Evidence
Unverified
Reported, not yet checked against the record. 391 of the 3046 claims in the Archives. All claims, with filters.
- Political self-protection influenced the handling of Kidd.
Interpretation
Interpretation from the pattern of correspondence, the parliamentary context and modern scholarship (Ritchie 1986; Jameson 1923)On: Captain Kidd; Captain Kidd: Political Fall Guy - The jury found the taking of the Quedagh Merchant to be piracy; Kidd had renamed her the Adventure Prize.
Trial record
Second indictment and verdict, printed 1701 trial record; capture dated 30 January 1697/8, about ten leagues from CochinOn: Captain Kidd; Trial of William Kidd; Quedagh Merchant - Most of Kidd's crew deserted to Robert Culliford at Ile Sainte-Marie, Madagascar, in 1698.
Correspondence and secondary accounts
Calendar of State Papers Colonial and secondary accountsOn: Captain Kidd; Madagascar; Robert Culliford; Mocha Frigate - On 7 May 1694 Every led the mutiny that seized the Charles the Second at Corunna, was elected captain, and renamed her the Fancy.
Trial record and pirate declaration
Printed 1696 trial record (A63217), Every's own Johanna declaration and David Creagh's testimony ('Upon the 7th of May, 1694, I came to the Groin')On: Henry Every; Fancy - The nickname Blackbeard is first attested in Jonathan Dickinson's letter of 23 October 1717 ('One Capan Tatch Allias Blackbeard'); the long black beard is independently described in Henry Bostock's deposition.
Letter and deposition (period transcription)
Dickinson letter, 23 October 1717; Bostock deposition sworn 19 December 1717 (Margaret taken 5 December 1717), 'a tall Spare Man with a very black beard which he wore very long'On: Edward Thache (Blackbeard) - The week-long carousal with Charles Vane at Ocracoke in October 1718 rests on Johnson alone and is contradicted by the surviving trial testimony.
Early secondary source
Johnson and later writers; capped at Possible because the trial testimony in evidence places Vane in Bahamian and Cuban waters in late October to November 1718On: Edward Thache (Blackbeard); Charles Vane - Thache renamed the prize Queen Anne's Revenge; some of the French crew were forced to stay, including the pilot, cook and surgeon, and a few volunteered.
French archival depositions (research report)
QAR narrative from the French depositionsOn: Queen Anne's Revenge - Queen Anne's Revenge grounded on the bar at Beaufort (then Topsail) Inlet about 10 June 1718 and was lost.
Naval report and secondary
Capt. Ellis Brand of HMS Lyme, 'the 10th of June or thereabouts'On: Queen Anne's Revenge - Thache marooned about fifteen of his own men on a shoal at the grounding, a figure carried as a range of fifteen or seventeen on the grounding record; whether he grounded the ship deliberately to do so is disputed in the period record.
Depositions and naval report
Marooning Highly Probable on the depositions of David Herriot and Ignatius Pell (preserved via the 1719 Bonnet-trials print); the deliberate-intent reading is Probable and disputed, Herriot alleging intent and Brand implying an accident of pilotageOn: Queen Anne's Revenge - Rackham's service as Charles Vane's quartermaster, the vote said to have deposed Vane for cowardice on 24 November 1718, and his acceptance of the King's pardon in 1719 rest only on Johnson (1724); the Vane trial record that mentions a deposing vote does not name the quartermaster.
Near-contemporary narrative
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724); Vane trial print silent on the quartermasterOn: John Rackham - He was born about 1682, at Casnewydd Bach (Little Newcastle), Pembrokeshire.
Scholarly reference and local tradition
Dictionary of Welsh Biography ('1682?') and Royal Museums Greenwich ('c.1682'); the Haverfordwest variant names the nearest market town, about ten miles southOn: Bartholomew Roberts - His birth name was John, adopted 'Bartholomew' after he turned pirate.
Scholarly reference
Dictionary of Welsh Biography titles the article 'ROBERTS, BARTHOLOMEW [originally JOHN]'; no period document naming him John was locatedOn: Bartholomew Roberts - His exact birth date was 17 May 1682.
Later tradition
Widely repeated online but tied to no baptism or parish record; the DWB gives only '1682?'On: Bartholomew Roberts - The 'over 400 vessels' career total comes from later writers; Johnson lists many separate captures but records no career total.
Period narrative
Johnson lists many separate captures but records no career total. That the total was very large is Highly Probable; the number 400+ is Possible onlyOn: Bartholomew Roberts - 'Black Bart' and the Welsh 'Barti Ddu' are later coinages, not names used in his lifetime.
Period records and later attribution
1722 records use Bartholomew or Bartho. Roberts; 'Barti Ddu' is attributed to the twentieth-century poet Isaac Daniel HoosonOn: Bartholomew Roberts - The dandy wardrobe (crimson damask, a feather in the hat, a gold chain) and the tea-drinking temperance are Johnson's tradition, not documented detail.
Period print (Johnson)
Johnson's General History, Vol. 1 (1724), a semi-journalistic compilation of disputed authorship; corroborated by no documentary source, capped at PossibleOn: Bartholomew Roberts - Roberts was taken off the slave ship Princess by Howell Davis at Anomabu on the Gold Coast in June 1719.
Printed narrative and secondary authority
Dictionary of Welsh Biography and Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724). Broadly accepted; the specifics are Johnson-derived.On: Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War; Bartholomew Roberts - Roberts took the Royal African Company frigate Onslow in August 1721 and remade her as the forty-gun Royal Fortune.
Printed narrative and dispatch
Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724) and Ogle's dispatch (London Gazette 6091, which gives the ship as 'formerly called the Onslow', 40 guns, 152 men). The exact day (5 or 8 August) is uncertain.On: Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War; Royal Fortune - Rogers handled two fortunes and was twice ruined. The circumnavigation prizes sold for about 148,000 pounds (the Bristol pamphlet gives 147,975 pounds 12s 4.5d), but after the Chancery decree split the proceeds two-thirds to owners and one-third to crews his personal share was only about 1,015 pounds; he was gazetted bankrupt on 10 January 1712 and again on 30 January 1724, and spent time in a debtors' prison, freed when his creditors relented.
Secondary carriers and pamphlet
Cordingly biography; the Bristol venture pamphlet; Chancery and Gazette bankruptcy records as reportedOn: Woodes Rogers - Johnson (1724) describes the harbour of Nassau verbatim as "big enough to hold 500 Sail of Ships; before which lies a small Island, which makes two Inlets to the Harbour; at either Way there is a Bar, over which no Ship of 500 Tun can pass."
Period narrative (sailing description)
Johnson, General History (1724), quoted verbatim; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Nassau / New Providence - After the collapse of Bahamian government in the War of the Spanish Succession, pirates occupied Nassau from about 1713 to 1718, perhaps a thousand at the height and the majority of the town's population, styling themselves the Flying Gang; Fort Nassau, built 1697, stood in ruins.
- The suppression was a coordinated state project of four instruments: legal reform, naval force, the pardon (covered by the pirate-pardons theme), and exemplary public justice.
Synthesis
Synthesis across the instruments cited on this page, each of which rests on its own primary evidenceOn: The End of the Golden Age - The Archive adopts 1716 to 1726 as the working frame for the end of the Golden Age, the collapse of the post-war surge, while acknowledging the phrase has always been used more broadly. The narrowing to an Atlantic and Indian Ocean frame of 1716 to 1726 is a deliberate editorial choice.
Historiography (editorial framing)
adopted frame per the THM050 definitionOn: The End of the Golden Age - Charles Town was destroyed by a raid in 1684, Spanish in some later accounts and Franco-Spanish in others, and rebuilt in 1695 under Governor Nicholas Trott, when it was renamed Nassau in honour of William III, of the House of Orange-Nassau.
Colonial record
Colonial record of the rebuilding and renaming of the town on New Providence, 1695On: The End of the Golden Age; Nassau / New Providence - The December 1718 Nassau trial of relapsed pardon-holders (John Auger, Phineas Bunce and company, retaken by Benjamin Hornigold) tried ten, convicted nine, and hanged eight on 12 December 1718; one convicted man, George Rounsivell, was reprieved at the gallows, and John Hipps was acquitted as a forced man, not reprieved. The trial and condemnations are firm from the calendared court copy; the gallows detail rests on consistent independent carriers.
Court record (calendared) and independent carriers
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, volume 31, item 475 (CO 23/1 No. 18); gallows detail from consistent independent carriersOn: The End of the Golden Age; Pirate Pardons; Woodes Rogers - The earliest known casual literary use of a "golden age" of piracy is attributed to the English journalist George Powell in 1894, reviewing Charles Leslie's history of Jamaica; Powell's original text has not been read, so the attribution rests on a later carrier.
Attributed literary use
Use attributed to George Powell, 1894 (original text unseen)On: The End of the Golden Age; The End of the Golden Age - The suppression of Atlantic piracy in about 1716 to 1726 was carried by four instruments: the reformed piracy law (the Acts of 1698, 1717 and 1721), naval force (station ships and dedicated cruisers), the pardon (the 1717 to 1719 Acts of Grace) and exemplary mass justice (the vice-admiralty trials and hangings). The four-instrument model is an interpretive synthesis; each component rests on its own evidence.
Interpretive synthesis
Editorial synthesis of the statutes, the naval record, the proclamations and the executions censusOn: The End of the Golden Age; The End of the Golden Age - Antigua was one island inside the English Leeward Islands general government, which also embraced Saint Christophers, Nevis and Montserrat; governors moved between the islands and dated their despatches from wherever they were then resident, so that Governor John Hart's report of the Antiguan pirate trial of 1723 is headed from Saint Christophers and Leeward Islands business is scattered across island datelines.
State papers via calendar
Governor Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, St Christophers, 8 June 1723, CSP Colonial vol 33 entry 576 (C.O. 152, 14); Hart's despatches of 3 and 11 December 1723, entries 771, 772, 784 and 785On: Antigua - The island's name was written unstably in English administrative and cartographic usage, Governor Hart writing "Antegoa" on 8 June 1723 and English map titles carrying the doublet "Antigua or Antego" as late as the middle of the eighteenth century.
State papers via calendar
Governor Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 8 June 1723, CSP Colonial vol 33 entry 576; Emanuel Bowen, A new and accurate map of the island of Antigua or Antego, 1752, Library of Congress G5050 1752.B6On: Antigua - Antigua's economy in the period was sugar produced by enslaved Africans, and enslaved labour built the naval infrastructure at English Harbour; no island-wide count of enslaved people for any year between 1690 and 1725 has been verified.
Statutory heritage documentation
UNESCO World Heritage List no. 1499, Antigua Naval Dockyard and Related Archaeological Sites, for the enslaved labour that built the yard (Confirmed)On: Antigua - Antigua hosted a documented pirate trial in 1723: HMS Winchelsea, Captain Orm, arrived at Antigua on 11 May with nine pirates taken on the island of Tobago, two were found to have been forced and were made witnesses, the remaining seven were brought to trial on 17 May at the town of St John's before fourteen persons named by His Majesty's commission for the trial of pirates, Captain Finn, an associate of the infamous Roberts the pirate, was convicted with six more of his associates while a Portuguese man was acquitted by the Court of Admiralty, five were executed at high water mark in the town, one of the condemned was reprieved at the gallows, and Finn's body was hung in chains on Rat Island in St John's Harbour.
State paper via calendar
Governor Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, St Christophers, 8 June 1723, with enclosure 576.i, minutes of Council April to May 1723, CSP Colonial vol 33 entry 576 (C.O. 152, 14. ff. 223-225, 226v.-230v., 232v.)On: Antigua - The Calendar's own figures for the 1723 Antigua trial do not reconcile, giving nine taken, two made witnesses, seven tried, seven convicted, five executed, one reprieved at the gallows, one Portuguese acquitted and Finn gibbeted, so the execution total is carried as unsettled and the phrase "convicted with six more of his associates" is a conviction figure that must not be quoted as a rival execution figure; the pirate captain's name is likewise unsettled, printed Finn in the Calendar and Fenn by later writers, and both forms are indexed.
State paper via calendar
Governor Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 8 June 1723, CSP Colonial vol 33 entry 576 (C.O. 152, 14), for the Calendar reading. The reconciliation itself is disputed and awaits C.O. 152, 14 and the Antigua minutes of CouncilOn: Antigua - English Harbour on Antigua's south coast, a deep and almost land-locked inlet whose entrance was commanded by Fort Berkeley, built on the spit in 1704, was assigned to the King by the Antigua legislature in 1725 with adjoining land added in 1729, two years after the hurricane of 19 and 20 September 1723 drove 47 vessels ashore on the island while HMS Hector and HMS Winchelsea took no damage; the widely repeated claim that 35 ships were destroyed in the other harbours while English Harbour's shipping was untouched is not supported by the contemporary list, which never states where the two King's ships lay.
State paper via calendar
Mr Smith to [Lord Carteret], Antigua, 4 October 1723, with enclosure 721.i, list of vessels driven ashore in the hurricane of 19 and 20 September, CSP Colonial vol 33 entry 721 (C.O. 7, 1. Nos. 26, 26 i.), Confirmed; UNESCO World Heritage List no. 1499 for Fort Berkeley and the 1725 and 1729 assignments, ProbableOn: Antigua - The chain sits astride the homeward route from the Spanish Caribbean, the plate fleets leaving Havana and running north through the Bahama Channel, that is the Straits of Florida, before turning east for Europe.
Government research project
300th Anniversary of Spanish Silver Fleet's fatal encounter with a hurricane, NOAA AOML hurricane research blog, for the Bahama Channel as the homeward routeOn: The Bahamas - The place now called Beaufort Inlet was called Topsail Inlet in the golden age, and the period name is fixed cartographically by Edward Moseley's printed map of the province of 1733, which carries Topsail Inlet with Beaufort Town beside it.
Period cartography
Edward Moseley, A New and Correct Map of the Province of North Carolina, 1733 with Susan M. Trimble's index to it; the deposition of David Herriot printed with The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet and Other PiratesOn: Beaufort Inlet (Topsail Inlet) - On or about 10 June 1718 Blackbeard's flagship Queen Anne's Revenge grounded on the bar at Topsail Inlet and was lost, the deposition of David Herriot recording that "Thatch's ship Queen Anne's Revenge run a-ground off of the Bar of Topsail-Inlet", and the sloop Adventure of about 80 tons, commanded by Israel Hands, grounded and was lost as well after being sent to her assistance.
Trial deposition and modern project research
Deposition of David Herriot, printed with The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet and Other Pirates; Queen Anne's Revenge Project, On This Day, the Fate of a Ship was Sealed; Richard W. Lawrence, Archaeological Investigations at Beaufort InletOn: Beaufort Inlet (Topsail Inlet) - Whether the groundings were deliberate is contested: Herriot deposed that it was common knowledge Blackbeard ran the ship aground on purpose "to break up the Companies, and to secure what Moneys and Effects he had got for himself", but he testified under an arrangement for clemency and reported the motive as common knowledge rather than as direct observation, while other contemporary readings treat the loss as an accident of pilotage on entering port and a later narrative tradition holds that the pretext for entering was careening.
Trial deposition against secondary narrative
Deposition of David Herriot; Queen Anne's Revenge Project, On This Day, the Fate of a Ship was Sealed; Hugh F. Rankin, The Pirates of Colonial North CarolinaOn: Beaufort Inlet (Topsail Inlet) - Blackbeard grounded his ship at Topsail Inlet on pretence of running in to clean, and Hands's sloop, coming to his assistance, ran ashore near the other, so that both were lost. He then went into the tender sloop with forty hands, took out of the great ship all the money, small arms and effects of value, and marooned seventeen men on a small sandy island about a league from the main, where there was neither bird, beast nor herb for their subsistence. They remained there two nights and one day until Major Stede Bonnet, having got intelligence of them, sent his boat and brought them all aboard his sloop, the Revenge, afterwards called the Royal James. The figure of about fifteen marooned given in one project account is not carried here, and David Herriot's appointment as sailing master of the Royal James is not established, no trial record having been read.
Period narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, second edition (London, 1724), attributed to Captain Charles Johnson: "on Pretence of running into Topsail Inlet to clean, he grounded his Ship, and then, as if it had been done undesignedly, and by Accident; he orders Hands's Sloop to come to his Assistance, and get him off again, which he endeavouring to do, ran the Sloop on Shore near the other, and so were both lost. This done, Teach goes into the Tender Sloop, with forty Hands, and leaves the Revenge there; then takes seventeen others and Marroons them upon a small sandy Island, about a League from the Main, where there was neither Bird, Beast or Herb for their Subsistance"; "they had taken all the Money, small Arms and Effects of Value out of the great Ship, and set ashore on a small sandy Island above a League from the Main, seventeen Men... They remained there two Nights and one Day, without Subsistance... for Major Bonnet happening to get Intelligence of their being there... sent his Boat to make Discovery of the Truth of the Matter... and they were all brought on Board Bonnet's Sloop"; and, for the renaming, "the Pyrates taken in a Sloop formerly called the Revenge, but afterwards the Royal James"On: Beaufort Inlet (Topsail Inlet) - Bermuda's golden-age significance is material and maritime rather than that of a haven: an isolated archipelago, it lay athwart the homeward track from the Caribbean and the American colonies to Europe and supplied the favoured hull, crews on both sides of the account and prizes, without ever becoming a pirate base comparable to New Providence.
Modern scholarship
Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 2010, and The Pirates Part I: The Amnesty, The Bermudian Magazine, for the colony's maritime role, for the position athwart the homeward track by which shipping passed within reach by necessity, and for the contrast with New Providence (Probable)On: Bermuda - Thomas Tew commanded the Amity, a sloop of 70 tons, 8 guns and about 60 men which belonged mostly to Bermuda. Having taken a Moorish ship in the Red Sea, he lay at St Mary's off Madagascar in October 1693, the plunder running about 1,200 pounds a man, and sailed from there for America on 23 December 1693; he afterwards went out under a privateering commission from Governor Fletcher of New York, and was killed by a great shot from a Moor's ship, the Amity returning to St Mary's without a captain on 11 December 1695. The Bermuda commission from lieutenant governor Isaac Richier, its date of 1691 or December 1692 and its reported fee of 300 pounds, the sailing from Bermuda with George Dew against the French factory in the Gambia, the reported yield of about 100,000 pounds and the fourteenfold repayment of the Bermudian owners are not carried here, no document for them having been read.
Deposition printed in a documentary collection
Deposition of Adam Baldridge, 5 May 1699, printed as document no. 68 in J. F. Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (New York, 1923): "October 19, 1693. Arrived the ship Amity, Captain Thomas Tew Commander, Burden 70 Tons, 8 Guns, 60 men, haveing taken a Ship in the Red Seas that did belong to the Moors, as the men did report, they took as much money in her as made the whole share run 1200 l. a man... the Sloop belonged most of her to Bermudas. Captain Tew set saile from St. Maries December the 23d 1693, bound for America" and "December 11th 1695. Arrived the Sloop Amity, haveing no Captain, her former Captain Thomas Tew being killed by a great Shott from a Moors ship, John Yarland master, Burden seventy Ton, 8 Guns, as before described, and about 60 men"; for the New York commission, Jameson's note to document no. 63, "He had gone out with a privateering commission from Governor Fletcher of New York"On: Bermuda - Boston was the principal venue of admiralty piracy justice in northern British America, trying pirates by commissioned courts of admiralty grounded on the Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy, 11 and 12 William III c. 7, rather than shipping the accused to England; the Quelch defendants were condemned in 1704 by virtue of a commission grounded upon that act, and the court of October 1717 sat under a commission and instructions founded on the same statute.
Statute and trial pamphlets
An Act for the More Effectuall Suppression of Piracy, 11 and 12 William III c. 7, Statutes of the Realm VII, pp. 590 to 594; The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch, and others of his company, London imprint 1705; The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy, Boston 1718, Evans N01688On: Boston - The privateer Charles sailed from Marblehead in July 1703 under a commission from Governor Joseph Dudley and, after her commissioned commander Daniel Plowman fell ill and John Quelch took command, took at least nine vessels off Brazil belonging to subjects of the King of Portugal, an ally of the Crown; Quelch and others of his company were found guilty at the Court House in Boston on 13 June 1704, and six men were hanged on Friday 30 June 1704: John Quelch, John Lambert, Christopher Scudamore, John Miller, Erasmus Peterson and Peter Roach.
Trial pamphlet and institutional research blog
The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch, and others of his company, London imprint 1705, Library of Congress item 99163093; Pirates in Boston: The Trial and Execution of John Quelch, Massachusetts Historical Society Beehive blog; 1704: John Quelch, pirate, Executed TodayOn: Boston - The Boston court of 1704 is generally described as the first admiralty piracy trial held outside England, a superlative that is credible and repeated by the Massachusetts Historical Society but is carried here as a label rather than a proved fact; and Boston's pirate executions were carried out at the tidal margin, on the flats between the tide marks where admiralty jurisdiction ran to the low water mark, the printed account of 1704 placing the gallows in Charles River between Broughton's Warehouse and the Point, which is a distinct site from Execution Dock at Wapping in London and should never be conflated with it.
Trial pamphlet, institutional research blog and secondary account
Pirates in Boston: The Trial and Execution of John Quelch, Massachusetts Historical Society Beehive blog; The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch; 1704: John Quelch, pirate, Executed TodayOn: Boston - Boston was a carrying and processing port whose trade ran on fish, timber, masts and provisions outward and West Indian sugar, molasses, logwood and rum inward, with distilling turning imported molasses into rum for export, and Massachusetts merchants were direct participants in the trade in enslaved people from the return of the ship Desire recorded by John Winthrop on 26 February 1638 onward, the province imposing an import duty of four pounds sterling on each enslaved person in 1705 to 1706 with rebates that blunted it; the sources conflict on the end of the Royal African Company's monopoly, the cited feature giving 1696 while the standard legal date is the Trade with Africa Act of 1697, effective 1698.
Institutional research feature and secondary literature
The Importation and Sale of Enslaved People, Massachusetts Historical Society online feature; John Bonner, The town of Boston in New England, 1722; Boston in 1700, The Pirate EmpireOn: Boston - Bunce Island is a small island lying in the Sierra Leone River about twenty miles above the Atlantic at the site of present-day Freetown, chosen for a fortified factory because it lay far enough upriver to be defensible and at the head of navigation for ocean-going ships while having deep water alongside, so that vessels could load directly from the establishment; its name is unstable in the golden-age record and appears as Bence, Bense and Bance, the modern standard form being Bunce Island.
Heritage monument entry and university research materials
"Bunce Island" national monument entry, Sierra Leone Heritage (sierraleoneheritage.org), accessed 2026, for the upriver position, the name variants Bence, Bense and Bance and the deep water alongside; Gilder Lehrman Center / MacMillan Center, Yale University, Bunce Island history materials drawing on the work of Joseph Opala, for the head-of-navigation argument. The geography is carried at Probable; the instability of the name is ConfirmedOn: Bunce Island - A fortified English slave-trading factory was established on Bunce Island about 1670.
Secondary accounts
Sierra Leone Heritage, "Bunce Island" national monument entry, and Gilder Lehrman Center / MacMillan Center, Yale University (drawing on Joseph Opala), for the founding about 1670 by English slave traders (Probable)On: Bunce Island - Bunce Island was a slave-trading factory, that is a fortified shore station rather than a naval or territorial fortress, whose business was to gather, hold and ship enslaved Africans and to trade in ivory, camwood and other goods in competition with interloping traders who evaded the chartered company's monopoly, and in the golden-age decades it was one of a string of company factories along the Sierra Leone and Sherbro coast that was never strongly profitable and served as much as a sign of English commercial presence as a money-maker.
Secondary accounts
Sierra Leone Heritage, "Bunce Island" national monument entry, and Gilder Lehrman Center / MacMillan Center, Yale University (drawing on Joseph Opala), for the factory's business, the trade in ivory and camwood and the competition with interlopers (Confirmed); the same Yale materials for the post's place in the chain of Sierra Leone and Sherbro factories and for its weak profitability (Probable). The page's placing of the post inside the same chartered system as Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast rests on the Archive's own Cape Coast Castle record and asserts no rank or dependency between the twoOn: Bunce Island - Bunce Island's largest years as a slaving station came after the golden age and under private ownership: from 1748 the post belonged to Grant, Oswald and Company, given in some accounts as Grant, Sargent and Oswald, whose leading partner Richard Oswald, a Scottish merchant, built direct ties with the rice planters of South Carolina and Georgia through his Charles Town agent Henry Laurens, who auctioned the people landed from the island and took a commission of about ten per cent on each sale; Sierra Leonean captives were sought by those planters for their rice-growing knowledge, and tens of thousands of Africans are estimated to have been shipped from the island across its working life; the site is a ruin today, abandoned by about 1840, designated Sierra Leone's first officially protected historic site in 1948 and cared for by the Sierra Leonean Monuments and Relics Commission, and its standing remains are the fabric of that later castle rather than of the golden-age post.
Secondary accounts
Gilder Lehrman Center / MacMillan Center, Yale University, Bunce Island history materials drawing on the work of Joseph Opala, and "Bloody Bunce: A Legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Sierra Leone," Royal Historical Society blog (Historical Transactions), 29 October 2019, for the 1748 transfer to Grant, Oswald and Company, Richard Oswald, Henry Laurens as Charleston agent, the ten per cent commission, the Rice Coast link and the scale of the trade (Probable). The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database would give a defensible range in place of these estimates. For the afterlife, Sierra Leone Heritage, "Bunce Island" national monument entry, for the abandonment by about 1840, the 1948 protection, the care of the Monuments and Relics Commission and the rebuilding after the French attacks of 1695, 1704, 1779 and 1794 that leaves the standing fabric as the later castle (Probable)On: Bunce Island - Cartagena de Indias is the walled Spanish city and enclosed bay on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia, and it must be distinguished from the Spanish peninsular port of the same name, since English documents of the 1690s to 1720s write "Carthagena" for both and The National Archives preserves the two usages side by side, a State Papers volume for 1722 to 1726 listing "Cartagena: John Richards" among British consuls in Spain while an Admiralty letter of 1723 is dated from "Cartagena Bay" on the Main.
Catalogue records
Discovery catalogue, The National Archives, Kew, consulted 2026, for the doubled usage and for the titles of SP 42/17/310 and the consular State Papers volume (Confirmed)On: Cartagena - The bay has two historic entrances, and Bocachica, the southern passage between Tierrabomba island and Baru, was the working entrance through the golden age because Bocagrande, the wide northern passage, had silted, the stranding of Portuguese vessels on the bar there in 1640 being the moment usually cited for its closure; the consequence for operations is that a hostile squadron had to force Bocachica before it could reach the city.
Heritage record and manuscript charts
"The Underwater Barrier of Bocagrande," Fortificaciones de Cartagena de Indias (Escuela Taller Cartagena de Indias and partners), consulted 2026, for the silting of Bocagrande, the 1640 stranding and Bocachica as the resulting deep water entrance (Confirmed for Bocachica as the working entrance, Probable for the 1640 stranding); Juan Manuel Curado, "Plano de la costa de punta de Canoa hasta bocachica...," 1755, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, G5294.C3A1 1755.C8, LCCN 90682766, for the approach with soundings, the Tierrabomba channel and the Salmedina bank (Confirmed)On: Cartagena - Cartagena remained under continuous Spanish sovereignty throughout 1690 to 1725, governed by a royal governor and captain general of the province and falling judicially within the Audiencia of Santa Fe, with a tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition sitting in the city as one of three such tribunals in Spanish America; no foreign power held the place.
Heritage record and modern scholarship
"Port, Fortresses and Group of Monuments, Cartagena," UNESCO World Heritage Centre, property 285, inscribed 1984, and Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500 to 1750, second edition (Routledge, 2016), for continuous Spanish control and the city's administrative and defensive character (Confirmed). The presence and jurisdiction of the Inquisition tribunal is Probable; and the Viceroyalty of New Granada was not yet in permanent existence in this window, so it must not be projected back into 1697. The claim as a whole stands at the level of its weakest elementOn: Cartagena - Cartagena was a slave port and for a long period the principal legal port of entry for enslaved Africans into Spanish South America, David Wheat's study of the port entry records counting 487 ships that disembarked nearly 80,000 captives there between 1570 and 1640, with Borucki, Eltis and Wheat stating that during the Iberian Union of 1580 to 1640 Cartagena de Indias became the largest single entry point into the Americas for Africans.
Modern scholarship
David Wheat, "The First Great Waves: African Provenance Zones for the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Cartagena de Indias, 1570 to 1640," The Journal of African History vol. 52 no. 1 (2011), pp. 1 to 22, doi 10.1017/S0021853711000119, for the 487 ships and nearly 80,000 captives (Confirmed); Alex Borucki, David Eltis and David Wheat, eds., From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas (University of New Mexico Press, 2020), for the largest single entry point statement (Confirmed). Port and decade level disembarkation figures for 1690 to 1725 have not been extractedOn: Cartagena - In the golden age proper Cartagena was a defended Spanish naval and judicial station rather than a pirate target: a catalogue search of The National Archives for records combining Cartagena with pirates in the years 1700 to 1730 returned two hits, neither concerning the Colombian port, while what the Kew records do carry for those waters is privateering and naval business, an abstract of 29 April 1713 setting out the case of privateers off Cartagena in which a Dutch ship trading with the Spaniards was taken by a Jamaican privateer, and Captain Thomas Liell of HMS Bedford writing to the Navy Board from Cartagena on 25 May 1716.
Catalogue records
Discovery catalogue, The National Archives, Kew, consulted 2026, for the searches performed and for the titles of SP 34/34/80 (29 April 1713, the case of privateers off Cartagena) and ADM 106/705/94 (25 May 1716, Captain Thomas Liell, the Bedford, Cartagena), both Confirmed. The searches performed are Confirmed and the general conclusion drawn from them is Probable; the negative result is a consequence of limited searching, not a demonstration that no instance exists, Colonial Office 137 and the Calendar of State Papers Colonial being where one would surfaceOn: Cartagena - The first substantial fort on the site was Swedish, a timber work named Carolusborg after Charles X built in 1653 by the Swedish Africa Company under Hendrik Caerloff, a former Dutch West India Company officer, by leave of the ruler of Fetu.
