The Daring Exploits of Pirate Black Sam Bellamy: An interview with author Jamie Goodall

CC_Jamie Goodall Part 1

Speakers: Benjamin Morris & Jamie Goodall

Benjamin Morris (00:00):

Jamie, welcome to Crime Capsule. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jamie Goodall (00:05):

Well, thank you so much for inviting me.

Benjamin Morris (00:09):

So, I'm just going to cut right to the chase. You have the best job ever, which is that you are literally a pirate expert.

Jamie Goodall (00:20):

Yes.

Benjamin Morris (00:23):

How did you win the lottery, Jamie? Just tell us straight up, how did you win?

Jamie Goodall (00:29):

I mean, it was really by chance, honestly. When I did my undergraduate degree, I decided I was going to go into archeology because I wanted to be the next Indiana Jones, which looking back, that's a terrible idea.

Jamie Goodall (00:45):

But I herniated three discs in my back on the first week of the excavation we had to do. And I was only like 19 years old. And I was like, "Oh, that's a problem."

Jamie Goodall (00:56):

So, I was like, I'll just stay in school and did my master's in museum studies and public history. And I did an eight week internship. It was probably one of the most boring things I had ever done in my life. And I was like, "Oh, no, what do I do?"

Jamie Goodall (01:13):

And one of my mentors, Dr. Phipps at App State, she said, "Well, what is it that you like most about history and doing history?" And I was like, "Probably the teaching. Like getting to research cool stuff, and then teach people."

Jamie Goodall (01:28):

So, she encouraged me to apply for PhD programs, and as part of those, you have to have a writing sample. And so, one of the classes I had taken during my master's was European imperialism, and we could write about any aspect.

Jamie Goodall (01:43):

And I came across this quote that basically said Sir Henry Morgan was England's Second Drake. And I was struck by that and I wanted to research more. So, that's what I wrote my paper on, and that's what I used as my writing sample.

Jamie Goodall (01:58):

So, after getting many rejections to PhD programs, the Ohio State, Margaret Newell, she was like, "I'm really interested in working with you." And she was like, "Have you thought of writing about pirates for your dissertation?" And I was like, "I did not know that that was an option, but yes." And it just kind of went from there.

Benjamin Morris (02:24):

It's like someone basically saying, "Have you ever thought about accepting this platter of solid gold bars that I'm going to place right in front of you?" And your answer being, "I didn't know that a person could do such a thing, but well, yes. Yes, I think I shall."

Benjamin Morris (02:41):

So, you ended up, you did your PhD work at the Ohio State University. Very important, the the there.

Jamie Goodall (02:48):

Oh, yeah.

Benjamin Morris (02:49):

And your dissertation formed the basis of this subject, which has then led into, and I write it and remembering it's three books now, that you have published on the topic.

Jamie Goodall (03:01):

Yes. And a bookazine.

Benjamin Morris (03:04):

And a what now?

Jamie Goodall (03:06):

It's called a bookazine, a National Geographic, when they do their special edition publications. They're magazine, but they're not quite books either. So, they call them bookazine. So, I wrote a National Geographic Bookazine.

Benjamin Morris (03:22):

Mind blown, Jamie. Mind blown. I learn something new every day. Well, that's very exciting. And that was on pirate history as well?

Jamie Goodall (03:31):

It was, yeah, it was on global piracy across all time, pretty much.

Benjamin Morris (03:38):

Let me ask you a question about the field for a moment, because it is interesting that as public history has had to adapt to things like new media or changing laws and regulations around sites, or increased protections for offshore shipwrecks and things like that.

Benjamin Morris (03:57):

The view of what it means to do, and I say this was an absolutely straight face, pirate history has really changed. And the idea of doing this kind of work has achieved so much more credibility in recognition in recent years.

Benjamin Morris (04:13):

Would you say that there has been a kind of renaissance or resurgence in pirate studies in the last generation?

Jamie Goodall (04:23):

I would say yeah. I mean, for a long time, especially throughout the '80s, Marcus Rediker was like the pirate historian, and everyone else was just sort of studying pirates for fun. But he was like the scholar. And I think for a while through the '90s, 2000s, there wasn't really a lot going on with that.

