Black Crewmen and Black Flags: Race on Golden Age Pirate Ships

Pirates of the early eighteenth century advertised themselves with color. A black flag, sometimes a red one, told a merchant crew what kind of ship was closing on it. The people who sailed under those flags are a harder question. The surviving records, most of them written by the officials who hunted and hanged pirates, show that Black men were aboard many pirate ships in large numbers. They do not show clearly what those men were: shipmates with a vote and a share, or captives forced to work the pumps. This article looks at the documents that survive and at what historians have made of them.

Black flags and bloody flags

The best-known contemporary account is A General History of the Pyrates, published in London in 1724 under the name Captain Charles Johnson. It is a mix of reporting, trial records and storytelling, and it has to be read with care, but it is also the source of much of what is known about pirate flags.

Johnson gives the name in passing. When two French ships chased Bartholomew Roberts off West Africa, he writes, they surrendered “on the hoisting of Jolly Roger, (the Name they give their black Flag,)”.¹ He does not explain where the name came from, and nothing in the sources read for this article settles that question.

The designs were not uniform. Roberts, angry at the governors of Barbados and Martinique, flew a flag showing himself standing on two skulls lettered “A B H” and “A M H,” which Johnson glosses as a Barbadian’s and a Martinican’s head.¹ Edward Low hoisted “a black Flag, with the Figure of Death in red,” and Francis Spriggs’s men copied Low’s design, a white skeleton holding a dart and an hourglass.¹ Stede Bonnet’s crew waved a “bloody Flag” at the South Carolina sloops that cornered them in 1718, and an East India Company captain described fighting under the pirates’ “black and bloody Flags”.¹

Pirates also flew ordinary national colors when it suited them. When HMS Swallow took the Ranger, one of Roberts’s ships, in February 1722, the pirates had been fighting under “a red English Ensign, a King’s Jack, and a Dutch Pendant” as well as a black flag.¹ Captain Chaloner Ogle’s own report likewise says the Ranger opened fire under English colors with a black flag at her mizzen.² The famous emblem, in other words, was one signal among several.

Counting the crews

The same naval action produced some of the firmest numbers on who served aboard. In his report, printed with the trial record in 1723, Ogle wrote that the Ranger carried 32 guns and 132 men, “23 of whom were Blacks”.² Of Roberts’s flagship, the Royal Fortune, he reported 40 guns and 152 men, of whom the digitized text appears to give the number of Black men as 45 (the first digit is unclear in the scan).² A sworn statement printed later in the same report gives the same total of 152 men, “of which 52 were Negroes”.² Johnson’s version has 157 men aboard the Royal Fortune, “45 whereof were Negroes,” and his summary of what became of the 276 people taken lists “Negroes in both Ships, 70” alongside those acquitted, hanged, sent into servitude or killed.¹

The figures do not match exactly, but they agree in scale. Something like a third of the men on the Royal Fortune and around a sixth of those on the Ranger were Black. Notably, the Black men appear in Johnson’s tally as a separate category, not among the 74 acquitted or the 52 executed.¹ The trial report from Cape Coast Castle, where the hearings ran through March and April 1722, does not record what became of them.²

Other crews show a similar pattern. Johnson says that the pirates who sailed under a captain he calls Taylor toward India after their fight with the East India ship Cassandra had “no more than 300 Men in both Ships, and 40 of them Negroes”.¹ The French pirate La Bouse, according to the same book, met Howell Davis with sixty-four hands, “half French, half Negroes”.¹ For the Whydah, Samuel Bellamy’s ship,³ whose wreck was found off Cape Cod in 1984,⁴ a 1998 newspaper report gave a figure of 25 Black men in a crew of 146, citing the ship’s two survivors.⁵

Kenneth Kinkor, project historian at the Expedition Whydah museum on Cape Cod,⁴ gathered figures like these for 23 crews between 1682 and 1726. As summarized by the economist Peter T. Leeson, the Black share of those crews ranged from 13 to 98 percent; if the sample were representative, between a quarter and three tenths of the typical crew would have been of African descent.³ Kinkor’s own chapter, published in 2001, is the source of that tally.³⁶ In interviews he went further, telling the Associated Press that at least one third of the pirates of the period were Black.⁴⁵ Estimates of that kind depend on small and uneven samples, and on how each source decided who counted as a member of the crew.

Crew or cargo?

That last problem is the central one. Pirates captured slave ships, and many of the Africans aboard pirate vessels were not sailors at all but people seized as plunder.

