On the night of January 5, 1708, in Lima, an enslaved negro named Fernando de Velasco exited the back door of the tavern where he lived and worked and, under the cover of darkness, met up with a trio of escaped prisoners who were waiting for him nearby. The men in the latter group were all British, and had been in custody since their privateering vessel, the Cinque Ports, had wrecked off the coast of the viceroyalty of Peru in 1704. After being apprehended by local officials and charged with acts of piracy against Spain, they were transported to the audiencia of Lima and were in the midst of a trial when they made their surprising escape.
For his part, de Velasco considered the men to be his paisanos, or countrymen; he was born and had been raised on the British Caribbean island of St. Kitts. His owner there had freed him prior to his death, but a dismal progression of events led to de Velasco's being re-sold into slavery, first in Jamaica and later in Peru. Upon his encounter with the arrestees in Lima, which took place at some point in the days before their prison escape, de Velasco seemed eager to join them for what was to come next. His goal, in his words, was “to enjoy my freedom,” and to accompany the men to “their homeland.” To those apparent ends, he led the group to Chorillos, a port just south of the city, where all four men boarded a small boat and set out into the Pacific Ocean. But instead of making their way south toward the Strait of Magellan and into the Atlantic Ocean, and then crossing over to England—which would have reversed the original course of the Cinque Ports—the men spent the next few months conducting a series of raids up and down the west coast of South America, overtaking other vessels and attacking coastal indigenous communities to secure provisions, weaponry, and information about sea traffic in the region.
From the start, de Velasco was a valuable asset: he used his local knowledge to lead the group through Lima and out of the port from which they eventually set sail, and because he spoke both English and Spanish, he deployed his linguistic abilities to communicate with informants and pass knowledge along to the other men. He also proved to be a faithful and reliable ally, serving as a guard and lookout during their subsequent raids. All of this culminated in the group orienting toward the bustling port of Guayaquil, where Spanish prizes carrying American silver, Asian silks, and African slaves abounded. However, before they could reach their intended destination, they were intercepted, captured, and escorted to jail in Quito.Footnote 1
This information comes to us by way of a 300-page court record that begins with allegations of piracy against the British prisoners in 1704, but soon comes to focus almost entirely on Fernando de Velasco's involvement in their escape four years later.Footnote 2 The details contained within the case file provide a remarkable glimpse of a man whose desire for the freedom he saw as his due led him to forge an unlikely, if short-lived, alliance. They also push our attention beyond the European (and mostly British) men who dominate the scholarship on piracy and privateering in the South Sea, or the part of the Pacific Ocean that connected East Asia to Central and South America. Indeed, to tell the story of the prisoners’ 1708 escape from Lima and subsequent movements without mentioning de Velasco would overlook the very person who drove their plot forward.
The case also points to important links between the history of piracy and privateering in the South Sea and the history of the slave trade. Beyond the fact that de Velasco's very presence in Lima— given his birth on St. Kitts and his eventual transfer to Jamaica—resulted from both an intra- and inter-colonial slave trade, his imprisonment in Quito forms part of this story as well, adding yet another destination to his route of unfreedom.
The specifics of his case notwithstanding, de Velasco was hardly a singular figure for his time and place. Archival records and published accounts from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period when heightened trade activity in the South Sea combined with events in Europe and elsewhere to embolden Spain's rivals to attack its vessels, waterways, and ports throughout the region—reveal the profound extent to which enslaved and free people of African descent came into similar contact with pirates and privateers.Footnote 3 Like de Velasco, they served as guides along unfamiliar terrain, translators, and go-betweens, to name a few of the skilled roles they were conscripted into and at times even voluntarily assumed. They also undertook complex itineraries that carried them far from both their points of origin and their intended destinations. When taken together, their stories depart in meaningful ways from the experiences of their Afro-descendant counterparts in the Atlantic World, where scholarly inquiries into the connected histories of slavery, piracy, privateering, and the slave trade are more frequently focused.
British pirates and privateers—a group that I will collectively refer to as corsairs—in the Atlantic largely treated men and women of African descent as laboring bodies or pillaging crews who could be easily disposed of or sold off when their utility ran out.Footnote 4 In the comparatively less familiar and less hospitable South Sea, however, they lacked the linguistic skills, geographic knowledge, and access to “pirate nests” and other safe harbors to always be so cavalier.Footnote 5 This is not, of course, to let British corsairs’ views of the value of people of African descent in the Atlantic World context shape our own understanding of those individuals’ skills. As Ernesto Bassi has shown in the region he refers to as the transimperial Greater Caribbean, which spanned the sea from Havana to St. Thomas and Cartagena, black sailors, including those taken captive by corsairs, possessed and continued to develop sophisticated knowledge that they passed on to one another and around the region.Footnote 6 Nor is it my intention to say that British corsairs in the South Sea had any sense of racial equality that extended into other spatial or social arenas, or that they fully abandoned their predatory and dehumanizing ways. Instead, I argue, they grappled with the reality that, like it or not, they counted on people of African descent in these particular waters for guidance, survival, and safe passage.
