“You sound like a philosopher.”
“Aye, a pirate philosopher I be on occasion. But what I say is true for all men.”
He took her by the hand and they kept walking, passing row after row of simple and unadorned Quaker houses. There was also a smattering of Swedish- and English-style designs in the neighborhood, but the architecture was dominated by Quaker lodgings. One of Thache’s favorite buildings in the city was the elegant Old Swede’s Church beyond the southern outskirts of the city, near the banks of the Delaware. Several of Margaret’s Swedish family members lived near the church, so she had attended mass there before and he had accompanied her on two prior occasions.
They came upon a furrier and jewelry shop and went inside. Thache bought her a little silver locket necklace and clasped it around her neck. She thought it too expensive, but he convinced her that he would not take no for an answer from such an attractive woman, which made the proprietor and Margaret both smile.
When they were walking again arm in arm down the street, he said, “The locket and necklace are fine, but not half as fine as the woman wearing them.”
“Do you really mean that, Edward Thache?”
“Verily I do.”
She ran her fingers along the silver necklace, appreciatively. “I still can’t believe you bought it for me. Three pounds is quite a lot of money.”
“Not for a notorious pirate,” he said with a grin.
She rolled her eyes and laughed. He drew her close and gave her a kiss. Though they were both a touch sad over his impending departure, he couldn’t help but feel a great warmth inside seeing her toss her head back and laugh. He knew how to make her giggle and cheer her up when she was blue. He knew that was his special gift: he had a knack for reading people and lifting their spirits when they were down, even while he felt his own sadness inside and kept his feelings to himself. But then he saw the tears in her eyes.
“Come now, my beauty, what are those for?” he asked her.
She sniffled. “I don’t want you to leave. And I’m scared of what might happen to you.”
“Don’t be frightened, my dear. Nothing is going to happen to me.”
“But I had a dream and in it you—” She stopped right there, covering her hand with her mouth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”
“In your dream, I died.”
She nodded.
“Whatever happens, it is God’s will. So you shouldn’t worry yourself over it.”
“I am going to miss you terribly,” she said. She struggled mightily, but could not hold back a torrent of tears. He held her in his arms, consoling her. He ached to think that he was going to leave her again and wouldn’t be able to hold her like this for a long time, how long he didn’t even know.
“What if I promised to come back for you, one day, as a wealthy gentleman and we were to be married? Would you wait for me?”
“Aye, I would wait for you for an eternity. I have never loved anyone as I love you, Edward Thache.”
He leaned down and kissed her again.
“I’d have my own shipping company, but I would be a fair and kindly merchant, and we’d live in a fine house right here on bustling High Street with our five children.”
“Five children?”
“Aye, three sons and two daughters, who would all grow up to be big and strong and smart as foxes.”
Her eyes lit up. “It sounds wonderful. I can picture it in my mind.”
He smiled at her as she rested her head gently upon his shoulder. “Our house will be a fine Swedish house—not one of those drab Quaker shanties—and the boys and girls would have their own separate rooms. It would have a fancy parlor and a big kitchen table for when your family came to visit on Sunday evenings for your fine Swedish dishes.”
“It sounds so romantic.”
“It is going to be romantic. In addition to living in our fine house, we would visit all the cities from New York to Charles Town for social functions. And of course, you would wear only the latest French fashions.”
“Oh, stop it. You’re so silly.”
“We can have it, Margaret—we can have it all. I’m going to take me a big ship as a prize, a ship so big that not even British fifth-rates will dare to challenge me. And then I’m going to get rich with plunder and retire with you here in Philadelphia.”
He felt her body tense and the contented and dreamy expression had evaporated from her face, replaced again with a look of worry.
“Don’t go,” she said. “Just stay here with me and don’t go off on the account. Please, I don’t want you to die.”
He gently rubbed her head. “I am not going to die. I am too clever for that.”
“But they’ll catch up to you eventually. You know they will.”
“I will have quit by then—and you and I will be living the life that we always dreamed.”
“But that’s just a fairy tale. It won’t happen like that and you know it. You’ll end up like Black Sam Bellamy and his crew—taken by the sea or the gallows. It doesn’t matter which, it will be a cruel end for you.”
“Hush, now you’re scaring even the notorious Blackbeard himself.”
“That’s not funny. You need to quit the pirating life, and you need to do it now before it’s too late. It may be merry, but it is altogether too short.”
A gang of wild young boys raced past them. He watched them for a moment, remembering back to his boyhood in Jamaica long before he had become a pirate. Suddenly, he felt the oppressive burden of the life he had chosen. It was going to be intolerably lonely again without his dear Margaret. It was then she took him by surprise. Tears burst from her eyes and she began to cry uncontrollably, her usual stoicism withering before him. He felt for her, knowing that he felt the same desperate feelings as did she. But he also knew that she was right. The law would close in on him eventually, and he had the dreaded feeling that sooner rather than later he would face more danger than he had ever faced before.
“I don’t want you to leave!” she cried, gripping his sturdy shoulder fiercely.
“I don’t want to go either,” he said to her, feeling miserable. “But I have to. I have a hundred and fifty men counting on me. But everything’s going to be fine.”
