“How did we get away?” he asked when Hanks was finished, his voice a mere croak.
“Because the Revenge be lightly built and quick as a cat, and Mr. Pell was able to quickly replace the jib topsail to get us out of the Spaniards’ range.”
“So you’re telling me that we could have outsailed her and avoided the encounter altogether?”
“Aye, and we wouldn’t have no forty dead ’n wounded.”
He licked his lips, for a moment feeling the pain of his humiliation far worse than the physical suffering from his wounds.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I had no idea it would turn out this way.”
“You can hold onto your words because they don’t mean spit to me or anyone else aboard this ship. We’ll get you to port, but I can’t guarantee what will happen after that. I suspect you may have to buy yourself a new crew.”
Though he wasn’t surprised by Hanks’s harsh words, they still stung. “And the Revenge?”
“She’s been gutted like a pig. But with proper refitting, she may just be herself again, the poor wretch. Upon my honor she deserves a better captain than the likes of you, Major Bonnet.”
He bit his lip. For a moment, he wished he had been killed in the battle; then at least he wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of being despised and disrespected by his officers and crew.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hanks,” he said with genuine feeling. “I’m sorry for…for everything.”
“Aye, ’tis beyond doubt you mean well, lubberly though you be. But it won’t bring those men back.”
“I know it won’t and I’m sorry for that.” He felt an excruciating pain in his head and upper chest and groaned heavily. But he saw little sympathy on his quartermaster’s face. “By the way, where are we headed?”
“We’ve set a course for New Providence.”
He couldn’t help an involuntary wrinkle of his nose. “New Providence? You mean the…the…”
“Aye, Captain Edwards. We’re headed for an island governed by a gang of cutthroats. So you’d better rest up, for I know not what’s going to happen to you when they learn of the devilment you’ve brought to your poor, hapless crew.”
PART 3
BLACKBEARD AND THE GENTLEMAN PIRATE
CHAPTER 19
NASSAU
SEPTEMBER 4, 1717
FEELING A TOUCH OF MELANCHOLY, Thache stared out at the gently bobbing vessels in Nassau Harbor and the azure-blue sea beyond. For some reason, today he missed his beloved Margaret of Marcus Hook terribly. He pictured her nubile young body lying beside him in their warm bed overlooking the Delaware River. He remembered back to the countless times he sat stroking the curve of her back when they lay naked; to the way she smiled when they strolled holding hands through the streets of Philadelphia; to how she kept her lodgings neat and clean and tastefully furnished; to her long flowing blonde hair when she combed it out to its full length; and to the savory Swedish meatball dinners she used to cook for him on Sunday nights, smothered in brown cream sauce and accompanied with lingonberries, pickled cucumber, and mashed potatoes. God, did he miss her and her wonderful cooking!
He knew he should never have left such a fine woman to become a privateer. Now he was a full-fledged pirate, a wanted criminal, and he could not turn back the clock to the way things once had been. True, he and his sea roving brethren seemed virtually unstoppable despite the recent setback with Bellamy and his crew, but that was bound to change. However, at present their control of the Atlantic sea lanes remained uncontested and the British Royal Navy was powerless to stop them. Based on recent intelligence from skilled seamen pressed into pirate service and captured merchant captains and their crews, the HMS Shoreham had only recently returned to Virginia and was said to require such extensive refitting that she was not allowed to leave the safety of Chesapeake Bay. Freebooters had so terrorized the British Leeward Islands that the mere whisper of their return had compelled the colonial governor to cancel a tour aboard HMS Seaford for fear of capture. In Barbados, the crew of the HMS Scarborough was gripped with tropical disease and unfit for service. Outside of Jamaica, that left only two or three of His Majesty’s warships to patrol thousands of miles of coastline from Barbados to Maine. Reinforcements were reportedly en route from Great Britain, but for the present, it appeared, the Americas were solidly in the hands of the masters of the sweet trade. But Thache knew that would soon change as he and his fellow freebooters continued to take a bigger and bigger slice of the pie away from the wealthy merchants who controlled Atlantic commerce.
