Under the Black Flag Read online

  The effect of Treasure Island on our perception of pirates cannot be overestimated. Stevenson linked pirates forever with maps, black schooners, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen with parrots on their shoulders. The map with a cross marking the location of the buried treasure has become one of the most familiar piratical props, and is such an appealing concept that it has joined the repertoire of children’s party games and become a regular feature of dozens of adventure stories. Yet it is an entirely fictional device which owes its popularity to that spidery drawing of Treasure Island which is usually reproduced as the frontispiece of Stevenson’s book.

  Wooden legs and parrots were not fictional devices, however. Pirates, like the wounded seamen who ended their days in Greenwich Hospital, were always vulnerable to serious injury when working a ship in a storm or when attacking another vessel. In 1684 Robert Dangerfield was among the crew of a pirate ship on the coast of West Africa when they attacked a Dutch merchant ship. Broadsides were fired by both ships, which resulted in two pirates being killed and five wounded, “two of them losing each one leg.”10 Captain Skyrm, who was commander of one of Bartholomew Roberts’ pirate ships, had his leg shot off in the battle with HMS Swallow. Israel Hynde, boatswain of Roberts’ ship Ranger, lost his arm in the same action.11 The treatment of such wounds was often rough and ready. When William Phillips was wounded in his left leg during a skirmish between two pirate ships, there was no surgeon on board either vessel and it was decided that the ship’s carpenter was the most suitable man to tackle the job. The carpenter produced the largest saw from his tool chest and went to work “as though he were cutting a deal board in two and soon the leg was separated from the body of the patient.”12 To cauterize the wound, the carpenter heated his broadax, but he proved less skilled with this tool and burned more of the flesh than was necessary. Miraculously Phillips survived the operation.

  Stevenson knew what he was doing when he cast Long John Silver as a cook. It was standard practice in the Royal Navy to select the cook from among disabled seamen. In his irreverent account of shipboard life in the early eighteenth century, Ned Ward described the cook as “an able fellow in the last war, and had been so in this too, but for a scurvy bullet at L’Hogue, that shot away one of his limbs, and so cut him out for a sea-cook.”13 Thomas Rowlandson, the celebrated caricaturist and painter of Georgian England, was responsible for a charming series of watercolors illustrating the various ranks and trades in the navy. His picture of the sea cook shows him balanced on a wooden leg as he stirs a steaming cauldron with a long spoon.

  The popular association of pirates with parrots can also be traced back to Treasure Island. Long John Silver kept his parrot in a cage in the galley of the Hispaniola, but the bird also accompanied him when he went ashore. The parrot, called Cap’n Flint, was reported to be two hundred years old, and had been at Madagascar and Portobello. Arthur Ransome reinforced the link between pirates and parrots in his adventure stories about children on their summer holidays in the English Lake District and elsewhere. These stories have lost some of their appeal for children today but were immensely popular with English boys and girls in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In Swallows and Amazons, first published in 1930, Nancy and Peggy Blackett play the part of pirates and fly the Jolly Roger from the mast of their thirteen-foot sailing dinghy. They have an uncle who is a retired pirate and lives on a houseboat. Ransome makes clear his debt to Treasure Island by calling the uncle Captain Flint and providing him with a green parrot. At one point Peggy Blackett remarks, “We were teaching the parrot to say ‘Pieces of Eight’ so that it would be a good pirate parrot to take with us to Wild Cat Island. It only says ‘Pretty Polly.’ That’s no use to anyone.” Captain Flint and his parrot appear in several of the subsequent stories, notably in Peter Duck, which describes a voyage to the Caribbean in search of buried treasure.

