Blackbeard- The Birth of America

by Samuel Marquis

  “Such a person will also be able to convey how critical it is to swiftly comply,” said Bonnet. “By sending one of the captive gentlemen in with whomever from the company is selected to deliver the demand, we will impress upon Governor Johnson just how serious the situation is.”

  There was a rumble of agreement. Bonnet was pleased to have contributed to the proceedings. He had been so marginalized during the past month that saying something valuable and contributing in any way was a godsend to him.

  “Agreed,” said Thache. “So is everyone on board with the plan?”

  More murmurs of concurrence.

  “Good, that settles it then. Mr. Howard, take some men with you and fetch Mr. Wragg and a handful of the most prominent citizens. We need to get that boat into Charles Town. There is no time to waste.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  He took Caesar and several other men with him, rowed over to the Crowley, snatched Wragg and the others, and rowed back to the flagship. Thache and most of the crew were still waiting on the quarterdeck. Thache quickly explained the situation to Wragg and then asked him who he thought should be selected from the group of prisoners to sail into Charles Town, act as an intermediary, and help acquire the medical supplies.

  “I believe it should be me,” said Wragg.

  “No, that’s not going to work,” objected Thache. “You are too valuable to us. It’s going to have to be someone else. Your son is also out of the question, for he is too young to make the proper impression.”

  Always the canny strategist, thought Bonnet with a ghost of a smile on his lips. He doesn’t want to lose possession of his most valuable bargaining chip because if his bluff is called, he has no intention of actually harming young William Wragg and the other captives.

  “Well then, who should we pick to deliver the ransom?” asked Bonnet. “Are there any volunteers?”

  “I’ll do it,” said a voice.

  “And just who might you be?” inquired William Howard skeptically.

  “The name is Marks—Jonathan Marks. I’m a landholder in Charles Town and know the governor. He’ll listen to me.”

  “All right, Mr. Marks,” said Thache. “And just what is going to be your message to the governor?”

  “I will be very direct with him. He is to be given orders to secure a medicine chest with the full list of supplies listed on the sheet your men carry with them. I am to warn him that if he refuses, the pirates will murder all their prisoners, send up their heads to the Governor, and set the ships they’ve taken on fire. That’s it, that’s what you want, right?”

  Blackbeard nodded. “Aye, that will do just fine. And if the governors not there, who will ye speak with?”

  “The justice of the peace or head of the militia. Don’t worry, we’ll find the right people who can get us the medicine.”

  “Who will we send from the company?” asked Caesar.

  “I vote for Captain Richards,” said Thache. “Who he wants to take with him be up to him, but I want Richards. Agreed?”

  A quick vote was taken and Richards, one of Blackbeard’s most reliable lieutenants, was duly elected. Bonnet realized that he would have liked to have gone, but he knew too many South Carolinians and would be embarrassed in their presence for abandoning his family and life of privilege for a career as a not-very-successful pirate. The Bonnet family had strong connections to Charles Town and the South Carolina planter society, which was very similar to that of Barbados.

  “I want to make one last point,” said Thache in closing. “This needs to be done in two days’ time.”

  “But does that give them enough time?” wondered Wragg. “What if something should go wrong?”

  “Two days, Mr. Wragg, and not a day longer.” He then looked hard at Marks. “Further, I want to make clear that if Richards or Marks fail to return in two days, we will sail over the bar and burn all the ships in the harbor. To save the lives of the hostages, Governor Johnson will need to have that chest aboard the Queen Anne’s Revenge by sundown of the twenty-fifth. I expect full compliance.”

  “I understand,” said Marks gravely. “If we don’t return with the medicine in two days, ye plan to make good on your threats. I will make sure the governor understands.”

  “Get them an outfitted longboat, Mr. Howard, and be smart about it,” said Thache. “There is not a moment to lose.”

  No, there isn’t, thought Bonnet. Two days—they only have two days. My God, they’ll be lucky to make it.