The South Sea: Background and Contexts
The inauguration of the Manila Galleon trade in 1565 made the South Sea a busy commercial and cultural contact zone. Ships carrying Asian slaves, porcelain, lacquers, silk, spices, and other merchandise made annual crossings from the Philippines to the port of Acapulco in the viceroyalty of New Spain, and were laden with silver for their return.Footnote 7 In addition to these transpacific voyages were numerous short-haul transfers, which moved African captives, bullion, indigo, sugar, flour, wood, wine, and textiles to various ports along Spanish America's west coast.Footnote 8 As a consequence of this multidirectional and lucrative traffic, this region of the Pacific was an early and enduring target of foreign incursions—beginning, most notably, with Francis Drake's sixteenth-century raids at Valparaiso and Callao and his taking of a gold- and silver-laden Spanish prize.Footnote 9
The 1680s to the 1720s marked an especially active period of vulnerability, thanks to the presence of such interconnected figures as William Dampier, Woodes Rogers, and George Shelvocke. Dampier made three major sojourns into the region, setting out for the first time in 1679 (stopping along the way in Mexico and the Caribbean) and returning in 1703 and 1708, in the latter instance aboard a ship captained by Woodes Rogers. For his part, Shelvocke began his journey in 1719, as a captain of a larger expedition that included at least one crewman who had been part of Dampier's 1703 trip. All three men kept logs of their expeditions and eventually published accounts of them upon returning home. The texts—specifically, Dampier's Voyages Round the World, Rogers’ A Cruising Voyage Round the World, and Shelvocke's Voyage Round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea—allowed readers in England to vicariously experience the natural facets, adventures, dangers, and rewards of a distant world.Footnote 10
Of course, while the desire to bridge distances may well have been a strong motivator for the men to publish accounts of their experiences, they also had other reasons for writing. Dampier lost a significant portion of his crew on his first voyage to mutiny, and lost money on the journey as a result. Telling his side of the story was thus a dual attempt to sway public opinion in his favor and to tap into the lucrative market for adventure stories so popular with English audiences. For his part, when Rogers returned to England after his time in the South Sea, he was immediately plunged into legal battles with the East India Company on suspicion of having breached a trade agreement. The conflict lasted for years, during which time Rogers was unable to reap the rewards of a journey for which he was already attracting attention, not least for having discovered the castaway Alexander Selkirk (upon whom Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoe, and who Dampier had had a hand in abandoning on an earlier voyage).Footnote 11 As for Shelvocke, he had abandoned most of his crew in China just before returning home to England, and was thoroughly pilloried in the pages of another account, published prior to his own, that criticized his leadership and integrity at every turn of the voyage.Footnote 12 In other words, because the men faced damaged reputations back home, telling their stories from their own perspectives and in their own words served important rehabilitative ends.
Given their intended audiences and self-serving aims, the texts primarily center on the men's own bravery, leadership, and heroism. The authors present themselves as protagonists who endured and overcame myriad obstacles, including rough waters, treacherous weather, and confrontations with Spanish ships, as well as perilous encounters with the inhabitants of the islands and port cities of the South Sea. The men also describe themselves at various points as having strong moral compasses, which they hoped would stand in contrast with the depraved characterizations often foisted upon them by their rivals.
As a consequence of the authors’ particular narrative orientations, most scholarship on the South Sea places Dampier, Rogers, Shelvocke, and others like them at the center of the discussion.Footnote 13 Even when casting critical attention upon the men and lending credence to their detractors, scholars still largely manage to keep their focus trained on “a handful of adventurers” (to borrow and slightly repurpose Matthew Restall's shorthand for an enduring myth surrounding the Spanish conquest).Footnote 14 They do this despite the fact that behind the men's self-aggrandizement lie hints of just how much they all relied on the labor and services of the “negroes,” and “mulattoes” (to use a couple of the generic racial descriptors the authors employed in their accounts) they encountered while plundering their way through the South Sea. Though frustratingly scattered and fragmentary on their own, the hints can be pieced together to make room for new ways of seeing. When these details are placed in conversation with extant archival records that detail other South Sea voyages (which are largely scattered and fragmentary in their own right), it becomes even more clear just how instrumental enslaved and free people of African descent were to the exploits for which Dampier, Rogers, and Shelvocke are so well known.
A “Very Pretty Boy”
In 1685, Dampier and his crew made their way into the Acapulco harbor. With annual arrivals of Manila galleons whose holdings could fetch enormous profits, the region was an immensely popular target. Upon Dampier's arrival, he wrote:
The people all fled, only a mulatta woman, and three or four small children, . . . were taken and brought aboard. She told us that a Carrier (one who drives a caravan of mules) was going to Acapulco, laden with Flour and other goods, but stopt in the road for fear of us, a little to the West of this Village (for he had heard of our being on this coast) and she thought he still remained there. And therefore it was we kept the Woman to be our guide and to carry us to that Place.Footnote 15
Dampier's wording makes it difficult to understand whether the “mulatta” woman was unable or unwilling to flee with her fellow townspeople. But the size of the woman's young family raises the possibility that she made a conscious decision to stay behind, perhaps out of concern over their ability to escape quickly, fear that the risk of separation was simply too strong, or in the hope that in staying put they could either escape the invaders’ notice or negotiate their way to safety.
In any case, the crew quickly extracted information from the woman and pressed her into service as their guide. Although Dampier did not directly mention it, the group probably included some of the “negro-men” taken from the above-discussed bark as well, since they could have been tasked with carrying whatever items the group found back to their ship. The following day, the woman led the group through a pathless wood until they came upon their target: a man with 40 packs of flour, along with some chocolate, cheese, clay pots, and a pack of 40 mules. The crew took all of the man's food and livestock and carried it back to their vessel (“The earthen vessels,” Dampier wrote, “we had no occasion for and therefore left them”).
Dampier noted the following as he concluded the passage:
Afterwards, we gave the woman some Cloaths for her, and her children, and put her and two of them ashore; but one of them, a very pretty Boy, about 7 or 8 years old Captain Swan kept. The woman cried, and begged hard to have him; but Captain Swan would not, but promised to make much of him, and was as good as his Word. He proved afterward a very fine boy for Wit, Courage, and Dexterity; I have often wondered at his Expressions and Actions.Footnote 16
Perhaps the allotment of clothing they gave her included some pieces of “Quito cloth” taken from a “bark full of negroes” that the group had previously captured en route to Lima from Guayaquil and—in an incident that underscores the rapacious indifference that also characterized British corsairs’ time in the South Sea—abandoned, save for a group of “forty of the stoutest Negro-men” before continuing on their way.Footnote 17 Although Dampier and his crew might not have recognized the cloth's importance, it was in widespread demand and therefore constituted a valuable form of payment. The woman could have sold it, or perhaps stitched it into clothing for her family. The payment thus acknowledged, even in a small way, that she was deserving of compensation for the service she performed. Or perhaps it served as payment for her child. In any case, whatever value Dampier and his crew placed on the woman's contribution to their expedition, they saw themselves as entitled to far more. Just as they picked among the “bark full of negroes” to take whom they wished while casting the rest away, and later sifted through the muleteer's bounty to separate what they wanted from what they did not value, they likewise plucked a child from his mother's arms before leaving the rest of the fractured family behind.
