Roberts

On the evening of the thirty-first of October 1904, in Moriah Calvinistic Methodist Chapel at Loughor on the Burry Inlet in West Glamorgan, a twenty-six-year-old former colliery boy and blacksmith's apprentice called Evan Roberts, then a candidate for the Methodist ministry at Newcastle Emlyn, came home for the half-term holiday and asked his minister, the Reverend Daniel Jones, for permission to address the youth meeting after the seven o'clock service. Sixteen young people stayed back. Roberts spoke to them for an hour and then asked them to commit to four points: confess any known sin, give up doubtful habits, obey the prompt of the Spirit promptly, confess Christ publicly. By the end of the meeting all sixteen had stood up. He held a similar meeting the next night, and the next. Within a fortnight, Moriah was full to the doors every night. Within a month, news had spread up the coalfield, and Roberts was preaching in Aberavon, Pontypridd, Cardiff, Caernarfon. By March 1905, by the conservative count of the chapel union, about one hundred thousand new converts had been added to the Welsh Nonconformist congregations, the largest spontaneous religious revival in modern British history. The tradition of the chapels of South Wales is that, on the night of the thirty-first of October 1904 at Moriah Loughor, the country changed.

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On the morning of the tenth of February 1722, off Cape Lopez on the west coast of present-day Gabon, the British Royal Navy fifty-gun ship HMS Swallow under Captain Chaloner Ogle, in pursuit of the pirate squadron of Bartholomew Roberts since the mid-January, came up on the Roberts flagship the Royal Fortune (a forty-gun captured-French slaver Roberts had taken at Whydah six weeks earlier) at the Cape Lopez anchorage. Roberts, forty years old, the Pembrokeshire-Welsh former merchant-marine mate who had succeeded Howell Davis as captain of the Royal Rover squadron in June 1719 and had taken about four hundred and seventy prize-ships in the thirty-two months since, had been celebrating the overnight a successful prize-capture of the previous day. The Swallow came in under French colours, hove to at long cannon-range, and opened fire with a broadside at the eight in the morning. Roberts, on the deck of the Royal Fortune in his customary crimson silk-and-feathered hat, was hit in the throat by a grapeshot ball from the Swallow's second broadside and was dead at the foot of the mainmast within seconds. His crew, by the pre-arranged Roberts protocol on his death, threw his body overboard before the Swallow boarding-party could secure it (the protocol had been agreed by the pirate-council to prevent the public-gibbet display the Royal Navy customarily inflicted on the pirate-captain's body). The Swallow captured the Royal Fortune and the surviving pirate squadron of about two hundred and seventy-two men; about a hundred and sixty-five were tried at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast in April 1722 and seventy-four were hanged from a single long gibbet on the beach, the largest single execution of pirates in British history.

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