Guest writer Richard Pennell analyses a notorious case of violent mutiny and piracy with surprising Poole connections.

Part 1 Mutiny

In 2008 researchers at Microsoft proved that the theory of six degrees of difference was to all intents and purposes true: that any two people in the world are connected by a chain of acquaintances that on average is six people long and links each of us to ‘Madonna, the Dalai Lama and the Queen.’ This global interconnection comes from the social network that covers the planet: the research was based on analysis of the Microsoft Messenger network that then made up about half the world’s instant-messaging traffic.^[1]

Microsoft Messenger no longer exists and even today there are gaps in the electronic networks. Earlier centuries were much more fragmented and localised, but some networks did exist and modern researchers have built digital images of parts of it. In 2015 Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University in the United States presented a project called the ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon,’ mapping the personal relationships of the sixteenth century English statesman and philosopher with Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and others. It is a smaller-scale sample than Microsoft’s, and confined to an intellectual, political and economic elite.^[2]

What happens when we shift our attention downwards further still? To, for example, a small Poole sloop, that in 1724 was carrying dried salted cod from Newfoundland to the Mediterranean and had the misfortune to meet up with a pirate ship off the Portuguese coast. The Poole ship was the Delight, whose master was Thomas Wise, and the pirate ship was the Revenge, whose captain was John Gow, which until a fortnight before had been a respectable, but poorly run merchant ship, the George Galley. Some of its crew mutinied off the coast of Morocco, murdered the captain and three of his officers, changed the ship’s name to the Revenge and became pirates. The Delight was their first prize. In the moment of that entirely unplanned meeting the ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ of eighteenth-century Poole seamen clicked into place, disastrously for the crews of both ships in the end. The pirates sank the Delight, took the men from Poole aboard the Revenge, and created a network that linked both ships. The boatswain of the Revenge was also a Poole man, who had no part in the initial mutiny, but joined the pirates soon after; and the murdered mate of the George Galley also came from Poole. Eventually the pirates released the crew of the Delight, who all made their way home, back to Poole, apart from the cabin boy who stayed on board the Revenge, until he was captured, with most of the rest of the crew, in Orkney. The Royal Navy took him to London where the High Court of Admiralty released him without charge. Then he vanishes from the historical records, at least I have been unable to find him so far. The boatswain was tried and executed in June 1725. For a few months, the ‘Poole Connection’ linked men from all around the British Isles – Orkney and Edinburgh, Dublin and Kinsale, London and Chester – the east coast of America and Scandinavia, and their victims from France and America, Bristol and Orkney.

The connections opened in mid-November 1724 in the aftermath of tremendous storms in the eastern Atlantic, what modern meteorologists call a ‘cyclonic bomb.’ A sudden and astounding drop in barometric pressure caused winds that spread to shipping around the coasts of Spain and Portugal. The first victim was in the Madeira archipelago: it wrecked a huge Dutch East Indiaman, Slot ter Hooge – 850 tons, with 254 crew and passengers – on the island of Porto Santo. The ship had already been drifting for a week after suffering an earlier storm. [3]

The cyclone swept eastwards, badly damaged two British warships, HMS Argyle and HMS Ludlow Castle, and forced a small squadron of Spanish naval ships to put back into Cádiz.^[iii] In Gibraltar, over four hundred kilometres away, a hailstorm had stones weighing more than four ounces, some with sharp points. An early European meteorologist, Diogo Nunes Ribeiro, court physician to the King of Portugal carefully recorded the windspeeds and barometric readings, and the British Royal Society added his statistics to its small file of reports about these astounding events.^[4]

The Delight was ill-equipped to weather such a storm. The tiny ship, carrying fish from Newfoundland to Cádiz, had a single mast and a crew of five or six men, all apparently from Poole. Only two names have survived: a sixteen-year-old named William Oliver, variously described as the ship’s boy, cabin-boy, or – by himself – a foremastman, that is a fully fledged seaman; and the captain, Thomas Wise, who was also a partowner of the ship, along with his father John, and a Mr Hackman. Thomas was 22 years old, young for a captain, but he was his father’s only male child.

The reason we know these two men’s names was not because the Delight survived a catastrophic storm, but because the little sloop did not survive the human encounter that followed. On 18 November they were captured by the pirates of the Revenge, a much bigger merchant ship that before the mutiny had been carrying hides, copper and very valuable beeswax from southern Morocco to Italy. On the night they left Santa Cruz, modern Agadir, some of the crew mutinied, killed the captain, Oliver Le Fourneau, and three of his officers , the surgeon, the supercargo or clerk, and the mate, Bonaventure Joliffe who also came from Poole. The pirates scuttled the Delight, which they first ransacked for supplies, then took the Poole crew aboard and then scuttled the ship. They released the men eventually, on another ship they had captured and, on the last day of 1724, Wise and all his crew except William Oliver, made it home to Poole. They reported what had happened to the local authorities, who sent the news to London.^[5]

