Under the Black Flag

by David Cordingly

  At 10:30 A.M. the Royal Fortune slipped her anchor cable and got under way. The clearest account of what happened next is to be found in the evidence which the Swallow’s officers gave at the trial of the pirates two weeks later:

  About eleven a clock she being within pistol shot abreast of us, and a black flag, or pendant hoisted at their main topmast head, we struck the French Ensign that had continued hoisted at our staff till now, and displayed the Kings Colours, giving her at the same time our broadside which was immediately returned by them again but without equal damage, their mizen top-mast falling and some of their rigging being disabled.

  The pirate sailing better than us, shot ahead above half gun shot, while we continued firing (without intermission) such guns as we could bring to bear … till by favour of the wind we came alongside again, and after exchanging a few more shot, about half past one, his main-mast came down, being shot away a little below the parrel.

  At two she struck, and called for quarters, proving to be the Royal Fortune of 40 guns, formerly the Onslow, and the prisoners assured us that the small ship remaining in the road … was called the Little Ranger and did belong to their company.… The total of the men on board were 152 of which 52 were negroes.46

  What this report does not mention is that the battle was fought in driving rain with “lightning and thunder and a small tornado.” Roberts himself was killed by one of the broadsides from the Swallow, his throat torn out by grapeshot. He collapsed across the blocks and tackles of a gun, where he was found by a member of his crew, who burst into tears when he found he was dead. His body was thrown overboard, as he had frequently requested during his lifetime. Two other pirates were killed, and ten wounded. The Swallow did not suffer a single casualty.

  Just as Blackbeard had wanted his ship blown up rather than surrendered, so some members of Roberts’ crew threatened to do the same. At the trial it was discovered that James Philips, a morose and drunken pirate, was down in the hold when the Royal Fortune surrendered. He had a lighted match and intended to set the magazine on fire, “swearing very prophanely lets all go to hell together.”47 He was prevented from doing so by two seamen recently captured by the pirates.

  The Swallow returned to Cape Lopez to find that the Little Ranger was deserted and had been looted of most of her contents. Captain Hill’s pink had vanished, and it was therefore assumed that he and his crew were responsible.

  For the next few days the Swallow’s crew were busy carrying out repairs, careening their ship, and collecting wood and water. They were hampered by a succession of tornadoes, thunderstorms, and continual downpours of rain. On February 18 they set sail in company with the Royal Fortune and the Little Ranger. They sailed first to the Isle of Princes to collect the Ranger, and then all four ships sailed to Cape Coast Castle. As the Swallow anchored off the castle on March 16, she was given a salute of twenty-one guns. The next day the prisoners were sent ashore and locked up in the castle. The subsequent trial became a landmark in the war against the pirates. It resulted in fifty-two men being hanged and seventeen being sentenced to imprisonment in the Marshalsea Prison.

  After the trial Captain Ogle had instructions to proceed to the West Indies before returning to England. He took two of his prizes with him as far as Jamaica. On August 20, 1722, the island was hit by a massive hurricane. All the merchant ships in the harbor at Port Royal were sunk or driven ashore, including the Royal Fortune and the Little Ranger, which were swept onto the rocks under Saltpan Hill and broken to pieces in less than an hour. The Swallow was only saved by the exertions of her crew, who managed to lay additional anchors and cut away the masts to prevent her heeling over.

  Soon after his return to England, Captain Chaloner Ogle received a knighthood in recognition of his success against the pirates. In 1739 he became a Rear Admiral and he finished his career with the rank of Admiral of the Fleet.

  There is an interesting postscript to this saga. On April 3, 1725, more than three years after the event, the London Journal reported that the officers and men of the Swallow who were responsible for taking Bartholomew Roberts and his men on the coast of Guinea had been paid the bounty money at the declared rate due to them under the royal proclamation for taking pirates. “It is remarkable that none of the Officers and crew of the said ship knew they were entitled to the said bounty, till the publishing of a book entitled, A General History of Pirates, where the said Proclamation is taken notice of.” This, of course, was Captain Johnson’s famous work, which was first published in 1724.

