Researcher Plunders Pirate Myths : Author Uses Old Literary Works to Separate Fact, Fiction

When Charles Ellms, a Boston stationer, first published “The Pirates Own Book” in 1837, he had no idea that he was creating a literary sensation. His press was busy throughout the 1840s and 1850s meeting the demand of armchair adventurers who delighted in the tales of mayhem on the high seas as corsairs seized treasure-laden ships, and plundered towns, leaving in the wake of their swift vessels a crimson trail of terror.

Ellms drew upon Capt. Johnson’s “History of Pirates” published in London in 1724 and other sources for his material, embellishing the volume with wood engravings. A later edition was published by the Marine Research Society of Salem, Mass., in 1921. The organization was then a part of Salem’s Peabody Museum, the oldest maritime museum in the United States, which was founded as the East India Marine Society in 1799.

Tourists Discouraged

The opening paragraph about pirates most certainly discouraged tourist traffic during the era when it was first published:

“The islands of the Indian Ocean and the east and west coasts of Africa, as well as the West Indies have been their haunts for centuries and vessels navigating the Atlantic and Indian oceans are often captured by them, the passengers and crew murdered, the money and most valuable part of the cargo plundered, the vessel destroyed, thus obliterating all trace of their unhappy fate . . .”

Unfortunately, many accounts of the freebooters who sailed under the skull-and-crossbones banner have been overly exaggerated by subsequent writers, each coloring their narratives with fictional prose.

Separating myths from what actually occurred has been a project of Robert C. Ritchie, a professor of history at UC San Diego whose book, “Captain Kidd and the War Against The Pirates,” will be published early next year by the Harvard University Press.

Ritchie, 46, has spent a year at the Huntington Library in San Marino doing additional research for the volume on a National Endowment for the Humanities-Huntington Library Fellowship. He began his study of piracy in 1977. The book will focus on the period from 1680 to 1730.

The author’s quest for information began in London where he studied Admiralty records. In the Colonial office, there were accounts of piracy in the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of North America. Searching through correspondence in the India office, Ritchie located records of the East India Co., including log books of its ships which came into contact with pirates.

‘Vast Treasure House’

“The British Library was a vast treasure house of pirates’ journals,” Ritchie recalled. “Here were eyewitness accounts of sea chases and captures.”

Ritchie went to The Hague to examine the records of the Dutch East India Co. He reads Dutch. “There are also sources in the United States,” he said. “A good one is the Driscoll Piracy Collection in Wichita, Kan., that was founded by a businessman who was fascinated by piracy.” He also cited the UC San Diego library and the Huntington.

“I was interested in who was the typical pirate, and what it was like to be a buccaneer. The motion pictures and romantic novels fostered an image that was often erroneous.”

A case in point was Rafael Sabatini’s “Captain Blood,” filmed in 1935, which was a swashbuckling adventure about a Caribbean pirate that made a star out of Errol Flynn.

“Pirates tried to avoid those pitched battles between their ships and a prize that are so spectacular in a film,” Ritchie said. “During such a fight with cannons blazing, the prize could be sunk, and the plunder would go to the bottom.

“The buccaneers depended upon surprise--to catch a merchantman unaware, and then board the vessel, overpowering the crew. Actually, they favored sacking towns.”

He said affluent women were usually well treated while they were held for ransom.

“If it was a woman with no means, well, let’s say that pirates were not gentlemen. And if the men were drinking, heaven help any woman on board. The trouble is that they were drinking most of the time.”

Ritchie said another fallacy about pirates is that they buried their treasures. “The truth is that they spent their money so fast that they were always in need of more to support their life style,” he said.

Ritchie’s book covers a period when piracy was spreading from the Caribbean into every corner of the world. The Island of Saint Marie off the northeast coast of Madagascar became a rendezvous of pirates in the Indian Ocean. During the late 17th Century, New York became a center of the piracy trade. The buccaneers paid New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston merchants hard cash for goods they purchased, making them popular with shopkeepers who cared little that the golden doubloons and pieces-of-eight they received were plundered from vessels in Atlantic waters.

Perhaps the unluckiest of all the corsairs was William Kidd, a sea captain who had once won honors from the British for his service against French privateers. In 1695, he was offered a king’s commission to rid the Indian Ocean and other waters of pirates preying on ships of the East India Co. Here he was to fall from grace. Kidd’s vessel sailed for East Africa, where he ignored his commission to hunt pirates and began seizing merchantmen as prizes. During an argument with his gunner, William Moore, Kidd struck him in the head with a wood bucket. Moore died.

