According to The Buccaneers of America, the rack was used on some prisoners, while “others had burning matches placed betwixt their fingers, which were thus burnt alive.”
The pirates lived in an age when torture was commonplace, almost expected. The rack and woolding were standard punishments during the Spanish Inquisition; the New Model Army in which so many of Moran’s original raiders had been trained (and whose red coats many of them still wore, “for the terrible name thereof”) had committed hideous savageries while conquering Ireland; and armies and bandits alike thought nothing of lopping off their enemies’ heads and sending them to the other side. It was a message that was sure to be understood.
The Spanish gave as good as they got: When in 1604 they intercepted English ships in West Indian waters, they “cut off the heads, feet, noses and ears of the crews and smeared them with honey and tied them to trees to be tortured by flies and other insects.”
If the pirates were distinguished in anything, it was their inventiveness. Chinese pirates were known to nail prisoners to their wooden decks and beat them with rattans; a certain English pirate, Captain Low, ordered that a Portuguese captain’s lips be cut off and broiled as the man watched. Low had, in his defense, been provoked – the captain had kept a bag filled with Portuguese gold coins hanging from a rope outside his cabin window; when the pirates appeared, he severed the rope and let the bag drop into the ocean – an incredibly stupid thing to do. Low made another sailor eat his own ears “with pepper and salt.”
The Irish mutineer and pirate Philip Roche initiated a massacre of his French mates that coated the entire deck with gore; the pirates were “all over as wet with the Blood that had been spilt, as if they had been dipp’d in Water, or stood in a Shower of Rain, nor did they regard it any more.”
What in Esquemeling’s account is perhaps more amazing than the pirates’ cruelty is the behavior of the tortured. Many of them resisted giving up information about their silver plate until they’d been mutilated beyond recognition.
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “An Amateur English Theatrical.” Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2007. 152-53. Print.
Further Reading:
Fly/insect torture doesn't seem so bad without a head.