  The battles which destroyed Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts and their crews were the most dramatic of the naval actions against the pirates, but they were not isolated incidents. In June 1718 HMS Scarborough, the ship which had been worsted by Blackbeard’s ship two years earlier, captured the pirate ship Blanco of six guns, commanded by the French pirate Le Bour. It was not an unqualified success because of the eighty pirates on board only seventeen were captured, and the captain and the remainder escaped. In May 1722 the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Nicholas Lawes, reported that HMS Launceton of forty guns, under Captain Candler, had been dispatched to the southwestern end of Hispaniola to protect shipping from pirates, and had captured a Spanish pirate ship commanded by Mathew Luke, an Italian. The captured pirates were put on trial in Jamaica, and forty-one of the fifty-eight crew were hanged.

  In May 1723 Governor Hart reported from St. Kitts that HMS Winchelsea, commanded by Captain Orme, had taken Captain Finn and eight of his pirate crew on the island of Tobago. This was evidently considered a coup because Finn was known to have been an associate “of the infamous Roberts the Pyrate,” and had been commander of the brigantine Good Fortune. The captured pirates were put on trial, and six of them were hanged “at the high water mark in the town of St. Johns in Antigua.”48 Governor Hart further reported that Captain Brand, the commander of HMS Hector, was pursuing the rest of the pirates on the island of Tobago. “It is to the indefatigable care of Capt. Brand and Capt. Orme in pursing the pirates wherever they hear of them, that the trade in these parts is so well secured from that pest, for which they can’t be too much commended.…”49

  But apart from the bloody battles which ended the careers of Black-beard and Roberts, the naval action which attracted most attention was the fight between Captain Solgard of HMS Greyhound and two ships commanded by Edward Low, the most brutal of the pirates of this period. The action was fought in the seas to the east of Long Island and lasted for more than eight hours. HMS Greyhound was a twenty-gun ship and relatively new, having been launched at Deptford in 1720. The two pirate ships were the sloop Fortune of ten guns, commanded by Low, and the sloop Ranger of eight guns, commanded by Captain Harris.

  Solgard located the pirates at 4:30 A.M. on June 10, 1723.50 Whether by chance or design is not clear, but he repeated the maneuver which had enabled Ogle to catch Roberts’ consort off guard: he tacked and headed away from the pirates, which encouraged them to give chase. This gave Solgard time to clear his ship for action.

  At 8:00 A.M. the ships were closing and the pirate sloops each fired a gun and hoisted a black flag. As the warship showed no sign of surrendering, they hauled down the black flags and replaced them with red flags to signal no quarter would be given. The Greyhound held her fire until the pirate sloops were abreast of her, when she let loose with round shot and grapeshot. For an hour or so the shooting continued, but the pirates then decided they had had enough and pulled away from the warship with the help of their oars. Captain Solgard put eighty-six of his men on the oars and set off in pursuit. At 2:30 P.M. they caught up with the pirate sloops and bombarded them with grapeshot, bringing down the mainsail of the Ranger. At four o’clock her crew surrendered. Low turned tail and fled. Solgard had to secure his prisoners, and although he chased Low, they lost sight of him near Block Island.

  The captured pirates were tried before an Admiralty Court held in the Town House of Newport, Rhode Island. The president of the court was William Dummer, Lieutenant Govern
or of Massachusetts. Twenty-six pirates were hanged on July 19, 1723, on the shore of Newport harbor at Gravelly Point. Governor Burnet of New York wrote a letter to Lord Carteret in London which must have greatly cheered the lords of the Admiralty:

  I have the honour to acquaint your Lordship with the good news that the station ship for this place under the command of Captain Solgard, has on the 10th of this instant engaged two pirate sloops at once, of about 70 men and 8 guns a piece, under the command of one Low, and after having disabled one towards night, she struck to the man of war, but night coming on, he lost sight of the other, which he writes me word, he has intelligence by which he believes he shall find her to the eastward of Boston. This blow, with what they have received from Captain Ogle will I hope clear the seas of these accomplished villains. These last have been remarkably cruel and have done vast damage in the West Indies.51

