Nicky Nielsen - The Pirate Captain Ned Low: His Life and Mysterious Fate

Map detailing the travels of Ned Low from his initial mutiny in the Bay of Honduras in December 1721 until he was deposed as captain near Martinique in early 1724.

E dward Ned Low is not among the most famous pirate captains of the Golden Age of Piracy, despite a career that lasted for as long as five years. This may not sound like much, but at a time when piracy usually resulted in a violent death, managing to stay alive and active for five long years was an impressive feat. Whats more, unlike so many of his contemporaries on the wrong side of the law, Ned Low never stood trial for his crimes. Instead he simply melted away, vanishing some time during the mid-1720s after terrorizing shipping from the Bay of Honduras to the Eastern Seaboard, from the fishing grounds of Newfoundland to the coast of Africa.

While not being among the most well-known pirates, Ned Low is among the best-evidenced. A plethora of source material was available to inform the writing of this book, and while there are fewer treatments of Ned Lows life and career from modern pens, recommended readings can be found in the back of the book. However, this short discourse will focus on the original source material available to the author and briefly discuss the way in which this material has been presented.

Without doubt the most notable source on pirate life in the early eighteenth century is the book A General History of the Pyrates by the author Captain Johnson. The identity of this incredibly well-informed pirate historian has long been a mystery. In the early 1930s, a historian proposed that he be identified as the British author Daniel Defoe due to similarities in writing style and content with Defoes other works. This identification was widely accepted, although it has received criticism in more recent years, to such an extent that many libraries and archives reclassified the book together with Defoes other writings. Whoever Captain Johnson was, he was suspiciously well-informed about pirate life, perhaps suggesting more than a passing acquaintance with life on the high seas operating either on the wrong side of the law, or in the shadowy world of privateering vessels and smugglers. Johnson bases his description of Ned Low and his life mainly on newspaper articles available at the time, both those published in Boston and London as well as on interviews with those who knew Ned Low when he lived in London.

Captain Johnson is an invaluable resource, but not an infallible one. He occasionally makes mistakes in his timeline of Ned Lows actions, placing events in the wrong order or entirely neglecting some, most likely because they had not been discussed in the press and so were not known to him. Finally, Captain Johnson was writing for an audience who while fascinated with pirates and piracy were also fearful of falling prey to such villains and rogues. To satisfy his readers, Johnson occasionally engages in rather tedious moralizing, which tends to get in the way of the actual narrative.

While Captain Johnson may not be identifiable as the author Daniel Defoe, the author Captain George Roberts certainly was. Defoe used the synonym Captain George Roberts to write and publish the book Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts in 1726. This book includes a detailed description of a meeting between the titular Captain Roberts and Ned Low himself. Defoes use of a synonym so clouded the waters that the book was taken as fact rather than fiction, and its descriptions have informed several biographies of Ned Low through the ages, from Charles Ellms 1837 The Pirates Own Book to Ned Lows modern-day Wikipedia entry! Due to the entirely fictional nature of Defoes book, it has not been utilized as a primary source in this work, in particular because Defoe did in fact borrow very heavily from an actual factual piece of writing: Ashtons Memorial: An History of the Strange Adventures, and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip Ashton, Jun. of Marblehead.

This outstanding account, published in 1724 by the Reverend John Barnard, preserves a lengthy eyewitness account of life on board Ned Lows pirate ship. Philip Ashton, the originator of the volume, was a Marblehead fisherman, taken prisoner by Ned Low in June of 1722. Ashton remained with Low for almost a year before escaping from him on the island of Roatn off the coast of Honduras. Ashton lived on this island for more than a year by himself before being rescued and eventually making his way back home. Ashtons account, and the account of his cousin Nicholas Merritt (who was captured with him) have along with newspaper articles, Captain Johnsons General History and a scattering of other briefer eyewitness accounts formed the source basis for the present book.

It should be noted that where original sources have been quoted directly whether from newspapers, books or accounts I have in some places chosen to standardize the spelling of certain words personal and place names in particular in order to help the reader. Spelling seems to have been an entirely optional pursuit in eighteenth-century newsprint, and personal names are often spelled in a variety of different ways. Ned Low is sometimes Ned Lowe and sometimes Ned Loe. The pirate George Lowther is sometimes George Lowder or even George Lower in some instances. The pirate Francis Spriggs is either Francis, Farrington or Thomas Spriggs (or indeed Sprig or Sprigg). To avoid confusion, I have as much as possible standardized these personal names throughout the book, both when quoting original sources and in the narrative. Similarly, both newspapers and published books in the eighteenth century made frequent use of abbreviations which are less familiar to a modern reader (verbs in the past tense are for instance frequently abbreviated with an apostrophe: for instance, returned as returnd, forced as forcd and appeared as appeard). In these instances, I have used the fuller modern spelling. In the same way, I have not capitalized as was customary at the time proper nouns in direct quotations.