Captain Jack Ward
"Go tell the King of England, go tell him this from me,
If he reign king of all the land, I will reign king at sea."
Jack Ward appears in history for the first time at the age of 50, when he no-call no-shows his job, steals a stranger's ship, sets sail with a small crew made up almost entirely of his old drinking buddies, and elopes to a life of excitement and danger on the high seas. Over the next two decades, he'll go on to become one of the most infamous pirate kings of the 16th-century, charging into battle with a boarding axe, a flintlock, and a codpiece the size of a football helmet because that's the only thing that would contain his huge iron cannonballs. He'll plunder the heavily-patrolled trade routes of the Mediterranean and command a fleet of bloodthirsty corsairs, capture some of the most valuable prizes in the history of piracy, and forge a name for himself as a folk hero across England, all before dying peacefully in his jewel-encrusted Tunisian palace as an old man.
He’s also the inspiration for Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. But we’ll get to that.
Jack Ward was born in Kent County around 1553, and grew up in a fishing village on the southeastern coast of England. We don't know a ton about his early career (and by early career, we mean the first five decades of his life), but it's pretty safe to assume he grew up poor, took work where he could find it as a fisherman and sailor, probably spent some time as a Privateer in the war against Spain, and may have at some point been involved in sailing expeditions as far West as the Caribbean and the American colonies.
Well, sure, that was fun and all, but war with Spain ended in the Summer of 1604, and part of the peace deal was that England had to stop encouraging naval terrorism against Spanish shipping, so the Queen had to cancel all those Letters of Marque and stop telling British sailors that it was super fucking rad to cold-cock Spaniards in the face with a halberd and then jack their wedding rings. Well, this kind of put Jack Ward out of a job, and he wasn't super psyched about the idea of being 50 years old and going back to his shitty life where he worked his ass off for months at a time for a handful of gray beef and barely enough coin to afford his weekly intake of whiskey and hookers. So, one day, he decided Fuck This Shit and quit his job in perhaps one of the most badass ways possible – he got a dozen or so of his friends drunk at an alehouse, rowed out to a 25-ton barque moored at the port, beat the shit out of the two guys guarding it, jacked the ship, and sailed off into the night towards a life of face-shanking piracy. Ward was acting off a tip that the ship might have been filled with jewels or silks or whatever, but it wasn't, so he and his mates had to settle for just cooking up the massive food stores on board and having a big-ass feast worthy of the sort of thing you'd see on a buffet table in Valhalla. A few days later, the stolen barque came across a French merchant ship minding its own business in the Mediterranean, grappled it, climbed aboard with axes and muskets, and insta-upgraded their little barque for something a bit beefier.
Ward sailed his new prize to a couple of the seedier ports on the English coast, recruited a hardcore crew of smugglers, fishermen, ex-privateers, and a few of his old drinking buddies, and then set off for the Mediterranean to pirate the balls off any ship flying the flag of a Catholic country – and not because this guy was some hardcore anti-Papist religious warrior or anything, but mostly because, in Ward's mind, he could basically plunder the fuck out of the Catholics and ask England for forgiveness later, and the King he hates the Catholics just as much as everyone else so he’d probably just high-five Ward and be like, “well, it’s all water under the bridge,” or whatever.
"Speaks little and almost always swearing. Drunk for morn to night… the habits of a thorough salt."
As a man, Captain Jack Ward was short, stocky, gray-haired, balding, swarthy, heavily-bearded, and utterly fearless. He led battles from the front, charged enemy decks armed with a fucking battle-axe and a brace of flintlock pistols, and never backed down from the opportunity to administer an asskicking. He generally commanded a squadron of 3-4 small, fast vessels that wolfpacked much larger ships, boarded them, took them without a fight if possible, and laid waste to them if they resisted. He was pretty much always drunk, spoke almost entirely in profanity, and dressed in whatever opulent silks and shit he could plunder from the holds of the wealthy Venetian and Spanish merchant ships. Like, he'd loot some badass carrack laden with damasks, silks, spices, dyes, and other shit you could go buy in a fucking Wal-Mart this afternoon if you wanted to but just blew everyone's damn minds in 1605, then, after he'd taken his prize, he'd go down into the hold, rifle through the captain's (perhaps a nobleman, if he was lucky) wardrobe, grab everything he liked, and throw it on. More than one account of this guy's appearance describe him wearing all manner of opulent, gaudy shit, even though a lot of it didn't really go together, and I like to also imagine he probably wasn't wearing some of it correctly, either. And as far as the Jack Sparrow comparisons go, you honestly can't read anything about this guy online without the entire article being bukkaked with Disney quotes, pictures of Johnny Depp in guyliner, and buy-now links for Pirates of the Caribbean boxed sets, and, sure, I liked the first movie a lot, and yes, one of Ward's pirate aliases was "Jack Birdy", but avian nicknames and questionable wardrobe choices are probably the extent of the similarities here.
He probably looked more like this than Johnny Depp, but you get the idea.
