Under the Black Flag Read online

  Dampier kept notes of everything he saw during his travels, and in 1697 he published a book entitled A New Voyage Around the World. This is remarkable not simply as a record of the exploits of some particularly enterprising buccaneers, but also for its wonderful descriptions of new lands, native peoples, and strange birds and animals. His second book, A Voyage to New Holland, was published in 1709, and described his ill-fated expedition to the northwest coast of Australia in command of HMS Roebuck, a small naval vessel of 290 tons and twelve guns. On the return passage the ship sprang a leak off Ascension Island in the Atlantic. They managed to anchor in seven fathoms, but were forced to abandon ship. Dampier and his men went ashore in a raft, leaving the ship to sink to the bottom. They were picked up several weeks later by a squadron of British warships. Dampier had to face a court-martial on his return and was declared unfit to command a King’s ship. This was not the end of his travels, however. His knowledge of the South Seas was invaluable, and he was taken on as pilot by Captain Woodes Rogers for his privateering expedition of 1708–1711. This took them around the world and, unlike any of Dampier’s previous trips, resulted in the capture of some rich prizes and a handsome profit for the investors.

  Dampier’s writings do not have the lurid accounts of torture and murder which ensured the popularity of Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America, but they do provide an extraordinary insight into the perils and hardships which faced the buccaneers who ventured beyond the Caribbean. Dampier combined the curiosity of a scientist and naturalist with the keen observations of a seaman. It is little wonder that his work has been admired and consulted by generations of explorers and navigators. James Burney, who traveled with Captain Cook and rose to the rank of admiral, wrote of Dampier: “It is not easy to name another voyager or traveller who has given more useful information to the world; to whom the merchant and mariner are so much indebted; or who has communicated his information in a more unembarrassed and intelligible manner.”6

  Dampier reproduces in his books several pages from his logbooks (see Appendix IV). These show the calculations which were made to plot the daily course of his ship. A rough estimate of longitude was obtained by “dead reckoning”; this involved keeping a record of the distance sailed each day and the compass course being steered. When heading for a particular island or harbor during a lengthy sea passage, it was usual for the captain to put his ship in the correct latitude and to sail along that line until his lookout spotted the destination. In this way Dampier located the Galápagos Islands: “We steered away NW by N intending to run into the latitude of the Isles Gallapagos, and steer off West, because we did not know the certain distance, and therefore could not shape a direct course to them. When we came within 40 minutes of the Equator, we steered west.…”7 The method worked well, and on May 31, 1684, they saw the islands ahead of them, “some of them appeared on our weather bow, some on our lee bow, others right ahead.”

  Ships’ captains frequently made use of pilots with local knowledge to guide them through dangerous channels or into harbors or estuaries. This was fine in theory, but all too often the pilots proved to be useless. On the first leg of his privateering voyage around the world, Captain Woodes Rogers used a Kinsale pilot when approaching the Irish port of Cork. It was dark and foggy, and the pilot was so incompetent that he nearly wrecked the ship. If Rogers had not prevented him, he would have guided them into the wrong bay, “which provoked me to chastise him for undertaking to pilot a ship, since he understood his business no better.”8 Dampier had a similar problem on the Gulf of Panama, where the pilots were found to be “at a loss on these less frequented coasts.”9 Fortunately there were some Spanish pilot books on board which had been taken from one of their prizes, and these proved to be reliable guides to that stretch of coast.

  It was not unusual for ships’ officers to make their own charts of anchorages and to draw coastal profiles to assist them in recognizing landmarks on future voyages. These were sometimes published later or were incorporated into “waggoners” or volumes of sea charts. At a period when the maritime nations of Europe were competing for overseas colonies and were challenging Spain’s rule in the New World, good charts were highly valued. In July 1681 a group of buccaneers led by Captain Bartholomew Sharp seized a volume of charts from the Spanish ship El Santo Rosario. It proved to be of major strategic importance. An account of the capture of this volume was given by William Dick.

