Edward England

Edward England was a pirate captain who was marooned by his own crew for refusing to murder prisoners, which is close to unique in the record of the period. He was Irish, sailed as mate on a sloop taken by pirates near the Bahamas, joined them, and was commanding his own ship off West Africa by 1718. It was England who captured the slaving vessel on which Howell Davis was chief mate; Davis refused to sign the articles and England set him adrift with the ship rather than kill him, which is how Davis came to be a pirate captain in his own right and how Bartholomew Roberts came to be pressed a year later. That leniency was his character and his undoing. He flew the skull and crossbones that has become the standard image of the flag, took ships along the Guinea coast and then into the Indian Ocean, and based himself on Madagascar. In 1720 off Johanna in the Comoros he fought a long action against the East Indiaman Cassandra under James Macrae, which cost him around ninety men; when Macrae afterwards came aboard to sue for terms, England gave him the damaged ship and let him sail away. His crew, led by John Taylor, regarded this as intolerable, deposed him and marooned him with three others on Mauritius. They built a boat, reached Madagascar, and England lived there on charity and died within about a year. Defoe, or whoever wrote the General History of the Pyrates, treats him as a man in the wrong trade. Macrae went on to become governor of Madras and made a fortune there. The Cassandra action is one of the best documented pirate engagements of the period because Macrae wrote it up. England s real name may have been Seegar.

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