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Jolly Roger
The Story of the Great Age of Piracy
By Patrick Pringle Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2001 Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-14759-8
CHAPTER 1
Abominable Brutes
PIRATES have been stripped of their glamour. No one believes any longer in the romantic conception of a shipload of hearties, immensely brave and daring and rather jolly: it is not supported by any historical evidence. So pirates have been degraded from swashbuckling adventurers to common criminals. Even in schoolboy literature they are portrayed not as enviable heroes but as despicably bloodthirsty, ferocious villains.
"For the most part," Raymond Postgate has written, "pirates were abominable brutes. They have no right to the romance with which later writers have invested them. There was sometimes chivalry or wit to be found among the highwaymen, but the records of Blackbeard, Kidd or Morgan are tedious stories of revolting cruelty and dishonest greed."
I have quoted this opinion because it is fairly typical of the popular conception of pirates to-day. Like the romantic conception, it is unsupported by evidence, and it seems equally far from the truth. Whether or not the stories of Blackbeard, Kidd, and Morgan are tedious is a matter of opinion; it is a matter of fact that one of these three was not a pirate at all; it is a matter of conjecture whether another of them was a pirate; and there is no evidence that any of them was revoltingly cruel. I shall try to give fairer pictures of these and other pirates and alleged pirates later in this book. Meanwhile it seems necessary to consider how pirates in general have incurred this bulk charge of abominable brutality.
Hundreds of books (not counting fiction) have been written on pirates. With a few notable exceptions, such as the works of Philip Gosse, these have been based mainly on two 'standard' books, the 'classics' of pirate literature: Bucaniers of America, by A. O. Exquemelin (Amsterdam, 1679; first English translation, London, 1684); and A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, by Captain Charles Johnson (London, first edition, 1724; fourth edition, enlarged, 1726). Together these two works cover the most important periods of the Age of Piracy.
Little is known about either of the authors, but both books have been proved to contain much accurate information. Unfortunately this fact has been overemphasized, especially in Encyclopedia Britannica and the Dictionary of National Biography, with the result that it has often been assumed that both works are entirely true instead of only partly true. Yet there is no need to take them on trust. Although not all the information given in them can be verified, much of the same ground is fully covered in the Calendar of State Papers and in Admiralty and Colonial Office documents preserved in the Public Record Office. By comparison with official records it can be seen, for example, that Johnson is more reliable on pirates of the seventeen-twenties than on pirates of the sixteen-nineties. This is hardly surprising.
There is no mystery about the sources of Exquemelin's information. He was a buccaneer himself, and sailed under Morgan. He did not like buccaneering, and he hated Morgan. Johnson, on the other hand, probably was not a pirate, but he knew some pirates and used their stories. He also made use of reports of trials and other similar publications, and almost certainly had access to unpublished documents as well.
All written history is selective, and it is not difficult to discover these authors' canons of selection. Both these 'classics' were written for entertainment. They were not serious histories; they were meant to be popular. From this point of view they were highly successful. Each ran through many editions and impressions. For both Exquemelin and Johnson tried, with success, to give the public what it wanted. It would be unreasonable to expect this to coincide with what is wanted by a twentieth-century historian in search of the truth.
It is said in Fleet Street that only bad news is news. The worse the news, the better the 'copy'; similarly, the best-selling pirates were the worst ones. There were scores to choose from, and Johnson openly revealed his method of selection in the title of his book.
Single sources of information, however authentic and accurate, are rarely satisfactory. Books written for popular enjoyment need to be treated with especial caution. Imagine, for example, the case of a historian of the future writing on crime in Britain in the twentieth century. Suppose that his only source of information was a complete file of back numbers of our most popular Sunday newspaper, which is as justly renowned for its accuracy as for its specialized brand of news. The historian would have plenty of material. He would have an embarrassment of embarrassing but true facts to work on. But his study would hardly be a balanced picture of twentieth-century crime.
Sex and sadism have probably always been the most popular subjects of entertainment, vicarious as well as actual. In our own age sex is the more fashionable, although discriminating film censorship has recently given sadism a boom. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, on the other hand, sadism seems to have had a greater market appeal. Pornography was not ignored, but in popular esteem the naked ran a poor second to the dead. In the popular literature of the period sexual incidents were usually related in catalogue fashion, and seductions and rapes were described with almost Biblical terseness. There were none of the lingering bedroom scenes that pander-writers excel in today. This seems to have been due to popular taste rather than lack of imaginative writing, for the pander-writers of the period lingered with equal salacity over torture scenes, which were described in considerable physical detail. The taste in vicarious entertainment then seems to have been for physical pain and human destruction. To-day the preference seems to be for physical pleasure and human procreation. After reading Exquemelin and Johnson, I am inclined to hope it will not change again, in spite of the efforts of the Hays Committee.
