People of African heritage comprised at least a fifth of Atlantic era ship crews,[1] and nearly a third of pirate crews whose racial composition was known[2] during that Golden Age of Piracy. Ken Kinkor notes that 27 out of 180 pirates in Samual Bellamy’s crew, 50 of 180 pirates in Edward England’s crew; 9 of Edward Lowther’s 23 men, and 65 of the 114 men led by Blackbeard were black men.[3] Nevertheless, most historians believe that relatively few Africans were full participants on pirate ships, and certainly very few African pirate captains are known to have preyed on Caribbean shipping. Most historians believe that Africans on pirate ships served as slaves and servants to white pirate sailors. Arne Bialuschewski speaks for this majority view when he states that pirates on the African coast saw little value in Africans, noting that when the Marquis del Campo from Ostend was taken by pirates, the pirates gave the Marquis’s crew an old captured barque in which to sail to a nearby port. The Ostenders found ninety-two “emaciated slaves” on board this ex-slaver, whom the pirates had apparently not troubled to feed.[4] In another instance, pirates returned 300 slaves to an English vessel because they had no means of profitably selling them.[5]
On the other hand, Michael Jarvis’s work on maritime slaves in Bermuda shows that there were numerous slave-seamen on Bermudan vessels who might have revolted and become pirates had they chosen to do so. Nevertheless, very few Bermudan slave sailors even fled slavery, let alone turned pirate. Indeed, when the Bermudian privateer Regulator fell prize to the United States Navy, its 75 man crew had only five white officers as compared to 70 black slave seamen. When Massachusetts offered these slaves their freedom, (rather than selling them at auction according to custom), the slave seamen refused to a man, asking they instead be sent home to Bermuda (and slavery) as prisoners of war.[6]
Bialuschewski’s point that pirate treatment of captured African slaves showed a lack of “respect for Africans,”[7] is unconvincing, as pirates are famed for their lack of respect for anybody. Feeding unsalable cargo was unprofitable to pirates, who frequently attacked vessels simply to steal food and drink.[8] Giving a captured crew an old ship riddled with Teredo worm in a one-sided exchange for their newer one, was not. Piratical self-interest meant that pirates seldom harmed crews who surrendered immediately;[9] this clemency encouraged other crews to refuse to fight when their vessels were attacked. Taking the better vessel and handing back a leaky derelict after stripping all profitable cargo was therefore good, sound, piratical, business sense.
In support of the minority historian view that black pirates were full members of a pirate crew, Kenneth Kinkor notes that on one occasion, black pirates successfully led a mutiny against a tyrannical pirate captain.[10] Also in support of the minority historian viewpoint, Leeson notes that while pirates could not call upon governmental authority to enforce cooperation, they nevertheless "successfully cooperated with hundreds of other rogues," and “rarely fought, stole from, or deceived one another”.[11]
Furthermore, unlike the despotic structures of the merchant and military navies of the day, pirate ships were true democracies. Major decisions were referred to a ship's council, which usually included everyone on board the vessel. Pirate captains were popularly elected, could be deposed by majority vote, and had unquestioned authority only in battle and while pursuing a ship or being pursued. In short, pirate captains were solely military leaders. To further restrict the power of a captain, pirate ships elected a quartermaster who acted as a civil magistrate. "Excepting in Time of Battle," the authority of pirate ships lay with this officer, who was also popularly elected, and was also deposable by majority vote.[12] Quartermasters often became captains of a captured prize if the original pirate ship was in good condition and had enough seamen to man a “consort ship.”
Given the democratic structure of piratical government, their inability to resort to legal compulsion and the relatively large proportion of Africans aboard pirate vessels, it seems unlikely that African seamen on pirate vessels were merely slaves and servants. But where are all the African pirate captains? The odd behavior of the Regulator’s slave-crew offers a hint to the first question. Here we have black slaves with valuable maritime skills - then in critically short supply due to the war - who declined an offer of freedom in the United States in favor of a return to Bermuda and slavery.[13] Why?
Bermuda had banned the import or export of slaves in 1676, and had simultaneously exiled the island’s tiny free colored population.[14] The entire black population was therefore composed of native-born slaves. There was little field work available since most of the island was not conducive to plantation style agriculture, and black children were therefore “cherished as property . . . brought up in the houses of their mothers’ owners, and (became) playmates to the owners’ children.”[15] Freedom meant exile from family and friends.