Centuries later, we cannot know whether the unnamed woman and her remaining children made it home from their ordeal safely. In this way the group joined the countless Afro-descendants, in both the South Sea and the Atlantic World, who were cast aside when their perceived utility ran out. But the Acapulco incident also tells a more complicated story, given that Dampier's crew, and particularly Captain Swan, retained the woman's “very pretty” young son.Footnote 18 To a modern reader, Dampier's descriptor might carry menacing implications, perhaps suggestive of the possibility that at least some of the child's value was sexual. Yet the term “pretty” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries connoted not only physical attractiveness but also ingenuity and cleverness.Footnote 19
It is possible that the young child spoke both English and Spanish, and revealed himself to be a useful translator between his mother and the crew, so much so that they decided to keep him to serve in this capacity for a longer stretch. Further, given Dampier's own wonder at the young boy's “expressions and actions,” the term “pretty” also seemed to indicate that in addition to providing meaningful assistance, the young boy perhaps even became a source of amusement for his captors. What this meant, exactly, is difficult to discern, but other passages of Dampier's text signal the extent to which he and his crew thirsted for friendly companionship. After crossing the South Sea to the Philippines, for example, Dampier wrote that “near a third of our men lived constantly ashore, with their comrades and pagallies [female companions], and some with women-servants, whom they hired of their masters for concubines.”Footnote 20 This desire for intimate or kind company was common among seafarers, regardless of their marital status back home. Thus, the presence of an innocent young child on board the ship may have offered the men an alternate means of escape from the hardscrabble work of seafaring.
Regardless of the specific contours of these individuals’ experiences, they form part of a larger narrative in Dampier's Voyages Round the World, in which his group took their pick of and did what they wished with Afro-descendant men, women, and children as they pillaged their way through the South Sea. These instances were always beneficial to Dampier and his fellow seamen and devastating to everyone else. Moreover, because Dampier framed these moments entirely in terms of their utility to his and his crew's insatiable ambitions, he never named the individuals who were dragged unwillingly along the currents of those ambitions. Consequently, he leaves us without any means by which to follow the threads of his captives’ stories to their ends.
But it is at least possible to connect their stories to one another. In so doing, it becomes clear that Dampier and his crew seized upon people of African descent in the South Sea as though they were no different from bolts of cloth, edible provisions, and other forms of booty, sifting among them to take their pick of the most desirable choices. But these men also recognized that their captives were more than mere objects. Beyond the obvious benefit of using their captives to perform physical labor, Dampier and his crew saw opportunities to exploit their intellectual and emotional labor as well. And so they put their captives under tremendous psychological pressure, threatening their lives and those of their families in order to take advantage of their knowledge of local traffic and terrain, thereby gaining an edge in an otherwise unfamiliar and potentially dangerous landscape.
Crisscrossing Empires
Dampier was hardly alone in these actions, which became especially pervasive in the early eighteenth century. The period marked the beginning of a veritable frenzy in Britain, as merchants—who had already engaged in contraband trade with the Spanish, supplying sugar and luxury goods in exchange for silver—grew ever more eager to finance privateering voyages to the South Sea to lay claim to the riches that abounded in the region. They were emboldened in these efforts by the 1700 death of Spain's King Charles II and the subsequent naming of his grandnephew Philip as heir to the throne, which promised to unite Spain and France as allies. The ensuing War of the Spanish Succession united Britain and other European powers against this possible dynasty, and the conflict spilled over into the South Sea, where Britain was authorizing raids on both Spanish and French ships in the region.Footnote 21
It was in this context that Woodes Rogers undertook his privateering voyage, setting sail from Bristol in August 1708. His complement consisted of two ships, the Duke and the Duchess, both of which carried their own letters of marque. Rogers commanded the Duke, while a captain named Stephen Courtney took the helm of the Duchess. In total there were more than 300 crewmen, including William Dampier.Footnote 22 Rogers described the group as a motley sort, of which “one Third were Foreigners from most Nations; several of her Majesty's Subjects on board were Tinkers, Tailors, Hay-makers, Peddlers, Fidlers, &c. one Negro and about ten Boys.”Footnote 23 The origins of the unnamed “negro” remain unclear, along with his reasons for being among the crew, but two possibilities are likely. The first is that he was a free Bristolian who shared his fellow crewmembers’ reasons for embarking on the expedition: the chance for an adventure and even some measure of wealth. The second is that he was enslaved, either to a crewmember or an owner who stayed behind in Bristol. As Arne Bialuschewksi has shown in his study of black mariners in the early eighteenth-century Anglo-American world, it was not unusual for slaveholders to dispatch their human property on privateering voyages in the region, citing (among others) the example of an unnamed enslaved man captured off the coast of Bermuda who testified that “his Master was to have his Share except Jewells and Rings in the Voyage. His Master having often sent him out on Privateering upon Shares.”Footnote 24
Other (likewise unnamed) men and women of African descent would join Rogers over the course of his voyage. The circumstances of their boarding are somewhat easier to decipher. For the most part, Rogers and his crew acquired them as prisoners, capturing them on board Spanish ships making their way from Panama to various port cities along the Pacific coast. For example, in June 1709, Rogers wrote of having taken a 90-ton prize en route from Panama to Guayaquil, whose cargo included 11 “Negro-Slaves.”Footnote 25 In another instance, in August 1709, Rogers described the Duchess having overtaken a 70-ton vessel as it made its passage from Panama to Lima. “The best of her Cargo,” Rogers wrote, “was about 24 Negroes, Men and Women.”Footnote 26 As Dampier had done with the “bark full of negroes” he encountered on his earlier voyage (who were captured along a similar route), Rogers sifted through the captured to select the most healthy and useful among them.
