When Captain Chaloner Ogle’s HMS Swallow ran down Bartholomew Roberts’ flagship off Cape Lopez on February 10, 1722, the roughly 270 men taken prisoner included dozens of Black Africans who had fought as pirates alongside the rest of the crew. What happened to them afterward exposes something the popular image of pirate life leaves out: shipboard equality, where it existed, stopped the moment a pirate ship was captured.
A Multiracial Workforce
Golden Age pirate crews were not uniformly white. Historians including Marcus Rediker, who has studied Atlantic maritime labor extensively, describe Black sailors as a substantial part of many pirate crews by the 1710s and 1720s, drawn from a Caribbean and West African world where the slave trade, colonial plantations, and merchant shipping all fed the same pool of desperate, mobile men. Some crews were majority white with a Black minority; others, by contemporary account, were more evenly mixed.
How Men Came Aboard
There was no single path. Pirates who captured a slave ship sometimes freed part or all of its human cargo and invited them to join the crew rather than treating them as plunder to be resold, though this was a choice individual captains made rather than a rule of the trade. Others had already escaped slavery on colonial plantations and found a pirate ship one of the few places that would take them on without asking too many questions. A smaller number were career sailors, free men of color who had worked merchant or naval vessels before piracy.
Equality at Sea, by Custom and Not by Law
Aboard ship, pirate custom generally split food, drink, and plunder without the formal racial hierarchy of naval or merchant service, and Black crew members could vote on ship’s articles and hold their share of a captain’s authority alongside everyone else. This was a practical arrangement rather than a principled one: a pirate crew needed every fighting hand it could get, and a ship’s articles bound the crew together against a common enemy on shore. It did not extend any legal protection once that crew was no longer at sea and no longer armed.
The Cape Coast Castle Reckoning
Roberts’ crew is the best-documented case of what could happen next. Sources differ slightly on the exact tally — one account puts the total at 272 captured with 54 hanged and 65 Black prisoners returned to slavery, another gives 268 captured, 52 hanged, and 77 Black Africans “returned to slavery” by Ogle — but the shape of the outcome is consistent across both. At the subsequent trial held at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast in 1722, the court treated white and Black defendants under different legal theories entirely. White pirates faced trial as free men accused of a capital crime; a large group of Black crew members, regardless of how they had actually joined or fought, were classified as property rather than defendants and remanded into slavery instead of being tried at all. A further group, in some accounts around twenty men, were sentenced to indentured labor for the Royal African Company in West Africa, a posting with a death rate high enough that historians have called it a slower version of the same sentence.
What the Record Actually Supports
The precise headcounts will likely never be fully reconciled, since surviving accounts were compiled by the same colonial authorities who had every interest in tidying up the story of their victory. What is well supported is the pattern: dozens of men who had shared equally in a pirate crew’s food, votes, and plunder were, on capture, sorted by race into entirely different fates. The pirate code’s rough equality was real, but it was a shipboard custom enforced by pirates on each other — not a status the law outside the ship recognized or protected.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia’s account of the Battle of Cape Lopez; World History Encyclopedia’s biography of Bartholomew Roberts; and Marcus Rediker’s published research on race and labor among Atlantic pirate crews.
Leave a Reply