Disease and Shipboard Medicine

Mortality is the first subject here and medicine the second, because in the period the two were only loosely connected. A ship's whole medical capacity was one chest and one man, and fevers and fluxes killed far more seamen than any enemy did.

What the theme covers

Mortality on the anti-piracy stations, the standing of the sea surgeon, the medical constitution pirate companies ran for themselves, and the archaeological residue. Scurvy belongs at alcohol, food and water at sea, and the mortality of the slave trade is a different measurement on different bodies.

Counting the dead

John Atkins, surgeon of HMS Swallow on the 1721 to 1723 African cruise, printed his narrative in 1735. Of the consort he later served in as purser he writes that "The Weymouth, who brought out of England a Compliment of 240 Men, having at the end of the Voyage 280 dead upon her Books." The dead exceed the complement because the complement was continually replenished.¹

At the Isle of Princes on 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" is load-bearing, and later writers lose it when they give three or four deaths a day without saying per ship: the rate is three to four a day per ship, across two.²

What Atkins blamed

Atkins blamed several things at once, and all of them from inside a theory of corrupted air: excessive heat, the irregularity of seamen ashore, the fatigue of careening, calms and disorderly living. His remark on stagnating waters and the "Broods of Insects thence" belongs to that theory, and not to any notion of insects carrying disease.³

The surgeon as a legal category

The depositions taken at the 1722 trials at Cape Coast Castle reached print two years later in the General History. Peter Scudamore was charged with signing the articles "with a great deal of Alacrity" and glorying in being the first surgeon to do so, "for before this, it was their Custom to change their Surgeons, when they desired it ... and never obliged them to sign". Harry Glasby was deposed to have prevented the articles being imposed on the surgeon Hamilton and procured the clearing of another, Hunter.⁴

Whether Scudamore signed willingly was disputed in the court itself. One deposition calls him a volunteer; he told the court that Roberts and Valentine Ashplant had threatened him into signing "in Terror". Behind the custom of not obliging surgeons to sign lies a logic that looks legal rather than humane: a signed surgeon was a pirate and could hang, an unsigned one was a prisoner and could be handed back.

The chief surgeon's office

A company ran a medical constitution of its own. The chief surgeon was elected: when Roberts's people "came to an Election of a chief Surgeon", Scudamore, Adam Comry and one Wilson stood, and the Ranger's company "in general, voted for Scudamore, to get rid of him". He held a jurisdiction, chests being plundered by order of the chief surgeon "who, by the Pyrates Laws, always directs in this Province", a station, "always to remain with the Commadore", and a quarter share above the common share. Of the three sets of articles that survive, Roberts's, Phillips's and Lowther's, Lowther's alone names the Doctor in that band.⁵

Chests, compensation and one instrument

What mattered was the chest rather than its contents: no chest meant no medicine, no surgeon meant no one to use one. The articles supply money. Roberts's ninth gives a man who should "lose a Limb, or become a Cripple in their Service" 800 dollars from the public stock, "and for lesser Hurts, proportionably"; John Phillips's eighth gives 400 pieces of eight for a joint and 800 for a limb. These are disability payments graduated by anatomical loss, and they belong with plunder shares rather than with medical provision.⁶

The wreck at Beaufort Inlet gave up a pewter urethral syringe, hallmarked for Paris in 1701 or 1708 and attributed to the pewterer Laurent Chatelain, with a low concentration of mercury still in the material inside it: an instrument of the kind used to administer mercury for venereal disease.⁷

The hallmarks predate the ship's capture. She had been the French slaver La Concorde, and the syringe may have been aboard her before any pirate was.

Where the popular image outruns the record

The drunken butcher with a saw comes out of two stories in the General History, the carpenter who took off John Phillips's leg and the surgeon who stitched Edward Low's jaw while "tollerably drunk". Popular histories have Blackbeard extorting his medicine chest at the Charles Town blockade for mercury and syphilis; Johnson, who tells the story of the ransom, says only that he was "in want of Medicines".

Every mortality figure here is one man's, written thirteen years after the events, and no muster or pay book has been read against it; whether the Isle of Princes burials fall inside the whole-voyage total is not stated, and the two figures cannot be added. The wreck's identification as Queen Anne's Revenge is strongly supported but circumstantial. The pirate medical constitution comes wholly from trial evidence printed in a single 1724 volume, corroborated across several deponents inside that text but not outside it. The two chief sources are less independent than they look: the 1724 book credits Atkins by name for its descriptions of St Thome and of Brasil and advertises his surgical notes from the same publisher.