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Plunder, Shares and Compensation

The system by which pirate companies of about 1690 to 1725 divided what they seized, in fixed proportional shares set down in written articles, alongside a flat cash payment from the common stock to men maimed in action, with the prize itself usually cargo and stores rather than coin.

Also writtenPirate shares; Share system; Division of plunder; Injury compensation; Limb payments; Pirate wound tariff

A pirate company fixed its terms before the taking: what each rank drew from a prize, and what a man was paid for a limb lost in getting it. A captain drew twice a foremast hand, and a maimed man a flat sum off the top before any division.

What the system was

A pirate company divided plunder by proportional share rather than by wage. The unit of account was one common crewman's share, and officers drew multiples of it. Charges agreed in advance came off the common stock first, compensation for maimed men among them; only the remainder reached the share table. The rules sat inside the articles each man signed, and on many ships the elected quartermaster oversaw the appraisal and the sharing-out. None of it began with the golden age: division by lay or share was ordinary in privateering and the fishery, and Henry Morgan's buccaneers settled spoil and wound payments before sailing. What was probably new in the golden age was the compressed ratio between captain and common man, roughly two to one where naval pay ran to many times that.

Two sets of ratios are quoted for the golden age, both printed in the 1724 General History of the Pyrates. In the articles of Bartholomew Roberts the captain and the quartermaster took two shares each, the master, boatswain and gunner one and a half, other officers one and a quarter, and every other man a single share. The articles of George Lowther and Edward Low follow the same pattern: captain two shares, master one and a half, and the doctor, mate, gunner and boatswain one and a quarter apiece. In both, a captain drew twice a foremast hand.¹

These were terms two companies agreed on paper. Signed articles almost never survive, because crews destroyed them to deny the evidence at trial.³

Payment for a maimed man

Both sets charge the common stock for injury before division. Roberts's ninth article gives a man who loses a limb or becomes a cripple in the company's service eight hundred pieces of eight out of the public stock, with lesser hurts paid proportionally, and names a thousand pounds as the sum a man should have before anyone talks of giving over the life. Lowther's articles fix a flat one hundred and fifty pounds sterling for a limb lost in time of engagement, but the same eight articles printed under Low's name give six hundred pieces of eight instead. Each remains a single flat sum.²

How such a sum was met is a further question. A payment of that size could only come out of a stock holding enough coin or readily sold goods, which most captures, being bulk cargo, did not hold.

The graduated tariff everyone remembers belongs to an older source. Alexandre Exquemelin's Buccaneers of America, first printed in Dutch in 1678, sets out the buccaneer tariff: six hundred pieces of eight for a right arm, five hundred for a left, five hundred for a right leg, four hundred for a left, one hundred for an eye and the same for a finger; the 1684 English version adds six enslaved people as the alternative for a right arm. That tariff is buccaneer, not golden age. The two are routinely run together.⁴

What a prize actually held

Shares were reckoned in goods far more often than in coin. Provisions, sugar, cloth, ships' stores, tools, medicines, alcohol and logwood were the substance of a capture, valued because they could be used or sold. So, grimly, were enslaved people: the vessel that became Queen Anne's Revenge was taken as the French slaver La Concorde in 1717, and enslaved people taken in prizes were counted as plunder, as the slave trade nexus page sets out. Coin appeared, sometimes in quantity, and was unusual enough to be remarked on. Roberts's cutting-out of a richly laden Portuguese ship at Bahia in 1719 is remembered as exceptional for that reason. Turning bulk cargo into value needed receivers and receptive ports: see prizes, cargoes and fencing.⁵

Buried treasure and the one real cache

Burying plunder for later recovery was essentially not a practice. The one substantial instance is William Kidd's deposit of goods and coin on Gardiners Island off Long Island in 1699, a concealment made before his arrest that the colonial authorities recovered and inventoried. There was no hoard and no map. The chest and the cross on the chart are furniture of later fiction, above all Stevenson's Treasure Island of 1883.⁶

Two over-claims

The injury payments are often called the world's first workmen's compensation, predating the state's by two centuries. The arithmetic does not hold: state schemes followed in Germany in 1884 and in Britain with the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1897, which puts the gap nearer one hundred and seventy years, and the pirate provision bound one crew by private agreement rather than conferring a right enforceable anywhere. The provision was real; the framing overstates it.⁷

The second over-claim is the uniform pirate code. A handful of article-sets from a single compilation do not make a common law of the sea. The habit was narrower: companies fixed their terms in writing before the taking and gave an elected officer charge of applying them; see crew voting and councils.

