When the invasion force arrived off Nassau on 24 February 1720 Rogers had at his disposal 100 soldiers and nearly 500 local militiamen; the fort was armed with fifty mounted guns and the 10-gun eastern battery had been completed; and in addition to his 40-gun guardship Delicia, there was a naval warship in the harbour – HMS Flamborough, 24 guns, which happened to be paying a visit. The logbook of the Flamborough recorded the first sighting and approach of the Spanish fleet: ‘at 6 AM saw 12 Sail in the Offing standing for the harbour mouth, We made ’em to be 3 Ships, 1 Brigantine and the rest Sloops, At noon the Ships anchored off the Bar and the Brig & Sloops sailed to the E end of Hogg Island & there anchored, They all hoisted Spanish Colours.’15
Later information revealed that the Spanish invasion fleet was led by the flagship San José of 36 guns; she was accompanied by the San Cristóforo, 20 guns; a third ship of 14 guns; a 12-gun brigantine; and eight armed sloops. They were carrying a military force of between 1,200 and 1,300 men. In theory the Spanish were considerably superior in ships and men to the British defenders, but an amphibious invasion force was invariably at a disadvantage when faced with well-manned forts and gun emplacements; and on this occasion the Spanish also had to contend with the weather. For some reason the Spanish admiral decided against launching an immediate attack but waited until the next day. And the next day a strong north wind built up during the morning so that the fleet found itself on a lee shore with waves breaking on the shoals and reefs off the harbour entrance. By 3 p.m. the situation had become so hazardous that the vessels in the fleet cut their anchor cables and headed for the open sea. The three ships never came back but at around eleven that night the brigantine and the sloops returned and, according to the Flamborough’s log, ‘attempted to land their men but two Negroes firing into their Boats they put back again to their vessels’.16 That was the end of the invasion. Some of the sloops remained off the coast for the next few days but on 1 March they headed back to Cuba. Several weeks later Rogers received a letter from two Englishmen in Havana who had been informed that the Spanish fleet had been hit by a storm two hours after arriving off Nassau and had been forced to lose their anchors and bear away. The Englishmen had some doubts about this version of events and reported that most of the ships ‘have all returned again to their safe harbour whether it was distress of weather or fear (which we are more apt to believe) that hath thus baulked their attempt we doubt not …’.17 However, the danger from the storm was very real because on the return voyage the San Cristóforo was wrecked on the Bahama Banks.18
Having successfully prevented a Spanish invasion and having expelled the pirates from New Providence, Rogers had every reason to expect a favourable reaction to the reports he sent home. He also deserved a sympathetic and practical response to his requests for the reimbursement of the money he and the copartners had spent on defending the island. Instead he heard nothing and received nothing. There was no response from the Council of Trade and Plantations to his first detailed report, and no replies to the many letters he wrote to Secretary Craggs updating him on progress. It is little wonder that the opening sentence of his second report to the Council, written two months after the abortive Spanish invasion, revealed his sense of abandonment: ‘My Lords, Its about twenty one months since my first arrival here attended with as great disappointments, sickness and other misfortunes as almost can be imagined of which I have continually advised in the best manner I could, and I have yet no account from home what is or will not be done for the preservation of this settlement.’19 He went on to point out that ‘having no news of my bills being paid at home I am forced to run into too much debt and its with great difficulty that I have hitherto supported myself and the garrison’. In December of the previous year Samuel Buck, on behalf of the copartners, had sent a petition to their lordships pointing out that they had already spent £11,394 on the fortifications, and further sums on the seamen’s wages for the guardship Delicia and on commissioning the sloops and crews which had been despatched to track down the pirates. The total sum to date was more than £20,000 and he humbly besought their lordships to present the estimates to Parliament for payment.20
During the summer of 1720 an incident took place which was minor in itself but revealed the tensions which Rogers was under. On the evening of 10 July the sentry on the eastern bastion challenged a boat which had set off from the shore and was heading across the harbour. The sentry challenged fifteen times without receiving an answer, and was therefore ordered by Rogers to fire two shots at the boat. The crew promptly yelled back that they were from the Delicia. Rogers immediately summoned Captain Wingate Gale, the commander of the guardship, to come ashore. When Gale refused to do so, Rogers collected his Provost Marshal and twelve soldiers and went out to the ship with a warrant to put its commander under arrest. Rogers’ justification for this was that Gale had disobeyed his commands and ‘I was driven to apprehend him myself by force to prevent the mischievous consequences of his ill example, or his raising a mutiny against me.’21 According to one witness, Captain Gale armed his men in order to resist the soldiers coming on board but several other witnesses denied that the captain or his men were armed and that Captain Gale ‘offered no resistance until Governor Rogers called him a rascal and struck him with his pistol upon the head’.22 Rogers ordered Gale to be put in close confinement all night and the next morning called a Council, which agreed that if Gale gave his word for his future good behaviour he could be released from custody.
The incident gives added credence to the remarks of Dr Thomas Dover, who, it will be recalled, noted several instances of Rogers’ hot temper and his violent threats to those who opposed him. But it is clear from Rogers’ correspondence that it was not the Spanish, or problems with his Council or his colleagues, which were proving an intolerable burden. It was his grave concerns about the finances of the islands, and his own ever-increasing debts, which were making him ill. Soon he would be driven to seek leave of absence in order to recover his health. Before he did so the pirates caused another diversion. It was a diversion which had its origins in the Bahamas but would reach its much publicised conclusion on the island of Jamaica.
12
Calico Jack and the Female Pirates
It was Woodes Rogers who first alerted the outside world to the presence of women among the pirates of the Caribbean. On 10 October 1720 The Boston Gazette printed a news item and two proclamations which had been despatched from New Providence a month earlier. The news item informed readers that among the pirates on the coast of the Bahamas was ‘one Rackum who run away with a sloop of 6 guns and took with him 12 men, and two women’. It went on to say that the Governor of the Bahamas had sent a sloop with forty-five men after them, and some time later Dr Rowan with his 12-gun sloop and fifty-four men had also set out to track down the pirates.
The first of the two proclamations issued by Rogers concerned a pirate attack on the sloop Recovery of Nassau by a company of pirates led by John Lewis. The second proclamation provided further details of the piracy committed by John Rackam and his associates. It announced that on 22 August ‘John Rackum, George Featherstone, John Davis, Andrew Gibson, John Howell, Noah Patrick, &c. and two Women, by Name, Ann Fulford alias Bonny, & Mary Read’ had stolen and run away with a sloop called the William, of about twelve tons, ‘mounted with 4 great Guns and 2 swivel ones, also ammunition, sails, rigging, anchor, cables, and a canoe owned by and belonging to Capt. John Ham’. The pirates had gone on to rob a boat on the south side of New Providence as well as a sloop riding at Berry Islands, some thirty miles to the north. The proclamation concluded that John Rackam and his company ‘are hereby proclaimed pirates and enemies to the Crown of Great Britain, and are to be so treated and deemed by all his Majesty’s subjects’.1
This was a sensational announcement because seafaring was then regarded as an exclusively male occupation. Women went to sea as passengers, of course, and it was not uncommon for wives on naval and merchant ships to accompany their husbands on
ocean-going passages. A few examples have come to light of young women dressing as men in order to spend months and sometimes years at sea working as sailors but they were so rare that when their sex was revealed they tended to become minor celebrities – Hannah Snell, who served in the British army and the navy in the eighteenth century, later performed on the London stage. Women pirates were an even greater rarity. There was Alwilda, the daughter of a Scandinavian king who had taken command of a company of pirates and roamed the Baltic in the fifth century AD. She had fought a battle in the Gulf of Finland and had eventually become Queen of Denmark. And there was the brave and resourceful Grace O’Malley, whose exploits along the west coast of Ireland in the sixteenth century are well documented. From her base at Rockfleet Castle, overlooking Clew Bay in County Mayo, she led a fleet of around twenty galleys on punitive raids against rival chieftains. She attacked and plundered passing merchant ships, provoking such a storm of protest that the English governor of the province sent an expedition to besiege her castle. She fought off this challenge but in 1577 was caught during a raid and imprisoned in Limerick gaol for eighteen months. Constantly forced to defend her territory from aggressive neighbours she famously appealed to Queen Elizabeth I. They met at Greenwich Palace in September 1593 and O’Malley made such an impression on the English queen that she was granted ‘some maintenance for the rest of her living of her old years’.2 She died at Rockfleet in her seventies and her son eventually became Viscount Mayo.
