The Slave-Trade Nexus

Four connected conditions sit under this heading, and the record keeps them apart. Pirates attacked slave ships and sometimes kept the hulls. The enslaved people found aboard a prize were, with rare exceptions, treated as property to be sold. The fort where pirates were tried belonged to the Royal African Company. And a minority of the men in pirate companies were of African descent, some free and drawing shares, some held aboard as labour. The four together describe predators working inside the slave economy.

A famous flagship was a slave ship

La Concorde was a Nantes slaver owned by Rene Montaudoin. She left Nantes on 24 March 1717, took on 516 captive Africans at Whydah on 8 July, and lost 61 of them and 16 of her crew to disease on the crossing. Blackbeard took her about a hundred miles from Martinique in November 1717, put the French crew and the surviving Africans ashore at Bequia in the Grenadines, save for a party the project literature reports him retaining in figures that do not reconcile with the 455 survivors, and refitted the ship as the Queen Anne's Revenge. She was a working slaver until that November.¹

Why a slaver was worth taking

The attraction was commercial. A slave ship carried trade goods, gold, ivory and specie outbound to the Guinea coast and sugar, indigo and other produce homeward, so she was worth taking at either end of the triangle, and as a purpose-built vessel she was a large, fast galley, well suited to conversion into a flagship. When piracy surged after the Peace of Utrecht and the demobilisation that followed, the arteries of the slave trade became the hunting grounds. The nexus was less a development within piracy than the environment piracy occupied from the start.

What became of the people aboard a prize

The ship, her crew and the people in her hold were then disposed of separately. The last of the three is the worst documented. In the ordinary case the enslaved people aboard a prize were disposed of as property, sold to planters or traders, ransomed, or kept aboard as forced labour at the pumps and the heavy work of the ship. The La Concorde captives are the traceable instance: set ashore at Bequia and afterwards carried to Martinique by the French, their presumed outcome is sale into colonial slavery rather than liberation. That is an inference; no record of their release exists, and the weight of the evidence is that captives taken in prizes were sold.²

Black men in the companies

A minority of the men in pirate companies were of African descent, and some were full members who signed articles and drew shares. An estimated 30 to 50 of the Whydah's company, about 146 on the sworn count at Boston and put as high as 180 in museum material, were of African descent. The estimate comes from museum and archaeological interpretation of the wreck rather than from a crew list, and is possible at best. Two are named: John Julian, of mixed Miskito and African descent, and Hendrick Quintor, described as a free Black man. Who those men were and how the sources count them is the subject of race, empire and maritime labour.³

The slaving interest and suppression

The traffic piracy fed on also helped to end it. The slave-trading interest, its shipping harried on the Guinea coast by Roberts and others, pressed for naval action. The naval response is described under naval suppression. The great trial of 1722 sat at Cape Coast Castle, the Royal African Company's fort, before a bench of three Royal Navy officers and four Company men.⁴

The liberating pirate

For most of the twentieth century this dimension was marginal to popular accounts. From the 1980s the work associated with Marcus Rediker and others recovered the multiracial character of pirate crews and argued for the pirate ship as a site of unusual levelling, and the excavation of the Whydah from 1984 by Barry Clifford, with the interpretive work of the late Ken Kinkor, put Black pirates before a wide public. Downstream that became a myth of the liberating pirate who systematically freed the enslaved. Free Black pirates with shares and the routine sale of captured Africans existed in the same companies in the same years.

What the sources cannot yet give is the paperwork behind the outcomes. No muster roll survives for the Whydah, so the crew figure stays an estimate; the fate of the enslaved people aboard most prizes goes unrecorded, so the presumption of sale rests on inference rather than on sale records for named ships. The Cape Coast trial file and the Royal African Company's factory books for 1719 to 1722 are where those answers should lie, and neither has been read.