Filled with the treasures of Mexico, Peru, and the Orient, the Atlantic treasure fleets had always offered tempting targets for English buccaneers, privateers, and Royal Navy warships. The Manila galleons were another story. They were built to be impregnable: floating fortresses of 500 to 2,000 tons, bearing hundreds of men and tiers of heavy cannon. Only one Englishman had ever captured one—the buccaneer Thomas Cavendish in 1587—and that had been a relatively small 700-tonner. Dampier himself had attacked a Manila galleon during his last cruise, but, in the words of one of his crewmen, "They were too hard for us." His ship's five-pound cannonballs hardly made a dent in the treasure galleon's tropical hardwood hull, while the Spaniards' twenty-four-pounders smashed into his ship's worm-infested hull. Nonetheless, in the words of another contemporary, Dampier "never gave over the project" and was eager to win young Rogers's support for his plan.
***
Dampier was more desperate to leave England than Rogers could possibly have known. Despite his fame, his career was in shambles. His command of HMS Roebuck had been a disaster: The 290-ton frigate sank on the way back to England, and when he and his marooned crew
were finally rescued, Dampier faced three courts-martial. The court fined him his entire pay for the three-year journey, ruling that "Dampier is not a fit person to be employed as commander of any of Her Majesty's Ships." On his Pacific privateering expedition, he quarreled with his officers, lost the respect of his crews and, in battle, hid behind a barricade of beds and blankets he'd built on the quarterdeck. He had failed to adequately clean the hulls of his ships—the 200-ton St. George and ninety-ton galley Cinque Ports—leaving worms to devour them both. One crewman had even chosen to take his chances on an uninhabited Pacific island rather than continue aboard a decomposing vessel. In the end the worms won and both ships went down, though not before a series of mutinies resulting in most of the crew abandoning their commodore. Dampier somehow made his way home and faced a variety of lawsuits stemming from his poor command performance.
Ignorant of much of this, Woodes Rogers threw himself into Dampier's scheme, a privateering expedition to the Pacific to capture a Manila galleon. The main challenge was fundraising. From Dampier's experience, he knew taking on a Manila galleon would require at least two well-armed frigates with enough men to allow for a sizeable boarding party. Sending these ships to the Pacific would be expensive, far beyond what Rogers could bankroll. They would need an enormous store of food and supplies to sail that far from home, and a team of reliable and experienced officers who could maintain discipline on a journey lasting three or four years. Fortunately for Rogers, his well-connected father-in-law, Sir William Whetstone, had just arrived back in Bristol, and was willing to present the bold plan to the city's leading merchants.
They went for it, hook, line, and sinker. Mayors, former mayors, would-be mayors, sheriffs, town clerks and the head of Bristol's all-powerful Society of Merchant Venturers all bought shares, as did Rogers's friend and possible relative, Francis Rogers. Together these local luminaries agreed to purchase and equip two new frigates already under construction in the dockyards of Bristol.
The Duke was the larger of the two, a 350-ton ship with thirty-six guns, the Dutchess slightly smaller at 260 tons and twenty-six guns. Rogers invested in the ships and was appointed as both commodore of the expedition and captain of the Duke. Another investor, noble-born merchant Stephen Courtney, commanded the Dutchess. Dampier was hired as the expedition's indispensable Pacific Ocean pilot. Other officers included Rogers's younger brother, John, and the Dutchess's executive officer Edward Cooke, a Bristol merchant captain who had been attacked twice by French ships in the preceding year. One of the largest investors, Dr. Thomas Dover, also came along as the expedition's president, a position that allowed him considerable say over strategic decisions, such as where to sail and what to attack. An Oxford-educated physician, Dover had earned the nickname Dr. Quicksilver for his propensity to administer mercury to his patients to treat a wide range of illnesses. The owners made him chief medical officer and also captain of the marines, with ultimate authority over military operations ashore, which was odd, given that he had neither military experience nor, as subsequent events would show, a knack for leadership.
