To understand the early modern Caribbean, we must understand all the societies that inhabited it. The parameters through which historians approach these societies have changed drastically in the last decade. Histories that emphasize the transposition of European social norms to the Caribbean have been challenged by those who emphasize social fragmentation and localization. Historians use organizing elements such as the household, familial networks, or even decentre structural analyses of societies altogether to better consider how contemporaries understood their place in the Caribbean world.Footnote 1 This change has coincided with multi-scalar studies of Caribbean societies, from network-based to island studies.Footnote 2 While these interventions are useful for framing our attitude to how Caribbean societies formed, problems arise when we think about societies whose long-term viability was not a foregone conclusion or that, in some cases, fractured, collapsed, or proved to be unviable. It is in this context that some historians have identified what they term “sinew populations”. These people, such as pirates or maroon communities, lived “off grid”, outside traditional social norms. While “marginal to Caribbean historiography”, they were “integral” to the region’s activities.Footnote 3
The “off-grid” nature of sinew populations necessitates different ways of thinking about how such communities functioned. Analyses addressing these questions often assume an innate antagonism between the ways of life pursued by sinew populations and the parent societies from which they emerged, regardless of whether these populations were antagonistic towards others. Karl Offen, Antonio Vidal Ortega, and Raúl Román Romero note that an array of “masterless men” influenced the activities of their European parent society through their disregard for European treaties, engaging instead in illicit trade along contested stretches of coastline.Footnote 4 Others, such as Boris Lesueur, Dominique Rogers, Cecile Vidal, and Jean-Frédéric Schaub emphasize the role of violence and coercion exercised by plantation parent societies in shaping the actions of maroon populations across the Caribbean.Footnote 5
Recent historiography has moved away from an antagonistic understanding of sinew populations to talking about the internal dynamics of such societies and reflecting on the conditions under which some of them flourished in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. A recent trend in studies of Caribbean maroon groups has been to identify various factors necessary for the long-term viability of a sinew population. For example, Richard Price wrote that maroon communities had to be “remote” and “inaccessible” to survive.Footnote 6 For Brett Rushworth, the introduction of coral necklaces amongst Martinique’s enslaved population, which denoted who was part of the illicit Gauolet trading network with maroons, enhanced the network’s viability as it signalled trustworthiness among community members.Footnote 7 This was in addition to the inter-communal connections that enabled enslaved Africans who escaped bondage to integrate into established maroon communities.Footnote 8
To talk about viability necessitates a discussion of unviability. Not all sinew groups survived as long as some maroon communities. Pirates, logwood cutters, and other groups had all but disappeared by the 1730s, while maroon societies persisted. What made these communities’ existence so tenuous and short-lived? Aside from Justin Dunnavant, whose work on maroons’ personal aspirations (from “full freedom” to using marronage as a negotiation tactic with their masters) highlights the strains that individualism could place on sinew groups’ communal ties, historians have preferred to focus on the formation, not the fragmentation and collapse, of these short-lived sinew societies.Footnote 9 The themes picked up in the historiography of marronage are applicable to other sinew populations and help contextualize the challenges faced by a range of groups living and surviving in the Caribbean world.
“Sinew population” or “sinew society”, while increasingly present in the historiography, is not a well-defined term. “Sinew” is a relational term that positions these sinew populations in relation to what are implied to be the more central economic movements, such as trade or plantations.Footnote 10 In the work of the scholars cited who employ the concept, the populations they study played an important role within these broader systems, but that is where analysis of them ends. Similarly, the term “society” is problematic, as it risks implying a degree of uniformity across different populations in terms of organization or suggesting that there were shared goals between otherwise diverse populations. As the aforementioned literature on maroon communities demonstrates, uniformity is a misnomer, as groups (and individuals within those groups) pursued very different goals. Consequently, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what constituted a sinew society without recourse to the relational characteristics traditionally ascribed to it. Discussing the viability and the unviability of sinew groups encourages historians to engage critically with groups’ activities and the factors at play in the maintenance of Caribbean societies over varying periods of time. Yet, to do so, we must be able to delineate what a sinew society was on its own terms. One way we might do this is by treating the sinew society as an “ideal type”.
Defining the sinew society as an ideal type (a loose interpretation of Max Weber’s sociological typology) enables us to rethink how the term is used by seeing “sinew population” both as a relational category (positioned between Caribbean groups and mainstream economic activity) and as a concept whose constituent terms are indicative of social form and function.Footnote 11 As mentioned, the term “sinew” suggests a population that is separate from but intrinsically connected to the mainstream economy, while “society” encourages the assumption that there was a search for uniformity and governance within these social groupings. Seeing a sinew population as an ideal type both enables us to define “a unified society intent on staying at the Caribbean’s economic fringes” and allows us to account for the variation among sinew populations. For example, Richard Price and Brett Rushforth’s maroon communities sit closer to the ideal type and are, in turn, more viable sinew societies.Footnote 12 Conversely, the population discussed by Justin Dunnavant sits further away from the ideal type, rendering its viability questionable.Footnote 13 All of these groups can still be understood as “sinew populations” in a broad sense, but they occupy different positions along a spectrum that is tied to the viability of these societies. This affords us a comparative angle through which to conceive of and analyse sinew populations, and to highlight the characteristics that made these societies more or less viable.
Sinew populations were varied and expansive in the early modern period. This article focuses on a single population to ensure that the contours and intricacies of a particular social group are fully appreciated. To demonstrate the utility of thinking about sinew populations’ viability as the key mode of analysis, it examines the pirates who operated in the Atlantic Ocean, from Nassau (the Bahamas) to the west coast of Africa, between 1715 and the 1720s. This population is instructive because, as I will argue, it has been frequently misinterpreted in the historiography and stands to benefit from reconsideration through the analytical lens of sinew population viability.
Most works dealing with this wave of piracy place it within the context of a battle between British colonists and the London metropole, portraying pirates either as vital agents of the imperializing process or as stooges of empire and disruptive figures requiring suppression.Footnote 14 When pirate communities themselves have been analysed, it has often been through the lens provided by “pirate codes”. These were written documents that dictated how members of the crew related to one another, whether decision-making authority lay with the crew or captain, and essentially formed a social contract between the constituent members of the crew.Footnote 15 More radical interpretations, such as those advanced by Marcus Rediker and Chris Land, treat these documents and the allegiances expressed in them as evidence of a rebellious culture that stood ardently against empire and early capitalism.Footnote 16 Thinking about piracy in these terms has helped historians to understand how individuals related to each other aboard a pirate ship, and how these crews related to wider global processes such as empire.