  In this ship, the Rosario, we took also a great book full of sea-charts and maps, containing a very accurate and exact description of all the ports, soundings, creeks, rivers, capes, and coasts belonging to the South Sea, and all the navigations usually performed by the Spaniards in that ocean. This, it seemeth, serveth them for an entire and completed Wagenaer, in those parts, and for its novelty and curiosity was presented unto His Majesty after our return to England. It has been since translated into English, as I hear, by His Majesty’s order, and the copy of the translation, made by a Jew, I have seen at Wapping; but withal the printing thereof is severely prohibited, lest other nations should get into those seas and make use thereof, which is wished may be reserved only for England against its due time.10

  William Dick was with Basil Ringrose and the buccaneers who traveled around the coast of South America from March 1679 to February 1682. The voyage was made at a time when Spain was at peace with England, so that the buccaneers’ capture or destruction of twenty-five Spanish ships and their plundering of Spanish towns along the South American coast were outright acts of piracy. When Sharp and his men returned to England, the Spanish authorities expected them to be tried and punished, but the capture of the charts was such a coup that King Charles II and his advisers refused to listen to the protests of England’s traditional enemy and the pirates were given a free pardon. The copies of the Spanish charts were made by William Hack, a London chart-maker. Several of these handsome charts survive today. The copy of the chart dedicated to the King by Sharp himself is in the British Library, and there is another copy in the National Maritime Museum in London.

  The journals of Dampier, Woodes Rogers, and Ringrose provide much information about the navigational methods employed by the buccaneers and privateers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but less is known about the navigational skills of the Anglo-American pirates who were operating in the 1720s. Presumably these pirates used similar methods, and it must be assumed that on every pirate ship there was at least one man capable of taking noonday sights and working out the latitude. The pirate captain or one of his crew must also have kept a logbook with dead-reckoning calculations. Local knowledge would have been sufficient to navigate familiar coasts, but the long sea passages which were such a feature of pirate life and the location of islands to careen and recuperate would have required accurate calculations and access to charts. Presumably charts, navigational tables, and instruments were taken from plundered ships. Henry Bostock, master of the sloop Margaret, which was taken by Blackbeard in December 1717, reported that as well as stealing cutlasses, and thirty-five hogs, the pirates took his books and instruments.11 Among the archaeological finds recovered from the pirate ship Whydah are four brass dividers, three navigational rulers, three sounding leads, a sounding lead rope, and a ring dial which would have been used with a compass to work out the altitude of the sun when calculating latitude.

  Lack of expertise in navigation could have unfortunate results. When a group of pirates led by Walter Kennedy broke away from Bartholomew Roberts’ squadron and set off on their own, they discovered that they had a serious problem: “In this company there was but one that pretended to any skill in navigation, (for Kennedy could neither write nor read, he being preferred to the command merely for his courage …) and he proved to be a pretender only.”12 They headed for Ireland but found themselves off the northwest coast of Scotland, tossed about by storms and with no idea where they were. They were lucky to avoid being shipwrecked and eventually found shelter in a small creek, where they abandoned their ves
sel and went ashore. Some of the pirates rampaged through the countryside, “drinking and roaring at such a rate that the people shut themselves up in their houses, not daring to venture out among so many mad fellows.”13 Two were murdered on the roadside and had their money stolen. Seventeen were arrested near Edinburgh and tried for piracy; nine of them were convicted and hanged. Kennedy, a former pickpocket and housebreaker, ended up in London, where he kept a brothel in Deptford Road until one of his whores accused him of robbery. He was committed to Bridewell Prison, where he was identified as a pirate by the mate of a ship he had once attacked. He was transferred to Marshalsea Prison, tried, convicted, and hanged at Execution Dock on July 19, 1721.

  The cruising grounds of the pirates were largely determined by the shipping lanes in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. The Bahamas were much frequented by the pirates because they could intercept Spanish ships en route from Central America to Spain as they passed through the Florida Straits. The Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola (now Haiti) was a favorite cruising ground because there the pirates could intercept merchant ships bound from Europe and Africa to Jamaica. Madagascar became a pirate haven because it lay in the path of ships trading with India.