This was the first inkling of a new pirate ship operating in European waters, and although it was not yet the media sensation it became, within days brief and scattered reports appeared in some London newspapers. A fortnight later two newspapers reported that the pirates had kept Oliver back on the George Galley and had ‘killed the said Captain and Chief Mate, whose Name was Joliff, and belonged to Pool.’^[6]

All later reports of the story garbled that name: accounts of the pirates’ trial, printed broadsheets and the witness statements of the pirate crew called him ‘Bonadventure Jellfs,’ a very unusual name indeed. In 2022 Ancestry.com said it had access to 30 billion historical records,^[7] but the surname ‘Jellfs’ was not among them.^[8] Bonaventure was not a common name either, but the surname Jolliff was well-known in Dorset, with numerous variations. In the seventeenth century a man named Humphry Joliffe, an attorney in Dorchester was listed in various sources as ‘Umfrey, Humfry, Humfrey, Humphrerey, Joleff, Joleffe, Jolife, Joileafe, Joliffe, Jolleiffe, Jollyffe, Joliff, Jolliffe, Jolyff, Jolyffe, Joyliffe, and Oliffe.’^[9] In 1701 the M.P. for Poole was William Joliffe and in that same year Bonaventure Jolliffe married a woman named Mary Weston in St James’s church there. In 1706 the couple had a child, a boy named Francis.^[x] During the mutiny, one of the sailors called on ‘Jellf’s’ murderer to spare him, to take pity on his family, although that fell on deaf ears. In November 1724, at the time of the mutiny, Francis would have been about eighteen and even if this was his firstborn, Bonaventure would have been pushing forty.

The master of the George Galley was Oliver Le Fourneau, a Frenchman. He lived in Jersey, a small port, and traded with Amsterdam, a very big one. He was an experienced sea captain who in 1721 and 1722, according to Dutch legal records, had hired a ship and got into debt as a result. In 1723 he had sailed the George Galley from Amsterdam to Santa Cruz via Marseille and the Canaries. The owner, of both ship and cargo, was a French merchant in Amsterdam named Bougar.

We don’t know much about Le Fourneau. The General History of the Pyrates, calls him ‘a peevish old man,’ but we don’t know much about the author of the General History either although it was a best-seller when it was published in the 1720s, and went through several editions. ‘Captain Charles Johnson,’ the supposed author, was a pseudonym, perhaps for a radical London publisher of The Weekly Review, Nathaniel Mist, who knew a lot about maritime life. He is often identified as the novelist Daniel Defoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe, although scholars have thoroughly debunked that theory. But the book has moulded the characterisation of pirates ever since: Johnson, whoever he was, was a flashy writer always good for a quotable phrase. He emphasised the supposed equality of the men in pirate crews, but in his book – as in so many others – those men are left out of the story itself. Histories of pirate ships, like naval warships, tend to focus on their commanders rather than the crews. They usually say even less about the pirates’ victims, who only became significant because they were killed; their stories died with them.

Captain Le Fourneau’s other officers, – John Guy the surgeon, and Stephen Atgier, the supercargo or clerk, are also shadowy figures. Atgier, Bougar’s man aboard the ship, supervised the finances, including how much – or how little – was spent on food. The crewmen resented the economies he imposed on them and their greed focussed on the four chests full of money he had brought on board. All that we know of the surgeon is his name. Not every merchant ship even had a surgeon; they were most common on slaving ships sailing to and from West Africa or other off-the-track routes, like southern Morocco. Ordinary seamen often disliked them because surgeons’ stipends were paid with money deducted from their wages.^[11]

It isn’t clear which, if any, of the officers had sailed with Le Fourneau before, but certainly very few of the crew had, probably no more than three. When lawyers in London interrogated the crew before their trial in May 1725, the carpenter, Timothy Murphey, said he had served with Le Fourneau on the voyage to Santa Cruz the year before. Like any master, Le Fourneau would have hung tightly onto a carpenter because finding and stopping leaks was an endless job. Murphey came from Kinsale in County Cork, the biggest shipbuilding town in Ireland. The cabin boy, Peter Hanson, was likely already on board too. He told the lawyers he came from ‘Addenal, Sweden,’ which was probably Adinal near Kristianstad in southern Sweden, not far from the Kattegat, the narrow waterway that linked the Baltic to the North Sea.. In any event he was very young, only ten years old and it is unlikely that so young a boy was on his own in Amsterdam waiting to be hired. The third man was John Swan, the boatswain, who managed both the machinery of the ship, the rigging and the sails, and the men, assigning tasks and organising the watches.^[12] But Swan left the ship before Le Fourneau sailed. Whether Le Fourneau got rid of him, or Swan left of his own accord, depends on how much credit you give to the story told by the man who took his place: James Belben, yet another sailor from Poole. Belben was one of the last men to sign on before it left Amsterdam, and quickly set about inveigling himself into a position of greater authority.