The record is good on what two companies wrote down and poor on what any company did. No authentic manuscript set of articles has been found; the figures reach us through one printed compilation of 1724 known to shape its material, and several of Lowther's points survive only in newspaper and trial print outside it. Whether a maimed man was ever paid his eight hundred pieces of eight, these sources cannot say. The goods named above as the usual substance of a capture are described from modern historical writing rather than from prize inventories, and Roberts's Bahia prize of 1719 is as the 1724 text reports it.

What the evidence does not settle

Survival of pirate articles

Whether an independent manuscript of any surviving pirate article set existsUnverified

Share and injury compliance

Whether share ratios and injury payments were honoured in practice is unresolved

Injury clauses as workmen's compensation

Calling the injury clauses early workmen's compensation is interpretation, not factDisputed

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

The two golden-age share tables that survive are both printed in the 1724 General History of the Pyrates: in Bartholomew Roberts's articles the captain and quartermaster took two shares each, the master, boatswain and gunner one and a half, other officers one and a quarter and every other man a single share, while the articles of George Lowther and Edward Low give the captain two shares, the master one and a half, and the doctor, mate, gunner and boatswain one and a quarter apiece. Confirmed Directly supported by the record. Period narrative: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, 1724, articles of Bartholomew Roberts and articles of George Lowther and Edward Low
Both printed article-sets charge the common stock for injury before the plunder is divided: Roberts's ninth article allows a man who loses a limb or becomes a cripple in the company's service eight hundred pieces of eight out of the public stock with lesser hurts paid proportionally, and names a thousand pounds as the sum a man should have before giving over the life, while Lowther's articles fix a flat one hundred and fifty pounds sterling for a limb lost in time of engagement; the same eight articles printed under Low's name from the Boston News-Letter of 8 August 1723 give six hundred pieces of eight instead. Confirmed Directly supported by the record. Period narrative: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, 1724, articles of Bartholomew Roberts (ninth article) and of George Lowther and Edward Low
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. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. 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, 2004
The finely graduated wound tariff of six hundred pieces of eight for a right arm, five hundred for a left arm, five hundred for a right leg, four hundred for a left leg, one hundred for an eye and the same for a finger is Exquemelin's record of the buccaneers, first published in Dutch in 1678, the 1684 English version adding the alternative of six enslaved people for a right arm, and not the golden-age pattern, whose surviving articles pay a single flat sum for the loss of a limb. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Period narrative: Alexandre Exquemelin, De Americaensche Zee-Roovers / The Buccaneers of America, 1678, read against the article-sets in the 1724 General History
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. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Secondary scholarship and period narrative: Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 2004 and the 1724 General History on Bahia
Burying plunder for later recovery was essentially not a golden-age practice, the one substantial documented instance being William Kidd's deposit of goods and coin on Gardiners Island off Long Island in 1699, a short-term concealment before his arrest that the colonial authorities promptly recovered and inventoried, while the treasure chest and the marked chart derive from later fiction, above all Stevenson's Treasure Island of 1883. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Secondary scholarship and colonial records: David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, 1995, with the records and inventory of the Gardiners Island deposit, 1699 to 1701, in Colonial Office papers and the printed Kidd trial accounts
The description of the pirate injury clauses as the world's first workmen's compensation, predating the state's by two centuries, overstates the record: state schemes followed in Germany in 1884 and in Britain with the Workmen's Compensation Act of 1897, making the interval nearer one hundred and seventy years, and the pirate provision bound a single crew by private agreement rather than conferring an enforceable right. Disputed The sources disagree, and we say how. Specialist secondary source: The Pirate Surgeon's Journal, "Health Insurance at Sea" and related pages, piratesurgeon.com, against the German accident insurance law of 1884 and the Workmen's Compensation Act 1897