The Pirate War

The company was not worn down at sea. It was hunted, and caught, by a ship sent to do exactly that.

Chaloner Ogle commanded HMS Swallow, a Royal Navy fourth-rate, and the Royal Navy had put him on the Guinea coast to end the depredations the governors and the Royal African Company kept complaining of. This is the room where the state answers the polity. The Swallow's page holds the instrument; here she does her work in two actions five days apart, off Cape Lopez, in February 1722.

On 5 February the Swallow came on the pirates' consorts and drew one off, feigning a merchantman until she was clear of the others, then turning on her. She took the Ranger. Her commander, James Skyrme, had a leg shot off in the fight. This is Ogle's own account, printed in the London Gazette: the first blow of the campaign landed on the consort, not the flagship.

Five days later the Swallow returned and found the Royal Fortune herself. The action opened in the morning. Ogle's broadside brought down her mainmast, and in that first exchange Roberts was killed. What the government's own dispatch says is the reason this Collection keeps coming back to it. For the death of the age's most famous pirate, Ogle wrote one flat clause: "The Captain, whose Name was Roberts, was killed." No duel, no last words, no crimson coat. A King's officer reporting a killing. The fact of the death is confirmed, sealed by that dispatch and reprinted in the trial record.

Set the legend beside the dispatch and let the gap show, because the gap is the room's real subject. Johnson gives the death a vivid manner: grapeshot to the throat, killing Roberts at once, his body weighted and thrown overboard in his finery at his own prior request, never recovered. It is the image everyone carries. It is also from one book. Ogle's dispatch gives no cause of death, and Atkins, who was aboard the Swallow as surgeon, does not describe it. So the throat wound and the burial in finery sit at possible, tradition rather than record, held visibly apart from the confirmed fact that he died that morning.

What the dispatch cannot tell us is what the fight was like from the pirates' side of the deck, or whether Roberts saw the Swallow for what she was before she fired. The Royal Fortune was captured, not sunk, and taken into service, so there is no wreck to question either. The record of this morning is a naval officer's, written to be believed by his superiors, and it is nearly all we have.