Evidence
Possible
Consistent with the evidence, not established. 451 of the 3046 claims in the Archives. All claims, with filters.
- Every's birth year and place are unresolved: 1659 at Newton Ferrers, 1653 at Cattedown near Plymouth, or c. 1656 from the Phillips deposition.
Parish and deposition readings
Competing versions; the 1653 Cattedown claim traces to the unreliable 1709 pamphlet and is capped at Speculative. Sources agree only on Devon origin near PlymouthOn: Henry Every - The Bristol origin rests on a single sentence in an uneven early secondary source and has no corroborating period record.
Early secondary source
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724), 'a Bristol man born, but had sailed some time out of Jamaica, in privateers'; capped at Possible for want of corroborationOn: Edward Thache (Blackbeard) - No birth record for the pirate has been produced; the usual date of about 1680 is a back-calculation from apparent age at death.
Estimate (no primary)
About 1680 is derived from an assumed age of 35 to 40 at death in 1718; the NPS c. 1660 and Brooks's early-to-mid 1680s figures are recorded as disagreementsOn: Edward Thache (Blackbeard) - The strongest candidate for Bonny's death is a St Catherine parish burial of an "Ann Bonny" on 29 December 1733, in the parish that also holds Mary Read's 1721 burial. The identification is inferential (name, spelling and parish only); the entry gives no age, family or reference to the trial, and a separate Bonny family appears in the same registers.
Parish register (reported)
St Catherine burial register, Spanish Town, 29 December 1733On: Anne Bonny - Bonny's pre-1720 biography (a Cork birth, an attorney father, the Carolina years, a first marriage to James Bonny) is Johnson-only. The parental names "William Cormac" and "Peg Brennan", and the story that she lived to about 1782 in America, originate in John Carlova's 1964 novel Mistress of the Seas and are not in Johnson.
Near-contemporary narrative and modern fiction
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724); John Carlova, Mistress of the Seas (1964)On: Anne Bonny - The tradition that Read and Bonny alone fought the boarders while the men hid below, and Bonny's parting rebuke that Rackham should have fought like a man, are Johnson-only and absent from the trial print.
Near-contemporary narrative
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724); not in The Tryals (1721)On: Anne Bonny; Mary Read - Read's entire pre-1720 biography (an English birth, a childhood disguised as a boy, soldiering in Flanders, the inn called the Three Horseshoes near Breda) rests on Johnson (1724); her nationality is Johnson's word, and no muster roll, marriage record or inn of that name has been found.
Near-contemporary narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates (London, 1724), attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, Vol. 1, the lives of Mary Read and Anne BonnyOn: Mary Read - The interval of about six weeks between Roberts being taken and his election at Principe, and the election speech Johnson gives him, are Johnson-derived and are capped at Possible under the house Johnson rule.
Period print (Johnson)
Johnson's General History, Vol. 1 (1724); the 'six weeks' and the election speech are Johnson-derived and capped at PossibleOn: Bartholomew Roberts - The cause of death was grape or small shot striking his throat, killing him at once.
Period print (Johnson)
Johnson's General History, Vol. 1 (1724); Ogle's dispatch gives no cause and Atkins does not describe the mannerOn: Bartholomew Roberts - His crew weighted his body and put it overboard in his finery at his own prior request, and it was never recovered.
Period print (Johnson)
Johnson's General History, Vol. 1 (1724) and museum retellings; Johnson-derived and capped at PossibleOn: Bartholomew Roberts - He captured a French warship and hanged the Governor of Martinique from a yardarm.
Colonial deposition and period print
A 1721 Bermuda deposition (CSP Colonial vol 32 item 463.iii, original CO 37/10) and Johnson both report it, so it is not Johnson-only; modern scholars doubt the literal event. Held at Possible; the original deposition survives as CO 37/10On: Bartholomew Roberts - After Howell Davis was killed at Principe, Roberts was elected captain of the company, about six weeks after being taken.
Printed narrative (Johnson)
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724), Roberts chapter. The election is accepted; the six-weeks interval and the election speech are Johnson-derived and capped at Possible under the house Johnson rule.On: Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War; Bartholomew Roberts - Roberts's articles, eleven of them as Johnson prints them, are the fullest single pirate code the period hands us, and survive only because a printed book preserved them.
Printed text (Johnson)
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724); the pirate constitutions as texts are Johnson-only. No independent manuscript of the articles survives; the verbatim text is capped at Possible.On: Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War; A Full and Exact Account of the Tryal of all the Pyrates (1723) - Off Bahia in 1719 Roberts took a rich Portuguese prize carrying about 40,000 gold moidores and a jewelled cross; the ship's name is not given in any period source read.
Printed narrative (Johnson)
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724). The moidore figure is approximate and Johnson-derived (Possible); the name 'Sagrada Familia' is a later attribution absent from Johnson, the 1723 pamphlet and Atkins (unverified).On: Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War - The famous 'over 400 ships' career total is a modern aggregate found in no period source.
Modern aggregate
Johnson lists many separate captures but no career total; the number is a modern figure (Possible), though that the total was very large is Highly Probable.On: Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War; Bartholomew Roberts - Roberts is reported to have hanged the Governor of Martinique at the yardarm; the episode is period-reported but contested.
Colonial deposition and printed narrative
Bermuda deposition of Lt Gov Bennett, 25 April 1721 (CSP Colonial vol 32 item 463.iii), independent of and predating Johnson; also in Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724). Held at Possible until the original CO 37/10 is read at Kew.On: Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War - The specific toll at the Porcupine, about eighty, is carried by Johnson alone.
Printed narrative (Johnson)
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724). Ogle's dispatch says 'a considerable Number' and the trial depositions say 'many'; the figure of about eighty is Johnson-only and capped at Possible.On: Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War; A Full and Exact Account of the Tryal of all the Pyrates (1723) - That Roberts was killed by grapeshot to the throat, dying at once, and was buried at sea in his finery, is a tradition carried by Johnson alone.
Printed narrative (Johnson)
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724). Ogle's dispatch gives no cause and Atkins does not describe the death; the manner is capped at Possible.On: Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War; Bartholomew Roberts - Three numbered pirate article sets survive in verbatim or near-verbatim form (Roberts 11, Lowther 8, Phillips 9), but all three survive only in Johnson's General History, which concedes Roberts's original was thrown overboard.
Printed history (Johnson)
Johnson, General History of the Pyrates (Gutenberg 40580); Roberts's, Lowther's and Phillips's articles; Johnson's admission the Roberts original was destroyed. Johnson-only, capped PossibleOn: Pirate Articles - The articulate set-piece of the quartermaster as a 'civil Magistrate', the two-shares figure, and the mock 'House of Lords' are Johnson-only and uncorroborated in the cached trial prints.
Printed history (Johnson)
Johnson, General History Vol. 1 (1724), Roberts chapter (Gutenberg 40580); 'House of Lords' absent from the 1723 Cape Coast print, which has only 'Lords Commissioners'/'Lords of the Admiralty'. Capped PossibleOn: Quartermasters and Divided Authority - The romanticised set-pieces of pirate democracy (the mock 'House of Lords' court, the captains' election and defiance speeches, Roberts's election speech of 1719) are Johnson's literary reconstructions and are capped at Possible; the mock court is absent from the 1723 Cape Coast print.
Printed history (Johnson)
Johnson, General History Vols 1 (1724) and 2 (1728); the 1723 Cape Coast print holds only 'Lords Commissioners'/'Lords of the Admiralty'On: Crew Voting and Councils - Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates (1724) is at once a near-contemporary source for the suppression and the principal myth-maker of the age's supposed coherence; where it is the sole carrier of a claim, the Archive caps that claim at Possible and frames it as tradition, not record.
Near-contemporary work
Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724)On: The End of the Golden Age; The End of the Golden Age - A separate company, the crew associated with Richard Worley and numbering about nineteen men, was condemned at Charles Town on 24 November 1718, so that the Charles Town courts sent roughly forty-nine pirates to the gallows in the closing months of 1718, one of the largest concentrated waves of pirate executions of the era, a count fixed by the surviving 1719 printed trials together with a modern reconstruction; the Governor and Council's own letter of 12 December 1718 reports instead that the Governor's expedition killed twenty-six men, Worley among them, and does not mention a trial of his company.
Signed library research resting on printed trial proceedings
Nic Butler, "The Pirate Executions of 1718", Charleston Time Machine, Charleston County Public LibraryOn: Charles Town (Charleston) - The Swallow returned to Cape Lopez and found the Royal Fortune still at anchor, many of the pirates said to be the worse for drink after a prize lately taken; Bartholomew Roberts was killed early in the engagement, and the grapeshot that struck him in the throat and killed him at once where he stood on deck, the crimson waistcoat and breeches, feather and diamond cross in which he is said to have fallen, and the story that his surviving crew, honouring a wish attributed to him, put his body over the side before the ship was taken so that it was never recovered and Ogle never had the man himself, alive or dead, all descend from Charles Johnson's General History and the accounts that follow it, and the Archive carries them as Possible following his own record.
Museum account and period narrative
Royal Museums Greenwich, "Death of Bartholomew Roberts," rmg.co.uk, accessed 14 August 2026, for the death by grapeshot to the throat, the explicit rejection of the broadside version, and the sea burial and non-recovery of the body (Probable); Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724), for the drunkenness of the crew (Probable) and for the account of Roberts's crimson waistcoat and breeches, feather in his hat and gold chain with a diamond cross, which the page attributes to Johnson by name and carries as PossibleOn: Cape Lopez - Execution Dock was a fixed place of public execution, not a berth for ships, on the north bank of the River Thames at Wapping, immediately east of the City of London, where the condemned of the High Court of Admiralty were hanged at or about the low-water mark; the gallows stood between the high and low watermarks on the foreshore, so that the tide reached the site, a placement that expressed the Admiralty's jurisdiction over crimes committed at sea, below the low-water mark and beyond the ordinary common-law counties.
Museum object record
Royal Museums Greenwich, "A Pirate hanged at Execution Dock," RMGC object 247376, rmg.co.uk, accessed 2026; and Richard Clark, "Hanged at Execution Dock 1735 to 1830," capitalpunishmentuk.org, accessed 2026, for the site at Wapping, the placement of the gallows between the high and low watermarks, and the Admiralty jurisdiction over crimes below the low-water mark (all Confirmed)On: Execution Dock - The custom associated with the site, that a body was chained to a stake at the low-water mark and left until three high tides had at least partially washed over it, is well attested as a practice of Admiralty executions generally, pirates included, and it fell out of use in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, on dates given variously between about 1786 and 1814.
Secondary account and museum object record
Richard Clark, "Hanged at Execution Dock 1735-1830," capitalpunishmentuk.org, accessed 2026, and Royal Museums Greenwich, "A Pirate hanged at Execution Dock," RMGC object 247376, rmg.co.uk, accessed 2026, for the chaining at the low-water mark, the three high tides, the qualification that the practice applied to Admiralty executions generally, and the end of the custom between about 1786 and 1814 (Probable). The terminal date is imprecise and would need contemporary reports to fix it; no consulted account fixes the yearOn: Execution Dock - Salvage of the 1715 wrecks was organised from the Cuban side, Juan del Hoyo arriving in September 1715 to direct it and about four million pesos being recovered within a few months of the camp near the Sebastian River, out of a cargo put at about seven million pesos in one modern account and at twelve million or more than fourteen million in others; Lieutenant Governor Heywood reported from Jamaica on 11 August 1716 that near twenty vessels had been seized by Spanish picaroons and recorded Lord Archibald Hamilton's receipt of 468 pounds 5 ounces troy of plate.
State paper and secondary narrative
"The Nueva Espana fleets (1715)," shipwrecks.es, for Juan del Hoyo's salvage from September 1715 and the recovery totals (Probable); David Wilson, "The 1715 Plate Fleet and the Rise of the Pirates," History Today, 30 July 2015, for the competing cargo value (Disputed); Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 29, entry 308, Lieutenant Governor Heywood to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Jamaica, 11 August 1716, C.O. 137, 12, Nos. 21, 21 i to iv, for the picaroon seizures and the plate received by Hamilton (Confirmed)On: Havana - President Samuel Annesley and the East India Company's factory staff at Surat were first held under house arrest with soldiers posted and then reportedly moved into confinement in irons, and a single popular secondary account gives their release as 27 June 1696, which would make the confinement a little over nine months rather than the round year that circulates in general retellings; the same account has Annesley entering into a bond on 6 January 1696 undertaking to provide convoy for the coming pilgrim fleets in the Red Sea, negotiated through the wazir Asad Khan alongside a promise to compensate the losses, and all of it is no stronger than Possible until the Company's own Surat correspondence has been read.
Secondary narrative (popular)
"The Mughals, The Pirates and the Plunder of the Ganj-i-Sawai", Enroute Indian History, is the only source consulted that gives dates for the confinement, supplying the house arrest, the transfer to prison in irons, the bond of 6 January 1696 negotiated through Asad Khan and the release of 27 June 1696 (Possible); "Samuel Annesley of Surat" for Annesley's presidency from 1694 and the protective custody (Probable, a low-authority wiki used only as a lead). The confinement is given as of the order of nine to ten months and no more strongly than Possible; the round formula of about a year is an approximation and not a finding, and neither date is printed here as factOn: Surat - The celebrated account that at close quarters only Anne Bonny, Mary Read and one other kept the deck while the rest of the company went below, that Read "called to those under Deck, to come up and fight like Men, and finding they did not stir, fired her Arms down the Hold amongst them, killing one, and wounding others", and that Bonny afterwards told Rackham that if he had fought like a man he need not have been hanged like a dog, derives from the 1724 General History attributed to Captain Charles Johnson and cannot be confirmed from the trial record.
Period narrative through a museum account
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson (1724), as quoted by Royal Museums Greenwich, "Anne Bonny and Mary Read: real pirate histories" (accessed 2026)On: The Capture of John Rackham (1720) - Lieutenant Governor Gledhill of Placentia reported to the Board of Trade that the pirates had burnt and destroyed 26 ships, a figure nothing else corroborates and one of a pattern of exaggerated destruction claims made by officials at a distance, while Captain Percy's naval report on the season is said to mention neither Roberts nor pirates at Trepassey and the local fishing returns for 1720 are not markedly worse than those for 1722.
State paper reported in a scholarly archival study
Olaf Uwe Janzen, The Problem of Piracy in the Newfoundland Fishery in the Aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, citing Gledhill's report in Colonial Office series CO 194 (CO 194/6, folio around 367) and the Newfoundland fishing returnsOn: Roberts Sacks Trepassey (1720) - When the Swallow returned to the anchorage on 10 February 1722 and closed with the Royal Fortune, Bartholomew Roberts was killed early in the engagement; that he was on deck in rich dress and was struck in the throat by grapeshot and killed almost at once, by an anti-personnel charge of scattered small shot rather than by a broadside, is Charles Johnson's account, unmentioned in Ogle's dispatch and in Atkins, and the Archive carries the manner of death as Possible following his own record.
Museum account
Royal Museums Greenwich, "Death of Bartholomew Roberts," rmg.co.uk, accessed 2026, for the death of Roberts by grapeshot to the throat early in the action of 10 February 1722, and for the express correction that grapeshot is an anti-personnel weapon and that he fell near the start of the fight and not at its end (Probable). The rich dress in which he is said to have fallen, and the often quoted detail of a piece of grapeshot no bigger than a penny, derive from Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates (1724); the page attributes both to Johnson by name and the Archive carries the finery as Possible, following its record of Cape Lopez. Captain Chaloner Ogle's own dispatch, printed in the London Gazette and reprinted in the 1723 trial account, reports the fact of Roberts's death and gives no cause for it, a limit the page statesOn: The Battle of Cape Lopez (1722) - The report that, at their captain's earlier wish, Roberts's crew weighted or wrapped his body and threw it into the sea before the Swallow's men came aboard, so that Ogle never had the man, descends from Johnson's General History and is carried as Possible following his own record, though it is consistent with the fact that no body, grave, remains or relic was ever recovered; the Swallow's broadside then brought down the Royal Fortune's mainmast.
Museum account
Royal Museums Greenwich, "Death of Bartholomew Roberts," rmg.co.uk, accessed 2026, for the crew weighting the body and casting it overboard at Roberts's stated wish, denying Ogle even the body, and for the fact that the remains were never recovered (Probable). The dismasting of the Royal Fortune by the Swallow's broadside is carried on the Archive's existing record of HMS Swallow, from Ogle's dispatch, and the page follows itOn: The Battle of Cape Lopez (1722) - Governor Robert Johnson and the Council of South Carolina, unable to resist, agreed to the demand and had the medicines gathered and sent out; on receiving the chest Blackbeard released the hostages, let the plundered vessels go, and took his flotilla off the coast without storming the town.
Journalism
Brian Hicks, "Hicks column: Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet and the end of piracy in Charles Town", The Post and Courier (Charleston, 2020)On: Blackbeard's Blockade of Charles Town (1718) - Roberts was elected captain by the surviving crew after Howell Davis was killed in a Portuguese ambush on the island of Principe; the General History attributes to him on that election the words that, since he had dipp'd his Hands in Muddy Water, and must be a Pyrate, it was better being a Commander than a common Man.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, for the election and the quotationOn: Roberts and the Bahia Treasure Fleet (1719) - The ship the master pointed out was a Portuguese merchantman of forty guns, and she proved to be carrying sugar, skins and tobacco, about 40,000 moidores in gold, chains, trinkets and jewellery of considerable value, and a cross set with diamonds that had been designed for the King of Portugal; the sterling worth of that gold is nowhere stated.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, for the forty guns, the lading, the moidores and the diamond crossOn: Roberts and the Bahia Treasure Fleet (1719) - Morgan started up the Chagres on 9 January 1671 old style with 1,400 men in seven ships and 36 boats, left 300 men holding the castle of San Lorenzo and 200 with the boats so that about 1,200 made the march, and on 18 January 1671 old style, that is 28 January new style, formed his column as a tertia with a vanguard of 300 under Lawrence Prince and John Morris, beat the Spanish army on the savanna in front of the city, and had the city in his hands by three that afternoon; the English accounts differ on the departure from Cape Tiburon, Morgan giving 8 December and William Fogg 6 December, and on the cost of the storm of Chagres, Morgan giving 470 men engaged with 30 killed and 76 wounded against Fogg's 400 men and a loss of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bradley, a Lieutenant Powell whom no other source names, and 150 men.
