1722
Cape Lopez, second action
The setting
Off Cape Lopez, Gabon (approx. 0.62 S, 8.70 E - as the first action; approximate to the engagement area, sufficient for the map layer, not for the site)
terrain_class `open_sea`. No shoal water to run to. draft_gate = 0. scale_type `nominal`.
Reveal the outcome
Recorded sideRoberts's company - Royal Fortune (Bartholomew Roberts - killed)
Recorded resultdefeat
Royal Navy victory with no fatalities reported; Roberts's company annihilated and the commander killed in the opening exchange. Disposition of the prisoners, Tier A from the trial: 272 taken; of those 65 were Black and were sold back into slavery rather than tried; 54 sentenced to death; 52 hanged; approximately 20 sent to Cape Coast Castle in servitude. The conventional terminus of the Golden Age.
How the atlas explains it
Ogle approached under false colours, closed to near pistol shot before being correctly identified, and opened with the weather gage. Roberts was killed by grapeshot in that opening exchange. The most successful pirate of the era - 400-odd vessels taken - died inside the first broadside of the one engagement he fought with no shallow water to run to.
What followed
The conventional terminus of the Golden Age, and the row where three of the volume's threads close at once. Roberts began his career after the 1717 Act of Grace and therefore had no exit at all: refusing the pardon works as a commitment device, and his total is the era's largest while his career is the shortest of the major captains at roughly thirty months - the most successful and the most doomed for the same reason. Royal Fortune was the converted Onslow, a Royal African Company frigate, which is the crew-and-hull regeneration engine of the era running in plain sight. And the disposition of the 272 prisoners shows what the courts took the men supplied that way to be. The theatre had migrated Caribbean to North American seaboard to West Africa, and the migration was terminal: West Africa gave hulls and men in abundance and gave almost no market. Cape Lopez is the end of a road, not an accident of one morning.