The association of piracy with the name of
Anguilla in the minds of writers and officials begins early. Starting in the historical records of the
seventeenth century Anguilla begins to develop a wide but undeserved reputation
as a haunt of pirates.
The period of the 'Pirate Round' lasted
from about 1690 to about 1700 when such characters as Thomas Tew and William
Kidd flourished. These ‘Roundsmen’ would
start their cruise in New York, Bermuda or Nassau heading south across the
Atlantic. They would round the Cape of
Good Hope and commence their search for rich Mughal shipping in the Indian
Ocean north of Madagascar. The so-called
'Classic Age of Piracy' ran from about 1714 to about 1724. These were the years that saw the activities
of Edward Teach otherwise known as Blackbeard, Bartholemew Roberts, and the
female pirates Mary Read and Ann Bonny who at their trial 'pleaded their
stomachs.' That is, they were able
temporarily to put off their hanging by proving they were pregnant. Slightly earlier than the Classic Age were
such notorious characters as Pier le Grand, Francois Lollonais, Henry Morgan, Bartholemew
Sharp, and William Dampier.
Some of these characters touched at
Anguilla. Space permits a mention of
only those of them and of their activities that tell us something of the life
and character of the Anguillians of this period. Anguilla’s reputation was negatively affected
by its interaction with these pirates.[1]
It is in the year 1672 that Anguilla first
appears, quite innocently, associated with the unlawful seizing of a ship. That seizure was made by Sir Charles Wheeler,[2]
the new Governor in Chief of the Leeward Islands. He was then on a familiarization tour of the
islands of his colony. Anguilla's
connection with the incident is only accidental and peripheral. Nevertheless, that connection is the
beginning of a series of incidents that conspired, over the years, to transfer
to the island a sort of guilt by association.
It culminated in the early eighteenth century in outright accusations of
piracy and smuggling.
On 10 May 1672, a petition by one John Knight and other merchants
against Wheeler’s seizing of their ship William and Nicholas was read in
London by the Committee for Foreign Plantations (see illus 1).[3]
1. The commencement of John Knight’s 1672
petition. CO.1/28. (UK National Archives®)
This petition revealed the following chain
of events. The ship was returning to
England from the West Indies, laden with logwood. It was forced by bad weather to put into
Anguilla. There it was found to be so
leaky that the owners, being then at Barbados, hired another sloop, the Swan,
to go to Anguilla and to take her cargo to London. But before the Swan's arrival at
Anguilla Wheeler seized the ship and condemned it and its cargo. His accusation was that the logwood was
illegally cut at Belize in Central America in breach of a treaty with Spain.[4] England was then at peace with Spain. Wheeler was mistaken, however. It was illegal for Englishmen to take logwood
from Spanish ships, but trade in logwood was not prohibited.
That same day that the petition was read
the Council recommended to the King that the ship and her cargo be released.[5] Wheeler’s action was deemed unjustified and
he was recalled to London and replaced as Governor in Chief by Col William
Stapleton, deputy governor of Montserrat.
The Privy Council instructed Stapleton immediately to restore to the
owners the ship and its cargo.[6] On 13 July Stapleton replied that he delivered
the logwood to the owners. The ship,
meanwhile, he reported back, sank at anchor in The Road.
The ‘Road’ refers to Road
Bay, Sandy Ground, Anguilla’s main cargo harbour then as now. Road Bay lies on the north coast, partially
encircled on its north, south and east by the low cliff that is a feature of
the north coast of the island. The
village on the north of this hill is called ‘North Hill’ village. The village to the south is called ‘South
Hill’ village. Since they are both on
the north coast, the reason for this nomenclature has long mystified
visitors. The explanation is apparent to
anyone who is a sailor. When you sail
from the west eastwards into Road Bay, and anchor at your mooring, the cliff to
the south of you is naturally referred to as the south hill. The hillside to the north of you is equally
naturally named the north hill. It is
only when you are on a ship anchored in Road Bay that the distinction of these
two north coast villages as South Hill and North Hill becomes apparent.
