WEST AFRICA
FEBRUARY-APRIL 1722
‘HEAVEN, YOU FOOL ... DID YOU EVER HEAR OF ANY PIRATES GOING THITHER? GIVE ME HELL, IT’S A MERRIER PLACE. I’LL GIVE ROBERTS A SALUTE OF 13 GUNS AT THE ENTRANCE’
THE JUDGE PLACED A black cap on his head, settled himself, and called on the prosecutor to begin proceedings. ‘An’t please your Lordship, and you Gentlemen of the Jury, here is a fellow before you that is a sad dog,’ the prosecutor began. ‘He has committed piracy upon the High Seas ... robbing and ravishing man, woman and child, plundering ships’ cargoes fore and aft, burning and sinking ship, bark and boat, as if the Devil had been in him.’
‘What have you to say?’ asked the judge, turning to the trembling prisoner. ‘Are you guilty, or not guilty?’
‘Not guilty, an’t please your Worship,’ he replied. ‘I am as honest a poor fellow as ever went between stem and stern of a ship, and can hand, reef, steer and clap two ends of a rope together, as well as any that ever crossed salt water. But I was taken ... and forced.’
‘Is our dinner ready?’ the judge suddenly barked, interrupting him. ‘Yes, my lord,’ replied the prosecutor. ‘Then, hark’ee, you rascal,’ the judge continued, addressing the prisoner once more. ‘You must suffer for three reasons. First, because it is not fit I should sit here as Judge and nobody be hanged. Secondly, you must be hanged because you have a damned hanging look. And, thirdly, you must be hanged because I am hungry . . . Take him away gaolor.’
And with that judge, jury, prisoner and prosecutor all rolled about, howling with laughter. This was not an Admiralty courtroom, but a beach on a deserted Caribbean island. And these were not the men of Bartholomew Roberts, but of Thomas Anstis, who had deserted Roberts almost a year earlier. Still awaiting a response to their request for a pardon, they were whiling away the time on their hideaway off Cuba enacting a mockery of a trial, the judge sitting in a tree with a dirty tarpaulin wrapped around his shoulders as a robe.
How Roberts’ men would have loved to be with them, lying on the sand, drinking rum in the shade of the palm trees one last time - poking fun at those who, for so long, had hunted them in vain. But at almost that very moment, thousands of miles away, they faced the dreadful reality of Admiralty justice. Manacled below decks in the hold of HMS Swallow, they were bound for Cape Coast Castle, where General Phipps awaited them in his laced suit.
The 1,000-mile journey back to the Gold Coast was a nightmarish one for Captain Ogle and his men. It rained incessantly and the ships were buffeted continuously by typhoons which swirled out of nowhere and turned the sea into a seething cauldron, before disappearing just as suddenly. And the pirates were by no means resigned to their fate.
Many were ‘impudently merry’, wrote Johnson, taking refuge in black humour. Still naked, and displaying a surprising knowledge of Greek mythology, they complained that Ogle’s men ‘had not left them a halfpenny to give old Charon, to ferry them over Styx’. Eyeing their meagre rations, they joked that they would not be heavy enough to hang once they got to Cape Coast Castle. Thomas Sutton, the gunner, was irritated to find himself chained to a man who prayed day and night. Eventually he exploded and asked him ‘what he proposed by so much noise and devotion’. ‘Heaven, I hope,’ the man replied.
‘Heaven, you fool,’ scoffed Sutton. ‘Did you ever hear of any pirates going thither? Give me Hell, it’s a merrier place. I’ll give Roberts a salute of 13 guns at the entrance.’ Many of the more hardened pirates were soon plotting escape.
HMS Swallow made initially for Princes Island, with the Royal Fortune and the old Ranger, now manned by Ogle’s own men, following in its wake. There it collected the new Ranger, with the Frenchmen and the wounded pirates from the first battle aboard. The vast bulk of the prisoners remained aboard HMS Swallow, which was grossly overcrowded with close to 400 men. But Captain Ogle placed a number of slaves aboard the Royal Fortune, along with ‘three or four wounded’ and Peter Scudamore, the surgeon taken by the pirates at Old Calabar, who was to tend them. It’s a mark of the instant respect that was afforded to someone of Peter Scudamore’s social position that he was not kept chained below. It was assumed he was a forced man and he ate with the officers on board the ship. But they had misjudged him.
