The Sugar Barons (40 page)

Braced by tales of savagery and cannibalism among the Africans on the coast, he was surprised to find that they were actually in the main a ‘civilized people’. Rumours of cannibalism were caused by ‘the credulity of the Whites’, he wrote. The defence of the slave trade was that the savage Africans would be conveyed ‘to a Land flowing with more Milk and Honey, to a better Living, better Manners, Virtue and Religion … a better state both of Temporals and Spirituals’. But by the time he wrote his book, Atkins had seen the West Indian plantations and societies: as for the
spiritual side, ‘few have the Hypocrity to own’, he wrote, and the temporal side was far from being an improvement: ‘hard Labour, corporal Punishment’. Africans at home might be poor, but they were, Atkins decided, ‘happily ignorant of any thing more desirable’. He concluded that ‘to remove Negroes from their Homes and Friends, where they are at ease, to a strange Country, People and Language, must be highly offending against the laws of natural Justice and Humanity’.

There was a flutter of concern at the head offices of the South Sea Company, which in 1721 ordered an investigation asking how slaves were obtained – whether they were genuine prisoners of war and criminals, or else volunteers who had sold themselves into slavery to pay a debt or prevent ruin, as defenders of the trade argued, or, as some complaints alleged, innocent victims of kidnap. But it was almost impossible to establish the truth. By the time the captives reached the coast, they had sometimes covered as much as 1,000 kilometres on their forced march from villages deep in the interior, driven from market to market and sold on many times.

Atkins found highly suspect the idea that the slaves being sold were facing a just punishment for a crime, as those in charge of them seldom had jurisdiction beyond their own town. Nor did he believe that they were legitimate prisoners of war, as ‘By War for the most part is meant Robbery of inland, defenceless Creatures, who are hurried down to the Coast with the greatest Cruelty’. Slaves were procured by ‘Villanies and Robberies upon one another’. Atkins remarked that ‘it is not unfrequent for him who sells you Slaves to-day, to be a few days hence sold himself at some neighbouring Town’.

The trade did, indeed, provide a disastrously destablising influence on the region for hundreds of miles inland from the long coast. As early as 1703, reported a Dutch official, the Gold Coast had ‘completely changed into the Slave Coast’, where ‘the natives no longer occupy themselves with the search for gold, but rather make war on each other in order to furnish slaves’. It was not just the demand for captives, but also what the European traders brought in return: Atkins reported them selling iron, linen and tools, but most popular were guns and gunpowder and ‘strong English spirits, whiskey and gin’. By 1730, it is estimated that 180,000 guns had been sold into the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin areas, creating a vicious circle whereby captives were sold for guns to procure more captives. Atkins concluded that the slave trade was ‘illegal and unjust’, ‘an extensive Evil, obvious to those who can see how Fraud, Thieving, and Executions have kept pace with it’. At fault, for Atkins, was the very idea of empire: ‘the
Settlement of Colonies are Infringements on the Peace and Happiness of Mankind’, he wrote.

Throughout his voyage, Atkins made careful notes not just about the Africans he encountered, including their languages, diets and spiritual practices, but also about wildlife, topography and the currents of the coast. He was kept busy, as well, nursing the crew; during an attack of fever, three or four were dying each day for six weeks. To keep the ship sailing, it became necessary to ‘impress Men from the Merchant-Ships’.

Near the Sierra Leone river, they had encountered the
Robert
of Bristol, taking on 30 slaves before heading further along the coast. A short time later, the
Swallow
met the Bristol ship again, and heard from its Captain Harding that there had been a slave uprising on board.