  But while the movement of merchant ships determined the cruising grounds, it was the weather which dictated the pace and pattern of daily life. As east coast Americans know well, the shores and harbors of New England are inhospitable places in winter. In the eighteenth century the worst winters prevented any ships from moving, sometimes for weeks on end: “Our rivers are all frozen up, so that we have no vessels arrived, nor entered and cleared this last week,” reported the Boston News Letter in January 1712. A report from New York in the same paper noted that HMS Lowestoft could not sail until the ice had gone, “which may perhaps be the middle of next month.”14 In 1720 the Charles River at Boston froze so deep that men and horses could cross on the ice. This had its dangers: “On Wednesday night last we had here a flurry of snow with a gust of wind at south-east, wherein two men on horseback going over our Neck, missed their path, their horses were froze to death, the men also much froze.…”15

  There was therefore a seasonal pattern to the pirates’ voyages. Most of the winter months were spent in the warm waters of the Caribbean, and not till April or May did they head north. Bartholomew Roberts, for instance, attacked shipping on the Newfoundland Banks in June and July 1720, but was back in the West Indies by the winter. Black-beard was on the coast of Virginia in October 1717 and blockading Charleston, South Carolina, in June 1718, but in the intervening winter he went south and plundered ships off St. Kitts and in the Bay of Honduras. Edward Low was cruising off Rhode Island and Newfoundland in July 1723, but by September he had headed across the Atlantic to the Azores.

  There were some exceptions to this seasonal movement of pirate ships. In the summer of 1722 George Lowther attacked the ship Amy off the coast of South Carolina. Her captain retaliated with a broadside which killed and wounded so many of Lowther’s crew that he was forced to put into a nearby inlet to recuperate. They laid up the ship and spent all winter among the woods of North Carolina. They “hunted generally in the day times, killing of black cattle, hogs, &c, for their substance, and in the night retired to their tents and huts, which they made for lodging; and sometimes when the weather grew very cold, they would stay aboard their sloop.”16

  In addition to the north-south movement there was an east-west movement of pirate ships. The west coast of Africa attracted a number of pirate crews, particularly the regions which were known as the Guinea Coast, the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, and the Slave Coast. As their names suggest, these places supplied ships with gold, ivory, and black African slaves. Some pirates made the additional journey around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean and attacked ships loaded with the exotic products of India. For a short period around 1700, regular commerce was established between trading posts in Madagascar and merchants and corrupt officials in New York and other North American ports. Thomas Tew was a leading figure in this illegal trade, which came to be known as the Pirate Round. However, the practice was not typical of pirate life. Apart from the obvious desire to avoid North America in winter, and a sensible use of the trade winds when crossing the Atlantic, there was no consistency in the planning and execution of most voyages. Indeed, there was very little forward planning by any of the pirate crews. The democratic nature of the pirate community meant that a vote must be taken by the entire crew before the destination of the next voyage could be agreed on, and this inevitably led to many decisions being made on the spur of the moment. A study of the tracks of the pirate ships shows many of them zigzagging all over the place without apparent reason.

  Historians in recent years have been able to provide a remarkably detailed picture of life in the Royal Navy and the merchant service by drawing on the extensive records in the Public Record Office and elsewhere. Hundreds of the logbooks of the ships of the Royal Navy have been preserved, and so have the letters of captains and admirals. The records of the Navy Board and the Lords of the Admiralty may be studied in the Public Record Office, and numerous biographies have been written about the more famous naval officers. Port records, the journals and logs of merchant sea captains, and the records of the East India Company, the Royal African Company, and organizations like the Merchant Venturers Company of Bristol have enabled historians to build up a similar picture of life in the merchant service.

