Even though success had often proved temporary in the past, new, more punitive deterrents were about to be applied that made the campaign against piracy more formidable than ever before.
The message was that pirates could no longer count on receiving pardons, or the collusion of corrupt officials or bribes handed out in exchange for better behavior. Appeasement was at an end. In its place was retribution.
Executions on Cape Coast Castle, South Africa
The first demonstration of the new truth took place in 1722 after pirates led by the notorious Bartholomew Roberts fought their last battle with Royal Navy vessels off the coast of southeastern Nigeria.
Of the ninety-five men charged with piracy, twenty-one served prison terms of varying lengths in England. Another twenty were sentenced to seven years’ hard labor in the mines of the Royal Africa Company: this was a death sentence deferred, for none survived to be released. Another fifty-four were condemned to hang.
Their executions were long drawn out, maybe deliberately, in order to demonstrate in public what happened to pirates under the new, more retributive rules. Starting on April 4, 1722 small groups of condemned pirates were taken out of the dungeons beneath Cape Coast Castle in southern Africa, their hands tied behind their backs and accompanied by a guard of Royal Africa Company soldiers.
A gruesome warning
At the scaffold, a crowd of Company employees, sailors, slavers, and sensation seekers waited to see the men die. The executions took sixteen days. Afterward, the corpses of the eighteen most reprehensible pirates were dipped in tar to preserve them and then hung in chains from gibbets until they rotted away. They were intended to serve as a gruesome warning to the crews of all ships approaching the Cape Coast.
However, the injunction was meant for all pirates everywhere and had special significance on Madagascar which had a great deal to lose from the campaign to eliminate piracy.
Piracy in Madagascar
Madagascar lay some 250 miles distant from the east coast of Africa across the Mozambique Channel. The island, the world’s fourth largest, was used as an entrepot by Arab and Indian merchants as well as by Portuguese and other Europeans.
By the mid-17th century, Madagascar had become what might be called a much larger Tortuga of the east, and was an ideal base to re-equip, re-victual, repair and careen ships. Pirates found Madagascar perfectly placed for plundering purposes. Trading ships stopping off there were easy victims of theft and pillage. The nearby Red Sea also provided rich pickings.
The "sweet trade"
The ‘sweet trade’ was the euphemism for piracy coined by the pirates themselves. It remained sweet for some thirty years after Madagascar reached its peak of prosperity in around 1690. But the new, more intensive anti-piracy campaigns turned the trade sour, as the imperial nations of Europe - Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal - found that the need to protect colonial trade became more urgent the greater that trade became.
Action in the American colonies
The anti-pirate campaigns took several forms, the first of them economic. In 1698, pirates based in Madagascar found their income seriously crippled when Frederick Philipse Robinson, their main supplier and dealer in the American colonies, was forced out of business by the British governor of New York, Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont.
The Earl used the simple expedient of seizing Robinson’s ships and confiscating them, together with their cargoes. All these cargoes were of immense value, for they were stuffed with loot stolen by the Madagascar pirates. With this, the American market for their illicit goods was destroyed.
Another colonial governor, Francis Nicholson of Virginia, chased a gang of pirates over the border into neighboring Pennsylvania and captured them: for good measure, Lord Bellomont saw to it that Pennsylvania’s corrupt acting governor, William Markham, who had been protecting the pirates, was removed from his post.
Nicholson personally directed one battle off the coast of Virginia between a pirate ship and a coast guard vessel. According to one eyewitness, the valiant governor ‘never stirred off the quarterdeck, but by his example, conduct and plenty of gold which he gave amongst the men, made them fight bravely, till they had taken the pirates’ ship with a hundred odd prisoners, the rest being killed.’
Prosecuting the pirates
The British government in London added to the onslaught by introducing new laws that made it easier to prosecute pirates. One of these laws did away with the practise of returning captured pirates to England for trial. Instead, they were tried and executed wherever they were apprehended. It was a policy that taught the locals a stern lesson.
Eventually, the economic pressure of direct action against the pirates together with the retributive laws exacted their toll. So did the increasing prominence and power of the Royal Navy, which had transformed itself from a small, defensive force into a highly professional service - the world’s largest - and one that was constantly on patrol watching out for illegal activity.
The end of piracy
Now, it became much more dangerous for pirates to prowl the seas and oceans seeking and attacking prey. The loss of Madagascar and the Caribbean and their invaluable facilities had also been a crucial factor in bringing down the edifice of piracy as the world had known and feared it since ancient times. Recognizing these unpalatable but realistic facts, many pirates decided to call it a day.
After around 1730, no pirate with the stature of the Brethren of the Coast or their successors in the Golden Age of Piracy challenged the major maritime nations. It was wise as well as logical, for by that time, pirates had only two choices: give up and retire or carry on and risk capture and death.
Either way, they had to face the same somber truth: their days of adventure, freedom, the democratic rights granted by the pirate code and the fabulous wealth the ‘sweet trade’ brought them were well and truly over.
Sources
- Defoe, Daniel: The history and lives of all the most notorious pirates and their crews, from Captain Avery, who first settled at Madagascar, to Captain John Gow, ... ... laws against piracy. The ninth edition. (Andover, Hampshire, UK: Gale ECCO Books, 2010) ISBN-10: 1170714102/ISBN-13: 978-1170714102
- Rogozi, Jan: Honor Among Thieves : Captain Kidd, Henry Every, and the Pirate Democracy in the Indian Ocean (Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 2000) ISBN-10: 0811715299/ISBN-13: 978-0811715294
- The Golden Age
Brenda Ralph Lewis - My interest in history dates from childhood. I am presently the author of 120 books and hundreds of articles, all on historical ...