Jamie Goodall (04:45):

And I honestly think that the Pirates of the Caribbean movie that came out, it was very early 2000s, and I think that that really sparked a renewed interest in examining who these people were and what their actions caused, and trying to de romanticize them to a degree.

Jamie Goodall (05:13):

Because that's when you start to get Mark Hannah, you've got Kenneth J. Kinkor, and he's writing about black pirates.

Jamie Goodall (05:23):

And so, yeah, I think there's this resurgence of interest, but I think part of it was a desire to debunk stereotypes and myths.

Benjamin Morris (05:37):

Which is a major part of your work on Black Sam Bellamy. And we will get to that momentarily.

Benjamin Morris (05:43):

Now, it would be uncouth, ungentlemanly even, of me to fail to recognize the fact that not only being an historian and a researcher and a member of (I'm going to see if I can get this right) The United States Army Center of Military History. Did I get that right?

Jamie Goodall (06:08):

You did, yes.

Benjamin Morris (06:09):

Okay. You are also a pirate yourself.

Jamie Goodall (06:14):

I am.

Benjamin Morris (06:15):

So, can you explain matey?

Jamie Goodall (06:19):

So, I loved going to Renaissance festivals ever since I was a kid. Growing up in North Carolina, I went to the one there every year.

Jamie Goodall (06:30):

And I made some friends, and they were like, "Come with us to the Maryland Festival." And I was like, "Yeah, sure." And they were like, "But you have to dress up because we're actually a pirate crew." And I was like, "Excuse me?"

Jamie Goodall (06:41):

And they were just a group of people that would get together at the Renaissance Festival almost every weekend, dress up as pirates. And they were what was called the Mare Nostrum.

Benjamin Morris (06:53):

Of course, they were. Oh, yeah.

Jamie Goodall (06:54):

And so, they brought me on as ship's scholar given my background. And I got to choose my pirate name, and I decided to go with Torienne.

Jamie Goodall (07:05):

And it's a amalgamation, it's like a combination of my online user handles, which is typically l'historien, which is French for the historian. And Tyrion Lannister because I drink and I know things.

Benjamin Morris (07:22):

There you go. So, for our listeners who may not be aware, would you just give a quick gloss on Mare Nostrum? Because it is actually a very old and important term.

Jamie Goodall (07:34):

Yeah. So, for me, when I was researching and I learned more about the concept of Mare Nostrum, one of the things that really struck me is that I think the reason why that term came to sort of define these limits of the known world, is because this is the area where piracy really begins. At least from the historical records we have.

Jamie Goodall (08:30):

The earliest records we have of pirates and attempting to deal with those pirates is from Pharaoh Amenhotep III, 14th century, BCE.

Jamie Goodall (08:39):

And he's basically saying, "Not only do I have to protect along the Nile Delta, but I'm dealing with all of these ..." He called them sea peoples, which the Romans, I think ended up adopting as their term for them as well.

Jamie Goodall (08:55):

And it was just by virtue of the location. The Mediterranean, the coastline around there is so rugged in a lot of places, and it's really easy to find inlets and islets and little coves and stuff to hide in.

Jamie Goodall (09:12):

And so, if you know the area very well, you can easily lay and wait for a passing merchant ship. And they're not going to see you until it's too late. And then you can attack them, and nobody's going to be able to chase you because they're not going to know the waters as well as you, kind of becomes a problem.

Jamie Goodall (09:31):

And I think we see that proliferate afterwards into other aspects.

Benjamin Morris (09:40):

That concept, I think, is particularly useful for your definition of the regions in which Sam Bellamy was operating. If you look up and down the Atlantic coast, it has some of those same features. It has particularly along, say the outer banks in North Carolina.

Benjamin Morris (09:56):

If you don't know those waters, you're going to founder, you absolutely will founder. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Benjamin Morris (10:06):

Of course, Cape Cod as well, incredibly treacherous area. And yet that sense of risk, married with reward is what has drawn mariners across the centuries to these landscapes.

Benjamin Morris (10:20):

Now, I want to ask you about Black Sam. He is such a captivating figure in American history, in imperial history, in colonial history, and pirate history. I mean, he sort of straddles so many different eras even in the few short years that we really know about his movements.

Benjamin Morris (10:46):

And our sharp eared Crime Capsule listeners may remember that a couple of years ago before we became a podcast, we actually ran an article about Kathleen Brunelle's book from the History Press on Maria Hallett, which is particularly interesting.