These captives served myriad functions. The women were generally skilled at washing clothes, preparing food, and sewing, all of which made them useful to the everyday workings of the Duke and the Duchess. For their part, men provided physical labor when it came to setting up ground camps and repairing the ships. And because several captives of both sexes were able to communicate in English as well as Spanish, they were pressed into service on various occasions as translators. For example, Rogers wrote of relying on a literate “negro” to write, in Spanish, several letters that would be nailed to trees offering freedom to any slaves who ran away to join their assemblage.Footnote 27
The episode also highlighted the potential for willing collaboration with the British among people of African descent. In an entry for August 1709, Rogers wrote of putting 35 “negroes” on board the Duke under the command of a free man of African descent named Michael Kendall who had joined the group after escaping the silver mines in Peru, with the instructions that Kendall be “continually exercising them, because I did not know how soon we might meet an enemy.”Footnote 28 Rogers provides only these scant details about Kendall, failing to offer insight into why he initially boarded the Duke, or what became of him over the course of the men's shared journey. We are therefore left to speculate as to Kendall's motives, calculations, and eventual fate. To be sure, Rogers and his roving expedition offered the possibility of escape from Peru's mining region. Further, Rogers had intentionally courted slaves throughout the South Sea by appealing to their desire for freedom. It is possible, then, that Kendall joined this group in order to lay claim to geographic mobility and individual liberty. And the group of 35 “negroes” under his command seems to have done the same.
None of these choices were without sacrifice. It was Kendall's responsibility to ensure that the rest of the men were ready and able to protect the English from the Spanish. To that end, Rogers wanted the men to understand where their true loyalties should rest. As he put it:
I gave ‘em Bays [baize] for Clothes, and told them they must now look upon themselves as Englishmen, and no more as Negro Slaves to the Spaniards, at which they expres'd themselves highly pleas'd: I promise my self good Assistance from them, if need be, having this Proverb on their Side, that Those who know nothing of Danger fear non; and for our own Parts, we must not submit to be Prisoners, tho’ forced to engage at the greatest Disadvantage, but every one resolve to stand to the last, for if taken we shall be worse than Slaves.Footnote 29
The clothing represented a kind of offering to the men, to strengthen their ties to their captors and remind them of the fate that awaited them should they fail in their duties. In this way, Rogers made clear that he viewed the men as both key allies and political actors, who had their own reasons to take up arms against the Spanish in order to secure their freedom from slavery.
Casting one's lot with a band of privateers was a dangerous prospect for reasons beyond the above, as there was no guarantee that an escape from Spanish American slavery would correspond to any sort of juridical freedom or individual autonomy among the British. Despite Rogers’ appeals to his black collaborators, we must also acknowledge the profound power imbalance and manipulation at work in the situation. Black people were “Englishmen” only when Rogers needed them to be. Other times, they were property, above all else. Rogers frequently handed blacks over along with material goods as payments and rewards. In August 1709, for example, Rogers detailed an episode involving two Spanish priests. Nearly a year prior, the crew had taken the priests as prisoners from a Spanish ship in the Canary Islands. One “Padre,” as Rogers referred to him, proved to be an especially crucial ally when it came to negotiating with Indians and convincing them to trade with the privateers. Finally, Rogers wrote:
We put our young Padre ashore, and gave him, as he desir'd, the prettiest young Female Negro we had in the Prize, with some Bays, Linnen, and other things, for his good Services in helping to promote our Trade for Provisions here . . . The young Padre parted with us extremely pleas'd, and leering under his Hood upon his black Female Angel, we nae doubt he will crack a Commandment with her, and wipe off the Sin with the Church's Indulgence.Footnote 30
The account underscores the callous disregard with which Rogers viewed people of African descent, who were so easily and regularly dispensed with in every shift in circumstances. It also offers additional insight into how Rogers characterized his moral standing and leadership during the expedition. John C. Appleby has argued that Rogers betrayed “overt anti-Catholicism” in implying that the attractive young woman was destined for sexual victimization, in an attempt to set his own crew's actions apart from those of the Spanish priest.Footnote 31 While it is difficult to assign such a precise sentiment to Rogers’ writing, it is clear that he wanted his readers to view him and his crew as fundamentally different and morally superior to the priest, regardless of the circumstances at hand. Elsewhere in his text, Rogers described having a zero-tolerance policy for sex between Afro-descendant women and his crew. For example, to prevent a “she-negro (call'd Daphne) from being debauch'd in our ship,” he wrote:
I gave her a strict Charge to be modest, with Threats of severe Punishment, if she was found otherwise. One of the Dutchess's black Nymphs having transgressed this Way, was lately whip'd at the Capstone. This I mention to satisfy the censorious, that we don't countenance Lewdness, and that we took those Women aboard only because they spoke English, and begg'd to be admitted for Landresses, Cooks, and Semstresses.Footnote 32
The passage is interesting for several reasons. One is the self-consciousness with which Rogers characterizes his own leadership. He breaks somewhat from the narrative flow of the larger account by more directly addressing his readers, particularly at a moment when they might question whether he allowed sexual relationships or depravity to take place under his command. In light of the post-journey legal conflict that informed the publication of Rogers’ book, the strategy fit within the overall exculpatory aims of his text. Perhaps, when he revisited that moment at sea, he wished to convey to his readers that he and his crew had standards to which others did not hold themselves. Further, given the tensions between Spain and Britain, the episode with the priest also served as a way to indict the Spanish, and, however indirectly, to call to readers’ minds the Black Legend of Spain, which emphasized Spain's notoriously brutal treatment of Africans and Indians in the New World.Footnote 33 But regardless of whether he did in fact seek and manage to limit sexual contact between the “she-Negroes” and crew on board the ship, it is clear that Rogers placed the greater burden on the women in the situation, as though they somehow had complete agency over their sexual experiences.Footnote 34
In taking note of Rogers’ myriad references to “negroes” in his account, historians Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, and Ben Vinson III have asked: “Just who were the men and women they captured and traded? How did their individual sagas unfold, and what were their interrelationships with one another, the broader colonial world, and the merging parts of the Atlantic and pacific realms?”Footnote 35 In asking this question, the authors remind us to consider the many black lives that were displaced and fundamentally altered in so many ways when Rogers and his counterparts arrived in the South Sea. Beyond an undifferentiated mass defined only by their race and gender, these were husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and people with subjectivities of their own. Just because Rogers and others like him failed to acknowledge such did not deny the fact of it. And while it remains tremendously difficult to answer the questions that Bryant, O'Toole, and Vinson have posed with meaningful depth or breadth, it not entirely impossible, either, if historians are willing to cross imperial archival lines to find greater depth behind their fragmentary narratives.