James Belben grew up on the edges of comfort. His grandfather, Stephen Barfoot, was a blockmaker, making the pulleys used on ships for lifting their cargoes on board. He grew rich in the thriving port of Poole. When he died, at the great age of 83 or 84, in May 1724 – a month or so before James joined the crew of the George Galley – he left a will that was designed to marshal family resources and was notably unswayed by affection. His sons William and George and a recently married daughter, Mary, each got a house on Thames Street to inherit once their mother had died. Another house, called Bayly’s Tenement, was divided between two other unmarried daughters, in a fashion so complicated that it sounds like a recipe for familial squabbling; but it did leave each of them with enough capital to make a good marriage. The sixth daughter, who had already been married for some years, got nothing.^[13]

Stephen founded a wealthy family. William and George Barfoot, his first and second sons by his wife Martha Bennit, dabbled with the slave trade: in 1722, they sailed to Barbados and loaded up with rum and slaves to take to Charleston.^[14] By the 1750s, William owned a grand house at 87 High Street, according to the modern numbering system; it had once been the residence of Samuel Weston, another local merchant and the M.P. for the town, and then of his son. It is still there, an elegant mansion of three storeys built in 1704. Or rather, half of it is elegant; the left-hand side is obscured by a much less attractive modern brick building that links to it. The old part of the house is now an Italian restaurant, and the building looks a bit neglected, but there is enough of the facade to show that the Barfoots were men of substance.^[15] But Stephen’s first grandson, James Belben, came from an earlier family of Stephen’s.

Martha Bennit was Stephen’s fourth wife: he married her in 1692, when he was over 50. He had married his third wife, Amy Beale in 1690 but within a year both she and their baby son were dead. His second wife, Elizabeth, had died in 1688 after having twins, a boy and a girl in 1683; both died within six months. His first wife, Catherine, died in childbirth in 1680, along with their infant son, but the two children they already had, survived. One, named Stephen after his father, married in 1710, died the following year and his wife later remarried. Stephen and Catherine’s daughter, Jane, married a man named James Belben in September 1698. She was in her early twenties, but this too was a very short marriage: James died in 1699, even before their son was born, and without making a will.^[16] The church court appointed Jane and her father as joint administrators of his estate. So the family wealth stayed in safe hands although, after the death of three wives in ten years, Stephen would have been acutely aware of the fragility of the family itself. Young James, baptised with his father’s name, grew up without ever knowing him, a rocky start to a life that would end on the gallows.  

Nothing came to James Belben in his grandfather’s will. Jane Belben and her dead brother’s wife had a token legacy of a shilling each.^[17] This was hardheaded realism: capital should not be dissipated, and they both already had new husbands, although not too far outside the family’s wider social circle. When Jane was still a girl of fourteen, she had lived in Thames Street, a few doors away from a man named Perse Smith and his wife Elinor. Elinor died sometime after, and Jane eventually re-married, to Perse.^[18]

Without any share in the family wealth, the young James Belben went to sea, after a childhood caught in a tangled web of familial disaster. Several years passed before this ‘stout, brisk Fellow, and a very good Sailor’ signed onto the George Galley in July 1724.^[19] Only two months after his grandfather died, he set about scheming his way into the position of boatswain. Mutiny and piracy were only months away, and execution a little less than a year.

Two days after James Belben came on board the George Galley, the boatswain, John Swan, told him in confidence of a ‘Design to secure the Master & to run away with the Ship.’ So Belben, as an upright seaman should, informed Captain Le Fourneau who ‘thereupon turned away the said Boatswain & put the Examinate in his place.’ Or so James told the Admiralty lawyers when they interrogated him before the trial. George Dobson, a prosecution witness at that trial, said he had indeed heard Belben accuse the boatswain of plotting to murder the master and some others and turn to piracy. But it was the mate he told, his fellow townsman from Poole, Bonaventure Joliffe; the mate told the captain, and neither of them believed the story. Le Fourneau, Dobson said, did not sack John Swan; it was the boatswain who refused to stay. Dobson reckoned that Belben told the story so he could take Swan’s place.^[20]

Whichever account was true, it did not describe someone planning mutiny. Belben was jockeying to advance his interests, seeking the favour of the master and the group of officers.^[21] But there were rumblings of mutiny elsewhere in the ship, tentative and very limited. Nothing happened immediately: only time at sea could produce an atmosphere where poor food and avaricious fantasising about Stephen Atgier’s gold developed into something more potent. The two men behind this rumbling were James Williams, an illiterate Welshman with a volcanic temper and a wide streak of violence., and John Gow from Orkney, in the most northerly part of Scotland.

