Black Barty: The Real Pirate of the Caribbean

By Aubrey Burl

Bartholomew Roberts, also known as Black Bart, was easily one of the most successful and deadly pirates in all of history. He went to sea at a young age and took to pirate life well. After his ship was taken by pirates, and he was made to join their ranks, Roberts proved himself and was elected captain in 1719. Two years after Roberts was made captain he had accumulated over 51 million pounds worth of treasure and had taken close to 400 ships throughout the Americas, Africa and Europe. He was fearless in battle but good to his prisoners and fair to his crew. He drank a lot of tea instead of alcohol, was well-mannered and clean shaven, and discouraged drinking and gambling among his crew. He is believed to be the first pirate to fly the skull and crossbones. Despite his brief career, Roberts created a reputation that can never be surpassed. Along with his success and bloodthirstiness, he was said to have been "an unusual character for this age, described as tall, good-looking, teetotal, and always well dressed. He possessed a ruthless skill in the piratical arts of intimidation and seamanship, and was highly regarded by his crew."

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jan 19, 2006
• ISBN: 9780752495972

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Ouidah

Introduction

This is the true story, recovered from original sources, of a band of pirates who from 1718 until 1723 terrorised the seas off the African coast, in the West Indies, and in the American colonies. It begins with the suppression of a pirate base on New Providence and ends near the cold shores of Newfoundland.

During those years the pirates had four captains: Howel Davis, the imaginative Welshman; Thomas Anstis, the deserter; John Phillips, the murderer. But it is with the fourth that this book is chiefly concerned because he was the greatest pirate of the age, a tea-drinking marauder of astonishing audacity. His name was Bartholomew Roberts.

He lived at a vintage time for rogues, an age of criminals whose names are household: Captain Kidd, privateer turned pirate, hanged at Execution Dock in 1701; the infamous Blackbeard, Edward Teach the pirate, who was killed in 1718, the year in which this story begins; the pirate women, Anne Bonny and Mary Read at whose trial in 1720 they ‘pleaded their bellies’, confounding the court who did not expect pregnancy in pirates; Jack Sheppard, pickpocket and locksmith, admired for his ingenious escapes from prisons, arduously breaking through padlocked door after door and thick wall after wall at Newgate. He was hanged at Tyburn in 1724.

There was Dick Turpin in 1739, arrested for the unprovoked shooting of his landlord’s gamecock, and who courageously leapt neck-snappingly off the gallows steps to avoid a more lingering death by slow strangulation. Others were almost as well known: Jonathan Wild the thief-taker, Claude Duval, courteous highwayman. But of all of them Bartholomew Roberts was outstanding for his daring, effrontery, and success.

Pirates must be seen against their historical background. The laws of Britain, the state of the American colonies, the self-seeking captains of the Royal Navy, unemployment amongst sailors, all of them contributed to piracy. Although the majority of Britons deplored Roberts they also helped to make him.

Pirates are not to be confused with buccaneers, privateers or corsairs, all of whom were more or less honest. Buccaneers, the Brethren of the Coast, were in the beginning only involved with profitable recriminations against the restrictive trading practices of Spain. Privateers and corsairs were a kind of civil navy with governmental permission to attack their country’s enemies. Loot was an added incentive for patriotism.

Pirates were the enemies of all who sailed the sea. Plunder was their only object, intimidation their chief weapon, corrupt shore officials and trade embargoes their secret allies. Their calling is no more to be defended than that of housebreakers, footpads and highwaymen. Yet no apology is required for this book. Biographies of pirates are rare. Books have been written about piracy in general, usually relishing the atrocities, but until recently most were plagiarisms of earlier works and in them the pirates were puppets. The element that set these criminals apart, the sea, was rarely mentioned. Their ships and the conditions in them were ignored. Content with reporting corpse after corpse such books could as well have been written about Bluebeard the child-murderer as Blackbeard the pirate.

Commendable exceptions to this criticism are the books by David Cordingly, formerly of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. His Life Among the Pirates is a masterly historical review of the facts and fictions that colour the images of the ruffians and blackguards called pirates.

