Captain Macrae’s experiences at the hands of pirates were not unique. There are many reports of piratical acts of violence lodged by hard-pressed Scottish mariners around this period.
Virtually all of the incidents led directly back to the dispersal of the great pirate nest of New Providence in the Bahamas in 1718. This scattering of more than two thousand pirates across the trade routes of the world could not have come at a worse time for Scotland’s merchant classes. The boom following the Act of Union of 1707 was short-lived and largely over by the time the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 halted all overseas trade. It took a few years thereafter for the tobacco and sugar merchants, operating mainly out of the Clyde, to recover their nerve. Their vessels started heading west again just as the virus of Black Flag piracy was spreading out of control across the Atlantic Ocean and beyond.
This phenomenon was, ironically, a direct result of the British government’s new initiative aimed at stamping out the scourge of piracy in Caribbean waters. Piracy had flourished under the cover of legitimate privateering against Spain and France, the enemies of the Protestant William of Orange and later Queen Anne. As William Bignall despairingly wrote in 1709 from Jamaica:
Privateers may follow anyone of our own ships out of port, and take away what he sees good and burn the ship, and we never the wiser. It is the opinion of every one this cursed trade will breed so many pirates, that when peace comes we shall be in more danger from them that we are now from the enemy, their captains have no command, every man is allowed to vote, and so most votes carry the vessell where they please.
His assessment was prophetic, for when a general peace with France and Spain was declared in 1713, piratical attacks on British vessels and townships of the outlying colonies surged.
The explosion of piracy in the Caribbean, however, was largely triggered by the actions of Lord Archibald Hamilton of Riccartoun (Linlithgow). He was the seventh son of the third Duke of Hamilton. As a most faithful servant of Queen Anne, he had made his name as the captain of hms Litchfield while defending Orkney and Shetland waters from attack by Jacobite and French privateers. While discharging his duty, Hamilton had netted a considerable amount of prize money. He then rose rapidly through the ranks of the English (British after 1707) navy to become Governor of Jamaica, a position he secured under the patronage of his uncle, George, Earl of Orkney.
On his arrival at Kingston, in 1711, Hamilton clashed head-on with the old gang of vested interests who had previously dominated the island’s ruling council. Hamilton’s first act was to weed them out from positions of authority. Their leader, the resident Chief Justice, Peter Heywood, proved impossible to oust. Up until then, he and his cronies had greatly benefited from privateering raids on the Spanish and French colonies and shipping. After over twenty years of continuous warfare, it had become an ingrained way of life with the seafaring fraternity.
Such was the reputation of their privateers that by 1712 Spain had suspended the annual shipment of plate (gold and silver) – the flotta – from the New World, as the ‘tit-for-tat’ war at sea between the Spanish and British colonists still raged unchecked. By 1715 there were three years of deferred bullion shipments stockpiled at Cartagena and Vera Cruz, awaiting escort across the Atlantic.
Hamilton’s extensive and costly spy network was quick to report the sailing of the two richest plate fleets of the century. First into Havana was the Cartagena fleet with its consignment of silver and gold coins from the Colombian mint, Peruvian gold jewellery (from an Inca King’s ransom), and 166 chests of emeralds from the mines of Muzo. A late addition to its cargo manifest was a wedding gift of sumptuous jewels, ordered by King Phillip V for his new bride, Elizabeth Farnese, the Duchess of Parma.
On 26 April 1715, as the last of the eight chests of this present was stowed on the Commodore’s flagship, Hamilton wrote to the Admiralty in London under a Most Secret cover: By late advices from Havana I am told the galleons from Vera Cruz were dayly Expected there in order to join the Spanish ships of war, who are said to have great Treasure on board for Old Spain. His intelligence was correct as, shortly afterwards, the Vera Cruz fleet arrived heavily laden with gold and silver ingots from the Mexico City mint, along with silks, ivory and porcelain from Canton and Manila. These latter cargoes had been delivered across the Pacific to Acapulco, and then ferried overland by pack mule to Vera Cruz.
Hamilton’s heavy hints at this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to plunder the coffers of Spain were ignored by their Lordships sitting in London. They firmly refused to condone any act of aggression that would break the fragile peace in Europe. There was also the delicate matter of the British Court being in official mourning for the recently deceased Spanish Queen. Hamilton was, therefore, forced by circumstance to curb his avaricious instincts and assume the role of passive bystander.