“Will you at least promise to come back for me?”
“Aye, I promise I will return for you. I have never loved anyone like I love you, Margaret my dear.”
She wiped away the tears. “Truly you promise? You’re not just saying that to make me stop crying?”
“I’m coming back for you, I promise. And when I do, you and I are going to be properly wed and live together to a ripe old age.”
She put her lips to his and they kissed with unbridled passion, his tricorn hat falling from his head in all the excitement and tears pouring from her eyes, and then he picked up his hat, dusted it off, and they were walking hand in hand once again along High Street. He felt the power of his love for her, and wondered by what strange alchemy he had managed to win over such an amazing woman.
Forever, he thought. When I come back, we’re going to be together forever—with our fine Swedish house and our five wonderful children.
In his mind, he could picture it perfectly. But he knew, deep down, it was most likely never going to happen.
CHAPTER 25
MOUTH OF DELAWARE BAY
OCTOBER 12, 1717
THACHE STUDIED THE FACE OF CAPTAIN CODD. In his last year and a half as a pirate, he had seen the look more than two dozen times before. Codd was typical: having surrendered his vessel to a gang of wild-looking, heavily armed pirates, the merchant ship captain’s face and body language showed a combination of abject fear and morbid curiosity. He had been sailing from Liverpool and Dublin with one hundred fifty passengers, most of whom were indentured servants, and a substantial cargo of supplies, when the Revenge and Margaret took him along the high sandy capes of the Delaware. Thache promptly sent his longboat over to the surrendered vessel to secure him, his officer
s, and his official mariner’s logbook, bills of lading, passes, navigational charts, and other documents. He was now asking the prisoner questions regarding the nature of his cargo while reviewing his official documentation and charts—all following standard protocols used by both privateers and pirates. Meanwhile, Quartermaster William Howard and his raucous boarding party were taking inventory and plundering the vessel. Captain Codd and his officers would be held onboard until all their valuable plunder was located and subsequently secured in the holds of the two pirate vessels.
The merchant captain appeared unusually anxious sitting in the wooden chair of the Revenge’s refurbished great cabin. Despite how deliberately cordial and accommodating Thache was being to his guest, Codd’s mannerisms were halting and nervous. To put his mind at ease, Thache poured his guest a glass of Madeira and shared a drink with him. But Codd was still tense. He had expected his opposite number to be a drunken cutthroat and appeared unsure of what to make of the uncannily calm and polite gentleman whose rowdy crew was making clamorous sounds pillaging his vessel. It was as if Codd thought his host was merely feigning common courtesy and would at any second transform into some sort of monster bent on having him and his crew tortured and killed.
Blackbeard found the whole situation ironic. After all, it wasn’t he, but Captain Codd, who was acting unconscionably—by transporting nearly one hundred fifty indentured servants in his cramped hold. True, they weren’t actually slaves, but if you had asked them how happy they were to be on the hook for seven years of back-breaking labor and serfdom to answer for their unfortunate choice of politics, escaping a press or labor gang, stealing a loaf of bed so their children wouldn’t starve, being born a Scot, or merely to secure passage to the New World, they would have said not at all. It always amazed Thache how merchant captains like Codd believed that they themselves weren’t profiteering rascals, that they were superior to morally corrupt pirates even though they made vast sums of money as mariners by treating people like chattel. It didn’t make any sense. Merchant seamen like Codd were as big as thieves as any sea bandit, but they would never own up to it. It made Thache angry at the unfairness of the world. He aimed to set things right.
Early on in his piratical career, working the sweet trade in consort with Hornigold, he had shown a measure of restraint, taking mostly French and Spanish prizes and then only the goods he needed from those he captured. But now in the wake of Bellamy’s death and with his crew soon to swing from the gallows in Boston, Thache had proposed his own personal agenda to his shipmates. The American pirate was declaring war on the whole British Empire, and he would use piracy and terror to bring the Crown, and particularly its greedy ruling and merchant class, to its knees. While Hornigold had limited his operations to maritime theft, the ambitious Thache was now prepared to raise the stakes of the contest to embrace the philosophy of his good mate Bellamy. His goal was to bring as much damage to British commerce as possible, short of the unnecessary taking of human life. From now on, he and his crewmates would indeed be Robin Hood’s men and seize, destroy, or liberate all cargo taken from the prizes of all nations they boarded.
After taking a moment to examine one of Codd’s bills of lading, Thache looked up at the captain. “What will happen to the indentured men and women in your cargo hold when you get to Philadelphia?” he asked him.
“They will work as farm laborers or domestic servants. A handful will be apprenticed to skilled craftsmen.”
“What’s your percentage of the merchant profits?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. You hold the indenture on at least a portion of these slaves, do you not?”
Codd frowned at the choice of words. “But they’re not slaves.”
“They will be for the next half-decade or more. And some will be for life, and you damn well know it. So don’t lie to me. It makes me angry when people—especially holier-than-thou scupperlouts like you—take me for a fool and lie to my face. It’s not a very gentlemanly way of going about one’s business, now is it?”
Codd bowed his head meekly. “If I have angered ye, I offer me apologies.”