The Virginia council records one plain example. Two men tried at Williamsburg in December 1718 explained that their company had deserted from Charles Vane, bringing with them “90 Negroes which the said Vane had Piratically taken from a Briganteen bound to South Carolina”.⁷ When that crew surrendered at Charleston, the council noted, they “did also deliver up the Negroes which they had rescued from the other Pirates”.⁷ The journal records those ninety people only as something taken and later handed over, not as members of either crew. Johnson describes similar transfers in which enslaved captives were moved from one prize to another like the rest of the goods.¹

Even among those counted as crew, status varied. One prisoner acquitted at Cape Coast Castle said in his defense that aboard Roberts’s ship he had been “kept to work as a Negro among them” and badly treated, a remark that assumes Black men on board did the hardest labor.² Johnson also tells of Black men from Roberts’s company held aboard a captured ship on its way to Cape Coast, whom the pirate surgeon Scudamore tried to draw into a rising. He called them “stout Fellows” and proposed to seize the ship, “run down the Coast, and raise a new Company”.¹ In that story they were neither cargo nor quite crew, but prisoners whom a fellow captive saw as potential allies. The link between piracy and the slave trade on the West African coast in exactly these years, 1718 to 1723, is the subject of a 2008 journal article by Arne Bialuschewski.⁸

Blackbeard’s men in Williamsburg

The clearest legal statement about Black pirates comes from Virginia. In November 1718 a force sent by Governor Alexander Spotswood killed Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, at Ocracoke in North Carolina.⁹ Johnson writes that Teach had posted “a resolute Fellow, a Negroe whom he had bred up, with a lighted Match, in the Powder-Room,” with orders to blow up the sloop if it was boarded, and that two prisoners in the hold talked him out of it.¹ Johnson does not name him. His list of Teach’s crew does include a man called Caesar, but Johnson does not say that Caesar was the man in the powder room, and none of the sources read here connects the two.¹

The survivors were taken to Williamsburg. On 11 March 1718 by the Old Style calendar (1719 by modern reckoning), Spotswood told his council that “five Negroes of the crew of Edward Thack” were in prison for piracy, and asked whether anything in their circumstances exempted them from the same trial as the others.⁷ The council answered that they had been taken aboard a pirate vessel and were, “by what yet appears, equally concerned with the rest of the Crew in the same Acts of Piracy, and ought to be tryed in the same manner”.⁷

The trial followed on March 12, 1719. According to the North Carolina Queen Anne’s Revenge Project, of the sixteen men brought to Virginia, Samuel Odel was released and Israel Hands, Blackbeard’s sailing master, was pardoned; the rest were hanged.⁹ Being tried as a pirate was a grim form of recognition, but it treated those five men as members of the crew, answerable for its acts, and not as goods to be returned to an owner.

Equality, myth and evidence

Pirate crews did run on written agreements. The first of the articles that Johnson attributes to Roberts’s company begins: “Every Man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment”.¹ Historians such as Marcus Rediker have argued that this kind of shipboard democracy reached Black crewmen as well, and Kinkor put the case strongly: “The deck of a pirate ship was the most empowering place for blacks within the 18th-century white man’s world.”⁴ Even they, the same report noted, saw pragmatism at work: pirate crews needed capable hands whatever their color.⁴

Others were more doubtful. W. Jeffrey Bolster of the University of New Hampshire acknowledged that some Black pirates enjoyed privileges, pointing to Captain Kidd’s quartermaster and to men in Blackbeard’s crew, but warned that pirates also kept enslaved people aboard for the worst work. “For us to say these white pirates always accepted the black men as equals is nonsense,” he told the Associated Press.⁴

Some claims have run ahead of the evidence. The same 2000 report quoted Kinkor’s assertion that the seventeenth-century buccaneer Laurens de Graaf was a Black former slave whose race historians had concealed.⁴ No documentary evidence for this was found in preparing this article, and it is best treated as unproven.

What the records do support is narrower and still striking. In the crews that were captured and counted around 1720, Black men made up a large minority, sometimes a third or more. Some were sailors and fighters whom colonial courts considered full participants in piracy. Others were captives, taken from slave ships and treated as plunder by the pirates and as property by the authorities. Which category a particular man belonged to often depended on who was writing, and the men themselves left almost no testimony of their own.

Footnotes

1. Johnson 1724, chs. 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 13 and 16 (Gutenberg ed.). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴

2. Tryal of all the Pyrates 1723, Ogle’s letter, deposition, and trial proceedings. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Leeson 2007, p. 1054, citing Kinkor 2001, pp. 200-201. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Jones 2000, Associated Press. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

5. Mutch 1998, Christian Science Monitor. ↩ ↩²

6. Kinkor 2001 (catalog record). ↩

7. Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, vol. 3, pp. 495-497 (council of 11 March 1718/19). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. Bialuschewski 2008 (catalog record). ↩

9. Carroll 2019, QAR Project blog. ↩ ↩²