On 24 July 1715 the Spanish plate flotta of twelve galleons, accompanied by heavily armed escorts, sailed out in fine weather and unmolested past Havana’s Le Morro fortress. In overall command was General Don Estebano de Ulvelia, Knight of St James. Nine days later, in the Florida Straits, a hurricane smashed into the fleet, catching all but one galleon too close inshore to work out to sea. Once stranded on the reefs and shoals, they faced a certain wrecking as mountainous seas, whipped by hundred-knot winds, crashed onto the decks – so violent that the water flew in the air like arrows, do[ing] injury to those it hit – tearing away masts and superstructure.
On that terrible night, ten vessels were sunk and over a thousand men drowned. The hundreds of survivors who managed to scramble ashore amidst the wreckage faced further tribulations from hostile native Indians and their own callous commanders. Two long boats were salvaged and sent north and south to raise the alarm. The Spanish military authorities at St Augustine (Georgia) were the first to respond. Its governor sent a party of infanty with orders to summarily execute – which they did – any survivor found with so much as one looted coin on his person. With them were priests whose primary function was to hear the last confession of the condemned men.
Small naval units were also brought up to stand guard over the wrecks, eight of which were lying in the shallows amidst the reefs. As this was shark-infested water, a local Indian tribe was enslaved to provide divers. They were forced to use upturned weighted barrels as air bells. None survived the ordeal. By such methods, however, a fifth of the treasure was officially accounted for by the end of the year.
Despite all attempts at secrecy, news of the wrecking of the plate flotta soon reached Hamilton’s ear back in Jamaica. By November he had commissioned, in partnership with a group of Port Royal merchants, three small private men-of-war. These were the snow Eagle (Captain Wills) and the sloops Bersheba (Captain Jennings) and Bennet (Captain Fernando). They departed carrying more than eight hundred Men fitted out in Warlike manner, doubly provided with Grenados and bombs under the cover story that they were hunting Spanish pyrates.
Since the declaration of peace, Spanish armed vessels had seized more than forty Jamaican vessels under the pretence that they were interloping traders caught within five leagues of their shores. Indeed, Hamilton had received a deputation of Jamaican merchants who delivered a petition demanding that their trade and vessels be given armed protection to replace the naval warships that were being recalled back to Britain with the peace.
Hamilton’s three armed cruisers went straight to the wrecks that December. Once there, they found it easier to attack the storehouse on the shoreline for its cache of raised treasure than to dive for it themselves. According to the incensed Spanish governor of Cuba, they were barbarous robbers who overwhelmed the forty defending soldiers, then nailed the guns and stripped the men naked before looting the small fort.
The Eagle and the Bersheba returned in early January 1716 with 120,000 silver ‘pieces of eight’ (£27,000) forcibly seized from the Spanish guards. Matters came to a head with the return of the sloop Bennet. Her captain, Francis Fernando, had intercepted a Spanish vessel only eight miles off the Florida Keys, heading for Havana, and kept her as prize. On board were 49,000 salvaged ‘pieces of eight’ and a small fortune in cochineal and indigo dyes. Hamilton, as a part-owner of the Bennet, stood to gain one-third of this booty, blatantly taken in Spanish waters in peacetime.
To the Governor of Cuba and his Chamber of Commerce sitting in Havana this was a clear-cut case of piracy against Spanish nationals and His Most Catholic Majesty’s property. Furthermore, it was a criminal act carried out with the apparent full knowledge and approval of the British governor sitting in Port Royal. He immediately dispatched his deputy, Don Juan Del Ville, to contest the prize case and extract full satisfaction from Hamilton.
His arrival in Kingston finally drove home to Hamilton the true extent of the compromising position into which he had got himself. In a desperate effort to protect himself he sold his shares in the three vessels, renounced his share of their booty and cancelled their quasi-naval ‘pirate-hunting’ commissions after just one voyage.
To deal with the immediate problem of the most recent attack made by Captain Fernando, Hamilton dispatched his trusted secretary, William Cockburn, to intercept him as he hovered off Jamaica. His instructions were that the cargo of silver and dyes was to be taken off the Spanish prize and landed on the north side of Jamica. Only then was she to be brought round to Port Royal for condemnation before the Vice-Admiralty Court sitting at St Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town).