Calendared state papers, two independent English relations
"A true account and relation [by Henry Morgan] of this my last expedition against the Spaniards", signed 20 April 1671, entry 504, Col. Papers, Vol. XXVI., No. 51, with copy at Col. Entry Bk., No. XXVII., pp. 121 to 128; "Copy of the relation of Wm. Fogg concerning the action of the privateers at Panama, taken the 4th of April 1671", entry 483, Col. Entry Bk., No. XXVII., 120 to 121; The Pirates of Panama, the English text of A. O. Exquemelin's De Americaensche Zee-Roovers for the marching figureOn: Morgan's Sack of Panama (1671) - The cause of the fire that destroyed Panama on the night of 18 to 19 January 1671 old style is not established: Morgan's relation states that the defenders commanded the city to be fired and blew up the chief fort with forty of their own soldiers in it, William Fogg reports independently that the buccaneers entered and found the houses already fired by the enemy, and Exquemelin states that Morgan had fire set privately to several great edifices and afterwards "pretended the Spaniards had done it"; a mixed and uncontrolled fire through a city of cedar built houses is excluded by none of them, and the account by the President of Panama that bears most directly on the question has not been read.
Calendared state papers and period narrative
Morgan's relation, entry 504, Col. Papers, Vol. XXVI., No. 51; Fogg's relation of 4 April 1671, entry 483; The Pirates of Panama, the English text of Exquemelin; against the unread "Account by the President of Panama of the Expedition", entry 547, Col. Papers, Vol. XXVI., No. 70On: Morgan's Sack of Panama (1671) - The plunder divided at Chagres on 26 February 1671 old style disappointed every writer who mentions it, but its size is not established: Morgan puts it at about 30,000 pounds and Richard Browne at above 70,000 pounds in plate and good plunder besides other rich goods with an accusation of embezzlement attached; the share is given as 10 pounds a man by both Fogg and Browne and as 200 pieces of eight, that is about fifty pounds at the Jamaica rate of five shillings the piece, by Exquemelin, and Browne reports that of 37 sail that went out 19 were cast away and not above 10 had yet returned, ruining Port Royal investors who had advanced money to fit them out.
Calendared state papers, private letter and period narrative
Morgan's relation, entry 504, Col. Papers, Vol. XXVI., No. 51; Fogg's relation, entry 483; Richard Browne to Joseph Williamson, 21 August 1671, entry 608, Col. Papers, Vol. XXVII., No. 24; The Pirates of Panama, the English text of ExquemelinOn: Morgan's Sack of Panama (1671) - The Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Madrid of 8/18 July 1670, by which the two crowns undertook to end hostilities in America, was concluded before the fleet sailed, but whether it was known or published in Jamaica by then, and how far Modyford knew of the design on Panama, is not established: nothing in the recall papers establishes ignorance, Sir Thomas Lynch's proclamation of 15 August 1671 charges Modyford with making war contrary to his Majesty's express order and command, and John Peek, Morgan's secretary throughout the Panama voyage, deposed on 3 April 1672 that Modyford had knowledge of the design by a ship sent on purpose and gave no countermand in a letter written ten days after that ship's arrival.
Calendared state papers, proclamation and deposition
Proclamation of Sir Thomas Lynch, 15 August 1671, entry 602, and the associated recall papers, Col. Papers, Vol. XXVII., Nos. 18 to 25; deposition of John Peek, 3 April 1672, annexed at entry 542, Col. Papers, Vol. XXVI., No. 69On: Morgan's Sack of Panama (1671) - The wartime service of the later pirates rests on evidence of unequal strength: the 1724 General History states that Edward Teach was a Bristol man born who had sailed some time out of Jamaica in privateers in the late French war, with no commission, muster or prize record found and the point in the war unknown.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, printed for T. Warner, 1724, attributed to Captain Charles JohnsonOn: The War of the Spanish Succession Begins (1700 to 1702) - Sir Nicholas Lawes reported on 13 November 1720 that Rackham and eighteen more were taken by a trading sloop belonging to Jamaica, well manned and commanded by Jonathan Barnet, and that the Assembly had appropriated an additional duty, laid on enslaved people imported and exported and including a tax of 1,000 pounds upon the Jews, to fitting out two sloops for guarding the coasts from pirates.
Calendared state paper
Item 288, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 32, 1720-1721, November 1720 (C.O. 137, 13. Nos. 45, 45 i.-iii.)On: Colonial Militias and Private Defence - The 1724 General History prints three sets of pirate articles: Bartholomew Roberts's in eleven numbered clauses, George Lowther's in eight and John Phillips's in nine, with compensation for a lost limb fixed at 800 dollars from the public stock in Roberts, 150 pounds sterling in Lowther and 800 pieces of eight in Phillips.
Period narrative
A general history of the pyrates, London, printed for and sold by T. Warner, 1724, Lowther articles at p. 352, Phillips articles at pp. 397 to 398, Roberts articles at about pp. 230 to 233, Internet Archive generalhistoryof00defo (SRC009-001)On: Pirate Articles and Crew Agreements - Reported outcomes of the 1722 Cape Coast Castle trial run to something on the order of fifty-two of the prisoners hanged and about twenty sentenced to servitude for the Royal African Company, with a substantial number acquitted, but the figures vary between popular and scholarly accounts and are approximate.
Trial pamphlet and secondary accounts
A Full and Exact Account, of the Tryal of All the Pyrates, Lately Taken by Captain Ogle, on Board the Swallow Man of War, on the Coast of Guinea, printed and sold by J. Roberts, London, 1723; Royal Museums Greenwich, Death of Bartholomew Roberts; the trial appendix to A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, as a secondary carrierOn: The Royal African Company Records (TNA T70) - The vivid particulars of the two famous battle deaths rest on unequal ground: the tally of Blackbeard's wounds, five pistol shot and about twenty cuts, comes from Maynard's report of examining the body and the Boston News-Letter and is repeated by the 1724 General History, the 'five and twenty' of the retellings being the later inflation, while the story that Roberts's crew, honouring his wish not to be taken, weighted his body and threw it overboard in his finery so that Ogle never captured him rests on the General History's narrative tradition alone and is no better than possible, though it is consistent with the fact that no body was recovered.
Period narrative with embellishment, checked against museum accounts
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, 1724; Death of Bartholomew Roberts, Royal Museums GreenwichOn: Death: Battle, Disease and the Gallows - The articles of Bartholomew Roberts, known only as Charles Johnson printed them in 1724, set out a scale of punishment rather than a single sanction, prescribing marooning for defrauding the company, the mutilation clause of slitting the ears and nose followed by being set ashore in a hard place for theft between shipmates, and death or marooning for deserting the ship or quitting quarters in action.
Transcribed articles as printed in a period narrative
The Articles of Bartholomew Roberts, as printed by JohnsonOn: Pirate Justice and Discipline - The articles sworn by John Phillips's company of the Revenge about 1723 to 1724, taken upon a hatchet for want of a Bible and reaching us only through Johnson's printing, carry the clearest documented flogging clause in the corpus, prescribing Moses's Law, that is 40 stripes lacking one, on the bare back for a man who struck another while the articles were in force, and marooning with one bottle of powder, one bottle of water, one small arm and shot for a man who attempted to run or kept a secret from the company.
Transcribed articles as printed in a period narrative
The Articles of John Phillips' crew, as printed by Johnson in the General History, chapter on PhillipsOn: Pirate Justice and Discipline - Fighting between shipmates was banned outright and personal quarrels were reserved for a duel ashore, Roberts's eighth article reading No striking one another on board, but every Man's Quarrels to be ended on Shore, at Sword and Pistol, while the choreography of that duel, in which the quartermaster placed the disputants back to back at a set distance, gave the word to turn and fire, sent them to their cutlasses if both missed and declared the man who drew first blood the victor, rests on a single passage of Johnson's 1724 General History and is no better than possible as regular practice.
Transcribed articles and period narrative
The Articles of Bartholomew Roberts, as printed by Johnson; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, 1724On: Pirate Justice and Discipline - The Phillips articles as printed by Johnson also carry a safety-discipline clause penalising snapping a weapon, smoking tobacco in the hold with an uncapped pipe and carrying a candle without a lantern, indicating that a substantial part of shipboard justice was the management of fire and powder risk.
Transcribed articles as printed in a period narrative
The Articles of John Phillips' crew, as printed by Johnson in the General History, chapter on PhillipsOn: Pirate Justice and Discipline - A minority of pirate crews were men of African descent, some of them free members signing articles and drawing shares, and an estimated 30 to 50 of the Whydah's company, about 146 on the sworn count at Boston and put as high as 180 in museum material, were of African descent, among them John Julian, of mixed Miskito and African descent, and Hendrick Quintor, described as a free Black man.
Museum and exhibition research
"The pirate crew", Real Pirates exhibition material drawing on Whydah Pirate Museum research, unionstation.org, accessed 2026; no muster roll survivesOn: The Slave-Trade Nexus - Drunkenness appears in the pirate trial and gallows literature both as a defence and as a confessed cause of ruin: in the evidence Johnson prints for the Cape Coast Castle trials of 1722 a prisoner called Harry Glasby to witness that he had come among the crew so drunk that he was hoisted aboard with a tackle and so without his consent, and another was deposed to have been always drunk and to have known nothing of the action against HMS Swallow, while the dying declaration of John Rose Archer, executed at Boston on 2 June 1724, names "my brutish Drunkenness" in the formulaic manner the genre required.
Period narrative of contested reliability printing trial evidence and dying declarations
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, 1724, trials of Roberts's men and the dying declarations of John Rose Archer and William WhiteOn: Alcohol, Food and Water at Sea - The General History has nine turtlers invited aboard John Rackham's sloop off Point Negril in 1720 to "drink a Bowl of Punch", trial evidence that when Jonathan Barnet chased "some were drinking, and others walking the Deck", the visitors going below when fired on with Anne Bonny and Mary Read among the few who kept the deck, and the sloop taken "after a very small Dispute", but it nowhere states that the company were drunk or attributes the ease of the capture to drink, so the popular claim that Rackham's crew were too drunk to fight is a later inference; the trial print does not date the capture, its latest charged act being 20 October 1720, the 22 October of modern accounts is in the print the date of the charge against the turtlers, and Governor Lawes's letter of 13 November, "about a fortnight ago", points to the end of October.
Period narrative of contested reliability
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, 1724, chapter on RackhamOn: Alcohol, Food and Water at Sea - Johnson's General History reports that at Whydah in January 1721/2 ten of the eleven ships in the road ransomed with Roberts's company at eight pounds of gold dust a ship and prints a receipt dated 13 January 1721-2, a figure that at Atkins's rate of about four pounds the troy ounce falls between about 384 and about 467 pounds sterling depending on the weight standard meant; the episode rests on that book alone.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), attributed to Captain Charles Johnson; rate from John Atkins (1735)On: Cargoes and Commodity Values - The Fateh Muhammed was taken in the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab in late August or early September 1695 and the Ganj-i-Sawai on her passage from Mocha to Surat, the day being disputed, while the 1696 indictment dates an attack on "a Moorish Ship" forty leagues from Surat to 28 September 1695, a charge the research reads as the Fateh Muhammed rather than the Ganj-i-Sawai; that a pirate squadron lay off the strait in exactly the weeks when eastbound Red Sea shipping had to make its passage or lose it is an inference drawn from a directory of 1791 applied backwards, and no source records any pirate stating a seasonal reason for a station.
Printed sailing directory
A New Directory for the East-Indies, 1791; the site's Mughal administration record for the 1695 chronology and its disputed dayOn: Charts, Maps and Route Knowledge - Johnson's General History of 1724 states that Bartholomew Roberts's company, having taken the Royal African Company's Onslow off Sestos in 1721, fell to "pulling down her Bulk-Heads, and making her flush", continued to her the name Royal Fortune and "mounted her with 40 Guns"; the forty gun figure is corroborated outside Johnson by the Cape Coast indictment reciting the action of 10 February 1722, but the alterations rest on Johnson alone and are possible at best, and the only alterations attested in the sources behind this record are the removal of bulkheads, the making of the deck flush, the mounting of additional guns and renaming, no record having been found of a hull designed or built for piratical use between 1690 and 1725.
Period narrative of contested reliability, with the armament corroborated by a printed trial proceeding
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, London 1724; the Cape Coast indictment and depositions printed in the same volumeOn: Ship Construction and Repair - Repair without a yard rested on the carpenter, and Johnson's General History records pirate companies forcing carpenters out of prizes, allowing the carpenter a share and a quarter under John Phillips's first article, telling off a man specially to plunder the carpenter's stores, and mending by cannibalising and patching, Stede Bonnet's company lying almost two months over a leaky sloop at Cape Fear River in 1718 and taking "a small Shallop, which they ripped up to mend the Sloop".
Period narrative of contested reliability
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, London 1724On: Ship Construction and Repair - The most reproduced images of pirate armament come from the 1724 General History alone and no corroboration of them has been found: the slings of pistols worn in action, three brace for Edward Teach and two pair on a silk sling for Bartholomew Roberts, appear four times in that book and no independent corroboration has been found; the pistols sold for thirty or forty pounds a pair and the coloured ribbons are the compiler's commentary on article V of Roberts's articles rather than the text of the article; the case bottles filled with powder, small shot and pieces of lead thrown at Ocracoke in November 1718 are that book's description; and the grapeshot that struck Roberts in the throat on 10 February 1722 is one sentence in the same book, unmentioned in the sworn deposition printed a few pages later in the same volume and absent from John Atkins's eyewitness narrative of 1735, though that Roberts died in the action is not in doubt.
Period narrative of contested reliability
A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd edn, London, printed for T. Warner, 1724, for the four sling passages, the commentary on article V, the case bottle grenadoes at Ocracoke and the grape-shot sentence; the deposition of Isaac Sun, Ralph Baldrick and Daniel Maclaughlin printed in the same volume, and John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, 1735, for the absence of the wound and of grapeshotOn: Weapons and Gunnery - The unit of the informal economy was the Spanish piece of eight, worth about four shillings and sixpence sterling in London and rated deliberately above that value in the colonies in order to attract and retain coin, Massachusetts rating it at seventy-two pence by 1692, while Parliament prohibited the export of British silver coin to the plantations, so that pirate silver answered a legally created scarcity.
Reference resource on colonial currency
University of Notre Dame, Colonial Currency collection, The Comparative Value of Money between Britain and the Colonies (coins.nd.edu)On: Pirate Ports and Informal Economies - The same companies held enslaved people as property: at Whydah in January 1721/2 Roberts's company fired the Porcupine rather than move the people aboard her, "being in hast, and finding that unshackling them cost much Time and Labour, they actually set her on Fire, with eighty of those poor Wretches on Board, chained two and two together, under the miserable Choice of perishing by Fire or Water", three to four weeks before the ship counts of February 1722 were taken of the same company.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, 1724; the interval is calculated from the book's own datesOn: Race, Empire and Maritime Labour - The General History of 1724 records that at Whydah in January 1721/2, the master of the Porcupine being ashore and refusing the ransom, Bartholomew Roberts's company, "finding that unshackling them cost much Time and Labour", set the ship on fire with eighty enslaved people chained aboard in pairs; the burning itself, with enslaved people lost because they were fettered, is also attested by witnesses at the 1723 trial and by Ogle's despatch, while the figure of eighty and the detail of the unshackling are Johnson's alone.
Period narrative of contested reliability
A General History of the Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson (London, 1724)On: Violence and Coercion - The Adventure Galley left England with about 70 to 80 men, 70 in the letter-of-marque declaration and Jameson and about 80 in the 1701 trial account, and increased her company at New York to about 150 to 155, given as 152 in the fullest account located and as about 155 on a colonial crew list.
Trial pamphlet and edition of state papers
Editorial headnote to the Case of William Kidd in Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period (1923), giving 70 men and citing the crew list in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1700, p. 199; The Arraignment, Tryal and Condemnation of Captain William Kidd (London, 1701), giving about 80On: Adventure Galley - J. H. Lefroy, editing the Bermuda records, notes that Captain Philip Bell sat on the Bermuda council down to April 1630, when he left for Catalina, adjacent to Providence Island, of which he became Governor in 1630; Lefroy names no document for the governorship.