Benjamin Morris (11:03):

She does a lot of the same work that you do of kind of diving into the fact and the folklore as to who were these people, what can we know?

Benjamin Morris (11:11):

You write in your book, Jamie, that there is still a major amount of sifting to be done based on Sam's origins, where he came from, whose child really was he. We're still kind of debating that.

Benjamin Morris (11:28):

So, we'll come to his major exploits in a bit, but at least to start, take us to the midst of time to where we are kind of blindly feeling our way through the fog, trying to understand where this guy came from.

Jamie Goodall (11:46):

Okay. So, we know at least that he came from England. He's not born in the North American colonies. And so, that gives us a starting point to try to figure out where he lived and what family he belonged to, because there are multiple Bellamys throughout parts of what would become the United Kingdom.

Jamie Goodall (12:10):

And I believe Kenneth Kinkor did this really great job of sort of trying to piece together a genealogy, so to speak, of Sam Bellamy, and offered multiple different explanations of who might have been his parents and therefore where he might have come from.

Jamie Goodall (12:30):

And the best evidence we have is that he most likely came from areas like Cornwall or similar spaces where he would been coastal, would've known the waters, would have had experience with maritime matters to some degree.

Jamie Goodall (12:52):

And so, that kind of narrows things a little bit in terms of, that's an area where there was a lot of piracy already. And so, he probably got a lot of his know-how from that before he decided to immigrate to North American colonies.

Jamie Goodall (13:12):

It's really interesting though, because depending on which group you believe his parents to be, it really gives a different understanding of what his background might have been, because there's differing statuses in terms of social standing between some of these different Bellamy families.

Jamie Goodall (13:32):

And so, if we were able to pinpoint specifically, if we could know for sure that this is his family, it would give us a better indication of did he grow up in an impoverished background, and was he seeking his fortunes or did he come from money and wanted to make a name for himself as opposed to being his father's son?

Benjamin Morris (13:56):

Exactly. So, break free of middle-class expectations and the sort of the very planned out bourgeois life, which in 18th century England was almost color by numbers. I mean, you can imagine how someone would see that as very confining.

Jamie Goodall (14:15):

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we see that with one of Bellamy's I guess sort of cohort. They're about the same time period, Stede Bonnet. And so, if we could know Bellamy's full background, it'd be really interesting to compare their two lives and to see what paralleled.

Benjamin Morris (14:39):

One of the things that I thought was particularly illuminating in your account was you have a sort of extended discussion of these Sea Dogs that hailed from the Elizabethan era and had sort of carried forward the tradition of local sailors who though they might not have been based anywhere near the metropole, the Imperial Capital, London, they were every bit as skilled, if not more so in some cases, than members of the actual British Navy.

Benjamin Morris (15:09):

And so, the Crown recognizing their skills often sought to recruit from the Sea Dogs in various expeditions, especially against the Spanish and the French and so forth.

Benjamin Morris (15:21):

Just can you tell us a little bit about that particular tradition, which you write was almost concentrated in Cornwall. We're going to get to America just in here in a second, but I think the background context is really helpful.

Jamie Goodall (15:35):

Yeah, absolutely. So, obviously, the Sea Dogs, that's not a moniker they gave to themselves. It was actually bestowed upon them by the Spanish.

Jamie Goodall (15:45):

And it was because that point during Elizabeth's reign, they're way behind Spain in a lot of regards, especially financially because Spain gets a hundred year head start on colonization, and they're bringing in literal boatloads of silver and other goods from their colonies.

Jamie Goodall (16:08):

And so, a number of these mariners who like John Hawkins, they have their own maritime businesses and they try to dabble in the slave trade mostly unsuccessfully at first.

Jamie Goodall (16:27):

But that's where Elizabeth starts to see the potential is that they can infiltrate this monopoly that Spain and Portugal have on the slave trade and the wealth that it's generating, as well as using them to divert attention away from the treasure ships and the colonies. Because if Spain's worried about their slaving ships, it's going to divide Spain's attention.