In an attempt to distance himself, Hamilton also refused to have any further dealings with Captain Fernando. Fernando, facing the Spanish demand that he should be hanged as a pirate, reacted angrily to being made the scapegoat. He insisted that he had acted in accordance with Hamilton’s commission, as his ‘Spanish prize’ was, in reality, the sloop Kensington of Port Royal, taken by Spanish pyrates the previous year. Prior to that illegal seizure, she had been the property of the Receiver-General of Customs of Jamaica, Colonel Broderick, a close supporter of Heywood.
Fernando demanded an urgent meeting with Hamilton to clear his name. After three days’ silence, Hamilton reluctantly agreed, on condition that Fernando came alone, at nine o’clock at night, to a secluded side door in his garden. This clandestine meeting was, however, immediately leaked back to his opponents in the island’s Council. The spy in Hamilton’s camp was his under secretary, William Page, who had been secretly serving as an informant to Heywood, ever since Hamilton’s arrival.
Page also seems, without Hamilton’s immediate knowledge, to have obliged his old friends by issuing at least ten more privateering commissions that summer. With the genie well and truly out of the bottle, the mania for treasure-hunting swept through the island. Captain Blechen, the master of a merchantman in Port Royal, later complained to the Admiralty that ten of his crew had deserted: being all mad to go a wrecking as they term it; For the Generality of the Island think they have Right to fish upon the Wrecks, although the Spaniards have not quitted them.
After he had unleashed this second wave of treasure-raiders, Page absented himself without leave that March, and took passage on hms Diamond, returning to London. He did so on Heywood’s orders as he carried dispatches to their Lordships of the Board of Trade. These contained signed testimonies as to Hamilton’s reckless actions and personal profiteering at the expense of the peace with Spain.
In this way the blame for the recent outrages was laid at Hamilton’s doorstep. One such deposition – that of Captain Jonathan Barner of the snow Tiger – solemnly swore that Governor Hamilton had known of his new commission. Indeed, it was Hamilton, he claimed, who had personally instructed him to go to the wrecks and take the money out of the water, if they were stronger than the Spanish. The other key witnesses were the Deputy Governor of Cuba, Del Ville, and the Chief Justice of Jamaica, Heywood.
The outcome of all this skulduggery was that the unsuspecting Hamilton was summarily dismissed from his post by Royal Command late that summer. In his place as governor was appointed the now favoured Peter Heywood. On receiving his appointment Heywood lost no time. Hamilton was arrested and within days dispatched as a prisoner to face trial in London.
Once there, Hamilton was granted bail to prepare his defence. His case was to be heard before their Lordships of the Board of Trade. He was, by now, fully aware of just how easily Heywood and his cronies had outmanoeuvred him with the help of Page. Belatedly, he penned and published a spirited defence: An Answer to the Anonymous Libel; entitled Articles & Exhibits against Lord Archibald Campbell, which was circulated in London.
In it he denounced his accusers as a set of violent and ill-designing men. Page, he claimed, had acted directly against his explicit order that no further passes should be issued for voyages to the wrecks. Indeed, it was Page who had wilfully forged more, for his own nefarious ends, by misappropriating some old blank commissions that Hamilton had signed prior to his declaration. He cited the minutes of the Council of Jamaica to prove that he had issued only three such passes. These were granted with the strict understanding that they might dive on the wrecks for plate, if the immediate sea area was uncontested by Spanish guard ships.
He had a strong case, and, as none of his accusers chose to respond or make an appearance, he was acquitted of all charges due to insufficient evidence. The damage, however, had been done and he did not receive his office back. Heywood, whilst escaping immediate censure, fared no better, as he was soon replaced as governor. Only the duplicatous Page was signled out by the Board and labelled a man who should never again be given a position of trust.
Just before his arrest, one of Hamilton’s last acts as governor was to declare the passes, illicitly issued by Page to the second wave of treasure hunters, null and void. Henceforth, any captain who attacked and pillaged a Spanish vessel or fort in peacetime was a pirate, and would be treated as such.
The cause célèbre was the case of Captain Henry Jennings on the Bersheba. Jennings had sailed to the wrecks for a third time under the direct orders of the new owner of the sloop, Daniel De Costa Alvarenga, a Jewish merchant in Kingston. Hamilton, now alert to the actions of Page, had used all his authority to try and stop the Bersheba sailing, but this was ignored.