Modern edition of colonial records
J. H. Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands, 1515 to 1685, volume 1 (London, 1877), editorial note following the council list of December 1629 (library file lefroy_v1.txt)On: Providence Island (Providencia) - Wright's history of the Surat factory states that the island of Perim, from its situation at the entrance of the Red Sea, suggested its own adoption as a convenient base for operations against the rich native trade then conducted between Surat and Mocha.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter on the depredations of Captain Evory, printed p. 159 to 160 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 4997-5002)On: The Red Sea - Wright's history of the Surat factory states that the island of Perim was untenable because of the total absence of drinking water.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter on the depredations of Captain Evory, printed p. 160 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5004-5007)On: The Red Sea - Wright's history of the Surat factory states that thousands of pilgrims sailed annually from the port of Surat to the holy places in Arabia, and that the native shipping drew a constant income from carrying them.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter on Surat and the English factory, printed p. 101 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 3200-3204)On: The Red Sea - Wright's history of the Surat factory calls the Gunjsawaee one of a small fleet of ships kept in commission by the Emperor for the use of the faithful on their pilgrimage.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter on Annesley in chains, printed p. 162 to 163 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5090-5093)On: The Red Sea - Wright's history of the Surat factory states that the nakhoda of the Gunjsawaee surrendered after a feeble resistance and that the ship was afterwards carried off to the pirates' base in Madagascar, where the cargo was disposed of.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter on Annesley in chains, printed p. 163 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5105-5109)On: The Red Sea - Charles Johnson relates that Howell Davis took Gambia Castle by a ruse of posing as a Liverpool merchant, getting possession of the fort without so much as a man lost of either side.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew.On: The Royal African Company - Johnson relates that George Lowther, second mate of the Royal African Company's ship Gambia Castle, carried her off and renamed her the Delivery.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter XII, Of Capt. George Lowther, and his Crew.On: The Royal African Company - Johnson relates that pirates made a fire ship of a vessel they had lately taken and attempted to burn two ships sheltering under Cape Corso Castle, and were driven off by the castle guns.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), the chapter of Capt. Edward England, And his Crew.On: The Royal African Company - Wright's history places the English factory at Surat by the waterside overlooking the estuary of the Tapti, and the Company's establishment at Swally a few miles down the river, overlooking the deep pool or Hole at which the Company's shipping anchored.
- Wright's history states that Surat was already famous as a commercial centre when the East India Company's first representatives reached it in 1608, and that through its gates passed a great trade conducted with every part of the East.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Surat and the English Factory, printed p. 101 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 3196-3200)On: Surat - Wright's history states that at the period of his narrative the city held 200,000 inhabitants of many races and creeds and brought a handsome annual revenue to the imperial funds.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Surat and the English Factory, printed p. 102 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 3227-3231)On: Surat - Wright's history states that Surat was governed through the seventeenth century by a succession of Governors appointed by the Mogul Emperors, usually Court favourites who had temporarily won the capricious favour of the Mogul.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Surat and the English Factory, printed p. 106 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 3358-3363)On: Surat - Wright's history describes the English factory at Surat as not a single structure but a congeries of buildings, warehouses in one part and the apartments of the Company's factors and writers in another.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Surat and the English Factory, printed p. 102 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 3233-3238)On: Surat - Wright's history states that the factory was enclosed by a wall and that admission to it from outside was through massive gates at which a guard was constantly posted.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Surat and the English Factory, printed p. 102 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 3240-3243)On: Surat - Wright's history places a branch of the English factory at Swally, the point a few miles down the river overlooking the deep pool or Hole at which the Company's shipping swung at anchorage, and describes this Swally Marine as the headquarters of the Company's captains when ashore and a neutral ground for conferences with the local authorities.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Surat and the English Factory, printed p. 105 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 3343-3347); Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Surat and the English Factory, printed p. 106 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 3348-3351)On: Surat - Wright's history states that the largest shipowner at Surat was Abdul Guffore, leader of the Borah community, who in a few years built up a great fortune by successful ventures in shipping.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Surat and the English Factory, printed p. 110 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 3480-3484)On: Surat - Wright's history states that the first ship Every took was one of Abdul Guffore's, on her return voyage from the Red Sea with a cargo said to have been worth Rs. 3,25,000, and that a young Mohammedan lady of good family returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca was carried off from her as a captive.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Annesley in Chains, printed p. 160 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5013-5017); Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Annesley in Chains, printed p. 160 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5016-5021)On: Surat - Wright's history states that Annesley promptly caused the gates of the factory to be closed, knowing the capabilities of the place for defence.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Annesley in Chains, printed p. 161 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5037-5041)On: Surat - Wright's history states that Ushoor Beg, the Military Commander, rode into the space in front of the factory with a troop of horse at his heels and demanded admission on the plea that he had an important message from the Governor.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Annesley in Chains, printed p. 161 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5048-5053)On: Surat - Wright's history states that the deputation that went to the palace demanded the execution of Annesley and his leading colleagues, the Mufti supporting the plea by quoting passages from the Koran.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Annesley in Chains, printed p. 162 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5075-5080)On: Surat - Wright's history states that the Governor knew very well that Annesley and his fellows were no pirates, flatly declined to take any violent action, and would promise no more than to submit the facts to Aurangzeb.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Annesley in Chains, printed p. 162 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5081-5085)On: Surat - Wright's history states that the Governor decided popular feeling must be conciliated by energetic action, and that his first step was to sweep into the common prison the factory had become every Englishman his soldiers could lay their hands upon.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Annesley in Chains, printed p. 163 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5115-5120)On: Surat - Wright's history states that some fifty Englishmen were brought under the factory roof, all heavily ironed by the Governor's orders, with a guard of between two and three hundred men placed over them.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter Annesley in Chains, printed p. 164 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5132-5137)On: Surat - Wright's history states that Aurangzeb, hearing the story at his camp, gave way to the most violent paroxysm of rage and swore by the Prophet's beard that the English should pay dearly for their sacrilegious acts.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter The Emperor Aurungzebe and the Pirates, printed p. 174 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5420-5425)On: Surat - Wright's history states that Aurangzeb ordered that the Sidhi should be instructed to invade Bombay, that a great army should be sent to attack Fort St. George, and that the Company's officials and goods should be seized in all parts of his dominions.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter The Emperor Aurungzebe and the Pirates, printed p. 174 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5424-5428)On: Surat - Wright's history states that the certificate of character clinched the matter and that Aurangzeb withdrew his orders.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter The Emperor Aurungzebe and the Pirates, printed p. 176 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 5491-5494)On: Surat - Wright's history states that a ship belonging to a Surat merchant named Hassan Ahmedan was taken, that indignation was again directed at Annesley and his colleagues, and that mobs besieged the factory.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter The Old Company Deposed, printed p. 230 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 7107-7114)On: Surat - Wright's history states that Ushoor Beg came to the factory with a force of some five or six hundred soldiers and an ultimatum that the English were to yield to the Emperor's demands or to leave the country forthwith.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter The Old Company Deposed, printed p. 233 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 7199-7204)On: Surat - Wright's history states that on 5 January the Governor had Venwallidas and two other of the Company's brokers seized, brought before him with their hands tied behind them, and barbarously whipped by his soldiers when they protested that they could not assent.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter The Old Company Deposed, printed p. 234 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 7236-7242)On: Surat - Wright's history states that on 25 January, the factory being surrounded by troops whose orders were to break in upon them in case of further resistance, the English surrendered.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter The Old Company Deposed, printed p. 238 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 7353-7358)On: Surat - Wright's history states that the Governor remarked that had the English held out longer he had resolved to secure their persons and convey them to the castle, to be publicly executed there as pyrates convicted by Indians and Christians.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (London, 1918), the chapter The Old Company Deposed, printed p. 238 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 7361-7366)On: Surat - Johnson relates that Bonnet fitted out a sloop of ten guns and seventy men entirely at his own expense and sailed from Barbadoes in the night-time.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724), Chap. IV, Of Major Stede Bonnet, and his Crew, read in the Project Gutenberg text 40580, with The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet, and Other Pirates behind it, library text lines 2790-2792On: Barbados - Twenty-two of Bonnet's crew were executed at White Point near Charles Town on 8 November 1718, and four of the men arraigned were acquitted. Later accounts of the trials give the number hanged as twenty-nine.
Period narrative
Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724), Chap. IV, Of Major Stede Bonnet and his Crew (Project Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Charles Town (Charleston) - Dalton identifies the Ordinary of Newgate at the time of Kidd's execution as the Reverend Paul Lorrain, and prints an account of the men hanged with Kidd signed by Lorrain and dated the day of the execution, Friday 23 May 1701.
Printed dying-speech account quoted in a modern work
Sir Cornelius Neale Dalton, The Real Captain Kidd: A Vindication (London: William Heinemann, 1911), the chapter on Kidd's end, quoting the account signed by Paul Lorrain.On: Newgate, the Marshalsea and Admiralty Execution - Charles Johnson's General History states that the ship taken was one of the Great Mogul's own, that several of the greatest persons of his court were in her, and that among them, it was said, was one of his daughters going on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724), the chapter Of Captain Avery (library file gut40580_johnson_general_history.txt, lines 1658-1661)On: Henry Every and the Ganj-i-Sawai (1695) - A modern edition of Rogers's voyage states that the Delicia, with the Governor and his retinue on board and escorted by H.M. ships Rose and Milford, lay off Nassau while the pilot of the Delicia judged it unsafe to venture over the bar that night, so that it was resolved to wait till the morning.
Modern scholarship
G. E. Manwaring, introduction to Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World (Seafarers' Library reprint, London, 1928), printed pages xxviii-xxix (library file rogers1712_djvu.txt, lines 1298-1302 and 1321-1325)On: Woodes Rogers Takes Nassau (1718) - A third count of the loss puts Bellamy himself among the dead, lost on the back of Cape Cod with a hundred and forty-two of his crew and prisoners on 26 April 1717.
Modern editorial insertion in a reprinted list
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 345 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 13317-13321)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - Governor Shute dispatched Captain Cyprian Southack to the scene of the wreck.
Modern scholarship
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 127 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5477-5479)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - Southack found the fragments of the wrecked ship scattered along the shore for a distance of nearly four miles.
Modern scholarship reporting salvage correspondence
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 128-129 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5522-5523)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - A coroner and his jury had ordered the victims of the wreck to be buried and made a demand for the cost of it.
Modern scholarship
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 128 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5514-5516)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - The ship came ashore about twelve o'clock at night, and as soon as it was light Thomas Davis, one of the two survivors, walked about two miles to the house of Samuel Harding, told his story, and went back to the shore on Harding's horse to salvage what had washed up from the ship.
Modern scholarship
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 127 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5455-5462)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - When Justice Doane reached the beach on the Sunday morning after the wreck he found that everything of value had been carried away.
Modern scholarship
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 127 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5464-5469)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - Justice Doane, with a deputy sheriff and a posse of men, pursued the fleeing pirates, who were overtaken and seized at Eastham tavern and taken to Barnstable gaol.
Modern scholarship
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 124 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5368-5370)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - A few days after the wreck the nine men held in Barnstable gaol were put on horseback and started for Boston under a strong guard.
Modern scholarship
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 127 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5464-5469)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - The taking of the pink is dated to Friday, 26 April 1717, early in the morning, about a fortnight after Captain Beer was set ashore.
Modern scholarship
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 122 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5281-5283)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - The ship first struck on the outer bar and turned bottom up before she broke up and came ashore.
Modern scholarship
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 127 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5455-5456)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - The chapter heading of Dow and Edmonds on Samuel Bellamy states that his ship was wrecked at Wellfleet and a hundred and forty-four drowned.
Modern scholarship
Dow and Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter VIII on Samuel Bellamy, p. 116 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 5044-5049)On: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - Execution Dock stood at Wapping in the East, on the left bank of the Thames.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times: the true story of the mythical Wesley fortune (London: Andrew Melrose, 1918), the footnote to the chapter 'Kidd the Pirate', pp. 194 to 196.On: Execution Dock - Dalton identifies the Ordinary of Newgate at the time of Kidd's execution as the Reverend Paul Lorrain, on his own account and not from any 1701 document that names the Ordinary.
Modern scholarship
Cornelius Neale Dalton, The Real Captain Kidd: A Vindication (London: William Heinemann, 1911), the chapter on Kidd's end.On: Execution Dock - John Massey was brought to his trial on 5 July 1723 at a Court of Admiralty held at the Old Bailey, was found guilty and received sentence of death, and was executed three weeks after at Execution Dock.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724), Volume I, chapter XII, Of Capt. George Lowther and his Crew.On: Execution Dock - Kidd's body was placed in chains and gibbeted on the shore near Tilbury Fort, in the lower reaches of the Thames.
Modern scholarship
George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (1923), the chapter on William Kidd, the Reputed Pirate, p. 83.On: Execution Dock - A modern history of the New England pirates places the pirate settlement on the island of St. Mary, or Nosy Boraha, on the east coast of Madagascar.
Modern scholarship
George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter XIX, Pirate Haunts and Cruising Grounds, printed p. 348 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 13439-13442)On: Ile Sainte-Marie (Nosy Boraha) - A modern history of the New England pirates states that the vigilance of the English Admiralty and the watchfulness of the ships of the East India Company discouraged freebooting in those parts, and that in 1721, when France granted an amnesty, a number of the pirates surrendered and became colonists on the island of Bourbon.
Modern scholarship
George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 (Salem, 1923), chapter XIX, Pirate Haunts and Cruising Grounds, printed p. 352 (library file dow_piratesnec.txt, lines 13580-13585)On: Ile Sainte-Marie (Nosy Boraha) - Wright's history of the Surat factory offers it as one possibility that Aurangzeb was apprehensive that too drastic action would lead to the withdrawal of the convoys of the Mocha and Jeddah ships, for which he had a tender solicitude owing to their association with the pilgrimage.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (1918), printed p. 212 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 6577 to 6582)On: Mocha - A General History of the Pyrates alleges that a pirate crew took two Moor ships from Muscat carrying horses, brought their captain and merchants on board, and tortured them and rifled the ships in order to discover riches, believing they came from Mocha.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Volume I, chapter V, Of Captain Edward England, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720 (library file gut40580_johnson_general_history.txt, lines 3780 to 3783)On: Mocha - Wright's history of the Surat factory states that the East India Company had a frigate called the Mocho whose own crew rose in mutiny and took her from the Company.
Modern scholarship
Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times (1918), printed pp. 199 to 200 (library file wright_annesley.txt, lines 6191 to 6196)On: Mocha - Europeans were said in some years to have carried twenty thousand people off from Whydah.
Period printed description of the coast
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies; in His Majesty's Ships, the Swallow and Weymouth (London, 1735), by John Atkins, Surgeon in the Royal Navy (library file gut72102_atkins_voyage_to_guinea.txt, line 3737)On: Whydah (Ouidah) - The ransoms at Whydah in January 1722 were settled with letters passing and repassing from the shore.
Period narrative
Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724), the chapter of Captain Bartho. Roberts and his Crew (library file gut40580_johnson_general_history.txt, lines 7562-7564)On: Whydah (Ouidah) - The story that Hornigold gave Edward Thache his first command by handing him one of his prize sloops rests on Johnson's General History alone and is not corroborated by period evidence.
Period narrative against modern research
A General History of the Pyrates (vol 1, chapter Of Captain Teach alias Black-beard), Gutenberg ebook 40580; "The Firsts of Blackbeard: Exploring Edward Thatch's Early Days as a Pirate", csphistorical.comOn: Benjamin Hornigold - The large prize values attached to Hornigold, the Marianne with 12,000 pounds of cargo and the Revenge with over 100,000 pounds in pesos, rest on thin secondary sourcing, and no muster or invoice supporting them has been produced.
Secondary website
"Benjamin Hornigold" (The Golden Age of Piracy mirror), waynesavage.comOn: Benjamin Hornigold - Johnson's General History, Vol. 1 (1724), has Hornigold's ship cast away on rocks a great way from land, with five of his men escaping by canoe; it gives neither a destination nor a date.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (vol 1, Introduction and chapter Of Captain Teach alias Black-beard), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Benjamin Hornigold - The whole of the evidence for a pirate captain named Lewis is a single chapter, 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew', in the second volume of Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates (1728); no colonial dispatch, naval log, deposition or newspaper naming him has been located.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson leaves Lewis's nationality unresolved, writing that he spoke English 'because it is doubted whether he was French or English, for we cannot trace him back to his Original'.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson credits Lewis with 'a great Aptitude for Languages', giving him the tongue of the Mosquito Indians, French, Spanish and English.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson makes Lewis a boy aboard the pirate Bannister, who was 'hang'd at the Yard Arm of a Man of War in sight of Port-Royal in Jamaica', Lewis and another boy being 'brought into the Island hanging by the Middle at the Mizzen-Peak' and spared.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson has Lewis take about ten Bermuda sloops becalmed in the Bay of Campeachy, force out of them forty enslaved African sailors and a white carpenter, and keep the largest, of about ninety tons, mounting her with twelve guns.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson has Lewis beat the master of one of the Bermuda sloops with a rope's end and drive him about the decks with a cane for having lain by instead of escaping, and redouble the blows when the man offered to show where money was hidden.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson prints a letter in which Lewis offers Captain Tucker ten thousand pieces of eight for his Bermuda-built brigantine of ten guns and threatens, if refused, to lie in his way and take her 'either by fair or foul Means'; Tucker escaped and the brigantine was never handed over.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson has Lewis rob and release homeward-bound West India merchant ships taking the Leeward Passage in the Gulf of Florida, and take and plunder several merchantmen off Virginia and Carolina, forcing men out of them.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson has Lewis seize the twenty-four-gun galley Herman, Captain Beal, at Trinity Harbour in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, and take two fishing shallops as hostages with a threat to put all his prisoners to death until his seized quartermaster was returned; the quartermaster was recovered and the hostages released unharmed.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson has Lewis man the two captured shallops, storm a shore battery and board a twenty-four-gun French privateer-built ship which he renamed the Morning Star, the owner's son, aboard out of curiosity, being killed in the boarding.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson has Lewis, fearing that the English of his crew meant to maroon his French, put the English and the men he suspected into a boat ten leagues from shore with ten pieces of beef and send them off, keeping only French and enslaved men; Johnson supposes they perished at sea.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson closes the cruise with depredations on the coast of Guinea against English, Dutch and Portuguese ships, the civil release of a Carolina master named Smith with more than had been taken from him, and the forcing of the separatist Frenchman le Barre to disarm and go ashore, his sloop being sunk after him.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Lewis was never tried and no court adjudicated any act attributed to him; Johnson has him killed on the Guinea coast, so every deed in the chapter stands as the allegation of a single narrator.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson says the French ship Lewis renamed the Morning Star was 'built at the latter End of the War for a Privateer', which if the war meant is the War of the Spanish Succession would place the Newfoundland episode after 1713, decades after Bannister's hanging.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Captain Tudor Trevor, named by Johnson as commander of the Sheerness man of war that missed Lewis by four hours off St John's, was a genuine Royal Navy officer, but his command of the Sheerness in Newfoundland waters at the relevant time is not established and the pursuit carries no date.
