Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean

by David Cordingly

  By the time Rogers’ expedition reached the Bahamas in July 1718 Blackbeard had moved on to the coast of North America and was terrorising the inhabitants of Charleston, South Carolina. Of more immediate concern to Rogers and his approaching squadron was the presence in Nassau harbour of Charles Vane, the most aggressive and brutal of the local pirate captains. As with most pirates, little is known of his background and early life. He seems to have been associated with Henry Jennings and may have joined him in plundering the Spanish wrecks, but he first came to prominence when news of the King’s pardon for pirates reached New Providence. Copies of the royal proclamation were brought to Nassau by the son of Governor Bennett of Bermuda in December 1717 and caused conflict and divisions among the pirates. Most of them, notably Jennings and Hornigold, were prepared to accept the pardon but a hard-line group including Charles Vane, Paulsgrave Williams, Edward England and John Rackam refused to submit to the crown.

  In February 1718 Captain Pearce, commander of HMS Phoenix, 26 guns, arrived at Nassau hoping to persuade more pirates to accept the royal pardon.35 He found fourteen vessels lying at anchor. Some were flying English, Dutch, French or Spanish flags but several were flying black or red pirate flags. When he learnt that Vane, the leader of the rebellious pirates, had taken his sloop Lark to a nearby island, Captain Pearce tracked him down, forced Vane to surrender and escorted the Lark back to Nassau. The naval officer’s resolute action had an adverse effect on those pirates who had already accepted the royal pardon. Alarmed that Vane and his crew would be executed, they told Pearce that more of the local inhabitants would surrender if Vane, England and the other fourteen men on the Lark were released. Pearce agreed to do so, and during the next two days he was gratified to receive the surrender of many more pirates. He had soon accumulated 209 signatures or marks on the necessary documents.

  Vane had no intention of giving up piracy and he persuaded forty other men to sneak out of the harbour in two boats and capture a small Jamaican sloop that was sailing by. In defiance of the anchored British warship they brought the sloop into the harbour with a pirate flag flying at her masthead and proceeded to plunder her. An attempt by Pearce to board the Jamaica sloop was repulsed, and he later wrote, ‘I several times summoned the inhabitants together in His Majesty’s name and used all the arguments possible to prevail with them to assist me in suppressing the said pirate. But they always rejected all methods I proposed.’36 His authority was constantly flouted during the following weeks. Three of his sailors deserted his ship and joined the pirates, and Vane’s company was now more than seventy-five strong. With his ship increasingly vulnerable to attack, Pearce made preparations to depart. On 8 April the Phoenix sailed from Nassau in company with five merchant vessels and headed for New York.

  Vane now embarked on a series of vicious attacks on passing merchant ships, three of them being documented in detail by some of the victims. On 14 April Vane intercepted the Bermuda sloop Diamond near Rum Key. Vane was sailing the sloop Ranger of 6 guns and had a crew of seventy. The pirates boarded the Diamond, stole 300 pieces of eight and a Negro slave, beat up the captain John Tibby and his crew and then hanged one of the seamen by his neck until he was almost dead. The seaman, Nathaniel Catling, would later testify that after they let him down on the deck, ‘one of them perceiving he began to revive cut him with a cutlass over his collar bone and would have continued the same till he had murdered this deponent had not one of their own gang contradicted it, being, as he said, too great a cruelty’.37 The captain was then forced to cut away his mast and bowsprit before the pirates set fire to the sloop.

  The same day Vane and his men attacked another sloop, the William and Martha of Bermuda, under the command of Captain Edward North. They took everything of value on the vessel, and assaulted the captain and crew ‘by beating them and using other cruelties, particularly to one, who they bound, hands and feet and tied (upon his back) down to the bowsprit with matches to his eyes burning and a pistol loaded (as he supposes) with the muzzle into his mouth, thereby to oblige him to confess what money was on board’.38 North observed that while he was on board the pirate sloop he heard such expressions as ‘Curse the king and all the higher powers’ and ‘Damn the Governor’ and that the usual toast when drinking was ‘Damnation to King George’.