Heritage board documentation
Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, "Cape Coast Castle, Cape Coast (1653)," gmmb.gov.gh, accessed 2026, for the Swedish Africa Company, Hendrik Caerloff, the leave of the ruler of Fetu and the founding of Carolusborg in 1653 (Probable)On: Cape Coast Castle - On the Royal Museums Greenwich account the Cape Coast proceedings produced the largest single batch of pirate death sentences in the records of an Admiralty court, a claim that is no stronger than Probable: fifty-four condemned, of whom fifty-two were hanged in the first weeks of April and two reprieved, the count the 1723 print tabulates and the Archive's trial record carries as Confirmed, the 'fifty-four hanged' of some accounts being the condemned figure.
Secondary accounts
Royal Museums Greenwich, "Death of Bartholomew Roberts," rmg.co.uk, accessed 2026, for the largest single batch of pirate death sentences and the numbers condemned and hanged (Probable). The exact figures are Disputed, though the range of 52 to 54 is well attested, and the claim as a whole stands at that weaker level; the "largest single batch" claim is attributed to Royal Museums Greenwich as Probable. The Archive's separate account of the trial, built on the printed record of 1723, carries the pamphlet's own tablesOn: Cape Coast Castle - Cape Coast Castle was inscribed in 1979, with the other forts and castles of the coast, on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
UNESCO listing
UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Forts and Castles, Volta, Greater Accra, Central and Western Regions," inscribed 1979, whc.unesco.org/en/list/34, for the World Heritage inscription (Confirmed)On: Cape Coast Castle - In golden-age documents, far more often in seamen's journals and company correspondence, "the Cape of Good Hope" means the Dutch East India Company settlement and anchorage at Table Bay in what is now South Africa's Western Cape.
Archival finding aids
The VOC archive at the Nationaal Archief, access number 1.04.02, and the Resolutions of the Council of Policy of the Cape of Good Hope, C series, Western Cape Archives and Records Service, for the VOC settlement and anchorage at Table Bay as the commoner referent (Confirmed)On: The Cape of Good Hope - Throughout the golden age of piracy the Cape settlement was governed by the Dutch East India Company and by nobody else, so that for the whole span 1690 to 1725 a pirate approaching Table Bay was approaching a foreign company's fortified and garrisoned port answerable to a Council of Policy.
Archival finding aids
The C series Resolutions of the Council of Policy with the TANAP and GLOBALISE transcriptions for the Governor and Council of Policy as the executive and for the resolutions as the backbone of the administrative record (Confirmed)On: The Cape of Good Hope - In the golden-age period Cape Lopez served mariners chiefly as a landmark, a sheltered anchorage and a place to take on wood, water and fresh provisions on the passage down the west African coast; for pirates its attraction was that it was a quiet, out-of-the-way anchorage off a thinly policed coast where ships could be careened, prizes rifled and crews rested away from naval patrols.
Period narrative
Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (London, 1724), for the use of the cape as a landmark, anchorage and watering and provisioning stop and for its attraction to pirates as a thinly policed anchorage for careening and refitting (Probable)On: Cape Lopez - Kidd made gifts to the Gardiner household on the same visit, the accounts differing on the particulars between cloth of gold and muslins and Bengals for Mary Gardiner, with sugar in some tellings and a clay pitcher of dried fruit in others, and pieces of Arabian gold to the proprietor, and two near identical fragments of the textile survive, the East Hampton one about four and three eighths by two and a half inches of silk, cotton and metallic thread, framed in the Long Island Collection at East Hampton Library, the other kept in a vault at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island.
Surviving objects with family provenance, and modern scholarship on them
Captain Kidd cloth of gold fragment, East Hampton Library, Long Island Collection; the companion fragment at Sylvester Manor; SEQUITUR, Boston University, A Piece of the Gold Blanket: Gardiner's Island, Captain William Kidd, and the Gifting of Family History, 2024On: Gardiners Island - San Cristobal de La Habana is the walled Spanish city and landlocked harbour on the north coast of western Cuba, at a bay opening on the Straits of Florida; English official and cartographic usage of the period writes the place with the definite article, as the Havana.
Period state papers
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 29, entry 328 and enclosures, and Thomas Jefferys, Plan of the city and harbour of the Havana, London, 1768, Library of Congress G4924.H3 1768.J41, for the English form "the Havana" in 1716 and 1768 (Confirmed). The transfer of the governor's seat from Santiago de Cuba is Disputed between 1553 and 1563, and that dispute is not resolved on the pageOn: Havana - Havana was governed from within by a resident governor and captain general of Cuba with a garrison, a cabildo whose minutes survive as the Actas Capitulares, and royal treasury officials receiving the Mexican silver subsidy known as the situado; it was never a pirate haven in this period but the state port from which counter-piratical force was projected, a negative put no higher than Probable because the sources consulted evidence Spanish counter-piracy rather than the absence of harbouring across thirty-five years.
State papers and secondary narrative
Adrian L. Denis, "Treasure City: Havana," Commonplace, July 2003, and the Actas Capitulares del Ayuntamiento de La Habana, 1550 to 1898, Archivo Historico de la Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana, for the governor, the cabildo and the situado (Probable); Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 29, entries 308 and 328, for the counter-piratical posture of the port (Confirmed). The negative is put no higher than Probable: no source consulted can establish the absence of harbouring across the whole windowOn: Havana - Under the Spanish convoy regime the Nueva Espana fleet loaded at Veracruz and the Tierra Firme fleet at Cartagena and Portobelo, and both made for Havana to combine before the run home through the Straits of Florida on the Gulf Stream; the fleets of 1690 to 1725 were fewer and more irregular than that ideal, but Havana's function as the last watering, provisioning, careening and mustering point before the Atlantic was unchanged.
Secondary narrative
David Wilson, "The 1715 Plate Fleet and the Rise of the Pirates," History Today, 30 July 2015, and "The Nueva Espana fleets (1715)," shipwrecks.es, for the combination of the fleets at Havana and the homeward passage through the Straits of Florida (Confirmed); Adrian L. Denis, "Treasure City: Havana," Commonplace, July 2003, for the port's provisioning and treasure functions (Probable)On: Havana - The English East India Company's Mocha factory is directly attested in the surviving India Office records: the series of letters and accounts from Mocha at the British Library, IOR/G/17/1, opens on 23 March 1644 and contains a Mocha Dyary entered on 18 March 1721, while letters from the Chief and Council at Mocha to the Court of Directors survive for 1717, 1718, 1721, 1722, 1723, 1724 and 1725.
Archival catalogue
British Library, Asian and African Studies, IOR/G/17/1, Letters and Accounts from Mocha, 23 Mar 1644 to 21 Oct 1789; IOR/E/3/99, 101, 102, 103, Letters from the Chief and Council at Mocha to the Court of Directors, 1717 to 1725; and The National Archives Discovery catalogue searches, all Confirmed from catalogue description and not inspected in the originalOn: Mocha - The general assembly of the English colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations sat for much of the piracy period at Newport, the colony being governed throughout under the royal charter of 1663, an unusually permissive instrument that made the governor and general assembly elective by the freemen of the colony and left the Crown very little direct purchase on the colony's courts.
Royal charter in facsimile and local history
Rhode Island Royal Charter of 1663, annotated edition, Rhode Island Department of State and Rhode Island State Archives; A Brief History of Newport, Newport Historical SocietyOn: Newport - Newport's harbour lies on the east side of the East Passage of Narragansett Bay near the bay's Atlantic mouth, screened by Goat Island, which divides it into an inner and an outer basin, with deep water close inshore, sheltered anchorage in Brenton Cove and Brenton Reef the one substantial natural hazard on the seaward approach; the depths, shelter and year-round navigability are modern pilotage description from which the period conditions are inferred rather than surveyed.
Modern pilotage
United States Coast Pilot 2, chapter 6, Narragansett Bay, National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationOn: Newport - Newport was a carrying and provisioning port that shipped livestock, salt provisions, fish and timber and distilled imported molasses into rum as its principal export, and enslaved Africans were landed and sold there within the piracy period, while the town's dominance of North American slaving belongs to the decades after the executions of 1723.
- New York's entanglement with piracy belongs to the 1690s, when the town was a haven, a market and a political shelter for the rovers of the Indian Ocean and its governor and leading merchants were participants, and by the second Golden Age of about 1716 to 1726 its position had reversed to that of a coastal port and naval station whose merchants petitioned for protection against pirates, so that no statement about the 1690s town can stand as a caption for the 1720s one.
Museum research and secondary account
The Philipse Family and the Slave Trade, People Not Property, Historic Hudson Valley; Twenty-Six Pirates Hanged at Newport in 1723, Online Review of Rhode Island HistoryOn: New York - Frederick Philipse ran a documented supply trade from New York to Adam Baldridge's settlement on Saint Mary's Island off Madagascar, sending arms, powder, spirits and ship's stores and receiving enslaved people and plunder-derived payment, and Baldridge's deposition of 5 May 1699, printed by John Franklin Jameson as document number 68, is the single most important surviving narrative of that trade and of its New York end; museum research based on the Philipse family's own records counts at least five Madagascar voyages by Philipse-owned vessels between 1693 and 1699 and more than eleven hundred African captives purchased in that window, and credits Samuel Burgess, who reached New York in April 1693 and entered Philipse's service as a shipmaster, with about fifteen thousand pounds of profit for his employer over two voyages and with landing roughly three hundred enslaved people at New York.
Printed primary compilation and museum research
Deposition of Adam Baldridge, 5 May 1699, document 68 in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. John Franklin Jameson, 1923; The Philipse Family and the Slave Trade, People Not Property, Historic Hudson ValleyOn: New York - New York's pirate commerce and its trade in enslaved people were one commercial system, carried in the same hulls and financed by the same men, with enslaved Malagasy people a principal return cargo of the Madagascar voyages and the Royal African Company's monopoly evaded by the Madagascar route; the city held one of the largest enslaved populations in British North America, established a public market for the hire and sale of enslaved people at the foot of Wall Street by law in 1711, and buried free and enslaved Africans in the ground north of the town, now the African Burial Ground National Monument, from the 1690s to the 1790s.
Museum research with agency heritage sources
The Philipse Family and the Slave Trade, People Not Property, Historic Hudson Valley; New York's Municipal Slave Market, Mannahatta Park, NYC Parks; African Burial Ground National Monument, National Park ServiceOn: New York - The Old Bailey is a short street on the western edge of the City of London, running between Newgate Street and Ludgate Hill outside the line of the Roman and medieval city wall; by extension the name attached to the building that dominated the street, the Sessions House or Justice Hall, which adjoined Newgate Gaol and served as the criminal courthouse for the City of London and for the county of Middlesex, and since 1834 the court on this site has been the Central Criminal Court.
Period topography
Map of Early Modern London (University of Victoria), Old Bailey (street) and Sessions House entries, mapoflondon.uvic.ca, and Historic England, London Wall: section of Roman wall at the Central Criminal Court, list entry 1018884, for the street, its line outside the wall and the Sessions House as the criminal courthouse of the City and Middlesex (Confirmed); Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 2, "The Old Bailey," via British History Online, for the constitution of the Central Criminal Court on the site in 1834 (Probable)On: The Old Bailey - The sessions house on this site was destroyed in the Great Fire of September 1666 and rebuilt in 1673 as a three storey brick building open at ground level on Doric columns so that air could move through the court and reduce the transmission of gaol fever from Newgate Gaol, and that open, semi-outdoor room is where Every's men and William Kidd stood; it was enclosed and refaced in masonry in the 1730s, rebuilt to George Dance's design in 1774, damaged in the Gordon Riots of 1780 and rebuilt again, and swept away with Newgate for E. W. Mountford's Central Criminal Court, built 1900 to 1907; nothing of the 1673 courtroom survives above ground, and the oldest protected fabric on the site is a stretch of Roman city wall about seven metres long in the basement, scheduled as list entry 1018884 at Ordnance Survey grid reference TQ 31816 81314.
Project scholarship, heritage designations and antiquarian narrative
Old Bailey Proceedings Online project (Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield), "History of the Old Bailey Courthouse," dhi.ac.uk, for the destruction of the pre-Fire sessions house in September 1666 (Confirmed), the rebuilding of 1673 with an open ground floor on Doric columns to ventilate against gaol fever (Probable), the rebuilding by George Dance in 1774 (Probable), and the loss of the earlier courtrooms (Probable); the same source for the enclosing and refacing in the 1730s; Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 2, for the Gordon Riots damage of 1780 (Probable); Historic England list entry 1359218, Central Criminal Court, for Mountford's building of 1900 to 1907 (Confirmed); Historic England list entry 1018884, London Wall: section of Roman wall at the Central Criminal Court, scheduled 9 May 1974, for the surviving Roman masonry in the basement and the grid reference TQ 31816 81314 (Confirmed)On: The Old Bailey - Panama in this archive is a corridor rather than a single settlement: the narrow neck of land and the three fixed points that gave it value, the Pacific city of Panama founded on 15 August 1519 by Pedro Arias Davila, the Caribbean fleet terminus of Portobelo founded in 1597 in place of Nombre de Dios, and the mouth of the river Chagres guarded by the Castillo San Lorenzo el Real, the move of the terminus being recorded in a consulta of the Council of the Indies of 29 August 1592 catalogued at Seville as "Traslado de Nombre de Dios a Portobelo".
Catalogue record and heritage records
Consejo de Indias, "Traslado de Nombre de Dios a Portobelo", 29 August 1592, Madrid, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, ES.41091.AGI/15//PANAMA,1,N.67, via PARES (Confirmed); "Archaeological Site of Panama Viejo and Historic District of Panama", UNESCO World Heritage Centre, list entry 790bis, and "Fortifications on the Caribbean Side of Panama: Portobelo-San Lorenzo", UNESCO World Heritage Centre, list entry 135, both consulted 2026 (Confirmed)On: Panama - The old Pacific city burned at the end of January 1671 and was never rebuilt on its site, a new walled city being founded in 1673 about 7.5 km from the ruins on the peninsula now called Casco Viejo, so that the archive must keep two Panamas distinct: Panama la Vieja, an abandoned ruin field of about 32 hectares with its original grid intact, and the successor city that is the ancestor of the modern capital.
Heritage record and modern archaeology
"Archaeological Site of Panama Viejo and Historic District of Panama", UNESCO World Heritage Centre, list entry 790bis, consulted 2026, for the destruction, the refoundation of 1673 about 7.5 km away and the extent of the protected remains (Confirmed); Juan G. Martin and Beatriz Rovira, "The Panama Viejo Archaeological Project: More than a Decade of Research and Management of Heritage Resources", Historical Archaeology vol. 46 (2012), pp. 16 to 26, doi 10.1007/BF03376868, for the excavation and management programme (Confirmed). Responsibility for the fire itself is carried separately as a conflict and is not settled hereOn: Panama - The isthmus was Spanish without interruption across the whole of the archive's period, governed through the Audiencia de Panama, and its economy was a transit economy in which silver mined in Peru came by sea from Callao to Panama City, crossed by mule on the Camino Real or by the Camino de Cruces and the Chagres, and was loaded at Portobelo into the Tierra Firme galleons for Havana and Spain, the Portobelo fair on the galleons' arrival turning a small and unhealthy bay into one of the richest markets in the Atlantic world for a few weeks at a time; the scale and duration of individual fairs are reported inconsistently and no single figure should be quoted as standard.
Heritage record and archival fonds
"Audiencia de Panama" (fonds), 1513 to 1825, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, ES.41091.AGI/15, 378 legajos, via PARES, for the governing archive and unbroken Spanish administration (Confirmed); "Fortifications on the Caribbean Side of Panama: Portobelo-San Lorenzo", UNESCO World Heritage Centre, list entry 135, consulted 2026, for the terminus, the transit route and the fortified bay (Confirmed). The fair's scale and duration are Disputed, and no fair value, duration or cargo figure could be verified to a catalogue standard, the Contaduria and Contratacion series at Seville being where it would be settledOn: Panama - The isthmus presented two different seas within a day or two of one another: on the Caribbean side a deep enclosed bay at Portobelo that could hold the galleons in safety, with the Chagres mouth, 43 km from Portobelo by the World Heritage inscription's own measure, as the other door, and on the Pacific side a tide that rises and falls about 12.5 feet at that end of the isthmus against a little under a foot at the Caribbean end, the two ends lying only about 30 nautical miles apart, so that across the shoaling flats of the Bay of Panama the approach to the old city dried into mud over a great distance, boats grounded and refloated on the clock, and deep-draught vessels lay off among the islands, Perico serving as the working roadstead.
Period chart and heritage record
H. A. Marmer, US Coast and Geodetic Survey, "Panama Tides", US Naval Institute Proceedings vol. 56/11/333, November 1930, for the comparative tidal ranges at the two ends of the isthmus (Confirmed); "Fortifications on the Caribbean Side of Panama: Portobelo-San Lorenzo", UNESCO World Heritage Centre, list entry 135, consulted 2026, for the enclosed bay, the component forts and the 43 km between Portobelo and the Chagres mouth (Confirmed); Cristobal de Roda Antonelli, "Discrecion (plano) de la Ciudad de Panama y el sitio donde estan las Casas Reales y la Ysla de Perico y las demas Yslas", 1609, Archivo General de Indias, ES.41091.AGI//MP-PANAMA,27, digitised via PARES, for the city, the Casas Reales and Perico in one view (Confirmed). The fit between the dry season of January to April and the timing of the great overland operations is an inference from the campaign dates rather than a motive stated in the sources, and no careening ground on the isthmus is documented at all. The whole is Probable rather than Confirmed because the drying of the flats and the working of boats on the tide are consequences drawn from the tidal figures rather than separately attestedOn: Panama - Henry Morgan took Portobelo in July 1668, about 500 men landed from a force of about 700 out of Jamaica, and returned for the Pacific city in the winter of 1670 to 1671, and almost every figure of that second raid is contested: the battle before the city at the savanna often named Mata Asnillos, where the force under Juan Perez de Guzman was routed, is dated 18 January 1671 by Morgan's own account, which is 28 January in the Gregorian reckoning of the Spanish authorities, the two dates being one day in two calendars rather than a disagreement, while the start of the march up the Chagres is dated 8 January by some accounts and 19 January by others, a spread of eleven days that the ten-day conversion does not fully explain, Morgan's account giving 9 January old style; responsibility for firing the old city is likewise unsettled, Morgan's own account and Spanish testimony both pointing to the inhabitants, and the plunder is reported at between about 140,000 and 400,000 pesos, against which Captain Robert Robinson's letter to the Navy Commissioners of 25 June 1671 reporting the capture of Panama with thirteen million pieces of eight measures the rumour rather than the treasure.
State paper and modern archaeology
Capt. Robert Robinson to the Navy Commissioners, 25 June 1671, The National Archives, Kew, SP 46/137/306, catalogued via Discovery, for the thirteen million pieces of eight report (Confirmed); Juan G. Martin and Beatriz Rovira, Historical Archaeology vol. 46 (2012), for the two dating traditions and the plunder range (Disputed). The crossing date, the battle date, the responsibility for the fire and the plunder total are all Disputed, and both dates are given here without settling between them; the Audiencia de Panama papers at Seville read against Morgan's own narrative at Westminster Abbey (WAM 11919, 11926) are what would resolve themOn: Panama - Between 1690 and 1725 the archive records no Anglo-American pirate assault on Panama City, Portobelo or the Chagres comparable to those of 1668 and 1671, and what the isthmus supplied to the golden age was print and precedent rather than plunder: Bucaniers of America appeared in English in 1684 and 1685, William Dampier, who was on the expedition that fought the Armada off Perico in April 1680, published A New Voyage Round the World in 1697, and Lionel Wafer, left injured among the Kuna, published his description of the interior in 1699.
Period narrative in print
William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, London, 1697, and Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, London, 1699, digitised copies via archive.org, the Royal Collection copy of Wafer recorded at RCIN 1141445 (Confirmed for the publications); Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, Bucaniers of America, London, William Crooke, 1684 and 1685, digitised copies via archive.org (Confirmed for the English editions). The negative finding for 1690 to 1725 is Probable and is a statement about what the archive records rather than a demonstration that no such assault occurredOn: Panama - The Caribbean fortifications, the works around Portobelo bay and the Castillo San Lorenzo el Real on its promontory above the Chagres mouth, were inscribed as a single World Heritage property in 1980 and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2012, where they remain, while Panama Viejo and the historic district of the 1673 city were joined into one property by the extension of 2003; at the Chagres mouth the first archaeological survey was carried out in 2008 with excavation seasons following, recovering cannon, ship timbers and an unidentified seventeenth-century wreck containing wooden chests, and although press coverage has attached that wreck to Morgan's Satisfaction the project's own account does not, so the archive treats it as unidentified.
Heritage records and modern archaeology
"Fortifications on the Caribbean Side of Panama: Portobelo-San Lorenzo", UNESCO World Heritage Centre, list entry 135, inscribed 1980, and "List of World Heritage in Danger", UNESCO World Heritage Centre, both consulted 2026, for the inscription, the component forts and the continuing danger listing from 2012 (Confirmed); Decision 27 COM 8C.40, Panama, UNESCO World Heritage Committee, 2003, and list entry 790bis, for the 2003 extension and renaming (Confirmed); "Lost Ships of Henry Morgan", project page, The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, Texas State University, page last updated April 2021, for the 2008 survey and the material recovered (Confirmed). The identification of any of that material with the Satisfaction is Disputed, asserted in press coverage but not established in the project's own accountOn: Panama - Pennsylvania's capital lived by a provisioning trade rather than a staple crop: a letter of 13 November 1697 from the Philadelphia merchant Francis Jones to William Penn describes Maryland taking its chief supply of bread and flour constantly from Pennsylvania, provisions shipped to Curacao returning as heavy pieces of eight, and the same vessels carrying that money to the salt-ponds and loading home with salt, a hard-money trade that gave the port a structural appetite for coin of any provenance.
State paper
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies, 1697 to 1698, no. 45, Francis Jones to William Penn, 13 November 1697On: Philadelphia - Between 1696 and 1700 Philadelphia was the focus of a sustained Crown accusation that the proprietary government sheltered men from Henry Every's Fancy: Robert Snead's letter to Sir John Houblon, read at the Board of Trade on 20 September 1697, alleged that Markham knew the men were in the town, that they had brought about 1,000 pounds each and given 100 pounds each to the Governor, and that he warned them before publishing the proclamation, all of which Snead reports as hearsay in the words I was told; Markham's defender Francis Jones replied that a warrant issued at once, that all of Every's men in the province were committed to the common gaol and that 5 pounds a head was offered after their escape; and on 19 May 1698 Markham summoned Snead before Governor and Council and put to him the charge sent home that Pennsylvania is become ye greatest refuge and shelter for pirats and rogues in America, the Governor giving them commissions.
State papers and provincial council minutes
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies, 1696 to 1697, no. 1,331 and enclosure i, Robert Snead to Sir John Houblon, pp. 613 to 615; same series 1697 to 1698, no. 45, Francis Jones to William Penn; Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, vol. 1, for the sitting of 19 May 1698; Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, volume 1On: Philadelphia - Three named men of the Fancy are recorded as prisoners at Philadelphia: the petition of Robert Chinton, Edmund Lassey and Peter Clauson, close prisoners on suspicion of piracy and felony, was read in Council on 20 May 1697, Clauson was still petitioning by 30 May 1698 after being confined above a year without trial, confessing that he had been in Avery's ship but claiming he was forced on board, and his petition was rejected; the province's own committee answered Penn's charge to suppress piracy by conceding only that Chinton and Lassell with some others of Avery's Crew happened for a small time to sojourn in this place, that the magistrates apprehended all who were there, and that the men broke gaol and escaped to New York, after which hues and cries were sent.
Provincial council minutes
Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, vol. 1, esp. pp. 510 to 511, 528 to 529 and 549 to 555; Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, volume 1On: Philadelphia - Edward Randolph, surveyor-general of the customs, reported to the Council of Trade and Plantations in letters of 25 and 26 April 1698 that of Every's men one James Brown was married to Markham's daughter and lived near New Castle, and Robert Snead states the same independently in his letter to Houblon endorsed read 12 July 1698, but both are hostile Crown witnesses, no marriage record has been traced and the daughter is never named; a James Brown was brought to Philadelphia by warrant from the sheriff of Kent County and examined before William Penn and Council on 12 April 1700, and on 15 April Penn told the Council that Brown came home with Capt. Averie to Providence, the Council advising that he be sent to the Earl of Bellomont at Boston.
State papers and provincial council minutes
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies, 1697 to 1698, nos. 401, 404 and 403; Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, vol. 1, for the sittings of 12 and 15 April 1700; Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, volume 1On: Philadelphia - In July 1699 Captain William Kidd lay some days before Cape Henlopen in the Delaware, and five named inhabitants of Lewes in Sussex County, William Orr, George Thompson, Peter Lewis, Henry Stretcher and Diggery Tenny, went on board, corresponded with him and received muslins, calicoes, monies and other East India and prohibited goods which they landed, hid, sold and gave away without telling the government or the King's collector; in April 1700 Penn, having sent 150 miles for them at the province's charge, referred them to the Court of Admiralty, John Moore, deputy to Robert Quary, being consulted.
Provincial council minutes
Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, vol. 1, esp. pp. 559 to 563 and 579 to 580; Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, volume 1On: Philadelphia - Providence has the islet of Santa Catalina at its north-west corner, and the working anchorage of both the English and the Spanish periods lay in the channel between the two islands, catalogued on the Admiralty chart as Catalina harbour and shown there as a separate inset at a scale of 1:18,150.
Catalogue records
The National Archives, Kew, MFQ 1/1276, "Colombia: Isla de Providencia. 'Old Providence Island and Coral Bank'", surveyed by Messrs J Cannon, G B Lawrence and F W Sidney in HMS Thunder in 1835, catalogued as showing coastline, soundings, hills and settlements with an inset map of Catalina harbour at 1:18,150 (Confirmed for the chart's existence, wording and scale)On: Providence Island (Providencia) - Providence Island was a slave society in the making: the colony began with English indentured servants, and as indentures expired the planters pressed for enslaved African labour.
Monograph
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter six, "Servants into Slaves" (Confirmed for the chapter title)On: Providence Island (Providencia) - Sir Thomas Modyford wrote from Jamaica to Lord Arlington on 18 December 1670 that Admiral Morgan was at sea with about 1,800 men in 36 vessels, English and French, without naming the island.
State paper calendar
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 7, 1669 to 1674, "America and West Indies: December 1670", item 359, 18 December 1670, Modyford to Arlington, Col. Papers, Vol. XXV., No. 103 (Confirmed for the letter, which names neither Providence nor Santa Catalina)On: Providence Island (Providencia) - The Providence Island Company's own records survive at The National Archives, Kew, as CO 124/1, the Book of Entries, 1630 to 1641, and CO 124/2, the Journal, whose covering dates run to 1650, nine years past the colony's fall, both within the series CO 124, Colonial Office and predecessors: British Honduras, Entry Books, and a Colonial Office map of the island, "Island of Old Providence", is catalogued at CO 700/BritishHonduras6/7 within a group described as plans and charts in Captain J. Speer's West India Pilot, 1771.
Catalogue records
Discovery catalogue, The National Archives, Kew, consulted 2026, for CO 124/1 (Governor and Company of Adventurers of Old Providence Island, Book of Entries, 1630-1641), CO 124/2 (the same body's Journal, 1630-1650) and CO 700/BritishHonduras6/7 ("Island of Old Providence", covering dates given in the catalogue as [1595-1927]). The very broad covering dates on the map are the catalogue's own and are not a dating of the sheet, and the post-1641 content of CO 124/2 is unexaminedOn: Providence Island (Providencia) - Port Royal commanded one of the finest and best defended harbours in the Caribbean, since ships entering or leaving had to pass under the guns of its forts; much of the built-up area before 1692 now lies submerged off the present shoreline, so that the site is at once an inhabited village and an underwater archaeological reserve.
Heritage record
UNESCO World Heritage List no. 1595 for the command of the harbour mouth and the submerged remains.On: Port Royal - Port Royal was a key hub of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans being trafficked through and sold at the town as part of England's participation in that traffic, with the UNESCO inscription documentation stating that enslaved people contributed to the town's growth and that the disaster of 1692 killed the poor and the enslaved alongside the wealthy; the volume of the traffic through this port specifically, as distinct from Jamaica as a whole, is not established here.
Heritage record
UNESCO World Heritage List no. 1595 for the town as a hub of transatlantic trade including the trafficking of enslaved Africans and for the enslaved among the dead of 1692.On: Port Royal - In 2025 the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as The Archaeological Ensemble of 17th Century Port Royal under criteria (iv) and (vi), the property covering about twenty-seven hectares of terrestrial and underwater remains, several forts and the restored Fort Charles.
Heritage record
UNESCO World Heritage List no. 1595 for the 2025 inscription, the criteria and the property area.On: Port Royal - In 1695 six vessels gathered at the island of Perim at the entrance of the Red Sea and joined in partnership, agreeing that Captain Every should be the commander: Every's Fancy, the Dolphin under Captain Want, the Portsmouth Adventure under Captain Faro, a ship fitted out from Boston under Thomas Wake, the brigantine Pearl under William Mues and the Amity sloop under Thomas Tew. After they had lain there five or six days the Moors' ships, about twenty-five in number, passed them in the night unseen on a Saturday night in August; they weighed on the Monday, burning the Dolphin as an ill sailer, and about three days before making Cape St John took one of the Moors' ships of between two and three hundred tons and six guns, which fired three shot, and took out of her about 50,000 to 60,000 pounds in silver and gold. Coming to an anchor they then took a second ship of about forty guns, which stood a fight of three hours and yielded. The night passage of the convoy is placed in August, not in early September; and on John Dann's account the sloop fell astern and never came up with the others, so that Thomas Tew's death in the assault on the first prize is not supported by the earliest examination.