“No need to apologize, just don’t lie to me. Now what is your take in this?”
“I get seven pounds per head.”
“How many head?”
“One hundred forty. The ten others are paying passengers.”
“So your take is just shy of a thousand pounds. That’s quite a lot of money for a merchant captain. But not one, I suppose, involved in the slave trade.”
The man started to argue but then thought the better of it and said no more. But then he seemed to have second thoughts and couldn’t resist defending himself and his actions. “I told ye, Captain Thache, they be not slaves.”
“Tell that to the seventy of them that will die after a year or two in the fields, or who will be whipped to death by their masters.”
This time, Codd knew better than to challenge him and snapped silent, not wanting to push his luck. Thache stared at him in disgust. Dealing in human cargo—whether it was slaves or indentured servants—was no way to make a living in his view. Unless, of course, it was pirated cargo that could be offered a better life by exchanging one master for a better one. In that case, slave or indentured cargo could be used to tip the scales more favorably for the dispossessed.
“I do believe I’ll have a look at your cargo,” he then said to the captain, who tried, unsuccessfully, to talk him out of it. Fifteen minutes later, they had rowed back to Codd’s vessel and all the indentured servants stowed belowdecks were brought up to the main deck so they could be inventoried.
Nothing could have prepared Thache for the sight he saw. Having spent most of the ten-week oceanic journey from Dublin stuffed into cramped quarters belowdecks, the indentured passengers were in a miserable state. Disease had run rampant in the immigrants’ overly crowded, poorly ventilated quarters. Many of the men, women, and children were rail thin, had unhealthy complexions, coughed uncontrollably, and had black circles around their eyes and open sores on their faces and lips. Thache saw at once that Codd had treated them no better than rats. They were hungry and thirsty and had been subjected to extremes of confined space, frost, heat, dampness, and the illness of their co-passengers. Many of them were covered with lice. Thache felt an overwhelming pity for them and knew that all they wanted to do was make land. Instead, they had the added misfortune of now being the prisoners of pirates, which would delay their long-awaited arrival to the New World.
He couldn’t do much for them, but he could at least feed and water them and make Codd and his men pay for their ill treatment. Thache did precisely that as his men continued to plunder the ship. When it was all over, they had taken whatever cargo and valuables they fancied: silver coin, jewelry, rum, foodstuffs, ammunition, and navigational instruments. But unlike in the past, Thache did not leave anything behind for the captain and his officers and crew. This time they dumped the remaining cargo into the sea. When one of the merchant passengers on board the ship saw his commercial cargo worth more than one thousand pounds sterling being tossed overboard, he begged to be allowed to keep enough cloth to make just one suit of clothes, but the pirates refused, throwing the last bolt of textiles overboard. By the time they released the ship, nothing remained of its cargo and Codd and the other merchants stood there in open-mouthed disbelief. Never in their lives had they witnessed such wanton destruction.
But in Blackbeard’s view, there was nothing about it that was wanton. He knew exactly what he was doing.
He was waging a war not only against the British Empire but versus all empires. A war against the strong on behalf of the weak. And he was doing it for his friend Black Sam Bellamy and their brotherhood of pirates all around the world. The British authorities and newspapers would, of course, now brand him and those who sailed with him under the black flag as hostis humani generi—the enemy of the human race. But he knew they were nothing of the kind. For
they were not waging a war against all humanity, only against the rich and powerful political and commercial interests and slaveholders that dominated an increasingly interconnected world. In his view, they were the true enemies of mankind.
And he was going to make them bloody pay.
CHAPTER 26
GOVERNOR’S PALACE
WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
NOVEMBER 12, 1717
“GREETINGS, GOVERNOR. I wanted to be the first to congratulate you on your recent failure.”
Sitting at his palatial desk, Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood stared with stupefaction at Philip Ludwell the Younger, seated haughtily before him. On the governor’s desk was a miniature golden horseshoe inscribed Sic Juvat Transcendere Montes—Thus It Is A Pleasure To Cross The Mountains. Caught off guard by Ludwell, Spotswood glanced at the souvenir ceremoniously given to himself, Harry Beverley, John Fontaine, and each of the gentlemen adventurers who had participated in the 1716 expedition to the Blue Ridge Mountains, thus forming the immortal order of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe. With Ludwell before him once again to make his life miserable, the relaxing and bibulous mountain journey seemed like a lifetime ago, and for a fleeting moment he found himself wishing he could return to those halcyon days of chivalry.
He looked back at Ludwell, snapping back to reality. He had thought his longtime nemesis and leader of the insurrection against him had come to his office to offer an olive branch—but instead his sole purpose here was to gloat in Spotswood’s most recent political defeat. Earlier this morning, he had received news that the Crown had repealed his 1713 Tobacco Act and 1714 Indian Act. During the past seven years, he had grown accustomed to criticism from his enemies on the Governor’s Council and in the House of Burgesses, but seldom had they attacked him with such blatant vitriol. Looking into Ludwell’s icy-blue eyes, he realized that the man and his tobacco-plantation-owner cronies didn’t simply desire to have him removed from office—they sought to have him shipped back to England in chains.
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