  On 19 April the Bermuda sloop Samuel, captained by Joseph Bossa, was attacked near Crooked Island by the Ranger.39 The pirates stripped her of her cargo of dry goods, and again beat up the captain and the crew. From the various depositions given by the victims when they returned to Bermuda we learn that during this cruise Vane plundered at least twelve vessels, in each case subjecting the crew to beatings and other cruelties in revenge for the fact that the Bermuda authorities had imprisoned a man called Thomas Brown on suspicion of piracy. No records have come to light of Vane’s activities in the subsequent weeks but, according to Captain Johnson, he was back in Nassau by 4 July with a number of prizes, including a French ship of 20 guns and a French brigantine laden with sugar, indigo, brandy, claret and white wine. He apparently stormed ashore with a sword in his hand and threatened to burn down the principal houses of the town, ‘and tho he committed no murders, his behaviour was extremely insolent to all who were not as great villains as himself’.40 For twenty days Vane ruled Nassau, stopping all vessels entering the harbour and preventing any ships from leaving. When he was informed that a governor had been appointed and was on his way from England, ‘he swore, while he was in the harbour, he would suffer no other Governor than himself’.41

  9

  Welcome to Nassau

  At 4 p.m. on 25 July 1718 the lookouts on HMS Rose sighted the eastern end of the island of New Providence. Captain Whitney had been ordered by Commodore Chamberlain to go ahead of the squadron and lead the way from the outer island of Eleuthera, past Harbour Island and the off-lying reefs, to Nassau. The 20-gun warship made good progress in a strong breeze and by 6 p.m. she was approaching the harbour entrance. The pilot guided her through the channel until she was able to drop anchor in three to four fathoms. Ahead was a long, narrow stretch of water with Hog Island on one side and the derelict waterfront of Nassau on the other side, the only prominent landmark being the crumbling walls and bastions of the fort. Thirty or forty merchant vessels of various nationalities were at anchor in the channel or were lying half-submerged in the shallows, their scorched black timbers indicating that they had been set on fire before sinking.1 Several of the vessels at anchor were stripped of their fittings and some were missing masts, bowsprits and rigging. There were a few visiting trading ships and brigs but most in evidence were the pirate sloops – powerful-looking vessels in good order and well armed with carriage guns and swivel guns.

  The largest vessel in the anchorage was a French-built merchantman of 22 or 24 guns which was flying the St George’s flag of England at her maintopmast head. To the surprise of Captain Whitney and his crew she fired three shots at the Rose. Whitney lowered a boat and sent his first lieutenant across to know the reason for this hostile action. The lieutenant discovered that the captain of the ship was the pirate Charles Vane. Most of his crew appeared to be drunk and when Vane was asked why he had opened fire ‘his answer was, he would use his utmost endeavour to burn us, and all the vessels in the harbour that night’.2

  At around 7 p.m. the Shark, the Buck and the transport ship Willing Mind negotiated the harbour entrance and anchored near the Rose. The larger ships Delicia and HMS Milford remained outside until they could get a pilot to guide them in. That evening Charles Vane made his preparations. He shifted his men and valuables into two shallow-draft vessels and loaded the guns of his French prize with double shot and partridge shot. At midnight he set the ship on fire and towed her towards the new arrivals. All wooden ships were extremely vulnerable to attack by fireships. Naval ships with their magazines loaded with barrels of gunpowder were particularly vulnerable, but what made the situation at Nassau even more dangerous was the narrowness of the channel and the shallows
on either side. Fortunately the British sailors were alert. As the flaming ship bore down on them, they hacked through their anchor cables, set their topsails and managed to escape out of the harbour without running aground.