  It was common for seamen who traveled in the tropics to bring back birds and animals as souvenirs of their travels. Parrots were particularly popular because they were colorful, they could be taught to speak, and they were easier to look after on board ship than monkeys and other wild animals. They also commanded a good price in the bird markets which were such a feature of eighteenth-century London. In September 1717 Michael Bland put an advertisement in The Post-Man which announced that “Parrotkeets with red heads from Guiney, and 2 fine talking Parrokeets from Buenos Ayres, and several young talking Parrots” were being sold at The Leopard and Tyger at Tower Dock near Tower Hill. In the next issue of The Post-Man, David Randall went one better: he announced the sale at the Porter’s Lodge, Charing Cross, of “Parrokeets which talk English, Dutch, French, and Spanish, Whistle at command, small Parrokeets with red heads, very tame and pretty.”14

  Parrots were sometimes used as presents to bribe officials or to obtain their goodwill. Clinton Atkinson, a notorious Elizabethan pirate, gave parrots to the deputies of the vice admiral of Dorset in 1583. The pirate captain Stephen Haynes gave two parrots to a servant of Sir Christopher Halton in 1582, and gave another two parrots to the Lord Admiral’s cook.15 There are several references to parrots in Woodes Rogers’ book of 1712, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, but the most interesting account of how the buccaneers collected and kept parrots appears in William Dampier’s description of his second voyage to South America. In 1676 he was in the Bay of Campeche near Vera Cruz and noted that the tame parrots found there were the largest and fairest birds of their kind in the West Indies:

  Their colour was yellow and red, very coarsely mixed; and they would prate very prettily and there was scarce a man but what sent aboard one or two of them. So that with provision, chests, hencoops and parrot-cages, our ships were full of lumber, with which we intended to sail.16

  Who exactly were the pirates, and where did they come from? The overwhelming majority were seamen: a sample of seven hundred men indicted for piracy between 1600 and 1640 shows that 73 percent described themselves as mariners or sailors.17 The proportion was even higher in the 1720s, during the great age of piracy. Marcus Rediker’s analysis of the Anglo-American pirates operating in the western Atlantic and Caribbean at that time shows that 98 percent were formerly seamen in the merchant service or the Royal Navy or had served in privateers.18 Most were merchant seamen who had volunteered to join the pirates when their ships were captured.

  The fact that almost all pirates were professional seafarers explains a great deal about them. It explains their ability to make the long voyages which frequently took them from the American coast to Africa and the Indian Ocean. It explains how they were able to find their way among the treacherous reefs and shoals of the Caribbean, and why they were able to give the navy the slip so often. It also helps to explain much of their behavior and their attitude to life.

  Seamen in the days of sail were a race apart. They spoke a language that was so filled with technical expressions that it was nearly incomprehensible to a landsman. We are all familiar with phrases such as “Avast there” and “All hands aloft” from shipboard scenes in the movies, but not many of us would be able to carry out the following instructions:

  Lift the skin up, and put into the bunt the slack of the clews (not too taut), the leech and foot-rope, and body of the sail; being careful not to let it get forward under or hang down abaft. Then haul your bunt well up on the yard, smoothing the skin and bringing it down well abaft, and make fast the bunt gasket round the mast, and the jigger, if there be one, to the tie.

  This is taken from The Seaman’s Manual by R H. Dana of 1844. Even more baffling are some of the phrases used by sailors in the seventeenth century. Here is an extract from a book by the former pirate Sir Henry Mainwaring:

  If the ship go before a wind, or as they term it, betwixt two sheets, then he who conds uses these terms to him at the helm: Starboard, larboard, the helm amidships.… If the ship go by a wind, or quarter winds, they say aloof, or keep your loof, or fall not off, wear no more, keep her to, touch the wind, have a care of the lee-latch; all these do
imply the same in a manner, and are to bid him at the helm to keep her near the wind.19

