Defoe has been credited as the father of the ‘adventure novel’ and Scott the father of the ‘Scottish novel’. Both shared a common interest in Scottish history and a particular fascination with the sordid exploits of Scottish rogues and pirates, at least one of whom, John Gow, the Orcadian pirate, was thoroughly investigated by both.
Daniel Foe (he later added the ‘De’ to his surname) was born to a dissenting Presbyterian family of butchers some time around 1660. He died ‘of a lethargy’ in 1731 in lodgings in Ropewalk Alley, Moorfields, a short distance from where he was born in East London. He had been, yet again, hiding out from his creditors. During his adult lifetime, the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ had flourished, rampaged around the world and finally burned itself out.
Defoe’s background is as shadowy as the rogues and villains he chose to write about. Bankrupted three times, he struggled to avoid debtors’ prison while earning an erratic living as a poet, political satirist, propagandist, government spy, hack newspaper reporter and finally novelist. His bitter experience with the libel laws taught him to use the cover of a nom de plume or the anonymity of the unsigned ‘True Account of’.
Whether or not Defoe wrote the General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724) under the nom de plume Captain Charles Johnson, has been hotly contested ever since their names were first linked in 1932. Prior to that, the generally held assumption was that Johnson was a real captain, a man who had sailed with or knew the pirates intimately and who subsequently retired to write and publish his experiences. This was certainly the view of the pirate historian, Philip Gosse, in his foreword to a 1925 edition. This was the ninth edition, by which time the book had been sold in four different languages, a lasting testament to the durability of the public interest in pirates.
Unfortunately, there is not a trace of such a captain ever existing around the right historical period. This makes Johnston’s existence dubious, as those who did make a good living from their buccaneering memoirs, such as the ‘Devil’s Mariner’ William Dampier and his fellow adventurers William Hacke and Lionel Wafer, all knew each other and were celebrities on the fringe of fashionable London society. They left corroborating eye-witness accounts and a trail of personal and official documentation by which to authenticate their existence and verify their claims.
None of these authors can possibly be the writer of what has since come to be known as ‘Johnson’s Pirates’. All were long dead by the time the two hell-cats Anne Bonny and Mary Read (recorded in the first edition) were tried in Jamaica in 1720. Of the first wave of buccaneer captains of the Golden Age of Piracy, only Woodes Rogers was in London at the time of the release of the first edition in 1724. That he is the mysterious Captain Johnson is possible, but highly unlikely, as he is known to have published only once, and then under his own name, back in 1712. Moreover, he would never have made the small discrepancies in dates, names and places that riddle the section on New Providence and the pirates.
The other highly unlikely candidate, who hardly deserves a mention, is the actor and hack playwright Charles Johnson. He lived in London around the time and penned the play The Successful Pyrate which was first performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 1713. This tale was loosely based on the life and adventures of the first great Indian Ocean pirate Henry Avery; hence the possibility that he might be the author of ‘Johnson’s Pirates’. However, all his other dramatic works were on wholly unrelated subjects. Indeed, there is no evidence to connect this famously overweight thespian and notorious plagiarist with the sea or pirates.
Defoe, on the other hand, fits the profile perfectly. Indeed, it is somewhat astonishing, given his propensity to write under pennames and his known interests, that his name was not connected with Captain Johnson earlier. He had originally intended to enter the Church but chose instead to be a merchant in overseas trade. His short career in mercantile speculation ended in bankruptcy, leaving him with a colossal debt of £17,000. It did, however, bring him into contact with sea captains and their accounts of pirates. He had other connections with the sea: his sister had married a shipwright and he is thought to have known Woodes Rogers when he resided in London.
Furthermore, during his numerous visits to Scotland, from 1706 onwards, he would have followed the example of the vast majority of gentlemen travellers and sailed from London to Leith. By all accounts the (at times) hair-raising passages on the fast sailing smacks which regularly plied this route provided many an attentive passenger with an education in practical seamanship. He was, therefore, well informed on maritime and plantation matters and understood the principles of handling a ship at sea. These details add that touch of authenticity to the accounts of ‘Johnson’s Pirates’ and underpin the original assumption that the author must have been a real sea captain. As all circumstantial and stylistic evidence point to Defoe, it is my opinion that he is the author of the General History of Pyrates. The first, leather-bound, edition of which went on sale from Charles Rivington’s bookshop in St Paul’s, London, in May 1724.