Examination printed in a documentary collection
Examination of John Dann of Rochester, mariner, taken 3 August 1696, Public Record Office C.O. 323:2, no. 25 IV, printed as document no. 63 in J. F. Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (New York, 1923): "they all Joyned in partnership, agreeing Captain Every should be the Comander"; "After they had laine there 5 or 6 dayes the Moores shipps (being about 25 in number) past by them in the night unseen, though the passage was not above 2 miles over. they was in August last on Saturday night"; "they wheighed on Monday, but the Dolphin being an ill sayler they burnt her... the sloop fell asterne and never came up to them"; "about 3 dayes before they made Cape St. John they mett with one of the Moores ships, betweene 2 and 300 tons, with 6 Guns, which they tooke, she haveing fired 3 shott. they tooke about 50 or 60,000 l. in that ship in Silver and gold"; "she had about 40 Guns mounted and as they said 800 men. Shee stood a fight of 3 houres and then yeilded"On: The Red Sea - The East India Company's General and Council at Bombay reported on 12 October 1695 that the Gunsway, one of the King's ships, had arrived at Surat from Judda and Mocha, her nakhoda and merchants with one voice proclaiming that they were robbed by four English ships of a very great sum; that the pirates dealt very barbarously by the people of the Gunsway and of Abd-ul-Ghaffar's ship to make them confess where their money was; that a great umbraw's wife, related to the King and returning in her old age from her pilgrimage to Mecca, was much abused and several other women forced, which caused one person of quality, his wife and nurse to kill themselves to prevent being ravished; and that the governor of Surat set a strong guard on the English factory, clapped all the Company's people in irons and shut them up in a room with the windows planked. The compensation estimated at 600,000 rupees, the trial of six of Every's men at the Old Bailey on 19 October 1696 and the executions at Execution Dock on 25 November are not carried here, no trial record having been read.
East India Company correspondence printed in a documentary collection
Abstract of East India Company letters from Bombay, 12 October 1695, London, Privy Council, Unbound Papers, 1:46, printed as document no. 60 in J. F. Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (New York, 1923): "the 13th in the Morning, the Gunsway, one of the Kings Ships, arrived from Judda and Mocho, the Nocqueda and Merchants, with one voice, proclaiming that they were robbed by four English Ships near Bombay of a very great Sume"; "upon this the Governour sent a very strong Guard to the Factory and clapt all our People in Irons, shut them up in a room, planked up all their windows"; "it is certain the Pyrates, which these People affirm were all English, did do very barbarously by the People of the Gunsway and Abdul Gofors Ship, to make them confess where their Money was, and there happened to be a great Umbraws Wife (as Wee hear) related to the King, returning from her Pilgrimage to Mecha, in her old age. She they abused very much, and forced severall other Women, which Caused one person of Quality, his Wife and Nurse, to kill themselves to prevent the Husbands seing them (and their being) ravished"On: The Red Sea - A governor named Le Vasseur fortified the hillside above the anchorage about 1640, building around a natural rock about eleven metres across and seven to nine metres high with a quadrangular enclosure and two southern bastions.
Archaeological project literature
Archeologie de la Piraterie, Ile de la Tortue project page, consulted 2026, for the structure of Fort de la Roche and its date (Probable)On: Tortuga - A Spanish force from Santo Domingo landed artillery in 1654 on the high ground above the fort and shot down into it, which demonstrated that the site could not be held against guns on the ridge, and the replacement work built by the engineer Blondel between 1666 and 1668 below the ruined rock was accordingly a harbour-defence battery, a circular tower over a lower courtyard with a sea-facing curtain pierced by embrasures.
Archaeological project literature
Archeologie de la Piraterie, Ile de la Tortue project page, consulted 2026, for the 1654 emplacement of artillery on the height, for the defect of the site and for the design and dates of Fort Blondel (Probable)On: Tortuga - Trepassey is a harbour and community on Trepassey Bay at the south-eastern corner of the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, its long, sheltered inlet being the feature that made it valuable to the migratory cod fishery.
Heritage board research page
Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, "18th Century Towns: Trepassey, Trinity, and St. John's"On: Trepassey - Trepassey was never founded as a chartered or fortified town but grew as a seasonal fishing station used by successive European fishing nations, with Jacques Cartier recorded passing through the area in 1536, French, Spanish and Portuguese fishermen working the southern Avalon across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a French settlement taking hold at the harbour in the later seventeenth century, and a raid under Commodore John Leake expelling the French in 1702 during the War of the Spanish Succession.
Heritage board research page
Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, "18th Century Towns: Trepassey, Trinity, and St. John's"On: Trepassey - Trepassey's role through the golden age was economic rather than military: it was a station of the transatlantic cod fishery whose population swelled each summer with migratory fishermen, bankers and servants from the English West Country and from Ireland and contracted each winter, permanent residents coming to outnumber seasonal ones only by the 1770s, while merchant-planter firms based in the South Devon ports of Topsham and Exeter dominated its trade and exercised considerable informal judicial and administrative authority over its inhabitants.
University heritage project research
Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, "18th Century Towns: Trepassey, Trinity, and St. John's"On: Trepassey - A General History of the Pyrates (1724) records that there were "two and twenty vessels in the harbour, which the men all quitted upon the sight of the pirate, and fled ashore", and that the pirates set about "burning and sinking all the shipping, except a Bristol galley, and destroying the fisheries, and stages of the poor planters, without remorse or compunction".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Trepassey - The Surat entry is a working complex of three linked things which the archive keeps separate: the walled commercial city on the left bank of the Tapti in southern Gujarat, about 24 kilometres from the sea by water and about 16 by land; the bandar of Surat, meaning the port and customs jurisdiction of the castle on the river bank, the customs house, the mint and the governor's establishment; and the anchorage at Swally, an open roadstead on the coast, because seagoing ships could not reach the city at all, the channel carrying about three fathoms at spring tide with river craft of about fifty tons the practical limit, so that cargo went up to the city by lighter and by bullock cart and a Company letter of the 1690s saying that a ship arrived at Surat means that she anchored in Swally road.
Secondary scholarship
Sagufta Parveen, "Surat: As a Major Port-Town of Gujarat and its Trade History", IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 19, issue 5, May 2014, for the distance upriver, the inability of seagoing ships to reach the city, the channel of about three fathoms at spring tide and the fifty-ton river craft (Probable); Shinsaku Kato, "The Formation of Surat Port City in the Seventeenth Century", Minamiajiakenkyu no. 29, 2017, for Swally's role as the harbour serving Surat (Probable). The anchorage relationship is Confirmed and the distances and channel figures are Probable, so the whole is stated here as ProbableOn: Surat - Surat was a Mughal imperial port administered by imperial officers and not a European colony: it was the head of a sarkar of thirty-one mahals under a governor styled hakim with a mutasaddi as revenue and port officer, within the subah of Gujarat, its annual customs revenue in Akbar's reign recorded at about four lakh rupees; and the European companies were tenants within that order, the English East India Company placing its first Indian factory here in 1612, the Dutch following in 1618 and the French in 1668.
Secondary scholarship
Sagufta Parveen, "Surat: As a Major Port-Town of Gujarat and its Trade History", for the sarkar of thirty-one mahals, the hakim and the mutasaddi from Akbar's time, the customs revenue of about four lakh rupees, and the factory dates 1612, 1618 and 1668 (Probable)On: Surat - Surat was never a pirate base and no pirate of this archive careened, wintered or recruited there; the city enters the record in three roles only, as the home port and owner of the ships that were taken, as the place where the consequences of those takings were visited on resident Europeans, and as the political engine that turned piracy from a colonial irritant into an imperial crisis, the careening grounds for the Red Sea trade lying instead in the Madagascar ports.
Conclusions drawn from the assembled evidence
That Surat was never a pirate base, and the three roles in which the city enters the record, are conclusions drawn from the assembled evidence (Probable). No evidence has been found for pirate careening or watering at Surat or Swally; that is an absence of evidence and not a proven negative, and it is stated here in those termsOn: Surat - The account that the press at the Nore was retaliation for an unreturned salute to a naval vessel rests on no primary document traced: no salute appears in Kidd's own narrative of the voyage or in his protest, which name only Captain Steward of the Duchess as the officer who took his crew.
Documented absence in the captain's own narrative and protest
Narrative of William Kidd, 7 July 1699, Public Record Office C.O. 5:860, no. 64 XXV, printed in J. F. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (Washington, 1923), doc. 76, read in full for the passage from the launch to the sailing from Plymouth, which carries the press at the Nore but no salute: "about the first Day of March following, his men were pressed from him for the Fleet". Kidd's protest, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the Duke of Portland, VIII. 80, quoted in Jameson's note to that document, likewise gives a cause of no kind: "At the Buoy in the Nore Captain Steward, commander of the Duchess, took away all my ship's crew".On: Kidd Departs England (1696) - By September 1696 the ship's complement at New York stood at about 150 to 155, given as 152 in the fullest account located and as about 155 on the colonial crew list cited by Jameson, a mixed body in which only 21 men were described as experienced seamen.
Secondary narrative
Cindy Vallar, Pirates and Privateers: Captain William Kidd, single source for the muster composition; Samuel Marquis, Captain Kidd and the Trial of the Century, Sea History 192 (2025), for the complement figureOn: Kidd Departs England (1696) - The prize was commanded by an Englishman named Wright, attested independently in a Boston deposition, in Robert Bradinham's trial evidence and in Dr Newton's opening for the Crown, while the forename John appears only in modern accounts and in neither the trial text nor the depositions; her complement is given four ways, three of the four having two Dutch mates and the French gunner, Hugh Parrot giving two or three Dutchmen and no Frenchman, with six or eight Armenians and a Moorish and lascar majority whom no source names.
Trial pamphlet and Admiralty depositions
The Arraignment, Tryal and Condemnation of Captain William Kidd (1701), via Graham Brooks (ed.), Notable British Trials, 1930; examinations of William Jenkins, Richard Barlycorn, Robert Lamley and Hugh Parrot taken at Boston before the Earl of Bellomont and Council, July 1699On: The Capture of the Quedagh Merchant (1698) - Blackbeard's flagship the Queen Anne's Revenge, formerly the French slave ship La Concorde taken by his consorts in the West Indies on 28 November 1717, grounded on the bar at the mouth of Topsail Inlet, now Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, on or about 10 June 1718 and was lost, the sources giving the date as around rather than on that day.
Institutional project history
North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project (NC DNCR), "Blackbeard's Story and Facts" and "On This Day, the Fate of a Ship was Sealed" (7 June 2018), qaronline.orgOn: The Grounding of the Queen Anne's Revenge (1718) - As La Concorde the vessel is recorded at 200 tons with 16 cannon and a crew of about 75 at the time of her capture under the French captain Pierre Dosset, and as refitted she is credited with some 40 guns, a figure traced to Philip Gosse's compilation of 1924 with no period gun count for her yet found, the excavated wreck reading as at minimum a twenty-gun ship, and a tonnage put by some accounts as high as about 300; the figures diverge between sources and are carried here as ranges.
Institutional project history
North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "The Pirate Ship's Journey", qaronline.orgOn: The Grounding of the Queen Anne's Revenge (1718) - The sloop Adventure, which came up at the grounding, ran aground and was lost as well, the surviving testimony placing her "about Gun-shot from the said Thatch", while Captain Ellis Brand of HMS Lyme reported to the Admiralty that the pirates "endeavour'd To goe in to a harbor, call'd Topsail Inlett" and that "the Ship Stuck upon the barr att the entrance of the harbour".
Admiralty report and deposition, through institutional project history
Captain Ellis Brand of HMS Lyme, report to the Admiralty, quoted by the North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "Blackbeard's Story and Facts" and "On This Day, the Fate of a Ship was Sealed" (7 June 2018), qaronline.orgOn: The Grounding of the Queen Anne's Revenge (1718) - Blackbeard stripped the two wrecks, transferred the most valuable plunder and stores into a smaller sloop, kept a reduced hand picked company, and put a number of the remaining men ashore on a low sandbar in the inlet without adequate provisions or means of getting off; the marooned party is reported at about fifteen in the depositions of David Herriot and Ignatius Pell and in the project account, and at seventeen in Rankin's narrative, and is carried as a range, and they were taken off by Stede Bonnet, who had put into the same inlet, or otherwise rescued, with no deaths recorded among them.
Depositions through institutional project history
North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "On This Day, the Fate of a Ship was Sealed" (7 June 2018), qaronline.org; the depositions of David Herriot and Ignatius Pell preserved in the 1719 Bonnet-trials print, for about fifteen; Hugh F. Rankin, The Pirates of Colonial North Carolina, for seventeenOn: The Grounding of the Queen Anne's Revenge (1718) - Blackbeard went from the inlet to Bath, North Carolina, and surrendered to Governor Charles Eden, receiving the King's Pardon under the royal Act of Grace for himself and the men remaining with him, in June 1718 soon after the grounding.
Institutional project history
North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "Blackbeard's Story and Facts", qaronline.orgOn: The Grounding of the Queen Anne's Revenge (1718) - The grounding cost Blackbeard his two largest vessels and broke up a company reported in the hundreds, leaving him with a single sloop, a small crew and the greater share of the accumulated plunder, and it marks the pivot from the heavily gunned squadron that had blockaded Charles Town in late May 1718 to the diminished final phase of his career, which ended with his death at Ocracoke on 22 November 1718 in the action led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard.
Institutional project history
North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "Blackbeard's Story and Facts", qaronline.orgOn: The Grounding of the Queen Anne's Revenge (1718) - Rogers's own despatch of 31 October 1718 fixes his arrival in the port at 26 July 1718, "I arriv'd in this port 26th July", HMS Rose having got in the evening before; reputable secondary accounts give 25, 26 and 27 July because the squadron came up to and worked into Nassau harbour over more than one day rather than all at once, one detailed reconstruction placing the escort at the harbour mouth in the early evening with HMS Rose leading in first and the deeper Delicia and HMS Milford held outside by the shoal ground, and the London Gazette dispatch of 11 November 1718 putting the Rose in the road on 25 July and the Governor's landing on the 27th; the Archive follows the despatch and carries 26 July as the arrival.
Secondary narrative in conflict
Rogers to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 31 October 1718, Calendar of State Papers Colonial vol 30 item 737 (manuscript CO 23/1), as carried on the Archive's Nassau and Woodes Rogers records; The London Gazette, issue 5706, Nassau dispatch of 11 November 1718 (25 July for the Rose, 27 July for the landing); Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean, chapter "Welcome to Nassau" (25 July sequence). Source check pending on the secondary carriers; the arrival date itself rests on the despatchOn: Woodes Rogers Takes Nassau (1718) - Bartholomew Roberts took a single small sloop into the harbour of Trepassey, on the southern Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, in late June 1720, on a day usually given as about 21 June though Janzen's archival study puts the visit in late June or early July, and the crews of the vessels lying at anchor there abandoned their ships and fled ashore rather than fight.
Period narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, printed under the name Captain Charles Johnson; and Olaf Uwe Janzen, The Problem of Piracy in the Newfoundland Fishery in the Aftermath of the War of the Spanish SuccessionOn: Roberts Sacks Trepassey (1720) - Roberts, born in Pembrokeshire about 1682 and elected to the command of his company after Howell Davis was killed at Principe in 1719, reached the Newfoundland fishing grounds in a sloop of about ten guns with a crew of roughly forty-five men; the primary narrative of the raid does not name that vessel, and the identification with a sloop called the Fortune rests on secondary works and is probably confused with the French prize taken afterwards.
Scholarly archival study with period narrative
Olaf Uwe Janzen, The Problem of Piracy in the Newfoundland Fishery in the Aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, drawing on Colonial Office series CO 194; A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter on Captain Bartholomew RobertsOn: Roberts Sacks Trepassey (1720) - Olaf Uwe Janzen's archival study, reading the Colonial Office correspondence for Newfoundland in series CO 194 together with the deposition of Moses Renos, the only surviving eyewitness statement, dates the visit to late June or early July 1720, finds Roberts using Trepassey chiefly as a service centre for provisions, refitting and recruitment, and concludes that he burned only one vessel and generally left the rest alone.
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 CO 194 and the Moses Renos depositionOn: Roberts Sacks Trepassey (1720) - The 1724 General History does not rename the Bristol galley and christens the French 26-gun prize simply the Fortune, so the popular accounts that call the galley the Royal Fortune and the French prize the Good Fortune have no warrant in the primary text.
Period narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson; the errors exemplified by the Golden Age of Piracy web article on Bartholomew RobertsOn: Roberts Sacks Trepassey (1720) - On the night of 26 April 1717 a violent storm drove the Whydah onto the bars off Wellfleet on the outer arm of Cape Cod, where she lost her masts, broke up and capsized in the surf.
Printed trial deposition
The night of 26 April from Thomas Davis's deposition in The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy, Boston, 1717, as carried on the Archive's hurricanes recordOn: The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717) - A young son of Samuel Wragg is said by tradition to have been taken with him, sometimes identified as William and given as about four years old, but the child's name and age come from the General History and its retellings rather than from the contemporary record and are not securely documented.
Period narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson (London, 1724)On: Blackbeard's Blockade of Charles Town (1718) - Stede Bonnet was defeated and captured at the mouth of the Cape Fear River on 26 to 27 September 1718 by a South Carolina expedition under Colonel William Rhett, in an action called the Battle of Cape Fear River or the Battle of the Sandbars, in which all three fighting vessels grounded on the falling tide and exchanged small arms fire for about five to six hours until the returning tide floated Rhett's heavier force first and Bonnet surrendered.
Period narrative
Nic Butler, "The Pirate Executions of 1718", Charleston Time Machine, Charleston County Public Library; "The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet, and Other Pirates" (London, 1719)On: The Trial and Hanging of Stede Bonnet (1718); Stede Bonnet; Revenge, later Royal James; Royal James - Held under guard in the town marshal's house at Charles Town because the town gaol was inadequate, Bonnet escaped on or about 24 October 1718, reportedly in disguise and with the help of sympathisers, in company with his sailing master Herriot; Rhett pursued and the pair were recaptured on or near Sullivan's Island, Herriot being killed in the taking and Bonnet returned to custody.
Period narrative
Nic Butler, "The Pirate Executions of 1718", Charleston Time Machine, Charleston County Public Library; "A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates" (1724), attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, for the escape narrative onlyOn: The Trial and Hanging of Stede Bonnet (1718); Stede Bonnet; Revenge, later Royal James; Royal James - In 1719 Bartholomew Roberts brought his pirate ship into the Bay of All Saints (Baia de Todos os Santos), the anchorage of Bahia, that is Salvador, then capital of Portuguese Brazil, mingled with a Portuguese merchant fleet lying there laden for Lisbon and awaiting convoy, seized a vessel, compelled its master to identify the richest ship present, and carried that ship off as a prize.
Period narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, attributed to Captain Charles JohnsonOn: Roberts and the Bahia Treasure Fleet (1719) - Roberts found at Bahia about forty-two Portuguese sail lying with their lading in for Lisbon and waiting on two men-of-war of seventy guns each that were to serve as their convoy, and when the alarm was given one of those seventy-gun guard ships weighed and gave chase but failed to press the action home, so that Roberts got clear of the bay with his prize despite her sailing heavily.
Period narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, the single narrative carrying the fleet count, the escorts and the chase; the round figures are read as order of magnitude rather than as audited countsOn: Roberts and the Bahia Treasure Fleet (1719) - Rather than attack openly Roberts brought his ship in among the anchored fleet and kept his men hidden below until a plan was formed, in some accounts hoisting Portuguese colours to pass unremarked, then ranged alongside one of the deeper-laden vessels, boarded and seized her, and brought her master aboard under threat with the demand that he point out the richest ship in the anchorage.
Period narrative and secondary account
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, for the concealment, the seizure and the compelled master; the Golden Age of Piracy project narrative for the disguised entry under Portuguese colours; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Roberts and the Bahia Treasure Fleet (1719) - The name Sagrada Familia, commonly attached to the prize in modern writing, does not appear in the General History passage and reaches later accounts through tradition and Portuguese-side sources, and the frequently cited dating of the raid to September 1719 is likewise a later reconstruction, the year being firm while the day and month are not fixed in the primary narrative; the tradition that Roberts kept the diamond cross and wore it on a gold chain is colour of the same kind, uncorroborated beyond the 1724 text and its descendants.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter on Captain Bartholomew Roberts, which names no prize and gives no day or monthOn: Roberts and the Bahia Treasure Fleet (1719) - Registered treasure aboard the 1715 convoy is disputed, being given as about 7,000,000 pesos in one modern account and as about 12,000,000 or more than 14,000,000 in others, and Spanish recovery from the wrecks is reported variously as more than 5,000,000 pieces of eight by late October 1715, as about eighty per cent of the sunken registered treasure by April 1716, and as about half before the formal salvage was wound down, in 1716, about 1718 or 1719 according to the account followed.
Specialist society history and scholarly article
David Wilson, History Today, 30 July 2015; 1715 Fleet Society, "History"On: The Wreck of the 1715 Spanish Treasure Fleet - Peter Cornelius Hoof, examined at Boston the same day, gives a different cause and no election at all: a difference about taking prisoners, some men being for one nation and some for another, with the company then holding two sloops and about a hundred men, after which "Hornygold parted from them in One of the Sloops, and Bellamy and Labous kept company together".
Trial pamphlet
The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy (Boston, 1718), examination of Peter Cornelius HoofOn: Hornigold Voted Out (1716) - The numbers and the vessels cannot be reconciled: Brown has Hornigold departing with twenty six hands and Hoof gives two sloops and about a hundred men in all, leaving seventy four for Bellamy against the ninety supplied by modern transcriptions where the 1718 Boston printing is illegible, and the three surviving accounts of which sloop each captain took are mutually exclusive.
Trial pamphlet and modern documentary reconstruction
The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy (Boston, 1718), examinations of Brown and Hoof, Text Creation Partnership transcription; David Fictum, "The Firsts of Blackbeard"; Cindy Vallar, Pirates and Privateers articlesOn: Hornigold Voted Out (1716) - No contemporary document dates the division; modern placements vary, and the working date of about November 1716 carried in this Archive's earlier research brief sits at the extreme late edge of what the record will bear.
- Edward Thache's earliest documented appearance as a pirate is 13 December 1716, when he was in a separate sloop of eight guns and about ninety men in company with Hornigold's sloop Delight at the plundering of the sloop Lamb off western Hispaniola; the assertion by later writers that Thache was present at the division and left with Hornigold rests on no contemporary document.
Colonial deposition
Deposition of Henry Timberlake, master of the Lamb, Jamaica, 17 December 1716On: Hornigold Voted Out (1716); Benjamin Hornigold - The parting took place at sea, in the dark, about 400 leagues from the coast of Africa, that is roughly 1,200 nautical miles out in the mid-Atlantic, on the squadron's passage from the West Indies to Guinea; the distance rests on a single sentence in the Roberts chapter and nothing corroborates it.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter IX, Of Captain Bartho. Roberts, and His Crew, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Anstis Splits from Roberts (1721) - The date is attested independently of the General History by the deserters themselves: the companies of the Morning Star and the Good Fortune petitioned Sir Nicholas Lawes, Governor of Jamaica, on 14 June 1722, stating that they had been taken and forced by Roberts and had run away from him on or about the 18th day of April 1721 in hope of the King's pardon, and the copy was referred at Whitehall to the Council of Trade and Plantations on 9 November 1722, read there on 13 November, and calendared as signed in the form of two round robins at C.O. 323, 8. Nos. 32 and 32.i.
Calendared state paper
Order of Committee of Council, 9 November 1722, item 333, with enclosure 333.i, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 33, 1722-1723, ed. Cecil Headlam (HMSO, 1934), C.O. 323, 8. Nos. 32, 32.i; the printed round robin in A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter XOn: Anstis Splits from Roberts (1721); Thomas Anstis - The General History makes the Good Fortune brigantine a Rhode Island vessel taken at Dominica from a master named Norton and christened by Roberts's company after they burnt their own sloop, and therefore neither the Bristol galley of 16 guns (18 in Renos's deposition) taken on the Trepassey cruise of June 1720 and afterwards left to the French, nor the French ship of 26 guns the company christened the Fortune.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter IX, Of Captain Bartho. Roberts, and His Crew, attributed to Captain Charles JohnsonOn: Anstis Splits from Roberts (1721); Good Fortune - The General History gives two intertwined causes for the desertion, Anstis's standing resentment at Roberts regarding the brigantine only as a tender and leaving her company no more than the refuse of their plunder, and the immediate quarrel in which Roberts killed a drunken crewman, ran the dead man's messmate Jones through the body and was beaten by him, after which the company sentenced Jones to two lashes from every man; causation here is plural and no single strand is confirmed.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), chapter IX, Of Captain Bartho. Roberts, and His Crew, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Anstis Splits from Roberts (1721) - The petition drew a commercial rather than a punitive response in London: Richard Harris reported on 7 December 1722 that the considerable West India traders, the assurance offices and most others in trade were clear that the soonest endeavours should be used to get the pirates called in or pardoned, John Hyde junior and 26 other merchants memorialised the Council of Trade and Plantations to the same effect on 13 December 1722, and the Board represented on 10 January 1722/3 that there was no reason why a royal proclamation of pardon should not issue, though no proclamation answering this petition appears in the calendar volume.
Calendared state paper
Mr Harris to Mr Popple, 7 December 1722, item 376, C.O. 323, 8. No. 35; Memorial of John Hyde and other merchants, 13 December 1722, item 387, C.O. 323, 8. No. 34; Council of Trade and Plantations to the Lords Committee of the Privy Council, 10 January 1722/3, item 411, C.O. 324, 11. pp. 3-6, all in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 33, 1722-1723On: Anstis Splits from Roberts (1721) - HMS Winchelsea under Captain Henry Orme carried nine of the company from Tobago into Antigua in May 1723, where Governor John Hart examined them aboard and seven were tried at St John's on 17 May before fourteen commissioners; John Fenn, formerly gunner of the brigantine, was convicted and afterwards hung in chains on Rat Island, and Hart's own account of the sentences does not reconcile, so this record states no execution total.
Calendared state paper
Governor Hart to the Council of Trade and Plantations, St Christophers, 8 June 1723, item 576, with enclosed Antigua Council minutes, C.O. 152, 14. ff. 223-225, 226v.-230v., 232v., in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 33, 1722-1723On: Anstis Splits from Roberts (1721); Thomas Anstis; Good Fortune - The company sailed from Accomack in Virginia on 23 August 1683 under Captain John Cook with about seventy men, bound for the South Seas; from 14 February 1684 it lay in a storm west of Cape Horn that held until 3 March, and on 22 March 1684 it raised Juan Fernandez and took off the Moskito Indian William, who had been left there alone since 1681.
Printed participant narrative
William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), quoted from the 1927 Argonaut Press text: "August 23 1683 we sailed from Achamack in Virginia under the command of Captain Cook bound for the South Seas"On: The Voyage of the Batchelor's Delight (1683 to 1691); Batchelor's Delight - The vessel's name is attested in print by a participant, the surgeon Lionel Wafer, who writes of the parting at Realejo in August 1685 "I staid with Captain Davis in the Batchelors Delight", while Dampier's narrative passes over the seizure of the ship in silence, never names his own vessel in the pages examined, and no calendared colonial paper found for this record names her.
Printed participant narratives
Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1699; 1704 edition used); William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697); Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volumes 12 to 14On: The Voyage of the Batchelor's Delight (1683 to 1691); Batchelor's Delight - On 19 July 1684 Edward Davis, the company's quartermaster, was made captain in Dampier's words "by consent of all the company; for it was his place by succession", the vote ratifying a right the office already carried.
Printed participant narrative
William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), quoted from the 1927 Argonaut Press textOn: The Voyage of the Batchelor's Delight (1683 to 1691); Batchelor's Delight - At the fleet action in the Bay of Panama on 28 May 1685 Dampier, whose figures are the only ones for the tallies, counts the buccaneers at ten sail and 960 men against fourteen Spanish sail and about three thousand men from Lima, with real force in two ships only, Davis with 36 guns and 156 men and Swan with 16 guns and 140 men; a lantern shifted overnight from the Spanish admiral's top to a bark's masthead cost the buccaneers the weather gage, they ran next morning with the loss of one man, and the confederacy afterwards fired Leon on 14 August 1685 and burnt Realejo on 24 August 1685.
Printed participant narrative
William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), quoted from the 1927 Argonaut Press text: "first Captain Davis 36 guns, 156 men, most English; Captain Swan 16 guns, 140 men, all English"; corroborated in substance by the examination of Richard Arnold, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, volume 12, item 805 IOn: The Voyage of the Batchelor's Delight (1683 to 1691) - In 1687, in latitude 12 degrees 30 minutes south and about 150 leagues off the mainland, the ship and her bark "felt a terrible Shock" that made the guns leap in their carriages and pitched Captain Davis out of his cabin, afterwards learned to have been the earthquake that emptied and then drowned the road of Callao; standing south afterwards, in latitude 27 degrees 20 minutes south, they closed "a small, low, sandy Island" with high land about twelve leagues to the westward and were not permitted to land, and Dampier, told the story by Davis in England, reports the same sighting, which became Davis Land.
Printed participant narratives
Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1699; 1704 edition used); William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), reporting Davis at second handOn: The Voyage of the Batchelor's Delight (1683 to 1691) - Morgan was carried to England as the King's prisoner in His Majesty's ship Welcome under Lynch's orders to Captain John Keene of 4 April 1672, no trial of him appears anywhere in the Calendar of State Papers Colonial for those years, and he was commissioned Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica on 6 November 1674 in a document that still styles him Colonel Henry Morgan; the date of his knighthood is contested between the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, which places it about January 1674, and the colonial papers, which still call him Colonel in November 1674.