Museum catalogue record and period narrative
Trevor, Captain Tudor RN, fl. 1711 (signature record), Royal Museums Greenwich object rmgc-object-507030; A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson places a 'Captain Woodes Rogers' at Trinity Harbour in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, chaining Lewis's quartermaster to a sheet anchor, an identification difficult to reconcile with the known career of the Woodes Rogers who governed the Bahamas and probably a confusion.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - Johnson's portrait of Lewis is deliberately double, setting the beating of the sloop master and the marooning of the English beside the civil release of Captain Smith and the sparing of the Newfoundland hostages.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the chapter 'Of Captain Lewis. And his Crew'On: Captain Lewis - That the company turned Vane out for cowardice in declining to engage the French man of war, and elected John Rackham captain in his place, comes from the General History of 1724; the deposition that records the removal names no successor beyond the quarter-master.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, vol 1 (1724), Of Captain Vane and his Crew, against the deposition of Hosea Tisdell in The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates (Jamaica, 1721), which leaves the quarter-master unnamedOn: Charles Vane - The hurricane wreck of Vane's sloop in the Bay of Honduras, the months marooned on an uninhabited island and the recapture through a Captain Holford all derive from the General History of 1724, and no deposition or despatch consulted carries any of them.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, vol 1 (1724), Of Captain Charles Vane, and his Crew (Gutenberg etext 40580), with its later carriers; no primary document consulted records the wreck or the marooningOn: Charles Vane - The testimony in the 1721 trial places Vane off Long Island in the Bahamas on 23 October 1718 and in the Windward Passage by 23 November 1718, which leaves little room for the Ocracoke meeting with Blackbeard that autumn.
Trial pamphlet
The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates (Jamaica, 1721), the depositions of John Shattock and Hosea Tisdell in Robert Deal's trial; CO 137/14/1On: Charles Vane - The West Indies phase attributed to Goffe, a return to the Caribbean in 1684, an episode at Bermuda in 1685 and proclamations against him by Jamaica and reportedly New York, rests on later compilation and was corroborated by no first-hand record read for this account; a direct search of two pages of the Calendar of State Papers Colonial, the index to volume 11 for 1681 to 1685 and June 1690 in volume 13, returned no entry naming Goffe, Goff, Gouge or Henley.
Calendared state papers
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, index to vol. 11 (1681-1685), pp. 777-783, and vol. 13, June 1690, pp. 276-291On: Christopher Goffe - The Charles Town letter printed in the second volume of the History of the Pyrates makes Moody's ship fifty guns and near two hundred men, figures larger than anything in the colonial papers.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the Captain Worley chapter, the corrective letter to Mr Johnson naming Moody off Charles TownOn: Christopher Moody - The Charles Town letter, written to correct Johnson, has a Moody off Charles Town in the autumn of 1718 taking two ships bound there from New England and taking the Minerva, Captain Smyter, laden with wine from Madeira, which he plundered and discharged after he was warned that the governor was fitting out against him.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II, the Captain Worley chapter, the corrective letter to Mr Johnson naming Moody off Charles TownOn: Christopher Moody - Dutch masters deposed at Cape Corso Castle that Christopher Moody was aboard at the robbery and plunder of the Flushingham, taken near Axim at the beginning of January 1722, and of the Gertruycht, taken near Gabon in December 1721.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. I (1724), the trials at Cape Corso Castle, the evidence of Geret de Haen, Benj. Kreft, James Groet, Castel and WingfieldOn: Christopher Moody - At the robbery of the Royal African Company's ship King Solomon, Moody took a large glass from one of his own company and "threatned to blow his Brains out" if he muttered at it.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. I (1724), the trials at Cape Corso Castle, the evidence of Captain Jo. Trahern and George Fenn against Jo. MansfieldOn: Christopher Moody - Searching a captured merchant ship for a man hidden aboard her, Moody and Harper "with their Pistols cock'd, searched every Corner of the Ship".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. I (1724), the trials at Cape Corso Castle, the deposition concerning the Tarlton episodeOn: Christopher Moody - On the passage to Cape Corso, Moody joined a conspiracy among the prisoners with Ashplant, Magnes and Mare "to rise, and kill the Officers, and run away with the Ship".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. I (1724), the narrative of the passage of the prisoners to Cape Corso CastleOn: Christopher Moody - The execution list gives Christopher Moody's age as 28 and leaves the column for his habitation blank.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. I (1724), the list of pirates executed without the gates of Cape Corso Castle, with their ages and habitationsOn: Christopher Moody - The fullest source read for Christopher Moody and the Cape Corso trial is Johnson's first volume, which reproduces the trial documents but remains a single printed source; the printed Tryals of 1723 and the High Court of Admiralty file were not read.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. I (1724), the trials of Bartholomew Roberts's crew at Cape Corso CastleOn: Christopher Moody - The whole connected life of the pirate captain Condent rests on a single period narrative, the chapter on him in the second volume of the History of the Pyrates (1728), a work conventionally attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, and no second independent period account of him was read for this record.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - The chapter gives not a single calendar year for the cruise and states that the time and motive of his first turning pirate are unknown to its author, so nearly every event in it is placed only by its position in the narrative.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - The nickname Billy One-Hand is modern and appears to be a later gloss on the wound in the 1728 chapter, where the arm is broken by the Indian's shot and not amputated, no period by-name for him having been located.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - The chapter's only word on his origin is the sentence "Captain Condent was a Plymouth Man born, but we are as yet ignorant of the Motives, and Time of his first turning Pyrate".
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - The chapter has him "retire from Providence (on Governor Roger's Arrival at that Island) in a Sloop belonging to Mr. Simpson, of New York, a Jew Merchant, of which Sloop he was then Quarter-Master", making his first recorded rank quartermaster and his departure coincide with Woodes Rogers' arrival.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - An Indian crewman aboard the Simpson sloop, having been beaten, seized the arms in the hold meaning to blow the vessel up, and Condent went down after him with pistol and cutlass, had his arm broken by the Indian's shot and shot the man dead, after which the crew hacked the body and the gunner tore out and ate the heart.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - After the taking of the merchant ship Duke of York a dispute split the company, and the sloop's half elected Condent captain.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - At the Isle of May his company seized the whole salt fleet of about twenty sail.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - There he set up what the chapter calls an Administration of Justice, whipping and pickling the commanders complained of by their men, a redresser-of-ill-usage motif the same author uses elsewhere and which no other source confirms.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - At St Jago he took a Dutch ship, formerly a privateer, with a single broadside that killed her captain and several of her men, and renamed her the Flying Dragon, which is the form the chapter uses throughout and not the Fiery Dragon of later writing, whose identification with a wreck at St Mary is unsupported by anything read for this record.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - On the coast of Brazil he plundered several Portuguese ships and released them, and engaged a Portuguese man of war of seventy guns for about three glasses before breaking off, over-matched, and escaping.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - In revenge for pirates lost and imprisoned on that coast his prisoners had their ears and noses cut off, and a captured priest was made to say Mass at the mainmast and then ridden about the decks, the victims in the chapter being Portuguese and Catholic and not the Arab or Muslim prisoners of later retellings.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - His conduct in the chapter is markedly uneven, civil and even generous to some, such as his townsman Spelt, and savage to others, such as the Portuguese and their priest, and he should be flattened into neither a monster nor a gentleman.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - The Wright Galley, Captain John Spelt, hired by the South-Sea Company, was detained, and Spelt, a townsman of his, was treated civilly and discharged at last with a present out of a Portuguese ship taken for her bale goods and stores.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - Near the Cape he took an Ostend East-India Man, with the London merchant Mr Nash aboard as supercargo, and then a Dutch East-India Man, before making for Madagascar.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - Johnson has Condent only assist, "in Company of two other Pyrates", in the taking of the East-India Man Cassandra, Captain Macragh, at Johanna about 1720.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - Condent's presence at the taking of the Cassandra from Captain Macrae in 1720 rests on the 1728 chapter alone and is probably a conflation.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - The richest prize of the cruise in the chapter is a Portuguese ship of seventy guns carrying the Vice-Roy of Goa, taken at the Isle of Mascarenas with all ransom refused, and not the Arab ship or Red Sea haul of later writing.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - On the coast of Zanguebar he took, plundered and razed a Dutch fortification, carrying off the men who entered with him voluntarily.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - After the pardon, the chapter says, "Condent married the Governor's Sister-in-Law, and stay'd some Time".
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - The chapter reports, marking it as hearsay, that he "is since come to France, settled at St. Maloes, and drives a considerable Trade as a Merchant".
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his CrewOn: Condent - The life was read in a modern proofread transcription of the East Carolina University copy of the 1728 second volume, uncollated against a clean first edition and conventionally attributed to Captain Charles Johnson though catalogued in that transcription as Defoe's, while the one genuine document behind any of it, the French colonial record of the Bourbon surrender in Le Mercure of May 1722 and in Grandidier's collection, was not read for this record.
Period narrative and secondary account
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Condent, and his Crew; Pirate Edward Congdon retires (October 2017), reporting the Bourbon surrender from French colonial material (Le Mercure, May 1722; Grandidier's Collection)On: Condent - A pirate captain called England was active on the Guinea coast and in the Indian Ocean between about 1718 and 1722; the surname stands in the heading of Charles Johnson's chapter, Of Capt. EDW. ENGLAND, and his CREW., the full name in the chapter's opening sentence and in the letter of Captain Mackra that Johnson prints, so that every attestation runs through the one book.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), with the letter of Captain Mackra printed within itOn: Edward England - The one eyewitness document in the England story is Captain Mackra's letter of 16 November 1720 from Bombay, first-hand in origin but reached only inside Johnson's chapter, so it stands as a text Johnson carries rather than as an independent witness.
First-hand letter within a period narrative
Letter from Captain Mackra, dated Bombay, 16 November 1720, as printed within Johnson's General History (England chapter)On: Edward England - The forename is abbreviated to EDW. in Johnson's chapter heading and spelled out in the chapter's first sentence, EDward England went Mate of a Sloop that sail'd out of Jamaica, and in Mackra's letter, which calls him the chief Captain, Edward England; the other attested forms are Captain England and the men's curse d--n England, and no alias or alternative spelling of the surname has been found.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), with the letter of Captain Mackra printed within itOn: Edward England - Johnson gives England no birthplace and no nationality, his earliest datum being that England went mate of a sloop out of Jamaica and was taken by Captain Winter, a pirate, just before their settlement at Providence, from which he had the command of a sloop and sailed to the coast of Africa.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), opening of the chapterOn: Edward England - England's company took the Cadogan snow of Bristol at Sierra Leone about 1718, where her master Skinner was made fast to the windlass, pelted with bottles and shot through the head by former crewmen of his own who were now serving with England, after which the snow and her cargo were given to her mate Howel Davis; England is not named as the killer.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the taking of the Cadogan snowOn: Edward England - England took a ship called the Pearl, Captain Tyzard, exchanged his own sloop for her, renamed her the Royal James, and took vessels of several nations at the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the taking of the PearlOn: Edward England - In the spring of 1719 England ran down the Guinea coast from the River Gambia and took nine named merchant vessels on dated days between 25 March and 27 June; three were let go, four of them, the Charlotte, the Bentworth, the Carteret and the Coward galley, were burnt, and two were fitted out as pirate ships under the names Queen Anne's Revenge and the Flying King.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the list of vessels taken between the River Gambia and Cape CorsoOn: Edward England - At Cape Corso Road England's company made a fire ship of a vessel they had taken and attempted to burn the Whydah, Captain Prince, and the John, Captain Rider, which had got in under Cape Corso Castle, but the castle fired on them and they withdrew; Johnson observes that they could not have been one farthing the better for it.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the attempt at Cape Corso RoadOn: Edward England - After several weeks lying ashore the company came to an open rupture with the people of the coast, killed several of them and set one of their towns on fire.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the stay ashore after Cape CorsoOn: Edward England - The company voted for the East Indies, reached Madagascar at the beginning of 1720, cruised the Malabar coast where they took several Indian country ships and one Dutch ship which they exchanged for a vessel of their own, and returned to Madagascar.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the passage to the East IndiesOn: Edward England - Two pirate ships, one of thirty four guns and the other of thirty, stood into the bay of Juanna on the morning of 17 August 1720 and took Captain Mackra's Cassandra after a hard fight; the day-dates come from Mackra's own letter, which gives his arrival at the island on 25 July, the action on 17 August, the pirates' sailing on 3 September and his arrival at Bombay on 26 October.
First-hand letter within a period narrative
Letter from Captain Mackra, dated Bombay, 16 November 1720, as printed within Johnson's General History (England chapter)On: Edward England - Mackra had thirteen men killed and twenty four wounded in the action and believed the pirates had lost about ninety or a hundred, and when the pirates came aboard they cut three of his wounded men to pieces.
First-hand letter within a period narrative
Letter from Captain Mackra, dated Bombay, 16 November 1720, as printed within Johnson's General History (England chapter)On: Edward England - England favoured Mackra after the action, helped talk Captain Taylor round, secured him the shattered Dutch built pirate ship the Fancy and a hundred and twenty nine bales of the Company's cloth, and advised him to get off quickly.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), with the letter of Captain Mackra printed within itOn: Edward England - Johnson's portrait of England is of a man who had a great deal of good Nature, and did not want for Courage, who was not avaritious, and always averse to the ill Usage Prisoners received, but who was generally over-rul'd by his companions; no first-hand source read corroborates it.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the character of EnglandOn: Edward England - On a report that Mackra was fitting out against them, England's crew pulled him out of his government and marooned him with three others on Mauritius, from where they made a little boat of staves and old pieces of deal and crossed to Madagascar to live on the charity of other pirates.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the deposition and marooningOn: Edward England - England was never brought before any court; the only punishment recorded against him was inflicted by his own company, who deposed and marooned him for his good usage of Mackra.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the deposition and marooningOn: Edward England - The last datum for England in any source read is at St Mary's, Madagascar in 1722, when he declined Commodore Matthews's offer of favour in return for intelligence about the Cassandra and the other pirates and for his help as a pilot, thinking it was to surrender at discretion; no source read records his death.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), Commodore Matthews at St Mary'sOn: Edward England - Johnson closes by saying it is a difficult matter to compute the mischief done by this crew in about five years, more than the plunder they gained, because they often sank or burnt what they took; the computation covers the whole company, including the career Taylor continued after England was put out.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England, and his Crew), the close of the chapterOn: Edward England - Edward Low's career survives in two period prints of unequal weight: Philip Ashton's first-hand captive narrative, written up by John Barnard and printed in 1725, and Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates of 1724, which supplies the only continuous account of his origins, cruise and end and stands alone for most of what it reports.
Period narratives
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew) and Ashton's Memorial (An History of the Strange Adventures and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip Ashton)On: Edward Low - Johnson states that 'Edward Low was born in Westminster, and had his Education there, such as it was, for he could neither write or read', and no parish or baptismal record has been read either for or against it.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew)On: Edward Low - Johnson gives Low an unnamed brother who ended his days at Tyburn in company with Stephen Bunce and Jack Hall the chimney-sweeper.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew), Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, lines 10692 to 10700On: Edward Low - Johnson traces Low's route into piracy through a Boston rigging house and a sloop to the Bay of Honduras, where the logwood boat he was patron of was sent back to work with a bottle of rum after its men asked to stay and dine, and where he then fired a musket at the master, missed him and shot another man through the head before putting to sea with about a dozen men under a black flag, declaring war against all the world.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew), Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, lines 10717 to 10724On: Edward Low - By Johnson's account Low joined George Lowther's already piratical company at Grand Cayman and parted from him on 28 May 1722, taking a brigantine and forty-four men who chose him captain; no source read for this record places Low in the Gambia Castle mutiny of 1721 that founded Lowther's company.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew)On: Edward Low - Johnson dates the raid on the fishing anchorage to about 12 July, names the harbour Port Rosemary, and counts thirteen vessels lying there, none of force, when the brigantine spread her black flag and ran in among them, a month and a name apart from the eyewitness account of the same raid.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew), Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, lines 10778 to 10782On: Edward Low - Johnson says the pirates took an eighty-ton schooner out of the anchorage which Low commanded and named the Fancy, gave the brigantine to Charles Harris, himself forced into the trade by Lowther out of the Greyhound of Boston, and increased the company to eighty men 'who all signed the Articles, some willingly, and a few perhaps by Force'.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew), Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, lines 10782 to 10794On: Edward Low - Johnson's narrative carries almost no dates between the parting from Lowther on 28 May 1722 and the Greyhound fight of 10 June 1723, so the captures in that stretch cannot be securely ordered; its one fixed point in the interval is the company's arrival in the Bay of Honduras about the middle of March 1722-3, within days of Ashton's escape at Roatan.