Defoe developed his interest in maritime low life during his six-year editorial collaboration with John Applebee. This publisher was particularly noted for his Confessions and short biographies of notorious criminals and miscreants.
Their relationship was struck up when Defoe’s career as government spy and political satirist (he wrote under such pseudonyms as ‘Quaker’, ‘Scots gentleman’, ‘Jacobite rebel’ and ‘Turkish spy’) came to an abrupt end in 1718. He was rumbled for writing simultaneously for the Whig Whitehall Evening Post and the Tory Weekly Journal or Secondary Post. Only the previous year he was regularly publishing (anonymously) in the Jacobite Mist’s Weekly Journal. When this became public knowledge, he lost the trust of all combatants in the political arena. Defoe’s services as a political agent provocateur and ‘spin doctor’ were summarily dispensed with. Indeed, the hoodwinked editor of Mist’s Weekly Journal, on hearing of Defoe’s duplicity, threatened to pursue and murder him.
Defoe was approaching sixty when he started his new commission with Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal. This involved visiting Newgate and Marshalsea prisons to glean the necessary gruesome details and the woeful tales expected by its readership. He was, of course, no stranger to the inside of a prison cell, having been arrested twice for libel. This time, however, he came into direct contact with the worst of London’s underworld – prostitutes, highway robbers and pirates.
His key contact in Newgate Prison was the Reverend Paul Lorrain. For twenty years Lorrain had served as chaplain to the condemned – the ‘Ordinary’ – in the prison. A major part of his job was to interrogate the wretches in the hope that by confronting them with their past sins, they would repent and so become one of ‘Lorrain’s Saints’. He then accompanied them on their last cart ride through the streets of London, lined with jeering mobs, to the gallows. Pirate executions were particularly well attended and attracted vast crowds along the route to Execution Dock, Wapping. Many shouted taunts at the doomed pirate to throw them ‘pieces of eight’ as he passed.
Lorrain also had a profitable sideline – writing ‘broadsheets’ that sold for a penny or two on the streets just before or immediately after an execution. These recorded the purported Confessions heard by him in the condemned man’s cell the night before, or the Last Dying Words gathered from the foot of the hangman’s ladder. Indeed, Lorrain would have been a prime contender for the credit of writing ‘Johnsons Pirates’, had he not died in 1719. Defoe had full access to these broadsheets (collectively known as the Newgate Calendar), as Applebee was Lorrain’s official printer.
Another source for Defoe was the trials themselves, which were open to the public. The trial of Walter Kennedy heard at the Old Bailey in 1721 described the fate of ‘Black Bart’ Roberts’s treasure and the episode at Loch Craignish in Argyllshire which Defoe briefly mentions. It would, however, seem certain that he had not attended the earlier trial of Kennedy’s crew in Edinburgh (1719). None of the extensive and new details of the pirate activities of Davis and Roberts available from that trial are evident in ‘Johnson’s Pirates’. Indeed, if Defoe had relied on the contemporary newspapers – the London Gazette, Edinburgh Evening Courant and Edinburgh Gazette – to cover that trial for him, he would have gleaned only the barest statements as to their arrest and execution.
The testimonies of the Craignish pirates and that of the prosecution witnesses serve, therefore, as a unique independent verification of the authenticity of ‘Johnson’s Pirates’. The conclusion is that Defoe’s general story-line on the spread of piracy out of New Providence is very close to that given in evidence in Edinburgh. Similarly, his specific details of the actions and character of the major pirates involved – Davis, Roberts, Antis and Kennedy – are a very good match.