The unfortunate Wheeler was doing what he
perceived to be his duty. His commission
as Governor in Chief instructed him to take steps to reduce the depredations of
the Leeward Island colonists and traders on the Spanish Main. In consequence, he arrested the ship which he
suspected was laden with logwood illegally obtained in Spanish territory. He was also trying to ensure himself an
income. Senior government officers in
the colony of the Leeward Islands at that period received no salary. They were expected to live off the ‘fruits of
office’. Wheeler was entitled, as Governor
in Chief and Judge of the Court of Admiralty, to at least part of the proceeds
of any vessel he condemned for piracy or as prize of war. He appears to have made one of two
mistakes. Either he was wrong to believe
that the ship was transporting illegally obtained logwood from Belize. Or, which is more likely, the owners of the William
and Nicholas had more important friends at the Court of St James than he did. With this relatively innocent involvement,
Anguilla’s name begins its centuries’ long association in the minds of the
colonial authorities with piracy.
Ten years later, Anguilla crops up again
in a report about piracy. In a dispatch to
London in the year 1683, Governor in Chief William Stapleton[7]
wrote to London complaining about the Danish Governor Adolph Esmit of St
Thomas.[8] He reported that Esmit harboured fugitives
who preyed on the merchants of the Leeward Islands. The Virgin Islands, including Crab Island,
were an important source of timber for building purposes. Governor Esmit provided a sanctuary for
runaway servants, black and white, and for the seamen and debtors who ran away
to the Virgin Islands.
Stapleton reported that Esmit allowed
pirates to bring into port in St Thomas a sloop owned by Thomas Biss of Nevis. Esmit refused to release either the ship or
its crew on the ground that it was contrary to the law and custom of St
Thomas. As Thomas Biss said in his
deposition which accompanied the dispatch, Esmit invented excuses for not
returning his ship. First, he said that
she was found derelict at sea. Then, he
claimed that she was taken by privateers from other privateers. Then, he changed his story yet again and,
more damaging to Anguilla’s reputation, claimed that when she came in to port in
St Thomas, she showed a clearance certificate from the deputy governor of
Anguilla authorising her to acquire timber.
Esmit’s explanation was that, having seen
this clearance, he allowed them to take on board wood and water and released
them after fourteen days. As they did
not set sail immediately, he became suspicious.
He then made further investigation of them. It was only then, he wrote, that he
discovered they were selling goods at prices far below their market value,
suggesting they were stolen or pirated.
He claimed he then made a thorough investigation and discovered that
they possessed no commission or papers for the goods. He, therefore, adjudged them to be pirates. Whereupon, they fled from the island, and the
sloop became forfeited to the King of Denmark.
This is an interesting story of the dangers of maritime trade between
Anguilla and the neighbouring islands. There
is no record if Thomas Biss ever got his boat back.
This is the earliest time that the
allegation arose that the deputy governor of Anguilla supplemented his income
by selling false customs clearances. As
we shall see, it was a spurious claim that was to reappear from time to time. It was a libel on Abraham Howell. From the testimony in this dispatch, it is
evident that even Esmit realised that the Anguilla clearance was forged, and
that it was not prepared by the deputy governor.
The author David Mitchell writes of the
notorious buccaneer and pirate Bartholemew Sharp that he was “last heard of
in 1688” serving as 'Governor' of Snake Island or Anguilla.[9] He writes that Sharp presided over a lawless
population, selling dubious commissions freely to old friends, and lighting his
pipe with summonses for his arrest. This
is a charming and romantic story, but there is not a shred evidence to support
it.[10]
Sharp may have
visited Anguilla, or at his trial he may have called himself commander of
Anguilla. Not one official document exists
indicating that the Governor in Chief or any other authority ever appointed him
to any position in the island. Indeed, there
is no indication in the available records that he ever resided on Anguilla or
was acknowledged by the Anguillians as their commander.[11]
Nor was Snake Island a common name for
Anguilla during the seventeenth century.