Period narratives
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew), Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, lines 10994 to 10998, and Ashton's Memorial (An History of the Strange Adventures and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip Ashton)On: Edward Low - The atrocities that made Low's name are carried by Johnson alone: a French ship's cook bound to the mainmast and burnt with his ship, two Portuguese friars triced up at the arms of the fore-yard and let down before they were dead several times over out of sport, and two whale-boat masters near Rhode Island, one ripped up and disembowelled and the other made to eat his own ears with pepper and salt.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew)On: Edward Low - Johnson says that after the captain of the Nostre Signiora de Victoria let a bag of moidores drop into the sea, Low had his lips cut off and broiled before his face and then murdered him and all his crew, thirty-two persons.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew)On: Edward Low - No specific atrocity attributed to Low is corroborated by a first-hand witness or a court record read for this account; Ashton, who was aboard from June 1722 to March 1723, describes a command run on coercion and death threats but none of the mutilations Johnson recounts.
Period narratives
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew) and Ashton's Memorial (An History of the Strange Adventures and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip Ashton)On: Edward Low - At the fight with HMS Greyhound on 10 June 1723 Low bore away in the Fancy and abandoned his consort the Ranger, commanded by Charles Harris, which was taken with her company.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew)On: Edward Low - Johnson reports that a court of vice-admiralty sat at Newport on 10 July 1723 and ran three days, and that twenty-five of the prisoners were found guilty and executed near Newport on 19 July, while the New York corporation's resolution printed in the same chapter says twenty-six were executed.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew), Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, lines 11122 to 11212On: Edward Low - Edward Low was never brought to trial, so no court adjudicated his personal guilt and the word proved attaches to none of the acts laid to him, unlike the consort crew taken in the Ranger.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew)On: Edward Low - Johnson says that late in July 1723 Low took a large ship called the Merry Christmas, fitted her with thirty-four guns, took the title of Admiral and hoisted a black flag with the figure of Death in red at the maintopmast head.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew), Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, lines 11337 to 11342On: Edward Low - The last act Johnson records is the taking of the ship Squirrel, Captain Stephenson, in January 1724, after which he reports that no news of Low had come to England, though he had heard Low talked of going to Brazil.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, And his Crew), Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, lines 11387 to 11392On: Edward Low - Exquemelin's Buccaneers of America, which survives in editions that diverge (1678 Dutch, 1681 Spanish, 1684 English), supplies the only continuous narrative of Mansvelt's cruise and gives no calendar dates for any part of it.
Period narrative
read via the Project Gutenberg reprint 'The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America', ed. G. A. Williams)On: Edward Mansvelt - Exquemelin supplies the only continuous narrative of the cruise, covering the fleet, St Catherine, the garrison left under Le Sieur Simon, the raid on the Central American mainland toward the river Colla and Nata, the prisoners set ashore near Puerto Velo, and the death at Tortuga; he gives no calendar dates, places the island near Cuba in one passage and near Costa Rica in another, and the credit for reaching Granada and the South Sea may belong to another raider such as John Davis.
Period narrative
The Buccaneers of America (1684 English translation; read via the Project Gutenberg reprint 'The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America', ed. G. A. Williams)On: Edward Mansvelt - Exquemelin alone makes Mansvelt Henry Morgan's predecessor and admiral and has him choose Morgan for his vice-admiral for the expedition; no contemporary document read for this record links the two men.
Period narrative
The Buccaneers of America (1684 English translation; read via the Project Gutenberg reprint 'The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America', ed. G. A. Williams)On: Edward Mansvelt - The date and place of Mansvelt's death are unfixed: Exquemelin places it at Tortuga with no date, giving a window of late 1666 or 1667, and no dated primary record of the death was located for this record.
Period narrative
The Buccaneers of America (1684 English translation; read via the Project Gutenberg reprint 'The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America', ed. G. A. Williams)On: Edward Mansvelt - Exquemelin survives in editions that diverge (1678 Dutch, 1681 Spanish, 1684 English), and later summaries credit him with two different death accounts, illness at Tortuga and capture and execution by the Spanish, while the 1684 English text read for this record gives only the Tortuga death.
Period narrative
The Buccaneers of America (1684 English translation; read via the Project Gutenberg reprint 'The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America', ed. G. A. Williams); the divergence between the 1678 Dutch, 1681 Spanish and 1684 English editions, and the second death account, carried by later summariesOn: Edward Mansvelt - Spriggs was quartermaster to Edward Low's company, is believed by Johnson to have come away from George Lowther with Low, and took a vessel and left Low in the night about Christmas 1723.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XVI, Of Captain Spriggs, and his Crew; and the Spriggs passage within the Captain Low chapter), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Francis Spriggs - Johnson gives the cause of the separation as a quarrel with Low over a piece of justice Spriggs would have executed upon one of the crew for killing a man in cold blood, one insisting the man should be hanged and the other that he should not.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XVI, Of Captain Spriggs, and his Crew), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Francis Spriggs - The vessel was the Delight, of twelve guns, taken off the coast of Guinea near Sierra Leone, formerly the Squirrel man of war and commanded by Captain Hunt; Johnson's two passages disagree on her, the Low chapter giving sixteen guns and sixty men and the Spriggs chapter eighteen men, and the same book has Low taking a ship called the Squirrel from a Captain Stephenson in January.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XVI, Of Captain Spriggs, and his Crew; and the Spriggs passage within the Captain Low chapter), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Francis Spriggs - A day or two after the parting the company chose Spriggs captain and made a black ensign they called Jolly Roger, carrying the same device as Low's: "a white Skeliton in the Middle of it, with a Dart in one Hand striking a bleeding Heart, and in the other, an Hour-Glass".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XVI, Of Captain Spriggs, and his Crew), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Francis Spriggs - Johnson narrates a Caribbean cruise after the split comprising a Portuguese bark burnt and her crew sweated, a Barbados sloop plundered and burnt near St Lucia, a Martinico ship abused but spared, a Rhode Island sloop under Captain Pike on 27 March whose mate was given ten lashes from every man aboard, a Boston schooner sunk while standing towards Bermuda, Nicholas Trot's sloop of St Eustatia on 4 June, and a ship of provisions and horses taken within two or three days of it, with days and months given but no years.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XVI, Of Captain Spriggs, and his Crew), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Francis Spriggs - Captain Hawkins, coming from Jamaica laden chiefly with logwood, was detained from 22 to 29 March, his mates Burridge and Stephens taken out of him by force, his ship burnt after he fell in with the pirates again, and himself put ashore at Rattan near the Bay of Honduras; Burridge signed the pirates' articles the next day and was appointed master.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XVI, Of Captain Spriggs, and his Crew), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Francis Spriggs - Spriggs sailed towards St Christophers to wait for Captain Moor of the Eagle sloop, who had taken Lowther on the careen at Blanco, and resolved to put him to death for falling upon "his Friend and Brother".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XVI, Of Captain Spriggs, and his Crew), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Francis Spriggs - The only continuous narrative of Spriggs is Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates, which treats him both inside the Edward Low chapter and in a chapter of his own, and the two passages disagree on crew numbers, on the manner of the split and on the Squirrel and Delight names, so the book is one witness rather than two.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XVI, Of Captain Spriggs, and his Crew; and the Spriggs passage within the Captain Low chapter), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Francis Spriggs - The figures of the raid are Exquemelin's own round numbers, giving a ransom of ten thousand pieces of eight at Gibraltar, twenty thousand pieces of eight and five hundred cows at Maracaibo, a dividend of two hundred and sixty thousand pieces of eight, above five hundred Spaniards dead at Gibraltar, and the stripping of the great church of Maracaibo of its images, pictures and bells.
Period narrative
Exquemelin, The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America (the l'Olonnais chapters VI to VIII), Gutenberg ebook 26690On: Francois l'Olonnais - Exquemelin has him take a Havana relief ship of ten guns and ninety men in the river Estera and behead her crew one by one, killing the black man appointed to be their hangman despite his plea and sparing one man to carry ashore a written message to the governor of Havana that he would never henceforward give quarter to any Spaniard whatsoever.
Period narrative
Exquemelin, The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America (the l'Olonnais chapters VI to VIII), Gutenberg ebook 26690On: Francois l'Olonnais - The cruelties Exquemelin lays to him run from the racking of Maracaibo prisoners and the hacking of one to pieces before the rest, through above a hundred and fifty prisoners left without provisions at Gibraltar and the cutting of prisoners with his hanger and pulling out of their tongues at Puerto Cavallo, to the cutting open of a prisoner's breast on the road to San Pedro and the biting and gnawing of his heart like a ravenous wolf, a scene the 1695 English printing carries in the same terms.
Period narrative
Exquemelin, The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America (the l'Olonnais chapters VI to VIII), Gutenberg ebook 26690; Exquemelin, The History of the Bucaniers of America, English printing of 1695, Part II, the march on San PedroOn: Francois l'Olonnais - Exquemelin's second expedition ran towards Nicaragua and Honduras, destroying the Indian inhabitants of the river Xagua in a single clause and marching inland from Puerto Cavallo to the town of San Pedro, where a two-hour quarter granted to the inhabitants was broken once the term was out and they were followed, robbed and made prisoners.
Period narrative
Exquemelin, The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America (the l'Olonnais chapters VI to VIII), Gutenberg ebook 26690; Exquemelin, The History of the Bucaniers of America, English printing of 1695, Part II, the second expeditionOn: Francois l'Olonnais - Exquemelin ends the story with a repulse at the river of Nicaragua and the seizure of l'Olonnais by the Indians of Darien, the 1695 English printing having his body thrown limb by limb into the fire and his ashes into the air so that no trace or memory of him should remain, the whole resting on one unnamed companion who gave the author an exact account of the tragedy and claimed to have escaped the same death.
Period narrative
Exquemelin, The Pirates of Panama, or The Buccaneers of America (the l'Olonnais chapters VI to VIII), Gutenberg ebook 26690; Exquemelin, The History of the Bucaniers of America, English printing of 1695, Part II, the death among the Indians of DarienOn: Francois l'Olonnais - A General History of the Pyrates makes Lowther second mate of the Royal African Company ship Gambia Castle under Charles Russel and ringleader with Captain John Massey of the mutiny that seized her in June 1721, the ship reaching port in May 1721 and Lowther leaving the settlement on 13 June; no primary document read for this record corroborates the mutiny, and the Royal African Company's T 70 series has not been opened.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. XII, Of Capt. George Lowther, and his CrewOn: George Lowther - A General History of the Pyrates has John Massey leave Lowther, surrender to Governor Lawes of Jamaica, return to England, stand trial on 5 July 1723 before a Court of Admiralty at the Old Bailey and hang about three weeks later at Execution Dock; no trial record for it has been read.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. XII, Of Capt. George Lowther, and his CrewOn: George Lowther - A General History of the Pyrates has Lowther and Edward Low join forces about Christmas 1721 at the Grand Caymans with Lowther as captain and Low as lieutenant, and separate on 28 May 1722 at the taking of the Rebecca, Low going off in the brigantine with forty-four hands and Lowther keeping the sloop with the same number.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. XII, Of Capt. George Lowther, and his CrewOn: George Lowther - The cruise between 1721 and 1723 rests on A General History of the Pyrates alone: the brigantine Charles of Boston plundered near Barbados on 20 June 1721, the Greyhound of Boston of two hundred tons under Benjamin Edwards taken in the Bay of Honduras on 10 January 1722 after an hour's fight with her crew whipped, beaten and cut and the ship burnt, the Happy Delivery lost to an attack while careening at Port Mayo and the sloop Ranger refitted in her place, a New England ship homeward from Barbados plundered on 3 June 1722 with six enslaved people among the goods taken, and the Amy crippling the pirate sloop off South Carolina after Lowther's men had killed her master Gwatkins.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. XII, Of Capt. George Lowther, and his CrewOn: George Lowther - The names of the fourteen accused, Churchill, Mackdonald, Lewis and the rest, are given by A General History of the Pyrates and not by Governor Hart's report as calendared, which carries the counts and a few names but not the list, the minutes of the court not having been read.
Period narrative and calendared state papers
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. XII, Of Capt. George Lowther, and his Crew; CSP Colonial, America and West Indies, Vol. 34, No. 102, Governor Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 25 March 1724On: George Lowther - A General History of the Pyrates prints eight articles for Lowther's company, the sixth giving a man who loses a limb in engagement one hundred and fifty pounds sterling and a place with the company and the eighth giving the man who sees a sail first "the best Pistol, or Small-Arm, on Board her", the wording being quotable as text while their authenticity as the company's own articles rests on that print alone.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. XII, Of Capt. George Lowther, and his Crew, including the Articles of Captain George Lowther and his CompanyOn: George Lowther - The General History has two ships and three sloops fitted out from Jamaica, Barbados and elsewhere under Captain Henry Jennings, three hundred men landed against a guard that immediately ran away, and a Spanish ship from Porto Bello to Havana rifled on the return voyage of cochineal, indigo and 60,000 pieces of eight and then released; none of it appears in the depositions.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (the Jennings wreck-raid narrative and the Porto Bello prize), 1724 (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Henry Jennings - The General History describes Jennings as a man of good understanding and good estate before this whim took him of going a-pirating, a favourable portrait carried by that book alone and standing beside an armed peacetime robbery of a foreign power's salvors and the taking of French and Spanish vessels.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (the Jennings wreck-raid narrative and the Porto Bello prize), 1724 (Gutenberg ebook 40580); CSP Colonial vol 29 no. 158 i, del Valle to the Marquis de Monteleon, Jamaica, 18 March 1715/16 (C.O. 137, 11. No. 16 i.), read on British History OnlineOn: Henry Jennings - By the General History's account the New Providence pirates called a general council on the coming of the proclamation and could agree on nothing, some being for fortifying the island and treating with the government upon the foot of a commonwealth, whereupon Jennings resolved upon surrendering to the terms of the proclamation without more ado, and about 150 more came in after him to the Governor of Bermuda and had their certificates.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (the Jennings wreck-raid narrative and the Porto Bello prize), 1724 (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Henry Jennings - Exquemelin alleges that at Puerto Principe the inhabitants were shut in churches and prisoners starved to make them give up hidden wealth, and Crooke's 1685 apology denies the cruelties stated after the taking of the town.
Period narrative
The Pirates of Panama; or, The Buccaneers of America (Broadway edition, ed. George Alfred Williams; reproducing the 1684 English translation of Exquemelin, here abridged for general readers), with William Crooke's printed apology and corrections (1685)On: Henry Morgan - The account of captured religious men and women being forced to carry and plant the scaling ladders against a castle wall at Porto Bello under the defenders' fire, so that several were killed, rests on Exquemelin alone.
Period narrative
The Pirates of Panama; or, The Buccaneers of America (Broadway edition, ed. George Alfred Williams; reproducing the 1684 English translation of Exquemelin, here abridged for general readers)On: Henry Morgan - Exquemelin alleges systematic torture of prisoners at Maracaibo and Gibraltar to extort hidden wealth, and Crooke's 1685 apology denies by name the racking of a fool, the torturing of a rich Portuguese and the forcing of a slave to kill prisoners.
Period narrative
The Pirates of Panama; or, The Buccaneers of America (Broadway edition, ed. George Alfred Williams; reproducing the 1684 English translation of Exquemelin, here abridged for general readers), with William Crooke's printed apology and corrections (1685)On: Henry Morgan - Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates (1724) is the only continuous narrative of Howell Davis's life, and almost every episode, ship name and figure in the standard story derives from it alone.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - The forename Howel, and so the modern Howell, rests only on the heading of Johnson's chapter, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew, Snelgrave supplying no forename at all, so that the two attested period forms are Howel Davis and Captain Davis.
