Articles

Definition

The written contract that the company of a pirate vessel signed on shipping aboard. Articles set out the share of prize-money each rank received (typically: captain 1.5–2 shares, quartermaster 1.5, ordinary hands 1), rules of internal conduct (no fighting aboard, no women aboard, lights out at a set hour), penalties for desertion or theft from a shipmate, and compensation for the maimed (Roberts’s Article IX awarded 800 pieces of eight to any man who became a cripple or lost a limb, with lesser hurts compensated proportionately; the limb-specific schedule of 600/500/500/400/100 pieces of eight derives from Exquemelin’s earlier account of the Brethren of the Coast, not from Roberts).

The 1722 trial of Bartholomew Roberts’s company at Cape Coast Castle reproduced the articles of his vessel in the proceedings; they survive as the most fully documented example of the form.