Pirate Articles and Crew Agreements

"Articles" here means the written compact by which a ship's company bound itself: plunder divided into shares, compensation for wounds, the offences that carried marooning or death, rules on gaming, arms and desertion, and the oath by which entrants subscribed. The form appears to be borrowed from merchant and privateering practice. Practice aboard ship is treated under articles as practice.

With a few court-generated exceptions, these are not documents in the archival sense. They are passages printed in books and newspapers, or recited under oath to a clerk, the signed originals having been deliberately destroyed, a destruction that is likely rather than shown. The compiler of the 1724 General History says so of Bartholomew Roberts's company: "as they had taken Care to throw over-board the Original they had sign'd and sworn to, there is a great deal of Room to suspect, the remainder contained some thing too horrid to be disclosed". His Roberts text is given only as "the Substance of the Articles, as taken from the Pyrates own Informations".¹

How the texts reached the record

The texts reached the record by three routes. Prosecution: subscription proved voluntary association, so a seized sheet was the most damning exhibit against a defendant; companies destroyed them at capture, and a witness afterwards recited the substance into the Admiralty record. The second route is informants, as with the Roberts set. The press: the ten-clause set attributed to Edward Low is credited to the Boston News-Letter of 1 August 1723.

The three printed sets

The General History prints three sets: Roberts's in eleven numbered clauses, George Lowther's in eight, John Phillips's in nine. Each opens with a shares ladder, the captain at one and a half or two shares and the warrant officers a quarter above the common man. Compensation for a lost limb stands at 800 dollars from the public stock in Roberts and 150 pounds sterling in Lowther, with Phillips tariffing 400 pieces of eight for a joint and 800 for a limb.²

Their making is described in the same pages. Lowther's company drew up, signed and swore their articles upon the Bible in 1721, aboard the vessel they renamed the Delivery. Phillips's set, of 1723, is the only one the compiler gives as verbatim, that company swearing "upon a Hatchet for want of a Bible".³

Ancestry and lawful analogues

Exquemelin supplies the seventeenth-century ancestry: a compact "put in writing, which every one is bound to observe", governed by "no prey, no pay", with maiming payments running from 600 pieces of eight for a right arm down to 100 pieces of eight for an eye or a finger. The 1684 English version adds an alternative in enslaved people at each step.⁴

Two instruments of William Kidd's show the lawful version. That of 10 October 1695, between Bellomont, Livingston and Kidd, divides a commissioned cruise's proceeds between the backers and the commander. That of 10 September 1696 is a crew agreement for the Adventure Galley, at The National Archives as CO 5/931: articles between Kidd and John Walker, quartermaster, "regarding conditions of service. Includes a list of the company". A further text, via the crewman Joseph Palmer, sits at HCA 1/15/8 (reverse), captioned 1701.⁵

Its limits as evidence

No signed original of a golden-age pirate articles sheet is known in a public catalogue as such. A set in John Gow's own hand is popularly said to survive; the Gow text comes down instead in a printed pamphlet of 1725.⁶

Three further cautions stand on the record. The compiler interleaves clauses with his own gloss, so editorial matter is separated visibly wherever a clause is quoted. The Low and Lowther sets overlap almost entirely, consistent with the two sailing in consort until they separated on 28 May 1722, so counting them as independent witnesses would be double counting. The totals in circulation, the eleven sets reported from Fox's 2013 thesis and the nine repeated by later writers who cite Fox, are not independent; the Archive quotes both and asserts none.

How the Archive uses it

These texts are labelled as a compiler's rendering of testimony, not as documents, and they are not harmonised: the three sets differ in shares ratios, in compensation currencies and in the offences they capitalise, and collapsing them into one "Pirate Code" invents a document that never existed. The clauses carry two readings, one a shipboard democracy of votes, elected quartermasters and social insurance, the other companies reproducing the hierarchies they came from. Recited sets sit in the Admiralty criminal records.

What this cluster cannot yet give is one confirmed original: no signed sheet has been traced, the Low attribution stays unchecked, and the sets listed for Cusack, Clough, Davis, Taylor and Anstis remain untraced.