Jamie Goodall (16:54):

And this is where she starts to hire (I mean, they're essentially private mercenaries) these private mariners to — if they slip up a little bit and they decide, "Oh, I landed in Panama, let me wreck this village." She's kind of like, "That's okay. Kind of slap on the wrist. Sorry, Spain, I'll never do it again," kind of thing. “That’s enough.”

Benjamin Morris (17:18):

Right. And what really happened out there? It's hard to say, it was 500 miles away and it was in a storm and maybe it wasn't us after all.

Benjamin Morris (17:28):

There's so much plausible deniability in these kind of contexts. I love the geopolitics of that. It's sort of like, if bad things happen to Spain at sea, why should Elizabeth shed a tear? Right?

Jamie Goodall (17:44):

Right, yeah. And I think plausible deniability is the perfect way to contextualize that because I mean, that's the reason why it was so difficult early on to prosecute pirates or privateers because you have that geopolitical struggle and Elizabeth is able to use that plausible deniability of, "Well, they're not doing this on my command. They're operating in their own."

Jamie Goodall (18:17):

So, yeah, it's very important to be able to do that.

Benjamin Morris (18:23):

What's interesting about this era is you describe kind of the successive waves, the ages of piracy in your book. And Sam Bellamy is born in the late 1600s, and he is basically born into — he's on the cusp of, I believe, the third great age of piracy, as you describe in the book.

Benjamin Morris (18:46):

So, there are some lost years where we don't really know exactly where he is or what he's doing. There is some kind of plausible conjectures between about very early 1700s into about 1714, '15-ish when he starts to appear in stateside accounts.

Benjamin Morris (19:08):

You write that he basically kind of comes out of nowhere in 1714. Maybe there'd been some military service, maybe he had been press ganged, who knows?

Benjamin Morris (19:18):

But he arrives, he shows up, and he's already a skilled sailor in sometimes legal, sometimes gray area-ish employ right at that moment, 1714. So, where do we first see him in the historical record?

Jamie Goodall (19:39):

One of the first times that we see his name in the historical record is when he is looking for work, when he's looking for employment, when he reaches what would've been the Massachusetts colony, Boston specifically.

Jamie Goodall (20:00):

But we don't really know much at that point until we start to look into records of his associates. Paulsgrave Williams, if we look at his records, we can see lower references here and there, a guy named Sam or Bellamy.

Jamie Goodall (20:19):

And I think one of the first major experiences that he has is trying to put together an expedition to basically raid this Spanish treasure fleet rick that everybody's flocking to.

Jamie Goodall (20:45):

And so, he just kind of shows up in the records. We don't have much, if anything, before that. And it makes it difficult to discern where he was, what he was doing, what experiences he was having that brought him to that point.

Benjamin Morris (21:08):

It's interesting because in this moment when he first becomes visible in the record, everybody is swarming to this particular treasure trove. I mean, there are thousands upon thousands of pieces of eight pieces of silver. I don't remember if it's gold or not, but I remember the silver.

Benjamin Morris (21:30):

It's sort of, they're late to the game. But it's so funny because you write he's bringing the skills, he's got the know-how, he's got the quote unquote "the street smarts" but he has to recruit somebody who can actually pay for the trip.

Benjamin Morris (21:42):

And this particular trip doesn't go quite the way that they had thought. But what is interesting is that it proves the strength of the partnership, and it proves at least the viability of his capacity to lead an expedition by himself, to pilot a ship, to captain a ship.

Jamie Goodall (22:48):

Yeah. And it's really interesting because his attempt to fish the wreck of the Spanish at that point, as you mentioned, didn't go very well. They did not succeed in their endeavors.

Jamie Goodall (23:03):

But in addition, proving his sort of maritime abilities, it opens him up to meeting key officials, or not officials, key leaders, if you will, of the pirate community at this point.

Jamie Goodall (23:21):

And had it not been for his foray to that wreck, it is unlikely he would have, at least at that time, met with those very important pirates. And those individuals are the ones who are helping him get better at being a pirate.

Benjamin Morris (23:43):

So, I want to ask you about pirate politics here in a second, but before we do that, we do need to just do a quick bit of groundwork for our listeners who may not be aware of who Maria Hallett was.

Benjamin Morris (23:54):

And so, when we meet Sam, there's this pivotal moment in the whole narrative where he's based in Wellfleet. Something happens in Wellfleet, he starts heading south to the Caribbean with the intent of returning to Wellfleet. Take us to that exact moment, which really propels his narrative forward.