Close to the island of St Thomas, HMS Swallow lost contact with the three former pirate ships in a typhoon. Aboard the Royal Fortune Scudamore saw his chance and immediately began plotting with the slaves, talking to them in ‘a smattering he had in the Angolan language’. He proposed ‘they demolish the white men, and afterwards go down to Angola and raise another company’, a witness later said. ‘Better venturing to do this,’ he argued to the other pirates, ‘than to proceed to Cape Coast, and be hanged like a dog, and sun dried.’ Scudamore knew that, once back at Cape Coast Castle, there would be plenty of evidence against him. And he was now fantasising of becoming captain of an all-black crew. ‘Having lived a long time in this piratical way’, wrote Johnson, the slaves were ‘as ripe for mischief as any’, and quickly agreed. But Scudamore was betrayed by one of his fellow pirates, hoping to curry favour ahead of the trial. The plan was thwarted, Scudamore was stripped of his privileges and clapped in irons.
Aboard HMS Swallow there was also a conspiracy brewing. At its heart were a group of Old Standers, including Valentine Ashplant and William Magness, the quartermaster. They passed messages by means of a mulatto boy, who had been allowed to attend them, and proved sympathetic. But on the night of the planned rising Roberts’ intimate friend, George Wilson, who was chained next to Ashplant, overheard them plotting. Also keen to ingratiate himself, he instantly betrayed the plot to Captain Ogle. Ogle ordered an inspection of the prisoners and found Ashplant, Magness and the others had managed to loosen their shackles. They were clapped back in irons and thereafter were kept under even closer guard, Ogle taking the precaution of keeping the gun room strongly barricaded.
It was with enormous relief that Captain Ogle finally pulled in to Cape Coast Castle on 15 March and with even greater relief that he saw his three prizes arrive a couple of weeks later, having got lost and initially hit the coast close to Sestos, almost 750 miles to the west. Ogle was greeted by an ecstatic General Phipps, whose letters to London were soon brimming with the ‘joyful’ news and gushing with praise for the ‘gallant behaviour and good conduct’ of Captain Ogle, whose bravery had destroyed ‘the arch pirate Roberts’ and his ‘nest of villains’. When the three prizes arrived at the start of April, Phipps quickly went aboard and started scavenging for any goods he could find from the company ships they had plundered, salvaging some tallow, sails, water casks, three slaves and ‘some cloths, which had suffered a little’.
Ogle immediately began transferring men from the hold of HMS Swallow to the cavernous, stone dungeons beneath the castle. The day after his arrival the Hannibal, the company ship the pirates had taken at Old Calabar five months earlier, finally limped home in a pitiful condition. As they were rowed across to the castle the chained pirates could see the face of John Wingfield, the company factor who John Philps had called a ‘son of a bitch’, glowering down at them over the ship’s rail. There would be no shortage of witnesses against them. Captain Traherne from the King Solomon was also here, as was Captain Sharp of the Elizabeth, and the two Dutch captains of the Flushingham and the Gertruycht. There were passengers and crew too from all of these ships, and from the Onslow, including Captain Trengrove and his wife, Elizabeth, whose hooped petticoat William Mead had forced off back in August.
On 26 March HMS Weymouth arrived, having been patrolling the coast to the west, the crew still in a desperately sickly condition. Captain Herdman had learned of Ogle’s success a couple of days before at Cape Three Points. It was agreed Herdman would be president of the court, Ogle obliged to take the role of prosecutor since the pirates’ actions against HMS Swallow would form an important part of the case against them.
Admiralty Courts were regulated by the Act for the Most Successful Suppression of Piracy, passed in 1700. This had stripped pirates of the right to trial by jury, the government having found juries in the colonies were reluctant to convict them. Instead they were tried by a seven-man panel of officials and naval officers. Besides Herdman, the court at Cape Coast Castle would consist of Lt Barnsely and Lt Fanshaw from HMS Weymouth, Edward Hyde, the Royal African Company’s secretary, Henry Dodson and Francis Boye, both merchants, and, of course, General Phipps, who wasn’t going to miss his chance to exact revenge on the men who had so humiliated him over the previous eight months.