  CHAPTER 38

  CHARLES TOWN BAR, SOUTH CAROLINA

  MAY 29, 1718

  FIVE DAYS AFTER THE ORIGINAL DEADLINE HAD PASSED, Caesar discretely watched Blackbeard pacing the quarterdeck, balling his hands into fists and cursing under his breath as he stared off at Charles Town. He had been keeping an eye on the captain for five straight days now and could not remember seeing him this angry before. His eyes were dark as lumps of coal and he was constantly in a foul mood, stomping back and forth across the wooden deck like a caged lion. Two deadlines had come and gone and still there was no sign of Richards, Marks, or the medicine chest. Like a dark storm cloud, an air of tension with the threat of violence hung over the Queen Anne’s Revenge and her growing flotilla of eight ships anchored around her off the sandbar.

  Caesar was afraid the captain would lose his usual self-control and execute Mr. Wragg or one of the other captives if the medicine chest didn’t arrive soon. The man seemed to be dangerously close to the edge, and Caesar couldn’t recall seeing him so darkly ill-tempered before, though the captain was known on occasion to have his tempestuous or melancholy moods. They had been happening with increased frequency in more recent months, as the size of the pirate flotilla had grown so large as to become unmanageable, an unruly faction had emerged that routinely caused trouble, and Major Bonnet had continued to be at odds with his crew over his decision-making.

  From a group of fisherman, Thache had been informed of the disaster that had befallen Richards and the other emissaries shortly after they had set off from the flagship for Charles Town. Early on during their journey, a sudden squall had capsized their boat. The three men managed to swim to safety on an uninhabited island and awaited rescue for much of the day, well aware that the clock was ticking. The next afternoon, hungry and bedraggled, they realized they would have to rescue themselves. They found a large wooden hatch cover on the shore, but it wasn’t buoyant enough to support all of them. Lacking other options, they clung to the hatch and swam hard towards Charles Town, still miles away. Paddling throughout the night, they made little progress but were rescued by a group of passing fishermen, who brought them to their camp. Marks, realizing the captives’ time was already up, paid the fishermen to sail to Blackbeard and inform him what had happened. Meanwhile, he hired a second boat to take the three of them to Charles Town.

  When the fishermen had found the pirates two days ago to report the emissaries’ condition, Blackbeard was in a rage. But once they related Richards’s and Marks’s mishap and requested, on Marks’s behalf, for two additional days, the pirate commander consented. But then when the two more days came and went with still no sign of Richards and his group, he became apoplectic. Pacing the deck, he threatened Wragg and the others, promising that they should not live through the day if the emissaries did not soon return. Though Caesar could tell it was all for show and Thache was only trying to scare them, it seemed to him that something had turned inside him, and he wondered if perhaps he might actually follow through with his threats. He didn’t like the look in his eyes—like a wild dog.

  But after thinking about it, he realized what was really angering the pirate commander. He was so used to getting his way with prizes and controlling his own destiny that he was coming unraveled when he couldn’t manage events to his satisfaction. Caesar understood that that’s why he was acting so out of character. Thache was not well-equipped to handle the stress of not being in command of a situation. For years now, he had been master of the sea, acting as a king
beholden to no one and taking prizes at will, and now his fate was in the hands of the governor of South Carolina and the citizens of Charles Town. Caesar realized that this was indeed something of an Achilles Heel for the captain. He couldn’t stand not being in control and having his fate dictated by others. It seemed to have caused something to snap inside him and turn him into something far different than the normally calm, composed, and charismatic leader he was.

  Suddenly, Caesar heard orders being barked out. It was Blackbeard shouting to the other ships through his speaking trumpet.

  “Prepare to sail! Prepare to sail! We’re going into Charles Town!”

  The word was quickly passed from sloop to sloop and a cheer of huzzahs went up. To the crew aboard the Queen Anne’s Revenge, Thache then bellowed, “We’re going to rob her and blow her to kingdom come, by thunder, if we don’t have our chest of medicines by the time I drop anchor! Now shake up your timbers and make sail!”

  Caesar snapped to and darted quickly for the quarterdeck as more than three hundred men on the four vessels of the flotilla and the five captured prizes began climbing the rigging and preparing for departure.

  “Get her under way swiftly, Mr. Gibbons!” Thache shouted to his new sailing master now that Israel Hands had taken over as captain of the Adventure. “All hands make sail!”

  “Aye, Captain!”

  Twenty minutes later, the flotilla had weighed anchor and was making steady progress towards the harbor with a strong onshore breeze at their backs. With the aid of the pilot, they followed the shallower South Channel that ran close to Cummins Point before turning into the harbor itself. There it split into smaller and even shallower channels. Out front sailed the Adventure, Revenge, and the small Spanish sloop, with the square-rigged Queen Anne’s Revenge taking up the fourth position and the recent prizes captained by various of Thache’s officers forming the rear of the menacing pirate flotilla.