Gow, was one of the first men Le Fourneau recruited in Amsterdam, the only new recruit who signed on in June rather than July. At his trial in London Gow used the name John Smith. ‘Smith’ was not an alias, to hide his identity – on occasion, he used both names together – it was merely the translation of the Scottish Gaelic ‘Gow.’ John Gow came from what was called a ‘good family,’ a respectable one, in Wick a small port in Caithness, almost as far north as it is possible to be on the Scottish mainland, apart from Thurso a little further to the west. The famous John O’Groats lies between them. John was born in 1697.^[22] William Gow, his father, had begun to prosper, and the following year bought land in Wick. The year after, in 1699, the family moved to Orkney, and William bought land there near the village of Stromness.^[23] Stromness was tiny but it sat on the western side of an inlet off one of the world’s greatest natural harbours, Scapa Flow. Trade was growing with the Baltic and Hudson’s Bay in Canada and William got richer. In 1710, he bought land in Kirkwall, the main town in Orkney. In 1708, his daughter Anna, older than John, married into the local gentry.^[24] William made sure John was educated. He gave him, as John said when he was in the condemned cell waiting to die, ‘the best of education that is requisite for being a Ship Master, or a Merchant, he making good Progress at School, his Father made him Master, of one of his own Ships, when he was but sixteen or seventeen Years of Age.’^[25] There is a striking parallel with Thomas Wise’s story, in leaving home in command of one of his father’s ships. In 1716, William settled property in Stromness on his wife Margret Calder, and on ‘John. their eldest lawfull sone in life.’^[26]

Then it all went wrong. In 1718, debt bankrupted William,^[27] and about the same time, John set off into the wider world. John Gow said later that this was because he being of a Proud Ambitious Spirit, could not be confined to these Northern Parts; and contrary to his Father’s earnest Desire went abroad to raise his Fortune, his Father within a Year or two dying of Grief.’^[28] Sure enough, within two years William was dead. He may well have been distressed by his son’s departure but he had struggled on, trying to clear his debts. In March 1719, he sold his house in Kirkwall to repay some of what he owed.^[29] Less than a year later he died, still in debt. His main creditor took possession of William’s only ship, that ‘skilful persons’ had valued at 101 pounds sterling, or 1400 pounds in Scots money.^[30]

John could no longer command a ship belonging to his father, and for six or seven years he faded out of the picture with just the odd fleeting glimpse. One of the more reliable and detailed accounts of his trial talks of him serving as a boatswain in an English merchant ship sailing between Lisbon and London in 1723, and plotting a mutiny, intending to turn pirate. He supposedly dropped the plan when he could not gather enough supporters and the captain only discovered the plot after the voyage ended and the men had been paid off. Then, according to another pamphlet, he sailed as mate on a ship going to Rotterdam, from where he made his way to Amsterdam.^[31] When the lawyers interrogated him in London, Gow said nothing about his earlier career but then again, neither did any other sailor they examined. The story may have been no more than moralising, because it handily made out John Gow to be an inveterate mutineer and murderer. He comes back into focus when Le Fourneau recruited him in Amsterdam as second mate and gunner on the George Galley. He completed the group of officers and specialists surrounding the captain.

Even if it was true that Gow was an inveterate plotter, he struggled to recruit men for a mutiny on the George Galley. For a long while James Williams was his co-conspirator. The crew Le Fourneau recruited was only patchily fertile ground. Apart from Belben, Gow, Williams and the cabin-boy Hanson, there were four Irishmen, of whom one eventually joined the mutiny, five Scots, of whom two joined and another equivocated, and a group of three Scandinavians – a Dane and two Swedes who were all at its heart. Two Englishmen not only refused to join the mutineers but were so clearly against them that they became prosecution witnesses at the trial. One Englishmen was William Booth, from Chester, who was the gunner’s mate – that is Gow’s assistant; he became a close friend of Bonadventure Joliffe. Support only came slowly for Gow’s planned mutiny.

It was Santa Cruz that set the mutiny in motion. It was not a very pleasant place – there were no quays, so the ships remained at anchor off-shore, and there were few attractions on land anyway. It was hot and boring and the food was poor. Resentment over food came to a head as Le Fourneau prepared to depart on 4 November. On the morning of his final day, some of the European merchants in the port came on board to take their leave. Le Fourneau received them under an awning on the quarterdeck, shaded from the hot sun. With the guests gathered there, three of the crew made their way aft to take advantage of their protection while they presented their grievances to the captain. There were two Scandinavians, and a Scot named Daniel McCauley, who must have done most of the talking. They complained ‘of their Provisions and Allowance (as they said) being not sufficient, nor such as was ordinarily made in other Merchant Ships; seeming to load the Captain, Monsieur Ferneau with being the Occasion of it.’ Le Fourneau talked the men down, telling them ‘if they were ill used it was not by his Order, that he would enquire into it, and that if any thing was amiss it should be rectify’d with which the Seamen withdrew, seeming well satisfied with his Answer.’ In other words, he blamed Atgier, because he controlled expenditure.^[32]

The men may have seemed satisfied, but discontent rumbled on, as Le Fourneau now knew. Before he could leave he had to get the merchants back ashore, and courtesy demanded he should accompany them, so he chose five of his crew to row him and the merchants to land. Two of those five were McCauley and James Williams: Le Fourneau was keeping his two most obvious opponents with him rather than loose on the ship while he was away. The other three rowers were a young Irishman, Michael Moor, who had already joined the conspiracy – though Le Fourneau may not have known that – John Phinnis an Englishman who became a prosecution witness – and James Belben, the boatswain. Le Fourneau would have been foolish to choose men who would outnumber him in the longboat, so apparently he trusted the Poole man still. When the captain was ashore with his guests, Williams tried to recruit Phinnis, who procrastinated.

