The Crew as a Polity

A vote put Roberts in the command. A vote could take companies away from him, and twice it did.

Between the captain and the crew stood the quartermaster, the office that makes the pirate company more than a gang. In an ordinary merchantman the master's word ran the ship. In Roberts's company the quartermaster held the plunder, spoke for the men, and could check the captain's appetite, and a council of the company sat over decisions that mattered. Roberts, who owed his own command to the vote, commanded a ship built so the vote could restrain him. The theme page on the quartermaster draws the office in the abstract; this deck is where it worked.

The proof that the polity was real is that it broke. Thomas Anstis, one of Roberts's own men, took the Good Fortune and sailed off to raid on his own account in April 1721, and this is not Johnson's word alone: the Calendar of State Papers places the Good Fortune under Anstis by that summer, which is why the Archives states the desertion as fact rather than tradition. Walter Kennedy had gone earlier, running off with a ship and the plunder aboard her, though that break rests on thinner ground and sits at possible. A company you can secede from, taking a hull and a company of men with you, is a company that governs by consent and can withdraw it.

One tradition needs flagging rather than repeating. Johnson gives Roberts's inner circle the name "the House of Lords" and paints a governing clique around the captain. Treat that as colour from a book, not as documented structure. The office of quartermaster and the fact of the council will bear weight; the parliamentary nickname will not, and the Archives does not build the polity on it.

The company also has a silence at its centre that the governance story must not paper over. The crew the trial names, Harry Glasby the sailing master, James Skyrme, Edward Evans, William Guineys, Richard Wood, are the men who could speak for themselves in court. The sixty-odd enslaved Africans taken with them could not. No muster book survives for either voyage, so even the free crew cannot be fully listed, and the men held as Royal African Company property are largely nameless in the record. This was a polity of some of the men aboard, not all of them. The Roberts page and the crew voting theme carry the parts of this that can be documented.