The castle buzzed with excitement, its normal population of fifty to a hundred men swollen by the arrival of the two men-of-war, the numerous witnesses, and curious onlookers who’d flocked from all along the coast. At least half a dozen ships bobbed in the road, their flags and pennants fluttering in the bright sunlight. The crew of HMS Swallow told and re-told the story of their double victory over the pirates, and men from other vessels swapped tales of their own suffering at the hands of Roberts and his men. Down in the African village the bemused fishermen went about their daily lives, perhaps stealing the occasional look at the curious Africans the pirates had brought with them, whose language they did not understand, but who had ranged thousands of miles over the oceans as slaves and as pirates and whose story would have been the most interesting of all - if only someone had troubled to write it down.
It took almost two weeks to get all the pirates ashore. By now they had finally given up all hope of escape. The mood among most of them had changed, wrote Johnson, ‘and from vain insolent jesting they became serious and devout, begging for good books, and joining in public prayers and singing of psalms, twice at least every day’. Crowded together with slaves awaiting sale in the dungeons, their conditions were appalling. But preparations for the trial moved with brisk efficiency.
On 28 March 1722 the court assembled in the Great Hall of the castle, the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks audible through the high windows, the sea breeze doing little to dispel the intense, suffocating heat that left accusers and accused, along with those in the gallery, immediately drenched in sweat.
There was little discussion over the fate of the pirates’ slaves. Ogle had taken seventy-five from the Royal Fortune and the new Ranger. The court took the view they were chattels rather than active agents in their own destiny and it was decided they would be sold. But the court agonised for some time over how to try the pirates themselves. Many of their crimes over the previous eight months had been committed against ships of the Royal African Company. This, technically, made General Phipps and the other company merchants ineligible to try them, since they were interested parties. Initially, therefore, it was decided to confine the evidence to the pirates’ actions against HMS Swallow. But since both ships had resisted Ogle’s ship this meant almost all the men would be found guilty. Many had only joined the pirates a month before and some were clearly forced. It was therefore decided to look at the behaviour of each man throughout their pirate careers. ‘Such evidence, though it might want the form, still conveyed the reason of the law,’ the court argued. In practice, General Phipps and his fellow merchants were trying the pirates for crimes committed against themselves.
Ogle had captured a total of 166 white pirates. Fifteen had died - many of their wounds - in the dreadful conditions in the hold of HMS Swallow en route to Cape Coast Castle and a further four died in the dungeons immediately after arriving. A total of 147 men therefore stood trial. Of these, eighty-seven had joined the pirates since they had returned to the coast of Africa the previous June. Twenty-three had joined in the year prior to that. Twenty-four had been taken off Newfoundland in the summer of 1720 and four during the first year of Roberts’ captaincy. Just nine remained from the days of Howel Davis. All but five were British.
The pirates were summoned up from the dungeons one by one. Starved, emaciated and dressed in rags, they formed a pitiful procession. A number had hideous injuries from the final battles against HMS Swallow. Only a small handful retained their swagger. John Walden - ‘Miss Nanny’ - demanded a stool on which to rest the stump of the leg he’d lost when the Ranger was taken. He ‘appeared undaunted though his wounds were great’, according to the court record, and he was ‘careless‘ of defending himself. Another Old Stander, John Coleman, defiantly admitted going aboard prizes, declaring ‘if he must be hanged for it, God’s will be done, ‘twas not of his seeking’. But most pleaded for mercy, in almost all cases basing their defence on the argument that they had been forced.
The most obviously guilty and the most obviously innocent were among the first to be tried. On 31 March, the air cleared by a thunderstorm, the court rattled through sixteen of the Old Standers in one day. Fourteen were found guilty, six of whom were immediately sentenced to hang, the court anxious to remove any ringleaders who might yet attempt an uprising. These six can be viewed as the very core of the crew - William Magness, the quartermaster, Thomas Sutton, the gunner, Little David, Valentine Ashplant, and two other Old Standers called Christopher Moody and Richard Hardy. ‘It is your aggravation, that ye have been the chiefs and rulers in these licentious and lawless practices,’ said Captain Herdman, passing sentence. They were executed three days later. General Phipps ordered their bodies to be hung ‘in gibbets on the most eminent hills around this place, very conspicuous to the shipping as it passes’. As the trial progressed in the sweltering heat over the next few weeks their rotting bodies were also visible to the pirates as they were dragged from the dungeons for trial and emerged blinking into the courtyard of the castle on their way to the Great Hall.
