On 10 February 1722, Bartholomew Roberts, the most successful pirate captain of the Golden Age, was killed almost instantly by grapeshot to the throat during a battle with HMS Swallow off Cape Lopez. His crew, honoring a request he had reportedly made while still alive, weighted his body and dropped it into the sea in its full captain’s finery rather than let the Royal Navy parade his corpse as a trophy. It is one of the few pirate burials from the period that was actually recorded in any detail. Most were not.
A Captain Denied His Enemy a Trophy
Roberts’ end is confirmed independently by museum and naval sources: Captain Chaloner Ogle of the Swallow had been hunting him for months, and a public display of the body would have been the kind of proof London wanted. The crew’s choice to sink him instead, denying that satisfaction, is treated as a deliberate act in the record rather than a simple accident of battle.
The Ordinary Pirate’s Burial
For everyone else, burial at sea followed the plain custom of the merchant and naval ships most pirates had once served on. The body was sewn into a hammock or spare bedding, weighted with shot, and committed to the water, usually without ceremony. Two seventeenth-century sailors’ journals make the tone clear: Francis Rogers wrote simply that his shipmates “heaved him overboard,” and Edward Barlow noted that a dead man was “quickly buried,” sparing his friends the trouble of a proper service ashore. Mid-battle, there was often no time for even that much.
Words Over the Water
Where a service did happen, it followed the Church of England’s 1662 burial rite, read by a chaplain if one happened to be aboard, or by the captain if not. The naval chaplain Henry Teonge recorded doing exactly this: “I buryed him according to our Common Prayer booke.” Pirate crews, largely made up of former merchant and naval sailors, would have known no other form and had little reason to invent one, outlaws or not.
Guns for the Few
A funeral with any pageantry at all was reserved for a captain the crew wanted to honor. The clearest example is the Madagascar-based pirate John Halsey, who died around 1708 and, according to Captain Charles Johnson’s 1724 General History, was buried ashore in a melon garden fenced against wild hogs, his coffin covered with the ship’s jack, his sword and pistol laid on top, and the burial service read over him before his men fired forty-six minute guns, one for each year of his life, followed by English and French volleys. It is a vivid scene, but Johnson is the only source for it, so it should be read as the exception that proves how plain an ordinary pirate’s send-off was, not as the norm.
What the Articles Actually Covered
Pirate ships ran on written articles that crews signed before sailing, and Bartholomew Roberts’ set, also preserved through Johnson, specified that a man who lost a limb or was otherwise badly maimed in action would receive 800 pieces of eight from the common stock, with lesser injuries paid out in proportion. What the surviving articles do not mention, in Roberts’ set or any other that has come down to us, is what happened to a dead man’s own share of the plunder. That is a genuine gap in the record, not an oversight in this account: no article or deposition yet found spells out an inheritance rule for pirates killed in action.
Blackbeard’s Body and the Legend That Grew From It
Blackbeard’s death on 22 November 1718 off Ocracoke is the best-documented pirate killing of the age: Lieutenant Robert Maynard’s men beheaded him and mounted his head on the bowsprit of their sloop as proof for the governor of Virginia. That his headless body was then thrown into the water is reported in later secondary accounts rather than an eyewitness record. The detail that it swam three times around the ship before sinking is explicitly a later legend, absent from the contemporary record and popularized centuries afterward by historical fiction and film. It makes a better story than anything that was actually written down at the time, which is exactly why it survived.
Fact Against the Fiction
Set against popular imagination, the record is almost anticlimactic. There was no elaborate pirate funeral rite, no burning ship sent adrift, no ceremony built for the cameras. A weighted shroud, a few words from a prayer book if anyone cared to say them, and the sea closing over the matter was the normal end, even for men whose lives were anything but ordinary.
Sources consulted: Royal Museums Greenwich; Smithsonian Ocean; Encyclopaedia Britannica; piratesurgeon.com’s primary-source collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ships’ journals (Barlow, Rogers, Teonge); Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (1724/1726).
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