Villains of All Nations Read online

  The capture was effected when twelve pirates in a small boat came alongside Snelgrave’s ship, a large vessel manned by forty-five sailors, plenty to mount a stiff resistance. Snelgrave ordered his crew to arms. They refused, but the pirate quartermaster heard the command and was infuriated by it. Once the pirates boarded, without resistance, their leader drew a pistol and, according to Snelgrave, “with the but-end endeavoured to beat out my Brains.” Some of Snelgrave’s crew came to his defense; they “cried out aloud ‘For God sake don’t kill our Captain, for we never were with a better Man.’” The quartermaster heard their plea and stopped the beating. Snelgrave noted, “he told me, ‘my Life was safe provided none of my People complained against me.’ I replied, ‘I was sure none of them could.’”13

  Snelgrave was taken to Cocklyn, who told him, “I am sorry you have met with bad usage after Quarter given, but ’tis the Fortune of War sometimes.... [I]f you tell the truth, and your Men make no Complaints against you, you shall be kindly used.” Howell Davis, commander of the largest pirate ship, apparently continued the interrogation of Snelgrave’s men. He later reprimanded Cocklyn’s men for their roughness and, by Snelgrave’s account, expressed himself “ashamed to hear how I had been used by them. That they should remember their reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base Merchants and cruel commanders of Ships.... [N]o one of my People, even those that had entered with them gave me the least ill-character.... [I]t was plain they loved me.”14

  Indeed, Snelgrave’s character proved so respectable that the pirates proposed to give him a captured ship with full cargo and to sell the goods for him. Then they would capture a Portuguese slaver, sell the slaves, and give the proceeds to Snelgrave so that he could “return with a large sum of Money to London, and bid the Merchants defiance.”15 Pirates hoped to show these merchants that good fortunes befell good captains. The proposal was “unanimously approved” by the pirates, but fearing a charge of complicity, Snelgrave hesitated to accept it. Davis quickly interceded, saying that he favored “allowing every Body to go to the Devil in their own way” and that he knew that Snelgrave feared for his reputation. The refusal was graciously accepted, Snelgrave claiming that “the Tide being turned, they were as kind to me, as they had been at first severe.”16

  Snelgrave later wrote of pirates to merchant Humphrey Morice, “they pretend one reason for these villainies is to do justice to sailors.” He related another incident to prove that it was not merely pretense. While Snelgrave remained in pirate hands, a decrepit schooner belonging to the Royal African Company sailed into Sierra Leone and was taken by his captors. Simon Jones, a member of Snelgrave’s crew who had volunteered to join Cocklyn and his gang, urged his mates to burn the ship, since he had been poorly treated while in the company’s employ. The pirates were about to do so when another of them, James Stubbs, protested that such action would only “serve the Company’s interests,” since the ship was worth little. He also pointed out that “the poor People that now belong to her, and have been on so long a voyage, will lose their Wages, which I am sure is Three times the Value of the Vessel.” The pirates concurred and returned the ship to its crew, who “came safe home to England in it.” Captain Snelgrave also returned to England soon after this incident, but eleven of his seamen remained behind as pirates. Snelgrave’s experience revealed how pirates attempted to intervene against—and modify—the standard brutalities that marked the social relations of production in merchant shipping. That they sometimes chose to do so with brutalities of their own shows how they could not escape the system of which they were a part.17

  Snelgrave seems to have been an exceptionally decent captain. Captain Skinner had a rather different experience, although he was, like Snelgrave, a slave trader and, again like him, captured off the coast of Sierra Leone by pirates. Skinner struck the colors of his vessel, the Cadogan, a snow out of Bristol, to the same freebooters, captained by Edward England and Oliver LaBouche, who would later capture Macrae. Ordered to come aboard one of the pirate ships in his boat, he complied. As soon as he got there, the “Person that he first cast his eye upon, proved to be his old Boatswain,” a man who had sailed with him on a previous voyage. The bosun “star’d him in the Face like his evil genius, and accosted him in this Manner.—Ah, Captain Skinner! Is it you? The only Man I wished to see; I am much in your Debt, and now I shall pay you all in your own Coin.”18

  As it happened, on that previous voyage Skinner and several of his men had quarreled, and the captain had “thought fit to remove these fellows on board a Man of War”—something captains often did with sailors they considered mutinous—and put them in a floating prison. Skinner “at the same Time refused them their Wages,” another practice not uncommon at the time. Soon after, the sailors “found means to desert that Service” and secured berths aboard a sloop to the West Indies, where they were taken by pirates. They apparently joined the brotherhood and sailed to Providence in the Bahamas, a pirate rendezvous, where they enlisted “upon the same Account along with Captain England” and soon set sail for West Africa.