  The next morning the ships made their way back into the harbour, all except the Milford and Delicia. A local pilot had come aboard the Milford at 6 a.m. but he mistook the height of the tide and as they approached the entrance both ships ran aground on the harbour bar, where they remained for the next two hours. By the time they got into the harbour Vane had set sail with all his men in a schooner and a sloop of 10 guns. With their shallow draft they were able to escape out of the confined channel at the eastern end of the harbour. By the time the sloop Buck and another sloop had been despatched to track him down, Vane was on his way. ‘When he perceived our sloops, he took down his St George’s flag, and hoisted a black flag, which is their signal to intimate that they will neither give or take quarter.’3 The sloops followed Vane out to sea but they had to abandon the chase, ‘finding he out-sailed them two foot to their one’.

  During the afternoon the Milford and the Delicia were anchored in the deeper part of the channel not far from the fort. Officers were sent ashore to meet the local inhabitants and assess the situation. The captain of the Shark sent a boat with some men to locate and recover the anchor, which they had cut loose during the night.

  The next day, Sunday 27 July, was cloudy with rain early in the morning and a fresh breeze tugging at the flags and rattling the rigging of the anchored ships. At 10 a.m. Captain Woodes Rogers, now His Excellency Woodes Rogers, Esquire, Governor, Captain-General and Vice-Admiral of the Bahama Islands, prepared to go ashore. Accompanied by Commodore Chamberlain and the men he had brought with him to assist him in governing the islands, he was rowed across the harbour in the longboat of the Delicia. As the boat passed each of the warships he was greeted with an eleven-gun salute. By the time he stepped ashore a large crowd had gathered at the water’s edge to greet him. The descriptions of his reception vary. Rogers himself simply wrote, ‘I landed and took possession of the Fort, where I read out his Majesty’s Commission in the presence of my officers, soldiers and about three hundred of the people here, who received me under arms and readily surrendered shewing then many tokens of joy for the re-introduction of government.’ Captain Pomeroy in a letter to the Admiralty confirmed that the Governor was received ‘with a great deal of seeming joy by those that stile themselves marooners’ and reckoned there were no fewer than 400 to 500 people on the island. The most picturesque description of the scene comes from an additional chapter which Captain Johnson added to his General History of the Pyrates. According to his version, Rogers was greeted by Thomas Walker, the chief justice, and by Thomas Taylor, the president of the council, and by the pirate captains Hornigold, Davis, Carter, Burgess, Courant and Clark. The pirates ‘drew up their crews in two lines reaching from the water-side to the Fort, the Governor and other officers marching between them; in the meantime, they being under arms, made a running fire over his head’.4

  There are very few references to the appearance of Nassau at this time. Before the Spanish raids there appears to have been a small but thriving community with some farms and plantations, but we have seen that on at least three occasions the Spanish landed on New Providence, burnt down and demolished the houses and plundered the inhabitants so that they fled to the surrounding woods for shelter. The arrival of the pirates and logwood cutters must have led to the construction of some buildings on the waterfront for shipwrights and carpenters and for shops and taverns, but it seems likely that it was little more than a shanty town. We know that the fort was in ruins and that soon after Rogers’ arrival one of the bastions facing the sea fell down, ‘having only a crazy cracked wall in its foundation’. There were certainly a few houses in reasonable condition, including one which would become the Governor’s house, but there was no accommodation for the soldiers, so sails had to be brought ashore from the ships and makeshift shelters constructed within the walls of the fort. The roads and pathways were overgrown with bushes and undergrowth. What would have struck the newcomers more than the derelict condition of the town was the foul stench which came from a vast pile of cow hides. This was blamed on the pirates ‘having sometime before the Governor’s arrival, having brought in great quantities of raw hides which putrefied and infected the air so much that it killed all ye cattle that were on the island, and afterwards infected the inhabitants so that many of the people carried from England died of the same contagion’.5

  At this time it was still believed that many diseases were spread by poisonous vapours or miasmas in the air. It was not known that mosquitoes were responsible for spreading malaria and yellow fever or that cholera was a waterborne disease which was transmitted to humans through eating food or drinking water contaminated with the cholera bacteria. The rotting and foul-smelling cow hides were unlikely to have been directly responsible for the sickness which overwhelmed the community but were indicative of dangerously unhygienic conditions which could have led to cholera, the most likely killer in this case. A later report on Rogers noted ‘that he was in danger of intestine commotions, and weakened by contagious diseases soon after his landing, that destroyed above half the best people he brought with him’.6 The logbook of HMS Milford records the death of the surgeon, the master and two crew members within a week of their arrival at Nassau.7 Rogers’ first report to London lists the names of eighty-six soldiers, sailors and passengers who had died after his arrival. It would be the first and most devastating blow to his plans for the reconstruction of the community.

