Black Bart: the real Bartholomew Roberts

Who was Black Bart Roberts?

Bartholomew Roberts was a Welsh seaman, born about 1682 at Casnewydd Bach, or Little Newcastle, in Pembrokeshire. His name at birth seems to have been John Robert. By 1718 he was a mate on a sloop from Barbados.

Nobody called him “Black Bart” in his lifetime: the nickname comes from a 20th-century Welsh poem, “Barti Ddu”. Our main source for his life is a 1724 book, A General History of the Pyrates by “Captain Charles Johnson”, which describes him as a tall, dark man of nearly forty. Much of it was drawn from his crew’s trial, but some of its stories are embellished.

How did Bartholomew Roberts become a pirate?

In 1719 Roberts was second mate of the Princess, a London slave ship. In early June 1719, at Anomabu on the Gold Coast of West Africa, the Welsh pirate Howell Davis captured her, and Roberts was forced to join the pirates.

A few weeks later the Portuguese killed Davis in an ambush on the island of Príncipe. About six weeks after his own capture, the crew voted Roberts their captain. The 1724 book says he accepted because, if he had to be a pirate, he would rather be a commander than a common man.

Late in 1719, in the bay of Bahia in Brazil, he found a Portuguese fleet of 42 merchant ships and took the richest, the Sagrada Familia, with gold coins and a jewelled cross aboard. Soon afterwards his lieutenant, Walter Kennedy, sailed off with the Royal Rover and the loot.

What did Black Bart do at Trepassey and in the Caribbean?

In February 1720 two armed ships from Barbados caught Roberts. He escaped, badly damaged, with about 20 men dying of their wounds, and swore revenge on Barbados and on Martinique, which had also hunted him.

On 21 June 1720 his sloop Fortune sailed into Trepassey harbour in Newfoundland with black flags, drums and trumpets. The crews of about 22 ships fled ashore without a fight. The 1724 book says he plundered, sank and burned 22 ships, but official fishery reports for 1720 record no losses, so the scale of the damage is uncertain. Even Virginia built shore batteries against him in 1721.

That autumn he was back in the Caribbean. In late September 1720 the ships at Basseterre, St Kitts, gave up to him. Governors’ letters also report that, in these waters, he captured a French warship with the Governor of Martinique aboard. By spring 1721 West Indian shipping had almost stopped, and he sailed for Africa.

How many ships did Black Bart capture?

The famous figure comes from the preface of the 1724 book: “Roberts and his Crew, alone, took 400 Sail”. Museums still repeat it, and he is very probably the most successful pirate of his era. But nobody counted his prizes one by one, many were small fishing boats, and other writers give figures from about 200 to over 400.

What was Black Bart’s pirate code?

The 1724 book prints eleven articles, or rules, that Roberts’s crew are said to have sworn to, the best-known pirate code there is. Among them:

• every man had a vote on important matters and a fair share of fresh food and drink
• no gambling for money
• lights out at eight o’clock
• weapons kept clean
• no boys or women on board
• no fighting on board; quarrels were settled ashore
• death or marooning, being left on a deserted shore, for running away in battle
• payment for men badly injured

The book says the original paper was thrown overboard, so its list was rebuilt from crew members’ testimony and may be tidied up. No copy survives.

What did Roberts do in West Africa?

In June 1721, in the Sierra Leone River, a former pirate living among the traders told Roberts that two Royal Navy warships had been there and would not be back until around Christmas. In August he took the Royal African Company ship Onslow and made her his last Royal Fortune, with about 40 guns.

In January 1722 he reached Whydah (Ouidah), one of the busiest slave-trading ports in Africa. Eleven ships at anchor surrendered, and their masters paid 8 pounds of gold dust each. One master refused. The pirates set his ship on fire with about 80 enslaved Africans still chained aboard. It is the cruellest act recorded on Roberts’s voyages.

How did Black Bart die?

On 5 February 1722 HMS Swallow, under Captain Chaloner Ogle, found Roberts’s ships off Cape Lopez in Gabon. She drew the Ranger away from the others and captured her. On 10 February Swallow came back. Many of his men were drunk. The 1724 book dresses Roberts in a crimson waistcoat, a red feather and a gold chain with a diamond cross. Early in the fight grapeshot struck him in the throat and killed him. As he had asked, his crew threw his body overboard, and it was never found.

Ogle was knighted in 1723. Royal Museums Greenwich says no other naval officer won that honour for an action against pirates. Historians see Roberts’s defeat as a turning point in the end of the Golden Age of Piracy.

What happened to Black Bart’s crew at Cape Coast Castle?

The prisoners were taken to Cape Coast Castle, the Royal African Company’s headquarters on the Gold Coast, and tried there from 29 March to 19 April 1722. About 243 men were captured, and 168 of them were tried. Seventy-seven were found not guilty because they had been forced to join. Fifty-two were hanged in April. It was the largest number of pirates ever sentenced to death at a single Admiralty trial. Twenty were sentenced to seven years’ labour in the company’s mines, which a Royal Museums Greenwich historian calls effectively a life sentence. Seventeen were sent to prison in London, and two were spared.

The crew also included many Black sailors, about a third of Roberts’s men by his biographer Richard Sanders’s estimate. Many had been taken off slave ships. Some historians call them freed slaves; Sanders thinks many were probably still treated as enslaved, even though they were armed and trusted. About seventy of them (counts range from 65 to 77) were never tried at all. Instead they were sold into slavery.