  Skinner probably thought, and surely hoped, he would never see these sailors again. But there they were, and the circumstances were rather different from the last time he had seen them. According to Captain Charles Johnson, who probably talked to an eyewitness, “The poor Man trembled [in] every Joint, when he found into what Company he had fallen, and dreaded the Event, as he had Reason enough so to do.” The boatswain “immediately called to his Consorts, laid hold of the Captain, and made him fast to the Windless.” His former seamen proceeded to pelt him “with Glass Bottles, which cut him in a sad Manner.” Then they pulled out the lash and “whipp’d him about the Deck, till they were weary.” All the while they were “deaf to all his Prayers and Entreaties.” At last, they announced with sarcasm that “because he had been a good Master to his Men,” he “should have an easy Death, and so [they] shot him thro’ the Head.” Such was the grim moment of truth for a captain who bore a rather different character from Snelgrave, even on board a pirate ship whose captain (England) was known to be good-natured, “always averse to the ill Usage Prisoners received.”19

  Numerous sailors, once they became pirates, seized their new and unusual circumstances to settle old scores in vengeful ways. The slave-trading captain Thomas Tarlton, writes historian Stanley Richards, “was beaten unmercifully by Bartholomew Roberts himself, who detested the dictatorial methods and brutalities of these same merchant captains.” Roberts knew them well, for he had labored under them in the slave trade. When Charles Vane’s crew captured merchant captain Alex Gilmore in 1718, a crew member named Robert Hudson, who had sailed with Gilmore, threatened, “Damn your blood, I’ll kill you, for sending me on the Main-Yard in the storm.” (In this instance Vane protected the captain against the wrath of his former crew member.) In January 1722, when pirates approached Joseph Traherne’s ship, the King Solomon of the Royal African Company, his boatswain, William Phillips, refused to fight. Once the pirates boarded, Phillips used the occasion to make a complaint. He used “threatning Language against the officers because his Captain had once threatened to cut off his ears for cutting Cordage without his Order.” He later joined the pirates, and Traherne survived to testify against the pirates and watch many of them, Phillips included, dangle from the gallows.20

  Once pirates determined the “character” of the captured captain, they decided what to do with his ship. A poor reputation among his seamen would lead to the destruction, usually burning or sinking, of the vessel. When Captain Thomas Grant was captured on the coast of Africa in July 1719, he suffered the wrath of Walter Kennedy, who punched him in the mouth for a previous offense and urged his comrades to kill him. They saved his life but condemned and sunk his ship, apparently to appease Kennedy. A similar situation developed when Edward England and his crew captured a Captain Creed and discovered that England’s brother, John, had once been mistreated by the man who was now a prisoner. This “occasion’d the sd
Pyrates to misuse the sd Capt Creed and to burn his ship the Coward.” These deliberations could also work the other way, as suggested earlier in the account of Snelgrave and again in the case of the Elizabeth, captured by Roberts and his crew in January 1722. Some of the pirates “hindered the Cargoe’s being plundered” and suggested that the ship “be restored to the Second Mate” because the captain and the first mate had died. This they proposed “out of respect to the generous Character [the ship] Owner bore, in doing good to poor Sailors.” The fate of a ship and its cargo frequently depended on the pirates’ investigation of the character of the ship’s captain and owner.21

  The “Distribution of Justice” could occasion debate among pirates. After the process was under way aboard a prize vessel in 1723, pirate captain John Evans intervened and asked of his own rank-and-file mates, “What have we to do to turn Reformers, ’tis Money we want?” He then turned to the sailors of the captured vessel, and “he asked them, Does your Captain give you Victuals enough? And they answering in the affirmative: Why, then, said he, he ought to give you Work enough.” But this is the exception that proves the rule, not least because Evans himself proved to be a tyrannical captain who was subsequently killed by a member of his own crew after giving out a beating that the victim considered an insult to his dignity. In any case, money and “reform” were not incompatible objectives, as numerous pirate crews made clear.22

