Thomas Anstis: leaving a larger pirate company

The General History identifies Anstis among men connected to an earlier seizure involving Davis. It then places him in command of the brigantine Good Fortune, separating from Roberts in April 1721. The smaller vessel headed back toward the West Indies while Roberts continued toward Africa. ^[1]

In the preceding chapter, resentment over unequal standing and a violent dispute aboard Roberts’s vessel help explain the split. Anstis’s vessel was treated as subordinate. Independence offered a way out of that arrangement, although the explanation of personal motives remains the author’s.

Leaving another captain did not provide a legal clean slate. The chapter describes men considering how to leave piracy and seeking the possibility of mercy, while continuing to depend on captured vessels and stores. That tension was practical: remaining together made survival easier while also keeping the company recognizable as pirates. ^[1]

In this setting, a pardon was more than a personal moral decision. It concerned the security of the whole company, what could be surrendered, and whether the men believed promises made by authorities.

The later narrative describes a captured ship being armed under Captain Fenn, who had commanded an earlier vessel lost by the company. A provision sloop, Antelope, added another necessary resource. The operation depended on more than the captain’s original brigantine. ^[1]

Ships were acquired, repaired and reassigned as the company’s situation changed. Those practical transformations help explain why a list of pirate-ship names can be misleading unless it follows the dates and the people moving between them.

At Tobago in April 1723, the account says guns and stores were taken ashore and the captured ship put on the heel for work. The arrival of Winchelsea interrupted that operation. The men burned vessels and fled ashore; Anstis escaped in the brigantine. ^[1]

The escape did not preserve his command. The book says members of his company killed him in his hammock, removed other officers and surrendered the vessel and remaining prisoners at Curaçao. It is a violent end to an enterprise that had itself begun through separation.

The survivors’ different fates matter. Some were captured, some hid ashore and some eventually dispersed. The end of Anstis’s life was not the end of every person’s story in the company. ^[1]

Compare the larger command he left with Lowther’s maintenance disaster. The recurring vulnerability was a vessel that needed work at a place where someone else could find it.