There was just one problem. It was already too late to pull the cumbersome anchor, even though the Adventure lay in less than thirty feet of water. He would have to cut it. The anchor was firmly embedded in the sand-covered bottom, with around seventy feet of cable laid out. To man the capstan and winch in the thick rope anchor cable would simply take too long—his crew would still be manning the capstan when the sloops reached them.
As he started to give the order to sever the cable, something unexpected happened. The sloop in the second position, the bigger of the two, shuddered to an abrupt halt.
“Look, they’ve run aground on a bar!” cried Caesar.
“Aye, they be in trouble now!” observed Garret Gibbons.
Though the two sides were still beyond trumpet-speaking distance, the pirate crew gave a rousing jeer and two of the crew members pulled down their trousers and exposed their arses in a taunt. Blackbeard smiled. So far things were going his way. But his optimism didn’t last long as the smaller sloop out front continued in its course directly towards him, and the crew of the second vessel began heaving her ballast overboard to lighten her load and reduce her draught. Thache was then surprised yet again. Though the smaller boat in the lead drew less water, she, too, ran aground. Her crew quickly began tossing her fresh water casks overboard to re-float the sloop, apparently recognizing that it was better to be thirsty than dead. Thache wondered if the commander of the flotilla had neglected to secure a pilot for navigation, or if the pilot simply didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He watched as the crews of both vessels worked mightily to get their vessels afloat by throwing objects overboard and using the oar crews.
When the larger sloop broke free, he gave the order to move out to engage the enemy. “Mr. Gibbons, cut the cable! Hoist sail and let’s away!”
“Aye, Captain!” answered the bosun. Then to Joseph Brooks and two other crew members standing by at the windlass. “Don’t stay to take up anchor! Cut the cable!”
They did as instructed as the deck of the Adventure sprang to life. Bosun Garret Gibbons and his team began to hastily haul on the jib’s halyard and others scurried up from below with armloads of cutlasses, flintlock pistols, grenadoes, black powder cartridges for the cannon, and three pair of grappling irons. Master gunner Philip Morton and his crew loaded the starboard guns with cartridges and swan shotpieces of old iron, spick nails, and other lethal odds and ends. In the flurry of battle preparations, Thache instructed Samuel Odell from the trading vessel to go below into the hold and pretend to be a prisoner in case they were boarded. The trader had gone too deep into his cups last night to row back to his vessel and had slept aboard the Adventure.
Four and a half minutes later—with the anchor cable severed, the mainsail and jib raised in the light wind, and both crew and cannon armed for battle—the pirate sloop shoved off. A marker buoy was left behind so they could later recover the anchor and what remained of the cable. Once the oncoming sloops had been dealt with, Thache would then be able to come back and recover the anchor. Now on the move, the Adventure swung parallel to the coastline and began heading on a compass angle ten degrees off the bow of the smaller, grounded sloop. With any luck, his adversaries might run aground again on one of the sandbars that ran parallel to the shore. To the west, Samuel Odell’s trading sloop remained at anchor and would not take part in the battle. For a moment, Thache considered augmenting his sail with his sweeps, but he lacked sufficient manpower to man the oars, cannon, and rigging at the same time and the wind seemed to be picking up a tad. He would just have to count on the jib to do a fair job of it.
All in all, it was a risky endeavor, but he had the advantage of firepower with his carriage and swivel guns and he felt more than up to the task despite their wicked hangovers. Mounted on the Adventure’s quarterdeck, the light anti-personnel swivels were quick to load and easy to aim and fire using either scrap metal or small cannon balls. All Morton and his gun crew had to do was point the swivel guns at the enemy using an iron tiller, clap a piece of burning slow-match into the touch-hole of the powder chamber, and blast away at the two enemy sloops once they had closed to within sixty yards. The effects would be devastating, particularly if fired just before a boarding action. However, at the Adventure’s current distance of slightly over two hundred yards from the lead sloop, still out of effective musket range, they were merely a clamorous way of warning the boat crew off.