Apart from these isolated examples there are no documented accounts of women pirates in the western world until the appearance of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, so it is not surprising that when Captain Johnson came to write his history of the pirates he devoted considerable space to their lives and drew particular attention to ‘the remarkable actions and adventures of the two female pyrates’ on the title page of his book. Although the printed record of their trial provides us with detailed information about their appearance and behaviour while they were members of Rackam’s crew, the only information we have about their early lives comes from Johnson. No evidence has come to light to substantiate his colourful account, which is a pity because, as he himself admits, ‘the odd incidents of their rambling lives are such, that some may be tempted to think the whole story no better than a novel or romance’.3
According to Johnson, Mary Read was born in England. Her mother had married a sailor and had a son, but the sailor went away to sea and never returned. Left on her own, the young mother had a brief affair and became pregnant. To conceal this from her relations she went to stay with friends in the country, where she gave birth to Mary. Soon after this her son died and she decided to pass her daughter off as her son and to ask her wealthy mother-in-law for financial assistance. Mary was brought up as a boy and when she was thirteen she was sent out to work as a footboy for a French lady. She soon grew tired of this menial life and, having ‘a roving mind’, she travelled to Flanders and joined a foot regiment as a cadet. She fought in several engagements, fell in love with a handsome Flemish soldier with whom she was sharing a tent and duly married him. After leaving the army they set up as proprietors of a public house near Breda called the Three Horse Shoes. Mary’s husband died shortly after this, so she assumed men’s clothing again and after a spell in another foot regiment she boarded a ship and sailed to the West Indies. Her ship was captured by pirates and after further adventures she found herself on the ship commanded by Rackam with Anne Bonny among the crew.
Anne Bonny was born near Cork in Ireland. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was a maid in the lawyer’s household. When the lawyer’s wife learnt of her husband’s affair they separated. The lawyer was so fond of the girl he had by the maid that he decided that she should live with him. He dressed her as a boy and pretended that he was training her to be a lawyer’s clerk. When the true circumstances were revealed the scandal affected his practice, so he emigrated to Carolina, taking the maid and their daughter Anne with him. Anne grew up to be a bold and headstrong young woman and in 1718 she married a penniless sailor named James Bonny. This so upset her father, who was now a successful merchant and plantation owner, that he threw her out of the house. Anne and her sailor husband sailed to New Providence, where he hoped to find employment. According to Johnson, it was in Nassau that James Bonny found that his wife, ‘who was very young, turned a libertine upon his hands, so that he once surprised her lying in a hammock with another man’. She also attracted the attention of John Rackam, ‘who making courtship to her, soon found means of withdrawing her affections from her husband’.
It will be recalled that Rackam had been a member of Charles Vane’s crew. He had taken part in the spate of pirate attacks which Vane had undertaken in the weeks before Rogers’ arrival, and he was with Vane when he escaped from the harbour at Nassau after the fireship attack on the warships which had escorted the new Governor to the Bahamas. In November 1718 Vane had broken off an action with a French warship against the wishes of the majority of his crew. The next day, by a general vote of the pirates, Vane had been replaced as captain by Rackam, his quartermaster. Rackam took command of the pirate brigantine and sailed away, leaving Vane with a sloop and the remnants of the crew. Rackam had headed for Jamaica. On 11 December he captured the merchant ship Kingston off the harbour of Port Royal and in sight of the inhabitants. The ship had such a valuable cargo that her owners promptly fitted out two privateers and set off in pursuit. They tracked Rackam to the Isle of Pines, off the south coast of Cuba. From Sir Nicholas Lawes, the Governor of Jamaica, we learn that, upon the approach of the privateers, ‘the pirates who were on board the ship, made their escape on shore in a canoe, and the two sloops are returned into Port Royal harbour with the ship and the greatest part of her cargo’.4 Rackam and his men eventually managed to make their way to Nassau, where they persuaded Rogers to grant them the royal pardon.