The present book describes how pirates lived and I have chosen to write about one man because his history includes the squalor, the temptations, the fear, the triumphs and the debaucheries that pirates knew. He was also brave, ambitious and successful.

Most pirate books are embellishments of Captain Charles Johnson’s classic, A General History . . . of the Most Notorious Pyrates . . . first published in 1724. Its details and current knowledge make it the foundation stone for any new work. That it is also very readable is unsurprising because ‘Captain Johnson’ was possibly Daniel Defoe who had already written two novels about pirates, The King of the Pirates, 1719, and Captain Singleton, 1720. Johnson’s History . . . is generally accurate but it does contain errors and omissions that contemporary documents and records of trials expand and rectify.1

‘Johnson’ is more reliable about Bartholomew Roberts than of other pirates and better about the end of Roberts’ career than its beginning because he had spoken with naval officers who were at the final trial, one of his informants being the surgeon of the warship, Swallow, John Atkins, who recorded the proceedings at Cape Coast Castle.

The attacks, plunderings, violence described here did happen. There are, perhaps, a dozen minor incidents which are uncorroborated although these are probable. They are identified as such in the Notes. Where a speech is quoted it comes from Johnson and is therefore fictitious but it gives the vocabulary and syntax of the day. What it must lack are the local dialects, regional Welsh, lowland Scottish, Cockney, the rich diversity of pronunciations of those pronouncedly parochial days.

Many events are attested in manuscript in the Public Records Office: the letters of colonial governors; the Calendar of State Papers (Colonial Series); or were admitted by pirates at their various trials. Lurid accounts of brutalities were reported in broad-sheets such as The Original Weekly Journal and others whose copies survive in the Burney Collection of the British Museum’s Reading Room. These bulletins are often the only source for such distant and ephemeral occurrences, the writers obtaining their copy from the returning captains and seamen who had suffered from piracy. References to them are provided in the Notes.

There is a coincidence. Fate brought together two men who by chance were associated with the events in this book, one with their beginning, the other with the end. In 1719 Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, a novel based on the desert island castaway, Alexander Selkirk, who had been rescued by Captain Woodes Rogers in 1709. Selkirk was in the naval warship, Weymouth, as it prepared to attack Bartholomew Roberts.

There are thanks to be offered: to Patrick Pringle for his stirring and exciting book, Jolly Roger, that stimulated my own interest in piracy and for his encouragement; to the Revd W. Lewis, rector of Little Newcastle; to Professor P.N. Furbank for his advice about the authorship of Daniel Defoe; to the staff of the Science Museum, London, who advised me on the technicalities of 18th century ship design; the Public Records Office; the Scottish Records Office; the British Museum Reading Room; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the pirate library of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; the Guildhall Library, London; the National Library of Scotland; the National Library of Wales; the libraries of Hull College of Higher Education, the University of Birmingham, and the Society of Antiquaries of London.

I am most grateful to Sally Jones of Alun Books, Port Talbot, for having the initiative to publish the story of just one pirate, albeit Welsh, however successful he was. Equally I am delighted at the enthusiasm of Sarah Flight of Sutton Publishing, Stroud, who has reincarnated that tea-drinking, Sabbath-observing, richly-apparelled scoundrel.

Finally, to the many friends and colleagues whose help and interest has saved this book from fading into a bloodthirsty dream.

1

Captain Howel Davis

1718–1719

‘The pyrates off the coast of Guinea in Africa have taken goods to the value of £204,000’.

The Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 9 April 1720

Early in January, 1709 the winter in England was so bitter that the Thames turned to ice and Dean Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels , ate gingerbread at one of the fairground stalls set up on the frozen river. A few weeks later but eight thousand miles away Robinson Crusoe was rescued.

‘Crusoe’ was not his real name. It was invented by Daniel Defoe ten years later when he wrote his first novel after forty impoverished years as a pamphleteer. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was Alexander Selkirk and his rescuer was Captain Woodes Rogers, a privateer famous for his raids on the American possessions of England’s enemy, Spain. It is a minor irony of history that it was Rogers who saw the start of the greatest reign of piracy the seas had known and it was Selkirk who almost saw its end which came only two months after his death on board a man-of-war pursuing Bartholomew Roberts.