Suddenly, the pair of enemy vessels raised their colors. Thache saw one Royal Naval ensign hoisted up followed quickly by another, the two crimson flags with the Union Jack in the upper left corner riffling only slightly in the modest breeze. They had refrained from presenting their Union flags at the masthead to keep him guessing and delay him from opening fire upon them until they had closed to three-quarters’ musket range—one hundred fifty yards.
Clever bastards, he thought. They waited right until the very end. You will soon have a taste of my lead and iron for your skullduggery.
“They be Royal Navy, lads! Let’s show them what we’re made of!”
Now the larger sloop out front broke free and both vessels were heading towards him, their decks crowded with men. Peering through his glass, he could now make out the commander of the flotilla, a tall, side-whiskered officer in a ruffled white shirt and blue naval jacket of lieutenant grade standing next to the wheel on the larger sloop. Even from a distance he could see the fierce resolve on his face beneath his feathered tricorn hat.
“By the blood of Henry Morgan, we are in for a scrap, lads! That there is a first lieutenant in the British Royal Navy and it appears he is well coiffed for the occasion!” he shouted with a pugilist’s grin. “Mr. Morton, make ready your guns to fire! We shall cut them asunder with swan shot and eat their gizzards for supper!”
The crew gave a rowdy cheer. Not one among them was sober or in tip-top fighting shape but their blood was up, giving them the perfect antidote for their hangovers, and they were more than ready to fight. With the wind picking up, the Adventure sailed south against the incoming tide. After threading his way around a sandbar that ran parallel to the shore, Thache was positioned to take an inner passage along the island side of the two vessels, passing to windward along their port beam. He quickly closed the distance between himself and the smaller British sloop. Having pulled herself free of the sandbar, the vessel’s captain bravely attempted to intercept the pirate sloop by altering her course to leeward. But it was a mistake that Thache knew would cost her captain and crew dearly.
“Mr. Morton, you may unleash with vengeance and fury when ready! Give them a taste of our hospitality!”
As the two vessels closed the distance between them to half a pistol shot—twenty-five yards—the Adventure fired a deadly broadside of swan and partridge shot and larger metal fragments. Flames blasted from the muzzles of the pirate cannons and, a split second later, the burst of spreading shot tore across the Ranger’s foredeck, eviscerating and maiming sailors and demolishing her foresails.
The Battle of Ocracoke Island had begun.
With the excitement of battle throbbing inside him, Thache realized the die was cast and there was no turning back. By taking up arms against and killing sailors of King George’s Navy, he and his crew had committed an act of treason for which no governor’s pardon or letter of marque and reprisal would ever protect them. Their fate was sealed. Regardless of the outcome here today, they would die at gunpoint, sword point, or by dangling from the hangman’s noose—for in delivering their broadside against the enemy, he and his fellow gentlemen of fortune aboard the sloop Adventure had signed their own death warrants.
There would be no amnesty and it would be a bloody fight to the death.
CHAPTER 67
OCRACOKE
NOVEMBER 22, 1718
LIEUTENANT ROBERT MAYNARD would always remember the moment just before it happened. One minute the two ships were slowly approaching one another, the Ranger to the lee of the pirate sloop, and the next the Adventure’s cannons
exploded with flame and dealt a lethal broadside that shook the Ranger like an earth tremor.
“Take cover!” he screamed to his consort vessel just before the first gunburst, but he was too far away even with a speaking trumpet and his warning was in vain.
The hailstorm of iron and lead raked across the decks of the Ranger like Death’s horrible scythe, killing the ship’s commander, Midshipman Hyde, and Maynard’s third in command, Allen Arlington, the Lyme’s coxswain. When the smoke cleared, Maynard was stunned to see that no officer remained to command the vessel and more than a dozen men appeared to be either killed or wounded. The deck was practically cleared of seamen, like an army of toy soldiers knocked down by a sudden gust of wind. There, on the Ranger’s blood-soaked deck, the wounded men writhed and convulsed as the sloop slowed to a virtual stop.
He raised his fist defiantly in the air. Damn you, Blackbeard! I’ll get you yet by thunder! This is not over—the battle has just begun!