A part of him couldn’t help but feel that his friend Black Sam Bellamy’s death was the beginning of the end for outlaws like himself. He had said as much to Charles Vane, who had laughed uproariously and insisted they drink again to the damnation of King George rather than entertain such morbid thoughts. The hard-drinking and incorrigible Vane thought he was being overly pessimistic. He predicted that the Flying Gang and other pirate squadrons menacing the New World sea lanes would remain uncontested, free-spirited “gentlemen of fortune” for at least another decade before the authorities could muster the strength to stop them. Thache didn’t believe that for a minute. A change was coming, and it was coming sooner than his Bahamian brothers-in-arms believed, he felt certain.
The truth was the Crown and Admiralty protecting its colonial interests would eventually terminate its hands-off policy of benign neglect by flexing its muscles, shutting down the pirate republic in the Bahamas, and installing a legitimate government. When that fateful day come, Nassau would turn overnight from a protected base of operations to a heavily regulated extension of Great Britain. The only reason that piracy was thriving and that day had not yet come was due to His Majesty’s lack of international naval strength and the mobility and dispersion of pirates across the Atlantic seaboard and Caribbean. The combination made it difficult to track pirates down. But Thache knew one day that would change and that would be the beginning of the end for himself and his fellow sea rovers.
As he stared sadly out at the sea, pining for his love Margaret, he spotted a sail on the horizon. He watched it for several minutes through his spyglass, which he carried with him at all times these days. The sloop tacked its way towards the island, negotiated the turn into the harbor, and fell off the wind under the protection of Hog Island and the half-submerged, burnt-out ships wrecked off her shallow blue waters. Next to him, a growing crowd of seamen gathered along the beach, stumbling out of the taverns and crawling out of their canvas awnings and lean-tos to have a look at the new arrival. From the Jolly Roger flying from her mast, it was readily apparent that she was a pirate sloop and not a privateer or merchant vessel.
As she drew near, Thache could see that she had fine lines and trim sails. All in all, she was a bonnie sloop, better than the Margaret. But there was a problem: she was badly damaged. Her sails and rigging were in tatters and appeared to have been jury-rigged to allow her to sail. The hull and railing were battered and pockmarked from cannon and grape shot. Parts of the gunwales, mast, rigging, and deck appeared to be splintered and actually stained with iron-red blood. At the captain’s great cabin at the stern of the vessel the glass had been shattered. He noted that the vessel was even more badly damaged than Paulsgrave Williams’s Mary Anne or Richard Nolan’s Anne Galley that had limped into the harbor last week. Her captain and crew must have fought in a pitched battle and come out on the losing end.
He studied the crew. They were a sullen and defeated-looking bunch. More importantly, the size of the crew visible on deck was not even half that which would be necessary to handle a sloop-of-war of her size. The men appeared tense and drawn, devoid of the usual bonhomie of the Flying Gang members and other pirate crews sailing into Nassau. Looking around at the sailors on the beach, Thache couldn’t help but sense a trace of disdain in the way they looked at the battered newcomers. How could they have allowed themselves to be manhandled like this, their eyes said, especially when even an average pirate sloop could
outrun anything on the high seas?
When the ship set anchor, Thache could make out her name: Revenge. He liked the name—an obvious tip of the hat to the Jacobite rebellion and Stuart dynasty of Queen Anne and James III—and he liked the sleek cut of the vessel. But who the hell did she belong to and what in heaven’s name had she been through?
A longboat dropped beside the vessel and quickly filled up with members of the crew coming ashore. With four men manning the oars, the boat made its way towards the beach. But even the longboat had been damaged in the Revenge’s recent action, and a pair of crewmembers were embarrassingly forced to bail buckets of water over the side as they made their way towards the crowded beach.