These works focus on the viability of individual crews and then extrapolate from this to draw conclusions about the viability of the pirate sinew population as a whole. The problem with this is that instances of disbanding or contexts in which the unviability of the pirate sinew population becomes evident are overlooked. For example, members of the pirate sinew population appeared divided over the viability of continued participation and often left piracy when the chance arose. When Woodes Rogers arrived at Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, in 1718 carrying King George I’s pardon for the pirate population there, the pirate captain Charles Vane fled with “90 men […] in a sloop wearing the black flag, and fir’d guns of defiance”. However, when Rogers landed, the 300 pirates who remained ashore “received [Rogers] under armes and readily surrendered, shewing then many tokens of joy for the re-introduction of Governmt”.Footnote 17 It is clear from this event alone that the viability of the pirate sinew population rested on more than the presence of pirate codes for individual crews. Despite the social contracts provided by such codes, there were deeper rifts present between segments of the sinew population that caused the sudden disintegration of this pirate society, if, indeed, there ever was a cohesive society to break up in the first place. As will be shown, both the individualism that pirates exhibited in situations such as this and the desire by some to re-enter the imperial fold represent a dramatic departure from the ideal type of sinew population. Investigating these rifts, and the factors that made the continuation of the population unviable after 1718, allows for a more nuanced engagement with the question of “viability” in studies of sinew populations and points historians toward discussions that are essential for understanding how these groups functioned.
The aim of this article is not to answer the question “how did sinew populations work?”. Instead, it contributes to the scholarship by illustrating the value of thinking about sinew populations in a more fluid sense, rather than emphasizing the mechanical “coming together” of these societies. Societies have flaws, and sinew societies were no different. Understanding why some societies were viable and managed to maintain themselves while others collapsed is important for developing a fuller view of how sinew populations operated in the colonial context. As this essay argues, the viability of the pirate population was undermined by the constant banding and disbanding of various crews. This was a frequent occurrence as pirates were intrinsically self-interested and profit driven (as will be outlined below). This practice undermined the foundations of a cohesive, broader society (as per the ideal type) because self-interest and personal differences shaped the behaviour and activities of the smaller groups and crews who made up the larger population. By analysing this practice and the logic behind it, we gain a better understanding of why pirate societies were not viable in the long term. In demonstrating this, the article shows the utility of problematizing social formation in the study of sinew populations and instead proposes that historians of Caribbean sinew populations focus more on long-term social maintenance than moments of initial cohesion.
This article is divided into three key parts. First, it outlines the social context from which pirates emerged, providing the background necessary to explain the individualistic mindset they exhibited during the period under study. Second, it examines the formation of pirate crews within the “pirate republic”, considering why they were there and the innate practices that they brought with them to the Bahamas from 1708 onwards. Fundamentally, the pirate republic was composed of self-interested crews who would periodically join forces if doing so served a common goal. Once that goal was achieved, the units would disperse. This theme forms the basis of the third section of the essay, which analyses three case studies of crew disbanding in the post-1717 period.
The Pirates’ World
As noted, each sinew population related to a distinct parent society, whether antagonistically or by drawing upon its primary practices. For example, a maroon society was shaped by its relationship to an enslaved population or to a local social network in which enslaved labour was central. For pirates, by contrast, the parent society was colonial America. Specifically, for the pirates discussed in the case studies below, this relationship was mediated through the maritime communities of Jamaica. This section will demonstrate the context that produced an unstable Jamaican society in which contemporaries had to work for their own survival. This context shaped how those who became pirates perceived their place in the world and generated a social context that encouraged an individualist outlook, setting the stage for the ultimate failure of the pirate sinew population. As such, pirates were inclined to act in ways that diverged from the sinew population ideal type.
Related to the point above, this article uses the terms “individualism” and “individualist” to illustrate the attitude of the pirate sinew population being studied. Methodologically, however, any claim about what pirates thought is problematic, given the dearth of accounts written by pirates themselves. The use of “individualism” invites the idea that pirates were making an active choice about their relationship to colonial society and to one another. In the absence of personal accounts from pirates themselves, we must use contextual inferences to assess the probability of this attitude existing. One way of doing this is to show how contemporaries residing in the parent society conducted themselves, patterns of behaviour that the evidence suggests were individualistic in nature. Pirates were shaped by their parent societies.Footnote 18 As such, if individualism was prevalent in the societies that the pirate sinew population originated in, then it is probable that this individualistic outlook spread to the mariners engaging in piracy and, consequently, made the pirate sinew population unviable.
Jamaicans in the late seventeenth century lived in a colony that demanded people establish themselves quickly to ensure their survival. Survival itself was far from certain. Most children born in Jamaica had lost one or both parents by the time they turned eighteen-years-old as a result of low life expectancy.Footnote 19 Before 1679, the colony recorded an average of 521 births to 540 deaths annually; between 1679 and 1691, this shifted to an average was 488 births to 880 deaths.Footnote 20 After 1704, only twenty-seven per cent of marriages lasted more than ten years, the remainder failing because one or both partners had died.Footnote 21 Nuala Zahedieh and others estimate that the total population peaked at around 10,000 people in 1690.Footnote 22 If there were 880 deaths in 1691, this amounted to nearly ten per cent of the population dying each year. Life in Jamaica was therefore necessitous, built on the imperative to survive and establish oneself quickly. The economic activity of colonists reflects this.
