Woodes Rogers and his Family

William Hogarth painted this in 1729, the year its sitter was about to sail back to a post most men would have refused. Woodes Rogers had made his name as a privateer, a licensed sea-raider, and it was he who, sent out in 1718 as the first royal governor of the Bahamas, broke the pirate haven at Nassau under the motto 'piracy expelled, commerce restored'. Ruined and briefly jailed for debt after that first tour, he was reappointed in 1729, and this family group seems to mark the moment. On the wall behind them a carved cartouche carries the line 'Dum spiro, spero', while I breathe, I hope. A globe, dividers and a sea-chart lie at their feet, the instruments of the trade that had already ruined him once.