Pirate crews are usually pictured as lawless mobs held together only by fear of the captain. The surviving evidence points the other way. Several pirate crews of the 1710s and 1720s sailed under written articles — a contract every man signed or swore to, usually on a Bible or crossed weapons, before a voyage began — and those articles laid out specific offenses and specific punishments in more detail than most merchant or naval codes of the same period.
The articles as a real contract
The fullest surviving text comes from Bartholomew Roberts’s crew, recorded by Captain Charles Johnson in A General History of the Pyrates (1724). Roberts’s articles banned gambling for money, required lights and candles out by eight at night unless the crew chose to keep drinking on deck, and demanded that muskets, pistols, and cutlasses be kept clean and ready for service — on pain of losing a share of the plunder. Article II set the penalty for stealing from the common stock: anyone caught defrauding the company of goods worth more than a dollar was marooned, put ashore with little more than powder, shot, and a pistol. Article VIII forbade fighting aboard ship entirely; grudges were settled on land, by sword or pistol, under the quartermaster’s supervision. Article VI barred bringing a woman or boy to sea in disguise, on pain of death — a rule that did not stop Anne Bonny and Mary Read from serving openly aboard Jack Rackham’s sloop a year earlier, a reminder that a written article and a crew’s actual practice were not always the same thing.
Injury pay, not just punishment
The same articles worked as a rough insurance scheme. Roberts’s Article IX promised 800 dollars from the public stock for the loss of a limb, with lesser injuries compensated proportionately. John Phillips’s crew, sailing a few years later aboard the Revenge, wrote a similar scale into their own articles: 400 pieces of eight for a lost joint, 800 for a lost limb. That two separate crews independently wrote near-identical compensation clauses suggests this was an established convention among Golden Age pirate companies, not an invention of one particular captain.
Who actually did the punishing
Discipline was not simply the captain’s to hand out. Outside of battle, a pirate captain generally held no more formal power than any other crew member with a vote; the quartermaster, elected separately, held equal authority in everyday matters and was usually the one who administered flogging with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and only after the crew had agreed a punishment was warranted. Captains who lost the crew’s confidence could be, and were, voted out. Charles Vane found this out directly: on 23 November 1718, his crew judged him a coward for retreating from a well-armed French vessel, voted him out of command in favor of his own quartermaster, and put him off the ship with sixteen loyal men. Vane was later wrecked in a storm, recognized while trying to sign onto another crew under a false name, and hanged at Gallows Point, Port Royal, on 29 March 1721.
What the record does not support
Two punishments popularly associated with pirates have thin support in the Golden Age record. Keelhauling — dragging a man under the hull on a rope — is well documented in the Dutch and English navies but rarely, if ever, described in accounts of pirate crews specifically. And marooning, not walking the plank, was the punishment pirate articles actually specified for the worst offenses; the plank itself belongs mostly to nineteenth-century fiction rather than eighteenth-century practice.
Sources consulted: Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (1724); Wikipedia’s “Pirate code” and “Governance in Eighteenth-Century Piracy” articles; World History Encyclopedia, “Pirate Punishments in the Golden Age of Piracy.”
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