Back on the ship Le Fourneau tried to get under way as soon as possible. The wind did not cooperate. The George Galley, held by a single anchor, stood still waiting for the wind to strike up. The captain worried that a sudden squall might push the ship into fouling the anchor, so he ordered one of the Swedes to furl the mizzen-top sail. The man carried out his orders with such lack of grace that the captain called him up and asked him why he was so dilatory. The answer came back loud enough for everyone on deck to hear: So as we eat so shall we work.’ Anxious to avoid pushing the moment to its crisis, Le Fourneau said nothing but began taking precautions against a mutiny. After talking to Bonaventure Joliffe, he decided to move the small arms into the great cabin. Joliffe told the second mate, Gow, to see that it was done. Evidently the captain still trusted his second mate, for this was as good as telling Gow directly that he knew about the mutiny and was preparing to resist it. Then the wind struck up from land and Le Fourneau ordered for the anchor to be weighed and put to sea. It was now about seven o’clock.

The captain kept to his nightly routine. At 8 o’clock Le Fourneau called the crew to the great cabin for prayers and then took the first watch on deck. While the rest of the crew and the other officers went below, supposedly to sleep, three men stayed with him on the afterdeck: George Dobson, who took the helm, was a clear anti-mutineer not only that night but through the three months that followed, Robert Reade who was an opportunist who flirted with the mutiny later, and James Belben.

As the ship settled down, Gow and Williams set about organising the final stages of the mutiny. They chose three men – two Scandinavians and a Scot – to kill the three officers in their hammocks, and two more to murder the captain on the afterdeck. The operation went badly wrong. It was impossible to kill a man by cutting his throat when he was lying on his back in a hammock, in a heaving ship and in the deepest dark. Each of the officers struggled free and ran away through the ship, bleeding copiously. With the rest of the crew waking up, they made for the afterdeck. Gow shot Atgier and failed to kill him, so Williams shot him too and succeeded. Bonaventure Joliffe tried to hide in the hold where two sailors helped him. One, an Irishman named Joseph Wheatley, later told the investigating lawyers in London how he ‘was awaked by the Noyse of the discharging a Gun or Pistol & thereupon he and John Mills (whose hammock was near the Examinates Hamock) turned out & were going aft to know the Occasion of the Noyse and they met Mr Jellfs the chief Mate in his shirt bleeding & he ye said Mate speaking to them said for Gods Sake let me down into the Hold, the Dutch Man has stuck me & he the Examinate and  ye said Mills then lifted up the hatch & let him down.’ Then, watched by Joliffe’s friend William Booth, they put the hatchcover back in place.

The mate did not stay hidden for long. Williams, one of the Swedes and Michael Moor, an Irishman went after him & pulled him about & Michael Moor stood by him with a Pistol in his Hand & the said cheif Mate begged of them not to kill him.’ Later, Williams turned this exchange into a grimly boastful joke; the day after the mutiny he told George Dobson ’that the said Mate when he saw him ye said Williams in ye hold called out to him saying Oh Captain Williams spare my Life! and that he ye said Williams told him he would .’ A small crowd had gathered, and one of the bystanders also called out to Williams not to kill Joliffe for the sake of his wife. So Williams’s promise to Joliffe to spare his life may have been a concession to the audience, and he kept his word to the letter, but no further. He got someone else to do it. Williams ‘cursed & swore’ at Joliffe ‘for not giving the Company a sufficient Allowance of Provisions & then called to Michael Moore & ordered him to shoot the said Mate & swore that if he did not shoot him he ye said Williams would make the Sun & Moon shine through him the Examinate & thereupon he the Examinate shot him.’ One can almost hear the cynical jocularity in Williams’s voice as he explained to George Dobson that he fulfilled his pledge.

The surgeon, fled towards the afterdeck, with one of the knifemen, named John Winter, in pursuit. The captain and the men on watch were relaxing in the warm night. George Dobson, at the tiller, was the only one who was properly alert. Robert Reade was still relaxing in the shrouds high above the deck, the captain was sitting on the hencoop and, according to Dobson, James Belben was ‘lying upon ye Main Top Sail Sheet bits,’dozing. Then came the noises of the murders below deck. When Dobson said he thought there must be a man overboard, Belben echoed him and said that he thought it was John Williams. With the only light coming from the binnacle, neither man would have been able to see much. So Le Fourneau got off the hencoop, went to the side of the ship and looked down. It was a natural thing to do, although rather pointless in the dark. Then two assassins attacked him.

