WEST INDIES
DECEMBER 1719-MAY 1720
‘THE TAKING OF PIRATES ... IS BUT A DRY BUSINESS, UNLESS THEY CATCH ’EM BY EXTRAORDINARY GOOD FORTUNE WITH A PRIZE FRESH IN THEIR MOUTHS’
THE SWITCH IN COMMAND was achieved without violence. Pirates ‘often displaced Captains,’ Walter Kennedy later explained, ‘having a sort of commonwealth among them, but very rarely suffered any violence to be offered them, but held a respect for any one who had been their commander’. But it must have been a bitter pill for Roberts to swallow after his triumph at Pernambuco. Having tasted power, a man of his drive and ambition was not going to resign himself to a place in the shadows and he watched eagerly for any chance to regain his position. He would not have long to wait. The events at Devil’s Islands proved to be the start of a difficult few months for the crew of the Good Fortune and Anstis quickly revealed his limitations as a commander.
Like Kennedy and his men a few weeks before, the Good Fortune headed for the Windward and Leeward Islands in the eastern Caribbean. Stretched in a chain at regular 20- to 30-mile intervals from the Virgin Islands to Trinidad, the archipelago formed one of the most beautiful waterways in the world - a series of vivid green emeralds, rising to densely forested volcanic peaks, each set in a frame of golden beaches, scattered across a sparkling blue sea. Set slightly apart from the rest, to the east, was the island of Barbados, the richest and most densely populated of the British colonies in the area. Barbados was often the first stop for ships coming from Europe, North America and Africa and the pirates, in desperate need of provisions, knew it would yield a plentiful supply of prizes.
Pirate tactics were simple and exploited the limitations of navigation in this age. The captains of merchant ships were able to calculate their latitude - or north-south position - by measuring the angle of the shadow cast by the sun at midday. This was a comparatively simple technique that had been known since ancient times. But there was no method for calculating longitude - a ship’s east - west position. Parliament had offered a £20,000 prize to anyone who could solve the riddle in 1714, but it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that a practical method was found. In the meantime captains simply hit the line of latitude required as soon as possible and then sailed due east or west, depending on their destination. Ships sailing for Barbados hit the line of 13 degrees north and then sailed west. All the men of the Good Fortune had to do was park themselves a few miles due east of the island and wait for ships to sail into their net.
The first to appear was the Essex, a two-masted schooner from Salem in New England, a welcome present on Christmas Day 1719. The pirates kept it for seven days, plundering it of pork, beer, bread, fish, butter, apples, cider, geese, fowls, running rigging, carpenter’s tools and large quantities of clothing. Two of the crew were forced to join the pirates. The captain reported the Good Fortune to have eight guns and forty men.
They then headed briefly for Tobago, a few miles to the south. They seized a small French sloop that was hunting for turtles in the area, liberating, on a whim, two boys, an Indian and a mulatto, who were serving aboard as slaves or servants. Then, on 10 January 1720 they attacked a sloop called the Phillipa from Barbados. The boarding party approached it in a long boat and the Phillipa’s captain, Daniel Graves, ‘sick and lame with the gout’ at the time, ordered his men ‘to fire at them and kill them’. At this the pirates identified themselves as ‘Englishmen and marooners’ and threatened to murder every man aboard if they did not surrender. The crew wisely complied and the Phillipa was plundered of two cannons, 15 small arms, two pairs of pistols, a 60-gallon cask of rum, a hogshead of bread, some sugar and, once more, large quantities of clothes. The pirates also took three white sailors and ‘six negro men’, one of whom was identified as ‘Kent a ship carpenter’. Captain Graves received only a rope and a couple of small sails in return.
They were back in the latitude of Barbados by 12 February when they took a ship called the Benjamin, en route from New York. They took bread, bacon and pork, giving the captain four barrels of old flour, a piece of old sail and ‘three live hogs’ in return. Their lack of generosity contrasted with Kennedy’s following his desertion at Devil’s Islands and reflected their straitened circumstances. On releasing the Benjamin three days later they threatened to kill the captain if he did not divert to the Leeward Islands - a threat he ignored, sailing in to Barbados the following day and giving a full description of the Good Fortune to the authorities. He told them the pirates had six guns and seventy men.
