Such deer memories
ANIMAL MAGIC REMEMBERING THE ‘OTHER ZOO’ IN BRISTOL TIMES
keep one step ahead of people to whom he owed money – and there were a lot of them.
Whoever the author was, the book tells us most of what we know about Rackam, and it doesn’t mention any Bristol connection. But until someone can prove any differently, we might want to claim him for our own.
Besides, the man who was the architect of his downfall was most definitely Bristolian.
In fact we know nothing about his earlier life besides the fact that he was supposedly born on December 26 1682. Fast-forward to 1718 and he was “quartermaster” for Charles Vane, a notably sadistic pirate captain.
One of the reasons that Caribbean piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries was so prevalent was that seamen saw a career in piracy as being preferable to service in the
Royal Navy or aboard merchantmen.
As pirates their potential earnings were of course much greater, but just as attractive was the form of “democracy” that they practised. Pirate captains did not have the power of life or death over crew members that merchant or naval masters had; on the contrary, they had to be elected, and they had to answer to a sort of trade union in the form of a crew committee. By convention, the only time that crew members were absolutely obliged to obey a pirate captain’s orders was in combat.
In November 1718, Vane and the two ships under his nominal command were confronted by a French naval vessel. Seeing that he was outgunned by the Frenchman, Vane ordered his ships to withdraw.
His crews, however, felt differ
ently, and that this had been an act of cowardice on Vane’s part. He was deposed as their leader and Rackam, known as Calico Jack for the bright coloured shirts he wore, was elected to take his place.
Vane and 16 of his supporters took the smaller ship, but they did not prosper. He was shipwrecked and left on an uninhabited island. When an English ship’s crew came ashore to fetch fresh water he tried to hide his identity, but was recognised and in 1721, a year after Rackam, he was hanged at Gallows Point and his corpse, too, was hung in chains.
Rackam would not turn out to be one of the more successful pirate commanders. You might say that he had been over-promoted. He was not especially bloodthirsty or aggressive and his victims were, for the most part, fishing boats and small coastal vessels. It might be
that his elevation to captain status by his comrades had more to do with his flamboyant dress, good looks (he was said to be tall and dark-eyed) and general swashbuckling air.
Calico Jack was a small-timer, memorable only for his name, and for two of his crew members. Pirate democracy, after its rough fashion, did not discriminate on grounds of social class, skin colour or sex. Rackam’s principal claim on history is that he sailed with two notorious female pirates who would escape the hangman’s noose because in the legal parlance of the time, they “pleaded their bellies” in court.
That is, both women declared they were pregnant.
Rackam’s back-story, along with so many of his other contemporaries, almost certainly goes back to the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714). During this conflict, the government had licensed private ship-owners to prey on enemy shipping.
Among the most successful of these “privateers” was Bristolian Woodes Rogers, who had commanded an astonishingly successful expedition which circumnavigated the globe and came back laden with loot taken from French and Spanish ships and settlements in the Caribbean, South America and the Pacific.
(He also brought back one Alexander Selkirk, who had been marooned on a Pacific island, inspiring Daniel Defoe to hack out what’s generally said to be the first real novel in English, Robinson Crusoe.)
When the war was over, though, many privateers did not much relish the prospect of a return to the hard and pinched life of peacetime sailing. Piracy became a huge problem in the Caribbean, and British and foreign merchants and settlers alike, not least the owners of sugar plantations, were demanding that the government in London do something about it.
Woodes Rogers, the most famous and successful English privateer of the day was invited to become the gamekeeper who would catch the poachers.
He had had some success in this role already, in the Indian Ocean, and was now appointed, in effect,
Governor of the Bahamas, a small settlement which by every contemporary account, was completely lawless.
Rogers’ first move was taken before he had even set off from England. A “King’s Pardon” was issued to all those engaged in piracy in His Majesty’s Caribbean domains. Bygones would be bygones, previous crimes overlooked, if they simply gave up their piratical ways and surrendered.
It was a smart move, but also a practical one. Rogers had very limited resources of manpower and ships at his disposal. The only way he was going to be able to bring law and order would be to flip several ex-pirates over to his side.
In May 1719 Calico Jack Rackam took the pardon. But while ashore in Nassau he would meet the great love of what little was left of his life – Anne Bonny.
Rackam, with Bonny and a number of men who had also opted to return to piracy, resumed his previous career. They were later joined by Mary Read who was aboard a ship they captured and who begged them to let her join them. At this point, neither Rackam nor Bonny realised that Read was a woman, though she later confessed to Bonny.
It was said that the two women were much more fearsome than any of the male crew members, and would often taunt the men into performing gruesome acts, or humiliate captives by opening their shirts to show them they had been defeated by women. How much of this is true and how much was made up to titillate later readers of sensational pirate histories is unclear.
One of their victims, Dorothy Thomas, wrote that the women “wore men’s jackets, and long trousers, and handkerchiefs tied about their heads, and each of them had a machete and pistol in their hands and they cursed and swore at the men to murder.”
Thomas added that she knew at once that they were women.
By now Rackam was using a very distinctive flag, hoisted to terrorise ships into (hopefully) immediate surrender. This was a white skull on a black background, but with crossed cutlasses underneath rather than bones. Anecdotally it’s claimed that the swords were meant to represent the two female pirates, but there’s no proof of this.
In September 1720, after Rackam and his crew stole a sloop from Nassau harbour, Woodes Rogers issued a proclamation naming Rackam, along with Bonny, Read and others as pirates, and despatched vessels, crewed in part by ex-pirates, to hunt them down.
In late October or early November, Rackam and his crew were anchored off the coast of Jamaica, and were getting drunk when a sloop, custom-built for pirate hunting and commanded by a bountyhunter named Jonathan Barnet, bore down on them.
The story goes that in the running fight, many of the male crew members, Rackam among them, were below deck, drinking, while the two women did most of the sailing and shooting.
Barnet, described as “a brisk fellow” and the crew of his wellarmed ship the Tyger won the day.
Rackam and his crew were tried for piracy in Spanish Town, Jamaica, a trial presided over by the governor, Sir Nicholas Lawes. Despite the pirates’ claim that they had bought their ship and were hunting turtles and had run from Barnet because they thought he was a pirate, the outcome was never in doubt.
Rackam and his ten crewmen were sentenced to hang. According to (yet another) legend, Anne Bonny saw Calico Jack just after sentence had been passed and said to him: “I’m sorry to see you here, but if you had fought like a man, you needn’t have hanged like a dog.”
In a separate trial held some days after Rackam’s execution Bonny and Read were also sentenced to hang.
They were, according to Captain Charles Johnson/Daniel Defoe:
… brought up and asked if either of them had any Thing to say why Sentence of Death should not pass upon them, in like Manner as had been done to all the rest; and both of them pleaded their Bellies, being quick with Child, and pray’d that Execution might be stay’d, whereupon the Court passed sentence, as in Cases of Pyracy, but ordered them back, till a proper Jury should be appointed to enquire into the Matter.
Both were reprieved until their babies could be delivered. Mary Read died in prison in April 1721, possibly of a fever or perhaps in childbirth.
Anne Bonny’s fate was for a long time thought to be unknown, but it turns out that in all likelihood that she died in respectable old age – see panel.
Whether Calico Jack Rackam came from Bristol or not, it’s clear that he was far less interesting and less fearsome than two of his crew.