The Council of the Whole Company

The company decided its own great questions in a council of the whole, common hands included. That whole company franchise is what makes the practice a form of government. The room leads on the earliest of those councils.

… learning the Mocha fleet had passed, calling a council they agreed to follow them.

… every man in the ship his share, as they thought they deserved.

… it was said, all might go that would.

The trial of the men taken with Henry Every, at the Old Bailey in 1696. Wing T2252, ESTC R38357. The original is in the British Library.

The whole company in council, in the earliest of these records In the 1696 trial the company, learning the Mocha fleet had passed, calls a council and agrees to follow, and it allots every man his share as they thought they deserved. The founding seizure, where it was said all might go that would, is the origin event that makes a company and not the standing council. The man and this case belong as a whole to the Henry Every Collection. Original in the British Library. Public domain.

At the 1723 Cape Coast trial a witness deposed that a captured brigantine was "voted by the pirates to be burnt", and that he believed he was "the instrument of saving her". The same company allocated its shares as it thought fit and admitted men as it thought they deserved, the franchise being the whole company, common hands and all.

The company held it a maxim that prisoners were not to be ill used after quarter was given, and it voted a whipping for a man who broke it.

The whole company franchise sets this apart from the officers only council of war of a naval or privateer ship, which sat under a commission and admitted only its officers. The founding seizure of a ship, where the men agreed that all might go that would, was a collective act and the origin event that makes a company, and it stands as that origin and not as the standing council.

None of this was a commonwealth of equals, and the same records that carry the votes carry the coercion. Forced men appear aboard every pirate company whose composition the record describes, and the pattern holds at the piracy trials of the decade generally. The forced man's defence, that he was dragged to the signing and never truly joined, is the shadow of the vote in the same trials that carry the vote, and the officer who allotted the shares is the officer who beat a man into the boat.

The census of councils and votes across companies belongs to the gallery of crew voting and councils. The man and the 1696 case belong to the Henry Every Collection, and this room borrows the council from that trial. What the cross-company view adds is a whole company deciding its own great questions, with the forced men standing in the same records that carry the decisions.

Records in this room