Table Of ContentT he Punishment of Pirates
The Punishment
of Pirates
interpretation and
institutional order in the
early modern british empire
Matthew Norton
the university of chicago press
chicago and london
T he University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2023 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
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University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2023
Printed in the United States of America
32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 66788- 1 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 82311- 9 (paper)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 82310- 2 (e- book)
doi: https:// doi .org/ 10 .7208/ chicago/ 9780226823102 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Norton, Matthew, 1976– author.
Title: The punishment of pirates : interpretation and institutional order in the early
modern British empire / Matthew Norton.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: lccn 2022020185 | isbn 9780226667881 (cloth) |
isbn 9780226823119 (paperback) | isbn 9780226823102 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Piracy—Great Britain—History—18th century. | Piracy—
Prevention—Law and legislation—Great Britain—History—18th century. | Trials
(Piracy)—Great Britain—History—18th century. | Social change—Great Britain—
History—18th century. | bisac: history / Maritime History & Piracy | history /
Europe / Great Britain / Stuart Era (1603–1714)
Classifi cation: lcc da16 .n67 2023 | ddc 364.16/4—dc23/eng/20220506
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022020185
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
“What’s real is family.”
This is for them!
Contents
introduction
Meanings and Mass Executions 1
1: institutions as cultural systems 11
2: the transformations of empire 36
3: vagueness and violence on the
maritime periphery 53
4: the classification of pirates 82
5: guns, gallows, and interpretive
infrastructures 110
6: “hung up in irons, to be a spectacle,
and so a warning to others” 140
7: ambiguity lost
Temporality and Fatalism on the Edge of Empire 158
conclusion
Pirates, Adverbs, and Institutions 177
Acknowledgments 185 Notes 187
References 207 Index 219
introduction
Meanings and
Mass Executions
Two ships wage battle off the western coast of Africa; it is February of
1722, and they are pounding each other with cannons and grapeshot. One
ship is an echo of the English Empire’s unruly maritime past. The other
represents the new empire: more orderly, oriented to trade, and more in-
tensively state governed. In this struggle between men and their boats,
one crew has the clear upper hand—i t is better equipped and has the bet-
ter position against the wind. Moreover, its adversaries, drunk after days
at loose ends, are surprised to fi nd themselves confronting not the easy
merchant prey they expected but the armed and ready HMS Swallow. The
Swallow, commanded by Captain Chaloner Ogle of the British Royal Navy,
grasps this advantage and wreaks a largely unanswered carnage on its en-
emy. That enemy is the Royal Fortune, a pirate ship that under its captain,
Bartholomew Roberts, had plundered more than four hundred ships in
a career beginning in 1719 and crisscrossing the Atlantic. As of this day, it
will go no further. Minutes after the battle begins, a round of grapeshot
fi red from the Swallow tears out Roberts’s throat and he dies on the deck.
Yet the crew of the Royal Fortune battles on for hours. What else are these
men to do? Their prospects have narrowed to the cannon or the noose,
neither much to hope for.
The battle ends with the surrender of the Royal Fortune’s crew. The
men of the Swallow bring their captives to Cape Coast Castle on the Gold
Coast of West Africa, a center of the English slave trade. Between March 28
and April 20, 1722, seven British offi cials under the direction of the piracy
tribunal president, Captain Mungo Herdman of HMS Weymouth, set out to
try some 169 prisoners, 4 of whom will die before their cases can be heard.
Perhaps 70 more men from Roberts’s crew, all African, are not tried at all
but sent or returned into slavery. The tribunal ultimately acquits 74 men
after hearing convincing evidence that they had been forced to turn pirate
by Roberts and the more vicious and enthusiastic members of his crew. It
2 | introduction
convicts the rest, sentencing them to be executed for the crime of piracy,
though in the end it will commute 39 sentences to lesser punishments.
The tribunal has 52 men hanged on a beach between the fl oodmarks of low
and high tides during those early days of April: 6 on the third, 6 more on
the ninth, 14 on the eleventh, 4 on the thirteenth, 8 on the sixteenth, and
on through a fi nal 14 on the twentieth, with the most incorrigible further
sentenced to have their bodies hung in chains.1
If we take the battle between the Swallow and the Royal Fortune as a re-
fl ection of the broader confrontation between piracy and an empire rising
to global hegemony through maritime trade and naval mastery over the
seas, then its grisly end in the waves off Cape Coast Castle is fi tting. Be-
ginning around the same time as Roberts’s career and ending in the mid-
1720s, the English Empire through various agents and methods contrived
a concentrated bloodletting against pirates. Across the empire, hundreds
of these marauders were killed in battle or tried by piracy tribunals and
hanged, with their grisly remains displayed as warnings. By the end of the
1720s, the outcome of this broader struggle had been decided, and piracy
no longer represented a systemic threat to England’s maritime empire.
The eradication of this threat to the political and economic founda-
tions of the British Empire is the end of the story that is the focus of this
book. Our story begins in the far murkier maritime social order of the
previous century. In the seventeenth-c entury colonial maritime world,
even the humblest merchant vessel was well advised to go armed, and
the boundary between lawful and unlawful violence routinely blurred in
encounters at sea. Privateers, buccaneers, and other men of violence who
took English colonies as their bases ferociously seized the opportunity
provided by this legal ambiguity; they engaged in ambitious acts of private
warfare and theft as they plundered foreign empires. They operated under
no effective authority but that holding their loose coalitions together. The
Spanish were the ideal targets of this lawless and entrepreneurial mari-
time violence based in English and French colonies. Though the decline
of the Spanish Empire had been already under way by the early seven-
teenth century, it remained an object of fantastic wealth compared with
England’s paltry colonies clinging to survival around the Caribbean and
the East Coast of North America. Spain’s cities were near the sea, and its
political-e conomic structure involved extensive maritime trade, including
the transport of bullion from the New World to the Old. And the Spaniards
were Catholic, providing many of the mariners gathered in England’s colo-
nies a hardly necessary religious justifi cation for their predation. Through-
out the mid-s eventeenth century, ships and crews of all sizes and in all