Defoe had read Rogers’ account of his privateering expedition, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, 1712, as the similarity of extracts from the two books show. Rogers, an experienced seaman and navigator had been commissioned by Bristol merchants to attack and plunder Spanish territories in the Pacific in retaliation for Spain’s unremitting harrassment of British shipping. Despite mutiny, near-starvation and battles at sea in which he was twice wounded Rogers returned in 1711 with a rich cargo of some £170,000, a huge sum when a soldier maimed in the wars might receive a pension of £18 a year. Rogers also brought back Selkirk who had been marooned in 1704 for more than four years on Màs-a-Tierra, now renamed Isla Robinson Crusoe, the largest of the Juan Fernandez islands off the coast of Chile, after refusing to sail in an unseaworthy vessel. He was discovered only by accident when Woodes Rogers sent a boat ashore for fresh water.1

Rogers had been so successful that on his return to England he was rich enough to rent the West Indian islands of the Bahamas, with the appointment as governor, for twenty-one years. But there was a problem. Piracy flourished there. It was a perfect time for pirates. Cargoes were plentiful, merchant ships were poorly armed, naval protection was slight and there was little chance of capture. Wherever there was trade whether on the American coast, in the West Indies or off Africa pirates lurked.

Although the war with Spain was officially over in 1713 skirmishes continued and the British Navy was occupied in the Mediterranean with few ships available for duties elsewhere. Yet trade was expanding. Chartered companies, The East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Royal African Company and scores of others prospered from the riches of virgin territories. New lands were acquired, new settlements established. Trading sloops and sailing galleys with auxiliary oars for calm weather travelled the long triangular route from Britain with cloth, hardware and weapons to Africa; from Africa across the Atlantic with slaves for the Americas; from America back to Britain with spices, rum, tea and, above all, money. Unprotected by the navy but bringing wealth to their employers the merchant captains, relied on the vastness of the oceans to save them from pirates. In vessels with inadequate armament and with unenthusiastic crews they were defenceless. Pirates thrived on such easy pickings. As the colonies and commerce increased so did piracy. To the aphorism, ‘Trade follows the flag’ can be added, ‘and piracy follows trade’.

In the colonies defence was often left to the private owner who had little incentive to resist pirates. To the contrary it was easier, safer and more profitable to trade with them. Life was hard, income was low and piratical goods were cheap. It was a time for the rich man and the business man but not for the poor.

In Britain there was wealth and luxury. The first English banknotes were issued in 1718. The streets of London offered the best shopping in Europe and everywhere tradesmen’s signs hung, elaborate and brightly coloured. After the Great Fire of 1666 the heart of the city was being rebuilt. The elegant squares, Cavendish, Grosvenor, Hanover, were rising. The church of St Mary-le-Strand was finished in 1717. The nobility gamed for fortunes, duelled in their fashionable grey-powdered wigs, lace cravats, satin waistcoats and breeches. Merchants met in aromatic coffee-houses. The South Sea Company would soon tempt investors with its promise of swift gains.

But the times were uneasy. The king, George I from Germany, speaking no English, had been on the throne only since 1714, there had been a Jacobite rising the next year and there was a persistent dread of a second invasion.

For those without money there were greater fears. In London the poor existed within a few yards of prosperity but were a lifetime of deprivation from it. Unemployment brought starvation but with the naval war over there were hundreds of seamen without ships. Laws were harsh, prisons were pits of corruption and fever, there was a gallows near every town. No job meant the misery of the workhouse or, worse, transportation. The colonies needed labour and many penniless men, women and children were condemned to near-slavery on the plantations.

Poverty meant degradation, even death. Despite the risks many sailors were lured by the pleasures of piracy. It offered easy money. Instead of hard labour there were the sirens of drink, idleness, wealth and women. Woodes Rogers was warned that in the Bahamas he might find hundreds of pirates.

