In 2018, conservators cleaning a cannon recovered from the wreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge, Blackbeard’s flagship, found sixteen tiny scraps of paper congealed in the sludge inside its breech-loading chamber. Months of research identified the text: a first edition of Captain Edward Cooke’s 1712 travel account, A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World. It was the first physical evidence that a Golden Age pirate crew owned and read a book for something other than navigation — a small, damp counterweight to the popular image of pirates as uniformly illiterate.
Could Pirates Actually Read?
The honest answer is: some could, some couldn’t, much like the rest of the merchant and naval sailors they were drawn from. By 1700, literacy in England, measured by the narrow standard of being able to sign one’s own name, covered roughly half of men and a much smaller share of women; reading ability alone, without writing, was more widespread than that bare statistic suggests. Certain roles aboard a pirate ship all but required functional literacy: the captain and quartermaster kept accounts of plunder and shares, a ship’s log recorded position and events, and forged or altered commissions and papers — used to pass a pirate vessel off as a legitimate privateer — needed someone aboard who could produce convincing handwriting. Ordinary crew were a mixed bag, and historians estimate that only a minority of any given crew had strong reading and writing skills, with the rest ranging from partial literacy to none at all.
The Round Robin
Limited literacy did not mean limited legal savvy. When a crew wanted to present grievances or a mutinous demand to a captain without anyone being singled out as the ringleader, they sometimes used a document called a round robin: names signed in a circle rather than a list, so no single name sat at the top. It is a small, practical piece of evidence that pirate crews understood exactly how authority worked, and how to protect themselves from it, even when full literacy was scarce.
Music: Rhythm, Terror, and Entertainment
Fiddlers and other musicians served three overlapping jobs on a working ship. They set the pace for repetitive manual labor like hauling rigging or working the pumps, they added to the noise and spectacle meant to frighten a target crew into surrendering without a fight, and they provided the crew’s main on-demand entertainment. That last duty came with an obligation, at least on Bartholomew Roberts’ ship: his 1721 articles specified that “the musicians shall have rest on the Sabbath Day only, by right; on all other days, by favour only,” meaning a fiddler could be called on to play at almost any hour except Sunday, whether he wanted to or not.
Gambling, Lights-Out, and the Long Hours
Roberts’ articles — preserved because Captain Charles Johnson reprinted them in his 1724 A General History of the Pyrates — also banned the crew from gambling for money with cards or dice, a rule that only makes sense if enough of the crew were doing exactly that to cause problems. A separate clause ordered lights and candles out at eight at night; anyone who wanted to keep drinking afterward had to do it on the open deck without a light. Long stretches at sea with little to occupy idle hands bred exactly the kind of disorder these rules were written to contain. Not every pirate crew operated under formal written articles as detailed as Roberts’, and the survival of his in particular owes more to Johnson’s bestseller than to how typical they were — but where they existed, they read less like a swashbuckling code of honor and more like a ship captain’s attempt at managing boredom before it turned into mutiny.
Sources consulted: North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, “Fragments of Pirate Paper Discovered and Conserved from Queen Anne’s Revenge”; Rebecca Simon, “Could Pirates Read and/or Write?”; World History Encyclopedia, “Who’s Who in a Pirate Crew?”; Mental Floss, “11 Rules from an Actual Pirate Code.”
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