Black Bart Roberts

The case

Bartholomew Roberts did not volunteer. In June 1719 he was second mate of the slave ship Princess, lying at Anomabu on the Gold Coast, when the Welsh pirate Howell Davis captured her and took Roberts and several others along by force. Within about six weeks Davis was dead, shot in an ambush on the Portuguese island of Príncipe, and the crew elected the newcomer, a skilled navigator, as their captain.

He had been born John Roberts in 1682 at Casnewydd Bach in Pembrokeshire and had spent his working life at sea without much prospect of a command. Over the next two and a half years he became, by number of vessels taken, the most successful pirate of his age. Contemporary counts run to around four hundred prizes, though many were small fishing craft. The nickname Black Bart was attached to him only after his death.

His first act as captain was a night raid on Príncipe to avenge Davis, in which many islanders were killed. He then crossed to Brazil, where in late 1719 his men slipped into a Portuguese convoy in the Bay of All Saints and carried off the Sagrada Familia with a large cargo of gold coin. A lieutenant, Walter Kennedy, later sailed off with the ship and most of the loot while Roberts was away chasing another prize; afterwards Roberts drew up written articles for his company, an early pirate code that survives in Charles Johnson's 1724 history.

From 1720 into early 1721 he worked north and south through the Atlantic. In June 1720 he sailed into Trepassey harbour in Newfoundland and took or destroyed the shipping there, its crews having fled without a fight. He swept the Leeward Islands, so disrupting trade that ships stayed in port. By the spring of 1721 the Caribbean had become too dangerous and too poor for him, and he crossed back to West Africa, where the slave trade offered rich, slow-moving targets.

In January 1722 he arrived at Ouidah, a major slaving port, and held the ships in its roads to ransom for gold dust. When one master refused to pay, Roberts's men set his ship on fire with the enslaved Africans still chained aboard; around eighty people died in the flames or in the water. It is the worst single act recorded against him.

The Royal Navy had sent HMS Swallow and HMS Weymouth to the coast after him. Captain Chaloner Ogle of the Swallow found the pirates careened at Cape Lopez, in what is now Gabon. On 5 February 1722 the consort Ranger chased the Swallow, mistaking her for a merchantman, and was taken after a fight in which her captain, James Skyrme, lost a leg. Five days later Ogle came back for the flagship Royal Fortune, whose crew were still sluggish from drinking the night before.

Roberts tried to run past the warship and take one broadside. A helmsman's error let the Swallow fire a second. Roberts, dressed for action in crimson damask with a jewelled cross at his throat, was hit in the throat by shot and killed where he stood on deck. His men, as he had asked, weighted his body and put it over the side before the navy could take it. The fight went on for about two hours more before the Royal Fortune struck.

Ogle had taken 272 men across the three ships. The survivors were carried to Cape Coast Castle, the Royal African Company's fort on the Gold Coast, for one of the largest piracy trials of the century.