Most white Jamaicans in the late seventeenth century were not engaged in plantation agriculture but instead pursued other economic activities that were secondary or tertiary to the maritime economy. Plantation production required large capital investments to establish and develop. Most people coming to Jamaica were “looser sorts” with no capital, who hoped to garner wealth through plunder.Footnote 23 This resulted in a variety of small businesses being developed, with archaeological evidence from Port Royal indicating the presence of wine retailers, cobblers, and clay pipe sellers, alongside more maritime focused businesses such as sailmakers, shipwrights, and coopers.Footnote 24 Engagement with the illicit maritime economy was commonplace, but it carried significant risks. Smugglers had to navigate changes in consumer fashions, competition from overstocked local markets, unsold goods during periods when the local economy was depressed, and attacks by Spanish guardacosta.Footnote 25
The combination of demographic crisis and economic uncertainty in late-seventeenth-century Jamaica generated a sense of instability that contemporaries had to contend with in order to survive. Children orphaned at young ages and raised in such economic volatility only knew this world. Although many contemporaries established businesses linked to the maritime economy, these enterprises operated out of necessity and operated in a competitive environment.
Individualism and the pursuit of personal wealth dominated social life in Jamaica. Even smugglers had to compete with their neighbours to sell in Jamaica’s markets. This perspective also shaped the mariners who engaged in piracy and their immediate communities. Edward Ward, a visitor to Jamaica in the 1690s, noted that the inhabitants of Port Royal (who routinely traded in goods obtained via maritime predation) believed there was “no other Felicity to be enjoy’d but purely Riches”.Footnote 26 Goods were expensive, and although residents were outwardly civil to wealthy strangers, they would “try a great many ways to Kill him farely, for the lucre of his Cargo”.Footnote 27 This attitude appears to have developed over a long period. John Style, writing in the 1670s, believed the Port Royal population to be fundamentally untrustworthy, claiming that it had grown from “the seeds of cruelty and oppression”.Footnote 28 Style also noted that mariners would put to sea whether commissioned or not, purely for their private gain.Footnote 29 Evidently, the Jamaican maritime population from which piracy spawned was concerned with individual gain. It was also a social characteristic that had engrained itself in Jamaican socio-economic culture over at least twenty years. Individualism was pervasive in Jamaica, and it is more than likely that this social reality filtered through to pirates as a result.
As Christine Walker has noted, communities were divided in their social and moral interpretations of the pirates who inhabited Port Royal. On the one hand, most of Jamaica’s free population in the early eighteenth century were pirates themselves or their supporters; on the other, plantation owners viewed them with contempt.Footnote 30 Therefore, the majority of Jamaica’s population would have viewed pirates as aligned with local social and moral principles. Yet, pirates had to align themselves with local aims and objectives in order to not be too odious to the local community.Footnote 31 When they began to threaten the local community and their economic livelihoods, they were readily discarded. In this context, it mattered that the perspectives of pirates aligned closely with the Jamaican maritime community with which they interacted. The individualism that permeated Jamaican society also permeated maritime culture, which, in turn, influenced how pirates saw one another, saw other crews, and, ultimately, shaped how the pirate sinew population functioned.
Faulty Foundations: Establishing the “Flying Gang” at Nassau
With the parent society from which pirates originated already fragmented, the foundations on which the pirate sinew population was built were already unsteady. The instability was compounded by the composition of the “Flying Gang”, dispersed by Woodes Rogers upon his arrival at Nassau in 1718. The gang comprised three distinct yet interconnected groups: pirates already active following the disastrous American Act of 1708; sailors commissioned as pirate hunters in 1715–1716; and displaced logwood cutters from the Yucatan Peninsula. Each of these groups developed from a long history of smaller groups agglomerating to achieve a common goal. As discussed below, each subgroup went to the Bahamas to join the “republic” and form a broader sinew population. The problem with the foundations of the pirate republic lies in the absence of any evidence that the objectives of these different groups were ever unified beyond a shared desire to escape the marginalization they experienced (as will be outlined below). Therefore, when an opportunity to escape this marginalization presented itself in 1718, it was embraced by some members of the group. In relation to the sinew population ideal type, this marks a clear departure from both the desire to stay at the fringes of the imperial economic system and to establish a unified society. This caused an inherent weakness within the sinew society – namely, a lack of commitment among a significant number of its population – which, in turn, diminished its viability, limited its longevity, and contributed directly to its collapse in 1718 (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Map of the Caribbean showing the routes taken by the constituent sinew populations in forming the Flying Gang in 1715–1716.
The privateering ventures undertaken by English sailors before 1700 were notably fragmentary in nature, reflecting both the prevalence of an individualistic mindset within the parent society and the problems that would later confront pirate crews in the early eighteenth century. The joining of multiple crews together was possible, but only so long as a shared goal was obvious to constituent members. Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin explicitly noted this in his account of the gathering of twelve English and French privateering vessels in the mid-1660s, which convened a joint council of war to decide collectively on targets for an upcoming venture.Footnote 32 A similar meeting is described by William Dampier in 1681.Footnote 33 From June 1664 to December 1671, Jamaican governor Sir Thomas Modyford encouraged such collaborative activities between English and French crews whenever there was an acute Spanish threat to English interests.Footnote 34 Even when alliances with the French were not possible, the interrelationships between crews was encouraged while it served English objectives.Footnote 35 However, cordiality between crews engaged in these joint ventures often proved short-lived. Exquemelin described how French privateers “made an insurrection against the English” after infighting amongst the privateer crews resulted in the death of a Frenchman by English hands. He similarly describes how Henry Morgan invited French commanders for dinner aboard his ship, the Oxford, before arresting them all for transgressions against English sailors.Footnote 36 While certainly not forming part of a universal pirate “discipline”, as I have previously argued, the fractured nature of privateer practices pre-1700 nevertheless shaped how groups of sailors interacted with one another as the conditions that gave rise to the “pirate republic” emerged.Footnote 37
Privateers’ independent tendencies, and their need for a unifying goal, continued beyond 1700 and are clearly reflected in the source material. Governor Handasyd of Jamaica, writing in 1709, highlighted that individual privateer crews were “headstrong” and “ungovernable”, noting that they had to “sometimes be led, and sometimes drove”, typically through the promise of plunder.Footnote 38 This independent and opportunistic attitude was a constant worry during wartime, with the council of Jamaica at times allowing crews to put to sea without commissions, fearing that “they should defect” if such opportunities were denied.Footnote 39 Privateer crews were evidently driven by plunder and the inability of government officials to police privateering enabled them to act almost with impunity. Greed and ungovernability became defining features of how privateer crews acted towards one another.