Dates of events, however, slip by a month in some instances and there are a few discrepancies between the witness statements and Defoe’s account in ‘Johnson’s Pirates’, the principal one being that he states that Dennis Topping (one of the six pirate ‘Lords’ with Davis at the taking of the Buck) was killed boarding the Portuguese bullion galleon Sacrada Familia off Brazil. In fact, Topping was very much alive and well when he stood trial for piracy at Edinburgh almost a year later. Indeed, Topping (‘Toppen’ on the list of accused) was one of the fortunate seven who were acquitted on the grounds that he was forced from the slaver Morrice at Anamaboe and was never a Blade. Topping is thought to have returned to London, where most retiring pirates headed, on his release from Edinburgh Castle. It is little wonder that Defoe chose to hide behind a pen-name with such rogues at large.
Defoe was ideally suited for his new line of work. A lifetime as a hand-to-mouth political journalist had equipped him with an eye for a story. His distinctive direct reporting style worked well with this type of seedy material and publisher. He was, by then, an expert in the use and abuse of facts with which to spin a moral tale.
Shortly after he embarked on this new career, he decided to try his hand at novel writing. His first effort, Robinson Crusoe, published in April 1719, was an instant success. This immortal tale of marooning was based on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk of Upper Largo, Fife. Selkirk, the world’s most famous castaway, had been rescued from his self-imposed exile by Woodes Rogers. Rogers was cruising off the Chilean coast on the Duke, with Dampier as his pilot on the Dutchess, in search of Spanish prizes when he called into Selkirk’s chosen home – the island of Juan Fernandez.
Rogers had published his account of this epic voyage, A Cruising voyage round the World … begun 1708 and finished 1711 … an account of Alexander Selkirk’s living alone four years and four months in an island, in London in 1712. This provided Defoe with the raw material for his most famous character. Whether he ever met Selkirk has never been established. Selkirk returned to London on Rogers’ Duke before Defoe was dispatched to Scotland for the second time. It is, therefore, quite probable that they did, for a mariner who had sailed with Dampier and Rogers was a celebrity in London’s world of commerce and shipping. Selkirk later died while serving on board a British warship off the Guinea Coast and was buried at sea.
More to the point, Rogers was back in London in 1721. Having rid New Providence of its pirates, he had fallen foul of the same brand of skulduggery that ended the careers of two other governors, Lord Archibald Hamilton and James Macrae. Rogers’ twenty-one-year Crown lease of the Bahamas was rescinded and he was recalled under a cloud and close to bankruptcy. Indeed, he spent some time in debtors’ prison before he eventually cleared his name and regained his position as governor, returning to the Bahamas in 1728.
During Rogers’ sojourn in London, to canvass their Lordships of the Board of Trade for justice and recompense, Defoe had ample opportunity to renew his acquaintance with him. It is virtually inconceivable that Defoe – the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe – would not have used this opportunity to hear at first-hand Rogers’ account of his rescue of Selkirk from his island and of the spread of piracy and the evil-doings of the rogues he expelled from New Providence.
In the adept hands of Defoe, such privileged information was collated and reworked to suit his own ends. He had learned from his time with Applebee that what sold well was heaps of gratuitous violence and an occasional incident of sexual abuse, set in wondrous and wild places. The moral message was usually hammered home with the inevitable grisly ending for the wrongdoers.
The perfect vehicle for his style was the fake autobiography complete with The Authentic Account of, cover. It was a winning formula that he repeated with The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and the pirate tale The Adventures of Captain Singleton. Stories of the adventures of pirates committing crimes on the grandest scale and a harlot’s progress to the New World greatly appealed to the scandal-mongering and hedonistic society of Hogarth’s London.
The known world of the early eighteenth century was then expanding geographically at breakneck speed along with debates on social values and political outlook. The philosophers mused on the pirate phenomenon – an anarchic group made up of desperate individuals waging war on all society, yet a brotherhood tied by their own Articles of Regulation on their floating democracies. Defoe’s description of the settlement of Liberteria on Madagascar founded by a pirate named Mission – a proto-socialist commune which even forbade the planting of hedges between houses – was almost certainly one of his inventions aimed at intriguing his readership.
