Under the Black Flag

by David Cordingly

  In youthful blooming years was I, when I that practice took;

  Of perpetrating piracy, for filthy gain did look.

  To wickedness we all were bent, our lusts for to fulfil;

  To rob at sea was our intent, and perpetrate all ill.

  I pray the Lord preserve you all and keep you from this end;

  O let Fitz-Gerald’s great downfall unto your welfare tend.

  I to the Lord my soul bequeath, accept thereof I pray,

  My body to the earth bequeath, dear friend, adieu for aye.

  AFTERWORD

  THE ROMANCE OF PIRACY

  Men and women who were attacked by pirates found it a terrifying and deeply shocking experience. There was the violence and the noise of the approach as the pirate ship fired warning shots and swung alongside with her heavy sails flapping thunderously. There was the confrontation with tough and brutal young men armed with knives, cutlasses, and boarding axes who deliberately knocked down or slashed at anyone who showed resistance. There was a confused and frightening phase during which the pirates ransacked the ship, interrogated the captain and crew, and frequently employed torture to extract information. And all too often the attack ended with some of the victims lying dead on the deck or with their bleeding bodies being thrown over the side to the sharks.

  It is not so different today in some parts of the world. Piracy is a regular occurrence on the coast of Brazil, in the Caribbean, on the west coast of Africa, and above all in the Far East, particularly in the Malacca Strait, which has the greatest concentration of merchant shipping in the world. In 1992 there were more than ninety attacks on shipping in the international waters between Singapore and Sumatra. Most of the pirates in that region operate from the narrow, winding channels in the islands of Indonesia. They use converted fishing boats with outriggers and powerful engines and make their attacks at night, approaching their targets from astern, often undetected on the ships’ radar. Once alongside they throw up ropes with grapnel hooks or shin up bamboo poles and clamber aboard. The small crews on today’s merchant ships have no chance against half a dozen determined men armed with machetes, knives, and pistols. The pirates force the captain to open the ship’s safe, and having seized the contents, they steal any loose valuables in the crew’s cabins. Within ten or twenty minutes they have completed their work and are over the ship’s side. By the time the authorities have been alerted they are racing back to their bases among the islands. There are also highly organized gangs armed with machine guns and assault rifles who attack in high-speed motorboats and commandeer the ships themselves. They carry forged papers, and sell off the entire cargo at a suitable port, making millions of pounds from the transaction.1

  There is nothing romantic about modern piracy, and as in earlier times, it is not uncommon for the captain and crew to be seriously wounded or killed if they fail to cooperate. Since piracy is simply armed robbery on the high seas, and has been accompanied by a catalog of cruelties and atrocities, it is surprising that it should have acquired a comparatively glamorous image. Part of the explanation may be found in the exotic locations where many of the pirates operated. The cruising grounds of the most notorious seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirates were the tropical waters of the Caribbean, the west coast of Africa, and the Indian Ocean. Coral islands, lagoons, and sandy beaches fringed with coconut palms have an extraordinary attraction for those brought up in colder northern latitudes, and this is why even a small-time pirate like Calico Jack, who attacked fishing boats in the seas around Jamaica, has more appeal than a bank robber or a thief who specializes in raids on main-street banks or stores. There is also the romance of the sea. The mythical voyages of Odysseus, the travels of Columbus, Magellan, and Captain Cook, and the sea stories of Conrad and Melville have fascinated generations of land-based readers. The pirates who roamed the seas in search of plunder share in this fascination.

  Another part of the explanation may be the anarchic nature of piracy. Most people are condemned to lives of monotony. Year in and year out, workers in offices, factories, and large and small companies follow the same daily routine. They catch the same bus or train; they drive along the same route and suffer the same delays and traffic jams. They endure hours of boredom, often doing a job which gives them little or no satisfaction. They come home to face the predictable problems of family life or the loneliness of a flat in some dreary location. What greater contrast could there be with a life of piracy? The pirates escaped from the laws and regulations which govern most of us. They were rebels against authority, free spirits who made up their own rules. They left behind the gray world of rainswept streets and headed for the sun. We imagine them sprawled on sandy beaches with a bottle of rum in one hand and a lovely woman by their side, and a sleek black schooner moored offshore waiting to carry them away to distant and exotic islands.

  There is a less obvious explanation for the attraction of the pirates. In his lengthy poem The Corsair Lord Byron created a pirate who was aloof and alien, “A man of loneliness and mystery” with a cruel past and an untamed spirit. As all women know and some men can never understand, the most interesting heroes of literature and of history have been flawed characters. The British nation admired and honored the Duke of Wellington, but when news of Lord Nelson’s death at Trafalgar reached London, men and women wept in the streets. Yet Nelson was a vain, impetuous, and diminutive figure who abandoned his wife and embarked on a passionate and ill-advised affair with the voluptuous Lady Hamilton. Heathcliff, Rochester, and Rhett Butler have a greater appeal, particularly for women, than the stalwart, manly heroes of the type created by writers like John Buchan. So it is with the pirates. They are seen as cruel, domineering, drunken, heartless villains, but it is these very vices which make them attractive. A degenerate and debauched man is a challenge which many women find hard to resist. They want to give him the love they feel he is missing and they want to reform his evil ways. There is also the powerful attraction of the strong and ruthless man who sweeps a woman off her feet and against all opposition carries her away to another life. This is, of course, the basic plot of most of the romantic novels which have ever been written, but it does help to explain why pirates (or the fictional image of pirates) have always had as great an attraction for women as they have for men.

