The ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ effectively came to an end in April 1722, when the last members of the New Providence ‘House of Lords’ were strung up at Cape Coast Castle. Without this core of ruthless pirates, the cycle of seizing vessels and forcing men to maintain their large pirate companies was broken.
In any case, by then the game was all but up. Their rampage across the Caribbean, African and Indian seas over the past four years had finally spurred the governments into taking unequivocal and direct action. The old policy of ‘carrot and stick’ was abandoned – there would be no more pardons, only relentless pursuit by naval squadrons. Likewise, the old accommodation struck up between a retiring pirate and a colonial governor became a thing of the past. Corrupt officials were weeded out and replaced by more resolute men who could not be so easily bribed.
Those pirates that were not caught and hanged – such as Edward England and John Taylor – got out of ‘the business’ and found sanctuary where they could: in their case, one under the protection of old mates on Madagascar and the other in the coastguard service of the Spanish. For the few remaining pirate companies that still pursued their chosen profession, it was only a matter if time before they were captured and killed. The rapid rise of royal navies and the armed fleets of the great trading companies gave the offensive power needed to enforce the Law of Nations in every corner of the planet. In the Caribbean the South Seas Company fitted out pirate chasers that assisted the navy to clear out the last of them. The East India Company performed the same service in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Prizes were also becoming tough nuts to crack for a single pirate company, as the fledging marine insurance industry took to rewarding merchant captains who fought off pirates.
For the Scots merchants, their losses to Black Flag pirates and Barbary corsairs had a profound impact on their business schemes. With full legal access to the Americans after the Act of Union (1707), they gave up, for the time being, their attempts to enter the East Indies and the African slave trades in favour of shipping tobacco and sugar. These trades kept their vessels plying the North Atlantic routes and away from the southern oceans where sporadic acts of piracy continued to happen after 1722.
The incentive to turn pirate in North Atlantic waters had, by then, virtually disappeared, as demonstrated by the paltry haul of personal valuables looted by the Orcadian pirate, John Gow, during his winter cruise off the Iberian Peninsula (1724–5). Even where the lure was irresistible – such as the barrels of silver dollars which tempted the opportunities Heaman and Gautier – the chances of getting clean away by landing on a remote Scottish shore were slight. By the time of their capture in 1821, the agents of government were firmly entrenched in every port in Scotland and Revenue cruisers patrolled the coastline. The trial of Heaman and Gautier marks the end of Scotland’s sporadically rich contribution to Pirate History, the legacy of which has since reached the attention of the world through the pens of Defoe, Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.