A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (30 page)

Another document that I handled in The National Archives was Captain Willis's logbook of the penultimate voyage of the
Royal Anne Galley
, from 25 August 1719 to 12 May 1721 – the log of her final
voyage from Plymouth to Lizard Point having been lost in the wreck. It was a great thrill to open the book, to see Willis's beautiful handwriting – so characteristic of the period – and to touch his signature at the end of the log, written only a few months before he was to perish. What makes this voyage so fascinating is that it saw the ship sail to the Guinea coast of Africa, patrol there for several months and then go on to the Caribbean. Scanning the first half of the log, my eye was caught by an entry that revealed the purpose of her voyage. Having sailed by way of the Cape Verde Islands, on 10 March 1720 they sighted Cape Sierra Leone and proceeded to sail down the coast. On 26 April native canoes came out and ‘gave Account of ships fireing att one Another at Grand Bassan', on what is now the Ivory Coast. They weighed anchor and stood that way, and on the following day saw ‘sail lying before Grand Bassam wich Suspecting by the Accounts we had … to be pirates we made a Clear ship', preparing for action. In the event, they proved to be two merchant ships that had been saluting each other, but the intent of Captain Willis's mission was clear: he was there to counter piracy along the Guinea coast.

The
Royal Anne Galley
was part of a little-known but pivotal episode in the suppression of piracy and the growth of the trade in African slaves to the Americas, one of the most appalling chapters in maritime history – lasting more than three centuries – for which shipwrecks provide evidence. In early 1720 she and another Royal Navy ship of similar size, the frigate HMS
Lynn
, were despatched by the Admiralty following pleas from English slave traders that ‘Two ships of Warr might be appointed to Cruize on the Coast of Africa, to protect their Trade from Pyrates.' The year 1719 had been bad for the English traders off West Africa, with more than thirty ships seized, plundered or burnt. For the pirates of the Caribbean, restricted in their home waters by more effective policing by the Royal Navy, the coast of West Africa offered rich pickings among the ships that sailed from England to take enslaved Africans on the ‘Middle Passage' to the Americas. The pirates went to Africa ‘in order to supply themselves with good sailing ships well furnished with Ammunition, provisions, & stores of all kinds, fitt for long Voyages'.

In a letter to the Admiralty from West Africa, Captain Willis noted that the slaving crews were ‘ripe for piracy' occasioned ‘by the Masters' ill-usage or their natural inclinations', a reflection of the poor conditions for seamen on slaving ships. Slavers based on the coast of
Africa added to the inducement for pirates to go there by providing a market for their stolen goods, as revealed in another memo to the Admiralty from the traders: ‘… so many Rascalls on shore … assist them with Boates & Cannoes to bring their goods on shore and likewise Encourage them in all Manner of Villainy', ‘returning loaden with goods & Liquors'. Left unchecked, the pirates might have established a base in Africa and preyed on ships going to and from the Indian Ocean as well, disrupting not only the slave economy of the Americas but also the East Indies trade too, on which the wealth of Europe was also coming to depend.

The end of the War of the Spanish Succession with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713–15 saw an increase in maritime trade generally, and freed up Royal Navy vessels for anti-piracy patrols. The slave trade carried out in English vessels, mainly supplying the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake Bay region in colonial America and the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands, had been in the hands of the Royal Africa Company, but by 1720 was largely carried out by independent traders, after the Company had lost its monopoly in 1698 and its ten per cent levy on traders in 1712. The Company was still a considerable presence through its continuing management of the forts on the Guinea coast; its elephant symbol on English guinea coins of the period – including several from the
Royal Anne Galley
wreck – reflects the original source of the gold for those coins in West Africa, but the slave trade by then was largely a matter of unregulated free enterprise. A major boost was the award to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht of the
asiento
, the sole right to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America. The effect of piracy on this trade was voiced by a Barbados merchant named Hugh Hall in October 1719 when he wrote that African slaves ‘happen to be dear now, from the Vast number the Pirates have taken upon the Coast of Guinea that were intended for our Island'.

