Gallery · The Republic of Pirates · Room 6 of 6
Only One Side Kept Paper
Curator's note
This room leads on an absence, and it is the only room in the Collection that does. It is also the room that explains how much weight the other walls in the walk can carry.
Set the two sides of this story beside each other. The state made paper and kept it: royal proclamations printed in the Gazette and preserved in the official record; a governor's despatches, calendared and filed; sworn depositions taken from men who had been robbed; a patent of appointment; a trial return recording nine convictions and eight hangings; rolls of the men who surrendered. Almost all of it survives, because the machinery that produced it was designed to keep what it wrote.
The haven produced paper too. Companies at sea agreed articles and signed them. Officers were chosen by vote. Shares were reckoned and disputes were settled. None of it was archived, because there was nothing to archive it into. The pirates' own voice at Nassau comes down as a name inside another man's deposition, and as the reported words of men in a book written by an author who never went there.
That asymmetry is a property of the haven, and it is the reason the two halves of this Collection rest on such unequal footing. Control of the port is documented because the people it inconvenienced wrote about it constantly. A constitution would have been documented by the pirates, and the pirates left no archive, so it can be argued and cannot be shown.
Some of the gaps could still close, and it is worth naming which. The Admiralty surrender roster at Kew, ADM 1/2282, would fix the numbers who came in, which now rest on later authorities at roughly two hundred and nine surrenders and roughly two hundred pardons. Rogers' patent, CO 5/189/019, would fix the date of his commission, which this Collection holds at early 1718. The CO 700 Bahamas charts would replace a drawn schematic with surveyed water. Each of those documents exists and each answers a question this walk had to leave open.
A motto is often attached to the ending of this haven, and this Archive is not printing it, because it has not yet been traced to a source of the period. When it is traced, or shown to be later, that finding will appear here.
Where this Archive has got something wrong, it is listed and dated on the corrections page. The entrance to this Collection, and the question it opened with, is at The Republic of Pirates.