Period narrative
A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave-Trade (Part III, the author's being taken by pirates); A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson states that Davis was born at Milford, in Monmouthshire, and was from a boy brought up to the sea, a birthplace that is internally doubtful because Milford Haven lies in Pembrokeshire and not in Monmouthshire.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson traces Davis into piracy through the Cadogan snow of Bristol, of which he was chief mate: the snow was taken at Sierra Leone by the pirate England, her master Skinner was murdered, and the vessel with its cargo was given to Howel Davis the mate.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson's chapter states that Davis was seized at Barbados on his crew's information, kept in prison three months, and discharged without being brought to any trial, having been in no act of piracy.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew), the Barbados imprisonment after the Cadogan reached the islandOn: Howell Davis - Davis's independent command began, on Johnson's account, with a night rising aboard one of Woodes Rogers' trading sloops at Martinique, the Buck or the Mumvil Trader, in which the conspirators secured the master and seized the vessel, after which the company elected Davis captain.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson has Davis take a French ship of twelve guns off the north side of Hispaniola and then a French ship of twenty four guns by a stratagem of false force, both of which were later released.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson has Davis plunder the shipping in the road at the Isle of May and take one vessel into his own use, mounting her with twenty six guns and calling her the King James.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson describes a night assault by Davis's company on the Portuguese fort at St Jago in the Cape Verdes, in which three of his men were killed.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson describes the capture of Gambia Castle, a Royal African Company fort, by a ruse in which Davis and two of his men posed as Liverpool merchants, taking about 2,000 pounds sterling in bar gold with no man lost on either side.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson describes the capture of a Dutch interloper of thirty guns off Cape Three Points after a long fight in which nine of Davis's men were killed, the prize being fitted up and renamed the Rover of thirty two guns and twenty seven swivels.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson describes the taking of three ships at Anamaboe, the Hink Pink, the Princess and the Morrice Sloop, and it is from the Princess that her second mate Bartholomew Roberts was taken into the company.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson describes the capture of a Dutch ship carrying the Governor of Acra with money to the value of 15,000 pounds sterling aboard, the richest prize of the cruise in his account.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - The great majority of Davis's cruise, from the Cadogan through Coxon's Hole, the Cape Verdes, Gambia Castle, Cape Three Points and Anamaboe, is known only from Johnson and carries no independent calendar dates.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson describes Davis entering Principe under English colours as a man of war in quest of pirates and plundering a French ship lying there on the pretext that she had traded with pirates.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - Johnson gives the manner of the death: a plot to lure the governor of Principe and the chief men aboard and hold them for a ransom of 40,000 pounds was betrayed to the governor, an ambuscade was laid, and Davis was shot through the bowels.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis, and his Crew)On: Howell Davis - A pirate captain named Bowen is said to have operated in the Indian Ocean and on the Madagascar round about 1700 to 1704, commanding successively the Speaker, the captured Scots ship Speedy Return, and the Moorish prize renamed the Defiance.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64, with the appendix life of Nathaniel NorthOn: John Bowen - Bowen was never tried and no court adjudicated his personal guilt for any of the acts attributed to him.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64, with the appendix life of Nathaniel NorthOn: John Bowen - The forename John rests only on Johnson, whose main chapter is headed "Capt. JOHN BOWEN"; no other source read for this record supplies a forename.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64 (chapter heading)On: John Bowen - Johnson's appendix states that Bowen "was born of creditable Parents, in the Island of Bermudas" and was educated for the sea, and that "The first Voyage he made was to Carolina", where merchants gave him command of a ship for the West Indies.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the appendix Of Captain Bowen, pp. 371-372On: John Bowen - Johnson traces Bowen's route into piracy through being taken, on a homeward voyage from the West Indies, by a French pirate who had no navigator and detained him to work the ship, so that he could obtain no discharge and was carried to the Guinea coast and thence to the East Indies.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the appendix Of Captain Bowen, pp. 371-372On: John Bowen - The descriptor "Creole", sometimes applied to Bowen in modern writing, is carried by no source read for this record, which gives only a Bermuda birth and a Carolina first voyage.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the appendix Of Captain Bowen, pp. 371-372On: John Bowen - Johnson's appendix life of Nathaniel North has Bowen succeeding to the command of the Speaker after the death of Captain Booth, while the main chapter presents him as the Speaker's captain from 1700.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the appendix Life of Captain Nathaniel North, against the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - In 1700 Bowen's company is said to have taken shipping of all nations off the Malabar coast in the Speaker, the crew being of all nations likewise.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - About 1700 the company is said to have taken the homeward English East India ship of Captain Coneway from Bengal near Callequilon, and to have sold her, ship and cargo, in three shares to two Indian merchants and a Dutch factor.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - The Speaker was lost at Mauritius about the end of 1700 or the beginning of 1701, Johnson dating the departure from the wreck to about the middle of March 1701 after a three-month stay.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - About the beginning of 1702 the Scots ship Speedy Return and her attendant brigantine were seized at Maritan by a boarding ruse under pretence of trade and without bloodshed, Bowen taking command of the ship and burning the brigantine.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64; the loss of the Speedy Return to pirates also in the editorial note on Captain Thomas Green and the Worcester in the 1930 Argonaut Press edition of Hamilton's A New Account of the East IndiesOn: John Bowen - About the beginning of March 1703, in consort with Howard's Prosperous, the company took the East India Company ship Pembroke at Mayotta, her chief mate and one other man being killed in the skirmish and her commander Captain Whaley, whom Johnson misprints as Woolley, detained as a pilot before the ship was plundered and released.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - In 1703 a Moorish ship of 700 tun bound from Mocha to Surat was carried into Rajapora and plundered of about 22,000 pounds sterling in gold, the richest single prize Johnson credits to Bowen personally.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - In 1703 the consort Prosperous, under Howard, took a second Moorish ship off Daman, plundered her of about 84,000 chequins and left her adrift.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - Late in 1703 the Pembroke was plundered a second time on the Malabar coast, of sugar and small goods, and then let go again.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - A projected taking of the country ship Rimae, lying in Mudbay, at the instance of the Dutch broker Malpa, came to nothing late in 1703 when one Punt of the factory refused to pilot a vessel out to the pirates.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - Johnson reproduces the trial evidence against Green, the deposition of the Indian boy Antonio Ferdinando and that of the surgeon Charles May, and argues it self-contradictory, noting that the two witnesses placed the supposed engagement in positions that "could not be less than 140 miles asunder".
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - Bowen died at Don Mascarenhas about 1704, Johnson giving no calendar date and the year following from his own sequence, in which the Defiance sailed at the latter end of October 1703, lay three months at Mauritius, and the company then spent six months ashore.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), the appendix Life of Captain Nathaniel North, with the chapter Of Captain Bowen, pp. 49-64On: John Bowen - Johnson surmised that Martel 'and his Gang, were some Privateer's Men belonging to the Island of Jamaica, in the preceeding War', while admitting in the same sentence that 'I have not enquired so far back, as to know the Original of this Rover'.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol I, Chap. II 'Of Captain Martel, and his Crew'On: John Martel - Johnson's account of the cruise opens in September 1716 with a pirate sloop of eight guns and eighty men cruising off Jamaica and Cuba, and lists as her takings the Berkley Galley (Capt Saunders, plundered of 1000 pounds in money), the sloop King Solomon, two sloops off Cavena in Cuba, a sloop and a brigantine, the Dolphin of 20 guns bound for Newfoundland, the galley Kent (Capt Lawton) in mid-December, a small ship and a sloop of Barbados, and one more sloop on the passage to Santa Cruz; the sequence and its ordering are his alone and carry no calendar days.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol I, Chap. II 'Of Captain Martel, and his Crew'On: John Martel - Johnson has the company take the 20-gun galley John and Martha, Captain Wilson, laden with logwood and sugar, and fit her out as their flagship of 22 guns and 100 men.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol I, Chap. II 'Of Captain Martel, and his Crew'On: John Martel - The taking of the Greyhound Galley of London, Captain Evans, from Guinea to Jamaica, is contradicted between the two Johnson volumes: Vol I (1724) dates it December 1716 and has gold dust, elephants' teeth and forty enslaved people taken out of her, while the Vol II letter of 1728 dates it 16 October, denies the ivory, and says she was taken by a crew under Kennedy after Martel had been deposed.
Period narrative and later contested print
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol I, Chap. II 'Of Captain Martel, and his Crew'; The History of the Pyrates, Vol II (1728), 'Of Captain Martel. To Captain Johnson' (a purported letter from the master of the Greyhound)On: John Martel - The fortified defence of the anchorage at Santa Cruz between 15 and 20 January 1716/17, with batteries ashore, a sloop warped across the mouth of the channel and red-hot shot fired at the man of war, is carried by Johnson alone; the official report records the action and the burning but nothing of the batteries.
Period narrative and calendared state papers
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol I, Chap. II 'Of Captain Martel, and his Crew'; Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Vol 29 (1716-1717), No. 484: Governor Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, AntiguaOn: John Martel - Johnson states that the pirates fired their own ship at Santa Cruz with twenty enslaved people aboard, who were all burnt, and that the captain and the rest went into the woods with twenty more, whereas Governor Hamilton's report mentions no one burnt and records that Captain Hume recovered six or eight enslaved people from the wreck and that the escaped pirates were afterwards taken off by Bellamy.
Period narrative and calendared state papers
A General History of the Pyrates, Vol I, Chap. II 'Of Captain Martel, and his Crew'; Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Vol 29 (1716-1717), No. 484: Governor Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, AntiguaOn: John Martel - A pirate captain surnamed Taylor commanded the Cassandra in the Guinea and Indian Ocean cruise of 1720 to 1723 and succeeded Edward England in that command after England was deposed and marooned by their crew for showing Captain Mackra too much mercy.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - Johnson names him only Captain Taylor and gives no forename at any point; the form John Taylor is the Archive's own settled usage rather than an attestation.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - The East India Company ship Cassandra was taken off Juanna on 17 August 1720 after a desperate resistance, and three of her wounded men were cut to pieces when the pirates came aboard.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - Captain Mackra's letter of 16 November 1720 from Bombay supplies the firmest dates in the sequence, the action on 17 August 1720, the pirates gone on 3 September and Bombay on 26 October, but it is read only as Johnson reproduces it inside his own chapter and so is not an independent first-hand text.
First-hand letter within a period narrative
Letter from Captain Mackra, dated Bombay, 16 November 1720, as printed within Johnson's General History (Of Captain England chapter)On: John Taylor - Johnson draws Taylor as the harder man who displaced the milder England, 'a Fellow of a most barbarous Nature' who 'was become a great Favourite amongst them for no other Reason than because he was a greater Brute than the rest'.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - The pirates fell into a tumult over whether to make an end of Captain Mackra, and Taylor was dissuaded from killing him only with difficulty.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - Taylor, mellowed with punch, consented that the old pirate ship and a quantity of bales of cloth should be given to Captain Mackra, and then fell asleep.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720), Chap. VOn: John Taylor - The crew of a gallivat from Gogo bound for Calicut had their joints squeezed in a vice to extort a confession about a fleet they knew nothing of, their cargo was thrown overboard, and they were put into a boat with a trysail, no provisions and four gallons of water, half of it salt, out of sight of land.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720), Chap. VOn: John Taylor - At the island of Melinda in the Laccadives, deserted by its men, who had fled to the neighbouring islands and left the women and children behind, the pirates forced the women, destroyed the cocoa trees and fired several of the houses and churches.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720), Chap. VOn: John Taylor - Mr Lasinby, an officer of the Cassandra kept aboard by the pirates, was exposed to shot and beaten, the beating carried out by the quarter-master because Taylor, whose privilege it was, was 'lame of his Hands, and unable'.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - In the action with the Bombay fleet off the Malabar coast the two pirate ships carried 'no more than 300 Men in both Ships, and 40 of them Negroes'.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720), Chap. VOn: John Taylor - The company kept the Christmas of 1720 at sea, came in to Mauritius about the middle of February, sheathed and refitted the Victory and sailed again on 5 April, leaving an inscription on a wall to say they had gone to Madagascar for limes.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720), Chap. VOn: John Taylor - They went not to Madagascar but to the island of Mascarine, and found there on the 8th a Portuguese ship of 70 guns lying at anchor with her masts lost and most of her guns thrown overboard after a storm.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720), Chap. VOn: John Taylor - The Portuguese prize carried the Conde de Ericeira, Viceroy of Goa, and diamonds which the passengers valued at between three and four millions of dollars; the Viceroy was made prisoner and ransomed for 2000 dollars, and about 200 Mozambique slaves were carried off in the ship, Johnson dating the taking to the 8th of April without stating the year.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - The plunder was divided at 42 small diamonds a man, and one man who drew a single stone judged equal to the 42 broke it in a mortar and swore he had beaten it 'into 43 Sparks'.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - The date of 26 April 1721 usually printed for this prize, the ship's name, and the Archbishop of Goa usually placed aboard her are carried by no source read for this record; they belong to a Portuguese record that has not been read, which also names England as a captor where Johnson has him already marooned and names only Taylor's company, and Olivier Levasseur's part in the taking is left as it stood.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - At Delagoa on the African main the company battered down a small Dutch East India Company fort of six guns, newly built and its garrison already reduced by sickness, and took sixteen of the starving garrison aboard.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - The company left Delagoa at the latter end of December 1722, could not agree how to proceed and parted, those who kept the Cassandra sailing for the Spanish West Indies and surrendering with all their riches to the Governor of Porto Bello, an event Johnson does not date and whose year is inferred from his sequence.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - Johnson reports, in the form 'Tis said' and without vouching for it, that Taylor took a commission in the Spanish service and commanded the man of war that attacked the English logwood cutters in the Bay of Honduras.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - No court ever adjudicated Taylor's guilt: by Johnson's account he escaped English justice by surrendering to the Governor of Porto Bello and passing into Spanish service, so that every act attributed to him is alleged and none is proven.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - No contemporary English record of the surrender at Porto Bello or of the reported Spanish commission was reachable for this record, the Calendar of State Papers Colonial volume fetched for America and the West Indies yielding no entry for Taylor or the Cassandra.
Calendared state papers and period narrative
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. 33, searched without result; the surrender itself rests on A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter)On: John Taylor - Nothing read for this record gives Taylor an origin, a forename or a trial: Johnson states no birthplace, nationality or early life, supplies no Christian name, and no court ever adjudicated his guilt.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Of Captain England chapter, carrying Taylor, the Cassandra, and the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720)On: John Taylor - The sloop Burgess commanded is unnamed in the primary record, Musson giving only her eight guns and about eighty men.
Calendared state papers
America and West Indies: July 1717 (Capt. Mathew Musson to the Council of Trade and Plantations, calendar item 635), C.O. 5/1265, No. 73On: Josiah Burgess - Johnson's Introduction states that Woodes Rogers "formed into Companies, appointed Officers of those whom he most confided in, and then set about to settle a Trade with the Spaniards, in the Gulf of Mexico; in one of which Voyages, Captain Burgess abovementioned, died", giving the number of those former pirates as 400, having already listed "Hornigold, Williams, Burgess and la Bouche" among the men who "were afterwards cast away".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Introduction, on the pirates of Providence and their fates under Woodes Rogers), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Josiah Burgess - Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates (1724) carries every other episode attached to the man, the New Providence list, the meeting with Howell Davis, the Sierra Leone fort and galley, the forestalling at Whydah, Captain Mackra's letter and the Indian Queen, and nothing read for this record corroborates any of it except the Sierra Leone confederacy, which Snelgrave attests.
- The forename rests on Johnson alone, who lists "Oliver la Bouche" among the commanders at New Providence and prints Captain Mackra's letter naming "Capt. Oliver de la Bouche"; Snelgrave gives only the surname-nickname.
- Johnson lists "Oliver la Bouche" among the pirate commanders in the island of Providence before Woodes Rogers arrived in 1718, and says that he was afterwards cast away.
- Johnson's list of the commanders then in the island, which he prefaces "I think were these", places Oliver la Bouche among Benjamin Hornigold, Edward Teach, Charles Vane, Edward England, Thomas Cocklyn and eight others.
- Johnson gives the French pirate ship that fell in with Howell Davis as of fourteen guns and sixty four hands, "half French, half Negroes", and her captain's name as La Bouse.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis and his CrewOn: Olivier Levasseur - By Johnson's account the two ships met by mistake, La Bouse firing a gun and hoisting his black colours as he made to board, Davis returning the salute with his own, the captains then meeting by boat under a flag of truce and agreeing to sail down the coast together, Davis promising him the first fit ship he took.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis and his CrewOn: Olivier Levasseur - Davis and Cocklyn went up in La Bouse's brigantine to attack the Sierra Leone fort, and the three companies held the place for near seven weeks afterwards.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis and his CrewOn: Olivier Levasseur - A galley that came into the Sierra Leone road was yielded to him at Davis's insistence, and he cut away her half deck and mounted her with twenty four guns.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis and his CrewOn: Olivier Levasseur - The confederacy broke up after a drunken quarrel aboard Davis's ship, Davis telling Cocklyn and La Bouse that he had put a rod into their hands to whip himself and that three of a trade can never agree, upon which the other two went aboard their own ships and parted, each steering a different course.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. VIII, Of Captain Howel Davis and his CrewOn: Olivier Levasseur - Operating independently after the confederacy broke up, la Bouche reached Whydah Road before Edward England and forestalled the market there, disappointing England's company.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England and his CrewOn: Olivier Levasseur - He commanded the pirate ship Indian Queen, of two hundred and fifty tons, twenty eight guns and ninety men, on a passage from the Guinea coast toward the East Indies until she was bulged and lost near Mayotta in about 1720.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England and his Crew, printing the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720On: Olivier Levasseur - Captain Mackra, writing from Bombay on 16 November 1720, reported that on putting in at Juanna in July he found fourteen pirates who had come in their canoes from Mayotta, where their ship the Indian Queen, commanded by Capt. Oliver de la Bouche, had been bulged and lost.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England and his Crew, printing the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720On: Olivier Levasseur - The fourteen men who came off from Mayotta told Mackra that they had left their captain and forty of their men there building a new vessel in which to proceed on their design.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England and his Crew, printing the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720On: Olivier Levasseur - Captain Mackra's letter, printed by Johnson, names his own lost ship the Cassandra and imputes her loss to the desertion of her consort the Greenwich.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. V, Of Capt. Edward England and his Crew, printing the letter of Captain Mackra dated Bombay 16 November 1720On: Olivier Levasseur - Johnson's General History dates Worley's death to 17 February 1718-19 and places the fight at the mouth of the James River in Virginia, which is contradicted on both date and place by the South Carolina court record
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates ('Of Captain Worley, and his Crew')On: Richard Worley - Robbery of a shallop off Newcastle on the Delaware, 1718 (about October); A shallop near Newcastle, Delaware; alleged by Charles Johnson
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates ('Of Captain Worley, and his Crew')On: Richard Worley - Seizure of a Philadelphia sloop belonging to Black Robbin, the company quitting their open boat for her and taking one of Black Robbin's men along, 1718 (about October); Black Robbin's sloop of Philadelphia; alleged by Charles Johnson
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates ('Of Captain Worley, and his Crew')On: Richard Worley - Capture of a sloop bound for Hull, laden with provisions, used to escape HMS Phoenix, 1718 (about October); A Hull-bound provision sloop; alleged by Charles Johnson
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates ('Of Captain Worley, and his Crew')On: Richard Worley - Taking of a sloop and a brigantine among the Bahama Islands, 1718; A sloop and a brigantine in the Bahamas; alleged by Charles Johnson
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates ('Of Captain Worley, and his Crew')On: Richard Worley - Cruising under a black death's-head ensign as an armed pirate company of about twenty-five men and six guns off the Delaware and the Carolinas, 1718; Shipping off the Delaware and Carolina coasts; alleged by Charles Johnson
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates ('Of Captain Worley, and his Crew')On: Richard Worley - The fate of Livingston's venture bond after Kidd's conviction and execution in 1701 is unknown: no evidence was found of the Crown enforcing it, suing him as surety, or discharging him, and the state papers and Exchequer records have not been searched on the point.
