Pirate Articles

A pirate company's articles were its constitution: written out, sworn to and subscribed by every man who joined, and binding on that ship and nowhere else. Three sets of clauses come down in something close to their own words. Behind them lies the practice itself, which is the larger thing: men were made to sign, they swore to what they signed, and they voted on what the company did.

What a pirate company's articles were

Pirate articles were the written agreement of a single ship's company. Each set was a run of numbered clauses fixing how plunder was shared, how the crew was disciplined, what a man was owed if he lost a limb in action, and how the men were to conduct themselves aboard. Every person who joined the company subscribed to the articles and swore to them, commonly on a Bible, and in Phillips's crew, for want of a Bible, on a hatchet. The articles were made by that company, applied only to it, and had no standing in any court on shore.¹

Signing was not optional. When the Cape Coast court in 1723 acquitted Richard Scot, it noted that he was "not in a condition to fign their Articles, which the Court asked him about, becaufe all are obliged to it." The bench treated the failure to sign as the thing worth remarking on. Membership ran through the pen.²

The homonym you have to watch

One word does two jobs, and the confusion is easy to make. In an Admiralty trial print, "the Articles" almost always means the numbered charges of the indictment, read out by the court's Register and exhibited against the accused. That is the dominant sense in the 1721 Jamaica trials and in the 1696 trial of Henry Every's crew, where "the Articles" are the counts of the charge. It is not the pirates' shipboard constitution.⁷

The 1723 Roberts pamphlet uses the word both ways inside its own covers. It opens by charging that the men were "Articled together", meaning indicted, and then fills its columns with depositions about signing the pirates' own articles, meaning the constitution.

The three surviving sets

Three numbered article sets survive in something close to verbatim form: Bartholomew Roberts's eleven articles, George Lowther's eight, and John Phillips's nine. All three come through one book, Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates of 1724 and 1728.⁵

Johnson prints only "some" of Roberts's articles. The crew had "taken Care to throw over-board the Original they had sign'd and sworn to", and he suspects that "the remainder contained something too horrid to be disclosed." Article I ran:

Every Man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment; has equal Title to the fresh Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized, and use them at pleasure, unless a Scarcity ... make it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a Retrenchment.

Phillips's men swore on a hatchet. In Johnson's words, "one of them writ out the following Articles (which we have taken verbatim) and all swore to 'em upon a Hatchet for want of a Bible." Lowther's company had a Bible, and their set opens straight onto the share table: "the following short Articles were drawn up, signed and sworn to upon the Bible ... 1. The Captain is to have two full Shares".

Signing, swearing and voting

A man might be brought to the paper at the point of a pistol, or never be shown it at all.

George Fenn, mate of the King Solomon, "depofeth, That the Prifoner William Philips, when he returned from the Pyrates, told him, that he had been obliged to Sign the Pyrates Articles that Night, for that a Piftol was laid upon the Table to force him to it." The pistol on the table is the physical fact of the thing: a document produced at a ceremony, and a man made to put his hand to it.³

Stephen Thomas gave the counter-image in the same court. He deposed that for John Stratton "no Piftol or Articles, were produced that Night by the Pyrates for his Signing." The articles were a thing that could be present or absent at a signing, and the court thought the difference mattered.

And the company governed by the vote the articles promised. Richard Scot swore that a shipmate "had begg'd the Deponent's Vote (all the Pyrates Affairs being carried by that) for his Difcharge." The parenthesis is dropped in passing, by a man who had been asked about something else: the whole business ran on votes.⁴

The Kidd instrument: what a lawful version looked like

Running beside the buccaneer custom was the privateer's "articles of agreement", a formal and lawful contract of service between a commander and his crew. William Kidd, commander of the Adventure Galley, signed one in 1696 with his quartermaster John Walker, a list of the company going with it. That instrument is the mould the pirate articles were cast in. The outlaws took the form of the privateer contract and much of its content, and threw away its legality.⁶

The buccaneer ancestry

The articles did not appear from nowhere. They descend from the buccaneers' written share-and-compensation agreement, the "chasse-partie". Exquemelin's Bucaniers of America (English 1684, from the Dutch of 1678) describes how the buccaneers before a voyage drew up "certain articles, which are put in writing, which every one is bound to observe; and all of them, or the chiefest part, do set their hands to it", followed by a fixed tariff for injury: six hundred pieces of eight or six slaves for a right arm, five hundred for the left, and so down to a hundred for an eye or a finger. The line into the 1720s is plain in the numbers. Roberts's crew promised eight hundred dollars for a lost limb, Phillips's four hundred pieces of eight for a joint, Lowther's a hundred and fifty pounds sterling.

What sits outside the subject

Three things share the vocabulary and must be kept out. The merchant service had its own articles of agreement, the wage contract of an honest voyage; it borrows the name and none of the constitution. The "Custom of the Coast" was the unwritten body of buccaneer usage, customary law rather than a document, which the written articles partly codify and are not identical with. And the indictment sense of "articles", already covered above, is the one that catches readers who trust the word rather than the sentence.

"Matelotage", the buccaneer partnership arrangement, turns up everywhere in modern popular writing, and in none of the primary sources cited for this theme.

The record is good on the fact of the articles and poor on their words. The depositions prove men signed, swore, and voted; they almost never give the clauses. The clauses survive only where a bookseller chose to print them.