The Written Articles

The company was bound by a written constitution. Each set of articles was a numbered agreement fixing how plunder was shared, how the men were disciplined, what a maimed man was owed and how the company was to conduct itself, and every man who joined subscribed to it and swore to it, commonly on a Bible. In one company, for want of a Bible, the oath was sworn on a hatchet.

… certain articles put in writing, which every one is bound to observe, and all of them, or the chiefest part, do set their hands to it.

At the 1723 trial of Roberts's crew, witness after witness described being made to sign the articles, one man obliged to sign that night "for that a pistol was laid on the table to force him to it", and the bench remarked of a man who had not signed that this was worth the noting, "because all are obliged to it". Those same witnesses swore that the oath went with the signature.

The form has an ancestor, and the buccaneer articles Exquemelin printed in 1684 are it. Its fixed table of payment for a lost arm or leg or eye runs straight into the injury clauses of the Roberts, Phillips and Lowther articles of the 1720s. Very likely

A lawful cousin of the same instrument survives as a physical document. The articles of agreement drawn up in 1696 between Captain Kidd and his quartermaster John Walker, with a list of the company, survive among the Colonial Office records at The National Archives at Kew, at CO 5/931. They are a privateer's lawful contract, and they stand for the form the pirates took over and stripped of its legality.

The figures that survive are all in the table of payment for injury, and they are compensation for a maimed man, not a share of a prize.

• The buccaneer table, from Exquemelin of 1684: for a right arm, six hundred pieces of eight or six slaves; for the left, five hundred; for a right leg, five hundred; for a left, four hundred; for an eye or a finger, one hundred. Given as the passage carries it.
• Roberts's clause: eight hundred dollars for a lost limb or a crippling. Charles Johnson's text, and possible.
• Phillips's clause: four hundred pieces of eight for a joint, eight hundred for a limb. Charles Johnson's text, and possible.
• Lowther's clause: one hundred and fifty pounds sterling. Charles Johnson's text, and possible.

The word for word text of any company's articles survives in one place only, Charles Johnson's General History of 1724 and 1728, and even there only in part: the company that wrote the fullest surviving set had thrown its signed original overboard, and Johnson printed only some of its articles, taken from the pirates' own informations.

The division of shares, the thing the articles existed above all to fix, is the one clause these tables do not touch. The figures that would give it lie in studies of the trade, not in the articles.

The article sets and the terminology belong to the gallery of the written articles, and Kidd himself to the Kidd Collection. What the cross-company view adds is that the articles were a real legal instrument the pirates took over and stripped of its legality, held across companies rather than the work of any one of them.