Violence and Coercion

The word covers six practices: threat never meant to be used, violence against a ship that resisted, torture of prisoners thought to hide money, cruelty as sport, force to recruit and keep skilled men, and violence against enslaved Africans.

The surrender-or-die system

Most takings involved no fighting at all, because the target struck her colours. The promise was two-sided: surrender and be plundered and released; resist and be given no quarter. Battle risked lives, damaged the prize and cost time, so the threat of slaughter bought a reputation that made slaughter unnecessary. The black flag put the promise in play.¹

William Snelgrave, taken in the Sierra Leone river on 1 April 1719 by Thomas Cocklyn's company, heard the pirate boatswain swear that "No Quarter fhould be given to any Captain that offered to defend his Ship". His own crew saved him by calling out "For God's fake don't kill our Captain", which turned the pirates onto the men themselves.²

Torture for information

Three companies used pain to make prisoners give up money. Edward North deposed in May 1718 that Charles Vane's men bound a captive to the bowsprit "with matches to his eyes burning and a pistol loaded with the muzzle into his mouth". John Wickstead deposed that Lowther's men put "lighted matches between the fingers of" prisoners to find the gold, and a Philadelphia paper of June 1723 reports Low's men burning prisoners "to the bone". The technique is the same one in all three.³

Sweating, in which a prisoner ran inside a ring of candles while armed men outside pricked him, was described by one of the men it was done to, Captain Richard Hawkins, in a newspaper of 8 August 1724.

Johnson tells the most famous cruelty of the period. Low, told under torture that the captain of the Portuguese Nostre Signiora de Victoria had hung a bag of eleven thousand moidores out of the cabin window during the chase and cut it away when taken, "ordered the Captain's Lips to be cut off, which he broil'd before his Face, and afterwards murthered him and all the Crew, being thirty two Persons." Governor John Hart reported the same acts and the same total to the Council of Trade and Plantations on 25 March 1724.

Forcing, and the courts that tested it

Navigators, surgeons and carpenters were taken out of prizes and kept. Philip Ashton, taken at Port Roseway in June 1722, went up a ladder of pressure: the question whether he would sign the articles; Low, pistol in hand and then cocked, demanding whether any of them were married; drink and promised riches in the steerage; the pistol again, with "I'll shoot you thro' the Head"; and his name set down in the pirates' book regardless, "tho' against our Consent". One of the same company's articles ran the other way: "Not to Draw Blood, or take away the Life of any Man, after they had given him Quarter, unless he was to be punished as a Criminal".⁴

The courts tested the plea. At Cape Coast Castle in 1722 the commissioners heard men from the Ranger say they had signed "from a Terror of Death", accepted that many had been forced, and heard each singly; they then set the rule that defeated most such pleas, that a man neglecting a fair chance of liberty "shews strong Inclinations to Dishonesty". Two of Bellamy's company were acquitted at Boston in 1717, twelve of sixteen there in 1726. See recruitment and forced men.⁵

The Porcupine at Whydah

Pirates met enslaved Africans as cargo: sold, ransomed and abandoned with no more ceremony than sugar. The extreme case is Roberts's company at Whydah in January 1721/2, where a master ashore refused the ransom and the pirates, in Johnson's words "finding that unshackling them cost much Time and Labour", fired the Porcupine with eighty people chained aboard in pairs. Witnesses swore to the burning at the 1723 trial, and Ogle reported it in his despatch. The shackles were not the pirates'. See the slave trade nexus.⁶

The violence of the age

Pirate violence was a minor tributary of the lawful violence around it. The Navy Act of 1661 prescribed death for desertion and mutinous assembly, and referred every unlisted offence to "the Lawes and Customes in such cases used att Sea", meaning a captain's discretion. On the Guinea coast in the same years, the naval surgeon John Atkins recorded, after a rising aboard the slaver Robert, a woman hoisted "up by the Thumbs, whipp'd, and slashed her with Knives, before the other Slaves till she died". That was lawful trade.⁷

The plank and the massacre

No period account has a golden-age pirate making a prisoner walk a plank; the nearest thing in the 1724 book is a classical anecdote in its preface. That companies habitually massacred crews who surrendered is not supported by the bargain the black flag offered, nor by the masters who lived to swear depositions.

Several documents here are known only at second hand: the depositions of North and Wickstead, the Philadelphia paper of June 1723, Hawkins's newspaper account, and Governor Hart's letter of 25 March 1724 on Low's cruelty to a Portuguese captain. Whether Hart is independent of the 1724 book is not established; his letter has not been read whole. The 1696 trial of Every's men, the only court record of the Ganj-i-Sawai, is known here from its title page. Torture for information is attested for three companies and no more: that it happened is established, how often is not. Of the Porcupine at Whydah, the burning is attested outside the 1724 book, but the figure of eighty people chained aboard, and the unshackling that would have cost too much time, are Johnson's alone. No reliable total of people killed or of ships taken survives, and almost every account of pirate violence comes from someone with an interest in its being as bad as possible, as almost every account of lawful violence comes from the institution inflicting it.