As the ‘Age of Reason’ blossomed in the sciences and humanities, so the Church’s traditional monopoly on the instruction of individual morality was challenged. Pirates and highwaymen, by breaking the rules of society and paying the ultimate price, were a fashionable humanist alternative to the biblical parables of divine retribution. Even the morally righteous were intrigued by the sheet audacity, scale of wickedness and marvellous feats of seamanship of the Black Flag pirates.
In his extended Volume II of the General History of Pyrates (published in 1728) Defoe heavily indulged in moralising on the hypocrisies of the society of his day. This work reported mostly on the lives of the first generation of pirates – those raiding between 1695 and 1716. It was, therefore, based much more on hearsay and legend and less on contemporary accounts. Defoe has Avery, the man who took the fabulous treasure from the Great Mogul’s ship, swindled out of his diamonds by local merchants in Barnstaple and dying a pauper without leaving the means to pay for his own coffin. He also took the liberty of inventing three fictitious pirates – Mission, Cornelius and Lewis – as vehicles for his sermonising.
Tinkering and embellishing the facts was a hallmark of Defoe’s work. According to his own (unreliable) memoirs he was a politically active dissenter at the very start of the revolt against Catholic King James. He claimed to have served on the losing side during the Monmouth Rebellion. Somehow he managed to escape the field on his stampeding horse and so evaded the clutches of ‘Hanging Judge’ Jeffreys.
It would seem likely that he transposed his own experience to dramatise one of the key scenes in the story of the pirate Bartholomew Roberts. This is when ‘Lord’ Sympson begrudgingly withdrew his candidacy for the vacant captaincy of the Royal Rover after the death of Howell Davis. He credits the bigoted young Scotsman with the sour aside that he did not care who they chose Captain, so it was not a papist, for against them he conceiv’d an irreconcileable Hatred, for that his father had been a Sufferer in Monmouth’s Rebellion.
Defoe’s long association with Scotland came about as a consequence of his brushes with the Establishment. This close relationship had started well enough. Commencing in 1691 he wrote some favourably received pamphlets. His long poetic eulogy, The True Born Englishman, in praise of the new King William was highly popular in its day.
He later, however, got into serious trouble with the high Tories. In 1703, he published the satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way With Dissenters. This tract lampooned the Tories’ hard-line stance: ‘Tis vain to trifle in this matter. The light foolish handling of them by mulcts, fines, etc., ‘tis their glory and advantage. If the gallows instead of the Counter, and the Gallies [slave galleys] instead of fines were the reward for going to a conventicle, to preach or hear, there would not be so many sufferers. When it was realised that the ‘high flyer Tory’ author was the jumped-up dissenter Defoe, the Earl of Nottingham (Secretary of State and champion of the high Tories) made it his business to have him tracked down. For this piece of ironic mimicry Defoe was imprisoned, convicted and sentenced to stand in the pillory three times. This led to his second bankruptcy in 1704 and paved the way for his recruitment as a government agent.
In 1706 Robert Harley, Secretary of State for England, sent Defoe to Scotland as a propagandist. His mission for ‘Robin the Trickster’ was to write pamphlets to sway public opinion towards accepting the Act of Union. He later claimed that in this special service … I had to run as much risk of my life as a grenadier upon a counterscarp. Nevertheless, he churned out a prodigious amount of tracts across the spectrum of topics related to the Union for his master.
When Harley was dismissed from government in 1708, Defoe was retained by the Queen’s chief minister, ‘Clockwork Godolphin’. Godolphin was a moderate Tory who tolerated Defoe’s pro-Whig Review newspaper, in which Defoe continued to write thrice weekly. It was during this term of employment that he published his History of the Union (1709) in which he reported on the political implications of the piracy trial of Captain Green and his crew at Edinburgh four years earlier. By 1710 Harley was back in office and Defoe’s pen was again gainfully employed for the Whigs.