Jamie Goodall (24:27):

Okay. When Bellamy arrives to Wellfleet he is allegedly drinking in a tavern. And there's a bunch of different stories about how this began but one of my favorite versions was that he was sitting in this tavern by himself, kind of back in a corner, and he happens to look out a window and see this beautiful young woman that is just probably the most stunning being he's ever seen. And he just has to go and meet her.

Jamie Goodall (25:00):

And when he does, it turns out her name is Maria Hallett.

Jamie Goodall (25:04):

Now, the interesting thing is, does she exist in the way we believed in this sort of narrative that she does. The name exists, but does that person exist? If you know what I'm saying.

Jamie Goodall (25:25):

But regardless, he and Maria have this beautiful courtship, but the problem is he is this penniless sailor, and she's from a sort of middling means family closer to the upper crust, and she could have her pick of men because she is so beautiful.

Jamie Goodall (25:43):

And she knows her father will never let her marry this downtrodden man. So, they have this secret illicit affair.

Jamie Goodall (25:51):

It should be noted that by all estimates, Sam Bellamy is in his 20s, and she is quite young, probably 14, 15. Very interesting.

Jamie Goodall (26:07):

But the story goes that they consummate their love before he leaves to go make his fortune so that he can come back and prove to her father that he is worthy of his daughter's hand in marriage, and that he is a world class gentleman. And so, off he goes on his exploits.

Jamie Goodall (26:28):

Unknownst to Bellamy, in his absence, it turns out that that consummation led to the-

Benjamin Morris (26:36):

Consequences.

Jamie Goodall (26:37):

... creation of a child. And so, here's Maria, a young unwed pregnant girl.

Jamie Goodall (26:45):

And what ensues from there varies depending on who you talk to. Brunelle's work was very influential in my understanding of these various different narratives.

Jamie Goodall (26:56):

And so, that meeting allegedly is what was the catalyst to Bellamy's entire periodical career. That he goes to try to make his fortune. Yes, he'll do that, he'll come back and live this fabulous life.

Benjamin Morris (27:18):

The love of a good woman has driven many a man to do far, far fewer things. So, to think that it launched one ship, if not a thousand ships as in the Trojan War, is not that much of a stretch to believe.

Benjamin Morris (27:33):

I do have to ask you though, I mean, historians work, their bread and butter is sources. And sources are key to basically every version of the story that we have. Of course, with Maria and Sam, we have multiple overlapping versions as you write in the book.

Benjamin Morris (27:53):

And I just wanted to ask you, can you describe for us what it was like as you were doing the research on this and you were sifting through the multiple accounts? I mean, you're basically working with kind of degrees of plausibility, but you're also kind of having to come down and say, there's certain things that we will never be able to know.

Benjamin Morris (28:12):

So, can you just give it a sense of the sources on this pivotal moment, because they are so important?

Jamie Goodall (28:22):

Yeah. Well, as you know, writing about pirates is very difficult because pirates did not typically leave records behind. Getting back to that plausible deniability. It's like in Harry Potter Dumbledore's Army, like you don't want to have a list of people like, "Hey, we're pirates.

Benjamin Morris (28:43):

Today, this morning, January 1st, 1718, I got up and I raided Barbados. Yeah, you just don't.

Jamie Goodall (28:52):

Right. That would be a problem.

Jamie Goodall (28:53):

And so, researching Bellamy in and of himself is difficult because not only are there a few records about pirates, but there's few records about him specifically.

Jamie Goodall (29:04):

And then with Maria, the difficulty is in the fact that more often than not at this point, women are not showing up in a lot of the records that remain available. They're not saving most women's wills because they typically don't have one unless they're super wealthy.

Jamie Goodall (29:31):

Women's journals were not considered important, but yet, you can have men writing about birds and like, "Oh, I saw a squirrel today." And that's monumental to history.

So, those are kind of the issues is that if the records ever existed, they were either poorly preserved and therefore didn't survive, or they were just destroyed. We see that happen a lot.

Jamie Goodall (30:14):

And depending on where records are kept especially if you think of the Caribbean, and I mean, even to a degree in Massachusetts, the weather conditions, if you are storing stuff in not so secure facilities, a monsoon or hurricane or whatever, you're probably going to lose everything.

