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    A History of Pirates: Blood and Thunder on the High Seas
    A History of Pirates: Blood and Thunder on the High Seas
    A History of Pirates: Blood and Thunder on the High Seas
    Ebook286 pages4 hours

    A History of Pirates: Blood and Thunder on the High Seas

    By Nigel Cawthorne

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    About this ebook

    The modern image of the pirate is derived from Captain Charles Johnson's accounts of the cut-throats who sailed under the Jolly Roger. It was he who gave mythical status to the likes of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd. Using contemporary sources, Nigel Cawthorne now turns the spotlight on the reality of pirate life, revealing the truth behind the legends. It gives us an insight into the men - and women - their weapons, their ships, their unhappy victims and their hide-outs, including the capital city of the pirate 'empire', Port Royal in Jamaica - known as the 'wickedest city in the world'.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcturus Publishing
    Release dateSep 1, 2003
    ISBN9781848584969
    A History of Pirates: Blood and Thunder on the High Seas
    Author

    Nigel Cawthorne

    Nigel Cawthorne started his career as a journalist at the Financial Times and has since written bestselling books on Prince Philip, Princess Diana, and the history of the royal family, as well as provided royal news comment on national and international broadcasters.

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      Book preview

      A History of Pirates - Nigel Cawthorne

      Introduction

      PIRACY HAS EXISTED since men first took to the seas to trade. One of its earliest strongholds was the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, where ships carrying gold, silver, silks, spices, copper and teak between the Middle East and India were forced to pass. In 694 BC the Assyrian king Sennacherib tried to stamp it out. The Roman emperor Trajan had another go in the first century AD, followed by King Shapur of Persia in the fourth century.

      Meanwhile in the Mediterranean, early pirates preyed on the ships of Phoenician merchants carrying silver, amber, tin and copper from the trading centres of Sidon and Tyre. During the flowering of classical Greece, pirates hid among the islands of the Aegean and their deeds were recorded by Thucydides and Herodotus, and the epic poets. Alexander the Great tried to stamp out Mediterranean piracy in 330 BC, but it was still going strong at the height of the Roman Empire two centuries later.

      The pirates of Cilicia, operating from the southern coast of Turkey, boasted a thousand ships. They defeated a Roman fleet, attacked Syracuse on Sicily and sacked hundreds of coastal towns and villages around the Empire. In 78 BC, they captured the young Julius Caesar and held him on the island of Pharmacusa for six weeks until a ransom was paid. Ten years later, they held such a stranglehold on Mediterranean trade that Rome was threatened with starvation. In 67 BC a bill was passed authorizing Pompey to stamp out piracy. He assembled a fleet of 270 ships and swept through the Mediterranean. Although some pirates were successfully resettled as farmers, the campaign climaxed in a major sea battle off the coast of Anatolia. Ten thousand pirates were killed, four hundred ships captured and many more destroyed. After that military outposts and patrols by armed galleys kept the Mediterranean safe for trade until the rise of the Barbary pirates of North Africa in the sixteenth century.

      Khayr ad-Din – better known as Barbarossa – united Algeria and Tunisia under the Ottoman sultanate and funded his regime by piracy. Pirate captains formed a distinct social class in Tunis and Algiers. Their ships were outfitted by wealthy backers who took 10 per cent of their booty. One of their most famous captives was the author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes. He was captured in 1575, along with his brother Rodrigo, and held for five years before being ransomed. With the arrival of powerful Moorish warlords in Tétouan and Rabat in 1609, Morocco became a new centre for the pirates. Again, the Alawi sultans encouraged piracy as a source of revenue.

      The Barbary pirates used galleys until the seventh century, when a Flemish renegade named Simon Danser showed them the advantage of sail. This made the Tunisian and Algerian pirates an even more dangerous force. By 1650, they held more than thirty thousand captives in Algiers alone.

      Piracy along the Barbary coast was the cause of several wars between the Unites States and Tripolitania (now part of Libya) in the nineteenth century. The British made two attempts to suppress Algerian piracy after 1815, and it was finally ended by the French in 1830 when they took over the country from the Ottomans.

