BIGHT OF BIAFRA
JUNE 1719
‘NEVER DISPUTE THE WILL OF A PIRATE!’
Bartholomew Roberts remained a sullen, resentful presence aboard the King James for some time. He was not a prisoner. But he knew there was little chance of escape. A few days later Davis released the Princess, having plundered it of all he needed. As Roberts watched his old ship disappear over the horizon, he knew his chances of ever returning to his former life were disappearing with it. The pirates may have kept their distance from the tall, muscular Welshman as he stared moodily over the ship’s rail. But they’d seen this before and they knew that the pleasures of pirate life had a way of wearing down even the most stubborn personality. Sure enough, it was not long before Roberts began to show the first stirrings of interest in the lives of the men around him.
He witnessed them take a prize for the first time on the very morning after his capture. A cry from the mast-top alerted the pirates to the presence of a sail on the horizon as dawn broke, just off Accra, and they gave chase. It proved to be another Dutch ship. The captain tried desperately to run ashore at the sight of Davis’s black flag. But the pirates were too quick and they pulled alongside, firing a broadside. The Dutch struck their colours and called for quarter - or mercy - which was granted, it being a rule among Davis’s men that quarter should always be given when asked for.
As at Anamaboe the pirates initially sent aboard a small boarding party to assess the prize. It turned out to be carrying a senior Dutch official and had £15,000 in cash aboard, an unusually rich haul. It’s unlikely Roberts and the other new men from Anamaboe received a cut so soon after being captured. But the solitary Welshman watched with interest as the loot was divided among the rest of the crew. Each man received a share of close to £100. Just a day earlier Roberts had been on a salary of £2 a month.
From Accra the pirates headed out into open sea, bound for the Bight of Biafra, 500 miles to the east. They arrived at High Cameroon, close to the modern Nigeria-Cameroon border, around the middle of June and set about converting the Marquis del Campo for their own use, knocking down the bulkheads in the hold and clearing the decks of any unnecessary obstacles.
As the days passed Roberts paid close attention to the work going on around him and Davis’s choice of vessels told him that he was among serious and ambitious pirates. Pirates tended to start out small scale, often beginning their careers in periaguas, a type of indigenous Caribbean canoe. They’d gradually work their way up as they seized larger and larger prizes. But in the Caribbean at this time only a minority operated in anything larger than sloops like the Buck that had been Davis’s first vessel. Part of the purpose of coming to West Africa, with its large, ocean-going vessels, was to move up a league. The King James was a ‘ship’, a term which at this time was restricted to vessels with three or more masts and square rigs - rectangular sails that ran across the ship, rather than being fixed ‘fore and aft’ the mast as on a modern yacht. The Marquis del Campo was a larger version of the same thing. The pirates loaded it with 32 carriage guns and 27 swivel guns (small cannons fitted on stanchions) and renamed it the Royal Rover.
Roberts knew he was now part of a fighting force that was more than a match for any other ship they were likely to encounter on the African coast. And, like many other pirate captives before him, he was starting to realise that the apparent anarchy of pirate life concealed a surprising degree of organisation. He was soon made aware that Davis’s crew was governed by a strict set of rules - rules that were startlingly democratic and egalitarian. Not only Davis but all other officers on board were elected. And Davis’s authority was restricted to command in battle. All other decisions were put to a vote. At High Cameroon the pirates debated for some time whether to keep the King James and continue in two ships. It was only after a vote was taken that they agreed to abandon their old vessel.
During his period as a prisoner at Sierra Leone two months before William Snelgrave had been equally intrigued by the pirates’ democratic power structures. He noted that officers on board were the same as on a man of war, with one exception - the quartermaster. This was a minor position in Royal Navy and merchant vessels but had been elevated to second-in-command among the pirates as a counterweight to the power of the captain. He ‘has the general inspection of all affairs and often controls the captain’s orders. This person is also to be the first man in boarding any ship they shall attack,’ wrote Snelgrave. He was responsible for dividing up the loot on prizes they took, and also acted as a ‘civil magistrate’, arbitrating disputes and handing out punishments for minor offences. More serious offences were tried by a jury of twelve pirates.
