Rogers and the End

Curator's note

Two printed proclamations and one short trial account carry the whole ending. The Crown resumed the government of the islands, sent a man to hold them, and offered mercy first because the harbour made force expensive. When the mercy failed for a hundred men, the same governor used the other instrument.

Front page of The London Gazette, issue 5706, for 23 to 27 December 1718. The second royal proclamation opens the first column: By the King, A Proclamation, George R. — The London Gazette, issue 5706: the second proclamation, December 1718 The extension of the Act of Grace, printed as the first surrender window was closing. The original grant is issue 5573, given 5 September 1717, and it is the instrument Rogers carried ashore at Nassau. Both are held in full in the pardons theme gallery. The London Gazette, issue 5706, for 23 to 27 December 1718. Official record, public domain.

Woodes Rogers arrived in the port on 26 July 1718 as the first royal governor of the Bahamas, and reported it himself: "I arriv'd in this port 26th July". The arrival and the office are confirmed. His commission is held here at early 1718, without a closer date, until his patent at Kew, CO 5/189/019, has been read.

The pardon worked and then stopped working. Rogers' own despatches give the failure in numbers: "above 100 men that accepted H.M. Act of Grace ... are now out pirating again", and of the former pirates on the island "scarce half" remained. Those relative counts are the firm figures in the room. The memorial on the state of the colony reports about two hundred destitute inhabitants and five to six hundred surrendered pirates, and those are the memorial's own reported figures.

In December 1718 he answered that with a court. Ten men were tried at Nassau on 9 and 10 December, nine were convicted, and eight were hanged on 12 December 1718. George Rounsivell was reprieved at the gallows, and John Hipps was acquitted as a forced man. The trial and the condemnations are confirmed; the tally at the gallows is very likely. The count of eight is the one this Archive prints, because the common figure of nine confuses the convictions with the executions.

Oil painting of 1729 by William Hogarth. Woodes Rogers is seated with members of his family on a terrace, with the sea and shipping beyond. — William Hogarth, Woodes Rogers and his family, 1729 Painted eleven years after the landing at Nassau, and after the governorship had ruined him financially. His own gallery holds the rest of the life. William Hogarth, 1729. Public domain.

The haven was governed back into the empire on purpose, by a named man carrying a printed instrument, in a sequence of dated steps that took less than five months from the landing to the scaffold. The pardon itself, and how the Crown used mercy across the whole suppression, is held in The King's Pardon. Rogers' own life is in the Woodes Rogers gallery.

Records in this room

Person Woodes Rogers Bristol privateer, author of A Cruising Voyage Round the World, and first royal governor of the Bahamas, who broke pirate Nassau.