Calendared state papers, commissions and biography
Lynch's orders to Captain John Keene of the Welcome, 4 April 1672, entry 794, Col. Papers, Vol. XXVIII., No. 34; draft commission and instructions as Deputy Governor, 23 March 1673/4, entries 1254 and 1255, and commission as Lieutenant Governor, 6 November 1674, entry 1379; Morgan, Sir Henry, in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, by David WilliamsOn: Morgan's Sack of Panama (1671) - The peace of Ryswick was a set of bilateral instruments negotiated in parallel at one congress under the mediation of Nils Lillieroot of Sweden, France concluding separately with Great Britain and with Spain on 20 September 1697, the date named as the last day for acceptance in a French memorial of 1 September, and with the Emperor and the Empire on 30 October, two days inside the term of 1 November allowed by the Franco-Spanish separate article.
Contemporary printed compilation of treaty texts
Jacques Bernard, compiler, The Acts and Negotiations, together with the Particular Articles at Large, of the General Peace, Concluded at Ryswick (London, printed for Robert Clavel and Tim. Childe, 1698), digitised copy from the Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library, Internet Archive identifier actsnegotiations00bernOn: The Treaty of Ryswick (1697) - The causation is carried as two parallel readings rather than one: Cecil Headlam's 1908 calendar preface attributes post-1697 recruitment of displaced men to the peace, stating that the Darien expedition "had been to a large extent manned by officers and soldiers of the rank and file thrown out of employment by the Peace of Ryswick" and that "the era of buccaneering, in which there had been some spice of patriotism, was therefore succeeded by an era of unmitigated piracy", while J. W. Fortescue's 1905 preface attributes the new depredations chiefly to colonial outfitting and Red Sea prize opportunity, recording that "these predatory vessels were equipped by British Colonists at various American ports, but chiefly from Rhode Island and New York".
Calendared state papers, editors' prefaces
Cecil Headlam, editor, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 17, 1699 and Addenda 1621 to 1698 (London, 1908), preface, pages vii to lix; J. W. Fortescue, editor, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 16, 1697 to 1698 (London, 1905), preface, pages v to xxxivOn: The Treaty of Ryswick (1697) - The Council of Trade and Plantations considered the transmission of the declaration to the plantations between 4 and 6 May 1702, when a proposal to notify them by way of Bermuda was laid before the Board by a person calendared only as Mr. Randolph, and on 5 May advised the Earl of Nottingham that advice-boats be sent besides, one to New England and one to Barbados with duplicates; the declaration reached Christopher Codrington at Antigua by 28 June 1702, was published at Boston on 30 June, at Portsmouth in New Hampshire on 7 July and in Jamaica on 11 July, and the Barbados Council read the enclosing letter of 8 May only on 14 July, which can be squared with Beckford's statement that his packets were forwarded from Barbados on 1 July only if more than one despatch reached Barbados or if the material forwarded on 1 July preceded the formal Council reading.
Calendared state paper
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 20, 1702, ed. Cecil Headlam (HMSO, 1912), items 415 and 417 (C.O. 324, 8, pp. 151, 152), 674, 679 (C.O. 5, 788, pp. 165 to 170), 713 (C.O. 5, 789, p. 93), 743 (C.O. 137, 5, No. 72) and 757 (C.O. 31, 6, pp. 243 to 245)On: The War of the Spanish Succession Begins (1700 to 1702) - Lieutenant Governor Peter Beckford published the declaration of war in Jamaica on 11 July 1702 and reported that the following day all the island's seafaring people came to offer their services and to desire commissions, which he granted on the resolution of Council for six months only, so that the holders might not be long absent or straggle too far from the island, and against bonds entered with principal merchants who stood surety for obedience to instructions; eight sloops were already fitted and ready to sail.
Calendared state paper
Lieutenant Governor Beckford to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Jamaica, calendared under 10 July 1702, item 743, with enclosed Minutes of Council of Jamaica of 11 July 1702, item 743.i, C.O. 137, 5, Nos. 72, 72.i, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 20, 1702On: The War of the Spanish Succession Begins (1700 to 1702) - Vice-Admiral John Benbow had divided his West Indies fleet into three squadrons, one between the capes of Hispaniola and Cuba, one off Cape Alteville on the south side of Hispaniola and one between Rio de la Hache and Cartagena, stationed to intercept Ducasse, the new Spanish governor designed for Cartagena and the victuallers intended for Chateaurenault's fleet at Havana; he engaged Ducasse off Cape Santa Marta from 19 to 24 August 1702 while several of his captains declined to close, had his leg broken by chain-shot on 24 August, and died at Port Royal on 4 November 1702.
Calendared state paper
Beckford to the Council of Trade and Plantations, item 743, C.O. 137, 5, No. 72, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 20, 1702On: The War of the Spanish Succession Begins (1700 to 1702) - The terminal date of the golden age of piracy is a historiographical construct rather than a fact: Arne Bialuschewski's published survey is bracketed 1695 to 1725 in its title.
Modern scholarship
Arne Bialuschewski, "Between Newfoundland and the Malacca Strait: A Survey of the Golden Age of Piracy, 1695 to 1725", The Mariner's Mirror 90:2 (2004), 167 to 186, title and pagination confirmed from the Crossref recordOn: The Final Anti-Piracy Campaigns (1726 to 1728) - The office of Lord High Admiral alternated between single holders and commissions, being held by individuals in 1660 to 1673, 1702 to 1709 and 1827 to 1828, and resting on successive letters patent rather than on any founding statute.
Calendared office-holder list
J. C. Sainty, Lord High Admiral and Commissioners of the Admiralty 1660 to 1870, Office-Holders in Modern Britain vol. 4 (British History Online)On: The Board of Admiralty - The Board was the standing recipient and archivist of colonial piracy intelligence, taking in from the governors of Jamaica, the Bahamas, New York, the Carolinas, Massachusetts, Barbados and the Leeward Islands their reports of pirate cruises, captures, depredations, trials and pardons together with the complaints of merchants and masters, and that correspondence survives in the Colonial Office series at The National Archives, calendared as the Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, as one of the richest single records of the campaign against Henry Every, William Kidd, Edward Thache and their contemporaries.
Archival guides and the printed calendar of primary documents
America and the West Indies in the Calendar of State Papers Colonial 1573-1739, The National Archives research guide; Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, British History Online; Colonial State Papers, Slavery, Law and Power projectOn: The Board of Trade - The Council of Trade and Plantations' worry over colonial complicity with the Red Sea pirates is documented in its own papers. Robert Snead's long letter charging Governor Markham of Pennsylvania with refusing to hear the proclamation against Every, with warning the pirates before publishing it so that they escaped, and with taking their money, was received and read by the Council on 20 September 1697; the Council heard information the same month from two naval lieutenants on the entertainment of pirates in Pennsylvania and on several of Every's crew being known to be there. That the Board itself wrote the standing anti-piracy clauses in governors' commissions and instructions, and the terms of the Earl of Bellomont's instructions, are not established by the documents read here.
State papers
Robert Snead to Sir John Houblon, endorsed "Recd. Read, 20 Sept., 1697", Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol 15, 1696-1697, no. 1,331, British History Online: "He refused to hear the proclamation when I offered to read it to him, but seemed very angry, so I left him. No sooner was I gone than he sent and acquainted the pirates with what had passed between us"; "But he did not do so until he had warned the pirates, who made their escape, those in gaol as well as those without, which shows pretty clearly that it was by consent." Minutes of the Council of Trade and Plantations, September 1697, same volume: "Lieutenants Ockman and Young attending gave information as to the entertainment of pirates in Pennsylvania... They also reported that several of Every's crew were known to be at Pennsylvania."On: The Board of Trade - The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa was created by an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain of 1750, "An act for extending and improving the trade to Africa," whose preamble recites that "the trade to and from Africa is very advantageous to Great Britain, and necessary for the supplying the plantations," and the new company took over the West African forts and factories of the Royal African Company.
Statute in transcription
An act for extending and improving the trade to Africa (African Company Act 1750), The Statutes Project transcription; the same Act transcribed on WikisourceOn: The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa - The company was a regulated and not a joint-stock body: any British merchant trading to Africa could be admitted on payment of forty shillings, there was no transferable stock, and government was vested in a body of nine, the African Committee, elected annually by the freemen and sitting in London, three returned from each of the three principal African-trading ports of London, Bristol and Liverpool, with tenure reported as limited to three consecutive years; the Act made it unlawful for the company to trade to or from Africa in its corporate or joint capacity.
Founding statute and secondary scholarship
An Act for extending and improving the trade to Africa, 23 Geo. II c.31On: The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa - The High Court of Admiralty, a court of law, is distinct from the Board of Admiralty, the executive body that administered the Royal Navy and was itself loosely called the Admiralty; the two descend from the same office of Lord High Admiral but were institutionally separate.
Research project publication
MarineLives, "Introduction to the High Court of Admiralty," marinelives.org, accessed 2026On: The High Court of Admiralty - The court's own records survive at The National Archives, Kew, in the HCA series, comprising examinations and depositions taken from suspected pirates and witnesses, indictments, session minutes and warrants, of which the oyer and terminer records and the examinations of pirates for 1721 to 1725 are a principal primary source for golden-age piracy trials.
Archival series descriptions
The National Archives (UK), "High Court of Admiralty: Oyer and Terminer Records," series description, Discovery record C8599; "Examinations of pirates and other criminals, 1721-1725," description of HCA material, Adam Matthew Digital, Life at SeaOn: The High Court of Admiralty - The shift from metropolitan to colonial trial after the Piracy Act transformed the suppression of piracy, allowing swift proceedings at Boston, Nassau, Charleston, Jamaica, the Cape Coast, Newport and elsewhere in the very years, roughly 1716 to 1726, when the golden-age outbreak was crushed.
Statute text and secondary study
"William III, 1698-9: An Act for the more effectuall Suppression of Piracy," Statutes of the Realm, vol. 7, pp. 590-594, British History Online; CrimeReads, "Turning the Tide Against Piracy in America," crimereads.com, accessed 2026On: The High Court of Admiralty - The Company was governed by a Governor, a Sub-Governor and a Deputy Governor with a Court of Assistants as the governing board elected by the shareholding membership, and exercised authority on the West African coast through an Agent-General with chief factors and factors stationed at the castles and lesser factories, who managed trade, garrisons and diplomacy with African polities.
Archive research note
research note on the African Companies records, T 70, The National ArchivesOn: The Royal African Company - The Board of Admiralty in this period was a board of commissioners executing the office of Lord High Admiral, sitting at the Admiralty Office in London, whose warrants directed colonial governors to commission the officers of the vice admiralty courts.
Admiralty warrant
Warrant of the Commissioners for executing the Office of Lord High Admiral for the commissioning of an Admiralty judge, Admiralty Office, 29 April 1697, New York State Archives, Albany, Historical MSS., vol. XLI, p. 60, printed in J. F. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (Washington, 1923), doc. 69: "By the Comiss'rs for Executing the Office of Lord high Admirall of Engl'd. Irel'd. etc.... You are therefore hereby Empower'd and directed, to give unto them Commissions for their said Employm'ts respectively... Dated at the Admiralty Office this 29th of April 1697", subscribed Russell, G. Rooke, Jno. Houblon and Kendall, and addressed "To his Ma'tis Governour of New-Yorke and Connuticutt, and East-Jersey/ for the time being".On: The Royal Navy - The Navy was chronically short of hulls for the expanse of ocean it was asked to police, covering the Atlantic, the Caribbean and the West African coast with too few ships, so that protection was uneven, pirates operated in the gaps between stations, and the service's successes were concentrated blows rather than a continuous blockade.
Modern secondary synthesis
"Pirates: the Royal Navy and the suppression of maritime raiding 1620 to 1830" (Military History Matters)On: The Royal Navy - The company's relevance to golden-age piracy is contextual rather than institutional: it was a leading node of the Atlantic slave-trading and commercial world that pirates preyed upon, and it did not try, pardon or police pirates as a vice-admiralty court or a colonial governor did.
Secondary sources
Black People under the Black Flag: Piracy and the Slave Trade on the West Coast of Africa, 1718 to 1723, in Slavery and Abolition, vol. 29, no. 4, 2008; the archive's research brief and cautions for this recordOn: The South Sea Company - The courts of admiralty commissioned under the piracy statute of 1698 to 1700 were the principal legal instrument by which the British state suppressed golden-age piracy in the colonies.
Statute
"William III, 1698 to 9: An Act for the more effectuall Suppression of Piracy [Chapter VII]", Statutes of the Realm, vol. 7, pp. 590 to 594, British History OnlineOn: The Colonial Vice-Admiralty Courts - The House of Commons was the elected lower chamber of the Parliament of England to 1707 and of Great Britain thereafter, a legislature and the sole grantor of supply that could enact, address, inquire, expel and impeach but could not try a pirate, commission a cruiser or appoint a governor, those powers lying respectively with commissioners sitting under the Admiralty, with the Board of Admiralty, and with the Crown on the advice of the Privy Council and the Board of Trade; its own coercive reach stopped at Westminster, as the South Sea inquiry of 1721 shows, when a Committee of Secrecy of thirteen members was chosen by ballot and seven members were expelled between January and May 1721, while the expedition that retook New Providence in 1718 was privately funded and not voted by Parliament.
Statute text and parliamentary proceedings
Piracy Act 1698, 11 Will. 3 c. 7, "An Act for the more effectuall Suppression of Piracy," revised text on legislation.gov.uk, for the trial power vested in commissioners; The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, vol. 6, session begun 8 December 1720, pp. 218 to 262, British History Online, for the balloted Committee of Secrecy and the seven expulsions; David Wilson, Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century (Boydell Press, 2021), chapter 3, for the private co-partnership that funded the 1718 Bahamas expeditionOn: The House of Commons - The Commons held the sole right to grant supply, resolving on 3 July 1678 that "all Aids and Supplies" are "the sole Gift of the Commons," who possess "the undoubted and sole Right" to "direct, limit, and appoint" the terms of such grants, terms that "ought not to be changed, or altered by the House of Lords."
Primary parliamentary record
House of Commons Journal, vol. 9, 3 July 1678, p. 509a, British History OnlineOn: The House of Commons - In the session of 16 November 1699 to 11 April 1700, the session that produced the piracy statute, the Commons voted a naval complement of 7,000 seamen for the next year's service with 90,000 pounds for extraordinaries of the navy, applied 76,383 pounds remaining in the Exchequer from tonnage and poundage to seamen's wages and authorised 220,000 pounds to be borrowed at 5 per cent for the same; in the session begun 19 October 1721 it granted one million pounds towards the debts of the navy, which had stood at about 1,700,000 pounds on 30 September 1721.
Printed parliamentary proceedings
The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, vol. 3, session begun 16 November 1699, pp. 106 to 127, British History Online, for the supply votes of 1699 to 1700; same work, vol. 6, session begun 19 October 1721, pp. 263 to 281, for the grant of one million pounds and the navy debt at 30 September 1721On: The House of Commons - The Compagnie des Indes orientales was created by a royal declaration of Louis XIV in August 1664, conventionally dated 27 August and registered by the Parlement of Paris on 1 September 1664, on a scheme of Jean-Baptiste Colbert intended to break Dutch and English dominance of the Asian trades, and it held a fifty year monopoly of French navigation and trade from the Cape of Good Hope eastward to the Strait of Magellan together with the attributes of a delegated sovereignty in territory, justice, coinage and armed force.
Museum institutional publication
La Compagnie des Indes en France (Musee de la Compagnie des Indes, Lorient)On: The French East India Company - The nominal capital of fifteen million livres tournois was never raised, the real subscription being just over eight million livres of which three million came from the king and the royal family; the reorganisations of 1685 and 1702 are read by Elisabeth Heijmans as informal bankruptcies effected through forced capital increases, and in 1708 the naval minister refused the directors' request to declare bankruptcy and issued private trading licences instead.
Peer reviewed journal article
Elisabeth Heijmans, Investing in French Overseas Companies: A Bad Deal?, Itinerario 43, number 1, 2019On: The French East India Company - A French pass was a document of protection that placed a vessel, whoever owned her, under the protection of the French crown, sought by Indian and Armenian freighters at Surat as insurance against French cruisers and obtainable through the Company's establishments in India, and the passes taken by William Kidd from the Rupparell and the Quedagh Merchant were the substance of his claim to have made lawful prize rather than piracy, the Quedagh Merchant's pass being issued by Francois Martin, directeur general of the French company in Bengal and Coromandel, at the Hooghly factory on 14 January 1698.
National archive blog and peer reviewed journal article
A rough deal for Captain Kidd (The National Archives, Kew); David Wilson, Piracy, patronage and political economy: Captain Kidd and the East India Trade, International Journal of Maritime History, 2015On: The French East India Company - The Company's colony at Ile Bourbon operated a regulated amnesty for pirates, offering Captain Congdon and his 135 men the rights of an inhabitant in return for surrendering their arms and munitions beforehand, renouncing their disorder for ever and keeping faith with the king of France, terms put to Olivier Levasseur and restated on 23 September 1724 by the island's Conseil superieur, a body established five days earlier under a royal edict of 1723 and not a Company organ, when his crew came in and surrendered and he did not.
Secondary research paper and local history chronology
Arnaud Verhille, L'ile Bourbon: Esclaves et Pirates, 2001; Histoire de La Reunion, annee 1724 (mi-aime-a-ou.com)On: The French East India Company - The Mughal empire had no charter, constitution or statute in the European sense: sovereignty was personal to the emperor and was exercised through written instruments, the nishan from a prince and the hasb-ul-hukm reciting the imperial will through a minister, so that every privilege a European company held in India rested on such an instrument and was revocable.
Doctoral thesis
"Administration of Gujarat under the Mughals, A.D. 1572 to 1737," doctoral thesis, author not named in the digitised copy, Internet Archive, for the ministerial instruments and the working of imperial authority in the provinceOn: The Mughal Imperial Administration - Surat was a sarkar within the subah of Gujarat and its port was governed by a mutasaddi, an office instituted under Akbar that joined executive authority over the town to fiscal authority over the customs house, serving under the subahdar at Ahmadabad, who could procure his removal on merchant complaint, as happened to Ghiasuddin Khan in 1677.
Peer reviewed journal article and doctoral thesis
Sagufta Parveen, "Surat: As a Major Port-Town of Gujarat and its Trade History," IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, volume 19, issue 5, version VI, May 2014, pages 69 to 73, for the sarkar and the institution of the mutasaddi under Akbar; "Administration of Gujarat under the Mughals, A.D. 1572 to 1737," doctoral thesis, Internet Archive, for the combination of offices, the supervision of the subahdar and the dismissal of Ghiasuddin Khan in 1677On: The Mughal Imperial Administration - Surat's customs were an imperial resource, the port yielding about four lakhs of rupees a year in customs and other dues as early as Akbar's reign, and from 1663 Aurangzeb set aside the earlier uniform rate and required Muslim merchants to pay 2.5 per cent while others paid 5 per cent.
Peer reviewed journal articles
Sagufta Parveen, "Surat: As a Major Port-Town of Gujarat and its Trade History," IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, May 2014, for the yield of about four lakhs of rupees a year; Ghulam A. Nadri, "Islam, Muslim Merchants, and Commerce in Early Modern South Asia," World History Connected, volume 19, number 2, June and July 2022, for the differential customs of 1663On: The Mughal Imperial Administration - A permanent Board of Customs dates from the appointment in 1671 of six commissioners to manage the customs duties in England and Wales, ending the farm that had run since 1662; the Board sat at the Custom House in the City of London under the Treasury, and its port establishment of collectors, comptrollers, surveyors, searchers and waiters served the chief ports of England and Wales and, from the 1670s, the American and West Indian plantations, the customs officer seizing goods that the vice-admiralty judge then condemned.
Archival catalogue and administrative history
Records of the Boards of Customs, Excise, and Customs and Excise, and HM Revenue and Customs, The National Archives, Kew, CUST, administrative history, for the 1643 ordinance, the farm of 1662 to 1671, the appointment of six commissioners in 1671, the separate Board of Excise from 1683 and the department's role in enforcing the trade laws; Exchequer: King's Remembrancer: Port Books, The National Archives, E 190, series description, for the ranks and duties of the port officersOn: The Customs Service - In September 1699 a ship and a parcel of East India goods were seized at Boston from William Symes, master of the Fidelia of London, the inventory of the seized goods being taken on 24 September and the deputy collector deposing on 21 October that Symes had said the ship brought twenty-two bales of East India goods; the Earl of Bellomont suspected a connection with the Quedagh Merchant which Kidd had left at Hispaniola and complained that the officers of the Custom House "were not nimble enough or we had got all the goods", the whole parcel being worth above two thousand pounds, but the pirate provenance of the goods was never proved.
Calendared state papers
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies vol. 17, 1699 and Addenda 1621-1698, ed. Cecil Headlam, Bellomont's letter of 24 October 1699 with enclosures, including the inventory of 24 September 1699 and the deposition of William Payne, deputy collector at Boston, of 21 October 1699On: The Customs Service - Customs enforcement in the proprietary colonies was defeated by rescue, riot and colonial law: Robert Quary reported on 20 October 1699 that prohibited goods seized by the King's collector in Pennsylvania had been taken by force out of the King's store by order of the government of that colony and that pirates admitted to bail "threaten the lives of the King's Collectors and with force and arms rescue their goods from them", and Caleb Heathcote reported from Newport on 7 September 1719 that Kay, the collector there, having seized several hogsheads of claret illegally imported in the daytime with the governor's warrant and the high sheriff in attendance, was set upon by the townspeople, John Wanton thereupon issuing a warrant for the collector's own apprehension.
Calendared state papers
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies vol. 17, 1699 and Addenda 1621-1698, ed. Cecil Headlam, Quary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 20 October 1699, with enclosures; Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies vol. 31, 1719-1720, ed. Cecil Headlam, Heathcote to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Newport, 7 September 1719On: The Customs Service - Between 1690 and 1725 the London merchant networks were not a corporation: no charter constituted them, no letters patent named them, no common seal authenticated their acts, no membership roll listed them and no court recognised them as a person capable of suing or being sued, so that the composite of separate traders to Africa, West India and Chesapeake merchants, private interests behind the chartered companies and financiers of armed voyages could not legislate, tax, arrest, try, condemn or commission, and its whole authority was access.
Printed calendar of a public body's own proceedings
Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations: Volume 5, January 1723 to December 1728, Journal, February 1726 and March 1726, Journal Book C.C., ed. K H Ledward (London, 1928), pages 214 to 221 and 221 to 230, British History OnlineOn: The London Merchant Networks - On 23 February 1726 the Duke of Newcastle referred the Royal African Company's memorial to the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, and on 24 February four separate traders, entered in the Board's journal as "Mr. Morrice, Mr. Harris, Mr. Elton and Mr. Brereton", attended unbidden, asked for copies of the Company's petition and to be heard before the Board reported, and were granted both; the Virginia merchants of London answered the Board's queries through one man, Micajah Perry, by a paper dated 5 March 1726.
Printed calendar of a public body's own proceedings
Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations: Volume 5, January 1723 to December 1728, Journal, February 1726 and March 1726, Journal Book C.C., ed. K H Ledward (London, 1928), pages 214 to 221 and 221 to 230, British History OnlineOn: The London Merchant Networks - The Board of Trade's hearings on the African trade ran over six afternoons between 14 April and 19 May 1726, the separate traders retaining Mr Serjeant Darnell and Mr Fazackerly as counsel against the Attorney General and Mr Wills for the Royal African Company; on 29 April Humphry Morice set the Company's export to the plantations at no more than 5,400 a year at the time it did trade against a disposition the separate traders had made that year for furnishing fifty thousand, a one year undertaking and not an annual supply; the traders' contention was that "the said separate traders have an equal and natural right to trade to those parts"; and on 19 May the Company offered to keep three hundred leagues of the African coast and leave about seventeen hundred leagues to them.
Printed calendar of a public body's own proceedings
Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations: Volume 5, January 1723 to December 1728, Journal, April 1726 and May 1726, Journal Book C.C., ed. K H Ledward (London, 1928), pages 230 to 250 and 251 to 270, British History OnlineOn: The London Merchant Networks - The merchant interest's oldest demand was convoy, and in May 1726 merchants petitioned the King for letters of reprisal against the Spanish guarda-costas, such as the French Government issued, estimating damages to British subjects since the Treaty of Utrecht at above three hundred thousand pounds; the documented petition that moved a Secretary of State against West Indian piracy in 1717 came from the merchants of Bristol and not of London.
Editorial prefaces to printed calendars of state papers
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 35, 1726 to 1727, Introduction, ed. Cecil Headlam and Arthur Percival Newton (London, 1936), and Volume 29, 1716 to 1717, Preface, ed. Cecil Headlam (London, 1930), British History OnlineOn: The London Merchant Networks - The New York merchant community of about 1690 to 1725 was not a corporation: it had no charter, no common seal, no roll of members, no minute book, no officers and no jurisdiction, and it acted institutionally only through Crown offices that its members held, the Governor's Council of 1698 including Frederick Philipse, Nicholas Bayard and Chidley Brooke, who was Collector and Receiver General of the revenue and executed the Naval Officer's place as well, while Philip French was Speaker of the Assembly.
State paper
Council of Trade and Plantations to the Lords Justices, representation on the state of the Province of New York, Whitehall, 19 October 1698, printed in E. B. O'Callaghan (ed.), Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, volume 4, pp. 385 to 396; with the churchwardens and vestry of Trinity Church, New-York, to Archbishop Tenison, 22 May 1699, same volume, pp. 526 to 528On: The New York Merchant Networks - Adam Baldridge's deposition, sworn at New York on 5 May 1699 before Abraham de Peyster, names Frederick Philipse as owner of the ship Charles in 1693, of the Katherine in 1695 and of the vessel Cornelius Jacobs commanded in 1697, with Thomas Mostyn as commander and supercargo of the Katherine; and Henry Watson's narrative, presented to the Council of Trade and Plantations in February 1697/8, names Baldridge and Lawrence Johnston as factors for Philipse at St Mary's island.
Sworn deposition and narrative presented to a Crown board
Deposition of Adam Baldridge, 5 May 1699, printed as document 68 in J. Franklin Jameson (ed.), Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (1923), pp. 180 to 187; Narrative of Mr Henry Watson, presented 14 February 1697/8, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, 27 October 1697 to 31 December 1698, no. 224. Both documents are Confirmed; the factorage itself is Probable and is stated as what Watson told the BoardOn: The New York Merchant Networks - New York stores passed directly into pirate hands and Red Sea plunder came back the same way: Baldridge itemised the consignment landed at St Mary's from Philipse's ship Charles in August 1693, including shoes, stockings, shirts, hats, tools, rum, Madeira, three barrels of cannon powder, two Bibles and three dozen hoes, and sold part of those goods to Thomas Tew and his company that October, while Giles Shelley's letter of 27 May 1699 to Stephen Delancey records his cargo sold for muslin, calicoes, elephants' teeth and opium and seventy-five passengers carried for about twelve thousand pieces of eight and three thousand lion dollars.
Sworn deposition and intercepted commercial letter
Deposition of Adam Baldridge, 5 May 1699, in Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period, pp. 180 to 187; Giles Shelley to Mr Delencie, or in his absence Mr John Barbarie, Cape May, 27 May 1699, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, 1699, no. 512 II. The deposition and Shelley's letter are Confirmed; the sale to Tew itself is Probable. Bellomont's report of a passage rate of one hundred and fifty pounds a man is Disputed against Shelley's own figures and Edward Buckmaster's hundred pieces of eight, and that conflict is left unresolvedOn: The New York Merchant Networks - The Madagascar voyages out of New York carried enslaved people as a routine part of the return, Baldridge returning thirty-four enslaved people to the Charles in 1693 before she went on to Mauratan to take in slaves and the Katherine sailing in 1695 for rice and slaves, and Governor Fletcher described the hire of the ship Fortune by English and Dutch merchants of New York to fetch enslaved people from Madagascar as was every year usual with them.
Sworn deposition and defence of a Crown officer
Deposition of Adam Baldridge, 5 May 1699, in Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period, pp. 180 to 187; Colonel Fletcher's Answers to the Complaints against him, Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, volume 4, pp. 442 to 448On: The New York Merchant Networks - The crackdown of 1698 to 1700 reached the traffic but no principal: Frederick Philipse gave up his Council seat on the stated ground of his great age, being seventy-two, as Bellomont reported on 21 October 1698, two days after and three thousand miles from the Board of Trade's recommendation of his removal, which cannot yet have reached New York, and he was not prosecuted because no bond had been taken from him at the custom house, Baldridge was never prosecuted, and by February 1705/6 Adolph Philipse and John Barbarie sat in the Council that had once been urged to exclude them.
Governor's dispatches and state papers
Earl of Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, New York, 21 October 1698, and 15 May 1699, Documents relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, volume 4, pp. 396 to 401 and pp. 518 to 526; Lord Cornbury to the Lords of Trade, 25 February 1705/6, same volume, pp. 1136 to 1137. The absence of any conviction is Confirmed only as to the sources consulted, which stop in 1706, and Unverified beyond themOn: The New York Merchant Networks - The Old Bailey criminal court sat under the King's commissions of the peace, of oyer and terminer, and of gaol delivery of Newgate, for the City of London and the County of Middlesex, at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey, with separate trial juries of twelve for the two jurisdictions.
Printed court proceedings
Front matter of the sessions of 13, 14 and 16 January 1720, Old Style, Old Bailey Proceedings Online, reference f17210113-1On: The Old Bailey Criminal Court - The court met eight times a year until 1834, each meeting preceded by the quarter sessions for the City of London and for the County of Middlesex, at which the clerks drew the indictments from lists supplied by the keepers of the prisons.
Scholarly editorial commentary
Old Bailey Online, Publishing History of the Proceedings, and Trial ProceduresOn: The Old Bailey Criminal Court - Within 1690 to 1725 the printed Old Bailey Proceedings report no trial for piracy and mention the Admiralty sessions only in two prosecutions for perjury, of 9 December 1696 and 8 June 1698, the corpus itself being missing for two thirds of the sessions between 1699 and 1714 and for the whole of 1701, 1705 and 1706.