Over the next few days the Good Fortune took at least three more vessels off Barbados, including a sloop called the Joseph, whose captain they gifted a set of surgeon’s instruments. But Anstis was pushing his luck. By 1720 a pirate could not stay bobbing on the waves indefinitely in one of the Caribbean’s busiest shipping channels. This was no backwater and, unlike West Africa and Brazil, there was a substantial Royal Navy presence in the region.
This was a comparatively recent innovation. Until the midseventeenth century it had not been regarded as the Royal Navy’s duty to defend merchant shipping and the Navy’s ships had generally kept to home waters in peace time. But by the early eighteenth century there was a general recognition that Britain’s wealth and power depended on her ability to trade - and Britain’s possessions in the New World were the jewel in the crown of the country’s burgeoning mercantile empire.
When the Good Fortune arrived off Barbados in the winter of 1719-20, the Navy had eleven ships on station in the Caribbean and North American mainland colonies, carrying a combined total of 288 guns and 1,485 men. The bulk of these were in the West Indies. And although most of the firepower was concentrated in Jamaica, far to the west, there were three vessels on station in the Eastern Caribbean: HMS Rose (with 20 guns and 115 men) and HMS Shark (14 guns and 80 men), both stationed in the Leeward Islands, and HMS Milford (30 guns and 155 men), stationed in Barbados. This was a substantial force and HMS Milford alone was more than powerful enough to blow the Good Fortune out of the water.
But the Royal Navy in the Caribbean was always weaker in reality than it appeared on paper. Captains were hobbled by a series of petty, penny-pinching rules from the Admiralty. They were obliged to return to England to take in provisions because supplies in the West Indies were more expensive. They were forbidden from hiring houses on shore to treat their sick men. Worst of all, in the years immediately after the arrival of peace in 1713, they had been forbidden from careening for fear it would damage the ships. This fatally slowed them. By 1720 some of the more absurd restrictions had been removed. But Navy ships remained fish out of water in the Caribbean compared to their pirate adversaries, who were superbly adapted to the tropical environment.
Sickness and disease were a major problem. It’s estimated between 12 and 15 per cent of all European emigrants to the West Indies died within a year of arriving, and figures for the Royal Navy were, if anything, worse. As late as the 1780s one in seven seamen in the region could expect to die during the course of a calendar year. The main killers were malaria, yellow fever and dysentery, but dropsy, leprosy, yaws (a type of syphilis) and hookworm all took their toll. Pirates do not seem to have died in quite the same numbers. They were generally ‘seasoned’ men who had already spent time in the tropics and acquired a level of immunity. And their greater leisure and more ample provisions meant they were probably healthier, despite the extraordinary quantity of alcohol they drank.
The risk of death from disease made the Caribbean an unpopular posting and captains compensated for it in other ways. ‘By dear experience we know [they] love trading better than fighting,’ noted the New England Courant bitterly in 1722. Royal Navy captains were notorious for indulging in a whole range of money-making schemes to the detriment of their duties. In June 1718 Governor Nicholas Lawes of Jamaica wrote to the Council of Trade and Plantations complaining that piracy was rife around the island. ‘This in great measure I impute to the neglect of the Commanders of HM ships of war,’ he fulminated. The Ludlow Castle, he claimed, had sailed for the Spanish colonies within six days of arriving ‘full of merchandise, without giving me the least notice thereof ... and I am still altogether a stranger when that ship is to return. The Winchelsea has not been here since my arrival. I am given to understand she is likewise a trading on the Spanish coast. And the Diamond sailed about ten days ago full of goods (as I am informed) for the coast of New Spain.’
By the following January the situation had not improved and the seas around Jamaica was still infested by pirates. ‘I must leave it to the commanders of HM ships to give an account on what service they have been employed ever since my arrival here,’ Lawes concluded. ‘All I shall say is had they been stationed in guarding our coast and cruising in proper places it might probably have prevented the mischief that has happened to us.’ Their activities not only left the island defenceless but also provided unfair competition to legitimate traders since the Navy captains had a free labour force at their disposal. Jamaican seamen ‘have not bread for want of employment, which is the chief occasion of so many of them going a pirating’, Lawes complained.