***
Rogers's expedition would make him famous among his contemporaries, but it has also provided historians with the only detailed account of life aboard an early-eighteenth-century privateering vessel. Both Rogers and Cooke kept detailed, daily diaries of their experiences on the three-year journey and published them as competing books shortly after their return. Together with other letters and documents, they not only afford a comprehensive picture of some of Rogers's formative command challenges, but also a sense of those faced by Thatch, Vane, and other privateersmen during the War of Spanish Succession.
The expedition departed on August 1,1708, the ships flying the new Union Jack ensign of Great Britain, a nation that had been created in 1707 with the union of England and Scotland. Rogers was forced to spend a month in Ireland, retrofitting the ships, stocking supplies, and recruiting crewmen. They left Ireland with a complement of 333, a third of whom were Irish, Danish, Dutch, or other foreigners. The expedition council met soon thereafter to discuss an important problem: a shortage of alcohol and cold-weather clothing for the frigid journey through the Drake Passage. Rogers argued that alcohol was the more important of the two, as "good liquor to sailors is preferable to clothing," so the council resolved to stop at Madeira to stock up on the island's namesake wine.
Along the way, a large number of the Duke's crew mutinied after Rogers refused to take a neutral Swedish ship as a prize, a decision that, in their view, deprived them of plunder. The Duke's officers broke out muskets and cutlasses and kept control of the quarterdeck throughout the night and, in the morning, managed to seize the ringleaders. Many captains would have executed the mutineers, but Rogers knew terror was not always the best way to win the respect and loyalty of a crew. He had the leading rebels placed into irons and their top instigators "soundly whipped" and sent back to England on a passing ship. The others he let off with light punishments—fines or reduced rations—and returned to duty. He even took the trouble to address the entire crew, explaining why it would be unwise to seize a neutral ship, which would probably result in legal proceedings against them. These actions broke the mutineers' resolve, though the atmosphere on the Duke remained tense for many days. Had the ship not had double the ordinary number of officers, Rogers noted in his diary, the mutiny might have succeeded.
***
They spent December 1708 sailing down the Atlantic coast of South America, the weather turning colder as they moved south. Rogers set six tailors to work making the crew cold-weather clothing from blankets, trade cloth, and the officers' hand-me-downs. The winds strengthened as they passed into the latitudes known as the Roaring Forties, and great waves swamped the decks of the smaller Dutchess. At times the ships were surrounded by breaching whales or great troops of exuberant dolphins, which, Rogers wrote, "often leaped a good height out of the water, turning their white bellies uppermost." There were large numbers of seals, the occasional penguin, and soaring albatross. By January 5, 1709, the ships had entered the Southern Ocean, and the seas grew to thirty feet or more, lifting the ships so quickly that the men could feel the blood swelling their feet, and then dropping them into the trough so fast they felt almost weightless. As the wind speeds increased, the captains sent men up into the rigging to lower the upper sails and reef the lower ones to prevent them from being torn to shreds. Suddenly there was a terrible mishap aboard the Dutchess. As the men lowered the main yard—the crosswise timber suspending the main sail—one side slipped, dropping part of the big sail into the water. At the speed the Dutchess was moving, the sail acted like a gigantic anchor, pulling the port side down so far that the frigid gray ocean began pouring onto the main deck. Captain Courtney ordered the other sails loosened. The Dutchess swung into the wind, sails flapping like
flags, her bow facing into the towering seas. "We expected the ship would sink every moment," Edward Cooke recounted, "floundered with the weight of the water that was in her." The crew secured the main sail; Courtney swung her around, stern to the screaming wind. The vessel began drifting rapidly to the south, toward the still undiscovered continent of Antarctica. Rogers, watching these events from the Duke, became increasingly worried as he followed the Dutchess further and further toward the bergs and pack ice Dampier had warned lay in these southern waters.
At nine P.M.—the spring sun still high above the horizon—the Dutchess's exhausted officers went down to the great cabin for dinner. Just before their food was served, a massive wave crashed into her stern, smashing through the windows and carrying everything it picked up, human and otherwise, forward through the ship. Edward Cooke was certain all of them would have drowned in the submerged cabin had its interior wall not been torn down by the force of the wave. An officer's sword was found driven straight through the hammock belonging to Cooke's servant who, fortunately, was not in it at the time. Amazingly, only two men were injured, but the entire middle of the ship was filled with water, soaking every bit of clothing, bedding, and cargo in ice-cold seawater.