The fallout following the passing of the America Act in 1708 is testament to the short-termism that characterized privateering, with the decision to work in larger groups largely driven by the need for self-preservation. The 1708 Act was intended to encourage British privateering in the Americas by rescinding the monarch’s share of plunder while increasing taxes on goods sold from privateer ships. However, these taxes proved onerous, and when combined with additional levies imposed by colonial elites seeking personal income, many contemporaries insisted that the Act made privateering unprofitable.Footnote 40 This unprofitability generated continuous complaints from merchants and supporters of Jamaican privateers between 1709 and 1710, as the effects of the Act became fully apparent.Footnote 41 In May 1710, the Council of Trade and Plantations wrote to the Earl of Sunderland to state that these letters had raised concerns that what remained of the prize goods “after the Deduction of the paid Duties, is so small, that the Privateers always make Losing Voyages”.Footnote 42 By May 1710, 900 ex-privateers set themselves up on islands around the perimeter of Laguna de Terminos near Campeche (the home of the logwood cutters, discussed below).Footnote 43 The newly emergent pirates were described as “miserable Creatures” who were nearly starving to death.Footnote 44 Their migration was not the result of a single, joint decision but occurred haphazardly as individual privateer crews faced financial issues. Of the 900, 300 had left Jamaica in 1708, with the remaining 600 joining them incrementally over the next two years.Footnote 45 These crews operated according to their own circumstances, and in doing so formed the first agglomerative groups that would later comprise the pirate population at Nassau.
Already, we can see that the independent-mindedness of privateer crews produced weaker social relations within this group. Privateers relied on short-term goals to justify working together; if these were absent then crews operated in isolation. The collective experience of financial ruin drove privateers to congregate in remote areas as a means of self-preservation. However, this coming together was only one of many examples of privateers uniting around a common aim, only to separate later when this objective was met. This repeated pattern of social formation and disbanding points to a highly fluid form of social bonding that directly impacted the long-term viability of the pirate sinew population.
Adjacent to the privateers were the pirate hunters commissioned by Lord Archibald Hamilton in 1715 to hunt Spanish guardacosta, who continued to harry British trade after the conclusion of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713. In September 1716, it was estimated that thirty-seven merchant ships had been captured since 1713, resulting in damages totalling £7,143 10s 6d.Footnote 46 In response to these attacks, Hamilton commissioned ten ships between 21 November and 20 December 1715.Footnote 47 Approximately 650 men joined the crews, and the ships were “provided wth Grenados, Bombs &c” from royal stocks.Footnote 48
These pirate hunters organized themselves similarly to the privateers. They received individual commissions from Hamilton but operated in pairs or groups.Footnote 49 The problem for Hamilton was that the activities of his hunters strayed from the anti-piracy measures he envisioned into outright piracy against Spanish merchants and salvage camps, drawn by the wrecks of the 1715 treasure fleet off the Floridian coast. For example, John Villo and Henry Jennings sailed together to raid the salvage camps, netting 120,000 pieces of eight, which were divided between the crews upon their return to Jamaica.Footnote 50 This success enabled Jennings to outfit a small pirate flotilla of six sloops, “fitted with Warlike stores”.Footnote 51 Jennings and the flotilla took the French merchantman L’Amiable Marie and divided the plunder worth 50,000 crowns, before taking another vessel worth 700,000 livres.Footnote 52 Again, it is worth highlighting that these social arrangements were flexible. By September 1716, Jennings was no longer sailing with the other vessels, instead being noted as sailing with Captains Hornigold and Fernando.Footnote 53
The reasons why many pirate hunters turned to piracy have been detailed by David Wilson (2021).Footnote 54 In summary, once news of the piracies committed by Jennings and other pirate hunters reached political elites in Jamaica, officials were quick to denounce these piracies and warn that if any of the pirate hunters returned they would face trial. Confronted with this threat, another set of loosely organized mariners (“Hamilton’s privateers”) fled their parent society to join the growing sinew population in the Bahamas. Once again, this subgroup functioned according to principles of short-termism and opportunism, with crews only working together when circumstances necessitated it. When they joined the ostracised privateers of the 1710s, Hamilton’s privateers contributed to the weak social foundations upon which the pirate population at Nassau was built.
Logwood cutters followed a similar organizational trajectory to these privateers. These men worked in the uninhabited swamplands of the Yucatan Peninsula, cutting logwood that was shipped to England to be used as a clothing dye. By the time the “Flying Gang” was forming, the cutters had been active on the peninsula for four decades. Logwood cutting camps were composed of many subgroups pursuing a quasi-legitimate living. One of the biggest subgroups consisted of ex-privateers, who used the dubiously legal practice of logwood cutting as a means of escaping their notoriety while earning a decent wage.Footnote 55
The camps worked independently of one another, varied in size, and traded with anyone willing to visit them. According to William Dampier, there was one “master” who organized the work to be done, but everyone was free to do as they pleased so long as their labour benefitted the camp members. This included the various activities associated with logwood cutting (the actual cutting of the tree, the breaking up of the log), to hunting and building huts. As long as the men played their part, they remained welcome.Footnote 56 As Steven Pitt has detailed, some logwood cutters were not there of their own choice, but had been tricked into service by Bostonian merchants;Footnote 57 however, the majority still operated as Dampier outlined in 1705.
This union of necessity worked in their favour. A logwood cutter could earn between £25 and £30 for each tun of logwood they cut and sold in Jamaica.Footnote 58 For context, mariners in this period usually earned £1–2 per month working on merchant ships.Footnote 59 The lucrative trade continued into the 1710s. Jamaican export records between March 1709 and September 1711 show that 898.5 tuns of logwood were shipped to England via the island. South Carolina exported 143 tuns in 1712, and Boston imported 2,572 tuns in 1714.Footnote 60 If logwood could not be exported to Britain for whatever reason, then British cutters and merchants willingly traded with other nations, such as the Dutch and Danish colonies at Curaçao and St Thomas.Footnote 61 This was a thriving trade with many participants and a healthy supply to demand ratio. The loose social organization and the simple aim to act in the interests of other camp members produced a high level of trust with each camp, which facilitated the social system’s longevity. However, these camp loyalties also resulted in a lack of social cohesion; no “logwood cutting identity” emerged, as individuals identified primarily with their immediate camp, not the wider profession.
