Bartholomew Roberts

Overview

Bartholomew Roberts — born John Roberts in Pembrokeshire, Wales — was, by the conventional reckoning of prizes taken, the most successful pirate of the Golden Age. In a career that lasted barely thirty months he and his consorts captured an estimated four hundred vessels across a theatre that ran from Newfoundland through the Caribbean and across the Atlantic to the West African coast. He was killed in action against the Royal Navy off Cape Lopez in modern Gabon in February 1722.

Origins

Roberts was born in Casnewydd Bach in Pembrokeshire on 17 May 1682. He went to sea as an ordinary mate and by 1719 was serving as third mate on the slaver Princess of London when the vessel was taken off the coast of West Africa by the Welsh pirate Howell Davis. Roberts was forced into Davis’s crew, but when Davis was killed in an ambush at Príncipe weeks later, the surviving company elected Roberts captain — reportedly on the strength of his navigational ability, after only six weeks of involuntary service among them.

Career

The career that followed was both extraordinarily prolific and geographically exceptional. Roberts crossed the Atlantic to the Brazilian coast in 1719, where he took the Portuguese treasure ship Sagrada Família from a forty-two-vessel Portuguese fleet at Bahia — arguably the single richest prize of the era. He recrossed to the Caribbean, harried Newfoundland in 1720, returned to the West African coast in 1721, and was hunted down by HMS Swallow under Captain Chaloner Ogle in February 1722.

Roberts is also notable for the surviving articles of his ship’s company — the “pirate code” of subsequent legend — which Johnson reproduces in his 1724 General History. The articles set out shares, conduct, and rules for compensation of the maimed; whether they are verbatim or reconstructed by Johnson is debated.

Ships

• Royal Rover Brigantine

  Roberts’s first command, inherited from Howell Davis at Príncipe in 1719.

• Royal Fortune Frigate

  Roberts used the name Royal Fortune for several successive flagships across his career; the final Royal Fortune mounted forty guns and was the vessel engaged off Cape Lopez.

• Good Fortune Sloop

  Roberts’s consort during the Newfoundland and Caribbean operations of 1720–1721.

Notable raids & captures

Treasures

Documented

• The <em>Sagrada Família</em> prize, 1719

  Approximately 40,000 Portuguese gold moidores, plus jewellery and a jewelled cross commissioned for King John V of Portugal. The cross is recorded in subsequent Portuguese diplomatic correspondence; its eventual disposition is unknown.

• Cape Coast Castle inventories, 1722

  The High Court of Admiralty trial records and the East India Company’s Cape Coast Castle accounts include inventories of gold dust, specie, and trade goods recovered from the Royal Fortune after the action of 10 February 1722. The recovered material was substantial but only a fraction of the career’s aggregate take.

Fate

The engagement with HMS Swallow took place at anchor off Cape Lopez. Roberts was killed early in the action by grapeshot to the throat; in accordance with his standing instructions his body was committed to the sea before the boarding party reached the deck. The remaining ship’s company was taken to Cape Coast Castle in modern Ghana, where 54 of them were hanged. The trial proceedings — the largest pirate trial in British colonial history — survive in the records of the High Court of Admiralty.

Associates & contemporaries

• Howell Davis — Welsh pirate captain under whom Roberts was forced into piracy in June 1719.
• Walter Kennedy — Lieutenant under both Davis and Roberts; deserted Roberts with the <em>Rover</em> in 1719.