Bartholomew Roberts’s flag
The jack of the Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts (killed 1722): a black flag showing Roberts himself holding a flaming sword, standing on two skulls marked ABH and AMH, for “a Barbadian’s and a Martinican’s Head”.
Meaning
Johnson’s General History (1724) says Roberts had the jack made in anger at the governors of Barbados and Martinique, who had tried to take him, and flew it from then on. At Whydah on the West African coast in January 1722 his ships came in under a St George’s ensign, with a black silk flag at the mizzen peak and a jack and pendant of the same. The flag showed Death with an hourglass in one hand and crossed bones in the other, a dart beside him and a heart dropping three drops of blood. Grey, in 1933, took this second flag for Roberts’s ensign. Johnson sends readers to “the Plate of Captain Roberts” to see the jack; B. Cole’s engraving of Roberts’s two ships, the Royal Fortune and the Ranger, in Whydah Road in January 1722 is in the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Origin and history
Roberts mounted forty guns on a captured Royal African Company ship and named her the Royal Fortune, the museum’s record of his portrait notes. In January 1722 he attacked the shipping at Ouidah (Whydah), a slave-trading port, where, Johnson writes, eleven ships struck their colours to him. On 5 February the warship Swallow, under Captain Chaloner Ogle, found his ships at Cape Lopez. Roberts was killed in the action of 10 February, and 52 of his men were later hanged at Cape Coast Castle.
The flags were seen in that fight. Ogle’s own account, printed with the record of the trial in 1723, records English colours and a black flag at the mizzen peak of the first ship he took, and a black pendant at the main-topmast head of the second. The flag of Roberts’s own ship fell with her mast, and the Swallow recovered it. Johnson says it showed a skeleton and a man with a flaming sword, “intimating a Defyance of Death it self”.
What ABH and AMH mean
Johnson reads them as “a Barbadian’s and a Martinican’s Head”: Roberts standing on the heads of the islanders whose governors had tried to take him. Grey gives the same reading.
How the form changed
Another flag given to Roberts in modern books shows him toasting a skeleton, the two holding an hourglass between them; the World History Encyclopedia describes him drinking a cup of wine with a skeleton or devil. Grey’s plate of 1933 labels that design Roberts’s ensign. It is not the flag Johnson describes, which has Death alone, with hourglass, bones, dart and bleeding heart.
Often confused with
The flag sold as Blackbeard’s has the same hourglass, dart and bleeding heart as Roberts’s Whydah flag, but it was given to Blackbeard in the twentieth century.
Read next
- Next in Historical flagsEmanuel Wynne’s flagA black flag with a white skull, crossed bones and an hourglass, reported in 1700 on the ship of the French pirate Emanuel Wynne. It is the earliest skull-and-crossbones pirate flag on record.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsKǒu 口The character for ‘mouth’ and ‘opening’, and radical 30 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for eating, calling out and other uses of the mouth are filed.
See also
Blackbeard’s flag, Jolly Roger, Calico Jack’s flag, Vexillum, Aquila, SPQR.
Sources
- A general history of the pyrates, Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, second edition (London: T. Warner, 1724), Project Gutenberg eBook #40580, Project Gutenberg, Chap. IX, Of Captain Bartho. Roberts
- A Full and Exact Account, of the Tryal of all the Pyrates, lately taken by Captain Ogle, A Full and Exact Account, of the Tryal of all the Pyrates, lately taken by Captain Ogle, on Board the Swallow Man of War, on the Coast of Guinea (London: J. Roberts, 1723), Internet Archive full text, Internet Archive, Captain Ogle's account of the action
- Capt Bartholomew Roberts (c.1682 - 1722), Royal Museums Greenwich, collections object PAD2721, Royal Museums Greenwich (National Maritime Museum), object description
- Captain Bartho. Roberts with two Ships, Viz. the Royal Fortune and Ranger, takes ii Sail in Whydah Road on the Coast of Guiney, January 11th 1721/2, Royal Museums Greenwich, collections object PAD2722, Royal Museums Greenwich (National Maritime Museum), object details
- The Jolly Roger & Other Pirate Flags, Mark Cartwright, World History Encyclopedia, published 18 August 2021, World History Encyclopedia, The Jolly Roger; Gruesome Symbols
- Pirates of the Eastern Seas (1618-1723), A Lurid Page of History, Charles Grey, Pirates of the Eastern Seas (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1933), Internet Archive full text, Internet Archive, The Black Flag, or the Jolly Roger, p. 18
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research
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