  There are no such archives for the pirates. We are dependent on the depositions of captured pirates and their victims, on the surviving records of pirate trials, on the reports of the colonial governors, on newspaper reports, and on a few valuable journals written by seamen who encountered pirates or were themselves buccaneers or privateers. This means that our picture of the pirates is inevitably fragmentary, and no more so than in the matter of their daily lives. The accounts of pirate life given by Exquemelin and Captain Johnson suggest an anarchic round of drinking and gambling and womanizing, interspersed with fierce raids on helpless victims. There was much of this, of course, but a closer look suggests that pirate life at sea was well organized, and similar in many respects to life on a merchant ship. This is not surprising, partly because the majority of pirates were former merchant seamen and would have adopted similar routines, and partly because ocean voyaging demanded a certain level of discipline if the crew were to survive the perils of the sea. There was the same need to establish watches, to post lookouts, to take soundings in shallow waters, and to navigate as accurately as possible. In heavy weather life would have been as wet, as cold, as physically demanding, and as dangerous as on a merchant ship. In calm weather there would have been days and sometimes weeks with little to do but mend sails and gear, carry out minor repairs, and eat and drink.

  There were, however, considerable differences too. Apart from the inevitable dangers involved when attacking a ship which might fight back, the daily routine on a pirate ship was considerably easier than life on a merchantman because the crew were not driven by owners and captains to make the fastest possible passage with the biggest possible cargo, and because the pirates operated with very much larger crews. The typical crew of a merchantman of 100 tons was around twelve men.17 A pirate ship of similar size would frequently have a crew of eighty or more. The pirates therefore had many more hands to haul on ropes, heave up the anchor, set the sails, work the pumps, load and unload provisions, man the boats, and go ashore for firewood and water.

  In 1726 a book published in London and entitled The Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts included a lengthy account of Roberts’ experiences while a prisoner of the pirate Edward Low.18 It is believed to have been written by Daniel Defoe and may be entirely fictitious, but the nautical detail is so authentic that it seems likely that it was based on interviews with former pirates or, like Robinson Crusoe, was based on real events. What is particularly convincing is the picture it creates of life on board a pirate ship in the early eighteenth century
. It tells how Captain Roberts was taken by Edward Low and his squadron of pirate ships off the Cape Verde Islands in September 1721. Low, who could be savagely cruel to his victims, was remarkably courteous to Captain Roberts. He invited him to join him in his great cabin, where he ordered a large silver bowl of punch, some wine, and two bottles of claret. After they had drunk each other’s health and talked awhile, Low ordered a hammock and bedding to be fixed up and told Roberts that he might come and go as wished and to help himself to food and drink. The weather was calm, and with the ship hove to, “no body had any thing to do, but the lookers-out, at the topmast-head; the mate of the watch, quarter-master of the watch, helmsman, &c being gone down to drink a dram, I suppose, or to smoke a pipe of tobacco, or the like.”19

  Low was on deck early in the morning and ordered the consultation signal to be made. A green silk flag with a yellow figure of a man blowing a trumpet was hoisted at the mizzen peak, and as the flag was raised, the pirates in the other ships came across in their boats. As many as could find space joined Low for breakfast in the great cabin; the rest found places in the steerage. After breakfast Low asked Roberts to remain in the cabin while the pirates went on deck to discuss what to do about Roberts and his ship. The crew were divided, and the arguments went back and forth. Low ordered the punch bowl to be filled and passed around, and the conversation turned to reminiscences of past adventures.

  In this manner they passed the time away, drinking and carousing merrily, both before and after dinner, which they eat in a very disorderly manner, more like a kennel of hounds, than like men, snatching and catching the victuals from one another; which, though it was very odious to me, it seemed one their chief diversions, and, they said, looked martial-like.20

  After dinner the pirates returned to their ships, while Roberts sat up with Low and three or four of the crew. They drank a couple of bottles of wine and somewhat improbably talked at some length about the affairs of church and state, “as also about trade.” When he had gone to bed, Roberts heard Low give the orders for the night. The ship was to lie to with her head to the northwest; they must mind the top light, and be sure to keep a good lookout, and call him if they saw anything or if any of the other ships made signals.