When Jennings reappeared off Port Royal he had on board 30,000 ‘pieces of eight’, forcibly taken at sea from a Spanish vessel that he had intercepted as it returned from the salvage site. Hamilton made it abundantly clear that, should the Bersheba enter Kingston harbour, the sloop and her cargo would be impounded and her captain arrested. Faced with the dilemma of giving up his stolen fortune or facing a capital charge of piracy, Jennings and his crew chose to sail away with their booty.
By then the security situation over the wrecks had deteriorated to a state of lawlessness. Bermudan sloops had muscled-in without procuring a pass from Hamilton’s office. Worse still, the Brethren of the Coast turned up in their droves. When not pirating, these freebooters made a dubious living as dyewood loggers along the hotly disputed ‘Mosquito Coast’ (Belize and Honduras) and the Bay of Campechy (Mexico). They owed little allegiance to any authority and set about the wanton pillaging of the Spanish forts and vessels along the Florida coast to acquire bullion and munitions.
Spanish retaliation was not long in coming and they launched a punitive raid on the Brethren’s encampments. At one location in the Bay of Campechy, twelve vessels were burned, along with onshore huts and stores. Those crews and loggers not slaughtered fled into the jungle where they were left to face starvation. It was, therefore, an easy step for them to turn (or return in some cases) to piracy and start looting ships of any nationality they encountered in order to replenish their provisions.
Forcibly evicted from the mainland, most followed Captain Jennings’ example and headed for Avery’s old pirate haunt of New Providence in the Bahamas. This island, after the Spanish and French raids of 1700, was virtually uninhabited and had momentarily slipped from the immediate control or interest of the British Crown.
This gathering had not gone unnoticed. The Earl of Orkney’s proxy governor of Virginia, the Scot, James Spottiswood, wrote to London in July 1716: a nest of pirates are endeavouring to establish themselves in New Providence and by the additions they expect, and will probably receive, of loosely disordered people from the Bay of Campechy, Jamaica and other parts, may prove dangerous to the British commerce, if not timely suppressed.
It was a prophetic warning for, during the next few months, two thousand of the Brethren moved to the island. Their sprawling encampment soon turned the shoreline of the main anchorage into an open cesspit, the stench from which was detectable many miles out to sea.
The natural prey of these pirates was the square-rigged brigs and ships that exploited the ‘great circle’ of the North Atlantic trade winds that took them out of Caribbean waters via the Florida Straits. The location of the Bahamas as a base for piracy was, therefore, ideal. Their small fast raiders, led by a galaxy of pirate captains, soon swarmed all over this sea area, taking any vessel heading for the North American seaboard or Europe. When not chasing plate galleons and rich merchantmen they turned to looting the smaller craft in the inter-island trade for provisions and marine stores.
The security situation in the Caribbean rapidly became so grave that the governors of the sugar islands were sternly predicting the collapse of the whole plantation economy, as few vessels reached Europe or America without the protection of a convoy. An immediate and comprehensive solution was, therefore, needed.
In the summer of 1717 the Privy Council met at Hampton Court to deliberate on this matter. There was, by then, a much greater sense of urgency as the mounting pirate attacks on neutral vessels were creating diplomatic tensions that threatened the peace in Europe.
The outcome of their deliberations was A Proclamation for the Suppressing of Pirates, which resurrected a tried and tested ‘carrot and stick’ strategy. The ‘carrot’ was a pardon, the Act of Grace, for any pirate who would forswear his criminal ways and return to lawful pursuits by a set date. The offer of pardon was, given the distances involved, valid for a year after receiving the royal assent.
This Act was, however, fatally compromised by the ludicrous decision to include a four-month additional deferment from when an individual’s piratical activity might be reported: We do hereby promise and declare, that in case any of the said pirates shall on or before 5th September in the year of our Lord 1718 surrender themselves … shall have our gracious pardon of … their piracies committed before 5th January next.
This royal proclamation duly arrived safely at New Providence from Bermuda on board hms Phoenix in early December. What happened next was farcical. Three hundred pirates presented themselves for pardon, knowing full well that they had the best part of a month in which to continue raiding. The more belligerent held out for a further extension in which to pursue their interests and dispose of their stock of looted goods. Indeed, they went so far as to threaten to forcibly take over the isolated island of Bermuda and turn it into a ‘new Madagascar’ if refused.
