Bartholomew Sharp

At his trial in June 1682, Sharp was described as having been born in the parish of Stepney about 1650. He

[12] We last met William Dampier (1652-1715) on page 19, near the Isle of Plate, in April 1681 when he was one of the party that left Sharp and Ringrose to return overland to the Caribbean. He was ashore in Virginia from July 1682 until August 1683, when he joined Capt. John Cook in the Revenge . The buccaneers—for that is what they were—sailed first to the west coast of Africa, where they seized a Danish ship and renamed her Batchelor's Delight , disposing of the Revenge . In March 1684, they rounded Cape Horn and sailed into the South Pacific, where they joined the Nicholas (Capt. John Eaton). Thus began the second "invasion" of the South Sea by English buccaneers. Cook died in July 1684 and was succeeded in command of the Batchelor's Delight by Edmund Davis, another of Ring-rose's former shipmates. As we shall see, the Cygnet , with Ringrose on board, abandoned legitimate trading and joined the pirates in October 1684. In August 1685, Dampier transferred from the Batchelor's Delight to the Cygnet , once again becoming a shipmate of Ringrose.

[13] For the duties of a cape merchant or supercargo, see Croft 1983.

Image not available.

Ambush of the buccaneers from the  Cygnet , near Sentispac, Mexico, February 19, 1686, when Basil Ringrose was killed. 
(From William Dampier's  Nouveau Voyage autour du monde . . .  [Amsterdam, 1698], vol. 1, opp. p. 307.)

boasted of having been a pirate for some sixteen years—say, since 1666. Dampier suggests that he was one of a gang who plundered Segovia (in 1675?). The first definite mention we have of him is in December 1679 as commander of a bark among the pirate ships assembling for the attack on Porto Bello (J14 , 20).

As we have seen, Sharp reached Plymouth on March 25, 1682, and was acquitted of the charges of piracy and murder in Southwark on June 10. In the meantime he had made contact with the cartographer William Hack at Wapping, assisting in the editing of his own journals—and those of Ringrose—and of the translations of the Spanish charts and books captured from the Rosario . Of the surviving copies of these (listed in Tables 1 and 3, pp. 267-68, 269-70), four have dedications by Sharp himself:

Probably as a result of the presentation to the king of the first of the above documents the previous month, Sharp was given a captain's commission in the Royal Navy on November 25, 1682. He was appointed to command the Bonetta sloop, being fitted out to search for the wreck of the Spanish treasure ship Concepción , stranded on a coral reef in the Bahamas in 1640, information on which had just reached Admirals Narbrough and Haddock, two members of the Navy Board who had been members of the admiralty court that had tried Sharp and his shipmates for piracy and murder the previous June. In the event, the Bonetta sailed under the command of Capt. Edward Stanley in April 1683

(Earle 1979, 119-23). Why Sharp did not take up this command we do not know, but his friend William Dick says that he wasted all his money on good fellowship and went out of England, he, Dick, knowing not where (in fact, back to the West Indies, as we shall see). Stanley and the Bonetta failed to find the wreck, but a subsequent expedition in 1687 under William Phips—backed by Albemarle, Narbrough, and others—found it and brought back to England treasure worth some £210,000 (Earle 1979, 173ff.).

Sharp's subsequent adventures have been related in some detail by Kemp and Lloyd (1960, 55-66), so they need only be summarized here. The first we hear of him in the West Indies again is in a commission from the governor of Nevis dated January 29, 1684, for Sharp to "take and apprehend savage Indians and pirates" (PRO, Colonial Papers, vol. 53, no. 18). On October 31 he captured a ship off Jamaica, which he renamed Josiah . He sailed to Bermuda where he became friendly with the governor, who described him as very zealous for the king's service. He sailed around the West Indies, but at the end of 1686 was brought to Nevis to stand trial for piracy at Jamaica in 1684 and at Campeche on the Yucatan Peninsula in 1686. One of his accusers, besides calling Sharp a proclaimed pirate, an absconding debtor, a cattle thief, and a traitor who had sold his services to the French, complained that when writs had been served on him he had lit his pipe or wiped his breech with them. In the trial, on December 30, 1686, the grand jury brought in a verdict of ignoramus;^[14] he was brought to trial once again on other charges on February 12, 1687, and this time he was acquitted by the petty jury.

In 1687, the duke of Albemarle, who had been one of the king's advisers during the trial in 1682 and to whom several of the journals and waggoners that relate to the Trinity voyage are dedicated, was appointed governor of Jamaica; he took with him as physician Dr. Hans Sloane, who assembled and later presented to the nation so many of the documents used to tell this story. In a book describing his visit to Jamaica, Sloane mentions that in 1688 "Captain Sharp, formerly an English Commander in the South Sea" was "commander" of Anguilla, the northernmost of the Leeward Islands (Sloane 1704, lxxxvii).

In the summer of 1699, when Sharp would have been about fifty-one, Rear Admiral Benbow visited St. Thomas in the Virgins in response to a rumor that the notorious pirate Captain Kidd was near. In answer to Benbow's enquiries, the Danish governor answered "that there were not any subjects of England on the Island, Captain Sharp, the noted pirate, only excepted who was confined for misdemeanours, and having some Alliegence to the King of Denmark, could not justifiably be delivered up." The author of that account added that St. Thomas itself "hath been, as it now is, a Receptacle for Freebooters of all Nations." So runs the last reference to Bartholomew Sharp so far discovered (Burchett 1720, 179).