When Edward Low’s men captured the sloop of a young English sailor named John Brown near the Cape Verde Islands in October 1722, Brown later swore the pirates “beat him black and blue” to make him sign their articles. It didn’t save him. Convicted at trial, he was hanged — partly because witnesses recalled him saying, once aboard, that he preferred the pirate ship to his old one. Brown’s case captures a pattern that runs through dozens of Golden Age piracy trials: sailors captured from prize ships routinely claimed they had been forced into piracy, and the courts routinely didn’t believe them.
A Defense Everyone Used
By the 1720s, colonial prosecutors had heard the excuse so often they treated it as background noise. Massachusetts prosecutor John Valentine put it bluntly at one trial: “The plea of constraint, or force (in the mouth of every pirate,) can be of no avail to them.” His reasoning was practical — if every captured pirate could simply claim coercion, no one could ever be convicted. So courts looked for corroborating evidence: had the accused signed the ship’s articles, the internal contract that divided plunder and set the rules of the voyage? Had he taken a share of the loot? Had he fought willingly in an engagement? Signing the articles in particular counted as strong proof of consent, since pirate crews rarely bothered forcing a reluctant man’s signature onto a document that determined his cut of the prize.
The Surgeon’s Exception
One group got the benefit of the doubt more often than any other: skilled tradesmen, and surgeons above all. Ship’s doctors were scarce and valuable, and captains like Bartholomew Roberts routinely detained them from captured vessels without bothering to make them sign anything. Captain Richard Hawkins reported that pirates “do not insist upon” surgeons and cooks signing articles the way they did other men. Surgeon John Kencate testified at his own trial that he had “never shared” in Edward Low’s plunder, “nor sign’d their Articles” — and it worked in his favor. Surgeon Robert Hunter, taken by Roberts’s crew, tried to escape with two companions; when they were recaptured, his companions were executed and Hunter alone was reprieved, his profession apparently buying him mercy the others didn’t get.
When It Didn’t Work
For most ordinary sailors, the defense failed more often than it succeeded. William White, who joined Captain John Phillips’s crew in 1723, claimed he had been drunk when he was taken aboard; he was convicted and hanged anyway. William Phillips, forced at gunpoint that same year, lost a leg helping put down a mutiny against the pirates who held him — his own shipmates testified to his coerced status, and he was still narrowly convicted, though Massachusetts’s governor pardoned him a year later. The line between a genuine captive and a man who had simply made his peace with piracy was, in practice, almost impossible for a court to draw with confidence.
Pirates Forcing Pirates
Captains disagreed sharply on whether forced men were worth the trouble. Roberts himself preferred volunteers, reportedly declaring that he would “force no Body,” since a resentful, unwilling crew could “in Time, destroy his Government.” Others had no such scruples: Captain Cornelius reportedly stocked his crew with seventy conscripts, and Captain John Gow ended up burdened with so many unwilling prisoners that they became a liability rather than an asset.
The Forced Men Fought Back
That liability could turn fatal for a captain. Seven forced men aboard John Phillips’s ship, led by the carpenter Edward Cheeseman, plotted to overthrow their captors and succeeded in delivering the ship and its pirate crew to the authorities. William Fly’s crew was overwhelmed in much the same way. For a captain who forced good sailors aboard against their will, the risk wasn’t only legal exposure back on land — it was mutiny at sea, carried out by men with every reason to want off the ship.
Sources consulted: Peter Leeson, “The Invisible Hook: The Law and Economics of Pirate Tolerance” (Journal of Political Economy, 2007); The Pirate Surgeon’s Journal (piratesurgeon.com); WeReHistory.org, “Peril of Pirate Captives in Colonial America.”
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