The Pirates

The Pirates by Roger Pocock (1922)

The Pirates by Roger Pocock tells the story of Captain Avery and a broader cast of pirates active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when buccaneers, corsairs, and sea thieves of every description preyed upon the world's merchant shipping under the Jolly Roger. Avery begins his career as mate aboard the Duke, a forty-four-gun merchant cruiser chartered from Bristol for the Spanish service. His captain is habitually drunk, and Avery conspires with the crew to seize the ship. He wakes the captain and offers him a stark choice: join the enterprise or be set ashore in a boat. The captain, bewildered and frightened, is put ashore along with any honest men, and Avery sails off to seek his fortune. Off Madagascar, Avery discovers two sloops whose crews have themselves stolen the vessels to go pirating. Assuming the Duke to be a warship, they flee into the woods in terror, but are overjoyed when they discover Avery is a fellow pirate and welcomes them as consorts. The combined force soon encounters a remarkable prize: the Great Mogul's daughter is sailing to Mecca with a magnificent retinue, jewelled princes, troops, servants, slaves, and chests of gold and golden vessels for the shrines. Avery's swift sloops intercept the ship outside the mouth of the Indus, strip her of everything valuable, and let her go. Avery then persuades the captains of the two sloops to transfer all their plunder onto the Duke for safekeeping. On a dark night he quietly loses both sloops and makes off with everything, abandoning their crews. He sails to the New England colonies, where he divides the gold among his men while secretly keeping all the diamonds for himself. His sailors scatter through the American settlements and the British Isles under assumed names. Avery himself returns to Bristol and finds merchants willing to receive his diamonds, but when he returns to collect the rest of his money the merchants deny all knowledge of him or his gems and threaten to hand him to the authorities as a pirate if he does not keep silent. He retreats, and dies of grief and poverty at Bideford in Devon, unable to afford even his own coffin. Meanwhile, rumour has made him a fabulously wealthy sovereign with a pirate fleet and a princess for a wife, at the very time he is dying in destitution. The two sloop crews abandoned by Avery resolve, in their chastened state, to settle in Madagascar and see what they can steal there. They dismantle their vessels, bring their guns and powder ashore, and make their sails into tents. On the island they meet another band of English pirates who have recently plundered a richly laden ship at the mouth of the Red Sea and received a dividend of three thousand pounds a man. Both parties make common cause with the local native princes, who value white men as military allies in wars against neighbouring tribes. Each pirate gradually acquires his own wives, slaves, plantations, fisheries, hunting grounds, and small kingdom. Native insolence is punished by shooting, and any attack on a white man is collectively avenged. When the native population once conspires to rise and destroy all the white settlers together, a pirate's wife runs twenty miles to raise the alarm and the uprising is crushed. After that each pirate king builds himself a fortress ringed with ditches and thorny entanglements so that any barefoot intruder approaching by night treads on spikes and rouses the garrison. Decades pass. The pirate kings grow stout and hairy, dressing in animal skins, ruling their petty domains with dirty ceremony. Captain Woods arrives in the forty-gun ship Delicia to buy slaves and finds eleven such kings still living after twenty-five years on the island. They emerge cautiously from the woods once they learn his purpose and offer to sell their black subjects by the hundred in exchange for tobacco, sailor's clothing, tools, powder, and shot. Though surrounded by harems, children, grandchildren, and dependants, they are deeply bored with their royalty and hungry for the sea again. Woods notices them growing dangerously friendly with his crew and discovers they are plotting to seize the Delicia, raise the black flag, and return to piracy. He keeps them at arm's length from that point, sends officers ashore to complete the trading, fills his cargo of slaves, and sails away, leaving eleven disconsolate pirate kings standing in a row on the beach.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1922 · Genre: Historical Fiction, Adventure, Biographical Fiction · 1,671 words

First lines

A. D. 1750

There are very few pirates left. The Riff Moors of Gibraltar Straits will grab a wind-bound ship when they get the chance; the Arabs of the Red Sea take stranded steamers; Chinese practitioners shipped as passengers on a liner, will rise in the night, cut throats, and steal the vessel; moreover some little retail business is done by the Malays round Singapore, but trade as a whole is slack, and sea thieves are apt to get themselves disliked by the British gunboats.

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piracy · maritime · adventure · history · seafaring · naval · exploration · historical fiction · action · danger · treasure · high seas

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The Pirates is listed on Textopian as a short story by Roger Pocock, dated 1922 CE.

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