Among the 30 slaves transported from their last stop had been a Captain Tomba. Beforehand, Tomba had led an effort to unite a group of inland villages against the raids of the slave-traders. But after early successes, the traders had found Tomba and ‘surprised and bound him in the night … he having killed two in his defence before they could secure him’. Tomba had been himself enslaved and then sold to Captain Harding. Keen to strike while they were still in sight of their homeland, Tomba ‘combined with three or four of the stoutest of his Country-men to kill the Ship’s Company, and attempt their Escapes’. A female slave, given more freedom on board, was recruited to pass them hammers and give the signal when the crew was at its weakest. Breaking out of their shackles, Tomba’s party urged the other slaves to join them, but procured only one further recruit. The first guards encountered, however, were fast asleep, and two were quickly ‘dispatched, with single Strokes upon the Temple’. The third roused himself enough to seize one of the escapees, but was then similarly ‘dispatched’ by Tomba. ‘Upon the confusion’, however, the other guards were alerted, and grappled with the handful of slaves. According to Atkins (or, more precisely, Harding’s own account), the ship’s captain saved the day by rushing into the melee, seizing a ‘Hand-spike, the first thing he met with in the Surprize, and redoubling his Strokes home upon Tomba, laid him at length flat upon the Deck, securing them all in Irons’.

Harding went on to describe his resulting vengeance. Tomba and the other main leader were too strong and valuable to be killed, so escaped with a severe whipping. The three others, ‘Abettors, but not Actors, nor of Strength for it’, looked less valuable and so were sentenced to death. After the first was killed, the other two were forced to eat his heart and liver (the only case of cannibalism Atkins came across during his time on
the African coast) and then executed. ‘The Woman he hoisted up by the Thumbs, whipp’d, and slashed her with Knives, before the other Slaves till she died.’

Atkins commented that ‘there has not been wanting Examples of rising and killing a Ship’s Company’. The slaves, he wrote, thought themselves ‘bought to eat’ – that the cannibals were the Europeans. Moreover they believed that ‘Death will send them into their own Country’. With seemingly nothing to lose, at least one in ten slave voyages saw a major rebellion, along with frequent fights and brawls. Most took place while the ship was still close to the African coast. A small number were successful, but most were bloodily suppressed, often with the aid of other European ships nearby.

20
PIRACY AND RUM

‘I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,

For how could we do without sugar and rum?’

William Cowper, ‘Pity for Poor Africans’

Dealing with slave rebellions was not, however, the primary purpose of Atkins’s warship the
Swallow
and her sister ship the
Weymouth
as they cruised off the coast of West Africa in 1721. Instead they were an anti-pirate force, protecting the slave trade. Some three months after arriving off the coast of Africa, Atkins heard that notorious pirates ‘under the Command of Roberts’ were in the area, causing ‘great Ravages upon the Merchant Ships’. Local traders were panicking. Thereafter, the Royal Navy vessels played cat-and-mouse with Bartholomew Roberts’s pirate flotilla; several times they were told the pirates were windward of them, ‘which kept us Plying’. But soon afterwards they would hear a contradictory rumour. Then at Whydah they missed Roberts by only 48 hours; the pirates had ‘plundered and ransomed 11 Sail of Ships’, but on hearing they were being pursued, quickly left the harbour. At last Atkins’s ship, minus its leaking sister ship the
Weymouth
, encountered Roberts’s three vessels at anchor near Cape Lopez, south of the Gabon river. Straight away, battle was joined.

As in the West Indies, pirates and state-sponsored privateers had infested the West African coast and far beyond since almost the very earliest European voyages. The growth of the slave trade had increased the traffic and number of targets. Some years before Atkins’s visit, a ship called the
Beckford
– 200 tons, 24 guns, 30 men – had been taken by pirates while loading slaves at Madagascar. Apparently while the master was on shore, men under
‘Ryder the Pirate’ had boarded the vessel, ‘turned’ nearly half the crew, and put the rest ashore before sailing off with their prize. The seven owners of the vessel, with old Colonel Peter Beckford at their head, had appealed to the Council of Trade and Plantations for the capture of Ryder, ‘a middlesized man, of a swarthy complexion, inclinable by his aspect to be of a churlish constitution; his own hair short and brown, and apt, when in drink, to utter some Portuguese or Moorish words’.