Antagonism between colonial governors and Navy captains was endemic. Governor Alexander Spotswood in Virginia and Governor Walter Hamilton in the Leeward Islands, both tireless enemies of piracy, were exasperated by the lethargy of the captains on their station. And Governor Woodes Rogers in the Bahamas even challenged Captain Hildesley of the Flamborough to a duel at one point, although it was never fought. In theory governors had considerable authority over Navy captains, if not absolute control. In practice the captains were contemptuous of civilian officials and reluctant to obey their orders. The fact that few of the small-scale pirates in the Caribbean carried much gold or other valuables on board meant there was little incentive to track them down. As one contemporary pointed out, ‘the taking of pirates ... is but a dry business, unless they catch ’em by extraordinary good fortune with a prize fresh in their mouths’.
Between 1715 and 1720 the Royal Navy achieved just one significant success against the pirates - the defeat of Blackbeard off North Carolina in November 1718 by Captain Maynard in the Jane. Originally from Bristol, Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach, had terrorised the Caribbean and North American coast for two years. A former privateer during the War of the Spanish Succession, he got his name from his long, thick beard, which he tied in ringlets and to which he attached burning matches when he went into battle, giving him a demonic appearance. Although better known, he was far less successful than Roberts would be and owes his fame to the fact that he actively cultivated a terrifying image and was later the subject of a successful play. Even his defeat was achieved largely at the prompting of Governor Spotswood of Virginia. Other than that the pirates were able to operate with extraordinary freedom. As Captain Johnson acidly commented;
’Tis strange that a few pirates should ravage the seas for years without ever being light upon by any of our ships of war, when, in the mean time, they [the pirates] shall take fleets of ships. It looks as if one was much more diligent in their affairs than the other.
When the Good Fortune arrived in the Windward and Leeward Islands in the winter of 1719-20 the Navy was distracted by the outbreak of the short-lived War of the Quadruple Alliance against Spain. All three local ships were away from their station, Milford and Shark on convoy duty while Rose had been stranded in Jamaica by an outbreak of sickness among the crew.
However, Barbados was not defenceless. By chance there were two other Royal Navy ships in Bridgetown - HMS Squirrel and HMS Rye, both normally based in North America. Squirrel was there to convoy a fleet of merchantmen north. Rye had been driven south to avoid floating ice as the rivers of Virginia thawed following an unusually cold winter. Between them they carried 40 guns and 215 men, easily enough to overwhelm the Good Fortune which, at that moment, was bobbing on the waves a few miles to the east. For all its ineptness the Navy had a golden opportunity to stamp out this particular pirate crew before it could gather strength again. But the men of the Good Fortune were saved as the result of a bizarre decision by the authorities in Barbados.
Around 12 February Governor Robert Lowther summoned Captain Smart of HMS Squirrel and Captain Whorwood of HMS Rye to see him. When they arrived he arrested them both and slung them into jail. A few days before they had seized a vessel called the Pearl that had previously been in use as a pirate ship under the command of Edward England. Lowther insisted that, since it had been taken in his jurisdiction, it should be handed over to him. Whorwood and Smart refused. These tugs-of-war over prizes was common. Captain Smart had been involved in a similar dispute with the governor of New England a year before - a dispute which also ended in his being thrown in jail after he fought a duel with the governor’s secretary. Captain Whorwood of HMS Rye had also quarrelled repeatedly with Governor Spotswood in Virginia.
Whatever the rights or wrongs of this particular case, Governor Lowther was cutting off his nose to spite his face. He was not one of the more able governors in the region and was removed from his post later in the year, in part because of his actions at this time. Captain Smart managed to break out of jail after just a few hours, returned to his ship and immediately left the island. But Whorwood remained in prison for twenty-two days. During this time a procession of merchant captains arrived with tales of being robbed in their passage to the island by Anstis and his men. The merchants of Barbados begged Lowther to release Whorwood and offered to pay his bail, but Lowther was adamant.
Eventually, in desperation, the merchants decided to mount their own expedition against the Good Fortune. Governor Lowther agreed to grant them a twenty-day commission and they fitted out two vessels - the Somerset Galley, from Bristol, under the twenty-eight-year-old Captain Owen Rogers, and the Phillipa, the same sloop that had been captured by the pirates at Tobago a month previously, under the gouty Captain Daniel Graves. The Somerset Galley alone, with 16 guns and 130 men, was more than a match for the pirates, and the Phillipa carried an additional six guns and 60 men.