The ‘stick’ was a small naval force under the direction of Sir Woodes Rogers who, by a Royal Commission, was appointed the first Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over our Bahamas islands in America. The redoubtable Rogers was very much the ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ as he was one of the most famous captains of his time. As a privateering commander he had circumnavigated the globe in his pursuit of Spanish bullion which culminated in the taking of the Acapulco galleon on its annual passage across the Pacific. He had actively petitioned the Court to be given this appointment, but with the condition that he would have a free hand in dealing with his unruly Bahamian subjects – many of whom were his old shipmates.
He appeared off New Providence in July 1718 on the ex-East Indiaman Delicia (460 ton), accompanied by his own trading sloop, the Buck. Escorting them was a pirate-hunting naval force comprising the 32-gun fifth-rater hms Milford, the 20-gun sixth-rater hms Rose and the 10-gun sloop-of-war Shark.
The arrival of such a powerful force had been anticipated by a number of the more die-hard pirate companies. Those following Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, Major Stede Bonnet, Christopher Condent and ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham had already slipped away north to raid along the coast of mainland America. Edward England led those crossing the Atlantic to plunder the shipping and slaving forts of the Guinea Coast of West Africa.
Their ringleader, Charles Vane, was still in New Providence. He sent out a letter to Rogers as his flotilla entered Bahamian waters, demanding an extension to the date for the royal pardon and a free hand with their loot. Rogers was determined not to start his governorship by make any such deals, as he had a powerful naval force at his disposal. Accordingly, he sent one escort to each entrance of the New Providence Channel to block Vane’s escape.
Vane’s response was to send a French prize full of munitions as a fire ship down the East Channel that night. He almost succeeded in ensaring the Rose, forcing her captain to slip his cable and run out to sea. Foiled in his design, Vane exploited the mayhem of blazing tar barrels and exploding gunpowder casks to clear out the unguarded channel and vanish into the darkness. He left behind a note swearing to return to burn out Rogers once his naval protectors had left. The old hands watching on dry land as bystanders chose the less dramatic ‘wait and see’ policy.
Three days later Rogers landed with a number of settlers and a small group of soldiers, complete with a chest of Bibles provided by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge for his pirate flock. He was greeted by a ‘guard of honour’ headed by two pirate captains, Benjamin Hornigold and Thomas Burgess. They had organised some 300 drunken inhabitants into two lines who fired volleys wildly into the air, whilst cheering King George.
He described his arrival in a letter to the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations:
Your Lordships,
I arriv’d in this Port on the 26 July last in company with the Men of Warr ordered to assist me. I met with little opposition in coming in, but found a French ship (that was taken by the Pirates of 22 Guns) burning in the Harbour … which we were told was set on Fire to drive out His Majestys Ship the Rose who got in too early the evening before me, and cut her cable and run out in the Night for fear of being burnt by one Charles Vane who command’d the Pirates and at our [approach] and His Majesty’s Ship the Milford near approach the next morning, they finding it impossible to escape us, he with about ninety men fled away in a Sloop wearing the black Flag and Fir’d guns of Defiance when they perceiv’d their Sloop out Sayl’d the Two that I sent to chase them hence
Rogers wasted no time in fortifying the two entrances against the return of Vane and his likes. A number of the 600 old lags who had taken the pardon since his arrival, including Olivier ‘La Bouche’, were provided with strong liquor as an inducement to labour alongside the soldiers rebuilding the ruined bastions of the old forts. A council was convened and law officers appointed from among the settlers and a few trusted indigenous inhabitants. Things were going well for Rogers, and his vision of a self-sufficient, productive and ordered plantation seemed within his grasp. Unfortunately, a terrible fever swept the island, decimating his new settlers and the crews of the naval ships in the anchorage.
He was acutely aware that time was not on his side, especially as his naval commanders were anxious to clear out to sea to avoid the sickness. With the prospect of a new war with Spain over Gibraltar looming, these commanders needed little excuse to abandon their policing role at New Providence which kept them from earning high fees as convoy escorts.
By late summer they had gone, leaving Rogers with only the Delicia and the Buck. Without a naval presence to intimidate them, hundreds of the Brethren drifted back to their old habits. Rogers struggled to find other schemes to occupy their more aggressive talents. The prospect of a new conflict with Spain provided what seemed a perfect diversion for the malcontents under his charge.
With this in mind, he fitted two armed sloops, the Buck and the Mumvil Trader, as privateers for a ‘forced trading’ mission to Spanish Hispaniola. They sailed under his hand-picked captains, Brisk and Porter, each with a complement of some thirty hands recruited from the cream of the pardoned pirates.