At some point Rackam had acquired the memorable nickname of Calico Jack ‘because his jackets and drawers were always made of calico’.5 He would now acquire lasting fame by his association with the female pirates. His recent piracies had provided him with enough loot to live in some luxury and his generosity towards Anne Bonny evidently contributed to her wish to leave her sailor husband. In the Appendix to the first volume of his history Johnson includes a curious description of what happened next. It seems that Anne wished Rackam to give James Bonny a sum of money in order to persuade him to give up his claim on her so she could live with Rackam. Furthermore she wanted this arrangement to be put in writing and confirmed by witnesses. Word soon got round the small community of Nassau ‘so that the Governor hearing of it, sent for her and one Anne Fulworth, who came with her from Carolina, and passed for her mother, and was privy to all her loose behaviour, and examining them both upon it, and finding they could not deny it, he threatened if they proceeded further in it, to commit them both to prison, and order them both to be whipped’. Anne thereupon promised to be very good, to live with her husband and to avoid loose company in the future.
Anne did not keep her promise for very long. Having run out of money, Rackam decided to return to piracy. He had his eye on John Ham’s 6-gun sloop William, which was noted for its speed and was currently at anchor in the harbour. On his behalf Anne went on board the vessel on several occasions to find out how many men were usually on the vessel and what sort of watch was kept. She learnt that the owner slept on shore at night and that only two men remained on board to keep watch. Armed with this useful information, Rackam decided to act at once. He assembled fourteen pirates, including Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and at midnight they rowed out to the William, which was lying very close to the shore. The night was dark and it was raining so they got on board without anyone raising the alarm. They had no difficulty in overcoming the men on watch. Anne went straight to their cabin with a drawn sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, and ‘swore that if they pretended to resist, or make a noise, she would blow out their brains’. One anchor was heaved in, the other ancho
r cable was let loose and a small sail was set to give them steerage way. Passing close to the fort, they were challenged and asked where they were going. They explained that their anchor cable had parted and they told the same story to the men on the guardship. When they reached the harbour mouth, and reckoned that they could not be seen because of the darkness of the night, they hoisted all sail and stood out to sea. John Ham’s two seamen were unwilling to join the pirates, so they were given a boat to enable them to row ashore.
From Nassau they sailed east to Eleuthera and along its low-lying coast until they sighted the settlement of wooden houses on Harbour Island. A mile or so off the white sandy beaches of that beautiful island they intercepted seven fishing boats and systematically robbed the local fishermen of their fish and fishing tackle and any money and valuables they could find. To avoid any search parties sent out by Rogers they headed south to the great island of Hispaniola, where they landed to steal some cattle and then attacked two British sloops which they found sailing offshore. According to witnesses, they ‘did make an assault in and upon one James Dobbin, and certain other mariners’ and then plundered the vessels of gear and tackle ‘of the value of one thousand pounds of current money of Jamaica’.6 Continuing their passage south, they sailed through the Windward Passage to the north coast of Jamaica, where they proceeded to plunder any easy target they came across. On 19 October they intercepted the schooner of Thomas Spenlow a few miles off Port Maria. They assaulted Spenlow and his crew, putting them ‘in corporeal fear of their lives’, and seized fifty rolls of tobacco and nine bags of pimiento (sweet pepper). They kept Spenlow and his men prisoner for forty-eight hours before releasing them and their schooner.
Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean Page 18