  As well as using phrases and expressions peculiar to life at sea, sailors looked different. Their faces and arms were burned and weathered to the nut-brown color of Robert Louis Stevenson’s sea captain Billy Bones. They were liable to have scars and injuries from handling sails and gear in heavy weather. Months of keeping their balance on a heaving deck gave them a rolling gait. Above all they were distinguished by their clothes. In the early years of the eighteenth century most landsmen wore long coats and long waistcoats over knee breeches and stockings. Seamen on the other hand wore short blue jackets, over a checked shirt, and either long canvas trousers or baggy “petticoat breeches,” which somewhat resembled culottes. In addition, they frequently wore red waistcoats, and tied a scarf or handkerchief loosely around the neck.20

  Most pirates wore variations of this traditional costume, which was hard-wearing and practical, though some wore more exotic clothes stolen from captured ships, or made from the silks and velvets which they plundered. Kit Oloard dressed “in black velvet trousers and jacket, crimson silk socks, black felt hat, brown beard and shirt collar embroidered in black silk.”21 John Stow noted that two pirates facing execution in 1615 gave away their fancy clothes, including breeches of crimson taffeta, velvet doublets with gold buttons, and velvet shirts with gold lace. Pirate captains seem to have adopted the clothes of naval officers or merchant sea captains, which at this period followed the style of English gentlemen. When he fought his last sea battle in 1722, the pirate captain Bartholomew Roberts was, according to Captain Johnson, “dressed in a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain round his neck, with a diamond cross hanging to it.”22

  The men who became pirate leaders were not the clean-cut heroes portrayed by Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in the movies, nor were they the jovial rogues of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. They were tough and ruthless men capable of savage cruelty and murder. They were elected by the votes of the crew and could be replaced as captain if they failed to satisfy the majority of the men under their command. They were expected to be bold and decisive in action, and skilled in navigation and seamanship. Above all they had to have the force of personality necessary to hold together an unruly bunch of seamen. The pirates who operated in the West Indies were drawn from a number of seafaring nations and many were black slaves, so there was no sense of national identity to unite them. Most pirates were by nature rebellious and lazy. They were notorious for foul language, and for prolonged bouts of drinking, which frequently led to quarrels and violence. They came together in an uneasy partnership, attracted by the lure of plunder and the desire for an easy life.

  There are surprisingly few detailed descriptions of what the pirate leaders looked like, and those we do have are rarely nattering. When the Beckford Galley was captured by pirates off Madagascar in 1698, the ship’s owners issued the following description: “Ryder the Pyrate, at present Commander of the Beckford Galley is a middle siz’d man of a swarthy complexion, inclinable by his aspect to be of a churlish constitution, his own hair short and brown and apt when in drink to utter some Portuguese or Moorish words.”23

  The Scotsman Captain Alexander Dolzell, executed for piracy in 1715, was described by the chaplain of Newgate Prison as “a seaman by profession, a pernicious and dangerous person; of a morose, stubborn, and ill disposition by nature.”24

  Equally unpleasant was Philip Lyne, who made a habit of torturing and killing the captains of the ships which he captured. He confessed to the killing of thirty-seven masters of vessels and an unspecified number of able seamen. The Boston Gazette of March 28, 1726, printed a graphic account of the appearance of Lyne and his crew as they walked to their trial in Barbados after being captured off the coast of South America:

  The commander went at the head, with about 20 other pirates, with their black silk flag before them, with the representation of a man in full proportion, with a cutlass in one hand, and a pistol in the other, extended; as they were much wounded and no care taken in dressing, they were very offensive, and stunk as they went along, particularly Line the commander; he had one eye shot out, which with part of his nose, hung down on his face.

  The most memorable description of any pirate is that of Blackbeard in Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pirates. It is often quoted, but worth repeating because Blackbeard became a legend and, together with such fictional characters as Captain Hook, Long John Silver, and Byron’s Corsair, was largely responsible for the image of the pirate which became popular over the years.

  Captain Teach assumed the cognomen of Black-beard, from that large quantity of hair, which, like a frightful meteor, covered his whole face, and frightened America more than any comet that has appeared there a long time.

