The REAL “Dread Pirate Roberts”
Forget Blackbeard! He was a dilettante next to Roberts!
“The Princess Bride” is one of my all-time favorite movies. It’s one of the few movies that’s as good as the book it‘s based on. My hat’s off to director Rob Reiner, who also brought us another comedy classic, “This is Spinal Tap.”
One of “Bride’s” central characters is “The Dread Pirate Roberts.” Although the movie is a fantasy, I was surprised to learn, a couple of years ago, that there really was a “Dread Pirate Roberts,” and he was probably the most “successful” pirate of all time!
John Roberts started out as an honest sailor, eventually working his way up to third mate of a merchant ship. In 1719 his ship, Princess of London, was captured by two pirate ships off the coast of Africa. The pirates had suffered some losses in the fight, especially their navigator, so they “recruited” crewmen from the Princess. Roberts very reluctantly became the new navigator.
Gradually, he became less and less reluctant, as he found that he really liked the life of a pirate.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably forgotten the day in 10th grade World History class when the teacher talked about The War of Spanish Succession. At the time, though, it was a Very Big Deal. Most of the major nations in the world were involved, and it was also a Very Expensive Deal. Then, as now, it cost a fortune to build a warship and train a crew, so a few monarchs found a cost-free way to expand their fleets--the Letter of Marque. This was literally a License to Steal. With a Letter of Marque, a private ship-owner was authorized by his king to arm his vessel, and rob & pillage any enemy vessel he came upon--all he had to do was cut the king in on a piece of the action. These licensed pirates were called “privateers.”
The war came to an end in 1714, and suddenly thousands of privateers found there was no market for their skills. So, with nothing else going for them, they decided to go freelance. Thus began the period that many historians (hopefully with a touch of irony) call “The Golden Age of Piracy.”
Another irony: your typical pirate ship was one of the most democratic institutions in the world at that time! Even the captain was elected by the crew, and served only as long as he found rich prizes for them. Except for living off the spoils of armed robbery, each pirate ship was like a miniature sovereign nation. (Although, come to think of it, quite a few officially-recognized nations depend on armed robbery, too.)
As navigator, Roberts was a respected member of the crew, and he found that the freedom and the adventure suited him just fine.
Just six weeks after he was “recruited,” the captain of his ship was killed, and the crew elected Roberts as new captain of the “Royal Rover.”
Eventually, Roberts changed his first name to Bartholomew (evidently he thought “John” wasn’t a cool enough name for a pirate), and began terrorizing the Caribbean, sometimes capturing as many as 22 ships at a time, catching them with their anchors down in various harbors around the islands.
Contrary to what you may have seen in the movies, there were few pitched battles between pirate and merchant ships. The common practice among pirates was to spare the lives of those who surrendered, and deal ruthlessly with those who resisted. Quite a few captains decided to surrender, and let the insurance companies like Lloyds of London deal with the cargo losses.
Over time, Roberts’s single vessel was expanded to a small squadron of three, and was thought by many to be invincible.
Blackbeard, arguably the most famous of all the pirates, captured about two dozen ships in his career. Roberts captured almost FIVE HUNDRED!
In “the Princess Bride,” Roberts secretly retired. In the real world, his ships were captured by the British Royal Navy ship “HMS Swallow,” a formidable warship of 50 guns. However, Roberts was supposedly killed in the battle, and his crew claimed to have buried him at sea. His body was never recovered. Maybe he did secretly retire, after all!
The crews were captured, and only about a quarter of the white members were hanged. The black members were all sold into slavery (another example of how the official governments of the world were less democratic than pirate ships.)
The Dread Pirate Roberts lives on, in the type of immortality only available in the 21st century – he has his own page on Wikipedia:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomew_Roberts
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