  Solgard’s victory was on a much smaller scale than Sir Chaloner Ogle’s crushing defeat of Roberts’ ships, but it made a greater impression because it took place in American coastal waters rather than off the distant shores of Africa. A month after the battle the grateful Corporation of New York gave Captain Solgard the freedom of the city and presented him with a gold snuffbox handsomely engraved with the city arms on one side and a picture of the Greyhound’s fight with the pirate sloops on the other.52

  Since the time of Henry VIII it was the custom during times of war to give license or “letters of marque” to private merchant ships. These authorized the captain of a named vessel to attack and capture the ships of an enemy nation. It was a cheap and easy way of augmenting the Royal Navy, and the owners and captains of the privateers received a proportion of the value of any captured vessel. In 1677 the Vice-Admiralty Court in Jamaica, which had been set up to deal with the prizes of privateers and naval ships in time of war, was given a special commission to try pirates. But the example was not extended to the other colonies, although some governors and councils did occasionally take the law into their hands and executed pirates.

  The Prize Act of 1692, along with twenty-two instructions issued by the Privy Council, provided much-needed regulation for the conduct of privateering, an activity which had hitherto been subject to abuse and often amounted to outright piracy. The captors of ships were given a statutory right to their prizes, but the prizes had to be declared in the appropriate courts. The division of the prize money between the Crown, the shipowners, and the ship’s officers and men was laid down. The effect of the Act, as Ritchie has pointed out, was that “it was now much easier to identify the privateers; for anyone who lacked the required passes, certificates, regulations, bonds, and even flags, was a pirate.”53

  The Treaty of Utrecht put a stop to the issuing of licenses against French and Spanish ships, but it did not stop the practice altogether. The pirates had become the new enemy, and the governors of the colonies in America and the West Indies on several occasions issued licenses to private ships authorizing them to capture pirates.

  In November and December 1715 the Governor of Jamaica, Lord Hamilton, commissioned ten ships, which ranged in size from the Diligence Galley of 90 tons to the 20-ton sloop Mary.54 One of the ten commanders who were commissioned was Jonathan Barnet, who was captain of the Tyger, a 90-ton snow. He is of particular interest for two reasons: firstly because his commission and instructions have been preserved; and secondly because he was responsible for capturing Calico Jack and the female pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny.

  Barnet’s instructions begin with a preamble which explains that the frequent attacks by pirates on the high seas in the West Indies has made it necessary “besides His Majesty’s Ships of War to fit out and commission other Private Men of War.” It goes on to authorize him and the snow Tyger “by force of arms to seize, take and apprehend all pyratical ships and vessels with their commander officers and crew.”55 There follow specific instructions which include bringing in any captured pirates to Port Royal, keeping a journal of all proceedings, and flying a Union Jack of the same design as that worn by naval ships except for a white escutcheon or square in the middle of the flag. Barnet is next referred to by the new Governor of Jamaica, Sir Nicholas Lawes, in his report to London dated November 13, 1720, in which he briefly describes the action which led to the capture and eventual trial of “Calico Jack” Rackam:

  About a fortnight ago a trading sloop belonging to the island being well manned and commanded by a brisk fellow, one Jonathan Barnet, did us a very good piece of service. He was met by pirate vessel at the leeward part of this island commanded by one Rackum in which were 18 pirates more whom he took and are now in gaol.56

  Two other privateer actions against pirates are of particular interest. In August 1718, two months after Blackbeard’s blockade of Charleston, two pirate ships under the command of Vane and Yeats appeared off the harbor bar and proceeded to plunder shipping coming in and out of the port. Among the vessels taken were the ship Coggershall of Ipswich, which was laden with logwood, a sloop from Barbados, and a large brigantine from the Guinea coast, with ninety blacks on board. The Governor and Council of South Carolina were so alarmed by this latest threat to their trade and the flagrant insults of the pirates that they commissioned two sloops to go out against them: the Henry of eight guns, commanded by Captain Masters, and the Sea Nymph of eight guns, commanded by Captain Hall. The expedition was led by Colonel William Rhett, who had volunteered his services.

