Pirates! Eric Graham has a riveting tale to tell. Too much of Scottish history is either ill-written text or retold romance. Not this: it is an account of brutal criminals preying on legitimate merchants sometimes scarcely less brutal than themselves, of sensational crimes and short lives (few pirates outlived their thirtieth birthday), and it is a story of law enforcement equally cruel and often grossly unjust. It goes with pace: it is informed by original records form the Scottish Admiralty Court, many unused before. It uncovers a world of historical fact unimagined by most of us.
In Scottish literature, it was Robert Louis Stevenson who was the unrivalled master of pirate stories, but the journalism of Daniel Defoe and the folklore collecting of Walter Scott predated and informed Treasure Island. Until now, few historians have explored this topic, and when Eric Graham does so he discovers a truth harsher than fiction, but no less colourful. What novelist could outdo the contemporary description of Bartholomew ‘Black Bart’ Roberts, pirate captain, fighting to his death dressed in a ‘rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain round his neck, with a diamond cross hanging to it, a sword in his hand and a pair of pistols hanging at the end of a silk sling, hung over his shoulder’? Or imagine crimes more awful than the mutilations, rapes, tortures and casual executions of their prisoners that were the pirates’ stock in trade? Or generosity more ostentatious than that of the former pirate hunter and Governor of Madras, Captain James Macrae, who returned from his adventures to make his simple cousins rich and their humble daughter (by dint of a huge dowry) the thirteenth Countess Glencairn?
Underneath the detail and the drama, however, lie some remarkably important discoveries relevant to the history of Scottish trade. The Glasgow merchants became famous for their part in the tobacco trade. But Eric Graham shows how they were equally attracted in the first years after the Union to the slave trade, only to be scared off it by their losses to the pirates who cruised the African coast as well as the Caribbean. The great age of the pirates lasted from the late seventeenth century to the 1720s and was brought to a close by the Royal Navy. How would the Scots have fared without its protection? Not well, to judge by the many disasters that befell ships of the Darien Company when they tried to sail in the Indian Ocean.
This is a book of few heroes, and of many villains of almost unimaginable wickedness, but you did not have to be a pirate to be a blackguard. The story of the captain and crew of the Worcester, the English East Indiaman, who were arrested, tried and executed for piracy even as evidence was being presented of their innocence, is a tale of political expediency and moral cowardice that engulfed the highest in the land.
Piracy still exists, of course, in the West Indies and off Indonesia. The last pirates in Scottish waters were a Swede and a Frenchman executed in Edinburgh in 1822 after trying to come ashore in Lewis with their ill-gotten gains. We are certainly well rid of them. This splendid book explains it all.
CHRISTOPHER SMOUT