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December 28, 2024 - March 13, 2025
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, a 1724 book whose author* wrote under the alias Captain Charles Johnson.
“I am a man of fortune, and must seek my fortune,”
America seemed to be the place where fortunes were made. Thatch discovered that being a sailor was not the way to make it.
Sailors stood below even farm laborers in England’s pecking order. The historian David Ogg described their treatment as being “barely distinguishable from the criminal,” while the eighteenth-century essayist Samuel Johnson wrote that their lot was very much the same as that of a prisoner, only with the added possibility of drowning.
“he that pisseth between decks.”
Jamaica was “as sickly as a hospital, as dangerous as the plague, as hot as hell, and as wicked as the Devil.” It was “the Dunghill of the Universe” the “shameless Pile of Rubbish . . . neglected by [God] when he formed the world into its admirable order.” Its people, he harangued, “regard nothing but money, and value not how they get it, there being no other felicity to be enjoyed, but purely riches.”
Even so, dozens of blacks did escape each year. They established rogue settlements in the mountains, where they grew crops, raised families, practiced their religions, and trained bands of swift and effective jungle warriors to raid the plantations, free slaves, and kill Englishmen. In their capital, Nanny Town, the runaways were said to be led by an ancient and powerful witch, Granny Nanny, who protected her warriors with magical spells.
“good liquor to sailors is preferable to clothing,”
Although Selkirk greeted Rogers’s men with enthusiasm, he was reluctant to join them after learning that his old commodore, William Dampier, was serving with them. Cooke wrote that Selkirk distrusted Dampier so much that he “would rather have chosen to remain in his solitude than come away with [Dampier] ’till informed that he did not command” the expedition. Dr. Dover and his landing party were only able to rescue the castaway by promising they would return him to the island were he not satisfied with the situation.
Their “Kingdom of Pirates” was a far more modest affair than the novelists and playwrights were making it out to be back in London. Most of them had been on the island for a decade or more, a collection of pirates, ex-cons, and deserters enjoying an easier, simpler existence in this tropical no-man’s-land. The local Malagasy people practiced polygamy, which seemed sensible to the English outlaws. Most of them had several wives and large numbers of mulatto children as well as a small army of slaves, whom they had acquired through trade or by intervening in the tribal wars that plagued the
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They’d gone into battle looking like they were capable of anything and, as a result, they hadn’t had to do anything at all.
They intended to fight smart, harm few, and score big.
Nassau looked like an encampment of castaways, with sailors singing, dancing, drinking, and fornicating. Increasing numbers of wives and prostitutes were settling on the island, tending alehouses, mending clothes, cooking meals, and keeping the men company at night. One young sailor, James Bonny, had recently arrived from South Carolina with his sixteen-year-old wife, Anne; the latter quickly earned a reputation for libertine behavior. For most of the mariners it was a dream come true: ample food, drink, women, and leisure time. And when the money ran out, there was always another ship to
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Bellamy may have felt he’d found paradise: a republic of sailors, freed from those who would exploit them, free to live the merry life as long as the agents of empire could be kept away.
They swore in the new men taken from the St. Michael, reading them the ship’s articles and making them promise not to steal from the communal plunder. This was kept in one large stash aboard the Sultana, carefully inventoried by Bellamy’s newly elected quartermaster, Richard Noland. Captives later reported that Noland declared, “If any man wanted Money, he might have it.” Withdrawals he marked in an account book, deducting them from the client’s share of the plunder, as if he were running a sort of pirate credit union.
But in one respect, Jennings continued to set himself apart from the rest of the pirates. He still refused to attack English vessels. On a cruise of Cuba, Jennings did detain one English ship, the Hamilton Galley of Jamaica, but only out of dire necessity: Days from port, his men had run out of booze. His crew boarded the ship and seized twenty gallons of rum, leaving the rest of her cargo intact. Jennings treated the captain “civilly and told him they hurt no English men” and, in parting, gave him valuables worth far more than the rum itself.
I scorn to do anyone a mischief when it is not for my advantage,”
“Damn ye, you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security, for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by their knavery,”
“But Damn ye altogether! Damn them [as] a pack of crafty Rascals. And you [captains and seamen], who serve them, [as] a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls! They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference [between us]: they rob the poor under the cover of law . . . and we plunder the rich under the cover of our own courage.”
“I am a free Prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred ships at sea and an army of 100,000 men in the field.
By the time darkness fell, they turned the helm over to one of their captives, freeing up another pirate for the critical task of drinking wine.