One of the men tried with them, John Dennis, attempted a plea bargain with the court. Dennis had been with the crew since Howel Davis’s time. He knew the crew inside out and offered to distinguish the forced men from the real pirates. Herdman, Phipps and the others conferred, but eventually turned him down. They didn’t trust him. More importantly, they didn’t need him. They had Henry Glasby.
Glasby was brought up from the dungeons for trial on 2 April. At first glance he was in a dangerous situation. He had been with the pirates for more than eighteen months and, as sailing master aboard the Royal Fortune, was one of their most senior men. But Captain Traherne of the King Solomon made clear that he was master in name only. The pirates ‘did as they would . . . never observing him’, he said. Witness after witness testified that he was a prisoner, that he had striven to rein in the excesses of the pirates, and that, when he could, he had returned stolen goods to their owners. He was ‘civil beyond any of them’, said John Wingfield. Acquitted pirates testified Roberts had never required him to play any military role, his responsibilities being restricted to sailing the vessel. Speaking for himself, he told the story of his two escape attempts in the Caribbean, and said that ‘Roberts after this was ever jealous of him and never committed his secrets or private designs to him’. Acquitting him, the court noted ‘that his evidence would be of great use . . . for trying the remaining prisoners’.
For so long a prisoner among the pirates, Glasby was now the arbiter of their fate. Again and again he was called, and again and again it was his voice, above all, that decided whether a man lived or died. He strove to be fair. Twenty-four times he spoke in favour of men. Isaac Russell ‘was forced out of the Lloyd Galley’ and had ‘feigned sickness’ to avoid being made boatswain’s mate, and had often told him ‘it was a wicked life they all led’, he said. George Ogle ‘was a quiet fellow, not swearing or cursing like most of them, and rather melancholy’. Both escaped the hangman. Glasby identified all of those who had conspired with him to run away, and many of them too were acquitted. But he spoke against far more - forty-six in total. ‘He was looked on as a brisk hand among them,’ he said of Marcus Johnson, a description which was usually enough to send a man to the gallows. He ridiculed the defence of many that Roberts had forced them to take their turn aboard prizes. They went ‘willingly, very willingly’, he insisted, crowding aboard the boats ‘sometimes as almost to sink them’. The pirates cast sour, bitter glances at him as they were hauled back down to the dungeons after sentencing.
The most hostile evidence came from the pirates’ victims. Captain Traherne identified each of the men who had been in the boarding party that seized the King Solomon, and also helped secure guilty verdicts against five of his own crew - despite the fact they had been with the pirates only a month. Samuel Fletcher, he said, ‘was always grumbling when ordered to any duty, and several times wished to God Almighty they might meet the pirates’. Fletcher pointed out this was true of most of the King Solomon’s crew, but to no avail.
John Wingfield from the Hannibal gave evidence against twenty-two men and spoke in favour of just four. William Davies ‘was but ill charactered even among the worst of them’, he said. The boatswain William Main ‘very active on all piratical occasions’. Richard Hardy ‘robbed his ship [and] broke the hinges of a box to get the gold out’. Elizabeth Trengrove took the stand and pointed an accusing figure at William Mead as the man who had forced her hooped petticoat off aboard the Onslow.
The surgeon, Peter Scudamore, was summoned on 5 April and found himself confronted with a battery of hostile witnesses, all ridiculing his claim to be a forced man. ‘There was no force used to compel him,’ said Glasby, contemptuously. Captain Traherne and Captain Sharp both accused him of stealing medicines and surgeon’s tools from their ships. Most damningly, his fellow prisoners from the Royal Fortune described his attempt to incite an uprising among the slaves during the passage from Cape Lopez. Scudamore admitted he had spoken ‘a few foolish words’ during the voyage, but claimed they were hypothetical - he was merely pointing out that the slaves could have taken the ship if they had wanted to. In whispering to the slaves ‘in the Angolan language’, he was merely passing the time, ‘trying his skill to tell twenty, he being incapable of further talk’. The court was unimpressed and sentenced him to hang.