The master fought them alone because nobody in the watch helped him. Reade was still in the shrouds, and Dobson could not leave the tiller. At first, Dobson thought the assailants had gone to help him rescue the man they thought had fallen overboard, but then the surgeon arrived on deck and presumably disabused him of that idea. Dr Guy fell across the tiller and dropped, dead, next to the steersman. As boatswain, James Belben should have been the most ready to intervene, and he was a strong and burly man. But he remained a spectator throughout the fighting.

John Phinnis heard the shout of ‘man overboard’ when he was in the forecastle, and he hurried to the afterdeck where Le Fourneau was fighting his assailants. When he got there, he saw the two assailants trying to throw the captain into the sea. John Winter the surgeon’s designated murderer, now joined the fight with the captain, stabbing him in the neck. Then he tried to cut his throat and failed again. Teetering on the side of the ship, Le Fourneau ’cryed out in the French Tongue O mon Dieu mon Dieu.’But he was not dead yet and fought on. Then he ‘turned himself within board & was likely to have got the said John Winter’s Knife from him,’ as Belben said later. Then Gow arrived, waving a pistol and  ‘rushed into the Crowd who had seized the aforesaid  Master & sayd Whats the Matter Whats the Matter And then a Pistol was discharged.’ Gow didn’t kill the captain either, but he did hit him. Yet even when three men tried to throw him overboard, Le Fourneau caught hold of the mizzen chains that formed a small platform jutting out from the side of the ship, so ‘Jno Winter with his foot forced him to let go & he dropped into the sea.’ That really was the end.

Now that the mutineers had won, they had to clean up the dead bodies. The captain was already gone and they tossed the surgeon after him quickly enough, but there were two bodies below decks. William Melvin, a Scot, worked out how to do it. He cursed them – ‘Damn you you Doggs I’l hang you when you are dead,’ – and then acted on his words: he went up on deck to the system of pulleys, the whip, used to bring up cargo from the hold. He pulled out the rope, the fall, so that it reached down through the hatch, then he tied the end, the whipfall, around the mate’s neck Robert Reade, who had come down from the shrouds, helped, apparently thinking to join the mutiny now it was over. He called out ‘Now wee’l hoyst him,’ and pulled the body up. An audience of appalled non-pirates either looked on in silence or fled. Booth and Murphey, the carpenter, took refuge in the great cabin; Booth did not want to watch the body of his friend Joliffe, swinging by the neck through the air, in a gruesome simulation of the public hanging that some of the pirates would suffer themselves soon enough.

An hour after the mutiny began, it was over, and its leaders began to take control: Williams declared Gow as captain. With Booth and Murphey already in the great cabin, Gow and Williams sent two other opponents of the mutiny to join them: John Phinnis, and James Belben. Then the mutineers had their own party there too: that way they could keep a watchful eye on their opponents while they drank away what was left of the night. As they became drunk they boasted gloating about their deeds that night. They fell to arguing and posturing about who had been the most active – and most violent. George Dobson, listening at the door, heard Gow ‘Declare that if any of the Company opposed them or disobeyed any of their Orders they should go ye same way as those that were killed.’ After the murders of the three officers only a very short time before, opponents of the mutiny faced the ominous threat that they might go the same way.

Realism intervened. Gow prevented Williams from shooting Booth because he knew that he needed experienced seamen, like Phinnis and Booth, to sail the ship; specialists like Murphey the carpenter were even more important. Pirates tried to keep, not kill, essential crewmen: doctors, coopers and carpenters were vital human plunder.^[33] So Gow clung resolutely to Timothy Murphey. He also needed an experienced boatswain, who could manage the ship, but James Belben was a very tricky individual: he had got his position by denouncing his predecessor’s supposed mutinous intent and he had been part of Le Fourneau’s retinue. Then he had stood aside and watched the mutiny happen without either opposing or joining it. Now Belben made the unlikely claim to have been asleep as the mutiny and the murders began. As Gow and Williams locked Belben in the cabin for the night, George Dobson heard him say ‘I am sorry you did not let me know that I might have helped as well as another I am sure I should have been as willing.’^[34] Gow and Williams evidently did not believe him: they locked him up anyway. Indeed, Belben himself claimed later that Williams had asked Gow whether or not he should shoot him.