“Scupper, sink, and burn me if another of our brethren hasn’t ventured to hell and back!” exclaimed a boisterous voice. “What the devil is going on here?”
Thache turned to see Charles Vane. He had just saddled out of the Blue Parrot with a tankard of ale. “Can’t you see? We’re at war,” he said to his opinionated Jacobite friend, who as usual was drunk as a skunk.
“Aye verily, I can see that. But this one looks like she’s been through a meat grinder. Take a gander at her starboard railing.”
“She must have taken a half dozen broadsides. Too bad because she be a bonnie ship.”
A dozen pirates waded into the water and began barraging the exhausted seamen with questions.
“Who are you and from whence have you come?”
“We be the Revenge out of Barbados,” answered a grizzled veteran of a seaman whom Thache took to be a senior officer. “We were returning from the Carolina coast when we came across a Spanish man-of-war. We’ve been on the account for the past four months. Sailing up and down the coast and taking prizes from New York to Charles Town.”
“So you were attacked? Where?”
The weary and battered seamen began to offload from the longboat, and the pirates in the water began to help them from the vessel. “Florida Straits, south of ye wrecks. Two days ago, it was. Had the misfortune of making our acquaintance with a Spanish warship. She fired many a ball through our brisket and nearly sent us to Davy Jones’ Locker. Lost over half our original crew of seventy men as casualties, we did. Those that be too poorly to be moved are belowdecks, recovering from their wounds.”
Thache and Vane stepped to the edge of the water and Thache posed a question to the man. “How did you manage to get away?”
“’Twas only through the spryness of our ship Revenge that we were able to evade the much larger Spanisher and avoid being put to the bottom.”
Thache nodded. Looking into their faces up close, he could now see that they were bleary-eyed from exhaustion. Many of them must have been standing nonstop watches for the past two days as they made their way to Nassau.
“What’s your name?” he then asked him.
“Ignatius Pell, bosun.”
“Now why in the world would a ten-gun sloop engage a Spanish man-of-war in the first place?” asked Charles Vane after taking a hefty gulp of ale.
“Because we were ordered to by our captain. We tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Thache shook his head in disbelief. The foremost priority of any sea captain worth his salt was to protect his ship and crew at all costs—and yet, whoever the bastard was in command of the Revenge had done neither. One thing was clear: the man was finished as a pirate captain. No one would dare sail with such a bad-luck commander ever again.
“What kind of fool captain gave that order?” demanded Vane. “That not be making sense.”
“Aye, that’s what we told the man,” answered another experienced-looking seaman. “But as Mr. Pell said, the captain’s blood was up and he wouldn’t listen to no reason. He almost got himself killed. He suffered several wounds and is all bandaged up. Looks like an Egyptian mummy, he does.”
“And who might you be, sir?” asked Vane.
“Ishmael Hanks, quartermaster. Now if you’ll excuse me and my mates here, we’re in dire need of a good stiff drink and a bow-legged woman. One who knows how to show particular kindness and enthusiasm to bedraggled gentlemen of fortune such as ourselves.”
The crowd in the water and on the beach rumbled its approval, and Thache smiled. He liked the cut of Hanks and Pell. But he still had a few more questions.
He stepped forward, partially blocking their path. “Just a couple more inquiries, lads, if you don’t mind. I’m Captain Thache of the Margaret and I must say I find your story of great interest. Could you tell me please, who by chance is the name of your captain as I might want to pay him a courtesy call, seeing as he has met with some misfortune?”
Hanks’s eyes narrowed suspiciously on the unusually tall man blocking his path, but he came to a halt on the gently sloping beach. “His name is Captain Stede Bonnet, but he insists we call him Captain Edwards. But he ain’t no sea captain at all. He’s a wealthy planter and a major in the Barbados militia, though he ain’t never fought none but an unruly slave.”
Thache felt his body become suddenly alert. “Major Stede Bonnet of Barbados, you say?”