The captain's log of the
Royal Anne Galley
as well as letters from Willis to the Admiralty give more details of the voyage. He was ordered to cruise between Cape Mount and Cape Palmas in present-day Liberia, a distance of some 500 kilometres, with the
Lynn
patrolling further east along the present-day coast of Ghana. The sailors on these ships would have seen aspects of the slave trade that many of its investors in England did not: the brutality of enslavement and the transport of people, the inhumanity of slave traders and the appalling
conditions on board slave ships. Ignorance of these realities went to the highest levels of English society, with the ship's namesake, Queen Anne, having herself been a substantial investor in the Royal Africa Company. It took until the end of the eighteenth century before images of slave ships circulated by abolitionists finally galvanised public opinion against the trade, after huge profits had been made from it, and from the plantations on which the slaves were forced to work. Both the slave traders and the pirates – who were far from the romanticised image that we have of them today – would have presented the Royal Navy with the worst that humanity had to offer, and there can be little doubt that the officers and men on the ships would have been perturbed by the fact that they were protecting a trade that went against the Christian values with which they had been brought up.

The pirates who had been operating along this coast when the two Royal Navy ships were ordered out in 1719 included Edward England, who had forced the slaving ship
Whydah
, under Captain Lawrence Prince, to flee to the protection of the Royal Africa Company fort at Cape Coast Castle. There, Prince was persuaded to buy 333 men, 102 women, 39 boys and 3 girls who had previously been bought by the Company and were held in the castle dungeons, as well as 4,000 pounds of elephant teeth, in exchange for 233 ounces, 8 ackeys and 6 takoes of gold, the equivalent of about 620 of the Portuguese gold moidores found in the
Royal Anne Galley
wreck – an instance of the type of transaction being carried out.

Willis followed up reports of a French ship being chased by a pirate, but ‘gett no Intelligence as yet of any Pyrates being in these Parts; nor of any that has been seen here for a Considerable Time'. After three cruises over eight months up and down the coast his ship was no longer in a state to ‘annoy those Vile Rascals or to Interuppt their Villanious designs', with the hull having deteriorated due to shipworm and his provisions depleted due to the ‘Heat of the Climate and the Vermin destroying it'.

Disease and the climate took its toll on the crews, with the two Royal Navy ships sent out as replacements each losing at least fifty men by the end of their first cruise. The
Royal Anne Galley
returned to England via the Caribbean, sailing across the Atlantic to Barbados to refit and replenish and arriving in Falmouth on 23 April 1721, the end of her last overseas voyage before her fateful departure towards the Lizard that November. She had brought with her from Barbados
a man who was tried in July by the Court of Admiralty ‘for selling 11 Christians to the Moors, who murdered most of them', a reminder of the concurrent problem of dealing with Barbary pirates and their capture and enslavement of people of many different nationalities in the Mediterranean, the reason for the first deployment of the
Royal Anne Galley
off Africa in 1712.

As we have seen from Willis's orders, had she not been wrecked, and instead safely delivered Lord Belhaven to Barbados, the next task of the ship was to hunt down pirates in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic seaboard of America, where her versatility as a galley would have made her well suited to the estuaries and backwaters favoured by the pirates for their strongholds. Her main objective would probably have been the Welsh renegade Bartholomew Roberts, ‘Black Bart', who sailed from the Caribbean for the African coast in early 1721, just as the
Royal Anne Galley
was making ready to return from Barbados to England. In the event, it was one of her successors on the West Africa station, HMS
Swallow
, that dealt the necessary blow, capturing Roberts' flagship the
Royal Fortune
off Cape Lopez in modern Gabon in February 1722 after killing him with a broadside. Captain Chalomer Ogle of the
Swallow
was made a Knight of the Bath for his achievement, the only knighthood awarded to a Royal Navy captain for action against pirates at this period. Roberts' crew were brought to Cape Coast Castle, the Royal Africa Company's headquarters in West Africa, where fifty-two were hanged and seventy-five ‘black men' among them were sold into slavery without trial.

This event, as well as the deterrent effect of the
Royal Anne Galley
and the other Royal Navy ships off West Africa in 1720–22 and in the Caribbean, brought the ‘Golden Age' of piracy to an end. The success of the naval presence can be gauged by the upsurge of enslaved persons embarked from Africa for the Americas, from about 150,000 in 1711–20 to almost 200,000 in 1721–30. Those figures illustrate the main outcome of Royal Navy involvement off West Africa in the early eighteenth century: by ending the threat of piracy they had cleared the way for the slave trade to flourish without hindrance. It was to be nearly a century before the role of the Royal Navy changed from protecting the slave trade to suppressing it, with the West Africa Squadron from 1807 to 1861 seizing over 1,500 slave ships and freeing some 150,000 slaves. By then several million enslaved Africans had been transported across the Atlantic and many thousands had died on
the voyage, in a trade of unimaginable brutality that had continued to be officially sanctioned until the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade made it illegal in the British Empire in 1807.