This lack of a larger group affiliation meant that if logwood cutting camps were ever threatened, they could not easily enact a unified response. The eventual threat to the camps came from the Spanish, who, as soon as logwood cutting had commenced on their territory in the 1660s, declared it illegal. The English argued that the trade was legal under the principles of res nullius; the Spanish had not “inhabited” the territory, thus produce in the Yucatan Peninsula and Laguna de Terminos was available to anyone willing to harvest it.Footnote 62 Nevertheless, logwood camps were subject to sporadic (albeit piecemeal) attacks by Spanish militias. These tensions came to a head in 1714. Governor Pulleine of Bermuda wrote to the Council of Trade and Plantations in January to tell them that the Spanish were commissioning vessels to capture English ships carrying both Spanish money and goods deemed Spanish property. This posed a problem for English mercantile interests, as their ships almost always carried at least one of those commodities.Footnote 63 It was particularly an issue for those who overtly defended “clandestine trade” in the region, including individuals invested in the exportation of logwood.Footnote 64 By 10 December 1716, the Spanish, under commander “Don Alonso”, had attacked and burned the logwood cutter settlements.Footnote 65 The representative of the Spanish Ambassador, the Marquis de Monteleon, denied the incident, but multiple depositions received by the Council of Trade showed that the logwood cutters had been displaced.Footnote 66
Devoid of work and a place of settlement, the logwood cutters were left with one option: “The mariners who were employ’d in it to the number of 3000, have since turn’d pirates and infested all our seas”.Footnote 67 The logwood cutter communities joined with the privateers at Nassau.
The three sinew populations that came to form the basis of the pirate population at Nassau in the mid-1710s were therefore structurally unsound upon arrival, lacking a shared purpose or identity. Three disparate groups were united solely by personal interests and profit motives. As such, different sub-groups only worked together if it benefitted themselves or their immediate associates in the short term. The only unifying factor for the “pirate republic” was their ostracization from mainstream society. This, and the individualistic mindset that continued to prevail, explains the disintegration of a larger pirate sinew population upon Woodes Rogers’ landing in 1718.
These communities were fundamentally fractious and short-lived, and there was no long-term viability. When we think about our ideal type of sinew population, it is clear that the constituent groups had different attitudes to both aspects of the definition. The privateers and pirate hunters did not want to remain peripheral to empire. In the case of the 1708 privateers, they were forced into peripheralization through problematic political decisions. The three groups also had disunified notions of how they related to other groups within the same population; thus, their perspectives on the purpose of society differed. The possibility of long-term social unity was therefore absent. With the pirate sinew population straying so far from the ideal type or being internally divided enough to the extent that it is unclear whether there was ever a single pirate sinew population, the more interesting question is how and why this sinew population fell apart.
Pirate Populations after 1717
Whilst the pirate population may have experienced a short-term convergence of objectives between 1710 and 1717, Woodes Rogers’ arrival at Nassau marked the moment when the initial interests of the sub-groups that formed the pirate sinew population re-emerged, as people reacted to the new situation according to their own interests. In contradiction with the unified society assumed in our ideal type, some pirates chose to accept the pardon, having been forced into piracy by circumstance. Others continued to engage in piracy for their personal interest. The pirate sinew population at Nassau therefore fell victim to its participants’ history of constant banding and disbanding. This pattern entrenched personal and sub-group interests over any larger group affiliation. Furthermore, this divergence was not limited to the fragmenting events of 1717. Pirates who remained active, or even those who began their careers after 1717, did not then emerge from that crucible as a cohesive society, nor did they pursue activities that moved them closer to our ideal type or that enhanced their viability as a society. Rather, the evidence shows that intra-crew conflict and social division continued to be common experiences, undermining the viability of a long-term pirate sinew population.Footnote 68
This section offers four case studies that highlight the continued presence of self-interest and the proliferation of other problems within the pirate sinew population, manifested through the constant association and disassociation between pirate crews. These case studies are: Blackbeard’s dissolution of his association with Stede Bonnet; the near-violent confrontation between Howell Davis and Captain Cocklyn; Charles Vane’s selective fraternity; and Benjamin Hornigold’s decision to become a pirate hunter. Each case illustrates a key problem that undermined the viability of sustained inter-crew unions and, by extension, the persistence of the pirate sinew population. In the cases of Blackbeard and Bonnet, as well as that of Hornigold, self-interest clearly resulted in the breakdown of collective bonds. The encounter between Cocklyn and Davis demonstrates how fundamental differences of opinion about the purpose of piracy could escalate to near-violence. Through Vane, we will see how association with other pirate crews, even those previously identified by historians as belonging to the same sinew community, was selective rather than automatic. The persistence of self-interest, divergent understandings of what their purpose was, and the individual choice to associate with other pirates all contributed to the unviability of the pirate sinew population. Based on the fundamental practice of banding and disbanding, the flaw in pirates’ social cohesion meant that a pirate sinew population could not be sustained over time.
One of the more famous groupings during the post-pardon period was that between Edward Thatch (commonly known as Blackbeard) and Stede Bonnet. Whilst Thatch is certainly mentioned more in colonial records and seems to have been the more active captain, initiating many of his and Bonnet’s noted escapades, Bonnet was nevertheless a captain in his own right. The exact balance of power between the two is unclear, and whether this union was for mutual benefit or not cannot be truly ascertained. What it does tell us, though, is that colonial authorities regarded Thatch as the threat, with Bonnet treated as a superfluous captain by his side.
Thatch was active as a pirate from at least July 1717, when he was noted as one of the core captains operating out of New Providence alongside Henry Jennings and Benjamin Hornigold.Footnote 69 By October, however, Thatch was sailing in consort with Bonnet, and by January 1718 the two were cruising together off the Windward Islands.Footnote 70 The most famous exploit undertaken by this small confederation provides perhaps the clearest piece of evidence of the mutual benefit they sought to gain from working together. In June 1718, four ships commanded by Thatch and Bonnet appeared off the mouth of Charleston harbour, South Carolina. After capturing ten vessels, the pirates told Governor Johnson that if he “did not imediately send them a chest of medicins they would put every prisoner to death”.Footnote 71 Thatch and Bonnet’s collaboration was evidently profitable for both men and their crews. The demand for medicines to be shared among the crews also suggests an intention to sustain this association over time, ensuring that each crew member had access to a ship’s surgeon or, at the very least, the possibility of medical treatment, necessary for keeping their venture going. This suggests a discrete society containing specialist crew members whose expertise was widely available to its participants. Meanwhile, the collaboration was clearly motivated by a desire for profit, otherwise the two crews would not have sailed from the Windward Islands all the way to Carolina.