That name does later occasionally appear in uninformed writing,
apparently as a free translation of the Italian word Anguilla. Additionally, in the year 1688 it was Abraham
Howell, not Bartholomew Sharp, who was deputy governor of Anguilla. In that year Howell led his hardy followers
in fighting off Spanish, French and Irish marauders on Anguilla, as described
earlier.[12] It was only in the eighteenth century that mapmakers
and armchair commentators began to take the liberty of translating the name of
Anguilla as Snake Island.[13]
Anguilla next appears connected to piracy
in the dispatches of the Governors in Chief to the Lords of Trade in 1699, when
William Kidd attempted to land here. The
Council for Nevis wrote on 18 May to the Secretary to the Lords of Trade,
William Blathwayt.[14] They reported that about twenty days
previously, Kidd touched at Anguilla, but that the islanders refused him
assistance. He left for St Thomas where
he was similarly refused provisions, though he anchored off the harbour for
three days. This Nevis Council report
clearly exonerates the Anguillians of any charge of providing safe harbour for
Kidd, as was subsequently alleged.
While he was incarcerated in London
awaiting execution, Kidd wrote a statement about his travels and troubles (see
illus 2). While he recorded that his
boat touched at Anguilla, it does not appear that he and his men landed there. He did state that he first learned from the
Anguillians that he was the subject of an English proclamation declaring him to
be a pirate. It is clear from this that
when he arrived at Anguilla, the Anguillians already knew that he was a pirate
and did not give him any help. However,
the mere mention of pirates touching at Anguilla was to cause some of the
stigma associated with the pirate in question to rub off on Anguilla. These allegations of visits by pirates were
to affect the island’s reputation in the years to come.
2. Kidd hanging in chains after his
execution.
The next blow to Anguilla's reputation
occurred two years later 1701. Governor
Codrington Jr wrote to the Committee for Trade stating that the men of Anguilla
were “perfect outlaws” (see illus 3).[15] He claimed that they worked for the Danes and
Dutch and that it was impossible for him to prevent it. In addition, he said, Anguilla served as an
intermediate mart or repository for prohibited goods from St Thomas and
Curacao. By this, he meant that the
Dutch and Danes used Anguilla to warehouse some of the prohibited goods that
they traded with the English Islands contrary to the Navigation Acts.
3. An extract from Codrington’s dispatch
of 10 November 1701 to the Council describing corruption in Anguilla: CO.153/7.
(UK National Archives®)
He claimed that the Anguillian merchants
and traders were working with the Danes and Dutch whose freeports, merchants
and shipping engaged in prohibited trade between the English colonies and
foreigners. If this is true, then it
shows that the profession of smuggling has an ancient pedigree in
Anguilla. However, there is no evidence
that during the first half of the eighteenth-century Anguilla provided
warehousing for smuggled goods. This was
an activity that the neighbouring islands of St Bartholomew and St Eustatius
specialised in. Anguilla was too poor
ever to have a warehouse on the beach.
Any storing of goods in Anguilla at that time was in the open, on the
beach, exposed to sun and rain.
Due note was taken in London of
Codrington's accusation. The following
year, William Popple, Secretary to the Commissioners for Trade and Foreign
Plantations, wrote a memo to John Sampson of HM Customs to acquaint him with
the details of the illegal trade allegedly being carried on by the people of
Anguilla, and of the corruption in the customs department of the Leeward
Islands, as reported by Governor Codrington.[16] The report was duly circulated, and another
black mark entered in Anguilla's record.
It is this illegal trade of smuggling,
rather than any connection with pirates, that is more probably than not the
origin of the description of Anguilla in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries as a haven for outlaws.