Benjamin Morris (30:40):

Or even just with the passage of time, humid salt air does terrible things to ancient paper.

Jamie Goodall (30:50):

It does.

Benjamin Morris (30:50):

So, we're kind of fighting a rear-guard action here, trying to save all this kind of stuff.

Benjamin Morris (30:56):

So, with this in mind, what is interesting, we have this kind of dearth of sources early on, but what is very interesting about the next sequence in your book is that we transition quite quickly into a period when Bellamy goes south.

Benjamin Morris (31:12):

He goes down to the Caribbean, he's traveling around the West Indies, and he really begins his life as a pirate and is quite successful at it in many ways.

Benjamin Morris (31:21):

What is interesting is that the sources actually start to get a little better because he is capturing British, Spanish colonial ships.

Benjamin Morris (31:34):

And some of those individuals later, are having to give testimony about what they experienced when he has captured them, or plundered their sloop or whatever it might be.

Benjamin Morris (31:46):

And I was really struck, Jamie, as I was reading your account, that you go from citing multiple overlapping levels of folklore, which is kind of the best of our knowledge on the early parts of his life to legal depositions.

Benjamin Morris (32:03):

And suddenly this picture begins to emerge that we didn't have of the previous few years.

Benjamin Morris (32:10):

So, tell us what he's doing down there. And then once we've got a sense of that, tell us how we know what he's doing down there.

Jamie Goodall (32:21):

So, basically, for Bellamy, as I mentioned, he gets into sort of the leading crowd of pirates. He becomes part like of Benjamin Hornigolds, I don't want to say crew, but like fleet. He meets Blackbeard. He's meeting all of these really important individuals.

Jamie Goodall (32:45):

And in doing so, he is learning from them best routes, best times to travel, when to not travel, where to avoid. So, he's learning all this, which they have sort of learned trial by fire, he's just able to absorb this.

Jamie Goodall (33:09):

And he ultimately, ends up becoming quite successful in his ability to captain this ship and to know when to hold him and know when to fold. He knows when to attack, when not to attack. And that's not something all pirates are good at.

Benjamin Morris (33:32):

I mean, he's got his own share of sort of broken and reforged loyalties. I mean, not all of his relationships are perfectly smooth, of course.

Benjamin Morris (33:43):

But I mean, in the film version of Bellamy's life, this would be like when you have the athletes training montage and there's that like little three to five-minute thing of them, like lacing up their shoes and hitting the running track or Rocky punching the slabs of beef in the ice house.

Benjamin Morris (34:03):

This is Sam Bellamy's training montage, isn't it? This period in his life?

Jamie Goodall (34:08):

Essentially, yeah. He's wheeling and dealing, and he is able to kind of make a name for himself, not just among these other pirates, but the Spanish start to know his name.

Jamie Goodall (34:21):

And the reason why we know the names of like Bellamy, Blackbeard, Hornigold is because they were good at what they were doing, but they got caught. If pirates aren't getting caught, probably don't know who they are.

Jamie Goodall (34:41):

And so, by making a name for himself, he sort of puts himself on a path towards potential destruction. It might be ... what's the word? Self-Sabotage almost. In that he's too good for his own good.

Benjamin Morris (35:07):

He is identifying the productive roots. There's a couple of instances in which he starts out on one ship, the Marianne, he seizes another ship, upgrades, trades it in. Says, "I think that one over there looks quite nice. I'll take that." And much to of course the displeasure of that ship's captain.

Benjamin Morris (35:31):

It is interesting, he's not kind of a slash and burn type pirate at all. In many cases, he treats the captain and the crew of whoever ship he's just seized with some decency. Releases them or gives them even one of his lesser ships to sail on with. He doesn't leave them to their fate on a desert island.

Benjamin Morris (35:50):

Is that typical of pirates in his day, or was he kind of an exception?

Jamie Goodall (35:58):

I wouldn't say that Bellamy's actions were necessarily typical because he is, at least in the records, portrayed as sort of self-demeaning and very like cordial and respectful.

Jamie Goodall (36:18):

But I will say that pirates were yes, absolutely brutal in many cases, blood thirsty murderers, but that typically was happening during lead raids, which we don't typically think about as being piracy because it's happening on land.

