ADM 2/50, The National Archives (photo: David Gibbins).

In my book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks, I include a summary of the orders given by the Admiralty to Captain Francis Willis of the Royal Anne Galley for her voyage to the Caribbean in 1721. We can never know for certain the wording of those orders, as they went down with the ship off Lizard Point in Cornwall on 10 November that year, but they should have been identical to the orders preserved in the Admiralty ‘Orders and Instructions’ book (ADM 2/50, The National Archives). You can read the full text of those orders, published here for the first time, by clicking on the images below.

They make fascinating reading. After delivering Lord Belhaven, the new Governor, to Barbados, Willis was to inform himself ‘whether any Piratical Ships or Vessels are hovering about that Government; and if so you are with the ships under your Command either singly or in conjunction with the Faversham … to proceed in quest of such such Pirates, and use your utmost endeavours to take, Sink, burn or otherwise destroy them.’ If none were to be found there, she was to go to the Leeward Islands to do the same, and then to Jamaica, and then ‘to range along the Coast of North America from North Carolina to Newfoundland and from time to time to inform yourself whether there are any Piratical Ships or Vessels hovering on any Parts of that Coast and if so to use your best endeavours to take or destroy them, either by proceeding after them with the Ships you command only or in conjunction with any Ships of his Majesty’s which are Stationed on the said Coast …’

The Royal Anne Galley was no stranger to hunting pirates; she had been designed as a galley specifically to counter the oared vessels of the Barbary pirates of North Africa, and on her previous voyage in 1719 she had ranged along the Guinea coast of West Africa hunting pirates of the Caribbean who had sailed there to prey on slavers and other merchant ships. Had she not been wrecked, she might have contributed significantly to the suppression of piracy in the Caribbean – her oars would have been an advantage in the estuaries and inland waterways where pirates held out along the eastern seaboard of North America – and, conceivably, the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ might have come to an end earlier than it did, with Caribbean pirates still being hunted down until the late 1720s.

Click on the images to enlarge: