Hello, sailor!

23 June 2007

Richard Sanders recalls the exploits of Bartholomew Roberts, a swashbuckling 18th-century buccaneer to match Johnny Depp — except that he drank tea, and was probably gay

Born to a farming family in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, in 1682, Roberts was captured by pirates while working as mate aboard a slaver off West Africa. Conditions aboard the slavers were almost as bad for the crew as they were for the cargo (their death rate was actually higher), and most were more than happy to be recruited into pirate crews. But Roberts was an exception. It’s likely he’d been raised a Baptist, and there was an austere, slightly puritanical streak to his personality. He felt a visceral revulsion at the drunken anarchy of the men looting his ship and begged to be released. But men like Roberts, who could read and write — and therefore navigate — were always in short supply on pirate ships and he was forced aboard.

Roberts was quickly seduced by pirate life. Compared with the harshness of life aboard the slavers, it was an existence of almost unimaginable ease and luxury. There wasn’t even much fighting, since the mere sight of the black flag was usually enough to send their victims scurrying to surrender. Roberts’s forceful, charismatic personality quickly impressed itself on the crew — so much so that when the pirate captain was killed in battle just six weeks later, Roberts was elected to replace him. He accepted command with the memorable words, ‘I have dipped my hands in muddy water and, if a pirate I must be, ’tis better being a commander than a common man.’

All pirate ships were governed by a set of rules known as ‘articles’. Those aboard Roberts’s ship have survived and clearly show the stamp of his puritanical personality. ‘No person to game at cards or dice for money,’ read article III. Article VI banned women aboard and stipulated that ‘any man found seducing’ a woman and ‘carrying her to sea disguised’ was to ‘suffer death’. Intriguingly, boys were also banned. Article XI stipulated that the ship’s musicians should have a day off on Sundays — a rare example of pirates respecting the Sabbath. Lights were to be out by eight in the evening, and the men were under strict instructions to keep their ‘pistols and cutlass clean and fit for action’.

It was Roberts’s ability to harness the manic energies of his men to his own disciplined personality that set him apart from other pirate captains of the age. But his style of leadership created endless tensions. Pirate ships were floating republics. Not just the captain but all other officers were elected. Booty was divided between the whole crew with the captain’s share only twice that of a common man. Most pirates had escaped the tyranny of the merchant navy and it was the promise of freedom, above all, that drew them to life beneath the black flag. For many this meant freedom to drink themselves to oblivion, and the central drama of Roberts’s life would be the struggle of a sober, intelligent man to rein in the inherent anarchy of pirate life.