From the earliest years, Anguillians built or bought sea-going boats and
conducted trade between the islands. They
would have earned the description of being industrious and hard-working at any
other time than during the regime of the Navigation Acts. There is no evidence that any Anguillian was
ever charged with, far less convicted of, the offence of piracy.
In 1706, a more serious accusation
appeared in a dispatch from Richard Oglethorp of South Carolina to the
Committee for Foreign Plantations. He
accused deputy governor George Leonard of being indebted to Captain Kidd's
colleague, Tempest Rogers. He charged
Leonard with the offence of dealing knowingly with the goods of Captain
Kidd. No further detail is
forthcoming. No consequences appear in
the record. Leonard was not
investigated. He continued in his
appointment as deputy governor.
Oglethorp provided no evidence to substantiate his vague charge against
the deputy governor. We can hope that
the authorities realised that it was a false libel. Interestingly, Oglethorp subsequently married
Johanna Rogers the widow of the pirate Tempest Rogers. He spent some time in Antigua between 1709
and 1712 before settling down in Charleston, South Carolina where he died in
1719. Heaven alone knows what personal tensions
lay behind that charge he made against George Leonard in 1706.
Traders from other islands were not
reluctant when caught contravening the Navigation Acts to produce forged
clearances purporting to be issued by the deputy governor of Anguilla. We know they were forged. There is a record of a 1764 complaint by the
Surveyor General of the Customs of finding “forged
certificates for Salem under Anguilla clearances.”[17]
In a dispatch to London the following
year, 1765, Governor in Chief Sir George Thomas informed the Committee that
there was no truth in the charge.[18] He wrote that there was no great illicit
trade to his knowledge in any of his islands.
In the Dutch island of St Eustatius, he explained, an Englishman by the
name of Claxton possessed a number of forged clearances that appeared to be
issued by the deputy governor of Anguilla.[19] With these forged customs clearances, Claxton
purchased large quantities of French sugar, rum and molasses at St Eustatius
and St Croix. He then clandestinely
imported them into North America pretending they came from Anguilla. Deputy governor Benjamin Gumbs discovered the
fraud and gave notice to the customs in the North American ports. This report by Governor Thomas once again
puts the lie to Oglethorp’s accusation. But
a small suspicion remains after reading the first customs declaration at table
1 of Chapter 18. There, we see deputy
governor Benjamin Gumbs in 1765 declaring on oath that the two hogsheads of rum
and eight barrels of muscovado sugar which he is shipping on the sloop Dispatch
are from his plantation. And, who is the
captain but one John Claxton?
The last famous pirate, all-be-it retired
and reformed, whose name was linked to the Anguillians was Captain Woodes
Rogers. Rogers enjoyed good connections
close to the King. In 1718, he was
appointed to his second term as Governor of the Bahamas. His mission was twofold. First, he was required to find enough
settlers to make those islands productive.
Second, he was charged to rid the area of his erstwhile piratical colleagues
who infected those waters since the destruction of Port Royal in 1692. Port Royal at Palisados in Jamaica was a
centre for English and Dutch privateers.
They were encouraged by the English government to raid Spanish shipping
in the Caribbean during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Port Royal was notorious for its gaudy
display of wealth and loose living. It
was destroyed by an earthquake which hit at 11:43 AM on the morning of 7 June
1692. Many of the survivors made their
new pirate headquarters in the Bahamas.
Pursuing his first mission of encouraging
settlers, Rogers tried for several months in 1719 to remove the entire
population from Anguilla to his colony.
Some were perhaps enticed away, for Anguilla was going through one of
her regular difficult phases of drought.
It is to be recalled that this was just one year since Abraham Howell
made his last brave but unsuccessful attempt to settle Anguillians on Crab
Island. The island continued to suffer
throughout the second decade of the eighteenth century from the effects of the
prolonged drought.