Two days later George Wilson was brought from the dungeons. His case proved more complex than any other, Wilson demanding the right to cross examine witnesses at length. He claimed his supposed ‘intimacy’ with Roberts was merely a ruse. If he paid Roberts ‘undue compliments and deference he did it with intention to ingratiate himself, and gain a good treatment from him . . . This was no more than what every prisoner endeavoured and practiced that had any regard to their own interest.’ He urged also his youth in excuse for his ‘rashness’. His case dragged on so long it was eventually adjourned until 17 April, enabling the court to get on with trying the other pirates. When he was recalled he was found guilty. But his betrayal of the proposed rising by the Old Standers aboard HMS Swallow saved him from immediate execution, the court granting him the right to return to England to plead for a royal pardon.
All the time John Atkins sat scribbling in a corner. He had been appointed court registrar on thirty shillings a day and the entire proceedings are recorded in his meticulous hand. Stretching to 184 pages, they provide us with a unique portrait of the inner workings and dayto-day life of a pirate crew. Not only are we given potted biographies of every man, but we learn of their different ranks, of how they organised the system of turns aboard prizes, of how booty was divided and how decisions were taken, of their punishments and rewards, and of how they spent their leisure time. It provides us with a mass of incidental detail, unavailable for any other pirate crew, freeing us from dependence on sensationalist and not always reliable secondary sources. From it, one fact emerges very clearly - this, the most prolific of all pirate crews, killed startlingly few people. Of their 400 prizes they had to fight for just two - the Sagrada Familia off Brazil in October 1719, and the Puerto del Principe off Dominica in January 1721. Other than in battle they never killed a single officer, crew member or passenger from any of the ships they captured - to their cost, since many went on to testify against them.
There were certainly thugs aboard, like Little David and Miss Nanny. Captives were beaten and ‘drubbed’ and some of the pirates took a sadistic pleasure in threatening and terrorising their victims. But the pressure from new recruits to punish their former captains was generally resisted. And, having heard hours of testimony, Phipps, Herdman and the rest of the judges were sceptical of many of the claims of mistreatment by ‘forced’ men. Usually this was a ‘pretence’ or ‘complotment’ for the benefit of witnesses, they concluded. And when men were genuinely reluctant, a beating was the worst they received. For all the tales of men having ‘a pistol clapped to their breast’, no one was ever executed for refusing to join Roberts’ crew.
There was much wanton destruction of property, particularly aboard vessels belonging to the Royal African Company. But many of the ships taken by Roberts went on to complete a successful slaving voyage. The Martha, taken in August 1721, unloaded 114 slaves in Nevis five months later while the King Solomon sailed for Jamaica in June 1722 laden with 300 slaves. As often as not the cargo of trade goods was left intact and at times it feels almost as if Roberts was taxing the ships he captured as much as plundering them. At Whydah he took just eight pounds of gold from each ship, although some were carrying far larger amounts.
Roberts’ men committed one truly barbaric act - the grotesque slaughter of the slaves at Whydah. To this might be added the attack on the African town at Old Calabar, and the use of Africans for target practice by Howel Davis’s men immediately prior to Roberts’ capture. For them, the lives of Africans were worth less than those of Europeans. But in this they were creatures of their time and no different from the law-abiding community of slave traders and plantation owners they preyed upon. The judges at Cape Coast Castle were not particularly concerned with the massacre at Whydah. For them it was just another crime against property, and it barely featured in the trial. Roberts’ men stood accused of being ‘traitors, robbers and pirates and common enemies of mankind’. Not one of them was on trial for murder.
But this was more than enough to send them to the gallows. When the trial concluded after little more than three weeks on 20 April a total of seventy-two men had been sentenced to hang. A further seventeen were referred to the Marshalsea prison in London for further examination. And George Wilson and one other were found guilty, but permitted to plead for a royal pardon. Of the seventy-two condemned men, twenty had their sentences commuted to seven years’ service in the mines at Cape Coast Castle - an effective death sentence given the conditions there. This left just fifty-six men acquitted, most of them among the newer recruits. It was the greatest slaughter of pirates ever carried out by the Admiralty.