Quartermasters and Divided Authority

The quartermaster was an elected and revocable officer, holding the company's money and much of its discipline, sworn to by deponents in four courts across four years and by one firsthand narrative outside the trials. The literary set-piece, the "civil Magistrate" with his mock House of Lords, is Johnson's.

What the office was

Aboard Anglo-American pirate ships of roughly 1690 to 1726, the quartermaster was an elected officer who held the civil and economic authority of the company. He was the crew's man and the captain's counterweight. Where a naval captain's word ran the whole ship, the pirate captain's near-absolute power was reserved to chase and battle; the rest of the time authority sat with the quartermaster and, above him, with the company that had chosen them both.¹

His functions were concrete. He was custodian and distributor of plunder and provisions, first aboard a prize, separating what he judged fit for the company and allotting each man his share. He was a magistrate for the small offences the articles did not cover, punishing by drubbing or whipping and restraining ill usage of prisoners. He led the boarding party. He was the standard successor when a captain was deposed or killed. And he held his place by the votes of the company, which could turn him out.

The naval homonym

There are two offices that share the name, and the reader who imports the wrong one loses the whole point. In the Royal Navy and in merchantmen the quartermaster was a petty officer: he attended the helm and the conning of the ship, the binnacle and the steering, the stowage of the hold, and the issue of provisions and the spirit ration. He had no power over shares, no judicial standing, no political place, and he was appointed from above rather than elected. The pirate quartermaster absorbed the provisioning core of that role and built an elected magistracy on top of it. Snelgrave, taken by pirates off Sierra Leone in 1719, saw the two layers side by side: his captors kept "all other Officers as is usual on board Men of War" in addition to captain and quartermaster. The word was the same. The office was enlarged.

The powers

The office was elected and revocable. At Cape Coast in 1723 the court treated it as a matter of course, asking a prisoner "why they voted for such a Quarter-master, since what he did, being chose by their Votes, was their Action." The crew answered for the man they had elected.²

He controlled the plunder. Benjamin Krest, master of the Gertruyt, deposed that William Magnes "came on Board as Quarter-Master of the Pyrates, and order'd his Provisions out." Another witness described the custom exactly: "after the Quarter-master has done with taking what he thinks fit for the Company's use, those that go with him do then serve themselves", and a prisoner "accepted of nothing on board a Prize, but the Shares the Quarter-master allotted him." First pick for the company, then the allotment of every man's portion.³

He was the successor. Hosea Tisdell, a Kingston tavern-keeper, swore that after Charles Vane's company met a French man-of-war in November 1718 and was beaten off, "the Pirates quarrelled among themselves, and divided their Company. That the Quarter-Master, being made Captain of their Brigantine, they turn'd out Charles Vane, Robert Deal ... and Fifteen Men more." When the company removed the captain, it raised the quartermaster in his place. Tisdell leaves the man unnamed; the identification with John Rackham is Johnson's, not the deposition's.⁴

William Snelgrave, writing in 1734 from his own captivity, described the whole division of authority in a single breath:⁵

the Captain of a Pirate Ship, is chiefly chosen to fight the Vessels they may meet with. Besides him, they chuse another principal Officer whom they call Quarter-master, who has the general Inspection of all Affairs, and often controuls the Captain's Orders: This Person is also to be the first Man in boarding any Ship they shall attack; or go in the Boat on any desperate Enterprize.

Snelgrave also watched the office act as a court. When a boatswain meant cruelty to him after quarter had been given, a passenger complained "to the Quarter-master and Company", urged the maxim against ill usage of prisoners, and "many of them voted for his being whipp'd." The quartermaster and the company together were the bench.

Named quartermasters

William Magnes (spelled Magnes, Magnefs or Mugnes, never "Maynes") was a named quartermaster of Roberts's company: a witness swore he "came on Board as Quarter-Master of the Pyrates." David Simpson, called "the old Quarter-master", was his predecessor in the same company, named when a prisoner protested he had voted "for David Simpson the old Quarter-master ... for that this Successor Magnes was too honest a Man for the Business."⁶

Three more names come down on Johnson's word alone. Johnson makes John Rackham Vane's quartermaster; the Tisdell deposition that records the succession leaves the man unnamed, and Rackham surfaces in no record before August 1720. Richard Hardy is a convicted senior pirate in the 1723 print but is not titled quartermaster there. Richard Corner appears as quartermaster of Rackham's own later company on the 1721 Jamaica roll. And one name in wide modern circulation is not among them: Paul Williams is often given as Bellamy's quartermaster, and the 1717 Boston trial of the Whydah crew would settle whether he was.

The civil magistrate and the House of Lords

Johnson gives the office its most quotable form: the quartermaster "claims all Authority this Way (excepting in Time of Battle)", "punishes at his own Arbitrement, with drubbing or whipping", "is Trustee for the whole, is the first on Board any Prize", and "acts as a sort of a civil Magistrate on Board a Pyrate Ship." He also styles the senior men of Davis's and Roberts's companies "Lords" and their body a "House of Lords". The phrase appears in none of the trial prints behind this record: the Cape Coast pamphlet has only "Lords Commissioners" and "Lords of the Admiralty", the crown's institutions.⁷

What the sources will not give is the inside of the office in any one named company: how a quartermaster was nominated, how a vote to remove him ran, where his authority stopped and the captain's resumed. The depositions prove the office existed and did these things. They are thin on the procedure.