Jamie Goodall (36:35):

But Henry Morgan's sack of Portobello, and those are like really terrible, violent situations. But out on the open water, it's not that they don't want to be violent necessarily but is that it may not do you very much good to have a violent reputation.

Jamie Goodall (37:00):

Because if you have a reputation of just slaughtering everyone on board, when you attack a ship, the people on board that ship are going to be like, "Well, I'm going to die anyway, so I'm going to die fighting." And you're going to lose your own people. There's going to be issues.

Jamie Goodall (37:18):

Whereas if you have a reputation for being tough, but reasonable, people are more likely to immediately surrender if they believe that they're going to be saved or spared.

Jamie Goodall (37:37):

So, it's a really interesting dynamic of you want to instill enough fear that people take you seriously, but you don't want to instill so much fear that they're willing to die fighting.

Benjamin Morris (37:56):

That is fascinating. That is absolutely fascinating, that balance. I mean, you want to talk about threading a needle in the world of pirate politics. I mean, what a compelling challenge that must have been.

Benjamin Morris (38:12):

I mean, my instinct was to think, okay, if you are so good at what you do, and you start to amass quite literally a fleet of your own, which by the end of his career, Bellamy more or less had a small handful of ships.

Benjamin Morris (38:30):

But imagine if you have half a dozen or 10, or even 12 or 15 ships under your command, that presents its own problems.

Benjamin Morris (38:41):

First of all, you have to provision them, you have to retrofit them and repair them as time goes on. And that all gets very expensive. You have to pay the crew and this sorts of thing.

Benjamin Morris (38:50):

But what you've also done, if you have gotten too big for your britches, is you have started to attract the full attention of either the Royal Navy in this particular case or other privateers who are looking to pick your lesser ships off one by one.

Benjamin Morris (39:07):

So, it's really interesting, you write that it's kind of better to be in the middle of the pack than the biggest dog of all.

Jamie Goodall (39:18):

Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, Blackbeard trying to be at the top of his game, like he's out there scaring people with smoke coming out of his beard.

Jamie Goodall (39:29):

Did that work for him? Yeah. I mean, people were scared to death of him, even though we have no record of him actually killing anybody. Interesting.

Jamie Goodall (39:37):

But it also puts him on everyone's radar and he basically puts a price on his head. Because we do have at this time, what are essentially bounty hunters.

Jamie Goodall (39:51):

There are people out there who are skilled mariners who are willing to dedicate their time and their resources to apprehend pirates on behalf of the Royal Navy so that the Royal Navy can focus on larger scale conflicts because there's a lot of war happening during this period.

Jamie Goodall (40:15):

And so, yeah, if you are sort of at that top level, people are going to be looking for you. Whereas if you're kind of middle of the road, you can blend in a little bit better.

Benjamin Morris (40:29):

So, let's pick up a thread from a few moments ago because I think it is really important here. When you do have ships being apprehended, when you do have the Royal Navy intervening when it's required.

Benjamin Morris (40:45):

You do occasionally get, say the Royal Navy takes a ship and they seize some of the crew, they take these depositions, there are these sort of formal accounts that are given by the prisoners who maybe if they were forced into their piracy, they're given a little bit of leeway. Maybe they're unrepented and so they're going to have to do their time in the brig, so to speak.

Benjamin Morris (41:13):

But either way, frequently you have this kind of formal account given of where a former pirate had sailed, who he was sailing with, what the demeanor of the pirate captain was like, and so forth. Which ports they raided, which flags they were flying under.

Benjamin Morris (41:33):

And, and frankly, Jamie, this is just the most interesting thing that I've ever encountered. It's sort of like here you have these firsthand accounts. Maybe they're not all completely trustworthy, maybe there's some sifting that the historian has to do there too.

Benjamin Morris (41:48):

But can you tell us, where are these formal accounts of former pirates who are having to swear under oath, this is what they did and so forth.

Benjamin Morris (42:01):

Are they kept in sort of Naval College archives? Are they in Greenwich, in outside of London? Of course, America's not independent yet, so it's still the colonies. So, it's all imperial.

Benjamin Morris (42:18):

Where do we get these, how valuable are they, tell us about these sources?