In April, 1718, he sailed from England in the Delicia, a thirty-gun, 460-ton merchantman that he had used on an earlier trip to Madagascar. With him was the Willing Mind of twenty guns, and two 20-metre long trading sloops, the Buck and the Samuel, two-masted vessels of 100 tons, fore-and-aft rigged, each with six guns on their upper decks. There was also a strong though temporary naval escort, the Milford, a 5th-rate man-of-war of 32 guns, and a pair of naval sloops, bigger and more heavily-armed than their civilian counterparts, the Rose and the Shark.2 With him Rogers carried a General Pardon for those pirates who cared to accept it.

. . . and we do hereby promise and declare that in case of any of the said Pirates shall, on or before 5 September, in the year of our Lord, 1718, surrender him or themselves, to one of our principal Secretaries of State in Great Britain or Ireland, or to any Governor or Deputy Governor of any of our Plantations beyond the seas; every such Pirate or Pirates so surrendering him or themselves, as aforesaid, shall have our gracious Pardon of and for such, his or their piracy or piracies, by him or them committed before the 5 of January next ensuing.

Rewards for taking:

pirate captain, £100

Lt, master, boatswain, carpenter, gunner, £40

inferior officer, £30

private man, £20

A pirate turning renegade and capturing or causing to be captured a pirate to receive £200.

Lord Treasurer or Commissioner of Treasury to pay accordingly.

Hampton Court, 5.9.17

The World of Bartholomew Roberts. Triumphs and Disasters

Early in July Rogers reached New Providence. Over six hundred pirates loitered there, indifferent to his arrival. So content were they with their life, so profligate with their riches, that once when they had captured a merchantman laden with fine brocades they casually tore the fine cloths into strips to tie to the horns of goats to distinguish between the herds of different settlements.3 Rogers seemed no threat. They had already ignored one appeal and the new governor could not anticipate any better response to this. Events proved him right.

For a day his little fleet lay in the harbour at whose mouth an island created two entrances making any blockade difficult. Then a launch rowed by a motley of pirates whose silks went ill with their rough hands and unwholesome bodies came out with a message from the worst of the pirates, Charles Vane.

To His Excellency, the Governor of New Providence.

Your Excellency may please to understand that we are willing to accept His Majesty’s most gracious Pardon on the following terms, viz:

That you suffer us to dispose of all our Goods now in our Possession. Likewise to act as we see fit with every Thing belonging to us, as His Majesty’s Act of Grace specifies.

If your Excellency shall please to comply with this, we shall, with all Readiness, accept His Majesty’s Act of Grace. If not, we are obliged to stand on our Defence. So conclude,

Your humble Servants,

Charles Vane, and Company.

P.S. We wait a speedy answer.4

At this impertinence Rogers ordered the Rose and the Milford to block the harbour. The Rose’s captain, Whitney, sent a lieutenant under a flag of true to talk with Vane. The officer reported that the pirates were drunk and were threatening to kill Rogers and all his force rather than give in. There was little to do except to attempt a blockade.

It was cannonfire from the burning ship that roused the fleet next night. She came flaming out of the darkness with guns firing erratically like a sputtering grenade, slicing into the rigging of the Rose. The naval vessels cut their cables and ran to sea pursued by mocking, undirected shots. Rogers watched helplessly. Flames lit the harbour and by their light he could see Vane’s vessel, black flag at the mizzen, sailing out through the dangerous narrows of the eastern channel. Then, as the fire reached her magazine, the fireship exploded in a blast that flared across the New Providence and left the Delicia rocking and tossing at her anchorage.

Vane had escaped accompanied by rebellious pirates including ‘Calico Jack’ Rackam, who was later to depose him. Only a drift of smoke remained of his fireship. Rogers sent the Buck and Samuel after him but the pirate eluded them only to be shipwrecked later, saved, recognised and sentenced to death on Jamaica in 1719. Johnson recorded that he ‘betray’d the Coward when at the Gallows, and died in Agonies equal to his Villainies’.5

With Vane gone Rogers acted decisively. He sent a second copy of the Pardon ashore hoping that the pirate had taken all the irredeemable criminals with him. It was a hope that seemed justified when he landed next day. He was met by men who said they would accept the Pardon. Most of them had pistols or curving cutlasses, they were filthy and the town of Nassau behind them was no more prepossessing with its rough shacks, tents and taverns. Raw hides rotted and stank at the waterside. Sailors said that when the wind blew offshore ships could smell New Providence before it came into view. Rogers had the Pardon read out and chose a dwelling larger and less dirty than the rest for his headquarters.

