Hello, sailor!

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

The Pirates of the Caribbean films, the third of which has just been released, have revived the age-old interest in all things piratical. But the average Victorian schoolboy would probably have choked on his porridge if he’d known the real nature of the men whose adventures he so avidly devoured.

If anyone deserves the title ‘the real pirate of the Caribbean’ it was the Welshman Bartholomew Roberts, who captured an astonishing 400 ships in a brief two-and-a-half-year career between 1719 and 1722 — a figure that dwarfs that of any of his contemporaries. Roberts was living proof that reality is always far, far more intriguing than fiction. He drank tea rather than rum. He organised his ships along strictly democratic, egalitarian lines. A third of his men were black. And he 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.