He looked at his men. To his dismay, even the veterans among them appeared deflated. They could hear the screams of death and anguish from their fellow sailors aboard the stricken Ranger, and the sounds made them wonder what in the hell they had gotten themselves into. Going straight at a pirate vessel armed with nine guns and commanded by the fiercest pirate commodore of them all was not merely reckless, it was insane. And yet, it was now grimly apparent to one and all that they had no choice but to slug it out. They were no longer fighting for King and Country, but for their very lives. And they would not have the support of the Ranger as she had been put out of action, at least temporarily. They were now on their own against a well-armed ship filled with bloodthirsty pirates.
“Brace up, men! We’re still in this fight!” he yelled, trying to rally them. “You know what you have to do! We cannot escape the pirates’ hands even if we had a mind to! Right here and now, it is either fight like a lion or be killed like a lamb!”
The crew gave a rallying cheer, but it wasn’t as loud or convincing as Maynard would have liked. All the same, his men knew how desperate the situation was and would neither give nor expect quarter when the time came.
He looked back at the Adventure. The broadside appeared to have been so effective that Thache slipped past the Ranger uncontested. Or so Maynard had first thought, before realizing that amid the confusion, some of the sailors had managed to get off a volley of small arms fire as the Adventure swept past. With the concentrated musket firing, they were able to sever the Adventure’s fore-halyards, sending her jib—her sole means of propulsion—crashing to the foredeck in a tangled mess of canvas and snarls of tarred rope. The end result was that the critical line holding up the pirates’ foresails caused the Adventure to abruptly lose speed. And in the confusion, whoever was steering the pirate sloop allowed her to slip onto a nearby shoal.
A determined gleam came to his eye. That’s it! There’s my chance!
If he came up alongside the enemy, he could attempt a boarding before she could bring her guns to bear. His greatest strength was his numbers so to have any chance of success he needed to get close to his quarry, board her, and allow his weight of numbers to win the day. But the clever Blackbeard, despite losing control of his vessel for a brief moment, took only a minute to get off the bar with his men throwing objects overboard on the still-rising tide.
Maynard cursed his bad luck. But then things went from bad to worse. Having dispatched the Ranger, Blackbeard’s pirate ship was to windward and coming straight for the Jane just as decisively as Maynard was heading for the pirates with a third of his crew straining at the oars.
As the smoke drifted off, he could see his opponent clearly now on the quarterdeck. Thache stood out from his gang of motley seamen, presenting a towering, eye-catching figure with his black tricorn hat, crimson jacket, bandolier of pistols strapped about his waist, and his thick, plaited black beard like something out of an Exquemelin adventure tale. But what struck Maynard most of all was his complete calm in the midst of battle. There was nothing frantic or desperate about him. He had clearly commanded in battle before, whether it was from his boarding actions in the Royal Navy serving under Admiral Whetstone, his later bouts as a privateer and pirate, or both.
At fifty yards and closing, the pirate commander called out to him with his speaking trumpet. “Damn you for villains, who are you? And from whence have you come? Leave us alone and we shall meddle not with you!”
Through his own speaking trumpet, Maynard roared back, “You can see by our colors we are no pirates, and it is you we want, sir! And it is you we shall have, dead or alive, else it will cost us our lives!”
“Damnation to you and King George then, you cowardly puppies! We will give no quarter, nor take none in return!”
“Nor shall we, sir!” he roared back before turning to his men and issuing a command. “Fire at will! Fire at will!”
A dozen muskets opened fire, pouring into the pirate vessel, as the oarsmen manning the sweeps put their backs into it and continued to close the distance between the Jane and the enemy to twenty-five yards. At the same time, the pirate commander ordered his crew to strafe the deck of the Jane with swivel-guns and small arms fire.