      However, this book is more concerned with that was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. It focuses on the pirates of the Caribbean, though the scurvy band of cutthroats who plied the Spanish Main also pillaged the west coast of Africa and roamed as far afield as the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Caribbean piracy began after the Spanish began plundering the empires of the Inca and the Aztecs for their gold. Other European nations decided they wanted a piece of the action. However, their monarchs were reluctant to pay for expeditions to the Americas and they did not want to risk all-out war by engaging their navies. The solution was to mount private expeditions. These were backed by such luminaries as Samuel Pepys and Sir William Penn, father of the founder of Pennsylvania. These ‘privateers’ were given a letter of marque by the Crown: in effect, a licence to commit piracy. They would hand over part of their plunder to the Crown and, in turn, would be rewarded with lands, honours and titles.

      During the reign of James I of Great Britain (1603–1625), there was a period of peace in Europe. Monarchs cut back on their navies, which meant that privateers who went to sea ‘on their own account’ – in other words, pirates – stood very little chance of being captured. Their numbers were also swelled with unemployed seamen. They worked from harbours along Morocco’s Atlantic coast, menacing shipping in the Straits of Gibraltar, and from Bantry Bay, attacking shipping in the English Channel. However, in 1614–15, the Dutch and English drove them out and they fled across the Atlantic, where piracy became inextricably mixed up with colonial wars and the slave trade.

      By this time, the British, Dutch and French were establishing colonies in the West Indies. The colonists’ numbers were swelled by prisoners of war from the English Civil War and criminals, vagrants, the unemployed and orphans who were transported on the orders of magistrates. Others went voluntarily, working off the price of their passage as indentured labour. However, white labourers were soon replaced by African slaves who were generally stronger than the undernourished poor of Europe’s disease-ridden cities and were better able to cope with conditions in the tropics. Displaced Europeans drifted to the smaller islands and other uninhabited regions where they lived by shooting wild game. They cured the meat over wood fires by a method know in French as boucaner – giving them the name buccaneers.

      When Jamaica came under threat by the Spanish, privateer commissions and ships were offered to the buccaneers who, though not necessarily great seaman, were good shots with a musket and handy with a cutlass which they used to carve up carcasses. British buccaneers were joined by Huguenots – French Protestants – Dutchmen who had fought a war against the Spanish at home in The Netherlands, and Africans – largely runaway slaves. As many of the buccaneers had been indentured labours themselves, they saw no reason to return slaves to their owners. And with truly international crews on board, they saw no reason not to attack the ships of any nation – though Spanish ships and the Spanish colonies still offered the richest spoils.

      Life on board was democratic, which was revolutionary in the early eighteenth century. Meetings and votes were held on all important decisions. The captain only held on to his position if he was popular and successful, and everyone got an equal share of the spoils. Some pirates even dreamt of setting up a pirate nation.

      By 1717, trade in the Caribbean was paralysed. Merchant ships could not set sail without a naval escort and piracy was seriously inhibiting the economic development of the West Indies and the British colonies in North America. In September 1717, George I offered an amnesty to all pirates. Those who gave themselves up by 5 September 1718 would be pardoned. New courts were set up and those who did not surrender, or went back to piracy afterwards, were relentlessly tracked down by the Royal Navy and former pirates.

      In 1724, a gentleman calling himself Captain Charles Johnson published A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, though the real author is thought to be Daniel Defoe. In it he created the modern image of the cut-throats who sail under the Jolly Roger and gave almost mythical status to Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Bartholomew Roberts, ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. It started a craze for highly romanticized pirate stories being written by Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, among many others. And it was Johnson’s swashbuckling villains who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and movies such as Captain Blood, which made a star out of Errol Flynn.

      These books and movies are all set in a golden era of piracy that lasted a little over thirty years from 1691 to 1724, though piracy flourished much earlier on the island of Tortuga and there was another short-lived flurry in the 1820s.