  The harbor resembled a large rectangular box some five miles long and one and a half miles across. Charles Town itself sat at one end of the harbor, while the other faced the open Atlantic. The main anchorage was where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers converged, and between this safe haven and the open sea lay a series of deepwater channels separated by ever-shifting sandbanks. Caesar saw a dozen or so ships of various sizes and types clustered around the wharves and mooring buoys in the Cooper River.

  Soon the flotilla closed in on the walled city. As they approached, he could see panic seize hold of the citizens at the battlements and beyond. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for them. The people of Charles Town were terror stricken as the nine ships came into full view of the city. Militia scrambled to Granville Bastion and the Half Moon Battery to man the cannons as the pirate fleet trained its guns on the city’s walls. Merchant ships that had been trapped in the harbor for nearly a week cut their anchor lines and made a break for the open ocean. The carriages of the city’s wealthy citizens, overflowing with possessions, clattered down the cobblestone streets, trying to make their escape. By the time the Adventure and Revenge set anchor, Caesar saw women, children, and old people running about the streets like mad things, while boys no older than fourteen or fifteen were being hastily handed flintlock rifles and pistols to defend the city from the invaders. Armed militia rode around on horseback, shepherding people to safety and trying to help them make an orderly exit, but pandemonium had seized hold of the city and people were running, riding, and stumbling in all directions.

  My God, he wondered, are we really going to attack these people? He was reminded of the tales Thache, Howard, and Martin had told him of Captain Morgan sacking Portobello on the Spanish Main. What was taking place before his very eyes was like something out of an old pirate book from the century before, and he couldn’t believe he was a part of it. He looked at Richard Greensail and could see that he didn’t quite believe it either.

  “Make ready the guns, Mr. Cunningham!” commanded Blackbeard. “All hands, stand by for action!”

  The Queen Anne Revenge’s cannons rolled out, one by one, and three hundred pirate throats lifted into the air in terror as one. Caesar checked his pistol charges and said a quick prayer. Though as a boy he had once drawn his spiritual power from the African animal gods passed down from his ancestors, he now believed in a Christian God—and he found that he especially believed in Him when he was about to go into action. He counted down the seconds in his head. He had never attacked a city before, and wondered how the fighting might be different from a boarding party. Somehow hand-to-hand fighting street-by-street seemed a dangerous operation, which was why he believed pirates attacked on land so rarely. They were sea marauders, not land soldiers, and were not properly trained for combat on terra firma.

  He now saw South Carolinians fleeing the nine triangular bastions that protruded from the perimeter wall on the landward side. He supposed the purpose of the bastions was to ensure that any attacker attempting to breech the walls would come under flanking fire from the triangular-shaped bulwarks, allowing the defenders to sweep the ground in front of the walls with musket fire and grape shot. But with the men abandoning the positions in panic, there was no way the town could offer resistance.

  Maybe they will surrender without a fight.

  “Are you ready, Mr. Cunningham, to give them our welcome?”

  “Aye, Captain, ready when you are!”

  “Wait!” someone cried.

  Caesar’s and Richard Greensail’s heads jerked in the direction of the voice. It was William Howard and he was pointing down into the languid, murky-brown river.

  “What is it, man?” snapped Thache, his voice bristling with pent-up irritation.

  “It’s Marks, Captain! I see him in a longboat!” He pointed. “See him there?”

  “Aye, mine eyes see him. But where in bloody hell is Mr. Richards?”

  Scanning the river, Caesar quickly spotted Marks in the longboat coming from Rhett’s Wharf. He was perched in the bow frantically waving a white scarf while two black oarsmen conveyed him towards the Queen Anne’s Revenge. But Blackbeard was right: there was no sign of Richards or the seaman that had accompanied him into Charles Town.

  “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” commanded Blackbeard.

  As the longboat rowed up to the pirate man-of-war, he again ordered his gunners to hold their fire. When the Negro oarsmen brought the shallow-draught vessel alongside, Marks was hoisted aboard along with a heavy wooden chest.