As well as many English gold guineas, the wreck of the
Royal Anne Galley
has produced some of the finest Portuguese gold coins known from the period. Portuguese gold coins saw widespread use in England at the time of the wreck – reference is made to them in Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
, published two years before the wreck, and Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
, five years after. They were large coins with a face value of 4,000
réis
, and were known in England as moidores, a corruption of
moeda d'ouro
, meaning ‘gold coin'. On the obverse was the Portuguese Coat of Arms – a crowned shield with seven small castles inside – and on the reverse the Cross of the Order of Christ, the symbol of the Knights Templar after they were abolished in Portugal and reconstituted as the Order of Christ in the fourteenth century. Both images are redolent of the Portuguese Age of Discovery from the time of Prince Henry the Navigator in the late fifteenth century, the shield being cast on cannons used around the Portuguese Empire and the cross representing the Portuguese Inquisition, still powerful in the early eighteenth century. The quality of these coins was unsurpassed, with highly skilled technicians etching the dies and the coins being struck hard to produce needle-sharp detail. They were milled – machine-struck – unlike the silver pieces-of-eight from Spanish America that had flooded Europe since the sixteenth century, though like those coins they tell a story of colonial exploitation and trade that also helps to explain the economic foundations of the modern world.

Their story begins some thirty years before the wreck, in the remote mountains of Minas Gerais in south-eastern Brazil, where slavers known as
bandeirantes
roamed the countryside looking for indigenous people to capture. At some point in the 1680s or early 1690s they discovered large deposits of alluvial gold some 200 miles inland from Rio de Janeiro. Brazil had been a Portuguese possession since the early sixteenth century, with a slave economy in the north-east based on sugarcane plantations, but the discovery of gold led to a large movement of people – the first great gold rush in history – that resulted in half the population of Brazil living in the mining district by the early eighteenth century. As in the Spanish silver mines of Bolivia and Mexico, African slaves, indentured and indigenous people formed
much of the workforce, with more than half a million African slaves thought to have been used in the gold mines by the time slavery was abolished by Brazil in the late nineteenth century, the last country in the Americas to do so.

For the Portuguese, the discovery of gold revived a flagging economy that had been based on the re-export of sugar and tobacco shipped from Brazil. It provided the means for the colonists in Brazil to purchase manufactured goods from Lisbon and Porto and paid for the import of woollen textiles to Portugal from England. Just as the Spanish shipped their silver across the Atlantic in the ‘plate' fleets, including two that came to grief off Florida in 1715 and 1733, so the Portuguese did with gold from Brazil, the ships being protected during the War of the Spanish Succession by vessels of the Royal Navy, as a result of an agreement between the two nations. The flow of gold to England that resulted from the woollen trade – accounting for more than half of Brazilian gold production at this period – contributed significantly to English commercial and industrial growth in the eighteenth century.

One of the moidores from the
Royal Anne Galley
had the letter R in the angles of the cross, showing that it had been struck in Rio de Janeiro; others were minted in Lisbon. Much of the Brazilian gold that reached England in the early eighteenth century arrived in Royal Navy ships such as the
Royal Anne Galley
. English merchants in Portugal seeking secure passage for their gold would consign it on Royal Navy ships putting into Lisbon and Porto, or on the weekly Lisbon to Falmouth packet. In the late summer of 1720, while the
Royal Anne Galley
was beating her way up and down the Guinea coast, the purser of one Royal Navy ship out of Lisbon, HMS
Winchester
, was said to have taken on board upwards of 6,000 moidores on one voyage alone. The coins were legal tender in England, with the moidore being worth a few shillings more than a guinea. The familiarity of Portuguese gold in England by the time of the
Royal Anne Galley
can be seen in Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
, where he laments the fact that had he stayed a planter in Brazil he ‘might have been worth a hundred thousand moidores'. In addition to moidores in circulation in England, it is estimated that the London Mint coined more than a million pounds worth of Portuguese gold in 1710–14 alone, and that between a quarter and a half of Brazil's annual output was arriving in England. In 1776, on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, the
economist Adam Smith was still able to observe that ‘almost all of our gold, it is said, comes from Portugal'.