The Captain Chosen, and Turned Out Again

Command in a pirate company was a conditional office. A company chose its captain and could turn him out, and his near absolute authority was reserved to chase and battle. The room leads on an election John Brown swore to at Boston in May 1717.

the sloop commanded formerly by Hornigold, at that time by one Bellamy, who upon a difference arising amongst the English pirates because Hornigold refused to take and plunder English vessels, was chosen by a great majority their captain, and Hornigold departed with twenty six hands in a prize sloop.

The examination of John Brown, taken at Boston on 6 May 1717, printed in The Trials of Eight Persons at Boston in 1718. The transcription is held in the Oxford Text Archive.

An election in a witness's sworn words, the month and the manner disputed A sworn examination, taken three months before Bellamy took the Whydah. It carries a captain chosen by a great majority in a policy quarrel, over a refusal to take English shipping, and the losing party sailing away with a vessel and its hands. The sentence reads as consistently with a factional split as with a formal ballot, and the month and the mechanism are disputed. Original transcription in the Oxford Text Archive. Public domain.

Command was conditional at both ends, given and taken back. At the Jamaica trials of 1721 a witness swore to a company deposing its captain.

being beaten off by the French ship, the pirates quarrelled among themselves and divided their company, and that the quartermaster, being made captain of their brigantine, they turned out Charles Vane, Robert Deal and fifteen men more, and put them on board a small sloop, giving them provisions and ammunition to provide for themselves.

A deposition in The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and other Pirates, Jamaica, 1721. The print is held at the National Library of Jamaica.

The election that put Bellamy in Hornigold's place came out of a policy quarrel. The company would take English shipping and its captain would not, so it chose another man by a great majority and let Hornigold go with twenty-six hands in a prize sloop. Very likely

The captain's authority was near absolute in chase and in battle and reserved to those, and outside them the company could overrule and unseat him. The founding seizure of a ship, the collective act by which a company first came together, was the origin event that makes a company rather than the standing constitution that followed it.

The famous election speeches, and the mock parliament with its House of Lords and its Commoners, are the work of one bookseller, Charles Johnson, in his General History of 1724 and 1728. The 1723 court record that a pirate House of Lords would have to sit in does not carry the phrase. The vote for cowardice, and the succession of John Rackham, that some retellings hang on the Vane deposing are Johnson's overlay on it; the deposition itself records a quarrel and an elevation and names neither.

The census of elections and deposings across companies belongs to the gallery of crew voting and councils. Bellamy and the material recovered from his wreck belong to the Bellamy and Whydah cluster, and Vane and Rackham to the Republic of Pirates and the End of the Golden Age Collections. What the cross-company view adds is that command was a job a company handed out and took back, shown in one company's election and another's deposing.

Records in this room