Somehow the Dutchess stayed afloat through the night, during which time the storm abated. In the morning, Rogers and Dampier rowed over from the Duke and found the crew "in a very orderly pickle," busying themselves with pumping water from the hold and lowering some of the heavy cannon into storage to make the ship less top-heavy. Her masts and rigging were covered in wet clothes, bedding, and hammocks hung out to dry in the icy wind. The captains agreed that the two ships had been pushed to nearly sixty-two degrees south (almost to Antarctica), slightly shy of the farthest point south any person had yet been known to travel. By the end of the day, they had swung around to the northwest and beat their way toward the Pacific in the mouth of yet another Drake Passage gale.
As they crawled out of the Antarctic, toward the warmth of the southern spring, the crew began to fall sick. Some suffered from exposure after spending days in soaked or frozen clothing; others were stricken with scurvy, the disease mariners feared more than any other. An affliction caused by a lack of vitamin C, scurvy is thought to have carried off more mariners in the age of sail than all other causes combined. Without vitamin C, the sailors' bodies could no longer maintain connective tissues, causing gums to turn black and spongy, teeth to fall out, and bruises to form beneath scaly skin. Toward the end, as the sailors withered and wheezed in their hammocks, bones broken long before became unhealed and old scars opened into wounds again. Most mariners believed it was caused by exposure to cold and damp clothing, but Rogers and Dover were aware it had more to do with the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables on long ocean passages. At a time when the Royal Navy had no treatment for the disease, Rogers stocked his ships with limes, which were rich in vitamin C. This supply was now exhausted, so the ships were in a race against time to get fresh produce. The first man, John Veal of the Duke, died on January 7 and was buried at sea in the Drake Passage.
From his prior travels, Dampier knew of a sanctuary where they would find ample provisions without alerting the Spaniards of Chile to their presence: the uninhabited island of Juan Fernández,* 400 miles off the coast. By the time the jagged peaks of Juan Fernández were sighted on January 31, more than thirty men were sick and seven men had perished. There, to their surprise, they saw a fire on the shore, an indication that a Spanish vessel was visiting the remote island.
The next morning the Duke and Dutchess sailed into the harbor entrance, their guns ready for action. It was deserted. Rogers anchored the ships a mile from shore, while Dr. Dover, eager to secure provisions, led a landing party ashore in one of the ship's boats. As they approached the beach, they were shocked to see a solitary man, clad in goatskin, waving a white cloth and yelling exuberantly to them in English. Alexander Selkirk, the castaway whose story would inspire Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, was about to be rescued.
***
Selkirk had been stranded on Juan Fernández Island for four years and four months, indeed ever since William Dampier's ill-fated privateering mission had passed through these parts in the latter part of 1704. Selkirk, a Scotsman, had been the mate aboard Dampier's consort, the Cinque Ports, whose captain and officers had lost faith in their commodore's leadership and sailed off on their own. Unfortunately, the Cinque Ports' hull was already infested by shipworm, so much so that when the galley stopped at Juan Fernández for water and fresh provisions, young Selkirk decided to stay—to take his chances on the island rather than try to cross the Pacific in a deteriorating vessel. According to the extended account he gave Rogers, Selkirk spent the better part of a year in deep despair, scanning the horizon for friendly vessels that never appeared. Slowly he adapted to his solitary world. The island was home to hundreds of goats, descendents of those left behind when the Spanish abandoned a halfhearted colonization attempt. He eventually learned to chase them down and catch them with his bare hands. He built two huts with goatskin walls and grass roofs, one serving as a kitchen, the other as his living quarters, where he read the Bible, sang psalms, and fought off the armies of rats that came to nibble his toes as he slept. He defeated the rodents by feeding and befriending many of the island's feral cats, which lay about his hut by the hundreds. As insurance against starvation in case of accident or illness, Selkirk had managed to domesticate a number of goats, which he raised by hand and, on occasion, would dance with in his lonely hut. When his clothes wore out, he stitched together new goatskin ones, using a knife and an old nail, and grew calluses on his feet as a substitute for shoes. He was rarely sick and ate a healthful diet of turnips, goats, crayfish, and wild cabbage. He'd barely evaded a Spanish landing party by hiding at the top of a tree, against which some of his pursuers pissed, unaware of his presence.