  Rogers’ first task was to appoint a Council and officers to help him rule the islands. After making enquiries about the characters of those inhabitants who were not pirates, he held an Assembly on 1 August. Twelve men were appointed to the Council. Six of these were drawn from the people he had brought with him. These included Robert Beauchamp, who was made Secretary General and First Lieutenant of the Independent Company of Soldiers; and Christopher Gale, who was made Chief Justice because he had proved ‘an honest and genteel character’ during his thirteen years as Chief Justice in North Carolina. Six of the councillors were local inhabitants. The next task was to offer the royal pardon to the pirates. Two hundred of these came forward and took the oath of allegiance to King George.

  On 5 August a formal council was held at the Governor’s house and a number of practical measures were drawn up and agreed. The first of these was to repair the fort, to mount as many guns as possible and to clear the brushwood and shrubs within gunshot of the fort. Among the other resolutions passed at this and subsequent assemblies were the following: each inhabitant was to be responsible for clearing the ground of the lot they possessed; where there were vacant lots a person could apply to the Secretary’s Office, enter his or her name in a book, and could then ‘build a habitable house according to the present manner of building in this island’; a palisade was to be constructed around the fort and every male aged between eighteen and sixty was to bring along to the fort ten sticks of straight wood nine foot in length for this purpose; every man who understood stone-laying was to assist in the building works; and all male Negroes were to report to the fort at six o’clock every morning for ten days to assist in the speedy repair of the structure.8

  A list drawn up on 31 October indicated the items that were urgently needed and not available on the island. At the head of the list were guns: eight twenty-four-pounders and eight eighteen-pounders; 150 small arms with bayonets and 100 pistols. Tools were next on the list: sixty pickaxes, sixty iron spades and ‘a large smiths bellows, anvil and all manner of tools to furnish a shop’.9 And finally a number of workmen were needed: six house carpenters, eight bricklayers and masons with tools, three blacksmiths and twenty able-bodied labourers.

  In spite of the sickness decimating the new arrivals, some good work was carried out in the first month or so. Urgent repairs were carried out on the fort, and a smaller fort of eight gu
ns was erected to guard the eastern entrance of the harbour. The inhabitants were formed into three companies of militia and were organised to keep a regular watch at night. Rogers noted, ‘The people did for fourteen days work vigorously, seldom less than two hundred men a day.’10 And on hearing news that Charles Vane had been seen in the vicinity of Green Turtle Key, about 120 miles north of New Providence, with some captured vessels, Rogers commissioned the reformed pirates Captain Hornigold and Captain Cockram to become pirate hunters. They set off in a sloop to track down Vane and report on his movements.

  It was perhaps inevitable that the initial enthusiasm which greeted the arrival of Rogers’ expedition would not last. By the end of October Rogers was reporting that 100 of the pirates who had accepted the royal pardon had taken up piracy again. He reckoned they were ‘weary of living under restraint and are either gone to several parts of North America, or engaged themselves on services at sea’.11 The local inhabitants soon returned to their old ways, preferring an idle life to serious labouring. And in spite of Rogers’ entreaties and his warnings about possible attack from the Spanish, the commanders of the naval ships which had acted as his escort abandoned the settlement to its fate. The Milford and the Shark left Nassau on 16 August and headed for New York. The Rose left four weeks later also bound for New York. Rogers and his people were left with the armed merchantman Delicia to defend the harbour and act as a guardship.