Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press) by Hanna Mark G

Author:Hanna, Mark G. [Hanna, Mark G.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

Plate 13. Cover page, The Tryals of Joseph Dawson, Edward Forseith, William May, William Bishop, James Lewis, and John Sparkes, for Several Piracies and Robberies by Them Committed … (London, 1696). Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego

Six of Every’s men were hanged at the Thames’s Execution Dock on November 25, 1696. Circumstantial evidence suggests many Londoners agreed with the original jury’s not-guilty verdict: William III ordered an unusually large armed guard to protect their procession to the gallows. Hoping to profit from the sensationalism that made Every a celebrity, a ballad writer promptly produced the broadside Villainy Rewarded; or, The Pirate’s Last Farewell to the World. This was a pirate’s confession that summarily rebutted Every’s Verses by updating the story, stating, “No nation we did spare.” Printers also produced an Account of the Behavior, Dying Speeches, and Execution of the six pirates, who admitted to “horrid Barbarities,” but only “upon the Persons of Heathens and Infidels.” While these self-proclaimed “privateers” professed this religious justification for their behavior to the bitter end, the trial allowed jurists like Hedges and Holt to publicly refute the logic that Muslim shipping presented viable targets simply owing to their faith.29

The attempt to suppress Every’s budding legend dovetails with a wave of broad social and political reformation after 1688. Numerous associations, like the Society for the Reformation of Manners (founded in 1691), sought to correct the perceived loose moral standards set by the profligate Stuarts following their Restoration in 1660. These reform efforts focused intently on male behavior, stemming from the fear that the manly ideal had become libertine and foppish under the Stuarts. There was a general understanding of the Restoration as a time of corruption, perhaps most evident in the pardoning of men like Henry Morgan and Bartholomew Sharp. John Evelyn had been thrilled to meet Henry Morgan in the 1670s; by 1697, Evelyn differentiated “our Buccaneers, Morgan and the rest” from sea dogs like Drake because the former were “famous only for Spoil, Robberies, Cruelty and Injustice.” Englishmen “ought to blot the Memory of their very Names.”30

Colonial political leaders paid as close attention as they could to the tumultuous affairs in London that were radically reshaping the empire. But news of the trial of Every’s men crossed the Atlantic slowly. The Privy Council’s proclamation against Every and his men was issued in August 1696 but not read by the Massachusetts Council until May 6, 1697; in Maryland, until June 10; in Virginia, until June 11; and as late as July 5 in the Leeward Islands. Without their own press, the colonists depended in large part on English newspapers for information about international pirates. One ship’s captain announced to Pennsylvania governor Markham in 1697 that he had “read in last July’s Gazette a proclamation to apprehend Captain Every and his crew, and hear that some of them are in your province.” Markham claimed that the proclamation was not specifically directed at him, “so that he was not bound to take notice of it.

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