      Pirates’ careers were rarely the swashbuckling epics of the movies. Usually they lasted no more than two or three years and often ended ignominiously at the end of a rope. Even though many pirates were brutal sadists, even during their own lifetime, they were admired as romantic heroes – men who lived life on their own terms. Ordinary low-born individuals, their rich plunder allowed them to enjoy the wealthy lifestyles of ship-board kings and lords, while their contemporaries lived in poverty and squalor.

      At that time, most people lived at the beck and call of their masters. Many ordinary seamen in the Royal Navy, for example, were usually forced in to the service by press gangs. They were never allowed off the ship anywhere they might escape, and were frequently flogged. Pirates, on the other hand, were free from almost all constraints. They lived outside the law. Largely accepting their fate, they were determined have an exciting life, if a short life.

      I

      Victims

      ON 14 SEPTEMBER 1723, the Princess Galley was approaching the island of Barbados with a cargo of slaves brought from the West African coast when her crew saw a ship approaching with a black flag flying from her masthead. As she grew closer they could see she was a sloop armed with eight guns on her main deck. A further ten swivel guns were mounted along her rails and there were between thirty and forty pirates on board.

      The Princess Galley’s forty-five-year-old captain John Wickstead realized that his ship was seriously outgunned by the pirates. He set more sail and tried to outrun them. But the heavily-laden merchantman was slow in the water. The sloop caught up quickly and began firing on her. By 8pm, she was alongside and Wickstead was ordered to send across a longboat. The pirates jumped in and returned to take over the Princess Galley. The second mate, twenty-four-year-old Goldsmith Blowers, and the ship’s surgeon, twenty-five-year-old John Crawford, were held down. Lighted fuses were put between their fingers and they were forced to reveal the whereabouts of the ship’s gold. The pirates soon had more than fifty-four ounces in their possession. Then they began to ransack the ship. They took the Princess Galley’s two quarterdeck guns and two swivel guns and sent them across to the sloop, along with gunpowder, pistols and both the bosun’s and the gunner’s stores. They also took eleven slaves valued at £500 each, along with the carpenter’s mate James Sedgwick and the surgeon’s mate William Gibbons. It was not unusual for pirates to press into service men with the skills they needed. Two other crewmen, Henry Wynn and Robert Corp, joined the pirates of their own accord. That was not unusual either. Having stripped the Princess Galley of everything of value, George Lowther, the pirate captain, sailed away in his sloop Ranger, leaving Captain Wickstead to make his way with the rest of his crew to Barbados.

      A small pirate sloop attacks a far larger merchantman. Pirates tended to use cannon sparingly, preferring to take their prizes intact.

      It is rare to find first-hand accounts by the victims of pirates, often because they did not survive. This one exists because the following month the Ranger was being refitted and careened off the Island of Blanco (Blanquilla) near the coast of Venezuela when it was spotted by HMS Eagle. Because the ship had to be turned on her side, so the hull could be scraped, her guns were ashore and she was defenceless. Lowther escaped, but most of the pirate crew, including Wynn and Corp, were captured. The account of the attack on the Princess Galley comes from Captain Wickstead’s deposition to the Admiralty Court that tried Wynn and Corp on the island of St Christopher – St Kitts – on 11 May 1724.

      A similar attack had taken place in the grey waters of the North Atlantic four years earlier. On 29 May 1720, the merchantman Samuel had left the port of London bound for Boston carrying a cargo of ironware, assorted goods in bales and trunks, and forty-five barrels of gunpowder. She had a crew of ten men under Captain Samuel Cary and three passengers. By 13 July she was forty miles east of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland when two ships hove into view. As soon as they came within range, they opened fire and hoisted pirate flags. The smaller of the two was an eighty-ton sloop carrying ten guns and flying a Union Jack emblazoned with four blazing balls. The larger was a 220-ton three-master carrying twenty-six guns and flying a black flag with a skull and a single cutlass. With just six cannons mounted on carriages, the Samuel was easily outgunned. Captain Cary estimated that each of the pirate ships carried a hundred men, so his crew was outnumbered by twenty to one.

      Cary was ordered to lower his boat and come aboard the pirate ship. He did was he was told and was greeted by the famous Welsh pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts who had been leaving a trail of destruction up the eastern seaboard for the past month. In one harbour alone he had plundered and burnt no less than seventeen ships.