  “Mr. Marks, you are late, sir!” roared Thache. “But I can see at least you have brought my supplies. And yet, rot my bones where be Captain Richards?”

  “Right over there on the quay, Captain,” said Richard Greensail, pointing to the two pirates stumbling along the waterfront with a crowd of townspeople trailing cautiously behind them.

  “Aye, it’s them all right,” said Marks. “They went off and got drunk and I have had the whole town out looking for them. They were located just before you arrived to town from the bar, but I wasn’t about to take a chance and allow you to attack the city. So I rowed out to you.”

  Thache frowned, but after a moment his face relaxed. “Very good, Mr. Marks. In that case, congratulations are in order.”

  “Are you going to let the hostages go now?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. But not until our surgeon has inspected these medical supplies and made sure we have everything we need. Doctor, if you would be so kind.”

  “Oui, Capitaine.”

  While the French doctor proceeded to inspect the contents of the medicine chest, Marks informed Blackbeard of Governor Johnson’s offer of a pardon to him and his men if he wished to lay down his arms. The pirate captain swiftly rejected the overture but soon released all the captives—once all the male prisoners had been stripped of their clothing—along with the captured vessels. Meanwhile, the drunken Richards and crew member who had accompanied him to town were rowed out to the flagship, where they were given an earful from Thache for their dereliction of duty. Once the first of
the prisoners were sent ashore, the flotilla set sail again for the open sea, this time taking the deeper channel that ran near Sullivan’s Island.

  From there, the four ships turned north along the inner shelf and headed parallel to the coast in the direction of the Cape Fear River. They quickly detained two more South Carolina-bound vessels, the sixty-ton William of Boston loaded with lumber and corn; and the forty-five-ton brigantine Princess of Bristol, carrying a cargo of eighty-six African slaves from Angola. Plundering both vessels, Blackbeard added fourteen black African slaves to the Queen Anne’s Revenge. This brought his total slave count up to fifty, since many of the one hundred fifty-seven slaves originally taken from the French La Concorde had been allowed to become pirates or were given away to merchant captains. Those handed over to merchantmen to become working crew members were given in return for skilled seamen pressed into service or for good behavior for not having resisted the pirates.

  When the final tally was in, the pirates had laid siege to a city and paralyzed a colony for more than a week for a chest of medicine, basic provisions including barrels of rice and corn, four thousand pieces of eight, silver and gold coins amounting to fifteen hundred pounds sterling, fourteen slaves, and the clothes off the backs of their gentlemen captives. To Caesar, it was a good haul from nearly a dozen ships and obtaining the chest of medicines had been critical, but what they had seized still had to be split more than three-hundred ways.

  More than three hundred ways, he thought, as he and Richard Greensail stared at the receding coastline and royal blue sea they were leaving behind. More than three hundred ways.

  It was then he had his first inkling of Blackbeard’s game. And he knew it was going to be dangerous and messy.

  CHAPTER 39

  ATLANTIC OCEAN EAST OF CAPE FEAR RIVER, NORTH CAROLINA

  JUNE 1, 1718

  THACHE STARED OUT at the crowd of seamen that had packed into the great cabin of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. A moment earlier they had been ensconced in conversation, but now, as he cleared his throat behind his captain’s desk in preparation for his speech, the crowd deferentially hushed. There were thirty men in all: they were the same crew members with whom he had been laying the secret groundwork for a life after piracy for the past six months. Many of them—like William Howard, Caesar, John Martin, Joseph Curtice, Joseph Brooks Jr. and Sr., Thomas Miller, Nathaniel Jackson, Stephen Daniel, and John Philips—were Bath County pirates. Others were simply men who could be trusted, like Israel Hands, captain of the Adventure; Edward Salter, a cooper who had been forced from his sloop near Puerto Rico to join the pirate flotilla and became a reliable crew member; bosun Garret Gibbons and seaman John Giles; and Caesar’s friend Richard Greensail and several other free black crew members that Thache believed could be counted upon, including Richard Stiles, James Blake, James White, and Thomas Gates who had lived and fought as equals alongside him for many months now and would do so again. These were Blackbeard’s trusted men, those loyal to him that he was counting on to perform one of the greatest maritime deceptions of all time. They stood looking up at him with palpable anticipation, though he and his inner circle had talked in general terms about this very course of action for some time now and had an idea of what to expect.