  The real world of the pirates was harsh, tough, and cruel. Pirates were mostly young men in their twenties and were far more likely to be ex-seamen than they were to be aristocrats or educated men. Pirate captains were often vicious and sadistic villains whose careers rarely lasted more than two or three years. They were more likely to drown in a storm or suffer death by hanging than they were to live out their days in luxury on the riches they had plundered. Those who spent time among the pirates were horrified by their foul language, their drunken orgies, and their casual brutality.

  The passing of time has mellowed the harsh picture which is revealed in the depositions of seamen who were attacked by pirates, and in the journals of men like Dampier and Ringrose who voyaged with the buccaneers. The melodramas of the Victorian era transformed pirates into stage villains who were frightening but not entirely believable. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance and Barrie’s Peter Pan took this image a step further, creating pirates who were entertaining caricatures. The novels of Walter Scott, Captain Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne, and Robert Louis Stevenson redressed the balance and made it clear that pirates were ruthless in their pursuit of treasure and were capable of cruelty and murder, but however vivid the descriptions of the writers, we are aware that their pirates are fictional characters. The films of the thirties and forties took the pirate stories of fact and fiction and added glamour. The swashbuckling heroes played by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Errol Flynn were handsome and chivalrous but bore little resemblance to the pirates of the Caribbean on whom they were based.

  The fact is that we want to believe in the world of the pirates as it has been portrayed in the adventure stories, the plays, and the films over the years. W
e want the myths, the treasure maps, the buried treasure, the walking the plank, the resolute pirate captains with their cutlasses and earrings, and the seamen with their wooden legs and parrots. We prefer to forget the barbaric tortures and the hangings, and the desperate plight of men shipwrecked on hostile coasts. For most of us the pirates will always be romantic outlaws living far from civilization on some distant sunny shore.

  This fearsome image of pirates raising the black flag was painted by N. C. Wyeth, who was commissioned to illustrate the 1911 edition of Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Wyeth was a pupil of Howard Pyle, and the pirate illustrations of both artists are notable for their realism and attention to detail.

  A map created by Stevenson for the frontispiece of Treasure Island. It has been the main inspiration for the popular myth of the treasure map with “X” marking the spot where pirates buried their loot.

  Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson at the age of thirty-seven. It was painted by W. B. Richmond in 1887, when the author had already established his reputation through books such as Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped.

  The Sea Cook, one of a series of pictures of British seamen painted by Thomas Rowlandson in 1780. It was common practice in the Royal Navy for cooks to be disabled seamen, and no doubt Stevenson was aware of this when he created the character of Long John Silver, a former cook who lost a leg during a battle at sea.

  Henry Morgan and his men after the raid on Portobello in 1668. Illustration by Howard Pyle for Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 1888.

  Portrait of Henry Morgan from an early edition of Exquemelin’s The Buccaneers of America.

  Mary Read, pirate, former soldier, and adventurer, was saved from the gallows by her pregnancy, but she later died of fever in a Jamaican prison shortly after her trial. Engraving from an edition of Johnson’s General History of the Pirates.

  Anne Bonny became the lover of Calico Jack and was tried for piracy in Spanish Town, Jamaica. A witness at the trial said that Anne had a gun in her hand during an attack on his ship, and that she and Mary Read “were both profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do anything on board.” Engraving from an edition of Johnson’s General History of the Pirates.

  Captain Woodes Rogers and his family, painted by William Hogarth in 1729. After an eventful career as a privateer, Rogers was appointed Governor of the Bahamas. He was reponsible for driving the pirates out of Nassau and restoring order to the colony.

  Portrait by Thomas Murray of the privateer and explorer William Dampier, who worked among the notorious logwood cutters of Campeche and sailed with buccaneers on several plundering expeditions. During one of his voyages he was on the ship that called at the Juan Fernández islands and picked up Alexander Selkirk, the castaway on whom Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was modeled.

  Plans of the British sloop HMS Ferret, built at Deptford in 1711. She had a crew of one hundred, and was armed with ten or twelve mounted guns and four swivel guns. Many of the pirate sloops operating in the West Indies and off the east coast of America in the early eighteenth century would have been similar in size and appearance.

  A British naval sloop of twelve guns anchored off Boston lighthouse, from an engraving by William Burgis dated 1729. This shows the rig of the sloops operating in American waters in the early eighteenth century.