Digitised corpus search and scholarly editorial commentary
Old Bailey Proceedings Online full text search, records t16961209-65 and t16980608-68; Old Bailey Online, Publishing History of the ProceedingsOn: The Old Bailey Criminal Court - The legal instrument of private colonial force was a governor's commission accompanied by written instructions and a penal bond from the owners, the commission granted at St Jago de la Vega on 24 November 1715 by Lord Archibald Hamilton to Jonathan Barnet of the snow Tyger being bonded in 1,500 pounds by Barnet, Lewis Galdy and Daniel Axtell, and its instructions requiring him to bring into his commission port all such pyrates as he should take there to be proceeded against according to law.
Calendared state paper
Item 131 and enclosures i to v, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 30, 1717-1718, October 1717 (C.O. 137, 12. Nos. 78, 78 i.-v.)On: Colonial Militias and Private Defence - Woodes Rogers reported from Nassau on 31 October 1718 that he had erected a small fort of eight guns at the eastermost entrance into the harbour and had formed the inhabitants and all the rest of the men on the island into three companies of militia under their own officers, keeping a guard in the town every night by turns, with a further company under a deputy governor at Eleuthera and another at Harbour Island, while doubting whether half of them would join him if their old friends came in strength.
Calendared state paper
Item 737, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 30, 1717-1718, October 1718 (C.O. 23, 1. Nos. 10, 10 i.-viii.)On: Colonial Militias and Private Defence - ADM is the letter code under which The National Archives at Kew holds the records of the Admiralty, the Navy Board and related bodies, and it is not a single document but a family of many separate record series, each with its own class number.
Archive catalogue
The National Archives, catalogue overview for Records of the Admiralty, Naval Forces, Royal Marines, Coastguard and related bodies (ADM), DiscoveryOn: The Admiralty Records (TNA ADM) - Captains' logs are ADM 51, covering 1669 to 1852; masters' logs are ADM 52, covering 1672 to 1840, with a later masters' series ADM 54 from 1808; and ships' musters begin with ADM 36, the first musters series, whose covering span requires confirmation against the catalogue.
Archive research guide and catalogue
The National Archives, Royal Navy ships' log books research guide; Admiralty: Royal Navy Ships' Musters (Series I), ADM 36, DiscoveryOn: The Admiralty Records (TNA ADM) - The Admiralty's correspondence and direction survive in three classes: ADM 2, the out-letters carrying the Board's orders to sea officers from 1660; ADM 1, the in-letters and reports of proceedings from flag officers and commanding officers from about 1698; and ADM 3, the Board's minutes from 1689.
Archive research guide
The National Archives, Royal Navy operations and correspondence 1660 to 1914 research guideOn: The Admiralty Records (TNA ADM) - The ADM classes are arranged by ship and by administrative function rather than by subject, so nothing in them is retrievable by the word pirate and the researcher must already know which vessel to look for.
Archive research guide
The National Archives, Royal Navy ships' log books research guideOn: The Admiralty Records (TNA ADM) - None of the principal operational records of the Royal Navy for the golden-age period are available online, so the logs, musters and correspondence of about 1690 to 1725 must be consulted at Kew or through microform and commercial partner reproductions.
Archive research guide
The National Archives, Royal Navy operations and correspondence 1660 to 1914 research guideOn: The Admiralty Records (TNA ADM) - The book is a retrospective memoir written and printed twelve to fourteen years after the events of 1721 and 1722, by an officer of the medical branch rather than the quarterdeck, whose numerical claims are approximate and need collation against the printed trial of 1723 and the Admiralty records; his separate medical writing, the treatise "The Navy Surgeon" first published in 1732, is a different work and not the voyage narrative.
Period narrative
John Atkins, "A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies" (London, 1735), for the 1735 publication date against the 1721 to 1722 events and so for the retrospective character of the book, for Atkins's rank as surgeon rather than a line officer, and for the separate existence of "The Navy Surgeon" of 1732 (Confirmed); "A Full and Exact Account, of the Tryal of All the Pyrates, Lately Taken by Captain Ogle" (1723), Internet Archive, as the record against which Atkins's figures are to be collated (Probable). The claim as a whole is no stronger than ProbableOn: Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies (1735) - The book was printed at London in 1735 for Caesar Ward and Richard Chandler, at the Ship between the Temple-Gates in Fleet-Street, and sold at their shop in Scarborough, the title page naming the author as John Atkins, Surgeon in the Royal Navy. The full text is freely available online, transcribed at Project Gutenberg as ebook 72102 from images made available by the Internet Archive.
Period printed book
Title page of John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies; in His Majesty's Ships, the Swallow and Weymouth (London, 1735), read in the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1735 edition, ebook 72102: "By JOHN ATKINS, Surgeon in the ROYAL NAVY" and "LONDON; Printed for CAESAR WARD and RICHARD CHANDLER, at the Ship, between the Temple-Gates in Fleet-Street; And Sold at their Shop in SCARBOROUGH. M.DCC.XXXV." (the ligature in the first forename expanded); the same file's front matter for the transcription's origin, "produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive"On: Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies (1735) - The Boston News-Letter was founded at Boston in 1704, its first number dated 24 April 1704, and is the first continuously published newspaper in the British colonies of North America.
Library catalogue
Catalogue record, The Boston News-Letter (Boston, Mass.) 1704 to 1726, Library of Congress, control number sn83020400On: The Boston News-Letter - Publication of the Boston News-Letter was suspended from May 1709 to the start of 1710.
Serial catalogue
Serial catalogue note of suspension from May 1709 to 1 January 1710 (union catalogue serial record, Stanford SearchWorks 1992522)On: The Boston News-Letter - It is a core title in the American Antiquarian Society and Readex Early American Newspapers digital programmes, and the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester and the Massachusetts Historical Society at Boston hold significant originals and reproductions.
Repository catalogues
Online catalogues of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, accessed 2026; Readex Early American Newspapers programmeOn: The Boston News-Letter - The Colonial Office Records are a record group and not a single document, holding the original in-letters, enclosures and Board of Trade papers of the bodies that governed England's, then Britain's, overseas plantations at The National Archives, Kew, where the label Colonial Office is applied retrospectively to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, the Board of Trade established in 1696 and the Secretaries of State handling colonial business, all of which predate the Colonial Office proper of 1801.
Archive catalogue and research guide
The National Archives, Discovery catalogue description of the Colonial Office record group; The National Archives, American and West Indian colonies before 1782 research guideOn: The Colonial Office Records (TNA CO) - CO 5 is America and West Indies, Original Correspondence, a general class covering roughly 1606 to 1822, and around it sit the colony classes most used for golden-age piracy, CO 137 for Jamaica, CO 23 for the Bahamas, CO 152 for the Leeward Islands, CO 37 for Bermuda and CO 28 for Barbados, together with CO 1, the earlier Colonial Papers of 1574 to 1757, and the Board of Trade classes CO 388, CO 389 and CO 391; the colony class identities are firm but their exact covering dates and internal arrangement are probable and need checking against the catalogue.
Archive research guide and catalogue
The National Archives, American and West Indian colonies before 1782 research guide; Discovery series descriptions for CO 137, CO 23, CO 152 and CO 37On: The Colonial Office Records (TNA CO) - A typical CO piece holds a governor's letters to the Board of Trade or a Secretary of State together with their enclosures, and it is the enclosures, depositions and examinations of prisoners and witnesses, minutes of councils of war, lists of ships and crews, copies of proclamations and pardons, accounts of prizes, muster and prisoner lists, that carry the richest piracy evidence and often survive nowhere else.
Archive research guide and piece content list
Contents list, Original Correspondence: Jamaica (CO 137), The Loyalist Collection, University of New Brunswick; The National Archives, America and the West Indies in the Calendar of State Papers Colonial 1573-1739 research guideOn: The Colonial Office Records (TNA CO) - The Calendar volumes are freely available in full text and in the public domain on British History Online, while the manuscripts themselves have no edition and are reached through the Discovery catalogue, with digital images of part of the group available only by subscription through the Colonial State Papers database for CO 1 and CO 5 and Adam Matthew's Colonial Caribbean for colony classes including CO 137 and CO 152.
Archive catalogue and digitisation platform descriptions
Calendar of State Papers Colonial digitised volumes, British History Online; Colonial Caribbean collection description, Adam Matthew Digital; Colonial State Papers database descriptionOn: The Colonial Office Records (TNA CO) - The CO correspondence is official and self-interested, written by governors and officials pressing cases on London to justify their conduct, solicit force and funds, blame rivals and present suppression favourably, so its tallies of pirates taken or killed and its charges of colonial complicity must be weighed as advocacy as well as report, its coverage runs in bursts around crises, and it must be cited at class and piece level to be followed.
Archive research guide and modern scholarship
The National Archives, American and West Indian colonies before 1782 research guide; Pirates, markets and imperial authority: economic aspects of maritime depredations in the Atlantic World, 1716-1726, Global Crime, vol. 9 (2008)On: The Colonial Office Records (TNA CO) - The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies is a printed calendar of summaries, abstracts and partial transcripts of the correspondence of English and British colonial administration, not an edition of full texts, and functions as the primary finding aid to the manuscripts it describes, which are the Colonial Office records at The National Archives, Kew, principally CO 1 for the period to 1688 and CO 5 thereafter.
Printed calendar and archive research guides
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies, series landing and volume set, British History Online, Institute of Historical Research; The National Archives research guides on the American and West Indian colonies before 1782 and on the Calendar of State Papers Colonial 1573-1739On: The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial - The series was produced under the authority of the Public Record Office and issued through His or Her Majesty's Stationery Office as part of the programme of calendaring the state papers, begun by William Noel Sainsbury of the Record Office, continued after his death by the Hon. J. W. Fortescue, whose volume for 1677 to 1680 was published in 1896 and credited to the late W. Noel Sainsbury and the Hon. J. W. Fortescue, and carried through the early eighteenth century by Cecil Headlam.
Printed calendar and scholarly review
Review of Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1677-1680, ed. the late W. Noel Sainsbury and the Hon. J. W. Fortescue, London, H. M. Stationery Office, 1896, in The American Historical Review, volume 2 number 3; prefatory matter of the printed volumes, Public Record Office and H. M. Stationery Office; Cecil Headlam (ed.), golden-age volumes of the calendarOn: The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial - The America and West Indies series spans roughly 1574 to 1739, the National Archives giving 1573 as its opening year, and is arranged chronologically entry by entry, each entry giving a date, the correspondents, a summary of contents and a reference to the manuscript source.
Archive research guide and printed calendar
The National Archives research guides on the American and West Indian colonies before 1782 and on America and the West Indies in the Calendar of State Papers Colonial 1573-1739; Cecil Headlam (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volumes as digitised on British History OnlineOn: The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial - Through the correspondence of colonial governors and the Board of Trade the calendar documents reports of pirate activity in the Caribbean and off the American coast, the condition of the Bahamas at New Providence as a pirate resort and the campaign to reduce it, the operation of the royal pardon or act of grace, and the trials, examinations and executions of captured men, together with the institutional machinery of governors and councils, the naval stations and the vice-admiralty jurisdiction.
Archive research guide and printed calendar
The National Archives research guide on the American and West Indian colonies before 1782; Cecil Headlam (ed.), golden-age volumes of the Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West IndiesOn: The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial - Because a calendar entry is a summary that can compress, paraphrase or silently omit what the original contains, and because the fullness of the abstracts varies with the editor's judgement, exact wording, names, figures and legal formulae must be read in the CO manuscript itself rather than taken from the calendar.
Printed calendar with editorial statement
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies, series landing and editorial statement, British History Online, Institute of Historical ResearchOn: The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial - The Buccaneers of America is the modern English name for the book by Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin first published in Dutch as De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, printed at Amsterdam in 1678 by the bookseller Jan ten Hoorn.
Period narrative
Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, "De Americaensche Zee-Roovers" (Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, 1678), Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, F2161.E71 (Copy 2), catalogue record loc.gov/item/02017955, for the title, place, date and publisher of the first edition (Confirmed)On: Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America - The English Bucaniers of America was published at London in 1684.
Period imprint
"Bucaniers of America" (London, 1684), Folger Shakespeare Library catalogue record 36134, catalog.folger.edu/record/36134, for the London publication of the first English edition in 1684 (Confirmed)On: Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America - The book is a first-order source for the internal culture of the buccaneers and for the atmosphere of Tortuga and Port Royal, but it was written to sell and dwells on atrocity so that the cruelties may be heightened, its author was not present at every event he narrates and its battle numbers, casualty figures and reported speech are unreliable; the gravest caution is textual, since the editions differ so far that a claim true of one may be false or absent in another, so that every citation on this site names the specific edition and, where possible, checks it against the Dutch text of 1678; and because the book documents the buccaneers of the 1660s to the 1680s rather than the pirates of the 1710s and 1720s, using it as direct evidence for the golden age proper is a category error.
Period narrative and modern scholarship
Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, "De Americaensche Zee-Roovers" (Amsterdam, 1678), against "Bucaniers of America" (London, 1684), Folger Shakespeare Library catalogue record 36134, for the divergence between editions, the resulting citation rule and the buccaneering period the book actually documents (Confirmed); Joseph Gibbs, "A certain false, malicious, scandalous and famous libel," International Journal of Maritime History (2018), DOI 10.1177/0843871417742270, for the demonstrated unreliability of the English text (Confirmed); "De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (1678)," Golden Age of Piracy project, for the book's eyewitness strength on buccaneer culture and for its sensationalism and unreliable numbers (Probable)On: Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America - The 1678 Dutch first edition is rare, the Library of Congress holding a copy in its Rare Book and Special Collections Division at Washington, DC, under the call number F2161 .E71 (Copy 2) from the Jay I. Kislak Foundation gift, described as roughly 186 pages in quarto with folded plates, maps and portraits; a digitised 1678 Dutch text is available through the Internet Archive, and the 1684 English Bucaniers of America in the Crooke and Malthus imprints survives in numerous research libraries including the Folger Shakespeare Library and is likewise digitised.
Library catalogue records
Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, catalogue record for "De Americaensche Zee-Roovers" (Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, 1678), loc.gov/item/02017955, call number F2161.E71 (Copy 2), Kislak 1995.022.00.0003, for the holding, the call number, the Kislak provenance and the physical description (Confirmed); Folger Shakespeare Library catalogue record 36134, catalog.folger.edu/record/36134, for the 1684 English edition as a research-library holding (Confirmed); Internet Archive, for digitised copies of the 1678 Dutch and 1684 English texts (Probable)On: Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America - The London Gazette has appeared continuously since 1665 under the standing imprint "Published by Authority".
Official gazette
The London Gazette (historical issues, 1665 onward), the Crown and His Majesty's Stationery Office and successors, cited by issue number, The Gazette official archive, thegazette.co.uk, for the imprint and the continuous run (Confirmed)On: The London Gazette and the Newspaper Press - Beyond the proclamations the Gazette carried official notices bearing directly on the suppression campaign: issue 5632 noticing that pirates had promised to surrender, issue 5655 reporting that Captains Hornigold, Nichols, Burgess and Lesley with 114 of their company had surrendered themselves, issue 5575 reporting an attack near Cape Cod associated with Samuel Bellamy, and issue 5740 reporting the death of Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard.
Official gazette
"Atlantic piracy in the 18th century," The Gazette editorial content item 100293, thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/100293, identifying issues 5632, 5655, 5575 and 5740 and their piracy content (Confirmed on the Gazette's own authority; each issue number would ideally be checked against the digitised original before quotation)On: The London Gazette and the Newspaper Press - Where the Gazette prints a proclamation, a reward or an official notice it gives the authentic public text of a government act and may be cited as such.
Official gazette
The London Gazette (historical issues) and "Atlantic piracy in the 18th century," The Gazette content item 100293, thegazette.co.uk, for the authority of the printed proclamation, reward and official notice (Confirmed). The claim as a whole is no stronger than ProbableOn: The London Gazette and the Newspaper Press - The Gazette survives as a complete continuous run from 1665 and is fully digitised and searchable in the official archive at thegazette.co.uk, which offers the historical issues, including the piracy proclamations of 1717 and 1718, as images and text retrievable by issue number, the Gazette having been published exclusively online since 2014, with printed originals also held in major research libraries including the British Library; the wider newspaper press survives less evenly and is dispersed, English titles of the period being held at the British Library and in commercial databases and the Boston News-Letter and other early colonial papers in American research libraries and in microform and digital collections such as those distributed by Readex, so that the absence of a report is never proof that an event went unreported.
Official gazette and repository holdings
The Gazette official archive, thegazette.co.uk, for the complete run from 1665, the full digitisation and searchability, retrieval by issue number and exclusive online publication since 2014 (Confirmed); "Atlantic piracy in the 18th century," The Gazette content item 100293, for the availability of the 1717 and 1718 piracy issues by number (Confirmed); Readex Early American Newspapers, readex.com, together with British Library newspaper holdings, for the dispersed and partial survival of the English and colonial commercial press (Probable). The claim as a whole is no stronger than ProbableOn: The London Gazette and the Newspaper Press - The book sold well and further editions followed quickly, described on their title pages as corrected and enlarged, with an enlarged edition in print by about 1726; a companion second volume appeared in 1728, associated with the bookseller and printer T. Woodward, extending the coverage to further pirates and to the Indian Ocean and the Madagascar settlements, after which the two volumes were sold and bound together and the work was commonly cited as A History of the Pyrates in two volumes.
Auction bibliography and library catalogue records
Bonhams sale catalogue entry, Johnson, A General History (Rivington / Woodward, 1724 to 1728), lot 1186, auction 19421, bonhams.com/auction/19421/lot/1186/, for the publishers and the two-volume 1724 to 1728 structure (Probable); HathiTrust catalogue records for A general history of the pyrates, record 102498705, catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102498705, for the editions and imprints, including the enlarged edition in print by about 1726 and the subsequent circulation of the work as a two-volume set (Probable). The exact sequence and imprints of the intermediate editions are reported inconsistently and are carried no higherOn: A General History of the Pyrates (1724) - The author of the work is unknown: "Captain Charles Johnson" is a pseudonym.
Modern scholarship
P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, "The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), ISBN 0300041195, Internet Archive item canonisationofda0000furb, for the demonstration that the authorship is not established (Confirmed)On: A General History of the Pyrates (1724) - The work is the principal early source for Edward Teach, called Blackbeard, for Bartholomew Roberts, and for Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
Period narrative and trial pamphlet
"A general history of the pyrates" (London, 1724 and later editions), early edition scan, Internet Archive item generalhistoryof00john, archive.org/details/generalhistoryof00john, for the lives of Teach, Roberts, Bonny and Read as printed (Confirmed); "The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates" (Jamaica: printed by Robert Baldwin, 1721), National Library of Jamaica copy, further copy at The National Archives, Kew, CO 137/14/1, for the independent record of Bonny and Read against which the work's primacy as a narrative source is measured (Confirmed). The portrait of Teach and the account of Roberts and his death are Probable, and the surrounding Bonny and Read narrative Disputed; neither is included in this claimOn: A General History of the Pyrates (1724) - The controlling caution for the Archive is that any detail resting on this work alone is treated as Probable at best, and as Possible where it is colourful, self-contained or otherwise uncorroborated, that the work cannot be assumed accurate on dates, dialogue, numbers or named prizes even in its better-documented chapters, and that a claim should wherever possible be verified against an independent record, a trial print, a state paper, a newspaper or an Admiralty file, before it is stated as fact.
Modern scholarship
P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, "The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), ISBN 0300041195, Internet Archive item canonisationofda0000furb, for the unreliability of internal argument and the need for external corroboration (Confirmed)On: A General History of the Pyrates (1724) - HCA is the letter code under which The National Archives at Kew arranges the surviving records of the High Court of Admiralty, and its criminal class HCA 1 holds the examinations, informations, indictments, inquests, warrants, commissions and sessions papers that form the core archive of English piracy prosecution.
Archive research guide and catalogue
The National Archives, High Court of Admiralty records research guide; HCA 1: High Court of Admiralty: Oyer and Terminer Records, catalogue descriptionOn: The High Court of Admiralty Records (TNA HCA) - HCA 1 is catalogued as High Court of Admiralty: Oyer and Terminer Records, with covering dates of 1535 to 1834 and languages recorded as English and Latin, and its documents are cited and ordered by class and piece reference such as HCA 1/51 or HCA 1/99.
Archive catalogue
HCA 1: High Court of Admiralty: Oyer and Terminer Records, The National Archives catalogue, series id C8599; Discovery series entry for HCA 1, catid 7290On: The High Court of Admiralty Records (TNA HCA) - Survival within the criminal records is uneven: the depositions come down fuller than the paperwork that opened and closed a case, so warrants, indictments and charges are fragmentary and out-of-court settlements went largely unrecorded, leaving documentary gaps around the surviving mass.
Secondary study of court procedure
Global Maritime History, Through the eyes of the court: researching maritime history through a critical understanding of High Court of Admiralty Criminal ProcedureOn: The High Court of Admiralty Records (TNA HCA) - The East India Company's administrative correspondence is held at the British Library within the India Office Records and Private Papers, principally as IOR/E/3, catalogued as Correspondence with the East, 124 volumes covering 1602 to 1753, and as IOR/G, the Factory Records, an assemblage of forty separately numbered subseries arranged by factory or region from IOR/G/1 Anjengo to IOR/G/40 Miscellaneous, with IOR/B, the Court Minutes, as the adjacent class recording the London decisions the letters transmit.
Archival catalogue records
IOR/E/3 Correspondence with the East, British Library, India Office Records and Private Papers (SRC006-001); East India Company Factory Records, IOR/G (SRC006-017); IOR/B Court Minutes (SRC006-021)On: East India Company Correspondence - IOR/E/3 divides into six catalogued subseries whose boundaries determine whether a document is inbound or outbound: volumes 1 to 71, Original Correspondence, 1602 to 1712; 72 to 81, Original Correspondence (Duplicates), 1602 to 1709; 82 to 83, Original Correspondence (Triplicates), 1626 to 1704; 84 to 111, East India Company Letter Books, 1626 to 1753; 112 to 121, Drafts of Despatches, 1703 to 1753; and 122 to 124, Despatch Books of the Court of Managers, 1704 to 1708.
Archival catalogue record
IOR/E/3 Correspondence with the East, subseries breakdown, British Library, India Office Records and Private Papers (SRC006-001)On: East India Company Correspondence - The factory side of the cluster runs to IOR/G/36, Factory Records: Surat, 125 volumes, 1622 to 1804, IOR/G/3, Factory Records: Bombay, 31 volumes, 1669 to 1710, and IOR/G/19 for Fort St George, and within the Surat series IOR/G/36/5 is catalogued as consultations covering 1 January to 31 December 1696, IOR/G/36/94 and IOR/G/36/95 as copies of letters despatched to 1 January 1696 and for 1696 and 1697, and IOR/G/36/112 as copies of letters received for January to September 1695 and January to December 1696, a scope note that leaves the last quarter of 1695 unrepresented.
Archival catalogue records
IOR/G/36 Factory Records: Surat, especially IOR/G/36/5, IOR/G/36/94, IOR/G/36/95 and IOR/G/36/112 (SRC006-002); IOR/G/3 Factory Records: Bombay (SRC006-003); IOR/G/19 Factory Records: Fort St George (SRC006-018)On: East India Company Correspondence - Two catalogued items show the granularity the class can reach: IOR/E/3/50 ff 257-58 is described as News of pirates, reported by Francisco do Passos Varella, commander of the Alma Sancta, Surat, dated 13 November 1694, with the deposition of Jonas Haun of Flushing about French pirates at Bombay, dated 19 November 1694, at ff 261-64 of the same volume; and IOR/E/3/92 f. 257v, within Letter Book 9, 1688 to 1697, is a letter of 23 July 1696 to the General and Council of India at Bombay recording the Company's offer of a reward for capturing Captain Avery of the pirate ship Fancy.
Archival item records
IOR/E/3/50 ff 257-58 (SRC006-005); IOR/E/3/50 ff 261-64 (SRC006-020); IOR/E/3/92 f. 257v, Letter Book 9 (SRC006-004)On: East India Company Correspondence - No calendar or published edition exists for IOR/E/3 or for the Surat and Bombay factory records after 1684, the printed editions of Danvers and Foster, William Foster and Charles Fawcett reaching only 1617, 1669 and 1684 respectively, so that material must be read in manuscript or in commercial digital facsimile; the Madras side is the exception, being printed in the Records of Fort St George series, whose Diary and Consultation Book volumes cover 1686 to 1727 and whose Despatches from England cover 1686 to 1723.
Research guide and printed record series
East India Company records, published editions, Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick (SRC006-008); Records of Fort St George, Madras Government Press (SRC006-008)On: East India Company Correspondence - The correspondence is exculpatory by design, because from late 1695 the Company stood under formal suspicion at Surat of collusion with English pirates and its officers wrote knowing their letters might be produced in its defence in London and before the Mughal authorities, and after 1698 two rival English companies were accusing each other of the same thing; the framing is commercial, so pirates enter the record only where they damage trade or cost money, and a designation of piracy in these papers is a claim by an interested party rather than a finding of fact.
Archival correspondence and modern scholarship
IOR/E/3 and IOR/G/36 correspondence and consultations, British Library (SRC006-001, SRC006-002); Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, Harvard University Press, 1986 (SRC006-012); Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700 to 1750 (SRC006-013)On: East India Company Correspondence - The petitions and complaints made against European piracy by Mughal officials and by Indian and Armenian merchants survive principally in English transmission, as enclosures, translations, abstracts and answers inside East India Company correspondence and English state records, rather than as an accessible Mughal or Armenian archival series.
Printed calendar, archival catalogue and research guides
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 16, 1697-1698, British History Online (SRC007-001); The National Archives research guide, America and the West Indies in the Calendar of State Papers Colonial 1573-1739 (SRC007-003); British Library, Asian and African Studies, catalogue record IOR/E/3/27 ff 36-37 (SRC007-004); University of Warwick, Global History and Culture Centre, Manuscript Sources at IOR (SRC007-005)On: Mughal and Armenian Petitions and Complaints - A calendar entry of 21 December 1697 at Whitehall transmits "copies of advices received from Persia and India by the East India Company concerning piracies committed there for the most part, as it is represented, by the King's subjects", filed as Board of Trade, Plantations General, 4, Nos. 80 and 80I, with the covering letter and concluding extract only at 34, pp. 226-227.
Printed calendar of state papers
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 16, 1697-1698, "America and West Indies: December 1697, 16-31", items 115 and 115.I, British History Online (SRC007-001)On: Mughal and Armenian Petitions and Complaints - That same packet names the Ruparrell and the Calicut as taken on 14 and 15 August 1696, while both were bound for Bombay, by a pirate "called the John and Rebecca, John Hore captain", reported in a Bombay letter of 15 October 1696, and carries a pirate commander's reported statement to Captain Mason "that most of the pirates which infest those seas are fitted out at New York, whither they return a share of their unlawful gains, the Governor conniving thereat".
Printed calendar of state papers
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 16, 1697-1698, "America and West Indies: December 1697, 16-31", items 115 and 115.I, British History Online (SRC007-001)On: Mughal and Armenian Petitions and Complaints - An agreement signed in London on 22 June 1688, negotiated between Sir Josiah Child, Jean Chardin and Khwaja Panus Kalendar of Isfahan, sought to channel Armenian Asian trade through English shipping and English ports; it failed in its commercial aims, and Armenian merchants appear thereafter to have had standing in English forums and to have drafted their claims in the idiom of English pleading.
Scholarly dictionary articles
Encyclopaedia Iranica, "JULFA v. ARMENIANS IN INDIA" (SRC007-009); Encyclopaedia Iranica, "EAST INDIA COMPANY (BRITISH) i. THE SAFAVID PERIOD" (SRC007-011)On: Mughal and Armenian Petitions and Complaints - Captains' logs of the Royal Navy for 1669 to 1853 are held at The National Archives, Kew, as ADM 51 and masters' logs for 1672 to 1840 as ADM 52, while the great majority of lieutenants' logs were transferred from the Admiralty to the National Maritime Museum in 1938 and form the ADM/L collection of 5,205 volumes covering 1673 to 1809.
Archive series descriptions and museum collection record
Admiralty: Captains' Logs, ADM 51, The National Archives catalogue record C1760; Admiralty: Masters' Logs, ADM 52, catalogue record C1761; Royal Museums Greenwich, Lieutenant's logs: Records of Royal Naval voyages 1673-1809, and the Navy Board, Lieutenants' Logs collection record, ADM/LOn: Naval Logbooks and Captains' Journals - A captain's log is a ruled manuscript volume kept on a continuous daily basis through a ship's commission, recording the employment and position of the ship and ship's company and the weather encountered, and the volumes of this period were divided by the officer himself, printed log forms appearing only from about 1799.
Archive series descriptions and museum collection record
Admiralty: Captains' Logs, ADM 51, The National Archives catalogue record C1760; Admiralty: Masters' Logs, ADM 52, catalogue record C1761; Navy Board, Lieutenants' Logs, ADM/L, National Maritime Museum collection recordOn: Naval Logbooks and Captains' Journals - Captains' logs were compiled from the masters' logs and lieutenants' logs were derived from the masters' logs in the same way, so the three streams are not three independent witnesses of the same day.
Archive research guide
The National Archives, Royal Navy ships' log books research guideOn: Naval Logbooks and Captains' Journals - ADM 51/954 contains five separate Swallow captain's log runs, of which the third, 1718/19 March 13 to 1723 May 10, is Chaloner Ogle's commission, with the Weymouth's captain's log for 1720 October 20 to 1723 April 6 in ADM 51/1057 and the Swallow's master's log in ADM 52/296 in two runs broken between October 1721 and October 1722.
Archive piece descriptions and catalogue search
Captains' logs including Swallow, ADM 51/954, Discovery record C4462357; captains' logs including Weymouth and Worcester, ADM 51/1057, Discovery record C4462726; Discovery search for ADM 52 pieces containing Swallow masters' logs, chiefly ADM 52/296On: Naval Logbooks and Captains' Journals - The captains' logs of both Virginia station ships survive across the Ocracoke operation of November 1718: the Pearl for 1717 April 1 to 1719 December 8 in ADM 51/672 and the Lyme for 1716/17 February 23 to 1719 August 14 in ADM 51/4250.