“Aye,” said Hanks. “What, you know of whom I speak?”
“I sailed with the HMS Windsor under Admiral Whetstone during the war and spent some time on Barbados. There was a young man there by the name of Bonnet. But that was over a decade ago.”
“Well, Bonnet’s have been gentleman sugar planters on Barbados for three generations, or so I have been told. So you sailed with Whetstone, eh, out of Port Royal?”
He nodded, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “He had just been knighted and appointed commander-in-chief of the West Indies fleet. There were terrible storms that summer. I believe this Bonnet may be the grandson of the admiral’s first cousin, or something like that. It appears that the world is smaller than I thought.”
“That be Bonnet all right. His mother was a Whetstone. All I know is the major should have stuck to soldiering on land because he doesn’t know spit about the sea.”
“He got forty men kilt or wounded, he did!” shouted one of the sailors as they hauled the longboat up onto the beach. “The no-good squab!”
Thache filed away what Hanks had just told him. So the clumsy Stede Bonnet was the son of a sugar plantation owner just like himself. And here they had both given up a life of wealth, privilege, and a liberal education to go off a-pirating. Then again, it wasn’t so surprising. After all, living and working on a tropical plantation in the sweltering heat every day, even if you were an owner and not a working slave, wasn’t very enjoyable. In fact, Thache had found the life tediously boring. Since a young age, he had always dreamed of escaping to the sea, and this Bonnet fellow must have felt much the same way and wanted to give up his lubberly life as a plantation owner for the promise of adventure upon the high seas.
“If you want to set eyes on the lubber, there he is now,” said Pell, pointing north.
All eyes turned to the deck of the Revenge, anchored in the bay between a pair of recently careened pirate sloops. A plump figure had materialized from the stern great cabin and stepped forward onto the deck. Walking slowly like an old man, he wore only a silken dressing gown. His head and upper chest were wrapped in bandages and his right arm was bound in a sling. The figure hobbled to the starboard railing and peered at the crowd gathered on the beach and along the waterfront staring back at him. To Thache, he looked pale as a ghost, and in his hand he clutched a leatherbound book that he had been reading.
Peering through his spyglass at the man, Thache could tell, despite the heavy bandages, that it was indeed the young planter he had met on Barbados during the war: the Scotsman Stede Bonnet. Back then, he had been a thin young man with his whole life before him, brimming with hope and confidence, instead of a plump gentleman with a broken look and general weariness about him, but it was still the same man.
Thache felt sorry for him.
“Aye, that be our Major Bonnet,” said Quartermaster Ishmael Hanks in a mocking tone. �
�As miserable wretch of a seamen as God ever saw fit to put aboard a ship.”
The Revenge’s crew echoed that sentiment with disdainful laughter and headed off for the taverns and brothels. Thache kept his glass trained on the inexperienced sea captain.
“What the hell are you looking at, Edward?” Vane needled him. “The man is an utter miscreant and scupperlout.”
“That may be,” said Blackbeard without taking his gaze off the portly, bandaged pirate captain hobbling across the deck in his dressing gown. “But sometimes even miscreants and scupperlouts have something to offer.”
CHAPTER 20
WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
SEPTEMBER 4, 1717
“THROUGHOUT MY TENURE AS LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR, I have endeavored to be an honest man and faithful subject—and yet these backwards burgesses and their anonymous cronies continue to assail my character. As sure as day, the seditious scoundrels will not stop until they have removed me from my appointed post.”
Here Spotswood stopped and adjusted his powdered wig, as it had nearly fallen off his bald pate due to his vigorous head shaking. His two companions, Robert Beverley and his older brother Captain Harry Beverley, stood there staring at him, unsure what to say at his unexpected outburst. The three men had taken lunch at a tavern and were walking along Duke of Gloucester Street towards the Capitol when Spotswood had taken his two companions by surprise and abruptly vented his frustration.
Blackbeard- The Birth of America Page 16