      Roberts’ men swarmed onto the Samuel, tore off the hatches and went about pillaging the cargo with cutlasses and boarding axes, ‘with incessant cursing and swearing, more like fiends than men’. They took anything of value. The rest was hacked to pieces and thrown overboard. The pirates took the Samuel’s guns, along with the ship’s boats, spare rigging and stores, and the anchor cables were thrown over the side. The pirates also took forty barrels of gunpowder, saying that they would never accept the King’s pardon. Instead, if they were overwhelmed, they would set fire to the gunpowder with a pistol ‘and go all merrily to Hell together’. The crew – with the exception of the captain and one Irishman – were forced to go aboard the pirate ship at gunpoint where they were forced into service. Meanwhile the passengers prepared themselves to die.

      The pirates were discussing whether to sink the Samuel or set fire to her, when they spotted another ship on the horizon and chased after her. In an amazing feat of seamanship, Cary and his single remaining crewman, with the assistance of the three passengers, managed to sail the Samuel into Boston harbour, where Cary gave an account of the attack to Joseph Hiller, a public notary.

      A more fulsome account of what it was like to be the victim of a pirate attack was given by Aaron Smith who had signed up at first mate on the merchant brig Zephyr in Kingston, Jamaica to work his passage back to England to get married. Her master was Mr Lumsden. That spring, the crops had failed and loading was slow. Eager to get underway, Smith purchased some coffee to be shipped on the brig. Even so, loading was not completed until the end of June. The passengers then embarked. They included a Captain Cowper, five or six children and a black woman servant. The Zephyr then crossed the bay to Port Royal where they picked up ‘a lady of colour’, who Mr Lumsden lodged with in Jamaica, along with some more children and another unidentified passenger.

      The following morning, they set sail for England. At first the weather was fine and the breeze moderate. But soon they encountered a strong wind from the northeast, accompanied by a heavy swell. It was then that Smith began to have his doubts about the abilities of Mr Lumdsen, who constantly sought his advice. Smith later discovered that Lumsden had spent most of his life at sea employed in the coastal coal trade and had little experience of transatlantic travel. He asked Smith whether he should take a windward or a leeward passage. A windward passage would take longer, Smith pointed out. But on a leeward path they would risk being attacked by pirates. Nevertheless, Lumsden took a leeward passage, heading for Grand Cayman. By this time, the winds had dropped and the journey took them four days. At Grand Cayman the locals came out in canoes to sell them parrots, turtles and shells. From there the Zephyr steered for Cape St Antonio, the southwesterly point of Cuba, and on their way they met a schooner from St John’s, New Brunswick.

      The following morning the Zephyr rounded Cape St Antonio and turned eastwards, taking advantage of a freshening breeze. The weather was fine and, ahead, they spotted two sails. At 2pm, Smith was walking on deck with Captain Cowper, when he saw a schooner making out to them from the land.

      ‘She bore a very suspicious appearance,’ said Smith, ‘and I immediately went up aloft with my telescope to examine her more closely.’ Smith was instantly convinced that she was a pirate. He told Cowper and they called Lumsden from below and informed him. On deck, Smith pointed out the schooner and recommended that they alter course. Lumsden obstinately refused, believing that the English flag he was flying would protect him.

      Half-an-hour later they saw the deck of the schooner fill with men and she began to hoist out her boats. Lumsden finally altered his course, by two points, but it was too late: the Zephyr was already within range of the schooner’s guns. As soon as she was within hailing distance, the schooner ordered the Zephyr to lower her stern boat and send her captain over. Mr Lumsden pretended not to understand the order. The schooner’s response was a volley of musket shot. Lumsden then sent the message, ‘Aye, aye’ and gave orders to lay back the main yard to slow the ship.