Published primary documents
Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, document 77, Lord Bellomont to the Board of Trade, Boston, 8 July 1699 (PRO C.O. 5:860, no. 62)On: Robert Livingston - A portrait of Robert Livingston (1654-1728) survives and circulates, but its artist, date, medium and current owning repository could not be established.
Portrait
Portrait of Robert Livingston (1654-1728), File:Robert Livingston (1654-1728).jpgOn: Robert Livingston - Bellamy is said to have divided plunder evenly among his men.
Journalism and period narrative
The Last of Sam Bellamy's Pirate Crew (Provincetown Independent); A General History of the PyratesOn: Samuel Bellamy - Johnson writes that Bonnet "was pleased to have himself called Captain Thomas" and, having received the King's mercy in the name of Stede Bonnet, relapsed into his old vocation "by the Name of Captain Thomas".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724), Chap. IV, Of Major Stede Bonnet, and his Crew, Project Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Stede Bonnet - Bonnet sailed in consort with Edward Teach, was laid aside so that one of Teach's men commanded his sloop, and parted from Teach after the loss of the Queen Anne's Revenge.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. IV, Of Major Stede Bonnet, and his Crew, Gutenberg ebook 40580; The Pirates of Colonial North Carolina, ch. 3 and Appendix I (Hugh F. Rankin)On: Stede Bonnet - The early chronology rests on Charles Johnson alone: the fitting out in 1717, the captures off the Capes of Virginia including the Turbet of Barbados burned, the two takings off the bar of South Carolina in August 1717 with Joseph Palmer's sloop kept and burned and Thomas Porter's brigantine plundered and dismissed, the plan for St Thomas and the marooned men.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, Chap. IV, Of Major Stede Bonnet, and his Crew, Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Stede Bonnet - Johnson attributes Bonnet's turn to piracy to "a Disorder in his Mind" said to have been occasioned by "some Discomforts he found in a married State", a motive no independent source carries.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724), Chap. IV, Of Major Stede Bonnet, and his Crew, Project Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Stede Bonnet - Johnson records that the prisoners made little or no defence, "every one pretending only that they were taken off a Maroon Shore", and that Bonnet himself pleaded force rather than inclination, a defence the court rejected.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (London, 1724), Chap. IV, Of Major Stede Bonnet, and his Crew, Project Gutenberg ebook 40580On: Stede Bonnet - The personal name Thomas Anstis rests solely on Charles Johnson's General History, whose chapter heading reads "Of Captain Anstis, And his Crew" and whose text opens "Thomas Anstis ship'd himself at Providence".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that Anstis shipped himself at Providence in 1718 aboard the Buck sloop and was one of six who conspired together to go off a-pirating with her, the others being Howell Davis, Dennis Topping, Walter Kennedy and two men he declines to name.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson's Roberts chapter gives the grievance behind the desertion: Anstis was a malcontent over the inferiority he stood in with respect to Roberts, who regarded the brigantine only as a tender and left her people no more than the refuse of their plunder.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. IX, Of Captain Bartho. Roberts, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that about the middle of June 1721, between Hispaniola and Jamaica, the company plundered Captain Marston of his wearing apparel, liquors and provision and five of his men, without touching his cargo.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that a ship he takes to be the Irwin of Cork, Captain Ross, was captured off Martinico with Colonel Doyly of Montserrat and his family aboard as passengers, and that the colonel was much abused and wounded, while declining to be positive of the ship's identity.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson relates that after the taking off Martinico twenty-one of the crew forced a woman passenger successively, then broke her back and flung her into the sea, and that Colonel Doyly was wounded trying to save her; he will not be positive it was Anstis's crew that acted it, yet states "that such a Fact was done, there is too much Evidence for it to be doubted of".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that the guns and tackle of a Barbados ship were taken out to mount the Morning Star with 32 guns, that she was manned with a hundred men, and that John Fenn was appointed her captain.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson has the government of the company disturbed by malcontents, with so many new men aboard not inclined for the game that whatever the captain proposed was carried against him and no fixed resolution for any bold enterprise could be reached.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that the petition for pardon was drawn up and signed by the whole company in the manner of a round robin, the names written in a circle to avoid all appearance of pre-eminence and lest any person be marked out by the government as a principal rogue among them.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - The petition as Johnson prints it pleads that the petitioners had been "forced by him and his wicked Accomplices, to enter into, and serve, in the said Company, as Pyrates, much contrary to our Wills and Inclinations".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson's statement that the company lay "about nine Months" on the island off Cuba is difficult to reconcile with the petition dated 14 June 1722 and the return to sea at the beginning of August 1722, which would leave nearer two months awaiting an answer.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew); Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Vol. 33 (1722-1723), no. 333 with enclosure 333.i (round robin petition of the companies of the Morning Star and Good Fortune, 14 June 1722), C.O. 323, 8. Nos. 32, 32.iOn: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that on the island the company appointed a mock court of judicature to try one another for piracy, in which the man who was a criminal one day was made judge the next.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that by intolerable neglect the company ran the Morning Star upon the Grand Caimanes and wrecked her, and that the brigantine, seeing the fate of her consort, hauled off in time and weathered the island.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that the Hector landed her men upon the island and took forty of the Morning Star's crew without any resistance, they alleging that they were forced men and glad of the opportunity to escape from the pirates.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that near the Bay of Honduras in late 1722 the brigantine took Captain Durfey's Rhode Island sloop and two or three other vessels, destroying them and bringing their crews aboard.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that the company took the Antelope sloop of Dublin, laden with provisions, at the Bahama Islands about December 1722, and carried her cargo to Tobago.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - Anstis was shot in his hammock by his own mutinying crew in 1723, the survivors surrendering the vessel at Curacao, where they were tried and hanged; this rests on Johnson alone, while Governor Hart has the Good Fortune escaping Tobago with twelve men and Captain Brand of HMS Hector in pursuit, and reports no death.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew); Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Vol. 33 (1722-1723), no. 576 (Governor John Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 1723), C.O. 152, 14On: Thomas Anstis - Johnson states that the company's survivors dispersed after Tobago and came home to the Bristol Channel about October 1723 in a small sloop which they then sank, and his John Phillips chapter names Phillips as one who came home in her.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew); A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XV, Of Captain John Phillips, and his Crew)On: Thomas Anstis - He became a respected colonist and is named as a founding member of Trinity Church, Newport
Modern scholarship
That Awful Spectacle: Masking the City-by-the-Sea's Piratical PastOn: Thomas Paine - He is associated in tradition with the Rhode Island harbouring of Red Sea men and with the pirate Thomas Tew, but no direct Paine-Tew partnership was documented in any source read this session
Modern scholarship
That Awful Spectacle: Masking the City-by-the-Sea's Piratical PastOn: Thomas Paine - The detailed figures for the Block Island action - two sloops and about 90 men on Paine's side against five French vessels and about 200 men, about 2.5 hours of fighting, roughly 100 French casualties, and Paine losing 1 killed and 6 wounded - rest essentially on Arnold and Chapin
Modern scholarship; Period narrative
A glimpse of RI's past: Captain Thomas Paine of Jamestown; History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Vol. 1 (1636-1700)On: Thomas Paine - Alleged harbouring and financing of Red Sea pirates at Rhode Island, and an alleged friendship with Thomas Tew, 1690s; (No specific victim; a reputation-level allegation); alleged by Hostile observers of Rhode Island's harbouring reputation (the Randolph-type accusations against the colony)
Modern scholarship
That Awful Spectacle: Masking the City-by-the-Sea's Piratical PastOn: Thomas Paine - That the Bermuda commission held by Tew and George Dew was for a voyage to Gambia to attack the French factory at Goree rests on Charles Johnson alone.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (the digression on Captain Thomas Tew)On: Thomas Tew - Johnson alone reports that the prisoners told of five further rich ships which Tew "would have attacked" but that he was over-ruled by the quartermaster and others, and the attack did not take place.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (the digression on Captain Thomas Tew)On: Thomas Tew - A pirate named Thomas White operated in the waters of Madagascar, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean in the first decade of the eighteenth century; his life is narrated in Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates vol. II (1728) and cross-referenced within the same work in the Life of Captain Halsey
Modern scholarship
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Thomas White, and his Crew; with cross-references in the Life of Captain Halsey)On: Thomas White - Johnson states White 'was born at Plymouth, where his Mother kept a Publick House', that she took great care of his education and 'procur'd him the King's Letter', and that he 'served some Years on board a Man of War'; this places his birth at Plymouth in Devon, England
Modern scholarship
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Thomas White, and his Crew; with cross-references in the Life of Captain Halsey)On: Thomas White - Per Johnson, White went to Barbados, married, entered the merchants' service, and commanded the Marygold brigantine, making two successful voyages to Guinea and back before his third voyage ended in capture
Modern scholarship
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Thomas White, and his Crew; with cross-references in the Life of Captain Halsey)On: Thomas White - Per Johnson, on his third Guinea voyage White was taken by a French pirate, detained because the pirates were 'in Want of good Artists' (skilled navigators), and thereafter carried unwillingly
Modern scholarship
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Thomas White, and his Crew; with cross-references in the Life of Captain Halsey)On: Thomas White - Per Johnson, White eventually commanded a company of about 60 men on a Red Sea cruise of his own, but later reverted to serving 'afore the Mast', appearing in the Halsey chapter as 'once a Commander among the Pyrates, but then a private Man'
Modern scholarship
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Thomas White, and his Crew; with cross-references in the Life of Captain Halsey)On: Thomas White - Per Johnson, White settled at a place the pirates called Hopeful Point on Madagascar, built a house and bought cattle, and had a son by 'a Woman of the Country'; the community he moved among is Johnson's 'Island of St. Mary' (modern Ile Sainte-Marie, Nosy Boraha) with settlements at Ambonavoula and Olumbah
Modern scholarship
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Thomas White, and his Crew; with cross-references in the Life of Captain Halsey)On: Thomas White - 'Thomas White' is a common name and this Madagascar pirate must be kept distinct from other men so called; the disambiguation rests on the Archive's own reading of the Johnson cluster (Plymouth birth, the Marygold, service under Halsey, death by a flux at Madagascar), offered as a methodological caution rather than a documented external error
Modern scholarship
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Thomas White, and his Crew; with cross-references in the Life of Captain Halsey)On: Thomas White - Johnson groups Valentine Ashplant among the senior pirates he distinguishes 'by the Title of Lords' (with Sympson and Anstis), the grouping popularly called the House of Lords
Printed trial record
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates (the Bartholomew Roberts chapter, with the Cabo Corso trial appendix)On: Valentine Ashplant - Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates, second volume (1728), is reported to head its Fly chapter with a differing forename, but it has not been read for this record, and no issue of the Boston News-Letter or the New-England Courant for June and July 1726 has been read either.
Trial pamphlet and execution sermon
The Tryals of sixteen persons for piracy, &c. (Boston, printed for Joseph Edwards, 1726), Special Court of Admiralty at Boston, 4 and 5 July 1726; and Cotton Mather, The Vial Poured Out upon the Sea (Boston, printed by T. Fleet for N. Belknap, 1726)On: William Fly - This William Howard is a different man from the John Howard of Rackham's crew executed at Kingston in 1721, from the Tho. Howard among Roberts's captured men, and from Thomas Howard the Indian Ocean pirate, the particulars distinguishing them resting on Johnson alone.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. III, Of Captain Teach alias Black-beard), Gutenberg ebook 40580On: William Howard - May's account of coming home from Virginia, lying sick at Bristol, being taken three miles short of Bath by the King's Messenger and examined there before the Duke of Devonshire rests solely on his own uncorroborated courtroom narrative, no other witness in the print speaking to any part of it.
Trial pamphlet
The Tryals of Joseph Dawson, Edward Forseith, William May, William Bishop, James Lewis, and John Sparkes for several piracies and robberies by them committed in the company of Every the grand pirate, Admiralty sessions at the Old Bailey ended 6 November 1696 (A63217; Wing T2252; ESTC R38357)On: William May - The naming of Israel Hands as the prize master put aboard the Adventure at Turneff rests on Johnson alone, Herriot's sworn information naming no prize master and saying only that five of the pirates' hands were sent to bring the sloop to anchor under the ship's stern.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (chapter on Edward Teach called Black-beard)On: Adventure (Blackbeard's sloop) - The captured sloop was sold, and the pirate effects together with the sale of the sloop came to about 2500 pounds divided among the companies of HMS Lyme and HMS Pearl, a total that rests on Johnson alone.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (chapter on Edward Teach called Black-beard)On: Adventure (Blackbeard's sloop) - Rather than proceed to the Gambia the Amity turned for the Cape of Good Hope and the Red Sea, her company assenting, on Johnson's telling alone, with the cry "A gold Chain, or a wooden Leg, we'll stand by you".
- Baldridge heard afterwards that the Amity was "trapaned and taken by the Moors", which is the last report of her and is his hearsay.
- A brigantine also called Amity, described by Baldridge as "that was Captain Tew's Sloop from Barbadoes and fitted into a Brigantine by the Owners of the Charming Mary at Barbados", arrived at St Mary's on 17 January 1696/7 and was later broken up by the Resolution, and whether she was Tew's sloop rebuilt or a distinct Barbados namesake is unresolved.
- The gun counts given for her disagree: forty in the 1696 indictment, forty-six in later accounts that describe her as a privateer, and 'thirty odd Guns' in Charles Johnson's General History of 1724.
Trial pamphlet and period narrative
The Tryals of Joseph Dawson, Edward Forseith, William May, William Bishop, James Lewis, and John Sparkes... in the company of Every the grand pirate (Old Bailey Admiralty Sessions, 1696); A General History of the Pyrates (Life of Captain Avery)On: Charles II - Johnson's General History of 1724 calls the ship the Duke and places her owners at Bristol, against the trial's Charles the Second and its London merchants.
- What became of the Dutchess after she came up to Erith in October 1711, whether she was sold, broken up or sent to sea again, is not established in the sources read for this record.
Period narrative
A Cruising Voyage Round the World, read in the 1928 Seafarers' Library reprint of the 1712 text, the closing entries of the journalOn: Dutchess - Johnson's General History garbles the ship, making her one of two vessels of 'thirty odd Guns, and 120 Hands' fitted out at Bristol for the Spanish service and naming her only as one 'which I take to be call'd the Duke'.
- Johnson's General History gives a different end, in which the company resolved to dispose of the ship at Providence and Every, pretending an owner's order to sell her to the best advantage, found a purchaser and bought a sloop.
- The 1728 chapter states that she was a Dutch ship, formerly a privateer, taken at St Jago in the Cape Verde Islands and there renamed; no contemporary document read for this record describes her origin.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates (vol. II), chapter 'Of Captain Condent', digital.lib.ecu.edu item 17002, internal book pp. 140 to 143On: Flying Dragon - Under Condent the ship cruised the Cape Verde Islands, the coast of Brazil and the River Plate and then the Indian Ocean, at Ile Sainte-Marie, Johanna and Bourbon, taking many prizes; the route rests on the 1728 chapter alone, apart from the Indian Ocean presence in 1720, which a contemporary French periodical independently corroborates.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates (vol. II), chapter 'Of Captain Condent', digital.lib.ecu.edu item 17002, internal book pp. 140 to 143On: Flying Dragon - The Governor of Bourbon, Joseph de Beauvollier, granted the company protection on condition that they destroyed their ships, the petition being carried in a Bristol snow, and the 1728 chapter states that the pirates 'accordingly sunk the Flying Dragon' at Ile Sainte-Marie.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates (vol. II), chapter 'Of Captain Condent', digital.lib.ecu.edu item 17002, internal book pp. 140 to 143On: Flying Dragon - The register entity 'Fortune' (FOR) is best identified as a vessel of Bartholomew Roberts' 1720 career; the bare name 'the Fortune' is used, among the sources read, only by Johnson, who applies it to a French ship taken on the Newfoundland Banks in the summer of 1720
Period narrative; Statute
A General History of the Pyrates (the chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, and the reproduced trial of Bonnet's crew); Governor Walter Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, with enclosures: the deposition of Moyse Renos of Dartmouth (sworn St Christophers, 26 Sept 1720) and a letter of Bartholomew Roberts to Lt. General Mathew (27 Sept 1720)On: Fortune - The armament of the vessel is uncertain: Johnson gives the French ship named Fortune '26 Guns' and the Bristol galley taken at Trepassey '16 Guns'; the Renos deposition says a ship was 'fitted out with 18 guns'
Period narrative; Statute
A General History of the Pyrates (the chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, and the reproduced trial of Bonnet's crew); Governor Walter Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, with enclosures: the deposition of Moyse Renos of Dartmouth (sworn St Christophers, 26 Sept 1720) and a letter of Bartholomew Roberts to Lt. General Mathew (27 Sept 1720)On: Fortune - Cruising from the Banks in July 1720 the company took the Richard of Bideford, the Willing Mind of Poole, the Expectation of Topsham and the Samuel of London, and on 16 July the Little York and the Love of Liverpool, and the next day (17 July) the Phoenix snow of Bristol, a brigantine and the sloop Sadbury
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (the chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, and the reproduced trial of Bonnet's crew)On: Fortune - Johnson has the bare 'Fortune' superseded when Roberts took a French Martinico ship, 'their first Royal Fortune'; the ultimate fate of the vessel named Fortune is not stated in the sources read
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (the chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, and the reproduced trial of Bonnet's crew)On: Fortune - This Fortune must be kept distinct from the Good Fortune, a brigantine (Norton's) that Roberts' company christened later, after burning their own sloop; the Good Fortune is a separate register entity
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (the chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, and the reproduced trial of Bonnet's crew)On: Fortune - The curators' lead that this Fortune was 'a Rhode Island sloop renamed the Fortune early in his career' is not supported by any source read: Johnson's Rhode Island vessels are brigantines (one chased and lost off Surinam, one taken near Deseada), and neither is named Fortune
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (the chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, and the reproduced trial of Bonnet's crew)On: Fortune - Khafi Khan has Ibrahim Khan running into the hold during the boarding and putting turbans and swords on his Turkish concubines to incite them to fight.