The result was a terrible fate similar to the Ranger. Maynard and his pirate hunters were massed on deck, with no protection from gunwales or barricades, and the lethal mix of swan shot, spick nails, and pieces of old iron tore through the Jane’s crew like a hurricane. There were a series of loud BOOMs and puffs of smoke all along the deck of the Adventure, and Maynard was shocked by the instant carnage. He saw a wet pink cloud of blood and tissue fly out the back of a seaman standing near the bow of the ship. He saw his bosun twitch and his arms fly out helplessly, as if he were groping through the darkness, and then fall to the deck grievously wounded. He saw blood spray over another crew member from a seaman near the starboard rail torn apart by buckshot-sized swan shot; it looked like crimson paint spattered across an empty white canvas. He saw another seaman take a hit to the kneecap and swiftly lose the unwinnable battle with gravity as his legs buckled like a stringless marionette and he slumped to the deck. Finally, he saw another of his crewmen go down hard, blood gushing from his torn pant leg from lead shot mixed with old iron scraps and nails.
Despite what his eyes told him, he couldn’t believe what was happening. The violence was almost too horrifying to be real. The world seemed to move in slow motion, as if he was caught up in a terrible nightmare. And then the realness of it all came crashing home as he heard the shrieks and moans of the wounded slice through the horrible incubus, summoning him back to reality.
Another blast came from the pirates’ swivel guns. He dove for cover on the quarterdeck, falling awkwardly with his sword in its sheath. The Jane gave a convulsive shudder from the swan shot and then the two sides exchanged musket fire. The air quickly became choked with a thick cloud of blue-gray smoke from the gunpowder blasts of cannon and small arms fire, and with little or no wind, the heavy pall added to the confusion of the fight. In less than a minute, the deck of His Majesty’s sloop had become strewn with dead and wounded sailors. Scanning the bloody, smoke-filled deck, he estimated that eight of his men had been killed and perhaps as many as a dozen wounded, which meant that between the two naval vessels under his command he had already sustained close to fifty percent casualties.
Hearing the screams of agony and looking through the haze of smoke at the scene of devastation, he realized that he was lucky to have avoided being hit. To stern, he heard the voice of his helmsman, the big Scotsman Abraham Demelt.
“Are you all right, Lieutenant?”
He quickly checked to see if he was hurt. No blood, but his left wrist was numb from falling awkwardly upon his sword on the quarterdeck. “I’m fine, I think. How about you?”
“I’m covered in blood. But it’s not mine.”
Someone screamed, “Make ready to fight! They’re going to board us!”
Good Lord, we’re all going to die, he thought, still struggl
ing to process the grisly close-quarters sea action he had just witnessed. You must do something.
And then it came to him.
There was no doubt that, having delivered a devastating blast of swan shot and taking down at least half of his men, Thache would now try to board the Jane. To counter the move, Maynard would, under the cover of the gunpowder smoke, order a dozen or so uninjured men to hide in the Jane’s hold and await his signal to attack. Another similar broadside would be crippling, and would leave him with too few men to continue the fight. He had already had the hatch covers removed and a second ladder fitted for the companionway for just such an eventuality, but in the heat of battle he had forgotten. Now he would implement what he had prepared for and turn the tide of battle in his favor. Once he and Thache came alongside one another, the hidden men could race up the ladders and take the pirates by surprise.
He looked through the haze at the approaching Adventure. The two boats would be abreast of one another any second now. He quickly assembled his first mate, helmsman, and pilot.
“Lieutenant Baker!” he shouted. “I want you to take the remaining unwounded men below decks, lay in wait until the pirates board us, and then take them by surprise in an all-out attack! I will lie low with Mr. Demelt and Mr. Butler here, signal you when the pirates come over the side, and join you in the fight! We are going to lure them into a trap and turn the tables on them!”
“Aye, Lieutenant! So, you’ll give me the signal then?”
“Aye, as I said I will remain here with Mr. Demelt and Mr. Butler, who will stand beside the whipstaff!” he said, referring to the steering tiller that operated the ship’s rudder. “I will whisper orders to you both during the pirates’ approach, letting you know where they are and when you and your men are to rush up the ladders and take the pirates by surprise!”
“It shall be done, Lieutenant! Godspeed!” and he was off to gather up the men.
Blackbeard- The Birth of America Page 50