For Roberts the physical environment of the ship emphasised its democratic nature. The removal of the bulkheads below deck was mainly to enable free movement in times of battle and mirrored the design of conventional warships. But Davis’s men went further and also knocked down most of the cabin partitions in the rear of the ship. This broke down the great vertical class divide between officers in the rear and men in the f’o’csle that Roberts was accustomed to on merchant ships. At Sierra Leone, William Snelgrave had noted that ‘everyone lay rough, as they called it, that is, on the deck, the captain himself not being allowed a bed’. Many pirates also cut down the raised quarterdeck at the rear of the ship and the f’o’csle at the front to make the deck ‘flush’, although this wasn’t done on Davis’s ships. Again, this was mainly a practical measure to remove obstacles in time of combat. But it also had the effect of levelling class distinctions since the quarterdeck was traditionally the preserve of the officers, the common sailors not being allowed to set foot on it.
There was none of the pomp and ceremony that accompanied power on a merchant ship. The ‘Great Cabin’ was preserved and set aside for the use of the captain, Captain Johnson wrote, ‘but then every man, as the humour takes him, will use the plate and china, intrude into his apartments, swear at him, seize a part of his victuals and drink, if they like it, without his offering to find fault or contest it.’ Invited to drink with his captors at Sierra Leone, Snelgrave found ‘there was not in the cabin either chair, or anything else to sit upon, for they always kept a clear ship ready for an engagement. So a carpet was spread on the deck, upon which we sat down cross legged.’
The rules governing the ship were set out in a list of what were called ‘articles’, which Roberts, like every other new recruit, was obliged to sign within a few days of joining. These were drawn up by the crew as a whole and made fascinating reading for the new recruits. Davis’s men pledged, according to a crew member, ‘to stand by one another ... to ye last drop of blood in ye piratical practice, and to share ye purchase according to ye custom of Blades of Fortune’.
The precise articles do not survive. But those of a number of other pirate crews do. They outlawed cowardice and desertion, established mechanisms for resolving disputes without bloodshed, and placed restrictions on gambling, which was often a source of discord among pirates. Some rules had an obvious practical purpose. Captain John Phillips’ articles, drawn up in 1723, stipulated that no man ‘shall snap his arms [pull the trigger of his musket], or smoke tobacco in the hold, without a cap to his pipe, or carry a lighted candle without a lanthorn’ - a precaution against fire. Others were surprisingly chivalrous. ‘If at any time we meet with a prudent woman, that man that offers to meddle with her, without her consent, to suffer present death,’ read item nine of Phillips’ articles.
Execution was usually by firing squad. Pirates at this time never made men walk the plank - one of the great pirate myths. The practice was introduced much later by Hispanic pirates off Cuba in the brief explosion of piracy that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and was never used during the Golden Age. Most punishments were less extreme. They ranged from flogging (often ‘Moses’ law ... forty stripes lacking one’) to marooning on an island or some other desolate shore. Those guilty of minor misdemeanours might find themselves left on a large island with water and animals. Men guilty of more serious crimes were abandoned on a sandbar and were given a pistol and some shot so they could kill themselves if they chose to. Marooning was so common that pirates often referred to themselves as leading ‘a marooning life’ or even referred to themselves as ‘marooners’, the term capturing their sense of apartness from the rest of society.
Articles also laid out elaborate systems of injury insurance. This was a practice which dated at least back to the 1660s when the Buccaneer Alexander Exquemelin described a complex sliding scale:
For the loss of a right arm 600 pieces-of-eight [a Spanish gold coin, worth around four shillings and sixpence] or 6 slaves; for the loss of a left arm 500 pieces-of-eight, or 5 slaves; for a right leg 500 pieces-of-eight, or 5 slaves; for a left leg 400 pieces-of-eight, or 4 slaves; for an eye 100 pieces-of-eight, or 1 slave; for a finger of the hand the same reward as for the eye.
Captain George Lowther’s articles, drawn up in 1721, were simpler:
He that shall have the misfortune to lose a limb, in time of engagement, shall have the sum of £150 and remain with the company as long as he shall think fit.
Invalids were given non-combatant jobs and, like Long John Silver in Treasure Island, many ended up as ships’ cooks. Roberts probably saw a number of eye-patches and wooden legs among the men of Davis’s crew, more than on a conventional ship where crippled men struggled to find work.
Above all, articles laid out the rules for the division of booty. Captain Lowther’s were typical:
The captain is to have two full shares; the master is to have one share and a half; the doctor, mate, gunner, and boatswain, one share and a quarter.