      By this time a boat from the sloop had caught up with them and nine or ten men ‘of a most ferocious aspect, armed with muskets, knives and cutlasses’ boarded and immediately took charge. They ordered Mr Lumsden, Smith, Captain Cowper and the ship’s carpenter to row over to the pirate ship – ‘hastening our departure by repeated blows with the flat part of their cutlasses over our backs and threatening to shoot us,’ said Smith. As they rowed across, Lumsden remarked that he had been very careless and had left the books, which contained an account of all the money on board, open on the table in his cabin.

      When they reached the sloop, her captain ordered them on deck.

      ‘He was a man of most uncouth and savage appearance,’ said Smith, ‘about five feet six inches in height, stout in proportion with aquiline nose, high cheek bones, a large mouth and very large full eyes. His complexion was sallow, his hair black, and he appeared to be about thirty years of age.’

      At first Smith took him for an Indian. Later he discovered that his father was a Spaniard and his mother a Yucatan squaw.

      In broken English he asked Mr Lumsden what the ships ahead of him were. Lumsden said they were two French merchantmen and the pirate captain ordered all hands to make after them. He then asked Lumsden what cargo he was carrying. Sugar, rum, coffee, arrow root and brazilwood for dyeing, Lumsden said. They were also interrogated about a schooner from New Brunswick they had met – whether she was carrying coin and whether she was armed.

      Mr Lumsden was then asked if he had money on board himself. Lumsden replied that there was none.

      ‘Do not imagine that I am a fool, sir,’ said the pirate captain. ‘I know that all vessels going to Europe have specie on board and if you give up what you have, you shall proceed on your voyage without further molestation.’

      Lumsden repeated that he had no money. The pirate captain then said that if the money was not produced he would throw the cargo overboard and search the ship. If any money was found he would burn the ship, along with everyone on board. He also enquired if there were any candles, wine or porter – dark beer – on board. Lumsden said he had none to spare.

      By then it was late evening and the breeze began to die away. The pirate ship gave up chasing the French merchantmen ahead and turned back towards the Zephyr. On the way, the pirates prepared for supper and began serving spirits to the Zephyr’s men. Lumsden, Smith and Cowper were offered some wine, but refused.

      Smith was then told that he was going to be held on board the schooner as her new navigator. He protested, falsely, that he had a wife, three children and aged parents waiting for him in England, and Lumsden complained that he could not be deprived of Smith’s skills.

      ‘If I do not keep him, I shall keep you,’ the pirate captain told Lumsden, who grew alarmed at this.

      When they were alone, Lumsden turned to Smith and said, ‘For God’s sake don’t importune the captain or he will certainly take me. You are a single man, but I have a large family dependent on me who will become orphans and utterly destitute.’

      He promised that, the moment he was freed, he would send a man-of-war to search for the pirate ship. He would tell the world what had happened and raise the matter with Lloyd’s, so that no one would think that Smith had consented to become a pirate. Lumsden also promised, with tears streaming down his cheeks, to deliver Smith’s goods to his family in England.

      Soon supper was ready and the pirate captain invited them to join him, which they did for fear of giving offence.

      ‘Our supper consisted of garlic and onions chopped fine and mixed up with bread in a bowl,’ said Smith, ‘for which there was a general scramble, every one helping himself as he pleased, either with his fingers or any instrument with which he happened to be supplied.’

      During supper, Mr Lumsden begged to be allowed to go back on board the Zephyr to see the children as they would be alarmed at his absence. Smith asked to go too, but the pirate captain said that, when the two ships anchored, he would accompany the two of them on a visit.

      As the pirate ship approached the Zephyr, the pirate captain ordered a signal shot to be fired. When this was answered, the Zephyr followed the pirate schooner inshore with one of the Zephyr’s men being told to take the lead and make soundings. When the crewman sounded fourteen fathoms, they anchored. A boat was lowered and Mr Lumsden and the pirate captain were rowed across to the Zephyr. Smith, Captain Cowper and the ship’s carpenter had to stay on board the sloop. Soon after, some of the pirates returned to the boat with Captain Cowper’s chronometer, Smiths’s telescope and some of this clothes, the ship’s spy-glass and a goat, which promptly had its throat cut and was flayed while still alive. The pirates told them that this is what would happen to them if no money was found on the Zephyr. The three men were

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