was in a crumbling condition, the seaward-facing bastion having recently collapsed. He arranged for the mounting of guns to defend the harbor. And he sent Captain Hornigold out to capture Vane and his pirates. Hornigold was a former pirate leader who had decided to surrender and accept the King’s Pardon.

  After chasing and losing Vane, whose sloop was a notably swift sailer, Hornigold continued his patrols. In October he captured a bunch of pirates at the island of Exuma, 130 miles southeast of New Providence. They were all men who had accepted the King’s Pardon but had returned to piracy, and Governor Rogers determined to make an example of them. On Tuesday December 9, 1718, an Admiralty Court wa
s held in His Majesty’s Guard Room in Nassau.26 Seven commissioners were assembled under the presidency of the Governor. They included William Fairfax, who was Judge of the Admiralty, three civilians, and Captain Wingate Gale, Captain Josias Burges, and Captain Peter Courant. The Register opened the proceedings by reading the Governor’s special commission for assembling the court under the terms of the recent Act of Parliament for the suppression of piracy.

  There were ten men on trial: John Augur, formerly master of the sloop Mary of Providence; William Cunningham, gunner of the schooner Batchelors Adventure; John Hipps, boatswain of the sloop Lancaster; and the mariners Dennis McKarthy, George Rounsivel, William Dowling, William Lewis, Thomas Morris, George Bendall, and William Ling. There was only one charge against the prisoners, but it was a damning one: having accepted the King’s Pardon, they had returned to their former evil ways of robbery and piracy, and on October 6 had combined together “at a desolate island called Green Cay” to mutiny, and piratically steal and take the Mary, the Batchelors Adventure, and Lancaster, their cargoes and tackle; and further that they had marooned James Kerr, merchant, and others on Green Cay while they proceeded to the island of Exuma.

  The prisoners pleaded not guilty, and evidence was taken from a number of witnesses. The prisoners were then examined individually. Only one man, John Hipps, was able to prove that he was forced to join the pirates, and he was found not guilty. All the others were found guilty and condemned to death. The date of execution was fixed for ten o’clock on the morning of December 12. The official account of what took place is perhaps the most vivid of all the descriptions of pirate hangings:

  Wherefore about ten a clock the prisoners were released of their irons and committed to the charge and care of Thomas Robenson Esq, commissioned Provost Marshal for that day, who according to custom in such cases pinioned them and ordered the guard appointed to assist him to lead them to the top of the ramparts fronting the sea, which was well guarded by the Governor, soldiers and people to the number of about one hundred. At the prisoners request several prayers and psalms selected were read in which all present joined. When the service was ended, orders were given to the marshal, and he conducted the prisoners down a ladder provided on purpose to the foot of the wall, where was a gallows erected, and a black flag hoisted thereon and under it a stage, supported by three butts [large barrels] on which they ascended by another ladder, where the hangman fastened the cords as dexterously as if he had been a servitour at Tyburn. They had ¾ of an hour allowed under the gallows which was spent by them in singing of psalms and some exhortations to their old consorts, and other sort of spectators who got as near to the foot of the gallows as the marshal’s guard would suffer them. Then the Governor ordered the marshal to make ready, and all the prisoners expecting the launch, the Governor thought fit to order George Rounsivel to be untied, and when brought off the stage, the butts having ropes about them were hauled away, upon which the stage fell and the eight swang off.27