  Plans of a Bermuda sloop, from Architectura Navalis Mercatoria, the treatise on ships and shipbuilding published by the great naval architect F. H. Chapman in 1768. The vessel shown here was 65 feet long and 21 feet wide and carried ten four-pounder guns on deck and twelve swivel guns. Sloops built in Bermuda and Jamaica were renowned for their speed and were much in demand by traders, privateers, and pirates.

  The English ship Charles Galley, from a painting by Willem van der Velde the Younger dated 1677. The Charles Galley (thirty-two guns) was built in 1676 and underwent a rebuild at Deptford in 1693. Captain Kidd’s ship, the Adventure Galley (thirty-two guns), was built at Deptford in 1695 and was very similar in appearance. Both vessels had oarports so they could be rowed in calms.

  Walking the plank, from an engraving by Howard Pyle. Examples of pirates making people walk the plank are rare, and it is probable that Barrie’s play Peter Pan and powerful images such as this book illustration have been responsible for the popular association of pirates with this particular method of victim disposal.

  Errol Flynn in the 1940 production of The Sea Hawk. Flynn played the part of Captain Thorpe, a dashing privateer commander whose adventures in the service of Queen Elizabeth I were loosely based on those of Drake and Hawkins. The film was directed by Michael Curtiz, who also directed Errol Flynn in several other swashbuckling epics such as Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

  Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in the title role of The Black Pirate, a silent film made by United Artists in 1926. In this action-packed yarn, Fairbanks swings through the rigging, captures a vast Spanish galleon single-handedly, fights several duels, and walks the plank.

  Blackbeard’s Last Fight, by Howard Pyle, 1895. This small oil painting gives a vivid impression of the scene on the deck of Lieutenant Maynard’s sloop as British sailors close in on the embattled figure of Blackbeard, who can be glimpsed beneath the raised cutlass in the center of the picture. Again, the almost photographic realism is typical of Pyle’s work.

  Captain Teach, alias Blackbeard, in theatrical pose. Engraving from one of the many editions of Johnson’s General History of the Pirates.

  Blackbeard the Pirate Chief. The celebrated pirate captain is again shown with lighted fuses under his hat, “which appearing on each side of his face, his eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a figure that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury, from Hell, to look more frightful.”

  Mr. Helme playing the part of the pirate captain in the popular melodrama Blackbeard, or The Captive Princess, first performed on the London stage in 1798.

  Robert Newton as Blackbeard and Linda Darnell as his adopted daughter in the 1952 film Blackbeard the Pirate, directed by Raoul Walsh.

  A pirate on the scaffold at Execution Dock on the banks of the Thames in London, from an engraving by Robert Dodd. On the left, on horseback, is the marshall holding the silver Admiralty oar. The prison chaplain stands beside the condemned man on the scaffold. The church of St. Mary, Rotherhithe, can be seen in the background.

  A view of the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, 1773. Apart from Captain Kidd, who was imprisoned in Newgate gaol, all pirates brought to trial in London were confined here.

  Captain Kidd in chains. After being hanged at Execution Dock, the body of Kidd was fitted into iron hoops and chains and suspended from a gibbet at Tilbury Point on the lower reaches of the Thames estuary. The artist has taken some liberties with the scene and includes the masthouse at Blackwall in the background: this was a prominent Thames landmark but would not have been visible from Tilbury.

  An early-eighteenth-century set of chains from the town of Rye in Sussex. It was usual practice in Britain and her overseas colonies to display the bodies of notorious pirates near the entrance to a port, as a warning to seamen.

  For Matthew and Rebecca

  APPENDIX I

  Trials and Executions of Pirates, 1700–1730

  APPENDIX II

  Pirate Attacks, 1716–1726

  This list is confined to incidents in the Caribbean and east coast of North America where some details were reported of the type of pirate vessel, and the number of her guns and crew.

  APPENDIX III

  Extracts from “The present Disposal of all His Majesties Ships and Vessels in Sea Pay” issued by the Admiralty Office1

  APPENDIX IV

  Extract from the logbook of William Dampier while en route from the coast of Mexico to the island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, 1686.

  A table of each day’s run during the first half of April 1686, reproduced from William Dampier’s book A New Voyage Around the World. Dampier describes the t
able as follows:

  The table consists of 7 Columns. The first is of the days of the month. The 2d Column contains each days course, or the point of the Compass wee ran upon. The 3d gives the distance or length of such course in Italian or Geometrical miles, (at the rate of 60 to a degree) or the progress the Ship makes every day; and is reckoned always from noon to noon. But because the course is not always made upon the same Rhumb in a direct line, therefore the 4th and 5th Columns show how many miles we ran to the South every day, and how many to the West; which last was our main run in this Voyage.… The 6th Column shews the lat. we were in every day, where R. signifies the dead Reckoning, by the running of the Logs, and Ob. shews the lat. by observation. The 7th Column shews the Wind and Weather.

  NOTES

  Where only the surname of the author of a cited book is given, the full title and place and date of publication will be found in the Bibliography.

  Key to Abbreviations Within Notes

  ADM Admiralty and Navy Board records

  CO Colonial Office records