The Milford left for duties on the North American coast. Whitney of the Rose also was impatient to depart. So was the Shark but Rogers could not spare them until his worst problems were solved. Law had to be established on the island and the fortifications had to be strengthened in case the pirates returned. Vane was still free but Whitney refused to pursue him. The perversity of naval captains in foreign places where they could make money was widespread and of them Whitney was to become notorious. Only a few months later in January 1719 Rogers was to write to his friend Sir Richard Steele, dramatist and editor of the Spectator, complaining about the captain.

‘Captain Whitney, Commander of H.M. Ship, the Rose man of war, being one of the three that saw me into this place, and left me in an utmost danger so long ago - he also pretends to have a knowledge of you, and several of my friends in London; but he has behaved so ill that I design to forget him as much as I can; and if he is acquainted with you, and sees you in London before me, I desire he might know his character from the several accounts I have sent hence, with what gives from other parts, may serve to convince all his friends that he is not the man he may appear to be at home’.

Whitney continued to follow his own interests.6

Rogers’ third problem was his greatest. There was Spanish territory all around him and Spain allowed no country to trade with her colonies. To prevent smuggling there were coastguard vessels, costagardas, whose suspicions were intense and whose methods unpleasant. Paradoxically, it was a system that encouraged piracy. Spanish merchants with their monopoly charged high prices. To the colonists pirates who sold stolen goods cheaply were welcome guests. Pirates and costagardas fought each other ferociously but both were menaces to honest British, French or Dutch trading ships.

By September Woodes Rogers was worried. Provisions were scarce and money scarcer. Only a trading expedition could obtain supplies but the nearest island, Hispaniola, was Spanish. There was no choice. Two ships had to be sent and if they met a costagarda they would have to fight. Lacking honest men Rogers manned the Buck and the Samuel with ex-pirates, filled the holds with goods for barter and hoped that the gamble would succeed. Captain Brisk of the Buck was pessimistic. In seaworthy vessels with few law-abiding seamen to oppose them he predicted that the crews would mutiny.

Yet as they sailed from New Providence, setting their sails southwards towards Hispaniola, there was no unease. In those peaceable waters with light winds and a clear sky it was good to be at sea, passing little islands, most of them barren with rock-littered hills but some brightly green, thickly wooded above the bleachingly white beaches that encircled them. With breezes against them the hands were busy and the ships reached Hispaniola safely, anchoring offshore, unloading the cargo, waiting for the inhabitants to creep down to the trees where the goods were hidden. While some of the men hurried casks and bundles across the sand others pretended to be filling water-barrels to fool any costagarda that might appear before nightfall. But it was not the Spaniards that ruined the enterprise.

Led by Howel Davis, Walter Kennedy, William Magness and Christopher Moody, the pirates waited until Brisk and his men were asleep and then overpowered them. There was no struggle, no killing, just a change of command that gave the mutineers two fine sloops. After some half-hearted threats to murder Brisk the pirates settled down to enjoy their regained freedom.7

Most were English or Welsh. It was said that there were British, French and Spanish pirates but never a Dutchman because Holland supplied fisheries where unemployed men could work whereas in England men begged. It was a fact that pirates were always reluctant to attack a Dutch ship because of their reputation for fierce and prolonged resistance.

Next day the sloops followed the coast, close to the shore, until they came upon a creek in which a ship, French from her lines, lay at anchor. The pirates fired a shot across her and as the sloops closed on her the crew scrambled into a jolly-boat and rowed frantically to the beach. It was a relief. With only six light guns the pirates could fight no large merchantman but this vessel, taken so simply, was an ideal capture. Soon a working-party was aboard and the three ships were under way, hugging the northern shore.

