Black Bart off Cape Lopez

A career built on speed and refusal can only be ended by the one weapon its captain has refused to carry. The man who outran every navy in the Atlantic for thirty-two months, who wrote sober articles for a drunken trade, who walked his quarterdeck in crimson silk as if daring the sea to take him, was felled at last not by a slower ship or a better gunner but by a single morning he had not slept off, and by a flag that was not what it claimed to be.

THE WELSHMAN AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE

He was born John Roberts at Casnewydd-Bach in northern Pembrokeshire on the seventeenth of May 1682, son of George Roberts the small farmer and Mary Lewis, and he went to sea as a ship's boy at twelve in the Welsh coastal trade. By 1719 he was third mate of the slaver Princess of London, taken at Anomabu on the third of June by the Welsh pirate Howell Davis. He signed the articles, by his own later admission, under the implicit duress that has always governed these signings; six weeks later, when Davis was shot dead at Príncipe, the pirate council elected him captain in Davis's place. He changed his name to Bartholomew, in the old Welsh fashion of taking a new name with a new life, and within a year he was the most-wanted man on the Atlantic.

He governed the Royal Rover, and then the Royal Fortune, by a written code. No gambling for money. No women aboard. Lights out at eight. Disputes ashore, on the sand, pistol and cutlass. He himself drank tea. In thirty-two months he took some four hundred and seventy prizes, more, by Marcus Rediker's reckoning in Villains of All Nations, than Blackbeard, Bonnet, Rackham and Bonny combined. At Bahia in September 1720 he cut a forty-two-ship Portuguese fleet in the roads and brought out the Sagrada Família, and from her governor he took the large diamond cross that he wore afterwards on a gold chain at his throat, as if to mark the spot where the cross would one day fail.

THE WHYDAH ROADS, JANUARY

At Whydah, on the Slave Coast, in early January 1722, he stood into the roads with three ships and put the eleven slavers anchored there under his guns inside an hour. Ten paid their eight pounds of gold dust ransom; the eleventh, the Porcupine, refused, and his men set her alight with the captives still chained below. He took for himself her consort, a forty-gun French slaver, and renamed her Royal Fortune. He had heard, from a Dutchman taken off Calabar, that the fifty-gun HMS Swallow under Captain Chaloner Ogle was on the coast looking for him. He stood south, anyway, towards Cape Lopez, to careen and to drink the new prize.

THE MORNING OF THE TENTH

On the ninth of February the Royal Fortune lay at anchor a half-mile off the Cape Lopez headland, on what was then the Portuguese-Atlantic slave coast and is now the coast of Gabon. They had taken a small prize, the Neptune, the day before, and the crew had been at the brandy through the night. The dawn of the tenth came up grey and equatorial, a thin east breeze on the land side, the sea oily and flat. At first light the watch raised a sail to the north and took her, in the haze, for a French merchantman standing in to trade. She was flying French colours. She hove to at the long range of half a mile and lay there, idle, at the eight bells of the morning watch.

Roberts came up on deck in the crimson silk waistcoat over white linen, the feathered hat, the two pistols slung across his chest on a silk ribbon, the gold chain at his throat and the diamond cross from Bahia. He had had his tea. He had a breakfast of salmagundi set out for him on the quarterdeck. He raised his glass to the stranger off the bow.

A SECOND OF TIME AT CAPE LOPEZ

He saw her gunports at once, and counted them, and counted them again. A French letter-of-marque on this coast carried twelve guns, fourteen at the outside; the ship lying off his bow carried fifty. He knew, in the time it took to lower the glass, that she was the Swallow, that Ogle had stalked him from Calabar, that the French colours were a lie of the kind he had used himself a hundred times. He knew that two hundred of his three hundred men were below decks asleep in their own vomit, that the Royal Fortune had perhaps forty men on her decks fit to stand, that the anchor cables could not be slipped and the ship cleared for action inside the time it would take the Swallow to fire two broadsides into him. He knew that the wind, such as it was, was wrong; that to run he would have to pass under her guns; that to fight at anchor was to be hammered to splinters where he lay. He knew that Ogle, a careful man, would not have closed at half a mile unless he meant to finish it in two broadsides and the boats.

And he knew, in the same second, the arrangement of his own articles, agreed by the council of the Royal Rover in 1720 and carried over to the Royal Fortune: that on the captain's death in action the body was to be wrapped and weighted and put over the side, before any boarding party could secure it for the gibbet at Cape Coast or at Execution Dock. He had written the clause himself, in the careful clerk's hand he had carried out of the Welsh coastal trade. He had never expected to need it before noon.

He gave the order to slip the cables and clear for action. He put on the crimson hat. He walked forward to the foot of the mainmast, in full view of the deck and of the ship across the water, because he had governed for thirty-two months on the principle that the captain is seen, and a captain who hides at the moment of the first broadside is a captain no more. The choice he made in that second was not the choice to fight, which was forced on him, but the choice to be visible while doing it. Of the bold action his trade required, only one was left him, and he took it.

THE TWO BROADSIDES

The Swallow struck her French colours and ran up the British ensign at a quarter past eight. Her first broadside, fired at the half-past, was chain-shot at the rigging and brought down the Royal Fortune's mizzen-topmast. Her second, at the three-quarters, was round-shot and grapeshot at the deck. A grapeshot ball took Roberts in the throat at the foot of the mainmast, where he was standing in the crimson hat. He was dead within seconds, before his quartermaster Henry Glasby could reach him.

The men did what they had sworn to do. They wrapped him in the canvas of the mainsail, in his crimson silk and his gold chain and the diamond cross of Bahia, and they tied a six-pounder ball to his feet, and they put him over the lee rail before the Swallow's boats were halfway across the water. By Glasby's later deposition at Cape Coast Castle, which is the only first-hand account of the morning, they threw him overboard with his arms and ornaments on, according to the repeated request he had made in his lifetime. The boarding party found a captured ship, a drunk crew, an empty quarterdeck, and a breakfast of salmagundi growing cold on the table.

CAPE COAST CASTLE, APRIL

Ogle took the Royal Fortune and her two consorts and two hundred and seventy-two surviving pirates to Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast. The naval court sat from the twenty-eighth of March to the twentieth of April 1722, under a commission read out in the great hall of the slave-castle whose dungeons held, on the same days, several hundred Africans bound for the Middle Passage. Of the one hundred and sixty-five men tried, seventy-four were hanged from a single long gibbet on the beach below the castle walls, in batches of six and eight over the course of a fortnight; the gibbet was nicknamed by the navy crews, for the next decade, the Tyburn of West Africa. Seventy were transported to the West Indies. The rest, mostly the forced men who could prove they had been pressed off legitimate ships, walked free. Henry Glasby, who had been pressed off the Samuel in 1720 and had refused promotion under Roberts three times, was acquitted and went home.

THE BANK AT CAPE LOPEZ

The Golden Age of Atlantic piracy is conventionally dated to close on the morning of the tenth of February 1722, at the foot of a mainmast off Cape Lopez, with a Welshman in a crimson hat who did not drink. The articles he wrote went into the legal record at the Cape Coast trial and from there into every history of the trade thereafter, as the closest thing the brotherhood ever produced to a constitution. The diamond cross from Bahia, the gold chain, the silk waistcoat, the feathered hat: all of them are still where his men put them, on the Atlantic floor at the Cape Lopez bank, in about a hundred and fifty feet of water, in a canvas shroud weighted with a six-pounder shot, the only Golden Age captain's body that was never hung in chains.