Archive piece descriptions
Captains' logs including Pearl and Portsmouth, ADM 51/672, Discovery record C4461441; captains' logs including Lyme, ADM 51/4250, Discovery record C4461020On: Naval Logbooks and Captains' Journals - The colonial depositions of this cluster travelled home as enclosures to gubernatorial despatches and survive as originals at The National Archives, Kew, in the Colonial Office original correspondence classes CO 5 (1606 to 1822), CO 23 for the Bahamas (1696 to 1951), CO 137 for Jamaica (1689 to 1951) and CO 152 for the Leeward Islands (1689 to 1951).
Archive series descriptions with calendared examples
Colonial Office original correspondence series CO 5, CO 23, CO 137 and CO 152, The National Archives catalogue, with the calendared examples at SRC-011-006 to SRC-011-008On: Merchant Depositions and Insurance Claims - Governor Woodes Rogers's despatch of 31 October 1718 from Nassau to the Council of Trade and Plantations, calendared as entry 737 under the printed reference C.O. 23, 1. Nos. 10, 10 i. to viii., carries eight enclosures of which three are depositions sworn at Nassau in August and September 1718 and two are certificates by Rogers authenticating the depositions that precede them.
Calendar of state papers (printed and digitised)
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 30, 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlam (1930), entry 737 and enclosures i to viiiOn: Merchant Depositions and Insurance Claims - The Admiralty deposition record at Kew divides between the civil side, HCA 13, catalogued as examinations and answers in 272 bundles and volumes covering 1536 to 1826 with the examinations proper running to 1750 and volumes HCA 13/80 to 13/87 covering 1690 to 1728, and the criminal side, the four volumes HCA 1/52 to 1/55 covering 1683 to 1725 and catalogued as "Examinations of pirates and other criminals", with the matching indictment files at HCA 1/13 to 1/17.
Archive series and piece descriptions
High Court of Admiralty: Instance and Prize Courts: Examinations and Answers, HCA 13, The National Archives catalogue; piece descriptions within High Court of Admiralty: Oyer and Terminer Records, HCA 1, with the series description at SRC-011-001On: Merchant Depositions and Insurance Claims - English marine insurance policies named piracy explicitly among the insured perils, in a clause insuring against "the seas, men of war, fire, enemies, pirates, rovers, thieves, jettizons, letters of mart and counter-mart, suprisals and takings at sea", which A. B. Leonard describes as varying only insignificantly between 1580 and 1980.
Scholarly working paper quoting the standard policy wording
A. B. Leonard, The Pricing Revolution in Marine Insurance, working paper, quoting the standard English perils clauseOn: Merchant Depositions and Insurance Claims - English marine insurance before 1720 was written by individual underwriters and left no institutional archive, so the surviving record is the merchant's own file, of which Ralph Radcliffe's forty-seven policies at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, DE/R/B293/1 to 47, are the best-catalogued English run, while the London Assurance Corporation held a royal charter for marine business from June 1720 but in its archive at The London Archives, GB 0074 CLC/B/192-26, the catalogued policy records begin only in 1721.
Archival catalogues and scholarly working papers
Marine Insurance Policies, Radcliffe of Hitchin Priory papers, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, DE/R/B293; A. B. Leonard, The Pricing Revolution in Marine Insurance; LONDON ASSURANCE, The London Archives, GB 0074 CLC/B/192-26On: Merchant Depositions and Insurance Claims - The three depositions enclosed with Woodes Rogers's despatch of 31 October 1718 describe seizures by Spanish guarda costas and Spanish periaugas rather than by the Anglo-American pirate companies of the Bahamas, although they are calendared within piracy correspondence.
Calendar of state papers (printed and digitised)
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 30, 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlam (1930), entry 737, enclosures iii, iv and viiOn: Merchant Depositions and Insurance Claims - The cluster as scoped for the Archive comprises five New England sermon pamphlets, four by Cotton Mather on the executions of 1704, 1717, 1723 and 1726 and one by Benjamin Colman on the same 1726 condemned company; one American gallows broadside, the dying speeches of the six pirates executed at Boston in 1704; the Ordinary of Newgate's account of Captain William Kidd, signed Paul Lorrain and printed for E. Mallet in Bride-lane in 1701 as one sheet of two pages, alongside at least one rival unofficial last-speech sheet on the same hanging; and four ballad artefacts, being two Pepys sheets on Henry Every, the London Kidd lament and its Boston reprint of about 1810 to 1814.
Printed pamphlets, broadsides and ballads, with library catalogue records
Cotton Mather, "Faithful warnings to prevent fearful judgments", Boston, 1704, Evans-TCP N00981; "Instructions to the living, from the condition of the dead", Boston, 1717, Evans-TCP N01600; "Useful remarks", New London, 1723, Evans-TCP N02066; "The vial poured out upon the sea", Boston, 1726, Evans-TCP N02345; Benjamin Colman, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God", Boston, 1726, Evans-TCP N02300 (Confirmed for the five sermon pamphlets); "An account of the behaviour and last dying speeches of the six pirates", Boston, 1704, Library of Congress, Printed Ephemera Collection, Portfolio 33, Folder 34, digital identifier rbpe.03303400 (Confirmed for the broadside); "The ordinary of Newgate his account... of Captain William Kidd", London, printed for E. Mallet, 1701, catalogue record, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries (Confirmed for the imprint and form); catalogue record 2081502, Falvey Library, Villanova University, for the rival sheet "A true account of the behaviour, confession and last dying speeches, of Captain William Kidd" (Probable, title only, the full record not retrieved); English Broadside Ballad Archive records EBBA 20813, EBBA 22206, EBBA 33482 and the American Antiquarian Society record BIB ID 276904 (Confirmed for the four ballads)On: Execution Sermons, Broadsides and Ballads - All five New England sermon pamphlets carry freely reusable encoded full texts under the Evans Text Creation Partnership identifiers N00981, N01600, N02066, N02300 and N02345; the 1704 broadside is held at the Library of Congress, Printed Ephemera Collection, Portfolio 33, Folder 34, digital identifier rbpe.03303400, where the copy is a positive photostat noted "Not in Evans"; Lorrain's Kidd sheet is reproduced from a British Library original with a second hard copy at the Huntington Library, call number 14152; and the ballads survive as Pepys Ballads 2.199 and 5.384 at Magdalene College, Cambridge, as "Captain Kid's Farewel to the Seas" at the National Library of Scotland, Crawford.EB.843, and as the Nathaniel Coverly Boston reprint of about 1810 to 1814 at the American Antiquarian Society, which titles it for "Captain Robert Kidd".
Library catalogue and digital archive records
Evans Text Creation Partnership phase one texts N00981, N01600, N02066, N02300 and N02345, hosted by the Oxford Text Archive and the University of Michigan Library under Creative Commons Zero (Confirmed from the rights statement carried at the foot of the texts); Library of Congress catalogue record for "An account of the behaviour and last dying speeches of the six pirates", digital identifier rbpe.03303400, LCCN 2020776687, with the notes "Positive Photostat.; Not in Evans." (Confirmed); catalogue record for "The ordinary of Newgate his account... of Captain William Kidd", University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, noting the reproduction of a British Library original, and the Huntington Library rare books call number 14152 (Confirmed); English Broadside Ballad Archive records EBBA 20813 for Pepys Ballads 2.199, EBBA 22206 for Pepys Ballads 5.384 and EBBA 33482 for National Library of Scotland Crawford.EB.843, and American Antiquarian Society, Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project, BIB ID 276904, for "The dying words of Captain Robert Kidd" (Confirmed)On: Execution Sermons, Broadsides and Ballads - The English Pilot, The Fourth Book, describing the West-India navigation from Hudson's Bay to the River Amazon, was produced by William Fisher and John Thornton and first issued in 1689, and was the first wholly English sea-atlas of American waters.
Library research guide and printed sea atlas
Library of Congress, Nautical Charts research guide, British pre-1800 charts; The English Pilot. The Fourth Book, John Carter Brown Library copy, imprint 1745On: Contemporary Maps and Sea Charts - The plates of the Fourth Book passed to Mount and Page and their successors, who printed the book for over a century, Library of Congress holdings of The English Pilot spanning 1671 to 1792, with at least 37 editions issued between 1689 and 1794 and the chart count rising from 18 to 26.
Library research guide and carto-bibliography cited at second hand
Library of Congress, Nautical Charts research guide, British pre-1800 charts; Coolie Verner, A Carto-bibliographical Study of The English Pilot The Fourth Book (1960), with Phillips, Atlases number 4460, as cited in a dealer description rather than consulted directlyOn: Contemporary Maps and Sea Charts - The National Archives, Kew, MPG 1/253, dated 1723 and catalogued as "The Plan of the Harbour of Providence", is an enclosure to Governor Phenney's despatch of 1 March 1722-3 extracted from CO 23/13 folios 101 and 102, measuring 53.3 cm by 74.9 cm, and the catalogue descriptions of the extracted-map classes name both the place depicted and the document the map was taken from.
Archive piece description and research guide
Bahamas: Nassau, 'The Plan of the Harbour of Providence', MPG 1/253, The National Archives catalogue record C3980942; The National Archives, Overseas maps and plans research guideOn: Contemporary Maps and Sea Charts - MPG 1/1016, dated 1731 and extracted from CO 23/2, carries five plans on a single sheet showing the fort at Nassau as found in ruins by Governor Phenney, as repaired and enlarged by him and as designed to be finished by him, together with a plan and section of Fort Walpole guarding the eastern entrance to the harbour, drawn by Edward Oakley and engraved by B. Col.
Archive piece description
Bahamas: New Providence Island, plans of the fort at Nassau and of Fort Walpole, MPG 1/1016, The National Archives catalogue record C3981705On: Contemporary Maps and Sea Charts - The best-known detailed plans of Nassau harbour, MPG 1/14 and MPG 1/15, were surveyed by the engineer John Montresor by order of Major General Thomas Gage and extracted from CO 5/88, MPG 1/15 catalogued as 1770 and MPG 1/14 with its date bracketed as an archivist's inference, so both postdate the golden age by roughly half a century.
Archive piece descriptions
Bahamas: New Providence, Montresor's draught and plan of the harbour and town, MPG 1/14 and MPG 1/15, The National Archives catalogue records C3980703 and C3980704On: Contemporary Maps and Sea Charts - The most reproduced printed charts of the Madagascar pirate anchorages, of the principal harbour and town of Ile Sainte-Marie and of the Bay of Antongil, were published by William Herbert in 1767 in the third edition of A New Directory for the East Indies, two generations after the Red Sea voyages they are used to illustrate.
Printed chart in a navigational directory, dealer catalogue description
William Herbert, plans of the harbour of Isl. S. Maries and the Bay of Antongall, engraved by John Spilsbury, published 1767 in A New Directory for the East Indies, third edition, as catalogued by Geographicus Rare Antique MapsOn: Contemporary Maps and Sea Charts - Scale ship draughts as drawings are effectively absent from the English record for vessels of 1690 to 1725, the national collection at Royal Museums Greenwich being described as holding over one million original ship plans dating back to the early 18th century, with the Admiralty Collection accounting for around 8,000 plans representing approximately 10,000 ships; for hulls of this period the technical record is textual, and no contemporary draught of a vessel sailed under a pirate flag was located in the catalogues consulted.
Collection description and archival catalogue records
Royal Museums Greenwich, "Our collections: Ship plans collection", for the quoted extent and the early eighteenth-century starting date (Confirmed as the museum's statement); the general claim about survival, and the absence of any pirate draught, rest on the catalogues consulted and are ProbableOn: Ship Plans, Surveys and Fitting Accounts - The English naval side of the cluster is carried by four classes at The National Archives, Kew: ADM 106, Navy Board: Records, 1650 to 1837, comprising in-letters, indexes and digests, entry books of out-letters, registers and miscellanea; ADM 180, the Navy Board and Admiralty Progress and Dimension Books, 1620 to 1912, registering naval vessels by construction, date and place of launching, refitting, complement and armament, of which ADM 180/1 covers 1694 to 1734 and is indexed; ADM 95, 1688 to 1959, carrying reports on sailing qualities, estimates and orders for shipbuilding and stores and lists of ships built, repaired or building; and ADM 49, 1658 to 1932, with the contracts and estimates, beside ADM 42 for yard wages and ADM 106/3120 for ships lost, sold or converted between 1688 and 1730.
Archival catalogue records
The National Archives, Kew, series descriptions for ADM 106, ADM 180, ADM 95, ADM 49 and ADM 42, and piece descriptions for ADM 180/1 ("Progress books", Book 1, indexed, 1694 to 1734) and ADM 106/3120 ("List and description of ships lost, sold or converted", 1688 to 1730), consulted through Discovery (Confirmed)On: Ship Plans, Surveys and Fitting Accounts - For merchant and private vessels the equivalent record is customs and prize administration rather than any builder's paper: the Exchequer port books, E 190, 1565 to 1798, record shipping movements and cargoes arranged by port and by customs official rather than by ship and describe no hull structure, while the letter-of-marque declarations in HCA 26, 1689 to 1809, required a commander to declare before the High Court of Admiralty specified details of the ship, its armaments, its crew and its officers, the registers from 1689 to 1783 being internally indexed; there was no compulsory general registration of British merchant shipping before the Shipping and Navigation Act of 1786.
Archival catalogue records and repository research guide
The National Archives, Kew, series descriptions for E 190, Exchequer: King's Remembrancer: Port Books, and for HCA 26, High Court of Admiralty: Prize Court: Registers of Declarations for Letters of Marque (Confirmed); The National Archives research guide "Merchant Navy ships' records: registration of merchant ships", for the 1786 Act (Confirmed)On: Ship Plans, Surveys and Fitting Accounts - HCA 26/3/58, dated 11 December 1695, records the commander William Kidd, the ship Adventure Galley, burden 287 tons, crew 70, armament 34 guns and folio 59, with the owners given as Admiral Russell, Robert Levingstone, an unnamed party and William Kidd himself.
Archival catalogue record, item level
The National Archives, Kew, HCA 26/3/58, item description in Discovery, the full description carrying the burden, crew, armament, folio, owners and officers (Confirmed as the content of the declaration; the 1701 trial account gives 30 guns, and the ship record carries both counts). The commonly repeated attribution of the ship's building to a yard at Deptford could not be traced to a catalogued primary reference and is not assertedOn: Ship Plans, Surveys and Fitting Accounts - The Navy Board in-letters document the ships sent against pirates and name Kidd at item level: ADM 106/513/51, of 1697, is a letter from Captain Thomas Warren of the Windsor at the Cape of Good Hope which lists the Adventure Galley among its ships, and ADM 106/513/342, of 12 June 1697, is a long and detailed report from Warren at Cadiz Bay; both are findable because the in-letters were catalogued to item level across the whole run of ADM 106/281 to 1299, 1,019 boxes, the work completed in September 2019.
Archival catalogue records, item level, and project finding aid
The National Archives, Kew, ADM 106/513/51 and ADM 106/513/342, item descriptions in Discovery, both naming Kidd and the Adventure Galley (Confirmed); The National Archives series note for ADM 106 and the Naval Dockyards Society Navy Board Project page, for the run of 1,019 boxes and the September 2019 completion, the project page's figure of 881 boxes being a superseded interim count (Confirmed)On: Ship Plans, Surveys and Fitting Accounts - North Carolina publishes the work at 31CR314 as a numbered public series, the Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project Research Report and Bulletin Series, free online and with conservation, artefact-class and historical-background reports issued separately under codes such as QAR-R-09-02 and QAR-B-07-03.
Modern archaeological report series
Mark Wilde-Ramsing, Historical Background for the Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Site, QAR-R-09-02, August 2009 (SRC015-003); Linda Carnes-McNaughton, Brick and Tile from 31CR314, QAR-B-07-03, 2007 (SRC015-005)On: Modern Archaeological Reports - Florida administers the 1715 plate fleet wrecks through consent contracts and permit files under Chapter 267 of the Florida Statutes, and exclusive salvage rights to the 1715 wreckage are reported to have passed to a commercial company in 2010.
Regulatory guidance and press analysis
Laws, Underwater Archaeology, Florida Division of Historical Resources, Department of State (SRC015-020); Florida coin hoard worth $1m resurfaces debate over treasure hunting, The Art Newspaper, 30 January 2026 (SRC015-022)On: Modern Archaeological Reports - The bronze bell from 31CR314 is dated 1705 and carries no ship's name, so the identification rests on location relative to a documented loss, wreck-scatter size, assemblage character and the documentary chain back to La Concorde of Nantes, a case contested in print in 2005 and defended in 2012.
Modern archaeology, fact sheet and peer-reviewed articles
Queen Anne's Revenge Fact Sheet, Queen Anne's Revenge Project (SRC015-002); Bradley A. Rodgers, Nathan Richards and Wayne Lusardi, 'Ruling Theories Linger': Questioning the Identity of the Beaufort Inlet Shipwreck, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 34(1), 2005, pages 24 to 37 (SRC015-007); Mark U. Wilde-Ramsing and Charles R. Ewen, Beyond Reasonable Doubt: A Case for Queen Anne's Revenge, Historical Archaeology 46(2), 2012, pages 110 to 133 (SRC015-006)On: Modern Archaeological Reports - Professional criticism of archaeological collaboration with commercially financed salvage was set out by Ricardo J. Elia in The Ethics of Collaboration: Archaeologists and the Whydah Project, Historical Archaeology 26, number 4, 1992, pages 105 to 117, which argues that such participation breaches the conservation ethic and imperils permanent curation.
Peer-reviewed archaeology
Ricardo J. Elia, The Ethics of Collaboration: Archaeologists and the Whydah Project, Historical Archaeology 26(4), 1992, pages 105 to 117, citation verified via aggregator rather than against the journal (SRC015-012)On: Modern Archaeological Reports - The museum-object cluster is a class of evidence rather than a record series, dividing into an archaeological population of artefacts raised under state permit from two North American shipwrecks, a curatorial population of a small number of museum objects whose connection to piracy is commemorative, judicial or traditional, and a much larger penumbra of items whose pirate attribution rests on the assertion of later owners; the shipwreck material dates from roughly 1690 to 1725 and the associated commemorative, printed and judicial objects run later, to a 1734 engraving at Greenwich and a gibbet cage of 1750 to 1800.
Museum object records, agency excavation publications and institutional catalogue searches
Composite of the cluster's own institutional records as surveyed in the August 2026 research: Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project, North Carolina Office of State Archaeology; Whydah Pirate Museum, West Yarmouth; Royal Museums Greenwich (PAD2721, 1734); London Museum (object ID 53.14, dated 1750 to 1800)On: Museum Objects and Material Culture - The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, holds a coconut cup in a silver mount associated with Captain Chaloner Ogle and his defeat of Bartholomew Roberts at Cape Lopez on 10 February 1722, referenced T4426, that reference being inferred from the naming of image files on the museum's own feature and returning no record in the Royal Museums Greenwich collections search, and the museum declines to assert that the mount was made from Roberts's plundered silver, writing, "But we cannot be absolutely certain of any of this"; the judicial material is represented by the London Museum's wrought iron gibbet cage, object ID 53.14, dated 1750 to 1800 and held on long-term loan, which post-dates the golden age and is attributed to no named pirate.
Museum interpretive feature and museum object record
Royal Museums Greenwich, "Death of Bartholomew Roberts" (Captain Ogle's cup), for the description, the T4426 image-file reference and the quoted refusal (Confirmed as the museum's wording; Probable for the reference, which is inferred and unconfirmable in the collections search); London Museum, "Cage, gibbet", object ID 53.14, 1750 to 1800, long-term loan (Confirmed)On: Museum Objects and Material Culture - Outside the two excavated wrecks there is a near-total absence of authenticated personal artefacts belonging to identified golden-age pirates, Royal Museums Greenwich stating that very few flags survive from the golden age of piracy and that most of what is known about pirate flag design comes from eyewitness accounts, newspapers or books rather than from surviving textiles; no authenticated pirate flag of the 1690 to 1725 period has been identified in the collections and catalogues searched, which is the limit of the search rather than a proved negative.
Museum interpretive feature and survey of institutional collections
Royal Museums Greenwich, "Pirate flags decoded", for the museum's published position on the survival of flags (Confirmed); the wider absence of authenticated personal artefacts, and the failure to identify any authenticated flag of the period, rest on the collections and catalogues surveyed and are ProbableOn: Museum Objects and Material Culture - Soon after the Restoration the civil business of the High Court of Admiralty divided into an instance court, which sat continuously, and a prize court, which existed only in wartime and was revived by commission as needed; the surviving records of both are held at The National Archives, Kew, under the HCA letter code.
Archive research guide and catalogue
The National Archives, High Court of Admiralty records research guide (SRC017-001); HCA 32, High Court of Admiralty: Prize Court: Prize Papers, catalogue series description (SRC017-003)On: Court of Admiralty Prize Cases - Letters of marque required a warrant from the Admiralty to the Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, a declaration on oath by the commander reciting his ship, her burden, her armament, his crew and his owners, and security given by sureties, the bond being replaced by the bail from 1696 and the Deputy Marshal certifying from 1689 that the sureties were sufficient; adjudication then ended in a sentence either condemning ship and cargo as lawful prize or restoring them as neutral or friendly property.
Archive catalogue and research guide
HCA 25, High Court of Admiralty: Prize Court: Warrants, Bonds and Bails for Letters of Marque, catalogue series description (SRC017-004); The National Archives, High Court of Admiralty records research guide (SRC017-001)On: Court of Admiralty Prize Cases - The prize sequence for 1690 to 1725 runs across HCA 26, the registers of declarations for letters of marque from 1689; HCA 25, the warrants, bonds and bails; HCA 32, the prize papers, whose alphabetical runs at HCA 32/49 to 32/93 carry covering dates within 1692 to 1727; HCA 34/15 to HCA 34/30, the sentences for 1689 to 1722; HCA 41 and HCA 42 for appeals; and HCA 49, the vice-admiralty proceedings, which also holds records arising from trials of pirates, 1723 to 1733.
Archive catalogue series and piece entries
The National Archives catalogue descriptions for HCA 25 (SRC017-004), HCA 26 (SRC017-006), HCA 32 (SRC017-010), HCA 34 and its pieces HCA 34/15 to HCA 34/30 (SRC017-002, SRC017-011), HCA 41 (SRC017-014), HCA 42 (SRC017-015) and HCA 49 (SRC017-005)On: Court of Admiralty Prize Cases - A declaration for letters of marque of 11 December 1695, catalogued as HCA 26/3/58 at folio 59 of the register, records William Kidd as commander of the Adventure Galley, of 287 tons and 34 guns with a crew of 70, and names Admiral Russell, Robert Levingstone and Kidd himself among the owners.
Archive catalogue item entry
Declaration for letters of marque, William Kidd, Adventure Galley, The National Archives, HCA 26/3/58, folio 59 (SRC017-019); Confirmed as the content of the declaration, the 1701 trial account giving 30 guns and the ship record carrying both countsOn: Court of Admiralty Prize Cases - Captain Howard of HMS Shoreham reported on 15 September 1716 that the Jamaica sloops working the Spanish wrecks held commissions "from the Governor of Jamaica for the taking pirates, under which pretence they search the vessels", and that three of them had "turned pirates since. One Horngold, Jennings and Fernando".
Calendared colonial correspondence
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. 29, November 1716, entry 408.ii, Capt. Howard, HMS Shoreham, to Mr Burchett, South Carolina, 15 September 1716; originals at The National Archives, CO 137/12 (SRC017-021)On: Court of Admiralty Prize Cases - HCA 32 is unevenly catalogued for this period: every war except those of 1652 to 1697 is described at least by the name of the ship and the name of the master, only the War of the Austrian Succession, HCA 32/94 to 32/159, carries the full modern description, and the Nine Years War material remains flagged as under arrangement, though the pieces redistributed to HCA 32/1850 onwards in 2022 are described at item level.
Archive catalogue series and subseries descriptions
HCA 32, High Court of Admiralty: Prize Court: Prize Papers, catalogue series description including arrangement note (SRC017-003); Nine Years War [under arrangement], HCA 32 subseries description (SRC017-008); captured ships with names beginning A, HCA 32/1850, described at item level (SRC017-009)On: Court of Admiralty Prize Cases - Colonial council minutes form a single documentary class across the colonies, kept by a clerk of the council and divisible into an executive sequence, in which the council advised the governor on proclamations, commissions, pardons, seizures and the arrangement of trials, and a legislative sequence, in which the same body sat as the upper house of the assembly; in New York the two were entered separately only in volumes 6 to 8, covering 1691 to 1702, and were mingled in the same books in volumes 9 to 17, 1702 to 1736, which are the volumes covering the piracy years.
Printed calendar of a colonial council minute series
Berthold Fernow, compiler, Calendar of Council Minutes 1668 to 1783, New York State Library Bulletin, Albany, University of the State of New York, 1902, preface and day entries (Internet Archive identifier calendarofcounci00newy)On: Colonial Council Minutes - Council minutes were made because the governor could act in specified matters only with the advice and consent of his council, and they accumulated in duplicate because copies were to be transmitted to England, an obligation traced to an order of 14 January 1679/80 that copies of the journals of the House of Burgesses and of the Council, in both its legislative and its executive capacity, be sent over, with compliance decaying thereafter; the duty was also policed inside the colonies, Governor Walter Hamilton of the Leeward Islands ordering his own secretaries, deputy secretaries and clerks in October 1718 to make good the arrears the Council of Trade required and to deliver copies of the Minutes of Council and Assembly quarterly henceforward, on pain of suspension.
Printed edition of a colonial council minute book and calendar of state papers
H. R. McIlwaine, editor, Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, volume 3, Richmond, Virginia State Library, 1928, preface, for the order of 14 January 1679/80 and the decay of compliance; Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 30, 1717 to 1718, edited by Cecil Headlam, London, 1930, entry 736 and enclosure 736 ii, Governor Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Antigua, 26 October 1718, CO 152/12, Nos. 124, 124 i and ii (the Hamilton order Confirmed as calendared)On: Colonial Council Minutes - The councils gave jurisdictional opinions on the trial of pirates and reached opposite conclusions: on 29 October 1718 the Virginia Council, having read the English statutes, the colony's own act and the commission under the Great Seal issued in pursuance of the act of 11 and 12 William III, resolved that William Howard the pirate then in the public gaol be tried by virtue of that commission, whereas the New York Council had given the opinion on 14 November 1717 that pirates could not be tried under the commission of King William.
Printed edition of a colonial council minute book and printed calendar of a council minute series
H. R. McIlwaine, editor, Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, volume 3, 1928, session of 29 October 1718 (Confirmed, quoted from the printed text); Berthold Fernow, Calendar of Council Minutes 1668 to 1783, Albany, 1902, abstract of the minute of 14 November 1717 (Confirmed as calendared; the wording is the calendar's abstract, not the manuscript)On: Colonial Council Minutes - The Virginia Council audited the administrative aftermath of the campaign against Thach in its own arithmetic: on 2 May 1719 it received proof of the pirates of Edward Thach's crew killed in the engagement with the King's sloops, and of others taken, tried and convicted, and advised payment of the rewards demanded under the acts of assembly; on 22 February 1719/20 it named eight men lately convicted of piracy and ordered two of them hung in chains at Tindalls Point in York River and two more at Urbanna in Rappahannock River; and on 22 April 1720 it advised pardon for two of the eight whom the governor had reprieved, six of the same gang having already suffered.
Printed edition of a colonial council minute book
H. R. McIlwaine, editor, Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, volume 3, Richmond, Virginia State Library, 1928, sessions of 2 May 1719, 22 February 1719/20 and 22 April 1720. The count of six executions and two pardons is internal to the record and is reported as suchOn: Colonial Council Minutes - Outside Virginia the class survives for the piracy years chiefly as enclosures to governors' despatches: Governor Woodes Rogers's despatch from Nassau of 31 October 1718 records the constitution of the first royal council of the Bahamas, six men he brought out with him sworn together with six found in the islands, and the council's own proceedings for 1 August to 28 September 1718 travelled with that letter and are now CO 23/1, No. 10 ii.
Calendar of state papers with council minutes as enclosure
Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, volume 30, 1717 to 1718, edited by Cecil Headlam, London, 1930, entry 737, Governor Woodes Rogers to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Nassau, 31 October 1718, CO 23/1, Nos. 10 and 10 i to viii (Confirmed as calendared)On: Colonial Council Minutes - T 70 is the class reference at The National Archives, Kew, for the records of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and its successors, the principal surviving corporate archive of the chartered companies that ran the crown's Africa trade, given covering dates of 1660 to 1833 and an extent of about 1,696 volumes.
Archive catalogue
The National Archives, Discovery catalogue description of series T 70, Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and successors: Records, series record C13807 under the Treasury division node C3489576On: The Royal African Company Records (TNA T70) - The series was generated by three successive chartered bodies: the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa, active in the 1660s and dated in the catalogue to about 1663 to 1672; the Royal African Company of England, chartered in 1672 with a monopoly of the Africa trade that was opened to separate traders in 1698 and running to about 1750; and the regulated Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, which administered the forts from 1750 until they passed to the crown in the early 1820s, all three date ranges being catalogue approximations.
Archive catalogue
The National Archives, Discovery catalogue administrative history for series T 70, series record C13807 under the Treasury division node C3489576On: The Royal African Company Records (TNA T70) - T 70 holds the London records of the Court of Assistants and its committees together with ledgers, journals, cash accounts and invoice and abstract books, and the overseas records of Cape Coast Castle and the subordinate forts and factories of the Gold Coast, Slave Coast, River Gambia and Sierra Leone, comprising inward and outward letter-books, fort accounts and inventories, registers of servants, soldiers and shipping, name-index volumes called alphabets and registers of ships' passes, with the Company's duty ledgers at T 70/349 to T 70/356 for about 1698 to 1713 and only a small number of surviving Company log books.