In 1605 Jack Ward rolled up to the Tunisian port city of Tunis – a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” in literally the same zip code where George Lucas filmed the establishing shots for Mos Eisley, and a place that, at the time, was essentially a Pirate Kingdom run by Barbary corsairs in the Hayreddin Barbarossa vein. Think of it like Port Royal with scimitars. Ward repaired and refitted his ship, sold off his stolen gear, recruited some Tunisian, English, and Dutch soccer hooligans to crew his fleet, bought some extra cannons, and made friends with the local governor – an Ottoman Jannisary Corps officer named Uthman Dey. Uthman and Ward came up with a mutually-beneficial arrangement – Ward would cut Uthman in for a 15% cut of his spoils, and Uthman would give Ward a safe harbor he could use as a Hub City for all of his branching adventure paths. This deal worked out pretty well for both of them, and over the next two years Ward and his pirate fleet plundered and captured a few hundred tons of Egyptian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Venetian riches, let Uthman pick his favorite fifteen percent of the haul, and then sold anything that Ward didn't want to either wear on his body or stuff into his badass mansion.
The Tunisian coast, as viewed from the ruins of Carthage.
Jack Ward's greatest victory came in April of 1607, when his cutthroat squadron came across the massive 1,500-ton merchant carrack Reniera e Soderina on its way to Venice loaded to the gills with Silk Road shit they'd bought in Aleppo. Ward took one look at this massive hulking vessel, which was so packed full of riches that it could barely maneuver, fist-bumped his first mate, whipped out his favorite boarding axe, and ordered an all-out attack.
The Reniera tried evasive maneuvers, ran out her guns, and opened fire, but the massive ship was about as maneuverable as a lighthouse and struggled to hit any of Ward's fast-moving pirate vessels. Ward’s ships weaved their way towards their prey, returned fire, pieced the hull a half-dozen places, set the Reniera on fire, and then closed on the battered ship for a good old-fashioned 16th-century asswhooping. The Venetians came out onto the deck armed with rifles and cutlasses, so Jack ripped off a volley of chain shot at them – which is basically two cannonballs connected with a chain (think of it like having cannonball nunchucks launched at your face like a bolo at a couple hundred miles per hour) – and ripped a bunch of the guards apart like they'd walked into a man-sized blender. The crew surrendered immediately, and Jack Ward found himself in possession of a 1500-ton ship carrying two million ducats worth of luxury goods… and I don't really know what the fuck a ducat is worth these days, but they were gold coins and you'd be really hard-pressed to find any tabletop or video game where 2,000,000 gp isn't equal to a fuckton of money in 2020 USD.
“In the deadly conflict he did so undauntedly bear himself as if he had courage to out-brave death.”
Ward was a legend pretty much immediately. He bought a ton of land in Tunis, built a massive mansion, hired an army of servants, and packed the place full of shit he'd stolen, decorating it in expensive furniture, marble, alabaster, silk counterpanes, and god-knows what else. One guy who visited him later in life wrote “his apparel is both curious and costly, his diet sumptuous, and his followers seriously observing and obeying his will.” The Venetians hated him, calling him, "that famous pirate Ward, so well-known in this port for the damage he has done, is beyond a doubt the greatest scoundrel that ever sailed from England," but in England he was almost kind of a hero – a regular schmuck from some poor-ass village who now lived like a Sultan and scared the piss out of anyone who fucked with him. They wrote plays and ballads about him, including one called Captain Ward and the Rainbow where Ward beats the shit out of a Royal Navy warship, and Englishmen who happened to find themselves in Tunisia usually made a point of looking this dude up and trying to see if he'd have dinner with them or whatever the hell rich people did in the old days.
Captain Jack did take command of the Reniera e Soderina, cut a bunch of new gun ports in her, outfit her with 60 cannon, and go around looking for trouble, but what he found wasn't quite the trouble he was looking for – he ran into a storm off the coast of Crete and his ship exploded. For a brief moment, all the rich one-percenters of Europe were like, "oh thank god that asshole's dead", but, nah, it turns out Ward managed to escape somehow, survived a harrowing experience at sea, and made it back home in one piece, despite being like almost sixty years old and trying to navigate a huge-ass storm in a rowboat or whatever. Dude was just not going to let the sea get the better of him.
Ward decided to retire around 1610, after a solid five-year mission to wrecking ship in the Mediterranean. He tried to appeal to the King of England for a pardon (he used that excuse about "but I only attacked Catholics"), but Venice basically said they were going to declare war on England if they pardoned this asshole, so King James told Ward to go fuck himself. Ward decided, fine, whatever, I guess I'll just retire to a life of luxury on the gorgeous Tunisian coast and spend my day swimming in turquoise waters and sipping designer rums. He converted to Islam, changed his name to Yusuf Reis, and spent the last ten years of his life strolling through the ruins of Carthage, training Barbary Coast pirates in navigation and gunnery, drinking wine on the beach, and scaring the shit out of people who looked at him funny. There was one story that said he also commanded a few rescue missions that helped Muslims and Jews escape the Spanish Inquisition, which is pretty rad, but I didn't really find much to back that up so who knows.
Captain Jack Ward, a living pirate legend in his own time who kicked ass, forgot the names, and lived to tell the tale, eventually passed away when he caught the Black Death in 1622. He was 69 years old.
Nice.
Links:
Sources:
Bak, Greg. Barbary Pirate. United States: History Press, 2010.
Earle, Peter. The Pirate Wars. United States: St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2013.
Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith Elder & Co., 1899.
Thomas, Graham A.. Pirate Killers. United Kingdom: Pen & Sword Books, 2011.
Yancey, Diane. Piracy on the High Seas. United States: Lucent Books, 2012.