Race, Empire and Maritime Labour

Three conditions run together under the heading of Black pirates: the man of African descent entered as a hand aboard a pirate vessel; the enslaved person carried in the same hull as property; and the ordinary maritime labour of empire. The first two often ran together in the same ship on the same day. The men at the centre of it left almost no documents of their own. They were counted, by those who captured, sold, tried or hanged them.

What the condition was

The labour system pirates raided was multiracial and stratified by statute: from 1660 the Navigation Acts required that three quarters of the crew of an English-flagged ship importing from Asia be English subjects, and an Act of 1697, in force from June 1698, opened the Guinea trade beyond the Royal African Company. John Atkins, on the traders at Sierra Leone about 1721, records that they "all keep Gromettas (Negro Servants) which they hire from Sherbro River, at two Accys or Bars a Month" to work their boats and periaguas. Free Black enterprise existed too: the 1724 narrative has Worley's company take a Philadelphia sloop "belonging to a Mulatto, whom they call'd Black Robbin". Most Black maritime workers of the period were hired hands of the gromettas' kind; Black Robbin's sloop was the exception.

The ship counts

Black men aboard pirate ships were counted in the way guns were counted, four times over in the General History of 1724. Of the French Ranger, taken by HMS Swallow off Cape Lopez on 5 February 1722: "She had 32 Guns, mann'd with 16 French Men, 20 Negroes, and 77 English." That is 20 in a company of 113, about 18 per cent.¹

Of Roberts's own ship, taken in the action of 10 February 1722 in which he was killed: "She had 40 Guns, and 157 Men, 45 whereof were Negroes", about 29 per cent, where Ogle's own dispatch gives 152 men, 52 of them of African descent. Of England and Taylor's two ships in the Indian Ocean in 1720, "no more than 300 Men in both Ships, and 40 of them Negroes", about 13 per cent. The French pirate La Bouse commanded "fourteen Guns and sixty four Hands, half French, half Negroes", the highest proportion in the record.²

What the counts do not say

No surviving record says whether the men counted held shares and votes under articles, were forced men, or were property. One eyewitness used a different word. Atkins, surgeon of the squadron and Register of the court that tried the prisoners, wrote that "We found in the three Ships about 200 Englishmen, 60 or 70 stout Negro Slaves, great plenty of trading Goods, and, what more attracted the Eye, a large quantity of Gold Dust." He served the state that held the trial, and he wrote thirteen years after the event.³

The same silence covers David Herriot's deposition of 1718, that Blackbeard left Beaufort in June 1718 with "forty white men and sixty Negroes": a count, and nothing about the status of the sixty.

Work and trust aboard

The 1724 book has Blackbeard at Ocracoke in November 1718 posting "a resolute Fellow, a Negroe whom he had bred up, with a lighted Match, in the Powder-Room, with Commands to blow up when he should give him Orders", and adds that the man "could hardly be perswaded from the rash Action". The powder room is a fighting ship's most dangerous and most trusted station, so the posting was a mark of trust; it fixes nothing about the man's status.⁴

Arne Bialuschewski reads the Roberts material the other way, as probably putting Black men to pumping and other hard labour.

Property in the same hulls

The same companies held enslaved people as property. The same book records that at Whydah in January 1721/2 Roberts's company fired the Porcupine rather than move the people aboard her: "being in hast, and finding that unshackling them cost much Time and Labour, they actually set her on Fire, with eighty of those poor Wretches on Board, chained two and two together, under the miserable Choice of perishing by Fire or Water". The counts above are of the same company, three to four weeks later.⁵

Who was tried and who was sold

The General History's summary of the Cape Coast trial of 1722 sets out the disposals as a column of ten entries, nine of them legal or mortal outcomes; the tenth reads "Negroes in both Ships, 70". The entry records no legal or mortal outcome for those men, only a number. David Wilson's study of the suppression campaign states that seventy-five men, described only as black men, were sold into slavery without trial; the trial record carries the number as about 65 to 70. Twenty white prisoners, meanwhile, escaped hanging by binding themselves to the Royal African Company for seven years, signing indentures on 26 April 1722 before a bench whose Register was Atkins.⁶

The arithmetic does not close. The 1724 narrative's two counts sum to 65, its table gives 70, Atkins gives 60 or 70, Wilson gives 75; the table totals 276 while its entries sum to 267. The number lies somewhere between 60 and 75.

Where popular belief outruns the record

The figure that about a third of golden-age pirates were Black circulates widely, with no working shown; the four counts above give about 13, about 18, about 29 per cent and about half, and four ships are not a sample. The claim that the pirate ship was racially egalitarian requires that those men held shares and votes, which no surviving source states and which Atkins denied. And "black" in a period document is an unreliable marker of African descent: the same book calls Roberts, a Welshman, "a tall black Man".⁷

No surviving record counts Asian seamen aboard a pirate vessel of these years. The modern dispute turns on the inference from presence to status: Marcus Rediker and Kenneth Kinkor read the crew counts as counts of crew, Bialuschewski reads the West African record as showing coerced labour.

What the sources cannot give is the status of the men they counted. The Charles Town proceedings of 1719, the Cape Coast court's minutes of 1722 and the Boston trial record of 1717 have not been seen, and the Royal African Company's Cape Coast accounts, which would record a sale of that size, are unsearched. Until one of those is read, whether the forty-five men aboard Roberts's ship had signed articles or were Atkins's "stout Negro Slaves" is unanswerable.