Belben’s conversion to the pirates’ cause prompted a scathing passage in the Account of the Conduct and Proceedings of the Late John Gow. This is one of the most complete stories of the pirates of the Revenge. But it is not neutral or measured: it wallows in the perfidiousness and infamy of their characters. ‘N.B.,’ it began,

N.B. Here, it is to be observd, they found a Man very fit for their Turn, one James Belvin; he was Boatswain of the Sloop a stout, brisk Fellow, and a very Good Sailor but otherways wicked enough to suit with, their Occacion and as soon as he came among them he discover’d it; for tho’ he was not in the first bloody Contrivance, nor in the terrible Execution. . . that is to say, he was not guilty of running away with the Ship, George Gally, nor of murthering the four Innocent Men. . . yet ‘tis Evident he joyn’d Heartily in all the Villanies which follow’d. ‘ And indeed this Man’s Fate is a just and needful Caution to all those Sailors, who being taken in other Ships by the Pirates, think that is a sufficient Plea for them to act as real Pirates afterwards, and that the Plea, or Pretence of being Forced, will be a sufficient Protection to them, however Guilty they may have been afterward, ’ and however Volunteir they may have Acted when they come among the Pirates.^[35]

The next morning, there was a meeting of the crew, when the pirates changed the name of the ship to the Revenge. and Gow repeated the threat to kill anyone who stood in his way. Quickly, Belben jumped in to emphasise his new-found loyalty to the pirates, using much the same words as the night before. Then he turned to George Dobson and ‘Comanded this Informant to do duty which if he this Informant refused he threatened him with Death.’^[36]

James Belben was busy making himself a fully-fledged forward man and the Account of the Conduct brought in a damning verdict, that:

‘after he took on with them, he took all Occasions to engage their Confidence, and to convince them that he was Hearty in his Joyning them. In a Word, he was the most active and vigorous Fellow of any that were, as it may be said, forced into their Service; For many-of the others, tho’ they acted with them. . . yet there was always a kind of Backwardness and Disgust at the Villainy, for which they were often maltreated and always suspected by their Masters.’^[37]

The story continues soon with an account of the crew’s exploits as pirates . . .

Richard Pennell
Principal Fellow and former Al-Tajir Lecturer in the History of Islam and the Middle East School of Historical & Philosophical Studies
The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia 
I would be glad to hear from anyone who has any more infomation:-
E-mail: rpennell@unimelb.edu.au    

