Howell Davis on Príncipe

Some careers are not closed by the men who oppose them but by the men who inherit them. A captain falls on a forest path in the wrong week of his life, and the chair he leaves empty is filled by the quartermaster's vote before sundown. The pirate republic was built for exactly this transfer: one ball through the chest, one show of hands in a cabin, and the cruise resumes under a new name. The man who fell first is remembered, when he is remembered, as the prologue to the man who stood up.

THE PEMBROKESHIRE BOY

Howell Davis was born at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire about the year 1690, into a coast that fed the Bristol Channel trade with mates and boys and any cargo the slavers would carry. He went to sea at twelve. By the summer of 1718 he was mate of the Cadogan, a Bristol slaver bound from London to the Gold Coast, when the pirate captain Edward England took her off Sierra Leone. Six weeks in England's company were enough; Davis signed the articles. In October the men of the Anomabu rendezvous elected him captain of the Royal Rover, thirty-two guns, and he gave them, in eleven months, the practice of his trick: come into a harbour under the king's colours, dine with the governor, and leave with his warehouses. He had worked it at the Cape Verdes against the Portuguese and at the Gambia River against the Royal African Company, and by June of 1719 he had brought it round to the island of Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, where the Portuguese kept a small garrison and a fat trade.

THE FIVE DAYS' COURTESY

The squadron came into the anchorage at Bahia das Agulhas on the fourteenth, the Royal Rover and the Royal James and a six-gun sloop they had taken off a Portuguese coaster, all flying the Royal Navy ensign. Davis presented himself ashore as a king's officer come to suppress piracy in the Guinea trade. The governor's house received him; the governor came aboard for dinner; a Te Deum was sung. For five days the trick held. The pirates watered the ships, the coopers came off with casks, the warehouse books were opened to the visiting commodore so that he could be sure no Frenchman or pirate had touched the consignment. The plan was patient. On the evening of the nineteenth, at a parting reception at the governor's house, Davis would seize his host, walk him back down to the boats, and ransom him for whatever was bonded in the company stores.

THE MORNING OF THE NINETEENTH

On the morning of the nineteenth a Portuguese cooper came aboard with the day's water and asked Davis a question about the dress of His Majesty's commissioned officers that Davis, fluent in slaver English but never in the Admiralty's small print, did not quite answer. The cooper went ashore and put the conversation in front of the governor. By breakfast the governor had made up his mind. He sent word that the commodore was expected for a small ceremony before the evening's dinner, and posted twenty muskets in the rainforest above the path that ran the half mile from the landing to his house. The path was a tunnel of green: high canopy, the heat already up, the equatorial light coming down in coins on the red earth. Davis ordered his boat away at a little after nine. Six men with him. By Captain Charles Johnson's account in A General History of the Pyrates, he went up the path with all the assurance imaginable.

A SECOND OF TIME ON A FOREST PATH

On the path he had perhaps a hundred yards in which to read what was, by then, already written. He noticed the cooper was not at the landing. He noticed that no one had been sent down to meet him. He noticed, because a Pembrokeshire boy who has worked the Guinea coast notices these things, that the birds in the canopy above the half-mile mark were not where birds in a canopy should be. To turn back was to abandon the trick, and the trick was the cruise, and the cruise was eleven months of acclamation; a captain who walks his men back to the boats on a feeling has lost his cabin by the second dog watch. So he walked on. The volley came from both sides of the path at once, twenty muskets at point-blank range. Five balls struck him. He fell into the red earth without speaking, and five of his six men fell with him. Only the Pembrokeshire bo'sun John Walden cut clear of the trees, ran the half mile back down to the water, and brought the Royal Rover the news by eleven o'clock.

THE CABIN, THAT EVENING

The pirate council met in the great cabin of the Royal Rover at the anchor. By the articles, the captaincy was elective and the vote was open. Two names stood: Thomas Anstis the quartermaster, and Bartholomew Roberts the sailing master, the Pembrokeshire man Davis had pressed ten weeks before at Anomabu out of the slave-ship Princess. Roberts had been a pirate for seventy-odd days and he made, by Johnson's report, a short speech in which he observed that since he had dipped his hands in muddy water, and must be a pyrate, it was better being a commander than a common man. He was elected by acclamation. By morning the squadron weighed and stood north out of the Gulf of Guinea, and the body of Howell Davis was left in the Portuguese ground above the Bahia das Agulhas.

THE WAKE OF THE TRICK

Roberts ran the captaincy for two years and eight months. He took, by the contemporary count, something near four hundred prizes between the Guinea coast, the Brazil banks, the Caribbean, and the Newfoundland fishery, including the Sagrada Família off Bahia in September 1720 with her freight of Portuguese gold. He was killed by grape-shot in action against HMS Swallow off Cape Lopez on the tenth of February 1722, forty years old, and his men were taken to Cape Coast Castle to be tried and hanged. The Welsh pirate republic that Davis had founded at Anomabu ended at the Cape Coast gibbet. Within a decade the West African coast was closed to Atlantic pirates, the Royal Navy patrols were settled, and the Golden Age was over.

THE PROLOGUE

Some men make a career; some make the man who makes the career. Davis worked his confidence-trick at six anchorages and it carried him from a slaver's berth to a thirty-two-gun ship in eleven months, which is a Pembrokeshire boy's whole answer to the Bristol trade. On the seventh trick the cooper asked the wrong question, and a forest path took the answer back. What remains of him is not a tomb and not a flag, but a sentence in Johnson's volume of 1724 and the name of the man he pressed at Anomabu, who walked into the cabin of the Royal Rover on the evening of the nineteenth of June and sat down in the chair Davis had left warm.