  The idiom of reform is worth noting. When merchant captain Fowle willingly came aboard the ship of Bartholomew Roberts, the pirates said “they were sure he was an honest Fellow that never abused any Sailors.” They continued: “had he been a Rogue, he would never have come on board to them.” As it happened, one of the pirates knew Fowle “and swore to the Company that he was an honest Fellow, which hinder’d her [Fowle’s ship] from being burnt.” On another occasion, a Captain Cain was captured by pirates who “whipp’d him barbarously, and told him their reason for doing so was, to make him honest.” Captain Macrae was said to be “an honest Fellow.” And of course the pirates considered themselves “honest men,” as explained by William Fly, who, facing the gallows, commented on the hundreds of pirates who had already met their ends; the authorities, he explained, have “hanged many an Honest Fellow already.” Honesty was a watchword for the fair and decent treatment of sailors.23

  Pirates like Howell Davis claimed that the more “dishonest” masters of merchantmen (“base” and “cruel,” as he called them)—the Tarltons and the Skinners rather than the “honest” Macraes and Snelgraves—had contributed mightily to seamen’s willingness to become sea robbers. John Archer, whose career as a pirate dated from 1718 when he sailed with Edward Teach, uttered a final protest before his execution in 1724: “I could wish that Masters of Vessels would not use their Men with so much Severity, as many of them do, which exposes us to great Temptations.” Fly, as we saw in chapter 1, made an even angrier indictment, as did many others. John Gow, facing the gallows for mutiny and murder in 1726, insisted that “the captain’s inhumanity had produced the consequences which had happened.” To pirates revenge was justice; punishment was meted out to barbarous captains, as befitted the captains’ crimes.24

  Pirates also reserved choice words for governmental officials they considered their enemies. While making merry by eating, drinking, and toasting, Charles Vane’s crew lustily chanted “Damnacon to King George.” They added, for good measure, “Dam the Governour,” probably referring to the recently established Woodes Rogers, who had ended their rendezvous in the Bahama Islands. And in case their drift remained unclear, they added, “Curse the King and all the Higher Powers.” Some of the pirates executed by Rogers in the Bahamas in December 1718 “reflect[ed] on the king and Government” in what must have been uncomplimentary ways. Other pirates, such as the crew of Stede Bonnet, rattled the nerves of the authorities by drinking to the health of “the Pretender,” James II, “and hoped to see him King of the English nation.” One observer noted that such actions made him see that pirates were “doubly on the side of the Gallows, both as Traitors and Pirates.”25

  In 1718, at the trial of Bonnet and thirty-three members of his crew at Charleston, South Carolina, Richard Allen, attorney general of South Carolina, told the jury that “pirates prey upon all Mankind, their own Species and Fellow-Creatures without Distinction of Nations or Religions.” Allen was right in claiming that pirates did not respect nationality in their plunders, that they could no longer be trusted to attack only the vessels of Catholic Spain, and that they attacked British ships. But he was absolutely wrong in claiming that they did not respect their “Fellow-Creatures.” Pirates did not prey on one another. Rather, they consistently showed solidarity for each other, a highly developed group loyalty. Here I turn from the external social relations of piracy to the internal in order to examine this solidarity for their “fellow creatures” and the collectivistic ethos it expressed.26

  Pirates had a profound sense of community. They showed a recurring willingness to join forces at sea and in port, even when the various crews were strangers to each other. In April 1719, when Howell Davis and his gang aboard the Rover sailed into the Sierra Leone River, the pirates who were already there, captained by Thomas Cocklyn, prepared to fight—to defend themselves if it should prove to be a naval vessel and to attack if a merchant ship. But when they saw on the approaching ship “her Black Flag,” “immediately they were easy in their minds, and a little time after,” the crews “saluted one another with their Cannon.” Other crews exchanged similar greetings and, like Davis and Cocklyn, who combined their powers, frequently invoked an unwritten code of hospitality to forge spontaneous alliances.27 Such a combination transcended nationality. French, Dutch, Spanish, and British pirates not only cooperated on the same ship, as we saw in chapter 3, but usually did the same when a ship manned primarily by one nationality met another of a different nationality. Such solidarity limited the amount of discord between different pirate crews.28