Although Selkirk greeted Rogers's men with enthusiasm, he was reluctant to join them after learning that his old commodore, William Dampier, was serving with them. Cooke wrote that Selkirk distrusted Dampier so much that he "would rather have chosen to remain in his solitude than come away with [Dampier] 'till informed that he did not command" the expedition. Dr. Dover and his landing party were only able to rescue the castaway by promising they would return him to the island were he not satisfied with the situation. Selkirk, in turn, helped them catch crayfish, piling them into the ship's boat before they rowed him out to the Duke. On seeing Selkirk for the first time, Rogers said he looked wilder than the original owners of his goatskin coverings. "At his first coming on board us, he had so much forgot his language for want of use that we could scarce understand him, for he seemed to speak by halves," Rogers wrote in his journal. "We offer'd him a Dram, but he would not touch it, having drank nothing but water since his being there, and 'twas some time before he could relish our victuals." Selkirk was remarkably healthy and alert at first, but Rogers noted that "this man, when he came to our ordinary method of diet and life, though he was sober enough, lost much of his strength and agility."
The expedition stayed on the island for twelve days. A tent city was set up on shore, and there the sick men were nursed to health with turnip greens and Selkirk's special goat broth; only two of the fifty patients died. Rogers lived in a tent on the beach, overseeing the repair of rigging, barrels, and sails. Selkirk ran down three or four goats each day, while the officers shot some of the seals and sea lions that lolled about on the shore by the thousands. "The men who worked ashore on the rigging eat young seals, which they prefer'd to our ship's victuals and said was as good as English lamb," Rogers wrote, "though for my own part I should have been glad of such an exchange."
Selkirk decided he enjoyed the company of men and joined the expedition as mate. On the thirteenth of February, he helped load the last firewood, water barrels, and freshly salted fish on board and bid farewell to his island home.
***
The next month proved frustrating. The privateers prowled the
coast of Peru under an intense sun for weeks on end without seeing a single vessel. Rogers became increasingly concerned about the crew's darkening temperament. It didn't help that that some men were showing renewed signs of scurvy, or that one of the Dutchess's boys whimpered in his hammock, having broken his leg in a fall from the mizzenmast. Rogers's lookouts didn't sight a sail until the afternoon of March 16. It proved a pathetic prize: a sixteen-ton coastal trading bark carrying fifty pounds, a seven-man crew, and eight black and Incan slaves. Rogers's prize crew took over the vessel, to which he gave the hopeful name Beginning.
After that, the prizes finally started coming in. Based out of the desolate, guano-covered Lobos Islands, thirty miles off the Peruvian coast, Rogers's ships captured four Spanish vessels, one of them a 500-ton ship carrying a cargo familiar to Rogers: slaves. There were seventy-three of them, mostly women and children, whose names were later added to the expedition's account ledgers, carefully sorted by gender and categories: from the two "useful men" (mariners Jacob and Quasshee) to two infant girls, Teresia and Molly. Amid the stink of Lobos, Rogers now presided over a sizeable flotilla and a growing army of prisoners and slaves, all taken without a shot.
With some 200 captives to provide for, the expedition's water supply was vanishing fast, and Rogers realized they would have to make a trip to the mainland. The privateers held an official council and agreed that if they had to betray their presence, they might as well surprise attack a wealthy town at the same time. They chose the shipbuilding port of Guayaquil, in today's Ecuador, which Dampier had sacked as a buccaneer in 1684.
En route, however, they gave chase to a large French ship and, in the ensuing battle, Woodes's brother, John, took a musket ball to the head and died, an event that Rogers took with "unspeakable sorrow." The only consolation was that the prize, the French-built Havre de Grace, carried "a considerable quantity of pearls," seventy-four slaves, and a number of wealthy Spanish passengers, improving his crews' morale.
The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down Page 8