Giving the public what it wanted, both Exquemelin and Johnson piled on the atrocities. It seems probable that the pirates they selected were the most atrocious they could find. The probability becomes almost a certainty when Johnson's book is compared with official letters from the Governors of British colonies in the West Indies. These letters confirm Johnson in many particulars, but there is nothing like the same emphasis on atrocities. There was no reason for the Governors to play down this or any other disreputable side of pirate behaviour, for most of their letters were in the form of impassioned pleas to the Council for Trade to persuade the Government to send out warships to destroy the pirates.
In popular literature the division between fiction and nonfiction was not so sharp then as it is to-day. Books about highwaymen and pirates were not subjected to any close scrutiny or liable to lose sales as a result of literary condemnation. There was no Times Literary Supplement with a corps of omniscient reviewers. Popular writers could get away with—well, murder.
The value of the histories of Exquemelin and Johnson is further weakened by the authors' conscientious observance of the convention that a writer on criminals had to be a moralist as well as an historian. This convention is not entirely dead to-day. It may help to reduce crime, although that is extremely doubtful; certainly it does not make for good history.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries biographers of criminals usually professed that their only object in writing about such dreadful persons was to deter others from falling into similarly evil ways. They simply wanted to prove that crime did not pay. This was an even more difficult task then than it is today, for in fact crime paid well. Piracy especially was highly profitable and not very hazardous. In the three peak periods, each of which lasted several years, dishonesty was much the best policy for the ordinary seaman.
Another literary convention of the period was that criminals came from the lowest class of society. In so far as poverty caused crime this was correct; but there were no grounds for assuming that honesty went hand in hand with birth, wealth, and high office. To observe this convention Exquemelin not only suppressed the fact (which he must have known) that Morgan always carried privateering commissions signed by the Governor of Jamaica, but he even falsified the facts about Morgan's parentage. Johnson, in his first edition, daringly suggested that Blackbeard had the support of the Governor of North Carolina, but later retracted this with an abject apology, although the accusation was well founded. Johnson was careful not to make the same 'mistake' when he came to write on the Red Sea pirates, nearly all of whom bought commissions and pardons from one or other of the Governors of the American colonies. Neither of the two 'classics' of pirate literature gives any hint of the fact that a large number of the most notorious pirates had the blessings of colonial Governors.
It is not the fault of Exquemelin and Johnson that their works have been credited with canonical authority for the last three centuries. Writers like Andrew Lang and Lord Macaulay deserve stronger censure for their blind faith in the magic label 'contemporary.' Even worse 'crimes' against the pirates were committed by those writers who exaggerated or distorted piratical characteristics and incidents found in Exquemelin and Johnson. Historical falsification of this sort was commonest in the nineteenth century, when even a Lord High Chancellor was among the culprits. Twentieth-century writers have drawn much less on their imaginations, although those who have not troubled to go back to primary sources have perpetuated many of the earlier embellishments.
There is, I think, one other important reason for the popular vilification of the pirates. This is the common error of judging men of a past age by the moral fashions of the present.
Historical novelists often show this failing, and they cannot be blamed very much. It is much easier for them—and easier for their readers to understand—if historical characters and events are taken out of their moral context and interpreted by present-day values. Makers of historical films do this quite regularly and shamelessly; and while much unreasonable fuss may be made if the heroine of a Hollywood 'Biblical' has a 1953 hair-do, little comment is made on the more important anachronism that she has been endowed with the morality, outlook, and even habits of an emancipated woman of the twentieth century.
Pirates have suffered from this in popular histories as well as fiction. When Raymond Postgate called them 'abominable brutes' he was presumably judging them by modern British standards of brutality. He did not mention that, by the same standards, they lived in an abominably brutal age. As it is impossible to judge, or even understand, the pirates outside their moral context, I shall end this chapter with a brief account of the behaviour of their law-abiding contemporaries on the high seas and of their law-enforcing contemporaries at home.
The most important part of the Age of Piracy was also the age of the African slave trade. The facts about this traffic have sometimes been obscured rather than enlightened by the propaganda of well-meaning sentimentalists, who also have made the mistake of judging the past by their own moral standards. My object here is not to criticize, but simply to state a few facts about the Middle Passage. These are especially relevant to the study of piracy because many pirates were recruited from slavers.
One common misconception about the slave trade is that the traders had no regard for the health of the negroes on the Middle Passage. In fact this concerned them very much, and they made great efforts to reduce mortality; for a dead slave was an unsaleable slave, and a sickly slave fetched a lower price than a healthy one. Indeed, it was more in the traders' interests to look after the slaves than to care for the crews of the ships that carried them, which were expendable; and it is not surprising that seamen often complained that their welfare was cared for less that that of the ship's cargo.
