Indians on "English/British" Pirates Ships?

[Tartan Jack]

With the "Pirate Round" and the colonialization of both the Americas and India by the British and the trade between the homeland and the colonies, I was wondering about India-Indians (as opposed to "American-Indians") to on pirate ships in the Golden Age or the late 1690s-1720s. Are there any specific recorded examples?

If so, who and what were they? Pirates? Servants? Just captives?

[Commodore Swab]

I recall reading somewhere that there was a law passed in England requiring English ships to maintain a certain percantage or number of English crew due to their getting "cheap crew" in Aisa and bringing them back. Perhaps someone can help me locate the source Im thinking of.

[Fox]

Are you thinking of the Navigation Acts, first introduced in the 1650s and periodically amended and ratified, which required that only English owned ships with a certain percentage of English crew were allowed to carry goods into or out of English and colonial ports?

[Daniel]

One specific case I know where Indians were on board a pirate ship was Henry Avery's. His ship Fancy took a number of Indian women from the Ganj-i-Sawai (Gunsway) aboard as prisoners. Many of the women aboard were upper class, and you would expect they would have been worth a good-size ransom, but there is no record of any effort to sell them back to their households. The women were not aboard when Avery reached New Providence, so it is generally speculated that they met a horrible fate: either abandoned in Madagascar, or murdered and thrown overboard.

European ships in the Indian Ocean employed large numbers of lascars (the word is Persian, roughly meaning "soldier"); Indian sailors usually from the Malabar coast, who might be either Hindu or Muslim. The East India companies tended to lose a lot of sailors to disease and desertion, and hired on local lascars to replace the Europeans. Lascars also might be valuable for their knowledge of local waters or markets. When they reached England, the lascars seem often to have had trouble getting jobs on a ship back to India, whether because of prejudice against them or just too many sailors chasing too few jobs. Many remained in London, and so many of them were poor that Parliament eventually ordered the East India Company to pay for taking care of them. (I don't know if the same problem occurred in France, Portugal, or the Netherlands, all of whom used lascars too).

In Zacks' The Pirate Hunter it mentions that when Captain Robert Culliford and his pirates stole the ketch Josiah in Madras, there were 18 lascars aboard. He sailed with them to the Nicobar Islands. Zacks describes them as "unhappy forced laborers." One lascar and one European made off with the Josiah, leaving Culliford, the other pirates, and the lascars stranded on the Nicobars. Culliford was later captured by the Elizabeth, but the lascars were not taken, and they had vanished when Culliford later returned aboard the Resolution/Mocha Frigate, their fate unknown.

Culliford then again captured a dozen lascars from a merchant ship, whom he used to careen the ship. He and his pirates mistreated them, and the lascars plotted a revolt, which was discovered by the pirates, who shot one lascar and tortured two to death.

Zacks also mentions that Captain Kidd had lascars on board pumping out the Adventure Galley when he came to Madagascar, and that Culliford stole them away. Presumably they had to be stolen because Culliford's extreme brutality to previous lascars would have dissuaded them from joining voluntarily, as the rest of Kidd's crew did.

Edited May 27, 2011 by Daniel

[Fox]

I'm not aware that Every's men took any Indian women aboard their own ship. They certainly behaved with some barbarity towards them while they were ransacking the Gunsway, but I think the idea that they kidnapped some comes from Johnson.

I've been wrong before though.

[Dutchman]

Sam bellamy had two aboard Whydah. I have also run across one count in the virginia records of a native"savage" from the eastern shore being aboard a pink caught mid-chesapeake bay where the crew was tried as pirates, but i could never determine if he was a pirate or slave much less his fate.

[Daniel]

I'm not aware that Every's men took any Indian women aboard their own ship. They certainly behaved with some barbarity towards them while they were ransacking the Gunsway, but I think the idea that they kidnapped some comes from Johnson.

I've been wrong before though.

Patrick Pringle's Jolly Roger, p. 142, cites the contemporary Indian writer Khafi Khan for the story that after Every despoiled the Ganj-i-Sawai, they "then left the ship to go free, but took with them most of the women." I can't remember now where I read that the women were gone by the time the Fancy reached New Providence.