References
(Note – Most of the information and all otherwise unattributed quotations are taken from the records the interrogations  of the crew by Admiralty lawyers in early April 1725 in TNA HCA1/55 Examinations of Pirates and other Criminals 1721-1725.)
¹ There is a succinct summary of this project in ‘Proof! Just six degrees of separation between us,’ The Guardian 3 August 2008.
² See ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon Launches’ Carnegie Mellon University News’ 14 October 2015, https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/october/francis-bacon-launch.html
³ Esmeraldo, “A Caminho Do Oriente,” 83.
⁴ Ana Maria Brandão Esmeraldo, “Os Vestígios Do Slot Ter Hooge (1724) Na Dinâmica Da Navegação Da Companhia Holandesa das Índias Orientais,” Mestrado em Arqueologia (Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2021), 83; F Domínguez-Castro, R.M. Trigo, and Vaquero. J.M., “The First Meteorological Measurements in the Iberian Peninsula: Evaluating the Storm of November 1724,” Climatic Change, no. 118 (0443–55 2013): 447.
⁵ ADM 2/51/ 172, Admiralty order to Barrow Harris Commander-in-Chief at Jamaica  18 January  1724[/5]
⁶ The British Journal: no 120 2 January & 16 January 1724/5; Daily Post: no 1645, 2 January & 18 January1724/5
⁸ https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/blog/were-increasing-our-monthly-subscription-prices-help-provide-you-more-content-and-new-product, Ancestry Team 2 January 2022.
⁹ https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/blog/were-increasing-our-monthly-subscription-prices-help-provide-you-more-content-and-new-product, Ancestry Team 2 January 2022.
¹⁰ Online Parish Clerk webpage, visited 8 August 2025 entry for HUMPHRY JOLIFFE – [Gentleman] https://www.opcdorset.org/fordingtondorset/Files/FordingtonDorchesterCo2.html
¹¹Poole St James Marriages 1685-1721. Marriages 1701 entry for 25 May 1701.
Poole St James Baptisms 1685 to 1721. Baptisms 1706. Cit. Date: 10 September 1706.
^]2 Markus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo American Maritime Worlds 1700–1726 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 122,144, 244.
^]3 Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 85.
¹⁴ TNA PROB 11/599/98 Will of Stephen Barfoot.
¹⁵ Jenny Oliver ‘Poole, South Carolina and the Slave Trade,’ in ‘Poole, South Carolina and the Slave Trade’, website of Poole High Street Project, https://poolehighstreet.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/poole-south-carolina-and-the-slave-trade/ visited 7 December 2014.
¹⁶ Rachel Cawley, ‘Barfoot Mansion’ Poole Heritage Action Zone Cultural Programme , posted  28 July 2022 https://poolehighstreetculture.co.uk/home, visited 12 December 2024 ¹⁷ Church of England Baptisms Marriages and Deaths 1538-1812, Burials 1699 and Marriages 1698 Poole, 4 July 1699 via Ancestry.com.
¹⁸ TNA PROB 11/599/98 Will of Stephen Barfoot.
¹⁹ DC-PL/DA/6/5 Second Poll Rate
²⁰ Anon, An Account of the Conduct and Proceedings of the Late John Gow Alias Smith, Captain of the Late Pirates Executed for Murther and Piracy Committed on Board the George Gally, Afterwards Call’d the Revenge; With A Relation of All the Horrid Murthers They Committed in Cold Blood; as Also of Their Being Taken at the Islands of Orkney, and Sent up Prisoners to London (London: Printed and sold by John Applebee, in Black-Fryers, 1725), 13.
²¹ Anon, The Proceedings on the King’s Commission of Oyer and Terminer, and Goal-Delivery for the Admiralty of England, Held at Justice-Hall in the Old-Bailey, on Wednesday and Thursday, Being the 26^th and 27^th of May, in the Eleventh Year of His Majesty’s Reign (London: John Applebee in Black-Fryers, 1725), 7.
²² Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 235.
²³ Orkney Archives D14-4 Traill-Dennison Papers – David Traill’s Compt Book. back pages.
²⁴ T. Hutton Johnston, “John Gow, the Pirate,” The Scottish Antiquary 5, no. 20 (1891): 184–85.
²⁵ Johnston, “John Gow,” 186; B. H. Hossack, Kirkwall in the Orkneys (Kirkwall: William Peace and Son, 1900), 106, 314–15.
²⁶ [James Guthrie], A True and Genuine Account of the Last Confession and Dying Words of John Gow, Alias Smith: Captain of the Pirates. As Likewise of the Eight Others, Who Were Executed with Him, on June 11th, 1725.. To Which is Added, a Relation of the Behaviour and Confession of Alexander Rob, (London: Printed for T. Warnfr[sic], 1725), 10.
²⁷ Johnston, “John Gow,” 187-88.
²⁸ [Guthrie], A True and Genuine Account, 10.
²⁹ Johnston, “John Gow,” 187–88.
³⁰ NRS CC8/8/87, 714-715, Edinburgh Commissary Court, Wills and testaments. Gow, William testament dative, 2 June 1720.
³¹ Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates and Also Their Policies, Discipline and Government from Their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, in 1717, to the Present Year, 1724, with the Remarkable Actions and Adventures of the Two Female Pyrates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny, to Which is Prefix’d an Account of the Famous Captain Avery and His Companiions; with the Manner of His Death in England, ed. Manuel Schornhorn (London: Dent, 1972), 419; Anon, Account of the Conduct and Proceedings, iv-v.
³² Anon, Account of the Conduct and Proceedings, 2.
³³ James S. Rankine, “Shaving Blackbeard: Reappraising Pirates and Piracy in the Early Modern Atlantic, 1660–1760,” Ph D Thesis (University of Rochester, New York, 2021), 123–124,127.
³⁴ HCA1/56 Information of George Dobson.
³⁵ Anon, Account of the Conduct and Proceedings, 13–14.³⁶HCA 1/56 Information of George Dobson.
³⁷ Anon, Account of the Conduct and Proceedings, 13–14.
Picture 1. The Delight was too insignificant a ship to merit a picture by a contemporary artist. This example of a single-masted sloop gives an idea of the very small size of the ship.
Picture 2. Dutch East India Company ship ‘Slot ter Hooge’. This enormous ship, pictured here at Fort Rammekens in the Netherlands before her maiden voyage with a huge cargo of bullion and 254 passengers and crew, was wrecked in the storm in November 1724. The sloop Delight, with a cargo of fish and five or six crewmen survived: Wikimedia Commons.
Picture 4. The most famous contemporary account of early modern piracy is Charles Johnson’s General history, sometime ascribed to Daniel Defoe. It was published in numerous editions in the 1720s and afterwards, not all of which carried Johnson’s name, let alone Defoe’s and the titles varied.
Picture 5. Pulley blocks and tackles distribute forces to provide control over the ropes used in managing rigging and lifting cargoes. They are vital in lowering sails and lifting cargoes on board.
Picture 8. Amsterdam was where Le Fourneau signed up most of his crew. In a port crowded with ships there was a huge market for seamen. Detail from Horman Erben Accurater Grundris und Prospect der weltberuhmten Hollandischen Haupt und Handels-Stadt Amsterdam, Nuremberg 1727. Library of Congress.
Picture 9. The three assassins who tried to cut the officers’ throats, failed, although they were armed with fearsome “Dutch knives”. This one was recovered from the wreck of the Dutch ship Hollandia, a 40 gun Indiaman that ran aground and sank off the Isles of Scilly in 1743. With its typical carved wooden haft it is nineteen centimetres long. It was sold in 2022 by Leski Auctions of Melbourne who provided the picture.
Picture 10. A fanciful depiction of John Gow in the 1725 edition of the History of the Pirates. (see above pic 4)

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