For most historians of piracy, this is where the narrative ends. However, one key aspect of the story of this confederation is consistently missed or ignored, perhaps because it does not fit the narrative of the pirate sinew population being socially cohesive. This is the running aground of the Queen Anne’s Revenge in June 1718.Footnote 72 The available source material points towards Thatch using the wrecking to disband his and Bonnet’s union, likely to secure a greater personal share of the plunder, as suggested by Bonnet, David Herriot, and Ignatius Pell at Bonnet’s trial in 1719.Footnote 73 The grounding of the ship necessitated the dispersal of its crew and they left the ship in smaller vessels and sought refuge on land. It was at this time that Thatch took most of the plunder. For Thatch, the association with Bonnet had outlived its purpose. He took the king’s pardon, lived in North Carolina, and continued to attack ships whose goods, such as sugar and cocoa, he could sell in Carolina for a steady income, until he was killed in late 1718.Footnote 74
These two events – the blockade of Charleston and the sinking of the Queen Anne’s Revenge – were diametrically opposed in intention. The former aimed to preserve the union between Bonnet and Thatch through medicine provision, while the latter was (according to the aggrieved party) designed to break it apart. Yet, based on what we have seen thus far about the pirate sinew population, the role of self-interest, and its impact on long-term social viability, these actions make sense. Self-interest was at play here, and Thatch thought his interests were no longer served by maintaining the union with Bonnet. While those interests benefitted from a greater pirate fleet operating in unison, Thatch acted to support this, hence the Charleston blockade. When his interests were no longer served by union, he sought to break it up. Unlike the internal regulation of individual crews through pirate codes, no formal structures existed to restrain self-interest at the level of the wider population, leaving such alliances inherently fragile.
In addition to the persistence of self-interest, pirate populations were also plagued by the competing egos of individual captains and by differing modus operandi. As mentioned in the previous section, people were drawn into piracy for a variety of reasons – through circumstance, choice, or a combination of the two. These differing motivations resulted in divergent objectives among pirates, and, when combined with clashes of egos and ideas, they could result in violence between pirate crews. This potential for intra-population violence further decreased the viability of a long-term pirate population remaining present in the early modern Caribbean.
An example of this can be seen in the grouping of the crews of Captains Cocklyn, Davis, and La Buse on the West Coast of Africa in 1719. This confederation was formed out of necessity, as the three pirates sought shared protection and security. However, the purely functional nature of the union is demonstrated by the vastly different ideas held by the pirates regarding the treatment of captives and the broader purpose of engaging in piracy itself.
Before delving into the account, it is worth evaluating the source from which this information comes from: Captain William Snelgrave’s A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade. We know that Snelgrave’s account of his captivity aboard a pirate ship was not in the original manuscript draft of his book, which was limited to details of the West African slave trade.Footnote 75 Consequently, there are doubts about the authenticity of his work. After all, the General History of the Pyrates had shown the British printing world that pirate stories were popular – Snelgrave could easily have capitalized on this demand.Footnote 76
The credibility of Snelgrave’s account lies in the fact that his characterization of the pirates fundamentally differs from that presented in the General History. Whereas the General History depicts all pirates as egalitarian, fraternal, and fervent about mariners’ rights, Snelgrave instead emphasizes the divisions within pirate society.Footnote 77 Although this could be construed as a unique selling point for his book, the detail and narrative style suggest this is a reflection (albeit potentially embellished) of his genuine experiences among pirates. As such, his insights are useful for showing the social functioning of larger pirate groups and highlight the innate problems that differing philosophies and egos had on attempts to form pirate societies.
The first crew described by Snelgrave is that of Captain Cocklyn, who Snelgrave states was cast out (along with twenty-five men) by Cocklyn’s own captain, Moody, in a prize.Footnote 78 Snelgrave describes Cocklyn and his men as “the basest and most cruel Villains”.Footnote 79 Olivier La Buse, the second notable member and Moody’s subordinate, apparently feeling guilty after abandoning Cocklyn, mutinied against Moody and joined with Cocklyn.Footnote 80 The final member of this group was Captain Davis. However, Snelgrave points out that Davis had not “consorted or agreed to join the others”, meaning that he was not part of the core social links between Cocklyn, La Buse, and their crews.Footnote 81 Davis’s refusal to officially join with Cocklyn and La Buse illustrates the autonomy of pirate crews in deciding with whom they would associate. Davis saw no value in joining forces with Cocklyn and La Buse, but was amenable to them because they had a shared safe haven near Sierra Leone, where several English merchants were willing to trade with them.Footnote 82 Davis was described as a “generous Man” who “kept his Crew […] in good order”.Footnote 83 There was evidently a marked difference in character between the captains, which also shaped their ideas about what the role of piracy was. For Davis, “their Reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base Merchants, and cruel Commanders”, whereas for Cocklyn piracy was simply about plunder and enrichment.Footnote 84 The association between Davis and Cocklyn was therefore limited to shared anchorage and safe harbour off Sierra Leone, rather than for any other benefit.
This grouping reveals the uneasy dynamics that flowed under the surface of pirate sinew populations. By assuming uniformity and viability across all sinew populations, we risk presuming that members joined for coherent and shared reasons. In practice, however, divergent thoughts about what the purpose of the union was could undermine attempts at unification. This was compounded when the egos of group leaders clashed. In this case study, Cocklyn and Davis had a burning dislike for each other, which, as outlined already, put pressure on the already volatile and weak foundations on which such pirate societies formed. Snelgrave noted that, upon meeting him, Davis expressed regret over the way Snelgrave had been treated by Cocklyn, explaining that, in his view, such poor treatment was only fitting for cruel merchant commanders. As for Cocklyn’s men, they “hated Captain Davis, because he kept his Ship’s Company in good order” and “being a brave generous Man, they dreaded his Resentment”. Apparently, whenever Cocklyn and Davis met, Cocklyn put on “a good face” but his dislike of Davis was well known.Footnote 85 This relationship between Cocklyn and Davis provides insight into the internal tensions that plagued the viability of sinew populations. Davis chose not to consort with Cocklyn because Cocklyn did not align with his views. If anything, Cocklyn was a liability and an irritant. Conversely, Cocklyn’s well-known dislike of Davis meant any cooperation would be difficult, especially given that both men appeared unwilling to compromise on their respective philosophies of piracy.