Centering Afro-Descendants
A return to the 1708 criminal case that opened this article provides an immeasurably valuable opportunity to center people of African descent in the history of British marauding in the South Sea. As with so many of the subjects of this essay, the case links back to William Dampier, specifically his early 1703 privateering voyage to the South Sea as captain of the St. George. Dampier's ship was one of two vessels that formed part of an expedition that left from Ireland. The other, the Cinque Ports, was initially captained by Charles Pickerling, but following his death during an early stop in the Portuguese islands of the Atlantic, Thomas Stradling took over in that role. By mid 1704, the two crews had separated, the Cinque Ports had grounded, and Stradling had been captured along with several of his crewmen and jailed on suspicion of piracy.Footnote 36
The only published account of this expedition was written by a man named William Funnell who served as a mate on the St. George and whose focus is primarily on the events on board that vessel.Footnote 37 Less is known about the fate of the Cinque Ports and its crew, and the 1708 criminal case is the most detailed record available on the subject. The 300-plus page document is filled with testimony collected after the Cinque Ports wrecked near the island of Santa María in July 1704 and contains many details similar to Dampier's Voyages Round the World. It showcases the extent to which British privateers relied on black captives from the earliest days of their journey. But it also pushes our understanding in new directions, by highlighting the profound extent to which Afro-descendants also willingly cast their lot in with the British.
In fact, the central figure in the case is Fernando de Velasco, who was accused of being an accomplice to the British once they had been jailed in Lima. According to court officials, Stradling and two other men, identified as William Roberts and John Knowles, had managed to escape, individually, from Lima's royal prison on the evening of January 5, 1708.Footnote 38 The escape had clearly been planned, as the men all met up later that night near a local tavern. By that point, according to testimony gathered after the group was apprehended in April of that year, Roberts had acquired a couple of weapons, which turned out to have been provided by a mestizo named Agustín de Pinares. At least one of the escapees had been working some local connections to help carry out the next phase of their plan. To that end, the group approached another mestizo, Nicolás de Arteaga, the owner of the tavern, who went to the back to wake up Fernando de Velasco. “Your paisanos are outside,” de Arteaga told him, and with that de Velasco left to join the group.Footnote 39
Fernando de Velasco emerges as a particularly compelling figure in the case, not only for his actions but for the autobiographical details that he provided to explain them. Recall that, according to his testimony, de Velasco had been born a slave on the British island colony of St. Kitts. When his owner there died, he was given his freedom but was never able to enjoy it because he had been taken “por engaños,” (through deceptive measures), to Jamaica and sold as a slave. From there, his new owner took him to Lima, where he sold him to another owner who eventually died and left de Velasco to a family member. In other words, according to de Velasco, he had been unfairly enslaved after earning his freedom. Passed around as property, he arrived in Lima, where he continued to be treated as something to be bought, sold, and bequeathed. About three months before his escape from the city, he hired himself out as a jornalero, working as a servant in the tavern owned by Nicolas de Arteaga.Footnote 40
We cannot know whether de Velasco was telling the full truth about the details of his background, especially given that he was later found to have provided inconsistencies in his account of how and why he left Lima. Initially, he claimed that he had never met the men before they came to the tavern on the night of their escape, and that they had forced him to go along with them. Later, however, he admitted to prior acquaintance with the men (though the question of when and how they had first met went unanswered).Footnote 41 But there was additional documentation in the record affirming de Velasco's chain of owners, which began with one Fernando de la Fuente y Roxas, who brought him to Lima and sold him to Juan de Velasco (who apparently also assigned the enslaved man's name as it appeared in this case file). Shortly thereafter, the new owner died and left him to a woman named Luisa Suárez.Footnote 42
Moreover, it was clear beyond any doubt that de Velasco was fluent in both Spanish and English. He provided his testimony in Spanish (without the aid of a translator, in contrast to Stradling and the other British prisoners), communicated with Stradling and the prison escapees in English, and was apparently known by at least one person (de Arteaga) as a “paisano” to the prisoners. None of the men explained how they knew one another, but there are myriad references in the document to them having been previously acquainted. In any case, even with its silences and elisions, de Velasco's testimony provides the closest we can come to a first-person account of an Afro-descendant person's experience of British marauding in the South Sea. This makes de Velasco an unusual source within the documentation on the subject, given that people of African descent have heretofore appeared to us only in the third person, as largely unnamed types with whom British privateers came into myriad forms of contact. What makes de Velasco's testimony even more valuable is the fact that he articulated exactly why he had joined up with the other men. “I fled,” he testified, “to enjoy my freedom.”Footnote 43
Upon joining the group outside the tavern, de Velasco made use of his local knowledge to lead the group toward the southern port city of Chorillos. The group spent the night there before eventually securing a canoe for themselves and making their way to Mongon, an island off the coast of Chile, where they raided a community of Indians to secure food and other provisions. This early phase of their escape corresponded to the testimony de Velasco later gave, indicating that the men's goal had been to return to “su tierra,” presumably back to Britain. The southward direction of their journey put them on course to the Strait of Magellan, which they would have had to cross to enter into the Atlantic Ocean. But at some point, the group changed course and headed north, to the Peruvian port of Paita, in the province of Piura. Once they debarked there, they robbed and assaulted another group of Indians who had recently laden their canoe with provisions in preparation for a journey to Guayaquil. Apparently, the group set out to that city thereafter, for it was near there that they were eventually captured and imprisoned.Footnote 44 In other words, despite the claims they intended to return home to Britain, the evidence indicated that the men threw themselves back into the same practice of violent raids on vessels and villages in the region that had gotten them arrested in the first place.