Archive catalogue and research guide
The National Archives, Discovery catalogue description of series T 70, series record C13807 under the Treasury division node C3489576; The National Archives, Slavery and the British transatlantic slave trade records research guideOn: The Royal African Company Records (TNA T70) - T 70 is a first-order primary source of contemporaneous, internally generated business records, and it is also the core archive of the Company's slave trade, recording enslaved people overwhelmingly as commodities through numbers shipped, prices paid, losses through death on the Middle Passage and cargo entries rather than as named persons.
Archive catalogue and research guide
The National Archives, Discovery catalogue description of series T 70, series record C13807 under the Treasury division node C3489576; The National Archives, Slavery and the British transatlantic slave trade records research guideOn: The Royal African Company Records (TNA T70) - The printed pirate trial pamphlets are a class of printed primary source: published proceedings of colonial courts of oyer and terminer and vice-admiralty piracy sessions, issued for sale in the colonies and in London chiefly during the 1710s and 1720s.
Trial pamphlets
The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates (1721); The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet, and other Pirates (London, 1719); A Full and Exact Account, of the Tryal of all the Pyrates, lately taken by Captain Ogle (London, 1723)On: The Printed Pirate Trial Pamphlets - These pamphlets are official records shaped by the prosecution and are print renderings rather than the manuscript minute, so they should be collated against the surviving manuscript Admiralty record at The National Archives, Kew, in the High Court of Admiralty criminal series, class HCA 1, and against colonial and newspaper sources.
Secondary study of court procedure
Global Maritime History, Through the Eyes of the Court: researching maritime history through a critical understanding of High Court of Admiralty criminal procedureOn: The Printed Pirate Trial Pamphlets - The shipworm Teredo navalis, a boring bivalve mollusc rather than a true worm, tunnelled through submerged timber and could destroy a hull from within if left unchecked.
Species database
Texas Invasive Species database, Naval Shipworm, Teredo navalisOn: Careening and the Haven Economy - Disease, shipboard accident, shipwreck, exposure and drink killed far more golden-age pirates than combat did, scurvy, dysentery, malaria, yellow fever, smallpox and the venereal diseases thinning every crew that spent months at sea and the tropical and West African waters being especially lethal, and the surviving trial records reconstructed by Marcus Rediker show a body of overwhelmingly young men, most of them in their twenties; no pirate-specific mortality figures survive, so no proportion can be stated as a number.
Secondary maritime history and demographic reconstruction
Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, Beacon Press, 2004On: Death: Battle, Disease and the Gallows - The name "Jolly Roger" is attested in print by 1724.
Period narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, 1724On: Flags and the Jolly Roger - The horned skeleton spearing a bleeding heart, widely sold as Blackbeard's flag, has no eighteenth-century evidence behind it: the design first appears in a Mariner's Mirror article of 1912 and was attached to Edward Teach only afterwards, the sole contemporary account of his colours being a newspaper report of 1718 describing "Black Flags and Deaths Heads in them" and other sloops carrying "Bloody Flags".
Institutional archaeology publication citing period newspaper
Queen Anne's Revenge Project, Did You Know Blackbeard's Flag is a Modern Design?, 6 October 2017, citing the historian E. T. FoxOn: Flags and the Jolly Roger - No original golden-age pirate flag is known to survive, so nearly every design in circulation is a reconstruction from a verbal description in a log, a newspaper or the 1724 General History, or from a later illustrator's invention.
Institutional archaeology publication
Queen Anne's Revenge Project, Did You Know Blackbeard's Flag is a Modern Design?On: Flags and the Jolly Roger - The theatrical pirate courtroom of popular imagination derives largely from Johnson's account of the crew of Thomas Anstis holding a Mock Court of Judicature to try one another for Pyracy on an island off Cuba in 1722 while they waited for news of a pardon, an episode described by its own source as a burlesque and a pastime, a parody of the royal courts that hanged pirates rather than a working instrument of discipline, serious discipline having run instead through the vote of the company.
Period narrative with modern annotation
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, 1724; Anstis Crew Mock Trial, World History CommonsOn: Pirate Justice and Discipline - The document's third article does not repeat the second article's allowance of one bottle of powder, one bottle of water and one small arm and shot; it prescribes that a man who steals from the company, or games for stakes up to the value of a piece of eight, shall be marooned or shot.
Pirate articles as printed
Articles of Captain John Phillips of the Revenge, 1724, Articles II and IIIOn: Marooning - Edward England was voted out of his command by his own crew, who judged him too lenient towards prisoners after the taking of the Cassandra and the treatment of Captain James Macrae, and was marooned on Mauritius in 1720, afterwards making his way to Madagascar; the account rests substantially on the 1724 General History of the Pyrates and its particulars cannot be carried above probable.
Period narrative with embellishment
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, 1724On: Marooning - Plunder was converted to value ashore through complicit colonial merchants who bought pirate goods below the market price and resold them as ordinary imports, through governors and customs officers who took bribes or shares, and through resident traders such as Adam Baldridge, who ran a fortified post on St Mary's Island off Madagascar that bought from the Indian Ocean crews and was supplied with trade goods from New York by the merchant Frederick Philipse, with enslaved people sent back in exchange; the complicity is documented but the volumes and prices of any single network are not, the trade surviving only in gubernatorial correspondence, Board of Trade complaints, Baldridge's deposition of 1699 and later prosecutions.
Deposition and secondary scholarship
Adam Baldridge's deposition, 1699, and his career on St Mary's Island with his supply relationship to Frederick Philipse of New York; Mark G. Hanna, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740, 2015On: Prizes, Cargoes and Fencing - The buried hoard and the treasure map are nineteenth-century literary inventions, with David Cordingly judging the influence of Treasure Island on the popular idea of piracy impossible to overstate and the treasure map an entirely fictional device.
Secondary scholarship
David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates, 1995On: Prizes, Cargoes and Fencing - In the one systematic count of pirate origins, drawn from surviving trial depositions of Anglo-American pirates of about 1716 to 1726, of 157 men whose earlier employment is recorded 155 had come from the merchant service, the Royal Navy or privateering and 144 from the merchant service alone, with probably fewer than five per cent originating as shipboard mutineers.
Modern social history resting on trial depositions
Marcus Rediker, "Under the Banner of King Death: The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716 to 1726", William and Mary Quarterly, 1981On: Recruitment: Volunteers and Forced Men - Volunteers were recruited at the taking of a prize, where the captured company was offered the pirates' articles and signing the articles made a man a member with a share, and companies preferred unattached men, crews being recorded as refusing to take a married man on the reasoning that ties ashore invited desertion, with only 23 of 521 sampled pirates known to have been married.
Modern social history resting on trial depositions
Marcus Rediker, "Under the Banner of King Death", 1981; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, 1724, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, for the recruitment scenesOn: Recruitment: Volunteers and Forced Men - Forcing was the compulsory recruitment of captives out of prizes and fell chiefly on skilled tradesmen, carpenters, surgeons, coopers, caulkers, sailmakers and sometimes musicians, because those trades were scarce and a company at sea could not replace them by hire; a forced man might be made to sign the articles under duress, which complicated any later claim that he had never consented.
Public history synthesis of trial records, with period narrative
"The Peril of Pirate Captives in Colonial America", We're History; A General History of the Pyrates, 1724; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Recruitment: Volunteers and Forced Men - Captives of Edward Low's company around 1723 testified to having been seized under threat, William Phillips saying the pirates had threatened to blow his brains out and being convicted despite corroboration by shipmates before a later pardon, while William White, who said he had been drunk when he joined, was convicted and hanged, showing both that forcing was real and that the courts frequently refused to credit it.
Public history synthesis of trial records
"The Peril of Pirate Captives in Colonial America", We're HistoryOn: Recruitment: Volunteers and Forced Men - No independent manuscript of either surviving share-and-compensation article-set has been found, crews having destroyed their articles to deny the evidence at trial, so the printed figures establish the terms two companies agreed on paper and it remains unestablished whether the ratios or the injury payments were honoured in any actual sharing-out.
Period narrative and secondary scholarship
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, 1724, with Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 2004On: Plunder, Shares and Compensation - The shares were reckoned far more often in goods than in coin, provisions, sugar, cloth, ships' stores, tools, medicines, alcohol, logwood and enslaved people being the common substance of a capture, with coin appearing as the exception the sources single out, as at Roberts's taking of a richly laden Portuguese ship at Bahia in 1719.
Secondary scholarship and period narrative
Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 2004 and the 1724 General History on BahiaOn: Plunder, Shares and Compensation - Enslaved people found aboard a captured prize were, with rare exceptions, disposed of as property rather than freed, being sold to planters or traders, ransomed, or kept aboard as forced labour; the surviving Africans of La Concorde, set ashore at Bequia and afterwards carried to Martinique by the French, have sale into colonial slavery rather than liberation as their presumed outcome.
Modern scholarship and project history
Queen Anne's Revenge Project, qaronline.org, accessed 2026; Yangas, "Black Pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy: Men Seeking Escape", Historia (Eastern Illinois University), 2014On: The Slave-Trade Nexus - The English naval allowance of the period was a weekly cycle resting on a daily pound of biscuit and a daily gallon of beer, a quantity already specified in a victualling contract drawn up by Samuel Pepys in 1677, with instructions transmitted as those of 1690 adding beef on four named days, pork or bacon with a pint of pease in Winchester measure on the alternating days, and fish with two ounces of butter and four ounces of cheese on the other three; the 1690 scale reaches this record through a nineteenth-century printing and a later transcription of it, and a modern reconstruction of the same cycle puts oatmeal rather than fish on the meatless days.
Period administrative records in later transcription, with institutional and modern reconstructions
Victualling Instructions 1690, transcribed from Ancient Naval Records as printed in the Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle for 1848, pages 326 to 329 and 478 to 482; Smithsonian Libraries, Beer on Board in the Age of Sail; Naval Gazing, Naval Rations Part 1On: Alcohol, Food and Water at Sea - Royal Navy pursers received provisions by one measure and issued them by another, sixteen ounces received against fourteen ounces issued for dry provisions including butter and cheese and a purser's quart of thirty-five fluid ounces for liquids, a shortfall of twelve and a half per cent sanctioned by custom, and retained a further eighth of what was supplied against loss and wastage, though the evidence for the two measures is a manual of 1761, so their application to the years 1690 to 1725 is inference rather than a sourced statement.
Peer reviewed accounting and business history article
Karen McBride, Tony Hines and Russell Craig, "A rum deal: The purser's measure and accounting control of materials in the Royal Navy, 1665 to 1832", Business History 58:6 (2016), pages 925 to 946On: Alcohol, Food and Water at Sea - Naval small beer was weak, sometimes under one per cent alcohol, which is what makes a gallon a day intelligible as a ration rather than an indulgence, and where beer would not survive the climate it was replaced at fixed equivalences by wine in southern waters and by rum in the West Indies, where rum had begun to displace beer from 1655.
Institutional library essay
Smithsonian Libraries, Unbound, Beer on Board in the Age of Sail, 2 August 2017On: Alcohol, Food and Water at Sea - No period ration of fresh water in English naval or merchant service was established for this record, and the best documented instance of a water failure is a pirate one reported by Johnson's General History, which has Bartholomew Roberts's company running some seven hundred leagues for Surinam with one hogshead of water for 124 souls, on an allowance of "one single Mouthful of Water for 24 Hours", men drinking their urine or sea water and dying of it.
Period narrative of contested reliability
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, printed for and sold by T. Warner, 1724; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Alcohol, Food and Water at Sea - A pirate company had no victualling contract, shore establishment or credit and provisioned itself from what it seized, and the articles Johnson prints for Bartholomew Roberts's company open by granting every man "equal Title to the fresh Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized" unless a scarcity, which the compiler notes in parenthesis was "no uncommon Thing among them", made it necessary to vote a retrenchment; Johnson presents those articles as taken from the pirates' own informations and not as a transcript.
Period narrative of contested reliability
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, 1724, articles of Roberts's company; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Alcohol, Food and Water at Sea - The cargoes of the period fall into three trades: plantation goods in sugar, rum and molasses, tobacco, cocoa, indigo and cotton, with ginger, pimento, tortoiseshell, dyers' wood, cedar, mahogany and manchineel wood as minor Jamaica lines; Guinea goods in gold weighed as dust, ivory, gum, camwood and enslaved people; and logwood cut on ground Spain claimed.
Period narrative
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies (1735); A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Cargoes and Commodity Values - A cargo carried at least four values, and Atkins prints two of them for the same commodity: an outward Guinea cargo invoiced at 950 pounds whose last line is 10 hundredweight of cowries at 5 pounds, and a Whydah selling rate for cowries of 12 pounds 10 shillings the hundredweight.
Period narrative with printed accounts
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies (1735), printed invoice and price notes; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Cargoes and Commodity Values - Atkins prints both the barter tables at which trade goods were exchanged for enslaved people and the sterling equivalents, about 15 pounds a head at Sierra Leone allowing the buyer 40 or 50 per cent advance on his goods, and four ounces of gold a head at Cape Apollonia costing at a medium 8 pounds sterling after a 100 per cent advance on goods.
Period narrative with printed accounts
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies (1735), printed trade tables; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Cargoes and Commodity Values - The prevailing winds could trap a company, as when Bartholomew Roberts's men failed to fetch Brava and were driven back with the trade wind to the West Indies, given as 700 leagues to Surinam on one hogshead of water.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd edn 1724, for the Brava episode; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Charts, Maps and Route Knowledge - An East India sailing directory of 1791, used only for a wind regime that is a physical constant, sets out the seasonal grammar of these waters: a monsoon sets in about six months after the opposite one sets in at the same place; the south-west monsoon reaches Surat by the middle of April but is not well set in from Bombay to Cochin until between the end of May and the middle of June, so that it is a moving front rather than a single date; on the coasts of Arabia and Persia south-westerly winds run from early April to the end of August and reverse to fresh easterlies in September; and ships leaving Mocha to the eastward at the end of August or later should keep southerly for the west-south-west winds that blow only till the middle of September.
Printed sailing directory
William Herbert, with William Nichelson and Samuel Dunn, A New Directory for the East-Indies, 1791 edition, chapters on the trade winds and monsoons, on the coasts of Arabia and Persia and on Mocha roadOn: Charts, Maps and Route Knowledge - Evidence at the Cape Coast Castle trial of 1722 records Edward Crisp, Captain Trengrove and Captain Sharp acknowledging that the good usage they had met with was chiefly through Harry Glasby's means, who often interposed for leaving sufficient Stores and Instruments on Board the Ships they had robbed, alledging, they were superfluous and unnecessary there, which establishes that stores and instruments were routinely stripped from prizes.
Trial evidence printed in a period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd edn 1724, the Cape Coast Castle trial matterOn: Charts, Maps and Route Knowledge - William Snelgrave, taken on the Guinea coast in 1719, records that he was questioned about how his ship sailed both large and on a wind and reflected that his journal, when they looked into it, would have made it plainly appear, which establishes that a captured master's written record was read for operational intelligence; his account of his great cabin records broken writing cabinets and two chests of law books emptied over the side as Jaw-work enough to serve a Nation, and mentions no chart, pilot book or navigational instrument anywhere in the narrative.
Period narrative, eyewitness of capture by pirates
William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave-Trade, 1734, optical text of the Internet Archive copy, long s normalisedOn: Charts, Maps and Route Knowledge - The project excavating the wreck identified as Queen Anne's Revenge publishes a pair of dividers of 4.2 inches, described as one of the essential tools used by navigators for determining positions on charts and as nearly identical to a pair recovered from the Whydah Galley, together with a brass sector of 5.1 inches closed and 9.4 inches open for solving problems of proportion; the identification of the site is the excavators' argued conclusion, and the Whydah pair is known only through that comparison.
Modern archaeology
Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project, North Carolina Office of State Archaeology, artefact pages for Dividers and Sector; the site identification as reported in the site's modern archaeological reports recordOn: Charts, Maps and Route Knowledge - No source yet found records a named golden-age pirate company taking a named chart, atlas or pilot book out of a named prize on a named date, and the word chart does not occur in a navigational sense anywhere in the 1724 General History.
Period narratives, stated as an absence in the texts examined
A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd edn 1724, full text searched; William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, 1734, full text searchedOn: Charts, Maps and Route Knowledge - John Atkins, surgeon of HMS Swallow on the 1721 to 1723 African cruise, records that the Weymouth brought out of England a complement of 240 men and had 280 dead upon her books at the end of the voyage.
Period narrative
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies; in His Majesty's ships, the Swallow and Weymouth, London, printed for Caesar Ward and Richard Chandler, 1735; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Disease and Shipboard Medicine - The abstract of the voyage appended to Atkins's 1735 narrative records that during the careening at the Isle of Princes from 28 July 1721 the ships became exceeding sickly by the fatigue, each burying three and four men a day for six weeks together, the word each making the rate one per ship rather than one across both.
Period narrative
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, London, 1735, abstract of the voyage; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Disease and Shipboard Medicine - Atkins gives a single multi-causal account of the 1721 sickness inside a miasmatic frame, naming excessive heat, the irregularity of the seamen, the fatigue of careening, calms and disorderly living together, and none of the sources read here applies malaria, yellow fever or any modern diagnostic category to those deaths.
Period narrative
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, London, 1735; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Disease and Shipboard Medicine - The trial evidence printed with the 1724 General History records that pirate companies had not obliged captured surgeons to sign their articles and changed them on request after a time, that Peter Scudamore was charged with being the first surgeon to sign, and that Harry Glasby prevented the articles being imposed on the surgeon Hamilton and procured the clearing of the surgeon Hunter.
Period narrative incorporating trial evidence
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, printed for T. Warner, 1724, evidence at the 1722 Cape Coast Castle trialsOn: Disease and Shipboard Medicine - The same printed evidence records that a pirate company elected its chief surgeon, that the chief surgeon directed the plundering of medical stores by the pirates' laws and remained with the commodore, and that the office carried a quarter share above the common share, the Doctor being named in that enhanced band in the first of George Lowther's articles as printed.
Period narrative incorporating trial evidence
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, printed for T. Warner, 1724, evidence at the 1722 Cape Coast Castle trials and the printed articles of Roberts and LowtherOn: Disease and Shipboard Medicine - The West Indian hurricane season was public knowledge and was stated in the period's own words by John Atkins, surgeon in the Royal Navy, who printed the rule that "The West-Indians agree, that August and September is the Season to expect them", recorded that hurricanes "give Warning by a preceding unusual Swell of Water" and blow "within a Chanel as it were, one Island feeling it, when the next (within 20 Leagues perhaps) has no Share", and also timed them to the moon nearest the autumnal equinox, which is the physics of his day and is wrong.
Printed contemporary narrative, eyewitness
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, London, 1735; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Hurricanes and Wrecking - Atkins, ashore at Port Royal for the storm of 28 August 1722, recorded that "Of 50 Sail in this Harbour, only 4 Men-of-War and 2 Merchant-Ships rid it out, but with all their Masts and Booms blown away", from which forty-four vessels lost in one harbour in one day follows as an arithmetical derivation from his figures rather than as a number he states, and he further recorded that of the twenty men left on Gun Kay, whom the boats could not reach through the swell, all were washed off and drowned but one.
Printed contemporary narrative, eyewitness
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, London, 1735; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Hurricanes and Wrecking - Under the articles enacted in 1661, which governed the Royal Navy throughout this archive's period, mutiny and desertion were both capital: article 19 forbade any person in or belonging to the fleet to utter words of sedition or mutiny or to make or endeavour to make mutinous assemblies "upon any pretence whatsoever" on pain of death, article 17 imposed death for deserting the service or enticing another man to run, article 15 imposed death for stopping or discouraging a commanded service "by pretence of Arreares of Wages", and under article 34 a death sentence passed within the Narrow Seas could not be executed without the leave of the Lord High Admiral, "except in case of mutiny".
Statute text
An Act for the Establishing Articles and Orders for the regulateing and better Government of His Majesties Navies Ships of Warr & Forces by Sea, 13 Cha. II st. 1 c. 9, as enacted, articles 15, 17, 19 and 34On: Mutiny and Desertion - Merchant crews stood outside the naval articles, which bound only persons in or belonging to the fleet, so that discipline aboard a merchantman rested on the master's authority, on the contract of hire and on the criminal side of the Admiralty, and the merchant risings in this archive came before Admiralty sessions and special courts of Admiralty rather than courts martial; no general statutory code of merchant discipline bound the seaman himself before the Act of 2 Geo. II c. 36, passed in 1729, which introduced written wage contracts, fines and the house of correction.
Statute texts
Navy Act 1661, 13 Cha. II st. 1 c. 9; Merchant Seamen Act 1728, 2 Geo. II c. 36On: Mutiny and Desertion - Section 7 of the Piracy Act of 1721, 8 Geo. I c. 24, legislated against seamen deserting merchant ships abroad in the plantations as "the chief occasion of their turning pirates" and forbade any master or owner to pay a seaman beyond the seas more than one moiety of the wages due, but the scale of desertion cannot be recovered: it was recorded in the muster books of ADM 36 and the pay books of ADM 33 rather than in the captain's log, and for the ships that hunted pirates in these years those musters do not survive, the Swallow's running only to May 1708 and resuming in January 1726.
Statute text and archival catalogue evidence
Piracy Act 1721, 8 Geo. I c. 24, section 7; The National Archives catalogue entries for the musters in ADM 36 and pay books in ADM 33On: Mutiny and Desertion - Between 1690 and 1725 latitude could be observed at sea by measuring the meridian altitude of the sun or a star and applying a printed table of declination, while longitude could not be observed at all and was deduced from the course steered and the distance run, degrading with every hour out of sight of land.
Period printed navigation manual
John Seller, Practical Navigation; or, An Introduction to the whole Art, edition of 1680On: Navigation and Seamanship - The standard English manual of the period sets the reckoning down as a shipboard routine: a log board of six columns recording the hours, the knots, half knots and fathoms run in the space of half a minute, the course steered and the point on which the wind lay, the log being commonly hove every two hours and the last twenty-four hours worked up at noon into one course and distance made good, with fifty feet between knot and knot on the log line, a half minute glass and a sea mile of 6000 English feet, and with leeway not measured at all but left to the discretion of the Calculator, to be allowed according to the mould of the Ship, and the Sail she bears.
Period printed navigation manual
John Seller, Practical Navigation, edition of 1680, the log board, the daily working up and the section Of the Log-Line and half minute GlassOn: Navigation and Seamanship - The Longitude Act, entitled An Act for Providing a Publick Reward for such Person or Persons as shall Discover the Longitude at Sea, offered rewards rising to twenty thousand pounds, half of any reward falling due only when a ship appointed by the Commissioners had sailed from Great Britain to a port in the West Indies without losing her longitude.
Statute text
The Statutes at Large, vol. 13: 12 Anne to 5 George I, 12 Anne stat. 2 c.15, An Act for providing a publick reward for discovering longitude at seaOn: Navigation and Seamanship - The introduction to the 1724 General History of the Pyrates argues that outbound ships ran into the latitude of their destination and then sailed down it, because the Latitude is the only Certainty in those Voyages, and that pirates therefore knew what Latitude to lie in, in order to intercept Ships; that any named company practised deliberate latitude interception rests on that passage alone and is not established beyond it.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London 1724, the introduction; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Navigation and Seamanship - Johnson's General History states that the bar at Old Calabar carried not above 15 Foot Water with an intricate channel, so that the depth as well as the want of a Pilot was a sufficient Security to the Rovers against men of war, that the pirates kept a pilot of their own for the place who was extreamly well paid according to the Journal of their own Accounts, and that the harbour of New Providence had a bar at either entrance over which no ship of 500 tuns could pass; as a description of pirate practice this rests on that single printed source.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London 1724, the Old Calabar and New Providence passages; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Navigation and Seamanship - The Admiralty court sitting at Cape Coast Castle in 1722, in the trial matter printed in the 1724 General History, held that Artists had the best Pretension to the Plea of Force, from the Necessity Pyrates are sometimes under of engaging such, and acquitted Bartholomew Roberts's master Harry Glasby, whose twice attempted escape and whose interposing for leaving sufficient Stores and Instruments on Board the Ships they had robbed were in evidence before it.
Trial evidence printed in a period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London 1724, the Cape Coast Castle trial matterOn: Navigation and Seamanship - Three instruments must be kept apart: a letter of reprisal was a narrow licence to a subject who had been wronged abroad and denied justice there to make his loss good out of that nation's property; a letter of marque properly so called was a general wartime licence against enemy shipping, the two remaining distinct in law into the 1690s; and a letter of marque ship was an armed merchantman that sailed with a cargo and took a prize if one offered, as against a private man of war which carried no cargo and cruised for prizes as her trade, a distinction the men themselves drew when the company of the Duke and Dutchess deposed in August 1711 "That we went out as Private Men of War and not as trading ships, And that no sort of Merchandise was shipped on board said Ships to trade withall".
Postgraduate thesis and local-history monograph resting on archival research
Toby Gane, Aspects of English Law Concerning Piracy and Privateering, 1603 to 1760, MPhil thesis, University of St Andrews, 1990; Donald Jones, Captain Woodes Rogers' Voyage Round the World 1708 to 1711, Bristol Branch of the Historical Association Local History Pamphlets 79, 1992, quoting the Chancery exhibits at P.R.O. C 104/36 to 40On: Privateering and Letters of Marque - The commissioning procedure ran from a warrant sent by the Lord High Admiral or the Commissioners of the Admiralty to the judge of the High Court of Admiralty, through a declaration made by the commander in that court giving specified details of his ship, her armament, her crew and her officers, to a bond entered by sureties for his correct performance of his articles, replaced by a bail from 1696; the declarations survive as HCA 26, 104 volumes covering 1689 to 1809, and the warrants, bonds and bails as HCA 25, 229 bundles covering 1549 to 1820.
Repository catalogue descriptions of archival series
The National Archives, Kew, scope and content notes for HCA 26, Registers of Declarations for Letters of Marque, 1689 to 1809, and HCA 25, Warrants, Bonds and Bails for Letters of Marque, 1549 to 1820, with the Instance and Prize Court group descriptionOn: Privateering and Letters of Marque - A commissioned privateer's instructions required him to carry his prizes into a port of the King's dominions to be adjudged, to send the master and pilot of the prize with her papers to the judge of the Admiralty to be examined, to preserve the goods until judgement, to attempt nothing against the subjects of friends, and neither to kill anybody in cold blood nor to treat prisoners cruelly, on forfeiture of the commission.
Postgraduate thesis transcribing a period manuscript
Toby Gane, Aspects of English Law Concerning Piracy and Privateering, 1603 to 1760, 1990, transcribing the fifteen instructions from an anonymous manuscript of about 1730 in the National Maritime Museum, pages 61 to 63, assigned there to the war with Spain of 1718 to 1720On: Privateering and Letters of Marque - Article IX of the Anglo-French treaty of Ryswick of 1697 made all letters, as well of reprisal as of marque and counter-marque, granted hitherto on either side for any cause, null and void, and provided that no like letters be granted in future unless it were first made manifest that right had been denied.
Contemporary printed compilation of treaty texts
Jacques Bernard (compiler), The Acts and Negotiations, together with the Particular Articles at Large, of the General Peace, Concluded at Ryswick, London, 1698, Anglo-French Article IX, Internet Archive copy actsnegotiations00bernOn: Privateering and Letters of Marque - The High Court of Admiralty ran separate instance and prize sides under one judge and one civilian bar, the holding repository stating that the two jurisdictions were formally separated in about 1660 and thereafter heard in their own separate courts, with instance appeals going to the High Court of Delegates and prize appeals to the High Court of Appeals for Prizes, whose papers survive from 1689.
Repository catalogue descriptions
The National Archives, HCA 23 interrogatories files, Records of the Instance and Prize Courts, Records of the High Court of Delegates, HCA 42 High Court of Appeals for PrizesOn: Prize Law and Condemnation - A prize cause opened with a monition, a process in the nature of a summons warning all persons interested to appear and show cause why the ship should not be condemned as lawful prize, usually affixed to one of the pillars of the Royal Exchange, and was decided principally on the captured ship's own papers, seized entire and numbered, and on the examinations of her crew taken on standing written questions before commissioners in the nearest friendly port.
Repository catalogue descriptions
The National Archives, HCA 31 monitions files and bundles, HCA 32 prize papers, HCA 13 examinations and answers, HCA 23 interrogatories filesOn: Prize Law and Condemnation - A case-insensitive count across the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1724 General History held in this archive gives sloop 396 occurrences, brigantine 83, galley 29, snow 23, pink 15, scooner 14, shallop 7, frigat 4, ketch 2, pinnace 2 and barque 1, which establishes the dominance of the word sloop in that book by nearly five to one over its nearest rival and establishes nothing directly about the frequency of vessel types in the world.
Count made over a named machine-readable transcription of a period narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, London 1724, Project Gutenberg transcriptionOn: Ship Construction and Repair - The technical record of this period is administrative and textual rather than graphic and covers the King's ships far better than any other shipping: hull surveys, defect reports, repair estimates, dimension and progress books, building contracts and yard pay books survive in the Admiralty classes, scale draughts in the modern sense are effectively absent from the English record before the early eighteenth century, and there was no general compulsory registration of British merchant shipping until the Shipping and Navigation Act of 1786, so that a pirate vessel's dimensions can only be taken from her earlier life in other men's papers and a ship's name identifies nothing on its own, the letter of marque registers holding both Kidd's Adventure Galley of 287 tons in 1695 and a wholly different Adventure Galley of 18 tons in 1757.