Given these volatile undertones, it is somewhat unsurprising that the mutual hostility between the two men escalated into near violence when a delicate but divisive situation presented itself. Violence between pirates was a reality that requires serious consideration. Stede Bonnet, for example, reportedly wished to hunt down Thatch following his betrayal in 1718.Footnote 86 Bonnet never got the opportunity, but Cocklyn and Davis nearly came to blows in 1719. According to Snelgrave’s narrative, Davis’s cabin boy plundered a chest initially reserved for Cocklyn’s crew. Cocklyn’s quartermaster tried to kill the boy with his sword, injuring Davis and the boy in the process. Davis “was all on Fire, and vowed Revenge”. Davis returned to his own ship, told his company of the matter, and “they all resolved forthwith to revenge this great injury done to one of their Comrades, and the Indignity shown their Captain”. Cocklyn initially prepared to fight but later admitted he could not outmatch Davis. La Buse and an English trader at Sierra Leone then intervened, encouraging both crews to stand down. Cocklyn eventually went aboard Davis’s ship to reconcile and permitted his quartermaster to be summoned and made to beg forgiveness.Footnote 87
If not for the intervention of third parties, these erstwhile partners-in-crime would have come to a more explosive conflict. This episode demonstrates how critically evaluating sinew populations through viability can prove useful to historians seeking to understand their dynamics. It is evident that for Cocklyn and his small crew of twenty-five men, uniting with La Buse proved advantageous. La Buse’s intervention had ensured Cocklyn’s safety. On the other hand, Davis clearly had no need to unify with Cocklyn and La Buse, confident in his own ability to defend himself against Cocklyn’s potential attack. This underscores the extent to which pirates were their own people with their own aims, choosing to associate out of necessity or opportunism, or to act alone. Seen in this light, Davies and Cocklyn’s violent outburst should not be considered an exceptional event within an otherwise cohesive society. Rather, once the complex undercurrents that shaped the viability of sinew populations across the Caribbean are acknowledged, particularly the centrality of self-interest and the presence of competing egos, such intra-population violence can be seen as an ever-present possibility within these groups.
In thinking about the viability of a sinew population, we must also acknowledge that some smaller groupings within the wider population did not want to form a wider collective. Rather, members of these groups were happy to fulfil their own needs irrespective of the direction the wider population was moving in. In the case of piracy, there is no better example than Charles Vane, who is usually characterised in the historiography as the archetype of the “pirates’ sense of brotherhood”.Footnote 88 However, the source material reveals the contrary: that Vane and his crew were disinclined to interact with other pirate crews. In May 1718, Governor Benjamin Bennet of Bermuda gathered ten depositions from mariners who had been attacked by Vane.Footnote 89 The deposition of Edward North, a mariner aboard the William and Martha, a sloop that had originated in Bermuda and was sailing among the Bahamas, portrays Vane as sadistic. North describes how Vane tied a crewman to the sloop’s bowsprit, forced a loaded pistol (attached to a slow-burning match) into his mouth, and used the threat of execution to encourage him to disclose the location of valuable goods on the ship. He also reported that Vane burned the sloops masts.Footnote 90 Vane’s attitude, North suggested, came from a seething hatred of Bermudians, whom he blamed for the execution of another pirate, Thomas Brown.Footnote 91 This story has gripped the imaginations of historians such as Marcus Rediker, and has been used to demonstrate an underlying social movement that allegedly united all pirate groups, even when some of them had little to do with other pirates in the same region.
Yet, North’s testimony is the only case where we see this fanaticism overtly. In the other nine depositions collected by Bennet, Vane’s violent tendencies are mentioned, but there is no mention of his commitment to a supposed “pirate fraternity”.Footnote 92 Even his violence is questionable. In his 1721 trial, Vane was prosecuted on six counts of piracy (none of which involved Bermudian victims), and the most threatening action Vane apparently took was raising the “Bloody Pendant”, the red flag used to intimidate merchantmen into surrender.Footnote 93 In most cases, Vane gave the sloop back to the owner and left without resorting to violence.Footnote 94 He even intervened to prevent one of his crew members, Robert Hudson, from killing his former captain.Footnote 95 We can confidently question the existence of a universal pirate fraternity. If Vane was genuinely motivated by outrage at the execution of Thomas Brown, it is striking that he appears to have been silent on the simultaneous hanging of eight pirates under their own black flag in Nassau in December 1718.Footnote 96
Once again, we see the role that self-interest played in undermining the viability of the pirate sinew population, becoming more pronounced by the late 1710s. This was not self-interest in the sense previously identified in Blackbeard’s actions, but rather a marked disinterest in uniting with other pirates and fortifying what Vane had apparently supported when he defiantly left Nassau in 1718 – a self-interest that reflected a disinterest in maintaining a larger society based on shared principles. If further evidence is needed, at Vane’s trial, one Captain Vincent Pierce of HMS Phoenix attested that Vane had surrendered to him in March 1718 and accepted the king’s pardon, only to resume committing acts of piracy afterwards.Footnote 97 As much as this may have been a pragmatic choice to legitimize or whitewash the piracies he had committed prior to March 1718, Vane was clearly not militant in his fealty to a pirate brethren, but acted in his own interests. In this reading of the material, a wider pirate sinew population was convenient for Vane, but unnecessary.
Given the earlier discussions in this article of pirates’ attempts to form larger populations, Vane may be seen as an outlier within the pirate world. Yet, when considered against the foundations on which the pirate sinew population was built, and the role self-interest and ego played in undermining larger groupings of pirates, Vane’s actions make sense. Maritime predators had been choosing when to unite and when not to for decades by this time, so Vane’s refusal to associate with other pirates should therefore be seen as a continuation of the weak social structures that had previously made a larger pirate society unviable.
