Hello, sailor!

Richard Sanders

20 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

A third of Roberts’s men were black. Lest we are tempted to see pirate ships as politically correct utopias, it should be pointed out that most were probably slaves rather than fully fledged pirates. But they were trusted to bear arms, they did the work of skilled sailors, and they were among the most loyal members of the crew. It was no life for the squeamish, but for slaves in the early 18th century, this was probably about as good as it got. When finally captured, many showed themselves eager to escape and to return to a life of piracy.

Roberts, like most pirates, was unmarried. The Buccaneers, who had pioneered piracy in the Caribbean in the 17th century, lived in male couples. They pooled everything they possessed and referred to their partner as their ‘matelot’. The Buccaneers’ fiercely misogynistic culture was bequeathed to pirates of Roberts’s day, and it’s likely there were strong homoerotic undercurrents aboard Roberts’s ships. On the rare occasions his men did manage to hunt down pirate-friendly brothels they indulged themselves with wild excess. But there is no record of Roberts himself ever partaking in these pleasures. And during his final rampage down the coast of West Africa in late 1721 he developed an intensely emotional relationship with his young surgeon, George Wilson. The two men were ‘intimate’, according to witnesses, and even pledged a mutual suicide pact, swearing to ‘blow up and go to hell together’ rather than be captured. The strange sexual ambiguity that Johnny Depp brings to the lead role in Pirates of the Caribbean is probably the most accurate element in the entire film.

By this time Roberts was living on borrowed time. The slave trade had always been the principle focus of his activity, providing both the bulk of his prizes and the bulk of his crew, and an angry coalition of slave traders and plantation owners was clamouring for action against him.