When Bartholomew Roberts’s crew went to trial at Cape Coast Castle in 1722, one of the men in the dock was not a gunner or a quartermaster but a surgeon: Peter Scudamore, who by his own account had been the first ship’s surgeon ever to sign a pirate’s articles voluntarily. It didn’t save him. Judges hanged him along with dozens of Roberts’s crew, unconvinced by his explanation for why he’d been collecting surgical instruments and medicine chests off every ship the fleet captured. His story says a lot about what a pirate surgeon’s job actually was — and why it was so hard to walk away from.
Trained men in an untrained trade
Piracy’s surgeons were not quacks pressed into a role nobody else wanted. Most had real training, either as university-educated physicians or as barber-surgeons who had served an apprenticeship. Britain’s surgical colleges were producing more qualified men than the merchant marine and Royal Navy could absorb, and the surplus went to sea — sometimes on pirate ships, more often dragged there. Alexandre Exquemelin, the buccaneer chronicler whose 1678 account remains a core source on the period, learned surgery the same way: by assisting a working surgeon until he could do the job himself.
Taken, not hired
When pirates captured a merchant ship, the surgeon aboard was one of the few crewmen routinely forced into pirate service rather than given a choice. Unlike ordinary sailors, forced surgeons typically weren’t required to sign the ship’s articles of agreement — a formal acknowledgment that they hadn’t joined willingly, which mattered if they were later captured and put on trial themselves. It also meant a surgeon could sometimes talk his way free if another captured ship turned out to have a doctor aboard. Not every case ended cleanly: when John Gow’s crew mutinied aboard the Caroline in 1724, the ship’s surgeon was murdered in his sleep rather than recruited.
Paid like nobody else on board
What made the position bearable, and occasionally attractive enough to volunteer for, was the money. A legitimate ship’s surgeon in the early 1700s might earn three or four pounds a month. Exquemelin put a pirate surgeon’s cut at 200 to 250 pieces of eight from a single prize — several years’ ordinary wages. Ships’ articles usually built in an extra share on top of the standard crew allotment: testimony at the 1722 trial of Roberts’s fleet described the chief surgeon’s position as worth a quarter share above what everyone else received, specifically because the job paid better than serving as an ordinary hand. It was one of the few forms of hazard pay built into the pirate compensation system.
The cockpit and its tools
Surgery happened below the waterline, in a cramped space below decks known as the cockpit, chosen because it sat below the ship’s waterline and was less likely to take a direct hit during a fight. The surgeon’s kit ran to knives, razors, bone saws, cauterizing irons, forceps, spatulas, syringes and needles. Amputation was the procedure of last resort and the one surgeons performed most: with germ theory still a century and a half away, a badly infected or shattered limb was removed to keep gangrene from killing the patient outright. There was no anesthetic beyond rum and something to bite down on. Medical theory of the era still leaned heavily on humoral doctrine, and bloodletting by lancet, leech or cupping glass was standard treatment for ailments that had nothing to do with blood loss.
A job people also wanted
Not everyone in the role was there against their will, and that is the detail that undid Scudamore. He’d had the chance other forced surgeons used to escape service and hadn’t taken it; instead he’d actively built up a stock of instruments taken from prizes, which at trial looked less like a captive keeping his tools in order and more like a man outfitting a practice he intended to keep. Other surgeons of the era, like Richard Brown, who served as surgeon-general of Henry Morgan’s buccaneer fleet, or John Hincher, an Edinburgh-trained physician who ended up sailing with Edward Low, moved through the same world without facing a hangman afterward. The surgeon’s berth paid well and demanded real skill, which is exactly why the line between forced service and willing collaboration was often as blurry to a judge in 1722 as it is to historians now.
Sources consulted: Cindy Vallar, “Pyrate Surgeons,” Pirates and Privateers; The Pirate Surgeon’s Journal (piratesurgeon.com), History of Pirate Surgeons; Alexandre Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America (1678); trial records of Bartholomew Roberts’s crew, 1722.
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