The Porcupine

The governance argument stops at the water's edge of this room, and it should.

On 14 January 1721/2, in the road at Whydah on the slave coast, Roberts's company demanded ransom from the ships they found there. Most paid. One, the Porcupine, did not settle in time, and the pirates set her on fire. Enslaved Africans were still chained in her hold. The confidence on this is not soft. The burning is confirmed, and it is not Johnson's word: Ogle's dispatch reports an English ship burnt at Whydah for refusing ransom "with a considerable Number of Negroes a-board", and the 1723 trial record carries sworn depositions that name the Porcupine directly.

The depositions are worse than any summary of them. One witness, the cook Edward Evans, told the court that those aboard faced "the dreadful choice of perishing by Fire or Water", and that men who jumped to escape the flames "were immediately seized by the Sharks, who tore their Limbs off in the sight of those Villains, who took a cruel satisfaction in looking on". Another prisoner's defence was that the pirates had set him to work unshackling the enslaved men on board; some were freed, and the fettered were "burnt or drowned, unable to help themselves being fetter'd". This is sworn testimony in a Vice-Admiralty court, not narrative colour.

Now the one number, held apart. Johnson puts the dead at about eighty. No other source gives a figure: Ogle says "a considerable Number", the trial says "many". So the Archives states the burning and the fettered deaths at confirmed and the toll of about eighty at possible, Johnson-only. Read the two together and keep them apart. That the Porcupine was burned with fettered people aboard is a documented fact. That eighty of them died is a single author's estimate.

Hold this room beside the three before it, because it is the answer to them. The same company that voted its captain and wrote its articles did this, on the same coast the Royal African Company worked, in a flagship that had been a Company slaving frigate. The democracy at sea and the atrocity in the hold are not two stories. They are one deck. The trial record that documents the burning is the same record that will hang fifty-two of the men who sailed her.