The rest of the men received a single share. For Roberts, as he watched the loot being divided up following the capture of the Dutch ship at Accra, this egalitarianism was a stark contrast to the merchant ships he was used to, where captains earned four times more than ordinary seaman and, more importantly, owned a substantial share of the cargo. Pirates, of course, were not obliged to share any of their profits with owners back in Britain. Articles set out severe punishments for any pirate who withheld loot from the common pot.
For William Snelgrave at Sierra Leone one incident had highlighted the unusual power structures aboard the three pirate ships that had captured him. He was sitting in his cabin on the Bird one day when the three captains - Davis, La Bouche and Cocklyn - came aboard. They’d been inspecting his books and had noticed he had three embroidered coats in the hold, part of his own private ‘adventure of goods’ - that is, goods he was trading on his own account. They asked him to produce them since ‘they were going ashore amongst the negro ladies’ and wished to dress up for their night on the town. Snelgrave had little option but to comply. There was a minor dispute when Cocklyn, ‘who was a very short man’, found the coat he’d chosen ‘reached as low as his ankles’. But the other two pointed out that since ‘the negro ladies ... did not know the white men’s fashions, it was no matter’. Cocklyn was placated and off they went.
When they returned the following morning there was uproar among the men. They had no problem with the three captains enjoying a night of debauchery. ‘It is a rule among the pirates,’ wrote Snelgrave, ‘not to allow Women to be on board their Ships when in the harbour. ... This being a good political rule to prevent disturbances amongst them, it is strictly observed.’ By going ashore the captains had complied with this rule. It wasn’t the women that were the problem. It was the coats.
‘The Pirate Captains,’ wrote Snelgrave, ‘having taken these clothes without leave from the quartermasters, it gave great offence to all the crew, who alleged, “If they suffered such things, the captains would for the future assume a power, to take whatever they liked for themselves.” So, upon their returning on board next morning, the coats were taken from them, and put into the common chest, to be sold at the mast’ - in other words, to be auctioned among the whole crew. Snelgrave himself only narrowly escaped a beating from La Bouche’s quartermaster for having supplied them.
This egalitarianism had been part of the culture of Caribbean pirates since Buccaneer times. But by 1719 the changing composition of pirate crews had given it a sharper edge. The earlier Buccaneers had been drawn from many walks of life. Henry Morgan, the most famous Buccaneer of all, was a soldier. Others were originally servants or planters who had only ever served at sea on Buccaneer vessels. Many of the later pirates in the Bahamas had originally been privateers. But the majority of these men retired following the royal pardon of 1718. After that pirate crews would be drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the merchant navy and piracy would be coloured by the fierce class antagonisms aboard merchant ships - above all, the slavers.
Howel Davis saw himself as a Robin Hood figure, at war with an unjust social order, and he was not alone. According to Johnson, Captain Bellamy, who operated off the North American coast in 1717, harangued a merchant captain with the following speech:
Damn ye, you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security, for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by their knavery ... Damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference; they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make one of us than sneak after the arseholes of such villains for employment?
When the captain declined to turn pirate Bellamy retorted:
There is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure; and pin their faith upon a pimp of a parson; a Squab who neither practices nor believes what he puts upon the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to.
In 1720 the famous female pirate Mary Read defended the death penalty for piracy on the unconventional grounds that, without it, ‘every cowardly fellow would turn pirate ... many of those who are now cheating the widows and orphans, and oppressing their poor neighbours ... would then rob at sea and the ocean would be crowded with rogues, like the land, and no merchant would venture out’.
Piracy had been transformed since the days of Francis Drake and the gentlemen adventurers of the Elizabethan era. The men Roberts now found himself among were almost exclusively lower class. If anything they attacked Spanish shipping less than that of any other nation, including their own, and they made no attempt to present themselves as patriots. Theirs was a ‘World Turned Upside Down’ - the title of a song in John Gay’s play Polly, the sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, which was banned in 1729 for drawing a moral comparison between pirates and the inner circle of Prime Minister Robert Walpole.
