Indian Antiquary Vol 49

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 41

MARCH, 1920 1
EPISODES OF PIRACY IN THE EASTERN SEAS
37
EPISODES OF PIRACY IN THE EASTERN SEAS, 1519 TO 1851.
By S. CHARLES HILL. (Continued from p. 21.)
XX. THE STORY OF THE CASSANDRA, 1720-1723. The story of the Cassandra, which was captured by the Pirate Jasper Seager, is famous in the history of the East India Company's shipping. Her Captain, James Macrae, was an Irishman and, it is said, had been a school-fellow of his captor, who, on turning pirate in order to prey on English commerce, had impudently taken the name of Edward England. James Macrae, in reward for the courage with which he had defended his ship, was made Governor of Madras. Seager was kind to him on his capture, a kindness which caused his own deposition and ruin, so that he died in a state of great misery in Madagascar. Taylor, Captain of the Victoria, a brother pirate, present on the occasion of the attack on the Cassandra, got away safely to America and, possibly in return for an act of generosity, committed whilst drunk, in favour of a distinguished Portuguese nobleman, was received into the Spanish service.
An account of the action by Richard Lazenby, second mate of the Cassandra, affords a good description of the way in which the European pirates used to treat their prisoners, and also of their infamous cruelty towards Asiatics. It also discloses the fact (which one finds it difficult to believe) that the Dutch maintained regular communications with such wretches, but there is too much evidence for any doubt to exist. It further discloses the cowardly behaviour on the part of Captain Kirby of the Greenwich in deserting Macrae during the fight with Seager and the equally disgraceful flight of Captain Upton in cominand of the Bombay fleet, which incidents prove that all the Company's Captains were not of the same metal as Macrae, whose reputation is heightened by the terror and rage shown by the pirates as soon as they heard that he was to be put, by the Governor of Bombay, in charge of the operations against them. It is, perhaps, amusing to observe that they considered him guilty of ingratitude to men who, whilst robbing him, had spared his life and given him the means of escaping from Madagascar; but nothing is more certain than that the pirates of this period looked upon seamen that remained faithful to their employers as a kind of blacklegs who supported those rascally capitalists, the merchants, against honest sailors. The pirates were, in short, extremists of a very red dye.
Jasper Seager flew the Black Flag, and, as far as I know, was the first pirate to do so in Eastern waters; the only other recorded instances with which I have met are those of Malay pirates one hundred years later. The first instance which I have found of its use anywhere is by a French pirate from Dominica named Emannuel Wynne in 1700, who fought Captain John Cranby, R.N., off Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands, but the skull and cross bones usually borne on it appear in the picture of Death and the Young Lady in Hulderich Frolich's Beschriebung ... des Todtentanzes Basels und Berns, published in the year 1607, in which the flag, attached to a trumpet which Death is blowing, bears this emblem. Whether Frolich invented it or actually found it on the walls of the convent he is desoribing cannot be known, for the Dances of Death there depicted have been destroyed, but it appears likely that the emblem was originally ecclesiastical and not piratical. Its Ilse at sea is shown by the fact that many of the commanders of the East India Company placed it as & marginal sign in their Logs to indicate the record of a death. Probably other sea-captains did the same, and so, possibly, it became known to seamen and was by them chosen as an emblem to show that those who had turned pirates were, being dead in law, serving under the banner of King Death. This I believe to have been the case rather