Mughal chronicle
Khafi Khan, Muntakhab al-Lubab, in Elliot and Dowson, vol. 7, pp. 350-351. A single hostile chronicle, and a detail damaging to the captain that may be partisan denigration; nothing else read for this record attests it.On: Ganj-i-Sawai - Johnson's Roberts chapter states that the company burnt their own sloop, manned the brigantine taken from a master named Norton at Dominica, and sent her master away in the Dutch interloper taken at the same time.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter IX, Of Captain Bartho. Roberts, and his Crew, the disposal of the prizes after the mock trial (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - No armament is recorded for the Good Fortune, Johnson describing her only as of far less force than the 32-gun Morning Star, as an excellent sailer, and as carrying about seventy hands at the separation from Roberts.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - Johnson states that the company took the Morning Star, bound from Guinea to Carolina, mounted her with 32 guns and about a hundred men, and that although the larger ship would have fallen to the brigantine's commander as elder officer he stayed in his own vessel and gave the Morning Star to his former gunner John Fenn.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - Johnson states that at Grand Cayman, where the Morning Star was run ashore and wrecked, two men of war came down upon the pirates and the brigantine had just time to cut her cable and get to sea, one warship keeping within gunshot of her for several hours until the wind died and her crew got out their oars and rowed clear.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - Johnson states that one Jones, boatswain of the Good Fortune, proposed as a place of retreat an uninhabited island off the south-west end of Cuba that he had used in the late war when privateering against the Spaniards, and that the pirates retired there.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - Johnson describes the anchorage as a lagoon at the east end of the island, so narrow that a ship could just go in, with 15 to 22 foot of water for almost a league up and red mangrove growing so thick on both sides that the entrance and the vessels lying there were hardly to be seen.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew, the description of the island off Cuba (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - The petition for a pardon that Johnson prints is headed as the humble petition of the company then belonging to the ship Morning Star and brigantine Good Fortune, and was sent home by a merchant ship bound from Jamaica to England.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew, the printed petition to King George (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - Johnson states that after her escape the brigantine sailed to a small island near the Bay of Honduras to clean and refit, taking a Rhode Island sloop commanded by Captain Durfey on the way.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - Johnson states that while the brigantine was cleaning, Captain Durfey, some of the other prisoners and two or three of the pirates concerted a scheme to seize the chiefs and carry the brigantine off, which was discovered before she was fit for sailing.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - Johnson states that the forced carpenter John Phillips, taken out of a West Country ship bound for Newfoundland the day after the separation from Roberts, served as carpenter of the Good Fortune until the company broke up at Tobago and afterwards commanded a pirate company of his own.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter XV, Of Captain John Phillips, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - Johnson states that about December 1722 the company took a good ship commanded by a Captain Smith, mounted her with 24 guns, and put her under Fenn, a one handed man who had commanded the Morning Star when she was lost.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - The command of the Good Fortune is in conflict between the sources: Johnson makes Thomas Anstis her commander from the separation from Roberts on 18 April 1721, while Governor Hart's letter of 8 June 1723 states that Capt. Finn had been three years in the brigantine Good Fortune, which he commanded, and never names Anstis.
Period narrative and calendared state paper
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X (Gutenberg ebook 40580), against Governor Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, no. 576, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. 33 (1722-1723), C.O. 152, 14. ff. 223-230On: Good Fortune - Johnson reports that the survivors of the disorder at Tobago put the rest of the company in irons and surrendered themselves and the vessel at Curacao, a Dutch settlement, where those concerned in delivering up the vessel were acquitted; he gives no date, and no colonial paper read for this record notices her arrival.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter X, Of Captain Anstis, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Good Fortune - No tonnage, dimensions, draught, rig description beyond the word brigantine, gun count, crew list, builder or owner before Norton survives for the Good Fortune, whose whole documentation consists of one period narrative and one calendared colonial letter.
Corpus-level negative finding
A NEGATIVE FINDING across A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapters IX, X and XV (Gutenberg ebook 40580), and Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. 33 (1722-1723), no. 576On: Good Fortune - Johnson's Martel chapter records a separate vessel of the name, the Greyhound galley of London, Captain Evans, bound from Guinea to Jamaica, from which the pirates took her gold dust, elephants' teeth and forty slaves before sending her on her voyage.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. II, Of Captain Martel, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson's Lowther chapter records a further vessel of the name, a ship of 200 tons called the Greyhound, Benjamin Edwards commander, belonging to Boston, which refused the pirates' gun to bring to on the tenth of January.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XII, Of Capt. George Lowther, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that Charles Harris, made captain of the brigantine, had been forced into the pirates' service by Lowther out of the Greyhound of Boston, in which ship he was second mate.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that the pirates gave chase to the Greyhound and calls her rather inferior in force to the two pirate vessels.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that about March 1722 a man of war trading on the coast, the Greyhound galley, Captain Walron, had her captain invite merchants to dinner aboard, sixteen or eighteen of them coming on board with their attendants and friends.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), introductory matter on proceedings between the English and the Spaniards in the West Indies (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that the guests in the cabin drew pistols and shot the captain, the surgeon and another man dead.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), introductory matter on proceedings between the English and the Spaniards in the West Indies (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that the ship was recovered before she could be carried off, the Spaniards taking about 10,000 pounds in specie and going off in their launch unmolested.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), introductory matter on proceedings between the English and the Spaniards in the West Indies (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that the Greyhound tacked and stood away from the two sloops, letting them chase her for two hours while she made ready to engage.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that on coming within musket shot the Greyhound hauled up her mainsail and clapped close upon a wind to keep the pirates from running to leeward, and then engaged.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that the wind fell, that the sloops gained on the Greyhound by the help of their oars, and that she left off firing, turned all hands to her own oars and came up with them at three in the afternoon.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that the Ranger's company had ten or twelve men killed and wounded and no possibility of escaping when they surrendered.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that the Greyhound carried her prize in to Rhode Island, to the great joy of the whole province.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson's printed list of the prisoners states that twenty-five of them were found guilty and executed on 19 July 1723 near Newport in Rhode Island, against the twenty-six of the New York resolution printed in the same chapter.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Johnson states that after their escape Low's company swore oaths and curses upon the captain of the Greyhound and vowed to execute vengeance upon all they should meet with afterwards.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), Chap. XIII, Of Captain Edward Low, and his Crew (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Greyhound - Charles Johnson's General History names 'The Mermaid Man of War happening then to be down on the Main with a Convoy, about 30 Leagues from these Pyrates' (Taylor's Cassandra crew, c.1723), whose commander, bound to protect the convoy, was 'unwillingly withheld' from attacking them
- Johnson's General History places Rackham careening and living ashore 'to the Back of Cuba' over Christmas 1718 and describes his recovery of a vessel from a Spanish Guarda del Costa, an episode distinct from the Kingston and probably the seed of the later conflation
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. VII, Of Capt. John Rackam and his Crew)On: Kingston - A 2004 media report announced that a treasure-hunting team had found the Oxford's wreck off Haiti; this is an unverified announcement, not established by peer-reviewed archaeology, and no securely identified wreck or material evidence for the Oxford was established this session
- The identity of the certifying officer 'Barna. Randolph' is not established; the surname invites but does not confirm a connection to Edward Randolph, the customs surveyor active in New England
Statute
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 11 (1681-1685), entry 1425 (December 1683)On: Pearl - The Essex Prize was reported to have lost about forty men in the action; the figure is second-hand and, since the ship escaped, very likely exaggerated
Colonial state paper
The Earl of Bellomont to the Council of Trade and Plantations (CSP Colonial, Vol. 17, no. 740); Samuel Day (Bermuda) to the Council of Trade, forwarding the account of the brigantine Larke (CSP Colonial, Vol. 17, no. 802)On: Providence galley - The men who went aboard the Ranger for the chase were, by the company's custom, volunteers out of the Royal Fortune, and Harry Glasby's evidence has Roberts hailing the new Ranger and bidding them right ship and get under sail after the sugar ship he took HMS Swallow to be.
- Johnson's narrative has a few of the most desperate of the Ranger's people firing a pistol into powder left in the steerage after she struck, burning several of themselves, William Main and Roger Ball among them, Ball dying of a mortification the next day.
- Johnson's General History has Bonnet fitting the Revenge out at Barbados at his own expense with ten guns and about seventy men, and paying his crew wages rather than shares; no document of the period read for this account covers the Barbados origin, and the trial gives no gun count.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, chapter IV, 'Of Major Stede Bonnet and His Crew'; A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. IV Of Major Stede Bonnet and his Crew; and the Capt. England chapter), EBook 40580; Stede Bonnet and the Golden Age of Piracy (Law Library blog)On: Revenge, later Royal James - Johnson's General History has Bonnet taking the Revenge out of Barbados by night and making a first cruise off the Capes of Virginia in 1717, plundering four vessels there (the Anne of Captain Montgomery from Glasgow, the Turbet of Barbados which was burned, the Endeavour of Bristol and the Young of Leith), then taking two more off the bar of South Carolina in August 1717 (a Barbados sloop under Joseph Palmer and a New England brigantine under Thomas Porter) before careening at a North Carolina inlet.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, chapter IV, 'Of Major Stede Bonnet and His Crew'; Stede Bonnet and the Golden Age of Piracy (Law Library blog)On: Revenge, later Royal James - On resuming command Bonnet renamed the sloop the Royal James and took the alias Captain Thomas, being arraigned as Stede Bonnet, alias Edwards, alias Thomas.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. IV Of Major Stede Bonnet and his Crew; and the Capt. England chapter), EBook 40580On: Revenge, later Royal James - The sloops Fortune (Thomas Read master) and Francis (Peter Manwaring or Manwareing master) lay in company with the Royal James at Cape Fear and are the two vessels named in Bonnet's indictments; Johnson's running narrative and the indictments give different capture dates, the indictments dating the Francis to 2 August and the Fortune to 31 August 1718.
Period narrative and indictment text
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. IV Of Major Stede Bonnet and his Crew; and the Capt. England chapter), EBook 40580On: Revenge, later Royal James - The trial record read for this account gives no gun count for the Revenge or the Royal James: the figure of ten guns comes from Johnson alone, and the later figures of twelve guns and then eight guns by the time of Cape Fear come from later accounts.
Trial testimony and period narrative
Testimony of Ignatius Pell in the Tryal of Stede Bonnet (from the 1719 Tryals), transcribed on B. C. Brooks; A General History of the Pyrates, chapter IV, Of Major Stede Bonnet and His Crew; Battle of Cape Fear River (1718)On: Revenge, later Royal James - The Rose Pink was a pink (a ship type with a narrow overhanging stern); Ashton, a primary eyewitness, calls her 'a large Portugueze Pink, laden with Wheat ... which I was told was formerly call'd the Rose-Frigat', so a Portuguese origin is primary-supported; Johnson by contrast says she had 'formerly a Man of War, Capt. Thompson'
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII: Of Capt. Low and his Crew); The Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts (written by Himself); Ashton's Memorial: An History of the Strange Adventures and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip AshtonOn: Rose Pink - The Rose Pink's master before Low took her was Capt. Thompson
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII: Of Capt. Low and his Crew)On: Rose Pink - Low took the Rose Pink at St. Michael's Road in the Azores on 3 August 1722, among seven sail lying there, after threatening all who resisted with present death; Ashton, a primary eyewitness, also narrates the taking but describes her instead as a large Portuguese wheat pink taken off St. Michael's that 'struck to the Schooner'
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII: Of Capt. Low and his Crew); Ashton's Memorial: An History of the Strange Adventures and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip AshtonOn: Rose Pink - Capt. Thompson, the Rose Pink's former master, was captured again by Low at St. Michael's in September 1723 in a new London-built ship of 14 guns; Johnson notes he 'was taken there the Year before, by Low, in the Rose Pink', which fixes the Rose Pink capture to 1722
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. XIII: Of Capt. Low and his Crew)On: Rose Pink - The ten guns and about seventy men often quoted for the sloop belong to her earlier fitting out at Barbados, when she was the Revenge and Bonnet paid for her himself, and that count rests on Johnson alone.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. IV, Of Major Stede Bonnet and his Crew)On: Royal James - On the night before the engagement Bonnet showed his prisoner Captain Manwaring a letter he said he would send to the Governor of Carolina, threatening that if the sloops then in sight had been sent against him and he got clear off he would burn and destroy every vessel going in or out of South Carolina.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. IV), the night before the engagement in Cape Fear RiverOn: Royal James - Four of the men arraigned were acquitted, Thomas Nichols, Rowland Sharp, Jonathan Clarke and Thomas Gerrard, and twenty-two were hanged at White Point near Charles Town on Saturday 8 November 1718, a date the printed narrative misprints as 1711; other condemned men were not among those hanged, and later accounts give the number of the executed in round figures that do not match the printed list of names.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (Chap. IV), the verdicts and the account of the executions after the sessionsOn: Royal James - Charles Johnson's General History narrates Rackham's cruise but does not name the William; it describes 'a small English Sloop' taken from a Spanish guardacosta; no name or identity fact in this pack rests on Johnson
- The most plausible surviving venue for a minor merchant or fishing sloop named Snapper is colonial newspaper shipping notices (the Boston News-Letter, the American Weekly Mercury, the Boston Gazette), which could not be full-text searched this session; the identity remains open pending that search
Colonial state paper; Modern scholarship
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, August 1717 - December 1718; The Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630-1730On: Snapper - The History of the Pyrates gives the Speaker as a ship that "could mount 50 Guns" and says that at St. Augustine the pirates "took up her Guns, and mounted the Speaker with 54", while the 450-ton figure that accompanies her appears only in later accounts.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Bowen; the Life of Captain North; the seizure of the Speaker in the Life of Captain Thomas White)On: Speaker - George Booth's company seized the Speaker on the Madagascar coast by a ruse, interceding with the local king and bribing a crewman named Hugh Man "for a hundred Pounds" to wet the priming of her guns, so that she was boarded and taken "without the Loss of a Man on either Side".
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Bowen; the Life of Captain North; the seizure of the Speaker in the Life of Captain Thomas White)On: Speaker - The period narrative does not settle where or when the Speaker was seized and does not name the captain who lost her.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Bowen; the Life of Captain North; the seizure of the Speaker in the Life of Captain Thomas White)On: Speaker - At the Bay of St. Augustine the pirates took 70 to 80 men and the guns of the pirate ship Alexander, Captain James, bringing the Speaker to 54 guns and about 240 men besides some 20 slaves.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Bowen; the Life of Captain North; the seizure of the Speaker in the Life of Captain Thomas White)On: Speaker - On leaving after about three months the pirates made the governor a present of 2500 pieces of eight and left him the wreck with her guns and stores, a gift and a figure resting on the period narrative alone.
Period narrative
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Bowen; the Life of Captain North; the seizure of the Speaker in the Life of Captain Thomas White)On: Speaker - The governor supplied the wrecked company and invited them to make the island "a Place of Refreshment", and they bought a sloop there which they converted into a brigantine.
Period narrative and scholarly working paper
The History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (Of Captain Bowen; the Life of Captain North; the seizure of the Speaker in the Life of Captain Thomas White); Piracy in the Indian Ocean (ca. 1680-1750), Working Paper No. 160On: Speaker - Going down the Guinea coast about 1719 England took the Peterborough Galley of Bristol, Captain Owen; he afterwards went into a harbour, cleaned his own ship, and "fitted up the Peterborough, which he call'd the Victory".
- A different and unrelated merchantman was also named Victory: on the same coast England "took the Peterborough Galley of Bristol, Captain Owen; and the Victory, Captain Ridout; the former they detained, but plundered the latter, and let her go".
- Coming out to sea the pirates put it to a vote what voyage to take, the majority carried it for the East Indies, and they were at Madagascar at the beginning of 1720.
- In the encounter with the fleet off the Malabar coast that the pirates had taken for Angria's, A General History of the Pyrates gives them "no more than 300 Men in both Ships, and 40 of them Negroes", which does not agree with Macrae's count.
- In that same chase "the Victory had then four Pumps at Work, and must inevitably been lost before, had it not been for some Hand-Pumps, and several pair of Standards brought out of the Cassandra, to relieve and strengthen her".
- On the passage to Mauritius the company were about to quit the leaky ship and would have done it but for a quantity of arrack and sugar she had on board, without which most of them must have perished.
- At Mauritius about the middle of February 1721 the pirates "sheathed and refitted the Victory", and sailed again on 5 April 1721.
- Sailing from Mauritius the pirates left an inscription on one of the walls reading "Left this Place the 5th of April, to go to Madagascar for Limes".
- At Madagascar in 1721, the plunder shared and the company having no occasion for two ships, "the Victory being leaky, she was burnt, the Men (as many as would) coming into the Cassandra, under the Command of Taylor", and no independent confirmation of the burning was located.
- No wreck, archaeological site or material object has been attributed to the pirate Victory, which is consistent with the report that she was burnt at Madagascar.
- No condemnation, sale or further use of the hull after her capture is recorded in the sources read; that Barnet brought her into Port Royal is possible and unattested.
Trial pamphlet and period narrative
The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates (St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica); A General History of the PyratesOn: William - Johnson gives a different account of how the company came by a vessel, describing a small English sloop taken from a Spanish guardacosta rather than a sloop stolen at New Providence, and no name or identity statement on this record rests on him.