  This beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant length; as to breadth, it came up to his eyes; he was accustomed to twist it with ribbons, in small tails, after the manner of our Ramilies wigs, and turn them about his ears: in time of action, he wore a sling over his shoulders, with three brace of pistols, hanging in holsters like bandoliers; and stuck lighted matches under his hat, which appearing on each side of his face, his eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a figure, that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury, from Hell, to look more frightful.25

  This fearsome picture was not entirely drawn from Johnson’s imagination. Henry Bostock, master of the sloop Margaret, was attacked by Blackbeard at dawn on December 5, 1717. He later described him as “a tall spare man with a very black beard which he wore very long.”26 Lieutenant Maynard, the naval officer who led the expedition against Blackbeard and fought him to the death on the deck of his ship, noted in a letter to a fellow officer that Captain Teach “went by the name of Blackbeard, because he let his beard grow, and tied it up in black ribbons.”27

  The practice of going into action armed to the teeth is confirmed by numerous accounts of pirate attacks. The carrying of several pistols was not simply to frighten the enemy but was a wise precaution. Flintlock pistols were unreliable at sea, and if one failed to fire because of a damp charge, a second might save the day. When he went into battle against the forty-gun warship HMS Swallow, Bartholomew Roberts had two pairs of pistols hanging at the end of a silk sling, slung over his shoulders “according to the fashion of the Pirates.”28 There is interesting confirmation of this among the artifacts recovered from the sunken pirate ship Whydah: at the stern of the wreck, an elegantly designed pistol with ornate brass scrollwork was discovered, and tied around its handle was three feet of silk ribbon. Pirates were also in the habit of wearing their weapons when they were off duty. Robert Drury visited one of the pirate settlements at Madagascar in 1716 and found the men living in some style on their plantations. One of these men was a Dutchman named John Pro, who spoke good English. “He was dressed in a short coat with broad, plate buttons, and other things agreeable, but without shoes or stockings. In his sash stuck a brace of pistols, and he had one in his right hand. The other man was dressed in an English manner, with two pistols in his sash and one in his hand, like his companion.”29

  Like their fellow seamen, pirates were mostly young men in their twenties. The average age of a pirate in the early eighteenth century was twenty-seven, which was exactly the same as the average age of a merchant seaman in the eighteenth century, and similar to the average age of seamen in the Royal Navy.30 The youthfulness of the crews was largely necessitated by the physical demands of working a sailing ship in all weathers. This required agility, fitness, stamina, a certain amount of physical strength, and an ability to put up with extreme discomfort above and below deck. Apart from the obvious perils of heaving in wet, flapping canvas one hundred feet above a pitching deck, there was a constant requirement to haul on ropes at all hours of the day and night, and the likelihood of being cold and wet for days on end.

  Pirates operating in th
e West Indies and American seaboard came from several seafaring countries. In the seventeenth century most of the men in the buccaneer ships were French or British, but all crews tended to be multinational. Of the five hundred men who took part in buccaneer Henry Morgan’s attack on the Spanish treasure port of Portobello in 1668, forty were Dutchmen, several were French, Italian, Portuguese, mulatto, or black, and the remainder were British.31 The majority of attacks in the Caribbean during the early years of the eighteenth century were made by French privateers, and in the years after 1725 the governors of the colonies reported numerous attacks by the Spanish coastguardsmen (guardo del costa), who exceeded their brief to defend Spanish possessions and took to piracy. But the pirates who terrorized the Caribbean from around 1715 to 1725, and used the island of Providence in the Bahamas as a base, were overwhelmingly from the English-speaking nations. By far the largest number, around 35 percent, were native Englishmen; next came men born in the American colonies, around 25 percent of the total; 20 percent came from the West Indian colonies, mostly Jamaica, Barbados, and the Bahamas; 10 percent of the pirates were Scottish; 8 percent were Welsh; and there was a scattering of Swedish, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.32