Returning to New York, Kidd found that he had been denounced for piracy. He was arrested and returned to England to stand trial. In May, 1701, Kidd was found guilty of five charges of piracy and of the murder of his gunner. Kidd was hanged, his body left suspended and wrapped in chains as a warning to all mariners who would become outlaws of the sea.

While many pirates died violently, the percentage of them who were apprehended and hanged was relatively small. The threat of the gallows was no deterrent. For men who had been born to poverty, the sea offered more than adventure. When the booty was divided, the lowest seaman could find himself moderately wealthy.

California had its share of pirates. Three of the most famous were Francis Drake, Thomas Cavendish and Woodes Rogers. They are generally called gentlemen buccaneers, for they operated in Pacific waters with the tacit approval of the English monarch they served.

In Pacific waters, the Manila galleons offered the richest prizes of all. Having subjugated the Philippines by 1564, Spain established a lucrative trade that lasted for 250 years. Mexican silver was exchanged for silks, spices and artifacts from the Orient.

Antonio de Morga in his “The Philippine Islands at the Close of the Sixteenth Century” listed some of the cargoes the huge awkward galleons carried from Manila to Acapulco, where it was transported to Mexican ports such as Vera Cruz to be shipped to Spain. Reading such a manifest would make any pirate eager to take up the chase for such a rich prize:

”. . . velvet embroidered in all sorts of colors and patterns . . . pearls and rubies, sapphires, stones of crystal . . . sheet iron, tin, lead, saltpetre and powder, wheat flour, preserves of oranges, peaches, pears, nutmeg, ginger . . . and a thousand other gewgaws and ornaments . . . peppers and other spices; and curiosities, to recount all which would never to come to an end, nor would much paper be sufficient for it. . . .”

Drake was one of those drawn toward Spanish possessions by the prospect of plunder. He sailed from Plymouth Harbor on Nov. 15, 1577, holding a commission from Queen Elizabeth I to “annoy the King of Spain in his Indies.”

Drake reduced his fleet of five ships to one, the Pelican which he renamed the Golden Hind. Passing through the Straits of Magellan, he entered the Pacific where in a series of raids and captures he packed his vessel with loot.

Drake spent from June 17 to July 23, 1579, on the California coast, beaching the Golden Hind at what is believed to be present Drake’s Bay north of San Francisco.

When Drake sailed from California and returned to England, Spain protested Drake’s depredations to Queen Elizabeth. She replied that she found no evidence that he had molested any of the subjects of King Philip of Spain or their property. One can assume that a few of the precious baubles Drake acquired on his odyssey were deposited in the queen’s jewel box.

Ritchie opened a large volume that is a meticulously detailed atlas with hand-colored maps showing the west coast of the New World from Mexico to the Straits of Magellan. It was made in Panama in 1669.

“This book is extremely rare,” he said. “It was also one of the greatest intelligence coups for the English. Called the ‘Derrotero g en eral del Mar del Sur,’ it shows various harbors and coastal towns with extensive notations for navigators. It would be invaluable for any English privateers or navy vessels attacking Spanish possessions.”

Ritchie paused to open a pamphlet published by the Huntington Library. “This tells the story of how the book fell into English hands. It was related by Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin in his ‘Bucaniers of America (1684).’ He related that Capt. Bartholomew Sharpe, a notorious pirate who harassed Spanish shipping along the west coast of South America in 1681, captured a large Spanish vessel near Cape Passao. He later wrote ‘In this ship the Rosario we took also a great Book full of Sea Charts and Maps, containing a very accurate and exact description of all the Ports, Soundings, Creeks, Rivers, Capes, and Coasts belonging to the South Sea . . . The Seaman who at first laid hold on it, on board the Rosario , told us the Spaniards were going to cast this book overboard but that he prevented them.’

“The book was carried back to England where the text was translated and the maps copied by William Hack who made several copies of the atlas for King Charles and other prominent men.”

Ritchie turned the pages of a second volume. “This is one of the English editions. There may be a few like it somewhere in the world today. The Huntington has a copy of both the English and the Spanish. It is now believed that this Spanish atlas is the one taken from the Rosario by Sharpe’s pirates. It was purchased from a European dealer by Henry E. Huntington a long time ago.”