At the end of the war in 1713, a large number of Anglo-American sailors, previously engaged in privateering or on naval vessels, found themselves unemployed. They turned en masse to piracy, attacking vessels whatever their nationality in the Caribbean, the American eastern seaboard, the West African coast and the Indian Ocean.
⁴⁴
This launched the climax of the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’, during which English island governors complained endlessly about the dangers of the sea routes and of the daily increase of ‘pyrates’. Charismatic pirate leaders such as ‘Blackbeard’ (Edward Teach), ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham and Charles Vane became well-known names, even in England.

The disruption to the hugely profitable sugar and slave trades was such that the European governments were forced to take action. A Royal Proclamation by George I of Britain in 1717 promised amnesty to those pirates who gave themselves up, and a number surrendered in Jamaica and Bermuda, several on more than one occasion. But hundreds remained at large, based in the Bahamas and elsewhere. The Royal Navy, helped by local auxiliaries, waged a determined campaign against the pirates during the early 1720s. Teach was killed during a fight on the high seas in 1718. Rackham and Vane were captured, hanged and then gibbeted outside Port Royal shortly afterwards, along with 20 of their crews. (Female pirates Anne Bonney and Mary Read were also sentenced to death but were spared execution on the grounds they were ‘quick with child’.) Others were executed in Barbados and the Leewards.

But of all of them, Bartholemew Roberts was perhaps the most successful and thereby infamous. It has been estimated that he captured as many as 470 vessels during a spectacular career that lasted less than three years. Roberts, a Welshman born in 1682, had been serving as a mate on a slaving ship when in 1719 it was captured by pirates off the Gold Coast. He was forced to join the pirates’ crew, but took to it, pledging himself to a short but merry life, and was soon afterwards elected captain of the band. He
adopted an outfit consisting of a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain with a diamond cross round his neck and two pairs of pistols slung over his shoulders.

Roberts’s leadership saw successes off Barbados and Martinique before he headed north to Newfoundland in search of fresh victims. Each time a bigger vessel was taken, Roberts would ‘trade up’ his flagship for a new model, while most of the time keeping a ‘fleet’ of two or three captured ships under his command. In late 1720 he returned to the Caribbean, where he took vessels in the roadstead of Basseterre, St Kitts, and a month later, seized 16 French sloops off Dominica and Martinique, capturing the Governor of Martinique in the process and unceremoniously hanging him from the yardarm, as well as torturing other prisoners.

By the spring of 1721, Roberts’s depredations had almost brought seaborne trade in the West Indies to a standstill, so with potential victims few in number, he headed to West Africa. He soon heard about the presence in the region of the Royal Navy vessels the
Weymouth
and
Swallow
, but continued his attacks with his three ships the
Royal Fortune
, the
Ranger
and the
Little Ranger
, capturing a number of vessels before his successful descent on Whydah in January 1722. Thereafter he proceeded south to Cape Lopez for repairs.

On 5 February the crew of HMS
Swallow
, with Atkins on board, spotted the three pirate ships. But on her approach to engage, the
Swallow
was forced to veer away to avoid a shoal. This unwittingly deceived the pirates into thinking she was a merchant ship fleeing at the sight of them. One of Roberts’s flotilla, the
Ranger
, raced off in pursuit. Once out of sight of the other pirates, the
Swallow
opened fire, and after a short engagement, the
Ranger
surrendered.

The
Swallow
returned five days later and found the two other pirate ships still at anchor at Cape Lopez. In fact, they had just captured an English ship, the
Neptune
, and were celebrating hard in true pirate fashion. At first the pirates thought that she was the
Ranger
returning, but a deserter from the
Swallow
alerted them. Roberts donned his finest outfit, and ordered a daring break for freedom. But at the crucial moment, his crew proved too drunk and disorderly to carry out his commands (Roberts himself is said to have preferred tea to rum). The
Royal Fortune
lost its course and came under sustained broadsides from the
Swallow
. Roberts was killed – hit in the throat by grapeshot while standing on his deck – and his crew surrendered soon after.

‘The Pyrates, tho’ singly Fellows of Courage’, concluded Atkins, had been undone by their ‘Drunkenness, Inadvertency, and Disorder’. The
death of Roberts, previously considered by many to be invincible, is now seen as the end of the golden age of piracy.