By 1700, one in five adult male Bermudan slaves was a deep-water sailor, who usually went to sea as part of a kinship group - often in the company of white boys raised in the same household - and under the command of men they had known all their lives..[16] By contrast, the position of black sailors outside of Bermuda was precarious, and deep-water black seamen in Bermuda - unlike most slaves - would have been aware of this fact. Common seamen of the era, whether white or black, were often treated with extreme cruelty. Equiano, in his autobiography, states that he had hardly come aboard the slave ship which took him from Africa, before he saw a white man “flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast that he died in consequence of it.”[17] Above all, Equiano knew the danger to freemen of being sold back into slavery. He had come near to having been kidnapped and resold into slavery himself after attaining his manumission[18], and once, when sailing as a slave seaman, saw a young mulatto known to have been born free, kidnapped onto a Bermuda ship despite the presence of witnesses attesting to his free status, and the sailor’s own ability to produce a certificate of having been born free in St. Kitts.[19]
How does this relate to the status of pirates of African ancestry? Twenty-five percent of male slaves in coastal Massachusetts in the 1740s were engaged in shipboard work. By 1803, black men – mostly free - filled about 18% of the jobs of American seamen.[20] Black seamen were therefore common throughout the Atlantic era, and since pirates had no use for landsmen,[21] any black man on a pirate ship who was not cargo to be sold, must have been a seaman.[22] Under even merely greedy captains, shipboard life took on added risks. Briton Hammon of Marshfield, MA was one of two blacks on a 12 man vessel shipwrecked when her captain refused to dump a cargo of valuable timber in order to keep the ship from being driven onto a reef. The crew was attacked by Indians who killed everyone but Hammon, who escaped only to become a slave to the governor of Jamaica; was press-ganged by the Spanish Navy; confined in jail for almost five years for refusing to serve Spain; attempted unsuccessfully to escape several times; and finally, made his escape on a British Man of War where he served as a seaman, was wounded in battle, and was eventually paid off. He then took service as a cook on a Boston bound ship, accidentally met his old master on board, and “joyfully” returned home with him to slavery[23]
Had this Boston-bound ship met up with pirates, would Briton Hammon have turned pirate? Quite possibly, depending on exactly how joyful he had been on seeing his master. Although about one in five pirates signed articles under the Jolly Roger as a result of mutiny, the most common way in which a sailor became a pirate, was by volunteering when his merchant vessel was captured. [24] Since at least some black seamen on pirate vessels really were slaves, it was advantageous to all black pirates to plead that they were slaves when facing a trial court. This fiction mutually benefited both seaman and the State court, as it permitted valuable black seamen to be sold as property, rather than to be hung as pirates even in most cases of obvious guilt.
While Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates,[25] shows that trial courts almost always sold African seamen captured on pirate vessels, this was less true for Africans of mixed race. A disproportionate number of people identified as mulattos and other persons of mixed race were hung as pirates. Thus, like Equiano, persons of mixed race lived under the shadow of slavery, knowing that they could at any time be returned to that condition. Equiano himself mentioned that “two gentlemen, who had been in the West Indies . . confessed they had made at one time a false bill of sale, and sold two Portuguese white men among a lot of slaves.”[26] Similarly, Dutch pirate Captain Laurens Cornelis Boudewijn aka “El Griffe” - meaning half African and half mulatto - was kidnapped and enslaved by the Spanish, and was forced to serve aboard a galley in a special Spanish naval squadron designed to combat piracy. El Griffe escaped and turned pirate, but retained a burning hatred of the Spanish, repaying their crimes with interest.[27] Mulattos and other mixed race Africans may have been emboldened to seek positions as captains and quartermasters on pirate ships because this general societal distrust made them more likely to be hung if captured, whether or not they claimed to be merely forced slave seamen.
Thus, it is clear that black pirates existed during the Atlantic era in numbers disproportionately greater than those in the total pool of black seamen; that some, if not most of them were full members of pirate crews despite their pretense of being slaves if captured, and finally that at least some people of African heritage successfully captained or quarter-mastered pirate ships: especially if they had reason to believe they would be hung rather than sold if taken. Why then are not their names better known? Here I believe the most likely reason was fear. Slaveowning planters could hardly have wished their laborers to know that just a few miles of their coasts lived a mobile, democratic pirate community to whom they could flee if they managed to escape. There would have been pressure on editors and publishers to obscure the numbers of black pirates. Daniel Defoe, for example, describes Black Caesar, who was a pirate captain in his own right before he joined with Blackbeard, and was the quartermaster on Teach/Blackbeard’s ship as merely being Blackbeard’s family slave. Or consider the case of Laurens de Griffe. He was of three quarters African heritage, but when Jamaica governor Sir Henry Morgan sent the HMS Norwich to hunt de Griffe down, Morgan described de Griffe as “tall, blonde, mustached and handsome.”[28] Where are all the black pirate captains? Right there in the history books, wearing whiteface.
[1] W. Jeffrey Bolster and American Council of Learned Societies, Black Jacks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997)2, http:// hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.00352.
[2] K. J. Kinkor, "From the Seas! Black Men Under the Black Flag," American Visions 10, no. 2 (1995)26, http://login.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mth&AN=9504272731&site=ehost-live (accessed 7/4/2012).
[3] Ibid., 27.
[4] Arne Bialuschewski, "Black People Under the Black Flag: Piracy and the Slave Trade on the West Coast of Africa, 1718-1723," Slavery & Abolition 29, no. 4 (12, 2008), 462, http://login.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=35582094&site=ehost-live.
[6] Michael J. Jarvis, "Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783," The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 3, Slaveries in the Atlantic World (Jul., 2002)586, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3491466.
[7] Bialuschewski, Black People Under the Black Flag: Piracy and the Slave Trade on the West Coast of Africa, 1718-1723, 464.
[8] Rediker, Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004)35.
[9] David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates (New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1966)120.
[10] Kinkor, 26.
[11] Peter T Leeson, "An‐arrgh‐chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization," Journal of Political Economy 115, no. 6 (December, 2007)1050, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/526403.
[14] Jarvis, 590.
[15] Jarvis, 590.
[16] Ibid., 597.
[17] Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano Written by Himself, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 66.
[18] Ibid., 151-152.
[19] Ibid., 120-121.
[20] Bolster, 6.
[21] Johnson and Defoe, 228.
[23] Briton Hammon, Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man, Servant to General Winslow of Marshfield, in New England, who returned to Boston after having been absent almost Thirteen Years, (Boston, MA: Printed and sold by Green & Russell, in Queen-Street, 1760) http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=HamNegr.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all (accessed 7/7/2012).
[26] Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano Written by Himself, 95.
[27] Clarence Henry Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century (New York, NY: EP Dutton and Co, 1910) 241-246.
[28] Alex Ritsema, Pirates and Privateers from the Low Countries. (Deventer, The Netherlands: Lulu Press, 2008)76 78.