  They failed to find Vane, but while they were searching the coast south of Charleston, they came across a pirate ship and two of her prizes at anchor in the Cape Fear River.57 A confused action took place, complicated by the fact that the pirates and the privateers went aground on shoals in the river. At one point the Henry, with Colonel Rhett on board, was stranded by the ebb tide for nearly six hours and exposed to derisive insults and sporadic fire from the pirates. However, the rising tide floated Rhett’s two sloops an hour before the pirates floated off, which enabled the crew of the Henry to carry out repairs and prepare to move in for the kill. They were about to board the pirate sloop when a white flag was sent up and the pirates surrendered. Casualties were heavy: the privateer ships lost fourteen men killed and had sixteen wounded in the action; the pirates had seven killed and five men wounded. However, Colonel Rhett found that the captain of the pirate ships was Major Stede Bonnet, who had sailed as a consort of Blackbeard and was one of the big names in the pirate community. Some weeks later Bonnet and thirty-three members of his crew were put on trial in Charleston. The subsequent hanging of Bonnet and thirty others was another landmark in the war against the piracy.

  A third privateer action which resulted in the death of a well-known pirate and the capture of his crew took place on the shore of a remote island ninety miles off the coast of South America. In October 1722 the sloop Eagle was sailing from the island of St. Kitts to the port of Cumana in Venezuela.58 Her course took her close by the island of Blanco, where her captain, thirty-two-year-old Walter Moor, saw a sloop aground in a sandy bay. Knowing the island to be uninhabited and not a place where law-abiding traders would normally call, he suspected the vessel to be a pirate. No doubt thinking of the reward if he captured her, Moor prepared to attack. As he approached the beach, he saw that the sloop was heeled over for careening, with her guns ashore. He challenged her to show her colors. The mystery vessel hoisted a St. George’s flag and fired at the Eagle. At this hostile response, Captain Moor prepared to board her, but before he could do so, the pirates cut their anchor cables and hauled the stern of their sloop ashore. Not wanting to run aground, Moor anchored the Eagle in the shallows opposite the pirate ship and proceeded to pound her with his guns until she surrendered.

  Before Moor and his men were able to take possession of the ship, the pirate captain and ten or twelve of his crew climbed out of the cabin windows and escaped ashore. The island was densely wooded with Lignum vitae trees and thick shrubs and undergrowth, so that the men Captain Moor sent in pursuit of the pirates had difficulty finding the
m. After searching the island for five days, they captured five men. Some of the pirates had remained with the ship, so that the total number captured was twenty-four. From the prisoners they learned that the pirate captain was George Lowther, but he eluded capture. It was Lowther who had recently attacked the Princes Galley of London, tortured her crew, forced the surgeon’s mate and a carpenter to join the pirates, and plundered her cargo.

  The Eagle sailed on to Cumaná, where Moor reported to the Governor. The captured pirate sloop was officially condemned and handed over to Moor and his crew. The Governor sent a small sloop with twenty-five men to the island of Blanco to round up the remaining pirates: they captured four of them, but Lowther, three men, and a small boy could still not be found. It was later learned that Lowther committed suicide; Captain Moor “was informed that George Lowther of the said pirate sloop had shot himself on the Island of Blanco, and was found dead with his pistol busted by his side.”59 On March 11, 1724, a Court of Admiralty was held on the island of St. Kitts, and the remnants of Lowther’s crew were put on trial.60 The two young seamen from the Princes Galley who had volunteered to join the pirates were found guilty but were reprieved. Eleven pirates were hanged on March 20.

  In retrospect it is surprising how effective the Royal Navy and authorized privateers were in hunting down the pirates. The pirates’ cruising grounds extended for thousands of miles, and there were so many places in the Caribbean and along the coasts of North America and Africa where they could hide their ships. And yet, without radios and telephones, the news of a pirate’s whereabouts would be passed among the thousands of ships and small craft plying among the islands and up and down the coast. The information would eventually reach the governor of a colony, the captain of a naval ship, or an agent of the Royal Africa Company or the East India Company. A warship would be dispatched, and a patient search made until the pirate was tracked down. It took Captain Ogle in HMS Swallow nearly eight months to find Bartholomew Roberts, but in the end the plunderings of the most successful of all the pirates were brought to an end. Already the world was becoming too small for a wanted pirate to be able to find a safe hiding place.