Dueling Under the Pirate Code: How Quarrels Were Settled Ashore

Fighting was common among men who lived at close quarters on a small, crowded ship for months at a time, but most pirate crews had a firm rule about it: settle it on land, not on deck. The best-preserved version of this rule comes from the articles of Bartholomew Roberts, recorded by Captain Charles Johnson in A General History of the Pyrates (1724). Article VIII reads, in substance, that no man was to strike another aboard the ship, and that every man’s quarrels were to be ended on shore, by sword and pistol.

No Striking Aboard Ship

The articles were not a vague code of honor. They were a written contract, drafted and sworn to by the crew before a voyage and often posted where everyone could see it, and they covered far more than fighting: shares of plunder, compensation for lost limbs, and the penalties for theft or desertion. Banning violence aboard ship was a practical matter as much as a disciplinary one. A crew that could turn on itself with cutlasses in a confined space was a crew that could lose a battle, or a ship, over a personal grudge. Taking the fight ashore removed the danger to the vessel and gave tempers time to cool before the matter was settled.

Roberts’ Procedure: Pistols First, Then Cutlasses

Roberts’ articles go further than simply banning onboard violence; they lay out a procedure. If two men could not be reconciled, the quartermaster, the crew’s elected officer for discipline and fair dealing, took them ashore with whatever assistance he judged necessary. He stood the two men back to back at a measured distance. On his command, they turned and fired their pistols at each other, or, in a lesser quarrel, the quartermaster simply knocked the weapon from each man’s hand before a shot could be fired. If both pistols missed, the matter moved to cutlasses, and the first man to draw blood was declared the winner. The quartermaster, not a hired second in the naval or aristocratic sense, supervised the whole affair, which made the duel an extension of the ship’s own disciplinary system rather than a private affair between gentlemen.

Not Every Crew Used the Same Rule

Other surviving articles handled quarrels differently, which is a reminder that there was no single universal “pirate code,” only broadly similar contracts drawn up crew by crew. The articles attributed to pirate captain John Phillips punished striking a crewmate while the articles were in force with what they called Moses’ Law: forty lashes save one, thirty-nine strikes on the bare back, a biblical formula for punishment rather than a ritual combat. The articles associated with Edward Low’s crew and George Lowther left the penalty for drawing an unlawful weapon or striking a shipmate to the captain and the majority of the company to decide case by case. The Roberts-style formal duel, in other words, was one solution among several, not evidence of a single shared rulebook that every Golden Age crew carried.

Why Bother With a Ritual at All

The back-to-back pistol duel followed by cutlasses looks almost sporting next to a crew that could simply vote to maroon or execute a man, and that is part of the point. A pirate ship ran on consent: the crew elected its captain and could depose him, and the quartermaster’s job existed specifically to check the captain’s power and keep plunder and punishment fair. A formal, witnessed, rule-bound way to settle a personal grudge did the same work as the rest of the articles: it replaced the captain’s arbitrary will, or an unsupervised brawl, with a procedure the whole crew had already agreed to. It was still often lethal, just no longer a threat to the ship itself.

Where the Record Comes From

Nearly everything known about these dueling rules comes from a small number of written sources: Johnson’s General History, which preserves the Roberts, Phillips, and Lowther articles in something close to their original wording; Alexandre Exquemelin’s 1678 account of buccaneering in the Caribbean, which preserves a partial code attributed to Henry Morgan; and scattered Admiralty Court records from the trials of captured pirates. No single surviving document lays out a “complete” pirate code, and the modern phrase “pirate code” is itself a later invention, not a term pirates used of themselves.

Sources consulted: Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates (1724); Alexandre Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America (1678); Wikipedia’s summary of surviving pirate articles and Admiralty Court records.