The essentially hard-working and
law-abiding nature of these early Anguillians is further emphasized by an
incident recorded in the Colonial Office reports the following year. In February 1720, deputy governor Walter
Hamilton of Nevis reported to the Committee for Foreign Plantations on the fate
of the crew of the pirate vessel the Royal Rover, owned by Bartholomew
Roberts.[20] The Royal Rover with its store of loot was
stolen by Walter Kennedy whom Roberts had left in charge while he pursued a
brig up river in Suriname with forty of his men.[21] It seems that by the time the ship arrived in
the Leeward Islands the crew decided to abandon piracy. Most of them returned to the United Kingdom. Six of them, five white and one black, landed
on Anguilla pretending to be shipwrecked.
They were, Hamilton wrote, either weary of that sort of life or they thought
they had accumulated enough booty.
However, they were detected by the Anguillians and captured and sent as
prisoners to Nevis. There they were
tried, found guilty and sentenced to death.
It does not appear from this incident that the Anguillians were
supportive of the pirates or their profession.
No other pirates from the Royal Rover
were reported turned in by other islands, besides those that landed on Anguilla. These pirates were captured and delivered to
the authorities by the Anguillians.
Those pirates that chose Tortola or Virgin Gorda to settle down got away
scot-free. And, all of this while George
Leonard, whom Christopher Codrington described as “an honest old sloop man . . . and having the best cotton plantation
there,” was deputy governor of Anguilla. It seems more likely that under George
Leonard’s leadership there was no encouragement given to pirates or
piracy. The favourable testimonies of
Governors Rogers and Hamilton as to the character, not only of Leonard, but of
the whole Anguillian community of that time, far outweigh the sly allusions and
libellous remarks of the others (see illus 4 for Penny Slinger’s surrealistic
depiction of both the Carib Raid and pirates at Sandy Ground).
4. Pirates and Caribs, by Penny Slinger®, depicting Road Bay in the background and
the Road Salt Pond in the foreground.
As for the allegation of smuggling - that is
something we may pass off with a knowing wink as a noble trade, until recently
immensely important to the economy of the island. It was this profession that was responsible
for giving valuable maritime training and employment for generations of Anguillian
shipwrights and sailors. Of course, we
have now grown past that activity now.
Next:
Chapter 9 - The
Lure of Crab
[1] Instances have been
mentioned earlier of Anguillians falling victims to pirates and privateers.
See, for example, the 1686 deposition of Peter Battery at Chapter 6 and the
report of the attacks on the island in and before 1688 by French pirates.
[2] Spelled “Wheler” in the correspondence.
[3] CO.1/28, No 51, folio 121: John
Knight’s 1672 petition.
[4] The 1670 Treaty of Madrid forbade the
English from taking logwood from Spanish ships.
[5] CO.1/28, No 52, folio 121a: Privy Council
to the King.
[6] CO.1/28: King Charles to Stapleton on 13
June 1672.
[7] He had by this time been appointed Governor
in Chief of the Leeward Islands (in 1672).
For a list of the Governors in Chief See Chapter 7.
[8] CO.1/51, No 9: Stapleton to the Committee
on 30 June 1683.
[10] His source for this strange story may be Kemp and
Lloyd, Bretheren of the Coast (1960), who wrote, “As for Sharp . . . in
1688 he is mentioned as commander, not quite governor, of the tiny island of
Anguilla, otherwise known as Snake Island, the northernmost of the Leeward
Islands.”
[11] After his pardon by Charles II on charges of
piracy and murder in 1681, Sharp retired to the Danish island of St
Thomas. In 1700 he had accumulated debts
from which he tried to flee. The Danes
confined him to Fort Christian where he died on 29 October 1702.
[12] Chapter 6: War and the Settlers.
[15] CO.153/7, fol 379: Codrington to the
Committee on 10 November 1701.
[16] CO.153/7, folio 387: William Popple to John
Sampson on 22 January 1702.
[18] CO.152/47, folio 98: Thomas to the Earl of
Halifax on 26 March 1765.
[21] Charles Johnson, A
General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates.
(1724, London).