  This communitarian urge occasionally took landed form, for example, in the pirate strongholds of Madagascar and Sierra Leone. Sea robbers occasionally chose more sedentary lifeways in regions far from imperial power, on various thinly populated islands, and they contributed a notorious number of men to the community of logwood cutters at the Bay of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1718 a royal official complained of a “nest of pirates” in the Bahamas “who already esteem themselves a community, and to have one common interest.” Pirates had, since the time of the buccaneers, considered themselves “the brethren of the coast.” In the 1722 trials at Cape Coast Castle, Thomas Howard called pirates “the Brotherhood”; others called each other “Brother Pirate.”29

  The pirates’ sense of brotherhood or fraternity, which Spotswood and others noted, was nowhere more forcefully expressed than in the threats pirates made and the acts of revenge they took. Theirs was truly a case of hanging together or being hanged separately. In April 1717 the pirate ship Whydah was wrecked near Boston. Most of its crew perished, and the survivors were jailed. In July, Thomas Fox, a Boston ship captain, was taken by pirates, who “Questioned him whether anything was done to the Pyrates in Boston Goall,” promising “that if the Prisoners Suffered they would Kill every Body they took belonging to New England.”30 Shortly after this incident, Teach’s sea rovers captured a merchant vessel and, “because she belonged to Boston, [Teach] alledging the People of Boston had hanged some of the Pirates, so burnt her.” Teach declared that all Boston ships deserved a similar fate.31 The fearsome Charles Vane “would give no quarter to the Bermudians” and punished them and “cut away their masts upon account of one Thomas Brown who was (some time) detain’d in these Islands upon suspicion of piracy.” Brown apparently planned to sail as Vane’s consort until foiled by his capture.32

  Acts of revenge could be more daring—and more frightening to colonial authorities. In September 1720, pirates captained by Bartholomew Roberts “openly and in the daytime burnt and destroyed our vessels in the Road of Bass
eterre [Saint Kitts], and had the audaciousness to insult H.M. Fort,” avenging the execution of “their comrades at Nevis.” Roberts then sent word to the governor that “they would Come and Burn the Town [Sandy Point] about his Ears for hanging the Pyrates there.”33 In 1721 Spotswood relayed information to the Council of Trade and Plantations that Roberts “said he expected to be joined by another ship and would then visit Virginia, and avenge the pirates who have been executed here.”34 The credibility of the threat was confirmed by the unanimous resolution of the Virginia Executive Council that “the Country be put into an immediate posture of Defense.” Lookouts and beacons were quickly provided, and communications with neighboring colonies effected. “Near 60 Cannon,” Spotswood later reported, were “mounted on sundry Substantial Batteries.”35

  In 1723 pirate captain Francis Spriggs vowed to find a Captain Moore “and put him to death for being the cause of the death of [pirate] Lowther,” his “friend and Brother”; shortly after, he similarly pledged to go “in quest of Captain Solgard,” who had overpowered a pirate ship commanded by Charles Harris.36 In January 1724 Lieutenant Governor Charles Hope of Bermuda wrote to the Board of Trade that he found it difficult to procure trial evidence against pirates because residents “feared that this very execution wou’d make our vessels fare the worse for it, when they happen’d to fall into pirate hands.” Walter Kennedy, as we saw in chapter 3, led a devastating attack on the slave-trading fortress on the Princes Islands in West Africa after the governor there had ambushed his comrade Howell Davis. The threats of revenge were sometimes effective.37

  Fear of retaliation not only terrified Governor Spotswood of sea travel unless he was in a man-of-war, it also drove some to retire from seafaring altogether. Nicholas Simons, who had killed three members of Shipton’s crew in 1725, begged relief of the Massachusetts government because he “is now under a necessity to leave off his Employment of a Mariner for Fear of Sd Pirates.” He found himself “in low Circumstances” and had to seek “a new Employment ... for his Support.” Captain Luke Knott faced a similar dilemma. After playing a critical role in fingering, convicting, and hanging eight pirates in Virginia in 1720, he petitioned the government for relief, “his being obliged to quit the Merchant Service, the Pirates threatning to Torture him to death if ever he should fall into their hands.” He chose to give up his maritime career. As it happened, none other than the prime minister of Great Britain validated the threat; Robert Walpole personally intervened to give Knott £230 for both his service to the state and his simultaneous loss of his means of subsistence.38