In 1714 he was again in prison for libel. It was a short interlude as he was soon freed on the orders of Lord Townsend, the latest Secretary of State. Townsend urgently needed Defoe’s skills as an impersonator and his knowledge of Scotland to infiltrate the Jacobite circles that had gone underground since the failed ‘Fifteen Rebellion’. During this mission (1716–20) Defoe toured Scotland extensively, acquiring a very good geographic knowledge of the remote parts of the region.
Defoe put this to good use when relating the various locations surrounding the comings and goings of the pirate John Gow in Orcadian waters. His story initially appears in a thick pamphlet, An Account of the Conduct and Proceeding of the late John Gow alias Smith Captain of the Late Pirates Executed for Murther and Piracy. It was unsigned, but there can be no dispute as to his authorship as his editor-to-be (after 1726), Mr Lee, cross-referenced ‘Gow’ with ‘Defoe’ in his personal catalogue.
This pamphlet was released by Applebee on 11 June 1725, the day of Gow’s execution. The trial had started only seventeen days earlier and so it was a classic piece of opportunistic courtroom journalism. It was never reprinted, for soon afterwards the third edition of Johnson’s Pirates appeared. This edition contained the first major change in content with the inclusion of a new section, ‘The Life of Captain Gow’, together with a lesser essay on the Irish pirate Roche.
One hundred years later Sir Walter Scott was involved in a scheme to edit Defoe’s great legacy to Scottish affairs and history, a veritable mountain of pamphlets, tracts and commentaries. He was certainly aware of his work on Gow, as well as his essays, Scottish Rogues, in which he took a keen interest. This latter work included a description of a contemporary of Gow, the cattle thief and proscribed outlaw Rob Roy Macgregor. Sir Walter Scott rehabilitated the wild robber Rob Roy by raising him to the status of a romantic legend caught up in the changing turbulent world of the Highlands after the Fifteen Rebellion.
Scott’s interest in Gow was stimulated by his voyage in 1814 to Orkney on board the sloop Pharos, belonging to the Commissioner for Northern Lights. Britain was then at war with Napoleon’s empire and America. The risk of enemy privateers in northern waters was very high, so the sloop was armed and escorted by the sloop-of-war hms Spitfire when she left Leith. The Spitfire soon detached herself as she was ordered to join up with the light frigate hms Alexandria in the hunt for the elusive American super-frigate uss President.
Once the Pharos was in the Pentland Firth, her watch sighted a large vessel in the distance. It was uss President making her way through the passage en route to intercepting the British Archangel convoys off Spitsbergen. It is an interesting conjecture to consider what would have been the impact on the Scottish novel had Commodore John Rodgers taken Scott prisoner that day and carried him off to America.
As it was, Scott was landed safely on Orkney and went in search of the traditions surrounding the local pirate. At Stromness, Gow’s home-port, he sought out the ancient Bessie Millie. She was a wizened old lady who ‘sold winds’ to anxious mariners for a sixpence from her house perched high above the harbour. Approaching her hundredth year, she regaled Scott with the tale of Gow, whom she claimed to have known when she was a child. Moving on to Kirkwall he visited the Sheriff-Substitute, Mr Peterkin, and pestered him to prepare a full account of Gow’s crimes and arrest, even though it all happened ninety years in the past.
After a gestation period of seven years the novel. The Pirate was published. In the interim Scott had fully absorbed the wild and beautiful seascapes of the Shetlands and Orkney Isles into his writing, with most of the plot takes place at the former location. As to characters, Scott utilised very little of the unsavoury John Gow in his pirate character Captain Cleveland. Bessie Millie, however, had left her impression, as he gave her a cameo appearance as ‘Norna of the Fitful Head’. Only in the later part of the story does the plot transfer back to Orkney and the real incidents first reported by Defoe, principally the abduction and abuse of the two local women by Gow’s crew and the taking of a hostage.
The novel was well received in its time but has since fallen from favour with the reader and critic alike. The master pirate storyteller, Robert Louis Stevenson, later denounced it as a ragged, ill-written book. Others, admirers of Scott’s vivid and atmospheric settings, continue to find great merit in the work.