Their unwelcome visit to ‘Privateers Bay’ only netted a few low-value prizes. As they disembarked their European goods and supplies to trade for contraband colonial goods with the locals, seven disgruntled veteran buccaneers from the Buck made their move. They seized Captain Brisk, the surgeon, Doctor Murray, and the first mate at pistol point, while they were consulting in the aft cabin. Soon afterwards an element of the crew on the other sloop also seized their officers. In pirate fashion, they elected their ringleader and ‘foremast man’, the Welshman Howell Davis, as their captain. The six Blades that first stood by him were Walter Kennedy, Thomas Antis, Dennis Topping (Toppen), Richard Jones, Roger Hughes (Hews) and John Clerk.
Davis immediately ordered the raising of the Black Flag, thereby abandoning all pretence of chasing only Spanish prizes. The deposed captains, their first mates and a few faint-hearted and sickly mariners were unceremoniously dumped on a French vessel after it had been looted off Barbados. The Scots surgeon and the rest of the two crews were detained on board the Buck.
Freed from all constraints, Davis turned north to raid for a while off the western coast of Dominica. There he took a few American vessels and two from New Providence. A number of the crews from the latter port decided to join him.
By that time, however, Governor Rogers was back in full control of New Providence, having caught and hanged a few backsliders in front of hundreds of their old comrades. Howell Davis, standing on the deck of the Governor’s own sloop, knew for certain that Rogers would now send out his new ‘game-keepers’, Hornigold and Burgess, to hunt him down, should he stay in Caribbean waters. And so Davis set the Buck eastwards, out into the vast expanse of the Atlantic.
Weeks later he arrived off the Isle of May in the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa. By this fine piece of navigation, he had brought the Buck safely to a small remote island that was a well-frequented watering place and source of natural salt for vessels bound for the West Indies or the Indian Ocean.
At his leisure, and in sight of the local mayor, he plundered a number of vessels for stores before deciding to keep a large Liverpool merchantman as his new flagship. Cocking his snook at the Georgian establishment he renamed her the King James. With the Buck as escort, he then headed south for the West African coast and the rich pickings around the slaving forts.
They made landfall off the St James Fort on the Gambia River. Davis’s audacious plan was to scout out the garrison’s defences before attacking. To do this he posed, along with the first mate and the doctor, as enquiring gentleman officers. Well received by the local governor, they were invited to dine. At the table Davis drew a hidden brace of pistols and overpowered the host and his staff. He then fired a shot through an open window as the signal for twenty waiting pirates to rush the guard-room. With the fort in their hands they found out, to their dismay, that they had just missed a gold shipment. In their frustration they sacked the fort for what they could carry and set it ablaze.
As they were about to clear out to sea, they ran into the Frenchman La Bouche who had, like so many from New Providence, reneged on his pardon and turned pirate before crossing over to Africa. The two companies, after a two-day drinking session, made a pact to cruise together. The Buck was abandoned where she lay and her crew was transferred to the King James. This gave them the necessary force to attack another fort with less risk. Their chosen target was the isolated English Royal Africa Company fort on Bance Island, a few miles up the Sierra Leone River.
As they worked their way up this great estuary, they fell in with yet another New Providence brother, the lethally mercurial Thomas Cocklyn, who was busy looting the Bird galley of Bristol. With a flotilla of three ships and hundreds of armed men at their disposal, they made their move on Bance Island fort. This neglected outpost of the Royal Africa Company fell after a day and a night of bombardment and a determined assault by a landing party. The last of the defenders fled upriver in canoes, leaving the fort open to the pirates who plundered it before putting it to the torch.
As fate would have it, the pirates settled down for a well-earned seven-week carousal and refit at ‘Old Crackers’ settlement at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, just as the Clyde’s first generation of dedicated slavers were arriving off the Guinea Coast. The clash of two vested interests was destined to alter the entire direction of Glasgow’s emerging entrepreneurial aspirations.
As for the pirates, their cycle of violence would terminate a year later. For most the end was the gallows outside the gates of Cape Coast (Corso) Castle, Ghana. Of a splinter group led by Walter Kennedy, two would be murdered by locals along a desolate Argyllshire road, and nine of their number hanged – including ‘Lords’ Hughes, Jones and Clerk – between the low and high water marks on the Sands of Leith.