When Bartholomew Roberts’ crew drew up their articles in the early 1720s, they set out exactly what a share of plunder was worth to every man aboard: two shares for the captain and quartermaster, one and a half for the master gunner and boatswain, one and a quarter for other officers, and a single share for the rest of the crew. Lose an arm or a leg in a fight, and the ship’s common fund owed you 800 pieces of eight before anyone else got paid. This was not improvisation. It was a written contract, voted on by the crew, and it is one of the clearest windows historians have into how a pirate ship actually ran itself.
Electing a Captain, and Checking Him
A pirate captain was usually elected, not self-appointed, and he could be voted out again if the crew judged him cowardly, cruel beyond reason, or simply unlucky. His authority was close to absolute only in battle, when swift decisions mattered; the rest of the time, major questions went to a vote among the crew. The check on his power was the quartermaster, a second officer chosen independently, who oversaw the boarding of captured ships, decided which cargo was worth taking, and settled disputes over the division of plunder. On many ships the quartermaster held more day-to-day authority over the crew than the captain did.
The Specialists Who Kept the Ship Running
Below the two senior officers sat a small group of specialists whose skills were too valuable to leave to a majority vote. The boatswain supervised rigging, sails, and anchors. The carpenter, often a skilled captive pressed into service from a taken ship, handled repairs and kept the hull sound. The master gunner commanded the cannon crews, each gun typically served by four to six men. A navigator, sometimes called “the artist,” read charts and currents well enough to intercept a target far from land. Cooks were frequently former sailors already disabled by injury, since the job required no climbing or lifting.
How the Shares Actually Broke Down
Roberts’ scale was not universal to every crew, but it typifies what survives in the nine complete sets of pirate articles that have come down to historians, most preserved in Charles Johnson’s 1724 A General History of the Pyrates. Captain and quartermaster took a double share each; the boatswain and master gunner took one and a half; lesser officers took one and a quarter; ordinary crew split a single share apiece. The historian Marcus Rediker has called this scheme one of the most egalitarian systems for distributing resources found anywhere in the early eighteenth-century Atlantic world, on a warship or off one.
An Early Form of Occupational Insurance
Because pirates worked outside any government’s protection, they wrote their own compensation scheme into the same articles that governed plunder shares. Roberts’ crew paid 800 pieces of eight from the common fund for the loss of a limb, with smaller fixed sums for lesser injuries. Other surviving articles show the same principle at different rates: John Phillips’s crew set 400 pieces of eight for the loss of a joint and 800 for a limb in 1724, while Edward Low’s articles from 1723 specified 600 pieces of eight for a lost limb. No merchant or naval sailor of the period had anything comparable written into his terms of service.
Who Actually Signed On
Crews were young, rarely including many men over forty, and drawn from a mix of mutineers, deserters, and sailors who had simply had enough of naval or merchant discipline. Many joined voluntarily after their own ship was taken, preferring a share of the plunder and a vote in ship’s affairs to conditions they had just escaped. Crews were also notably multinational, and included both enslaved and free Black sailors, some of whom held specialist roles and a full vote under a ship’s articles, a status the law of the period denied them almost everywhere else.
Sources consulted: World History Encyclopedia, “Who’s Who in a Pirate Crew”; Wikipedia, “Pirate code,” citing Marcus Rediker’s research on Bartholomew Roberts’ articles and other surviving pirate codes from Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724).
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