After gathering testimony, judges in the case found Fernando de Velasco and the two mestizos, Agustín de Pinares and Nicolás de Arteaga, guilty of aiding and abetting acts of piracy against the Spanish crown. They were sentenced to life terms in prison, just as the three Britons were.Footnote 45 From the judges’ perspective, all three men had committed grave offenses that merited such harsh penalties: Pinares for the “most serious crime” of supplying the prison escapees with the weapons the latter used to carry out attacks on Indians; de Arteaga for failing to alert the authorities to the prison escapees’ presence at his tavern, and for waking de Velasco up so that he could abscond with them; and, finally, de Velasco for playing such an active role in the prisoners’ escape from Lima, which resulted in their committing robberies and violence along the coast.Footnote 46 Judges also criticized de Velasco for having failed to adhere to the “obligations of a loyal vassal,” since instead he “chose to pursue freedom.”Footnote 47
The irony and fallacy of the above claim cannot be overstated. As de Velasco had testified, he was a native of St. Kitt's, making him a British imperial subject rather than a vassal of the Spanish crown. From his perspective, he owed Spain no allegiance, despite being enslaved within its overseas realms. Instead, de Velasco saw himself as entitled to freedom, and left the city along with his “paisanos” so that he could pursue it. This was not an act of treason but one of self-determination. We cannot know what would have become of him had his escape not been thwarted. Would he have eventually made it safely to Britain? With this group there was no guarantee, especially considering that Thomas Stradling, when describing the early part of his voyage, made reference to having subjected “un negro portugués,” who his group had taken on board their ship near Cape Verde in 1703, to an unfathomable 1200 lashes for engaging in some kind of conflict with another member of his crew.Footnote 48 Whether de Velasco would have been spared such cruelty in the event of another such conflict is an open question. So too is whether he would have been accepted as British if he had in fact made it to the men's homeland. In the end, however, these questions proved irrelevant since de Velasco was sentenced to the very thing he had risked so much to avoid: a lifetime of captivity in a place that was far from home.
The criminal case ends there, but there are additional documents in the file that tell us what became of the three Britons. A letter at the back, written in French and dated from Paris on November 26, 1714, tells us that the three men were sent to France to serve out their sentences, in late 1708.Footnote 49 On the way there, Thomas Stradling escaped and could not be found, while William Roberts and John Knowles continued on their journey to prison. By 1714, with the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, a most extraordinary turn of events transpired: Roberts and Knowles were given their freedom. And so it was that Fernando de Velasco along with the mestizos Nicolas de Arteaga and Agustin de Pinares, whose crimes, such as they were, paled in comparison to the atrocities committed by the British, were the only ones to suffer consequences.
The fate of these three men points to the need for research that centers not just people of African descent, but also Indians and mestizos, within the history of British marauding in the South Sea. Their stories invite us to consider the range of risks they faced, both at the hands of the British and before the judgment of Spanish-American courts. For now, the conclusion of the 1708 record stands as an example of both the possibilities and the limits of (re)centering people of African descent within the history of British marauding in the South Sea, as even in those moments when they appear to us on record with more dimension and vibrancy than they do in printed sources from the era, their presence nonetheless feels fleeting, particularly when they are sentenced to fates that effectively close off any chance of tracing them in subsequent records.
Dark Mazes of the Pacific Ocean
Another episode from the era provides insight into the difficulty of tracing the itineraries of people of African descent in the context of British sea marauding with any precision. In 1719, a group of London merchants purchased and outfitted two privateering ships—the Success and the Speedwell—to conduct raids on merchant vessels and ports along the Pacific coast of Spanish America. At the helm of the Success was John Clipperton, who had previous experience in the South Sea as a carpenter on board the St. George, captained by William Dampier in 1703, while George Shelvocke commanded the Speedwell. Although Shelvocke had been a lieutenant in the British navy, as a newcomer to the South Sea he relied heavily on the expertise of his second captain, Simon Hatley, who, like Clipperton, had also been to the region on a previous voyage with Dampier. Hatley proved to be a valuable asset. From the very start, he drew upon his experience to facilitate the journey. In one early encounter, on Chiloé Island in November 1719, Hatley gathered information from an Indian. According to Shelvocke, the man showed Hatley “where he might, at once, get both wood and water without any great trouble, even under the command of our cannon, and out of all danger of being surprised.”Footnote 50
Likewise, in their dealings with men of African descent, Hatley, Shelvocke, and the others drew upon a time-honored strategy. On January 13, 1720, for example, the group approached the shores of Coiba Island, off the Pacific coast of Panama, where they spotted two pirogues steering into a cove. Shelvocke reported that they sent some crew members after the pair in a rowboat, and that they returned with two captives, “the one a Mullatoe, the other a Negroe.” In addition, according to Shelvocke: “We took all their provisions, which consisted of a little pork, and some green, ripe and dry'd plantains, there was a large quantity of the latter, which being pounded made a grateful flour to taste, indifferently white, and all together made up a month's bread, I mean we ate it instead of bread.”Footnote 51
Shelvocke conveyed these details in a way that elided the violent process by which the men were likely taken from their pirogues and stripped of their provisions. Also left unanswered was the question of just how Shelvocke and his crew knew that plantains could be ground into flour and made into bread. While Second Captain Simon Hatley's prior experience in the region may have again come in handy in this instance, it is also worth considering the possibility that the captives supplied both the knowledge and the attendant labor. It was their food, after all.