The two ships set sail from Bridgetown on Sunday 21 February 1720. The crews were recruited locally and the Barbados council saw fit to record pen portraits of each of the men - a precaution in case they absconded and turned pirate themselves, which wasn’t unknown in these situations. Most of the descriptions were fairly simple - ‘a tall thin man’, ‘a short thick man’, ‘a young fair man’, ‘a short, pox-broken man’. But forty-year-old John July from Cornwall, we are told, was a ‘lusty jolly man’, and twenty-four-year-old George Tucker from England was a ‘pretty well set seaman, brown complexion’. Captain Rogers was ‘short and thick’. Many were described as ‘black’ or ‘brown’, although for the most part, as with Captain Johnson’s description of Roberts as a ‘black man’, this simply meant they had a dark, swarthy complexion rather than that they were Africans. The majority were in their twenties, like the pirates they were being sent to hunt.
After four days at sea they encountered a small French trader. The French captain informed them he’d been seized by the Good Fortune a few days before and that they had cut down his mizzen (rear) mast and a third of his main mast for their own use. The pirates had taken a small sloop from Virginia shortly before, he told them, and were now using it as a consort. He estimated they numbered about eighty, of whom twenty were in the new sloop. They had ten guns, all in their main sloop, and were now slightly to the north, in the latitude of Antigua, cruising ‘up and down for a ship’.
The following morning, 26 February, Rogers and Graves spotted the Good Fortune and its consort, bearing down fast on them from the east with the wind behind them. ‘The biggest sloop fired a shot at us, and then another, and when she came in musket shot she fired another,’ wrote Captain Rogers in his log. Both of the pirate sloops then hoisted black flags ‘with death’s head & co.’ and, drawing close, ordered Rogers to surrender. When he failed to respond they poured a broadside into the Somerset Galley accompanied by ‘a continual fire of small arms’. Rogers and his men ‘lay still in expectation they would board us’, presumably hoping to surprise them with their superior numbers (Captain Maynard had defeated Blackbeard using a similar ruse). But instead, perhaps sensing a trick, the pirates veered away. Rogers now ordered his men to open fire and cannon balls and grapeshot tore through the Good Fortune. Rogers saw three men, including the pirate drummer, killed instantly. Two others, who were in the long boat being towed behind the Good Fortune, were also killed and the remaining three men in the boat were cut adrift. A cannon ball ripped a gaping hole in the Good Fortune’s hull and the pirates’ carpenter was forced to lower himself over the side in the midst of the battle to repair it, ‘hundreds of bullets flying round him’. He succeeded in stopping the leak but two men who went with him were washed away.
Now was the moment to move in for the kill. The pirates’ smaller consort had sped away to the south the moment the Somerset Galley opened fire, never to be heard of again. The Good Fortune was at their mercy. Rogers’ men crowded to the edge of the ship with their pistols and cutlasses ready to board. But as they closed the Phillipa, which until now had played no part in the battle, suddenly came between the two vessels. It was all Rogers could do to stop his men firing across the decks of the Phillipa into the pirate vessel. Rogers called out to Captain Graves ‘begging and praying that he would board the pirate, but he never made any assault, or fired a gun until the pirate was out of gunshot’.
The pirates sped away and were observed throwing bread chests overboard and even sawing down their gunwales (the upper planking along the sides of the ship) to lighten the load. The Somerset Galley was able to make little progress in pursuit of them - ‘our running rigging &c being all shot about our ears’, wrote Rogers. He screamed at Captain Graves in the Phillipa, which had not suffered damage, to give chase. But Graves was slow to set his sails and never pulled in his long boat which, towed behind, slowed him down. Around four in the afternoon he tarried to allow the Somerset Galley to draw level and asked how long they should continue the pursuit. ‘Till night,’ bellowed the exasperated Captain Rogers, but around 7 p.m. they were forced to give up the chase. Six days later, on 3 March, they limped back into Barbados amid bitter recriminations.
Captain Graves claimed his helmsman had made a mistake, which was why he’d ended up between the Somerset Galley and the pirate sloop, and that he’d been unable to catch the pirate because he didn’t have enough sails on board. It’s impossible to know whether he deliberately sabotaged the mission. He’d spent time, of course, with this very pirate crew a month before and it’s possible he’d developed some sort of relationship with them. But he may simply have been incompetent.
