Roberts · 1722
Black Bart off Cape Lopez
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.
It is twenty past seven on the morning of the tenth of February 1722, on the quarterdeck of the Royal Fortune at anchor a half-mile off the Cape Lopez headland on the west African coast (modern-day Gabon, then the Portuguese-Atlantic slave-coast), in pale equatorial morning light with a east breeze. He is forty years old. He is Bartholomew Roberts, born John Roberts at Casnewydd-Bach (Little Newcastle), a small village in northern Pembrokeshire, on the seventeenth of May 1682, son of George Roberts the small farmer and Mary Lewis, schooled at the Welsh maritime trade as a small ship's-boy from twelve, third mate of the slave-ship Princess of London on the 1719 voyage from London to Anomabu on the Gold Coast, captured by the Welsh pirate Howell Davis at Anomabu on the third of June 1719, signed the pirate articles under implicit duress, succeeded to the captaincy of the Royal Rover squadron on Davis's death at Príncipe six weeks later.
He is in the customary Roberts public-dress of the thirty-two-month captaincy: a crimson silk waistcoat over a white linen shirt, a large gold chain around the neck with a large diamond cross (the cross taken from the Brazilian governor of Bahia at the September 1720 Sagrada Família capture, the largest single prize-haul of his career), a feathered crimson hat, two pistols on a silk sling across the chest. By the tradition of his three-year captaincy, he is the only named pirate captain of the Golden Age who, in plain reading of the court-records, did not drink (he is, by the pirate-article he had written for the Royal Rover in 1719, a teetotaler; his personal-drink at the public dinner is tea).
On the horizon to the north, the Royal Navy fifty-gun ship of the line HMS Swallow under Captain Chaloner Ogle has come up under French colours during the previous half-hour. The Royal Fortune's watch had misidentified her at first light as a French merchant ship. The Swallow hove to at the long-cannon-range of about half a mile at the eight bells of the morning watch.
He thinks: the ship is a fifty-gun ship of the line. The French merchant ships of this coast are twelve-and-fourteen-gun letter-of-marque-and-reprisal vessels. The ship is not French.
He thinks: the ship is Royal Navy. The ship is HMS Swallow. The Swallow has been after me since the Whydah capture.
He thinks: the crew is recovering from the Whydah celebration of yesterday. The crew is, in plain reading, drunk and asleep below decks. The Royal Fortune has, on the decks at this hour, about forty men. The Swallow can put two broadsides into us before we can clear the anchor cables.
He thinks: I have the pre-arranged protocol with the crew that, on my death in action, the body is thrown overboard before the boarding party can secure it. The protocol prevents the Royal Navy public-gibbet of the pirate-captain's body. The protocol is the only arrangement I have on this point.
He gives the order to slip the anchor cables and clear for action at the eight bells. The Swallow fires the first broadside (about twenty-five shot, mostly chain-shot intended to bring down the rigging) at the eight-and-a-quarter; the second broadside (round-shot and grapeshot) at the eight-and-a-half. The grapeshot ball from the second broadside catches Roberts in the throat at the foot of the mainmast. He is dead within seconds.
The crew (by the Cape Coast Castle trial record of April 1722, the quartermaster Henry Glasby's deposition, which is the primary source for the events) wrap the body in the canvas-mainsail-shroud, attach a six-pounder cannonball as ballast, and throw the body overboard before the Swallow boarding-party (which had been launched in the three boats at the eight-and-a-quarter) reaches the deck. The body of Bartholomew Roberts was thus the only Golden Age pirate captain's body that did not end up on a public Royal Navy gibbet. By the tradition of the Cape Lopez fishermen, the body is still on the Atlantic floor at the Cape Lopez bank, in about a hundred and fifty feet of water, in the canvas shroud.
About two hundred and seventy-two surviving pirates of the Roberts squadron were taken to Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast and tried by a naval court between the twenty-eighth of March and the twentieth of April 1722. Seventy-four were hanged from a single long gibbet on the beach below the Castle (the largest single execution of pirates in British history; the Cape Coast Castle gibbet was nicknamed the Tyburn of West Africa by the British navy crews for the next decade). Seventy were transported to penal servitude in the West Indies; the remainder, mostly the forced men who could prove the coercion of their conscription, were acquitted. Bartholomew Roberts, by the careful judgment of Marcus Rediker's Villains of All Nations (2004) and David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag (1995), was the most successful pirate of the Golden Age in terms of prizes taken (about four hundred and seventy ships in thirty-two months, more than Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet, Calico Jack Rackham, and Anne Bonny combined), and his death on the tenth of February 1722 is conventionally taken as the end of the Golden Age of Piracy in the Atlantic.