As he continued describing the experience with the captives, Shelvocke noted, “The Mullatoe mortified us very much by telling us, that a vessel laden with provisions had pass'd very near to us in the night; but to make amends, promised to conduct us to a place where we might supply ourselves without any hazard, provided we were not above 2 or 3 days about it.Footnote 52 Shelvocke's retelling of this encounter makes it difficult to discern why the “mullatoe” shared the information he knew about the vessel that had passed the group in the night, or how his captors registered their mortification over the apparent late reception of such information. But by describing the captive as wanting to make “amends,” Shelvocke's implication is that the captive was somehow willingly complicit in the group's operations, or at least eager to be part of them. That characterization is certainly suspect, for it conceals the threats to the man's safety that may have compelled him to supply the group with whatever information he could in order to stay alive. For so long as he remained useful, he would stay alive and perhaps even be able to return home. While we can only guess as to what the captive may have been thinking in these moments, it is easy to imagine that violence—or at least the threat thereof—played a part at every turn of his encounter with Shelvocke and his crew.
The next day, the captive tried to lead the group toward the ship and provisions he had mentioned the night before. At this point, Shelvocke began to suspect that the captive had “no good designs in his head.” Whether this meant Shelvocke was questioning the man's intelligence or intentions is not clear, but it is obvious that the latter's utility ran out, for he never gets directly mentioned again in the account. As a result of this failed mission, the whole group began to suffer the effects of dwindling food supplies. “We had so little provisions to spare,” Shelvocke complained, “that we could not afford to keep any prisoners in possession, and therefore turned all the Whites, Indians, &c ashore, detaining only the Negroes.”Footnote 53
This recounting makes for an interesting comparison to narratives of the Atlantic context, which frequently mention the dispensing of “negroes.” The “negroes” that Shelvocke detained included captives taken from a ship called the Sacra Familia that had been captured off the coast of Peru in an earlier raid.Footnote 54 Perhaps it also included the “negroe” who had been captured from the pirogue, but the nature of Shelvocke's storytelling makes it difficult to know.
As was true of the captives in William Dampier's narrative, the “negroes” performed a significant amount of labor that went unacknowledged in Shelvocke's story. For example, when Shelvocke and his crew ended up shipwrecked on an island in the Juan Fernández archipelago off the coast of Chile, the author simply wrote that the group spent their time as castaways rebuilding their ship.Footnote 55 But by this point in the journey, they still had with them a large group of black captives, who—if William Dampier and others’ accounts were any indication—probably performed the bulk of the work required to restore the ship to sailing condition. This too was skilled labor. As Kevin Dawson has shown, canoe-making and boat-building were skills commonly possessed by enslaved people in the Americas. These “African dexterities,” as he calls them, were transported via the slave trade, passed down through the generations, and regularly exploited by slaveholders.Footnote 56 Although Dawson's work focuses on enslaved people in the Atlantic World (specifically the American South and the Caribbean), their shared points of origin with enslaved people in the South Sea context, coupled with the familiarity that British corsairs had with the Atlantic World, suggests similar possibilities.
As his own journey continued, Shelvocke began to rely on the skilled labor of his captives more than ever before. He makes this particularly evident when, after suffering through a series of misfortunes, the group sets out towards Amapala (a port on the Pacific coast of Honduras): “The loss of my officer and boat's crew, sensibly diminished the number of white faces amongst us, and our strength would have been so much weaken'd by it, that we should never have been able to manage this great ship, with her large heavy cotton-sails, if we had not taken our Negro prisoners along with us, who proved to be very good sailors.”Footnote 57
It is not clear whether the captives knew all along how to sail, or whether they had been taught by their captors. Yet regardless of how they had come by their skills, Shelvocke became so reliant upon the captives that he kept them on board the ship for the next leg of his journey, which involved heading west across the South Sea to Asia. By the time Shelvocke arrived at Canton, a major entrepôt on the South China Sea, in November 1721, he was more directly acknowledging the work of the black captives under his command. In part, his purpose in retaining them was, as he put it, “to assist us in the management of our ship, knowing that we could not well hold out much longer, if the work was not made more easy.” Moreover, Shelvocke was also by this point aware of and willing to exploit the seafaring expertise of his captives. “Since we had a large ship,” he observed, “and a run of 175 degrees to sail, I thought we could do no other than reinforce ourselves by the assistance of these Blacks, who are commonly good sailors in these parts, and indeed, as it afterwards happen'd, we should never have reached the coasts of Asia, or any other land without them.”
By this point in the voyage Shelvocke also appears to have developed a slightly more relaxed attitude toward the black captives aboard his ship. When one day he went ashore, he chose to leave the captives behind unattended, so that they could “look after the Ship, and defend my effects.” The decision marked a significant departure from those of just one year before, when Shelvocke's uniform policy had been to leave at least one of his officers behind to keep watch over the captives. In 1720, for example, upon arriving at Payta, a town on the coast of Peru, Shelvocke designated a member of his crew to “look after the Negroes we had, who ought not to be trusted with the ship by themselves.”Footnote 58 It is not clear what Shelvocke feared, exactly. Was he aware even then of the captives’ seafaring capabilities? Did he harbor concerns that they might overtake the ship and steer it to safety (wherever that may have been), or force one of the crewmen to do the same? Or was it a more mundane concern that, if given the chance, the captives might try to escape, even if that meant jumping into the waters below? In any case, his attitude had by now clearly shifted.
Perhaps his experiences over the course of that dramatic year had built up his trust in the captives. After all, even Shelvocke had to acknowledge that he would not have survived the transpacific voyage without them. But Shelvocke also must have known that Canton and the South China Sea represented to those same captives a much less familiar—and therefore more formidable—terrain. Not only were the captives now in an altogether unfamiliar part of the world, about which they knew little if anything in terms of geography and language, but they had also arrived in a region where they undoubtedly stood out as outsiders. Unlike the coasts of Chile, Peru, and Mexico, from where the captives had been taken—and which were filled with other enslaved and free people of African descent—they would not have easily blended in here or escaped detection should they have tried to flee.
Regardless of whether he had come to trust, rely on, or even become bonded to his captives, Shelvocke was not at all concerned with their fates once he found himself on firmer footing. Shelvocke knew that arriving at Canton meant entering East India Company territory, which in turn meant finding friends and a way back to England. Records from the British East India Company's activities in Canton reveal that their agents came into contact with Shelvocke after he wrote them a letter in December 1721 requesting their assistance in securing a passage home.