Archival finding aids and catalogue records
The National Archives, Admiralty and High Court of Admiralty classes ADM 106, ADM 180, ADM 95, ADM 49, ADM 42 and HCA 26, as described in the archive's record on ship plans, surveys and fitting accountsOn: Ship Construction and Repair - The best excavated golden-age pirate armament is shipwreck 31CR314 in Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, which the excavating agency identifies as Queen Anne's Revenge: twenty-four cast-iron pieces had been located there as of 2005, of which five were cleaned and analysed, two six-pounders, a four-pounder, a one-pounder and a half-pounder ranging from 7.5 feet down to 3.5 feet in length and of English and Swedish origin, one Swedish piece cast in 1713; four of the five were recovered loaded, one six-pounder with cartridge, wads and ball and the one-pounder with powder, a ball and three wrought-iron bolts bundled as langrage; of forty iron shot analysed nearly sixty per cent are of six-pounder size and one is a twenty-four pounder for which the site holds no matching gun; no grapeshot and no canister are reported; and on the excavator's reading the vessel would be considered at minimum a twenty-gun ship.
Modern archaeology
Nathan C. Henry, Analysis of Armament from Shipwreck 31CR314, Queen Anne's Revenge Site, North Carolina Underwater Archaeology Branch, QAR Technical Series, June 2009, for the pieces located and analysed as of 2005, their calibres, lengths and founders, the loaded contents, the langrage and the minimum twenty-gun reading; Nathan C. Henry, Iron Shot from Shipwreck 31CR314, Queen Anne's Revenge Site, January 2011, for the forty analysed shot, the poundage distribution, the anomalous twenty-four pounder and the absence of grapeshot and canisterOn: Weapons and Gunnery - The sworn evidence of three named officers of HMS Swallow, printed in the record of the Cape Coast trial, records the pirate Ranger on 5 February 1722 firing four chase guns, hoisting a black flag at the mizen peak and getting her spritsail yard under the bowsprit for boarding, and records that in the action of 10 February the Swallow's own fire slackened because the pirate was shot so far ahead on the weather bow that few of her guns could point to her; John Atkins, surgeon of the Swallow, wrote in his printed narrative of 1735 that the pirates "neither killed nor wounded us a man in taking them".
Trial pamphlet and period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd edn, London, printed for T. Warner, 1724, in the printed Cape Coast proceedings it carries, the deposition of Isaac Sun, Ralph Baldrick and Daniel Maclaughlin; John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, in His Majesty's Ships, the Swallow and Weymouth, London, 1735; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Weapons and Gunnery - The archive's two best known pirate gun counts rest on evidence of quite different weight: the Royal Fortune's forty guns are recited in the sworn Cape Coast indictment and deposed to by the officers of HMS Swallow; the forty guns of the Queen Anne's Revenge come from later writers, no period gun count for her having been found, the available transcription of the 1724 narrative reading instead that Teach mounted no guns aboard the captured Guineaman, a reading in tension with the same narrative's account of an action against a thirty-gun man of war and unresolved until an original page is inspected.
Trial pamphlet and period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, 1724, for the Cape Coast indictment and the officers' deposition on the Royal Fortune of forty guns, and for the "mounted no Guns" readingOn: Weapons and Gunnery - In the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1724 General History the string worm does not occur at all, while careen in any inflection occurs eight times, the period spelling carreen a further three, and clean in any inflection fifty-five times unfiltered.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, 1724, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, searched in fullOn: Shipworm and Environmental Damage - The 1724 General History records pirate companies destroyed while cleaning, the Happy Delivery burnt when the local people attacked Lowther's men at Port Mayo as they were "heaving down, scrubing, tallowing, and so forth", the Eagle sloop of Barbados finding his later vessel at Blanco "just careen'd, with her Guns out, and Sails unbent", and Low losing a ship "by the oversetting of his Ship, when she was upon the Careen".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, 1724, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, Project Gutenberg ebook 40580; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Shipworm and Environmental Damage - John Atkins, a Royal Navy surgeon ashore at Port Royal for the hurricane of 28 August 1722, states the period's own hurricane climatology, that "The West-Indians agree, that August and September is the Season to expect them" and that they give warning "by a preceding unusual Swell of Water", and records of that storm that "Of 50 Sail in this Harbour, only 4 Men-of-War and 2 Merchant-Ships rid it out, but with all their Masts and Booms blown away."
Period narrative
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, 1735, Project Gutenberg ebook 72102, searched in full; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Shipworm and Environmental Damage - Juries sat on one side of admiralty justice only: the instance and prize courts were civilian, written and juryless at all times, the criminal side in England had both a grand jury and a trial jury from the Offences at Sea Act of 1536, and the commission courts created in 1700 had no jury at all, while the naval courts martial with which all of them are confused sat under the Navy Act 1661 and were not admiralty courts.
Primary statute text, repository research guide and scholarly reference
11 Will. 3 c. 7, Statutes of the Realm vol. 7; The National Archives research guide, High Court of Admiralty records; MarineLives, Introduction to the High Court of Admiralty; the Navy Act 1661, 13 Cha. 2 st. 1 c. 9On: The Admiralty Courts - The common law courts curtailed admiralty business from outside by writs of prohibition, the measured effect in London collision litigation being that roughly two thirds of collision disputes resolved at Admiralty before 1663 had originated in the crowded river and that after the prohibition of the following year in Martin v. Green few if any did, with the deeper effect lying in the causes never brought at all.
Scholarly article, online edition
George F. Steckley, Collisions, Prohibitions, and the Admiralty Court in Seventeenth-Century London, History Cooperative online editionOn: The Admiralty Courts - The General History of 1724 presents the choosing of a captain as the constitutive act of a new pirate company and places it before the drawing up of articles, stating of Howell Davis's men after they had seized two sloops at Martinico that "a Counsel of War was called over a large Bowl of Punch, at which it was proposed to chuse a Commander; the Election was soon over, for it fell upon Davis by a great Majority of legal Pollers, there was no Scrutiny demanded", and giving George Lowther's company in June 1721 the same founding sequence by acclamation rather than by a poll, "They one and all came into the Measures".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, printed for T. Warner, 1724, the Davis and Lowther chapters; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Captain Election and Removal - Captain William Snelgrave, held by pirate companies at Sierra Leone in 1719 and publishing in 1734, states that "the Captain of a Pirate Ship, is chiefly chosen to fight the Vessels they may meet with" and reports Thomas Cocklyn's people saying they chose him "on account of his Brutality and Ignorance; having resolved never to have again a Gentleman-like Commander", so that the qualification for the office was fighting capacity and a company could elect a bad seaman deliberately; his text survives in an uncorrected scan whose orthography and proper names are corrupt, so its substance and not its spelling is relied on.
Period narrative
William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave-Trade, London, 1734, the account of his captivityOn: Captain Election and Removal - Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol documented one hundred and nineteen cases of women living as men in Holland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and explained the Dutch concentration structurally, by the length of chartered company service and its lack of provision for a wife or sweetheart.
Scholarly monograph, known through a detailed secondary summary
Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe, Macmillan, 1989On: Gender Disguise and Identity at Sea - Dianne Dugaw's index of the female warrior ballad contains one hundred and thirteen English language ballads, a tradition at its height from about 1650 to about 1800, in which the disguise is always penetrated and the heroine restored.
Scholarly monograph and digital project
Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650 to 1850, Cambridge University Press, 1989; The Warrior Women Project, Wayne State University, 2021On: Gender Disguise and Identity at Sea - The General History of 1724 defends its lives of Mary Read and Anne Bonny by appealing to "many thousand Witnesses, I mean the People of Jamaica, who were present at their Tryals", although the printed trial record contains none of the biographical material at issue.
Period narrative and trial pamphlet
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, 1724, the lives of Mary Read and Anne Bonny; The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates, 1721On: Gender Disguise and Identity at Sea - The best known English women who served at sea or in arms in male dress, Hannah Snell of 1723 to 1792 and Mary Lacy who ran away in 1759 as William Chandler, belong to the 1740s and after and fall outside the window of about 1690 to 1725.
Museum catalogue record and printed memoir
National Army Museum, London, record for Hannah Snell, accession 1963-05-63-1; Mary Lacy, The Female Shipwright, 1773On: Gender Disguise and Identity at Sea - In November 1721 His Majesty's Ship Weymouth was left under the guns of Cape Corso, too disabled by disease to hand her sails or weigh her anchor, expressly to impress men, while the Swallow stretched away to windward "in order to mann, by the Purchase of Slaves, and impressing Sailors from the Merchant Vessels; the latter we had little Occasion of, their ill Treatment, and bad Diet (or a Pretence of it) making them all Volunteers that could be spared"; against a marginal date of 10 November 1721 the same witness gives the cruise's purposes as securing trade, airing a sickly ship, gathering intelligence and impressing men from the merchant ships, and records that as many again on the same complaint "took on with the Pyrates".
Printed contemporary narrative, eyewitness participant
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies (London, 1735), the Gold Coast narrative for October and November 1721 and the voyage abstract at 10 November 1721, corroborated for the Weymouth's station by A General History of the Pyrates, volume one (1724); the two are not independent witnesses, both coming out of the Swallow's people; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Naval Impressment - A mechanical search of volume one of the 1724 General History of the Pyrates finds every occurrence of the string press resolving to suppress, express, oppress, compress or impression except six, of which exactly one is impressment in the naval sense and describes the Royal Navy, while prest, press-gang, impress'd and impressed do not occur at all: the founding printed source of the pirate legend carries no pirate complaint about the press, no press gang and no pressed man, and the labour grievance it does record, Bartholomew Roberts on "thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour" in an honest service, names merchant masters, wages and food and expressly denies want of employment as a motive.
Period narrative, searched for a negative result
A General History of the Pyrates, volume one (1724), working plain text transcription of the Project Gutenberg digitisation; the result is a negative about that text and not a finding about pirate opinion, and no later volume or edition was searched; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Naval Impressment - A Jamaican act of 1702 authorised "four standing Parties", each of "a Captain, fourteen White Men and five Armed Slaves", with "the Sum of five Pounds for every Rebellious Slave which they shall kill or take alive", and a Jamaican act of 1717 provided that a person enslaved who had been "one whole Year in this Island" and then remained absent "for the Space of Thirty Days" might be punished "by cutting off one of the Feet of such Slave".
Colonial statutes
An Act for the more effectual raising Parties, to pursue and destroy Rebellious and Runaway Slaves, Assembly of Jamaica, 1702; An Act for the more effectual punishing of Crimes committed by Slaves, Assembly of Jamaica, 1717, section V; both transcribed in Laws of Enslavement and Freedom, University of New Brunswick LibrariesOn: Maroon Communities and Fugitive Networks - John Atkins wrote of Jamaica that "many hundreds of them have at different times run to the Mountains, where they associate and commit little Robberies upon the defenceless and nearest Plantations", that the parties sent against them "have 5 l. a Head for every one killed, and their Ears are a sufficient Warrant, for the next Justice to pay it", and that "Our latest Advices from Jamaica" reported the maroons to "have chose a King, daily increase" and to be suspected of supply with powder and arms from Cuba, a report his own phrase marks as news current at the time of writing and which cannot therefore be dated to his voyage of 1721 to 1723.
Period narrative
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies; in His Majesty's ships, the Swallow and Weymouth, London, 1735; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Maroon Communities and Fugitive Networks - No period document has been identified recording a pirate company of the years 1690 to 1725 provisioning at, recruiting from or sheltering in a maroon community, and the concrete Caribbean instances offered for the argument that maroons and pirates formed a common front of masterless people are seventeenth century.
Period narrative and modern scholarship
A General History of the Pyrates (1724); John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea (1735); the Jamaican session laws transcribed by the University of New Brunswick Libraries; Isaac Curtis, Masterless People: Maroons, Pirates, and Commoners, in The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples (2011)On: Maroon Communities and Fugitive Networks - The French corsair Jacques Cassard attacked Suriname in October 1712 and left with a ransom stated at 2.4 million French livres, part of it paid in enslaved people, and more than seven hundred enslaved people whom planters had sent into the forest for safekeeping during the attack remained free rather than return, forming the first substantial Surinamese maroon community.
Modern scholarship
Marcel van der Linden, The Okanisi: A Surinamese Maroon Community, c.1712 to 2010, International Review of Social History 60, 3 (2015)On: Maroon Communities and Fugitive Networks - The Jamaican act of 1739 confirming Cudjoe's articles granted his people "all the lands situate and lying between Trelawney town and the cockpits, to the amount of fifteen hundred acres", and obliged them to send runaways to the chief magistrate of the nearest parish, who was directed to pay "the sum of ten shillings" for each; the articles confirmed by the act of 1740 for the Windward maroons are dated 23 June 1739 in that act, while the National Library of Jamaica gives 23 December 1739, and the difference is unresolved.
Colonial statutes and a national library history note
The Jamaican acts of 1739 and 1740 confirming the articles executed with Cudjoe and with Quao, transcribed in Laws of Enslavement and Freedom, University of New Brunswick Libraries; National Library of Jamaica history note, The Jamaican MaroonsOn: Maroon Communities and Fugitive Networks - A pirate company held no dockyard, warehouse, market, mint or court, so the shore side of the trade operated as a chain of four links, the haven, the victualler, the receiver and the protector, all four of which can be seen working at one island in Adam Baldridge's station at St Mary's off Madagascar between 1690 and 1697.
Sworn deposition and archive analysis
Deposition of Adam Baldridge, sworn at New York 5 May 1699 (Public Record Office C.O. 5:1042, no. 30 II), printed in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (1923), no. 68On: Pirate Ports and Informal Economies - Baldridge's deposition records that he was paid in ordnance and stores for cattle supplied to careening pirate crews, receiving from George Raynor's company in October 1691 "a quantity of Beads, five great Guns for a fortification, some powder and shott" and further guns, shot and flour from Edward Coats's company in 1692, while the bulk of the fresh provisions, fowls, rice and yams, was sold to the crews by the islanders.
Sworn deposition
Deposition of Adam Baldridge, 5 May 1699 (Public Record Office C.O. 5:1042, no. 30 II), in Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period (1923), no. 68On: Pirate Ports and Informal Economies - Baldridge's deposition itemises the cargo Frederick Philipse's ship Charles brought from New York to St Mary's on 7 August 1693, comprising footwear, hosiery, shirts and breeches, hats, carpenters' tools, rum, Madeira, cased spirits, stills, grindstones, saws, oil, iron pots, three barrels of cannon powder, books including catechisms, primers and hornbooks, two Bibles, garden seeds and hoes, and records that he returned for it "1100 pieces 8/8 and Dollers, 34 Slaves, 15 head of Cattel, 57 barrs of Iron."
Sworn deposition
Deposition of Adam Baldridge, 5 May 1699 (Public Record Office C.O. 5:1042, no. 30 II), in Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period (1923), no. 68On: Pirate Ports and Informal Economies - Of the pirate vessel taken by HMS Swallow off Cape Lopez on 5 February 1722, the General History of 1724 records that "She had 32 Guns, mann'd with 16 French Men, 20 Negroes, and 77 English", which is 20 men counted as Black in a company of 113.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, printed for T. Warner, 1724; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Race, Empire and Maritime Labour - The same book gives three further counts: Bartholomew Roberts's own ship, taken on 10 February 1722, "had 40 Guns, and 157 Men, 45 whereof were Negroes"; Edward England and John Taylor had "no more than 300 Men in both Ships, and 40 of them Negroes" in the Indian Ocean in 1720; and the French pirate La Bouse commanded "fourteen Guns and sixty four Hands, half French, half Negroes".
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd edn, London, printed for T. Warner, 1724, chapters on Captain Bartholomew Roberts and on Captain England for the quoted counts. For Roberts's own ship Ogle's dispatch (London Gazette 6091) gives 152 men, 52 of them of African descent; the two counts are carried side by side on the Royal Fortune record; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Race, Empire and Maritime Labour - At Ocracoke in November 1718 Blackbeard "had posted a resolute Fellow, a Negroe whom he had bred up, with a lighted Match, in the Powder-Room, with Commands to blow up when he should give him Orders", and the man "could hardly be perswaded from the rash Action", which places a Black man of Blackbeard's company, of unstated status, at the most dangerous and most trusted station in a fighting ship.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, 2nd edn, London, printed for T. Warner, 1724, chapter on Captain Teach, for the quoted passage; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Race, Empire and Maritime Labour - The circulating estimate that about a third of golden-age pirates were Black is printed without a shown derivation in the accounts that carry it, and the only counts this archive can verify are four ship counts giving about thirteen, about eighteen, about twenty-nine per cent and about a half, which is too small a set to generalise from.
Newspaper feature, tested against period narrative
Richard Sanders, Pirates and the Middle Passage, Times Higher Education; tested against the four counts in A General History of the Pyrates, 1724On: Race, Empire and Maritime Labour - The first article of the Act of 1661 for the establishing of articles and orders for the regulating and better government of His Majesty's navies required commanders, captains and other officers at sea to cause "the publique Worshipp of Almighty God according to the Liturgy of the Church of England established by Law to be solemnly orderly and reverently performed in theire respective Ships", and its second article made unlawful and rash oaths, cursings, execrations, drunkenness and uncleanness punishable as a court martial should think fit; the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 supplied the text in a section headed "Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea", with distinct forms for storms, for before a fight at sea, for thanksgiving after a storm, for deliverance from an enemy and for the burial of the dead at sea, the duty binding King's ships and not merchant hulls.
Statute in a standard scholarly edition and period liturgical text
Charles II, 1661: An Act for the Establishing Articles and Orders for the regulateing and better Government of His Majesties Navies Ships of Warr and Forces by Sea, Statutes of the Realm, volume 5, pages 311 to 314, British History Online; Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea, in The Book of Common Prayer, 1662On: Religion and Providence at Sea - The providential reading of events at sea is recorded in both the naval and the criminal literature of the period: John Atkins, surgeon in HMS Swallow, writes in his 1735 voyage of the sea as an element "whom none ought to trust; but they who have a Faith in Providence" and reads a newly risen volcanic island as intended "to strike Mankind with a Dread of Providence, and warn a sinful World against the Consequences of angry Omnipotence" while advancing a subterranean fire hypothesis in the same paragraph, and the General History of 1724 records of a company dying for want of water that "This was their Case, when (by the working of Divine Providence, no doubt,) they were brought into Soundings".
Period narrative and period printed book of contested reliability
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies; in His Majesty's Ships, the Swallow and Weymouth, London, 1735; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, London, 1724On: Religion and Providence at Sea - The two passages most often cited as evidence of pirate piety both come from the General History of 1724 and neither establishes a practice: Article XI of the set attributed to Roberts's company reads "The Musicians to have Rest on the Sabbath Day, but the other six Days and Nights, none without special Favour", which is a labour provision for one trade aboard and says nothing of worship, and the clergyman taken in the Onslow on his way to the chaplaincy of Cape Corso Castle was offered a share by men alleging "merrily, that their Ship wanted a Chaplain" and promising he should do nothing "but make Punch, and say Prayers", was not forced, and declined; no source yet found describes a pirate company holding a service, keeping a Sunday or ceasing work for worship.
Period printed book of contested reliability
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, London, 1724, the Roberts chaptersOn: Religion and Providence at Sea - The execution of a pirate carried a printed theology: the Ordinary of Newgate, chaplain of the prison, held the right to publish the behaviour, confessions and dying words of the executed, the accounts running from 1676 to 1772 with over four hundred editions surviving, and Paul Lorrain, Ordinary from 1700 to 1719, signed the account of Captain William Kidd and other pirates executed at Execution Dock on Friday 23 May 1701; at Boston the equivalent was the execution sermon, Cotton Mather's Faithful Warnings of 1704 presenting the condemned as "a tragical spectacle, in a number of miserables", his Converted Sinner of 1724 preached "In the hearing and at the desire of certain pirates, a little before their execution", and these pamphlets and sheets are prosecution theology addressed to a congregation rather than reports of what pirates believed.
Scholarly project background page, repository catalogue records and period printed sermons
Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts, The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield; Huntington Library catalogue record 14152 for Paul Lorrain's account of Captain William Kidd, 1701; Cotton Mather, Faithful Warnings to Prevent Fearful Judgments, Boston, 1704; Cotton Mather, The Converted Sinner, Boston, 1724On: Religion and Providence at Sea - The General History of 1724 records that at the Cape Coast Castle executions of 1722 no chaplain officiated and a ship's surgeon "was so charitable at this Time, to offer himself in the room of an Ordinary"; that the first six condemned refused the penitential script, exclaimed against the severity of the court, said they were poor rogues hanged while others no less guilty escaped, and answered that they "suffered the Law, and should give no Account but to God"; that other prisoners, described as destitute of ministers, behaved with seeming devotion, Peter Scudamore desiring at the gallows that they would have patience with him to sing the first part of the thirty-first Psalm, which he did by himself throughout; and that Thomas Sutton, in irons, mocked a praying fellow prisoner and asked that he be removed or his prayer book taken away "as a common Disturber".
Period printed book of contested reliability
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, London, 1724, the Cape Coast trial appendixOn: Religion and Providence at Sea - Henry Every's plunder of Mughal shipping in September 1695 took a vessel carrying travellers returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the injury was received at Surat and at the imperial court as religious as well as commercial, Tyler Kynn's 2021 study reading the episode from a previously unexplored Mughal captain's letter and showing the empire attributing blame to English interests and to the East India Company; the religious character was legible in London too, the General History of 1724 explaining to English readers that the pilgrims thought "themselves obliged once in their Lives to visit that Place" while misdescribing their offerings as gifts for a shrine of Mahomet.
Peer reviewed journal article, at abstract and record level, with a period printed book of contested reliability
Tyler Joseph Kynn, Pirates and Pilgrims: The Plunder of the Ganj-i Sawai, the Hajj, and a Mughal Captain's Perspective, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, volume 64, pages 93 to 122, 2021; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, London, 1724, the Every chapterOn: Religion and Providence at Sea - At the Boston court of admiralty of October 1717 the prisoners "prayed the Court, That they might have the benefit of Council" before plea and the request was granted, and Thomas Davis, arraigned separately, was assigned an attorney on his own motion, served with a copy of the indictment "with the Names of the Witnesses annexed" and given two days to prepare, none of which an English felony defendant of those years could claim, though the statute is silent on all three and no comparable application is recorded at Newport in 1723 or at Boston in 1726.
Trial pamphlet
The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy, Boston, printed by B. Green for John Edwards, 1718, Evans-TCP N01688, for the Boston grants; the comparison with the English felony trial rests on modern accounts of Old Bailey procedureOn: Trials, Evidence and Defence Rights - The same court rejected an affidavit sworn before a notary in Great Britain and favourable to Thomas Davis as "contrary to Act of Parliament, which directs that all Evidences respecting Pirates shall be given into Court Viva Voce", and refused to let Davis, then in gaol and not yet indicted, testify for his shipmates on the ground that an accomplice in custody could not lawfully be a witness for prisoners, while eight days later Thomas South, acquitted on 22 October, was sworn as a witness for the King against Davis.
Trial pamphlet
The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy (Boston, 1718), Evans-TCP N01688On: Trials, Evidence and Defence Rights - James Smith, Advocate General at Boston on 30 October 1717, set out the civil law of proof under three heads, holding that confession was "the strongest and surest proof in Law", that two witnesses concurring in one fact "are not required in proving a crime by the Civil Law" where the crime is reiterable, "as in Adultery, Piracy, and Robbery", and that presumptions joined together "fall upon his head like a Storm of Hail and overwhelm him", while quoting in the same speech the authorities that a charge wants proofs "as clear as the Sun" and that "it is better that a guilty man pass Unpunished, than that an Innocent man should be Condemned".
Trial pamphlet
The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy (Boston, 1718), Evans-TCP N01688On: Trials, Evidence and Defence Rights - The 1724 General History of the Pyrates, a compiler's printing and not a court publication, carries the Cape Coast Castle proceedings of 1722 in which the court resolved to hear evidence on "the three Circumstances that compleat a Pyrate", namely volunteering at the beginning, volunteering at a taking or robbing, and voluntarily accepting a share of the booty, held that "Artists had the best Pretension to the Plea of Force" in acquitting Bartholomew Roberts's mate Harry Glasby, and answered pleas of compulsion by ruling that the acts were "still your own Acts, since done by Orders from Officers of your own Election".
Period narrative printing court material
A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London, printed for and sold by T. Warner, 1724, the Cape Coast Castle trial section; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious PyratesOn: Trials, Evidence and Defence Rights - Most pirate takings in the surviving record involved no fighting, because the arrangement was a two-sided promise, plunder and release for a ship that struck her colours and no quarter for one that resisted, and the black flag was the signal that put that promise in play by identifying the attacker as a pirate rather than a coast guard.
Peer-reviewed scholarship and period narrative
Peter T. Leeson, 'Pirational Choice: The Economics of Infamous Pirate Practices', Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 76 (2010); William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade (London, 1734)On: Violence and Coercion - William Snelgrave, taken in the Sierra Leone river on the night of 1 April 1719 by Thomas Cocklyn's company, recorded the pirate boatswain swearing that "No Quarter fhould be given to any Captain that offered to defend his Ship", and was saved by his own crew calling out "For God's fake don't kill our Captain", after which the pirates turned on the crew instead.
Period narrative by a victim
William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade (London, 1734), long s rendered as f in the digitised copyOn: Violence and Coercion - Pirate violence sat inside a far larger lawful violence: the Navy Act of 1661 prescribed death for desertion and for mutinous assembly and referred every unlisted offence to "the Lawes and Customes in such cases used att Sea", while the naval surgeon John Atkins recorded, after a rising aboard the Bristol slaver Robert, a woman hoisted "up by the Thumbs, whipp'd, and slashed her with Knives, before the other Slaves till she died".
Statute and period narrative
An Act for the Establishing Articles and Orders for the regulateing and better Government of His Majesties Navies, 13 Cha 2 St 1 c 9 (1661); John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West-Indies (London, 1735); A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-IndiesOn: Violence and Coercion - Article XXXVIII of the captain's instructions in the Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty's Service at Sea, approved on 7 January and printed in 1731, reads "He is not to carry any Woman to Sea, nor to entertain any Foreigners to serve in the Ship, who are Officers or Gentlemen, without Orders from the Admiralty", and is the earliest located codification of an older expectation rather than evidence that the prohibition began in 1731.
Printed official regulation
Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty's Service at Sea, Great Britain, printed 1731On: Women at Sea - Period writers call the island itself plainly "Providence": Johnson (1724) has the pirates fix upon "the Island of Providence, the most considerable of the Bahama Islands, lying in the Latitude of about 24 Degrees North, and to the Eastward of the Spanish Florida". Providence in period usage names the island, not the town.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, from their first Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, to the present Time (Gutenberg ebook 40580)On: Nassau / New Providence - Jennings's later life and death are not established: the only thread is a notice in the Pennsylvania Gazette of 4 July 1745 reporting West Indies sloops lost, one commanded by a Henry Jennings, and nothing links that commander to the privateer of 1716, who may not be the same man.
Newspaper notice at second hand
The Pennsylvania Gazette, notice of Bermuda advice of West Indies sloops lost, one commanded by Henry Jennings, issue of 4 July 1745 (not read directly; known at second hand)On: Henry Jennings - The taking of the great Portuguese ship at Bourbon in April 1721, with the Viceroy of Goa aboard, is attached to him by later writers only; Johnson, the period narrative read for this record, credits that prize to Taylor, England having been marooned before it, and does not name la Bouche at it.
- That the free prince speech is Samuel Bellamy's is reported and not yet checked against the record: Johnson names only a Captain Bellamy, without a forename.
Period narrative
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, which gives only "Captain Bellamy"On: Samuel Bellamy - A court-martial on 8 June 1702 is reported to have found against Dampier for hard and cruel usage of his lieutenant George Fisher aboard the Roebuck, the Admiralty record not having been read for this record.
- Dampier is reported to have commanded the twenty six gun privateer St George on a commissioned cruise against Spanish and French shipping between 1703 and 1707, and to have lost his chief mate John Clipperton on 2 September 1704, when Clipperton seized a prize bark and took about twenty one hands with him.
- The identification of that captain with William Mayes junior of Newport, Rhode Island, son of the White Horse Tavern keeper William Mayes senior, who commanded the brigantine Pearl on Thomas Tew's second Red Sea voyage and kept the tavern from 1702, rests on later popular and genealogical accounts and has not been tested against a document.
Popular and genealogical accounts
"The pirate who fooled Rhode Island for 16 years while running his family's inn"; "William 'The Pirate' Mayes, Jr. (c.1662-1723)", geni profile 6000000027083790932; "Newport and its Pirates: A Love/Hate Relationship"On: William May - The Portuguese prize is commonly identified as the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, taken off Bourbon in April 1721 with Olivier Levasseur in the Victory alongside.
- A ship database instead has the Cassandra retaken by the Falkland man of war under Captain Harris in February 1722, which cannot be reconciled with her later career under Taylor or with the surrender at Porto Bello.
- No wreck of the Cassandra has been identified, and the treasure wreck found off Sainte-Marie in Madagascar is the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, a different vessel.
- The ship's tonnage, builder and build date are not established by any source read for this record, and the Fancy of about three hundred tons and Dutch build that Johnson mentions elsewhere is a different vessel, a prize later given to Captain Mackrae.
Period narrative
A General History of the Pyrates, chapter 'Of Captain Avery', for the distinct three-hundred-ton FancyOn: Fancy - The Mocha was an East India Company frigate based at Bombay, and one modern ship database reports that she was bought for the Company as the Supply, renamed, and acquired about 1694; no contemporary register or builder's certificate for her has been located.
- A modern shipwreck survey account reports the ship scuttled across the entrance of the Ile Sainte-Marie harbour about January 1699; the documentary sources read for this record do not record a scuttling.
Contested survey account
Great Mahomet and the Mocha Pirate Shipwrecks, Sainte Marie, Madagascar; Pirate Shipwrecks of Ile Sainte-Marie, MadagascarOn: Mocha Frigate - A modern remote-sensing and diver survey reports readings beneath the sea bed at Ile Sainte-Marie that it describes as 'consistent with' the Mocha and the Great Mahomet; no excavation report or diagnostic object ties any of them to her, and the project's other identifications at the island have been disputed.
Contested survey account
Great Mahomet and the Mocha Pirate Shipwrecks, Sainte Marie, Madagascar; Pirate Shipwrecks of Ile Sainte-Marie, MadagascarOn: Mocha Frigate