Jamie Goodall (42:26):

Piracy at this point, was just fascinating to most people. On the one hand, they've gotten to a point where they hate them. They're disrupting trade and lives and everything, but it's still captivating to learn about.

Jamie Goodall (42:42):

And so, publishers and printers have capitalized on this. And a lot of times what they'll do is they'll take all of the trial material that the admiralty courts have collected, and they will publish them in bound volumes.

Jamie Goodall (43:01):

Many of them are in The National Archives in the UK, but the Library of Congress actually has quite a collection of pirate trial documents. And a lot of these have been digitized at this point, which is really cool.

Jamie Goodall (43:19):

So, it's by virtue of public sort of demand at the time, that we are able to more readily access these kinds of court records. Because I feel like most court proceedings probably not that exciting. Like my neighbor stole my pig and then I threw mud at him.

Benjamin Morris (43:59):

Now, take us to a day in the life of a researcher here. I mean, were you sort of trawling through these on the Library of Congress sort of resources website? Did you actually go to Washington and spend time with the hardbound volumes? How did you engage these particular sources

Jamie Goodall (44:20):

For this particular book, a lot of the work that I did was digital because COVID. It really impacted the ability for researchers to go to The National Archives, to go to the Library of Congress. They were booking appointments months and months and months in advance.

Jamie Goodall (44:41):

So, in order to stick my publishing deadline, I was fortunate that a lot of these materials are available digitally. And so, that's largely what I did with this particular project.

Jamie Goodall (44:58):

But I have in many cases done research at the UK National Archives kind of diving into colonial office records and stuff like that. Admiralty court records are also there which you can easily access at the archives.

Jamie Goodall (45:41):

So, such a hardship studying pirates sometimes. I had to spend a week in Bermuda at the Bermuda National Archives. I was forced to spend a week in Jamaica.

Benjamin Morris (45:52):

Oh, you poor thing.

Jamie Goodall (45:54):

I know. It was really, really tough.

Benjamin Morris (45:59):

Yeah. Are you okay? Do you need to talk?

Jamie Goodall (46:02):

I mean, therapy might be on the horizon, right?

Benjamin Morris (46:06):

Yeah. Maybe you need some aversion therapy, which is to go back to that traumatic place.

Jamie Goodall (46:12):

Yeah, absolutely.

Benjamin Morris (46:12):

And relive it all over again. What about the American Naval College? Do we have many records on this topic?

Jamie Goodall (46:21):

They do have some admiralty records but a lot of the stuff that the Naval College and the sort of military archives we have here in the States, they tend to deal more in later records. Typically, revolutionary period forward because so much of the stuff prior was already being sent to the UK for storage.

Benjamin Morris (46:48):

Makes sense. So, here you are. You're kind of combing through this incredible primary source material.

Benjamin Morris (46:58):

Again, day in the life of a researcher, are you looking for mentions of Sam Bellamy's name? Are you tracing his crew mates and kind of where they are being picked up? What are your hits? What are your kind of keywords that you're looking for as you're trying to basically turn the clock back 300 years?

Jamie Goodall (47:23):

It can be challenging just because 17th and 18th century records, there's not a lot of consistency in spelling and writing. There's no clear standardization quite yet.

Jamie Goodall (47:40):

So, when I'm searching these documents, I'm having to keep an eye for ... like if I am looking for the word pirate, I can't just look for the way we spell it today, P-I-R-A-T-E. I also, have to look for P-Y-R-A-T, or variations of that.

Jamie Goodall (48:00):

And in a lot of cases, I don't just search for the word pirate because even the contemporaries of the pirates at that time would interchangeably use words like corsair, buccaneer, privateer, even though all of those have very specific and distinct contexts.

Jamie Goodall (48:22):

And so, I try to look for names, which can be difficult because again, issues with spelling. But also, there were pirates who had aliases.

Jamie Goodall (48:35):

I mean, Henry Every spelled his name like five different ways, and he had an alias named Bridgeman. And so, like you have to kind of read closely if you're looking for those sorts of things.

Jamie Goodall (48:46):

Now, if you're looking just for piracy writ broadly, it's a little bit easier because all you have to do is look for sort of the letters from colonial governors or correspondences between them and the Board of Trade and Plantations, because that deals with a lot of their experiences with being maritime trade. So, it's easy to kind of comb through those, just for a broad brush.

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