A few months later, in early 1722, Shelvocke arrived back in England where, in addition to facing charges of piracy (of which he was eventually acquitted), he also had to shoulder a reputation as a terrible captain, thanks to the publication of another South Sea narrative that appeared two years after his own. Written by his marine captain-turned-rival William Betagh, A Voyage Round the World thoroughly pilloried Shelvocke, criticizing his leadership and integrity at every turn.Footnote 59 But none of those criticisms had anything to do with the anonymous black captives to whose labor Shelvocke and the rest of his crew (Betagh included) so freely laid claim. Instead, Betagh's narrative—filled as it was with targeted and personal attacks on Shelvocke—kept the focus of their journey to the South Sea squarely on European men.
What became of his captives? When he decided to sell the ship before returning to England, Shelvocke claimed in his published account that he “prevailed with most of my Officers, and Ship's Company, to take their passages in the English homeward bound ships.”Footnote 60 It is tempting to assume that they were included among the collection of officers to whom Shelvocke refers, but the British East India Company's records show otherwise. They include a list of Shelvocke's officers and their property, which included minor amounts of silver along with cups, plates, and utensils; on the list was a surgeon identified as Mr. Adams, a captain of marines named Mr. Rayner, and another man named John Theobald.Footnote 61 There were no “negroes.” Nor did Shelvocke ever refer to them in his published account in describing his preparations to leave Canton or his eventual return home. Again, we are faced with a story about unnamed persons whose fates remain difficult to determine.
But one of the records from the era does offer a hint. It lies in a comment one of the British East India Company agents made about French traders, either from the French East India company or the Mississippi Company: “We hear they have bought the Spanish ship that was commanded by Capt. Shelvocke.”Footnote 62 The most likely scenario, then, is that the captives were bought along with the ship. But where they went next remains unclear. Had the traders been part of the French East India Company, it is possible they would have set out for Vietnam, since, according to Susan E. Schopp, the early 1720s saw that company engaged in early efforts to establish a trading station on the country's south coast. In contrast, the Mississippi Company had interests in North America.Footnote 63 Whatever fates awaited them, they would unfold on an entirely new route.
In his study of the complex dimensions of the slave trade, Gregory O'Malley points out that British corsairs were deeply—and illicitly—entangled with the trafficking in human souls. They helped deliver Africans to colonies where they previously had not been, and “helped disseminate the logic of people treated as property across the Americas.”Footnote 64 These actions formed part of African captives’ “final passages,” a term O'Malley uses to refer to the experiences of those whose transatlantic voyages were followed by often-circuitous journeys to Atlantic and Caribbean destinations that were often far beyond their intended points of debarkation.Footnote 65 O'Malley also includes the Pacific in his framing, citing the enslaved people sold at Portobelo who made the treacherous journey across the Isthmus of Panama, having “reached the Pacific with their captors for yet another sea voyage, this time down the South American coast.”Footnote 66 But in looking at Dampier, Rogers, and Shelvocke's behavior, we also see yet another dimension to that process, which resulted in a set of what we might call “postfinal passages” for those enslaved captives unlucky enough to land in these men's crosshairs. They ended up scattered around and across the Pacific, and perhaps thereafter even back in and around the Atlantic, to destinations that are as yet unaccounted for but that nonetheless underscore the importance—following O'Malley's lead—of looking beyond the Middle Passage and the slave ship as the primary framework for understanding Africans’ experiences of the slave trade.Footnote 67
Conclusion
Together, the accounts at the center of this study produce a compelling image. They show that Afro-descendant people in the South Sea played decisive roles on behalf of British corsairs in the region. When taken from Spanish vessels and held captive aboard British ships, they were forced to perform personal service, lead cleanup and repair efforts when their captors’ ships ran aground, and facilitate European ships’ returns home or departures to new destinations. For their part, inhabitants of port communities were subject to violent raids during which they were robbed, physically attacked, and even taken captive in order to guide strangers along local terrain in search of loot. They, too, could be forced to board ships, where—regardless of their legal status on land—they toiled alongside slaves in fulfillment of their captors’ changing needs.
Although some were able to return home after performing specific duties, others were swept into the swirling currents of the South Sea. Their presence in these narratives thus makes it possible to begin the process of constructing a more complete history of the daily workings of British marauding in the South Sea, one that acknowledges not just the physical but also the intellectual and emotional labor of the black men, women, and children who lessened pirates’ burdens and without whom their missions would never have progressed. In addition, in taking young children and “she-Negroes” on board their ships, the men hinted at the extent to which black captives also satisfied their needs for human company and sex. This kind of emotional and intimate labor is difficult to quantify, and even to describe in detail, but it was nonetheless part of the story of their time in the region.
Constructing such a history necessarily means looking toward the Atlantic World to glean insights that help shed light on Africans and their descendants’ experiences in the South Sea. Marcus Rediker notes that during the period between 1716 and 1726, which he refers to as the region's Golden Age of Piracy, “black pirates sailed with Captains Bellamy, Taylor, Williams, Harris, Winter, Shipton, Lyne, Skyrm, Roberts, Spriggs, Bonnet, Phillips, Baptist, Cooper, and others,” including notorious figures like Blackbeard and Black Bart.Footnote 68 But the image we have of those men involves a lot of physical heavy lifting, following other people's orders, or taking up arms during raids. This especially applied to African slaves who, as Arne Bialuschewski has argued, owing to their inability to communicate in English as well as to their lack of sailing know-how, were more of a hindrance in large numbers than a source of meaningful help. In other words, British corsairs in the Atlantic World “were only interested in the workforce provided by the strongest slaves.”Footnote 69 Looking from the Atlantic World to the South Sea, however, invites us to recognize the unique skills and talents brought to bear by Africans and their descendants from this region. This all, in turn, calls for increased attention to the particularities of black life in the South Sea, not only to learn how these identities and forms of knowledge came to be cultivated, but also to discover what purposes they served beyond their exploitation.
