The Printed Pirate Trial Pamphlets

The printed pirate trial pamphlets are a class of source rather than a single document. They are cheap printed accounts of the courts of oyer and terminer and the vice-admiralty sessions that tried captured pirates under the statute law then governing the offence, sold in the colonies and in London chiefly during the 1710s and 1720s. The class is small and dense: a handful of titles, each exhaustive about one court sitting and silent beyond it.¹

A pamphlet in the class runs to the same order of parts: a heading identifying the court, its commission and the presiding officers; a prefatory narrative of how the pirates were taken; the formal articles or charge; individual indictments naming each accused, often with his aliases; the sworn evidence of prosecution witnesses, sometimes verbatim; whatever defence the prisoners offered; and the court's findings prisoner by prisoner with the sentences, distinguishing the condemned from the acquitted and, on occasion, the reprieved.²

Nobody wrote these pamphlets in the literary sense. They were compiled from, or presented as, the record of a particular sitting, and issued anonymously or under a printer's imprint. The motive was commercial: an account of a notorious trial, with named prisoners and gallows sentences, sold to an appetite already fed by the newspapers and the criminal biography trade.

The three titles that anchor the class

The first is The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates, which records proceedings held at St. Jago de la Vega, now Spanish Town, in Jamaica, on 16 and 17 November 1720, and prints as well the trials of Mary Read and Anne Bonny. It was printed in 1721. The printer of that edition is not established. The Archive's gallery of the pamphlet transcribes an imprint from the title leaf of the National Library of Jamaica copy, a reading not yet checked against a full bibliographical description.³

The second is The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet, and other Pirates, covering the Admiralty sessions held at Charles Town in South Carolina, begun on 28 October 1718 and continued by adjournment to 12 November. It carries the imprint "London: Printed for Benj. Cowse, 1719". It names roughly thirty prisoners condemned for piracy, lists four men acquitted, Thomas Nichols, Rowland Sharp, Jonathan Clarke and Thomas Gerrat, and prefixes an account of the taking of Bonnet.⁴

The third is A Full and Exact Account, of the Tryal of all the Pyrates, lately taken by Captain Ogle, on board the Swallow Man of War, on the Coast of Guinea, printed and sold by J. Roberts at London in 1723. It documents the mass trial at Cape Coast Castle of the crew of Bartholomew Roberts, taken by Captain Chaloner Ogle in the Swallow, and appears to be one of the largest single piracy proceedings of the era.⁵

The statute that put the courts overseas

The courts behind these prints were constituted under the piracy legislation of the period, in particular the statute of 1700, 11 and 12 William III, commonly cited as the Act for the more effectual suppression of piracy. It allowed pirates to be tried in the colonies before commissioned courts of admiralty sitting without a jury, rather than being sent to England for trial in the High Court of Admiralty. That is why the sittings are at Spanish Town, Charles Town and Cape Coast Castle. The Rackam pamphlet prints a copy of the Act alongside the trial record.⁶

What the class documents

The Rackam print is the principal contemporary source for Anne Bonny and Mary Read. It places them in Rackham's company and records the evidence given against them at the November 1720 trials, and almost everything later written about the two women runs back to it. Testimony there, including evidence attributed to a woman named Dorothy Thomas describing their conduct aboard, is the kind of first-hand detail the class preserves and later narratives elaborate.

The Bonnet print documents the collapse of the Cape Fear pirate company, naming the crew and recording the South Carolina sessions that condemned them in 1718. The Ogle print documents the destruction of Roberts's crew after his death in the action against the Swallow and the trial of the survivors in 1722.

Their limits as evidence

The strength of the class is proximity and specificity. It records names, aliases, ships, dates, places and sworn testimony close to the events. For biographical facts about individual pirates, and for the machinery of prosecution, these are often the earliest and most reliable evidence there is.

Four cautions travel with them. These are official records shaped by the prosecution, so the frame belongs to the authorities and the pirates speak only through indictment, hostile cross-examination and such defence as they were permitted. They are print artefacts, a printer's rendering rather than the manuscript minute, and may compress, select or err. Orthography is unstable, the same man appearing as Rackam and Rackham, with aliases multiplying, so name-matching requires care. And the prefatory capture narratives are closer to journalism than to court record. The print is collated against the surviving manuscript record of the Admiralty courts, in the High Court of Admiralty papers at Kew, class HCA 1, and against colonial and newspaper sources.⁷

Survival, editions and access

Survival is uneven and some titles are rare. The Bonnet pamphlet of 1719 survives in institutional copies and in digital surrogates, one of them digitised by the Library of Congress. The Ogle pamphlet of 1723 survives in library holdings and is digitised on the Internet Archive. The 1721 Rackam pamphlet survives in a National Library of Jamaica copy, digitised on the Internet Archive, and The National Archives is catalogued as holding a further copy at CO 137/14/1, filed among the Jamaica original correspondence rather than with the Admiralty papers. All three have been reprinted in modern scholarly collections, among them Joel H. Baer's edition British Piracy in the Golden Age: History and Interpretation, 1660 to 1730.⁸

How the Archive uses them

The pamphlets are the spine of the trial rooms. Where a page here names a prisoner, an article of the charge or a sentence, this class normally stands behind it, checked against the manuscript record where that survives. Marcus Rediker and other social historians have mined the depositions for the conduct of ordinary seamen turned pirate, and biographers of Bonny and Read return to the 1721 print as the earliest hard evidence beneath a mythologised story.

What this class cannot yet give the Archive is a measure of its own fidelity: the printer and precise imprint of the 1721 Jamaica edition are not established, the extent to which each pamphlet matches the manuscript minute of its court is nowhere systematically documented, and the wording of individual depositions, Dorothy Thomas's among them, is secure only on the facsimile page.