The Constitution Thrown Overboard

This room leads on an absence, and here the absence is the argument. No object can close the gap, because the gap is a property of the surviving record. The institution has stood, room by room, on the sworn depositions of four courts. The one document a company drew up for itself survives only as an absence and a stranger's reconstruction.

No text of any pirate company's own articles is known apart from Charles Johnson's. The fullest of them are in the General History of 1724 and 1728: Roberts's eleven articles, Lowther's eight and Phillips's nine. Roberts's men had thrown overboard the original they had signed and sworn to, and only some of it reached print.

the men had taken care to throw overboard the original they had signed and sworn to, so that he prints only some of it, suspecting the remainder contained something too horrid to be disclosed.

Set out the surviving sets and the companies that have none.

• Roberts's company: eleven articles, carried by Charles Johnson alone and possible, with Johnson's own note that he prints only some of them and that the men threw the signed original overboard.
• Lowther's company: eight articles, carried by Charles Johnson alone and possible.
• Phillips's company: nine articles, carried by Charles Johnson alone and possible.
• Gow's company: no set in the General History, and the source that might carry one is outside the record read.
• Bellamy's company: no numbered set anywhere in the sources read, a famous speech and no articles.

One thing the articles existed above all to fix was the division of shares. The figures for it belong to a gallery of shares and prize division, and this walk leaves them there.

The transmission is itself part of the story, and it can be set out in one chain. Each part of pirate government runs to the carrier that preserves it.

• The signing of articles, the deposing of a captain, the council of the whole and the quartermaster's custody of plunder run to the sworn depositions of three courts, the Old Bailey in 1696, Jamaica in 1721 and Cape Coast in 1722.
• The election of a captain runs to a fourth court, the Boston examination of 1717 printed in 1718, and is very likely.
• The divided authority of captain and quartermaster runs to Snelgrave's firsthand narrative of 1734 and the trial records, and is very likely.
• The buccaneer ancestry runs to Exquemelin of 1684, and is very likely.
• The word for word article texts and the set piece theatre run to Charles Johnson's General History of 1724 and 1728 alone, and are possible.
• Every one of these carriers is a prosecutor, a witness against the pirates, or a bookseller.

The finding this walk has carried is set down here for the last time, in the words used for it throughout. In the sources read for this Collection, the institution of pirate self government is carried by the sworn depositions of the piracy trials, independently of Charles Johnson, while the word for word text of any company's articles and the set piece scenes of pirate senates and election speeches survive only in Johnson's General History of 1724 and 1728; every one of these records was made by the pirates' prosecutors, by witnesses giving evidence against them, or by a bookseller writing for sale.

The walk closes where it opened, at the court record read in the prosecutors' words, and here at the constitution the men wrote and destroyed. The article sets and the terms belong to the gallery of the written articles. The deep case study of one governed company and its end, its elected captain, its articles and its crew as a polity, is the Roberts Collection, and the walk hands the reader on to it.