Two factors made the conditions for the slaves worse than they should have been from an economic point of view. One was the cupidity of the traders, whose profit depended on the number of slaves still alive at the end of each voyage. The other was the cupidity of captains, most of whom surreptitiously shipped additional slaves as a private investment. The result was considerable overcrowding.
According to the Royal African Company, which held a monopoly at the time, the mortality in 1679 was twenty-five per cent. This was a rough average. An outbreak of infectious disease, such as smallpox, made the figure much higher on a single voyage.
The most reliable evidence about conditions on slavers dates only from the end of the eighteenth century, shortly before the abolition. It is reasonable to suppose that conditions were at least no better earlier in the century.
A convincing picture is painted by a surgeon named Alexander Falconbridge, who served on a number of slavers and wrote his testimony in a book entitled An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London, 1788). Nearly forty thousand slaves a year were being transported at this time, and Falconbridge says that the mortality was often one-half or even two-thirds of the total cargo.
Male slaves, according to Falconbridge, were usually fastened together in pairs, with handcuffs on their wrists and irons riveted on their legs. They seem to have been packed like sardines. "They are frequently stowed so close as to admit of no other position than lying on their sides, nor will the height between decks, unless directly under the grating, allow them to stand." Except for brief daily exercise, the slaves had to lie in their own filth for the whole voyage. Every morning the dead were thrown overboard and the living hosed with seawater. Their food was usually adequate, and refusing to eat was a serious offence. Falconbridge reports having seen "coals of fire, glowing hot, put on a shovel and placed so near their lips as to scorch and burn them"—with a threat to make them swallow the hot coals if they could not take food. Falconbridge adds hearsay evidence of a captain who had molten lead poured on hunger strikers.
Another surgeon, James Arnold, giving evidence before a parliamentary commission in 1789, described a voyage under a captain named Williams, who wielded the cat tirelessly and "seemed to find a pleasant sensation in the sight of blood and the sound of their moans." On this ship the cat was used to make the slaves dance as part of the keep-fit programme. Once the slaves tried to revolt, and were brutally punished. One man who hid in the hold was dislodged by pouring down boiling fat, which removed most of his skin. Two corpses were beheaded, and "the two gory heads were successively handed to the slaves chained on the deck, and they were obliged to kiss the lips of the bloody heads. Some who refused to obey were unmercifully flogged by the captain and had the bloody part of a head rubbed against their faces." Not wanting to jettison any of his valuable cargo, Captain Williams did not execute any of the rebels, although one boy of about fifteen who got a fractured thigh was condemned as unsaleable and thrown overboard alive.
Male and female slaves were kept apart, and in practice the relations of the crew with female slaves were at the discretion of the captain. Sexual intercourse was often allowed, for it was an amenity that was much appreciated by the crew and cost the captain nothing. According to Falconbridge, ordinary seamen were usually allowed intercourse if consent was given, while for officers consent was unnecessary. According to Arnold, Captain Williams reserved the youngest and prettiest girls for his own use, and if they refused he had them flogged into submission.
While it usually paid captains to keep the slaves alive, there were exceptions to this. In 1783 the ship Zong carried about four hundred and forty slaves, of whom sixty died and many more became very ill. The captain had one hundred and thirty-two of the sick men thrown overboard, on the grounds that " if the slaves died a natural death, it would be the loss of the owners of the ship; but if they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters." After the voyage the underwriters refused to pay, so the owners took them to court. The case for the owners was that the insurer was liable in a case of "jetsam or jetson, i.e. a plea of necessity to cast overboard some part of a cargo to save the rest." The captain's excuse was that there was not enough drinking-water to go round. This was probably untrue, but it could not be disproved, and the court ordered the underwriters to pay.
It is sometimes said that until Wilberforce roused the public conscience the morality of slave-trading was not questioned. This is incorrect. The Quakers—who in matters of humanity seem usually to be about a hundred years in advance of other religious bodies—condemned the slave trade as early as 1727, and in 1761 excluded from their ranks all who participated in it. George Fox had denounced the trade as early as 1671. And in 1734 Captain Snelgrave, who had commanded several slavers, published a book in defence of the slave trade.
It is ironical that slave-dealing, which is to-day statutory piracy, was in the Age of Piracy virtually a royal prerogative. The trade was a monopoly vested in a company founded by the Duke of York, whose principal shareholders were members of the royal family, and whose president at one period was King George I.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jolly Roger by Patrick Pringle. Copyright © 2001 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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