Only the southern side of Hispaniola had settlements. The north had nothing but forbidding forests and wild cattle, an excellent, uninhabited coastline for pirates. Nearby was the Windward Passage between the island and Cuba. Through it ships passed using the prevailing winds to Jamaica, returning the same way, battling against the contrary winds on the journey to the American colonies and Britain. A pirate could lie in wait, picking off vessels as he chose with only the peril of a costagarda to deter him.

The ships sailed in to Privateer Bay, named from the tortuous channel that led to a concealed anchorage behind the hills, almost invisible from the sea and a traditional hiding place for pirates. In its protection the mutineers looted their prize. Putting guards over their prisoners they lolled on the decks with bottles and flagons. It was time to elect a captain.

They wanted a man who, in their own words, was pistol-proof and not afraid to look a cannon in the mouth, one who knew the sea, not boastful or vainglorious, who would keep his promises and, most important of all, one who was lucky. In Howel Davis, a short, dark-haired Welshman, they had their man, already respected for his daring and his cunning. Without dissent he was declared their leader.

Captain Brisk, his two mates, the boatswain of the Buck and two unfit seamen were put into Captain Porter’s Samuel sloop. Porter who appeared to be a truly reformed pirate was also released. But of his crew of thirty-six only seventeen with families in New Providence were freed. The rest were compelled to stay. Men were needed to sail the ships. Amongst them was Archibald Murray, a young surgeon.

Surgeons were always wanted. Although it was rare for such men to be trained doctors they could set bones, staunch wounds, extract bullets, treat venereal disease. So valued were they that they were given larger shares of plunder. Some were actually paid for each voyage that a ship made.

The Samuel departed. Those left behind could only hope that Brisk would remember their names and that they had been forced to join the pirates. If they were captured only his testimony would save them. Every pirate on trial for his life swore that he had been forced, that he had never volunteered. Cynical judges demanded proof.

Davis steered to Cuba where they took a vessel from Philadelphia before cruising back to Hispaniola, lingering around Cape Franbarway where it was usual for many traders to pass.8 This time only a few ships were captured. From one of them came Richard Jones, a seaman who was loth to quit an honest life. Tiring of his repeated refusals the pirate gunner slashed Jones’ leg with his cutlass. Then with a rope tied around his waist he was slung into the sea and hauled into the Buck by jeering pirates.9

Day by day there were grumbles at the lack of prizes and Davis decided to try his luck on the African coast. An unlucky captain could be as swiftly deposed as he had been elected. Indeed, Charles Vane was replaced by Jack Rackam, his quartermaster, because of the captain’s sensible refusal to attack a strongly-armed French man-of-war. The following March he was arrested and hanged at Port Royal. Davis needed to be more fortunate.10

Before setting across the Atlantic he had the ship careened, its bottom cleaned of marine life. In those warm waters teredo worms burrowed into the timbers. molluscs laying countless eggs, growing to a voracious six inches (15 cm) in length. Without regular treatment planking became riddled, rotten and leaky and the vessel sailed sluggishly as its keel accumulated trailing weeds and encrustations of shells. Careening was usually a simple, quite pleasant task but this time, lacking a proper carpenter, a trained craftsman responsible for the maintenance of the hull, it was a labour that no one welcomed.

Finding a bay where trees came down to the water’s edge tackles and ropes were passed from their trunks and around the mast so that the sloop could be hauled onto her side. Below the waterline she was thickly matted with shellfish, tangles of oily undergrowth and pitted with wormholes. Jones and other forced men scraped off the accretions. Others daubed the bottom with sulphur and brimstone to kill the worms, smearing on protective tallow before the Buck was tilted onto her other side. Leafy shelters were put up on shore as an escape from the ship which already had a stench that was never to leave it. Built for fifteen men she was now carrying over sixty.

Food was prepared for the long voyage. Strips of raw meat from wild cattle were hung on a wooden frame above a fire until they were tough as leather but well-preserved, something learned from the native Caribs who called the frame a ‘boucan’. It was from this that the term ‘boucanier’ came, given to those European sailors who,