Gay was not alone in using pirates as a vehicle for a political critique. Captain Johnson pointed out that the careers of Blackbeard, Edward England, Howel Davis and others coincided with the scandal of the South Sea Bubble, when thousands of investors lost a fortune in savings. ‘Whatever robberies they had committed,’ he commented, ‘they might be pretty sure they were not the greatest villains then living in the world.’ Many modern historians have seen pirates as protorevolutionaries, consciously challenging the conventional values of their day. And, as Roberts looked around him on the Royal Rover, one of the most striking features of Davis’s crew was that almost a third of the men were black. This was common on pirate ships and has led some historians to portray them as pioneers of racial equality.
But, as the astute Welshman no doubt quickly observed, if all pirates were equal, some were more equal than others. This was true even among the whites. Davis’s crew was divided into two groups - the ‘Lords’ and the ‘Commons’. Drawn from the more experienced pirates, the Lords advised Davis on important questions. They received the same share of loot as the rest of the crew, but were granted certain privileges, such as the freedom to go ashore whenever they liked, and the right to talk directly to the captains of captured ships. This feature was unique to this particular crew. But in most pirate crews there was a pecking order, with the longest-serving pirates at the top, and the newest recruits at the bottom. Blacks came lower still. Pirates, like the ancient Athenians, were a slave-owning democracy.
The Africans Roberts observed working aboard Davis’s ships did not sign the pirate articles, they took no share of the loot, and they were not permitted to bear arms. They ‘were kept in an underling way’, a witness said. As the Buccaneer Exquemelin’s sliding scale for injury insurance suggests, most pirates saw blacks primarily as commodities. And this view was shared by the Admiralty, which almost always sold the blacks captured aboard pirate ships as slaves, rather than try them as pirates.
Davis’s men were no more humane in their treatment of Africans than the brutal slave traders and plantation owners they preyed upon. A couple of weeks before Roberts was captured they seized a group of nine or ten local people in retaliation for the murder of some of their men ashore. They hanged them by their feet from the yard-arm. Then, inviting men from Cocklyn and La Bouche’s vessels aboard to join in the sport, they used them as target practice, firing their muskets at them ‘as if they set themselves apart to study cruelty’, according to one report. For variation they slung the survivors into the sea and carried on shooting at them until they were all dead. Such were the men Roberts now found himself among. They were democratic and egalitarian through not abstract idealism but self-interest. Their rules were designed to protect their new-found liberties. But they were not a universal code of brotherhood.
But, if the presence of large numbers of blacks aboard did not spell liberty and equality, Roberts quickly realized that, for him, it meant something far more tangible - less work. The Africans in Davis’s crew were ‘trained up’ and capable of doing ‘the work of the ship’, according to witnesses, indicating that some, at least, could go aloft and do the work of skilled sailors. This probably spared a proportion of the crew from the tyranny of the watch system. It’s likely the privilege was closed to new recruits. But, for a man like Roberts who, in twenty years, had probably never enjoyed an unbroken night’s sleep while at sea, the prospect represented an almost unimaginable luxury.
Beneath the talk of brotherhood and equality Roberts was also beginning to see other, more concrete, benefits to pirate life. It was certainly an easier, more comfortable existence than that aboard the slavers. But he soon realised that the true appeal, for many, was the raw power it placed in the hands of common men.
This was something William Snelgrave had observed at first hand in Sierra Leone. Cowering in his cabin one day while Davis’s men looted his ship he became aware of a figure entering the room - one ‘more sober than the rest’, Snelgrave recalled. He helped himself to ‘a good hat and wig ... whereupon I told him ... I hoped he would not deprive me of them, for they were of no service to him in so hot a country.’ He was brutally cut short by a blow on the shoulder with the flat of the pirate’s broadsword. The pirate grabbed him and hissed in his ear, ‘I give you this caution, never to dispute the will of a pirate, for supposing I had cleft your skull asunder for your impudence, what would you have got by it but destruction?’
The pirate’s name was Walter Kennedy and he would loom large in Bartholomew Roberts’ life over the next few months. The exchange captures the arrogance of a large, powerful pirate crew at this moment in April 1719 with the entire West African coast at their mercy. For a merchant captain like Snelgrave, accustomed to wielding absolute power, it was terrifying. But for a low-ranking seaman like Roberts, accustomed to a life of impotence and humiliation, the impact was very different. The promise of unlimited alcohol may have held little appeal to his sober, disciplined personality. But power did.
By the time the Royal Rover pulled away from High Cameroon towards the end of June 1719 the seductive magic of pirate life was already starting to have its effect on the austere Welshman.