In addition to those who chose to operate in smaller groups rather than within a larger population, as in the case of Charles Vane, some members of sinew populations chose to re-enter mainstream society rather than operate tangentially to it. As mentioned in the introduction, this happened in maroon populations, where some enslaved people used their marronage to negotiate better working conditions before returning to their masters.Footnote 98 Some pirates were willing to enter mainstream society (albeit not into the bondage of slavery) and, given the already weak foundations the pirate sinew population was built upon, were particularly inclined to do so if re-entry into mainstream society suited their objectives.
A key example of this thought process is Captain Benjamin Hornigold. Hornigold had been active as a pirate out of the Bahamas longer than most others, appearing in the source material as far back as March 1715 as one England’s privateers who refused to accept the Peace of Utrecht in 1713.Footnote 99 He remained active in the Bahamas and even appears to have attempted to unify the pirate population into a single society under his governorship. Evidence of this lies in his confrontation with Captain Thomas Walker (acting governor of the non-pirate Bahamian population) whom Hornigold threatened for imprisoning a pirate, warning Walker in the process that “all pirates were under his protection”.Footnote 100 However, the inherently decentralized and divided organization of piracy persisted under Hornigold, and intra-group violence among those resident in the Bahamas continued. For example, Henry Jennings tried to attack Hornigold following the latter’s taking of a French prize that Jennings had been hunting.Footnote 101
Hornigold’s defection to Woodes Rogers’ new government has therefore often been brushed under the carpet of pirate social organization analysis because it is hard to understand given his apparent high status among the pirates at Nassau. But when we think about pirates as a sinew population, with fundamental flaws that encouraged disunity, Hornigold’s actions become more understandable. Hornigold took the pardon at some point in mid-1718 alongside two other pirate crews.Footnote 102 For Hornigold, the long-term preservation of both his own and his crew’s interests lay in supporting Rogers’ settlement of the Bahamas. In October 1718, he volunteered to chase after Vane, who had been spotted around Abaco Island. Failing to capture Vane, Hornigold instead brought in a concession prize: a trader who had been dealing with Vane.Footnote 103 Not only did Hornigold prove his worth to Rogers in hunting Vane, but his actions “devides [sic] the people here and makes me stronger than I expected”.Footnote 104 This division of the Bahamian population further evidences the fundamentally weak social structure among pirates. The lack of unified objectives, the constant banding and disbanding based on self-interest, and the prevalence of self-interest and egos undermined the viability of pirates maintaining a long-term sinew population. Some therefore sought to reintegrate into mainstream society; others loathed it.
As Hornigold and his crew gained favour with Rogers, the interest of Hornigold’s crew in continuing to align itself with the pro-Rogers faction became increasingly clear. Hornigold acquired a positive reputation among the Bahamian elite, in effect removing “the infamous name he has hitherto been known by” and gaining support among his fellow ex-pirates, as the crew of Captain Cockram aligned itself with Hornigold’s to form a pirate-hunting union.Footnote 105 Of course, capturing pirates on behalf of the new governorship had financial perks as well. Rogers apparently “paid as much as I could spare towards the bounty money H.M. has allow’d for apprehending pirates to Captains Hornigold and Cockram, and those that were with them”. The hope was that the money given to Hornigold would be publicly distributed in Nassau so that other residents could join in the anti-piracy measures that Hornigold and Cockram represented.Footnote 106 However respected the crews of Hornigold and Cockram came to be by the Bahamian elite, these actions were done solely in the interest of their respective crews. Hornigold, his men, and other pirates who came to share his thinking acted on what they believed was best for themselves. They joined together when it suited them and would serve the interests of their crew.
Conclusions
The conclusions of this article fall into two main categories. The first relates to the pirate sinew population itself, and what histories of its collapse reveal about how this group functioned. The second is the history of sinew populations more broadly, with the article proposing a new approach to understanding these groups as a whole.
Regarding the pirates, the article advances the central claim that the pirate sinew population was fundamentally unviable. Contrary to historiography that presents pirates as a cohesive group, the evidence suggests deep and persistent fragmentation within the pirate population, which had deep and long-term roots in the histories of both privateering and colonization. The Flying Gang lacked shared goals, a collective identity, and the cohesive social structures to ensure long-term viability of the sinew population. Pirates associated with one another only when circumstances forced them to and disbanded as soon as personal advantage shifted. The article shows that no unified purpose tied the groups together beyond temporary self-preservation.
This attitude, combined with rampant self-interest, was the governing principle behind pirate behaviour. As demonstrated in the third section of the article, Blackbeard ended his alliance with Bonnet when it no longer suited his goals. Charles Vane did not associate with other pirates unless it served his interests. Benjamin Hornigold re-entered mainstream society and hunted former comrades for similarly self-interested reasons. Taken together with the evidence presented in the articles’ second section, this analysis shows that associations within the pirate sinew population were ad hoc, opportunistic, and temporary. Any shared identity was shallow and intra-pirate fractures were the norm rather than the exception.
The article has also made some key methodological suggestions regarding sinew populations more broadly, the value of which have been demonstrated through the pirate analysis. The first is that analysing social viability, rather than formation, is the crucial analytical lens through which to understand sinew populations. Social formation only tells us so much about the nature and history of sinew populations. By focusing on long-term social maintenance and the issue of (un)viability, we can better understand the social strategies employed (or not, in the case of the pirates) to ensure long-term viability. This is more revealing of sinew populations’ natures and functioning than ending analysis at the point of their formation. The ideal type of sinew population also enables us to challenge the uniformity of sinew populations and account for differences between different groups. This ideal type was built from the assumptions embedded in the term “sinew society” itself and marks an idealized version against which historically based sinew populations can be compared.
As noted in the introduction, the aim is not to say definitively how sinew populations worked. Rather, acknowledging the fragility of the populations and thinking critically about what maintained them or, indeed, drove them apart, is an essential aspect of the narrative and requires deeper study. Further analysis of the viability of sinew populations will help historians to better understand the functioning of sinew populations and allow them to comment more accurately on the state of Caribbean society in the eighteenth century.
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