The pirates gave three cheers and fired ‘a volley and a broadside’ in celebration as they watched their pursuers turn away. It had been a close call and would have been far worse if it had been HMS Rye and HMS Squirrel pursuing them. But this was the lowest point yet for them. Rogers claimed he’d killed around thirty-five of the pirates. This was probably an exaggeration. Even so, the Good Fortune was badly damaged and the crew had suffered a number of casualties. And they’d lost their consort. The slow recovery of the last couple of months had been undone and they were now in a worse position than when they left Devil’s Islands. At this moment it looked as if the Good Fortune would be little more than a footnote in pirate history, part of the broader story of the break up of Howel Davis’s crew.
Roberts saw it differently. He must have taken a grim satisfaction from the debacle. The near disaster had dented Anstis’s authority and he knew this was his chance to regain command. It may even have been Roberts, with his sharp eye for ‘the bulk and force of any ship’, who guessed the true strength of the Somerset Galley and warned them against boarding it at the last moment. Shortly afterwards he was reinstated as captain.
The crew of the Good Fortune then disappeared from the radar of the authorities for the next three months, the only time this happened during the whole of Roberts’ pirate career. It was a time of rest and gradual recuperation spent skulking in the backwaters of the Caribbean. They were back down to around forty men and lived from hand to mouth. But it was during this period that Roberts forged the core of what would soon, once more, be the most powerful pirate crew in the Atlantic. He restored their resolve and self-confidence. And from now on there would be no doubt that this was his crew, rather than the remnant of Howel Davis’s.
They repaired the Good Fortune on some unrecorded beach or cay. Then they made their way to the island of Dominica - squeezed between the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, but officially ceded to the Carib Indians - to take in water and buy provisions from the small French community there. There they came across thirteen English smugglers, who had been dumped by a French coast guard vessel. One of them - Joseph Mansfield - was a former highwayman and a deserter from HMS Rose. All thirteen were happy to join the pirates and they were to prove enthusiastic recruits.
They needed to careen but Roberts knew they were vulnerable at Dominica because of the proximity of the French islands. Instead, they headed south for the Grenadines, the string of tiny islets between St Vincent and Grenada in the southern Windward Islands. There was no formal colonial government here and the islands were inhabited mainly by Indians and the occasional community of ‘maroons’: escaped slaves, many of whom had made their way across from Barbados and lived in small, self-governing communities. A maze of sandbanks and narrow channels, the islands were accessible only to smaller vessels and to those who knew the waters well. The pirates made their way to the tiny island of Carriacou. There they hauled the Good Fortune into a lagoon and prepared to clean it.
Travellers of the eighteenth century took little pleasure in tropical landscapes. The golden sands, the turquoise seas, the nodding palms - they held no appeal, perhaps because they were so associated with death and disease. But to modern eyes Bartholomew Roberts’ career consisted of a tour of tropical paradises, and Carriacou was as beautiful as any of the islands he visited. Just a few miles across, it was ringed with white, sandy beaches and the countryside was a riot of brightly coloured, tropical flowers. The name means ‘land surrounded by reefs’ in the Carib language and the warm waters teemed with fish. After the stress and fear of Pernambuco, Devil’s Islands and Barbados, Roberts’ men were able to relax in the shade of the palms. Many pirate crews at this time never grew beyond fifty men and never left the Caribbean, and it’s easy to see why. Freedom and an easy life, that was their motivation. But Roberts was different. He wanted to cut a figure in the world, to inspire awe and respect. He sought wealth, fame and power and, ultimately, a comfortable retirement. For all the disappointments of the last few months, he was still filled with restless energy and ambition. He knew they’d come close to disaster at Barbados and that they were vulnerable, not just to men-of-war, but to any large, armed sloop that local traders fitted out to hunt them down. He wanted more men, he wanted a larger ship, and he wanted them fast. There was a faction in the crew that also wanted to move on, if only for the want of wine and women on Carriacou. They careened unusually quickly, staying little more than a week. Their haste saved their lives.
At Dominica the local French community had somehow discovered the pirates’ destination as they left. They informed the Governor of Martinique and he fitted out two sloops to pursue them. Navigating the narrow channels of the Grenadines they quickly closed in on the lagoon at Carriacou. But they arrived to find the island empty. They’d missed the Good Fortune by a matter of hours.