Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

  Second, Rogers planned to avoid open confrontation by leaving the pirates of New Providence free to live pretty much as they pleased, and pretty much as they had been doing—as long as they acknowledged his authority and abstained from overt piracy or other acts against the law. Clearly he hoped, with this policy, to achieve an interval of peace necessary for his colonist-farmers to get themselves organized on the island.

  Third, Rogers would try to induce at least some of the pirates to give up the sweet trade. He would attempt to persuade as many of them as he could that they could live just as freely as honest Bahamian citizens as they ever had on the account. He would also seek active allies among the pirates, even inviting a few key figures among them into his government.

  With these general principles to guide him, Rogers went ashore on July 27, only two days after Vane’s explosive departure, resolved to conduct himself with the dignity and firmness befitting the king’s representative.

  Instead of a crowd of grumbling brutes sullenly tolerant of their new situation, Rogers found a celebration.

  The pirates of Nassau greeted their new governor with a drunken reception, which included cheers for the king, volleys of musketry, and pledges of goodwill. There was even an honor guard and a welcoming committee headed by the roguish republic’s own “governor”—a mad old ex-pirate named Sawney, who lived in the town’s dilapidated fort and who was accorded sarcastic deference by the pirates.

  If the welcome tendered the new governor contained in it elements of the customary piratical derision of Authority, Rogers was too astute to take notice of it.

  With his usual aplomb, he read out the king’s proclamation of pardon and his own commission of appointment. He then swore an oath to obey his commission as governor, shouting the words with a flourish so that all who heard him—the half-drunk pirates, their whores, the tavern keepers, traders, settlers, and soldiers—would know beyond doubt that he was, from that moment on, the legitimate representative of the king of England in those benighted islands. He thus took possession of the colony.

  During the first few weeks of his tenure as governor, Rogers worked furiously in the brutal summer heat to establish himself in his capital. Nassau’s harbor was a wreck, unkempt and neglected, in keeping with the shantytown nature of the town itself. There were no roads, no agriculture, no wells or sanitation. Nevertheless, Rogers set to work to bring some order out of the chaos that was Nassau.

  He brought his company of soldiers ashore, quartering them in makeshift huts inside the town’s fort, which he made his headquarters. He housed his 250 settlers in tents that ringed the fort.

  He created a civil government from an amalgam of his settlers and the few New Providence natives who had been living in the colony before the pirates had arrived and who could prove they had not trafficked with the outlaws. To help him run his government, he appointed a chief justice, an admiralty judge, justices of the peace, constables, and overseers of the roads.

  Rogers also let it be known that he would be liberal in granting the king’s pardon to any and all pirates who applied. (Eventually he would issue amnesties to more than six hundred of his freebooters.) The new governor, however, was under no illusion about the significance of these pardons. He knew that for the most part those who accepted them tended to be the older men, the hopeless alcoholics, the sick, and—by far the majority—those who regarded a pardon as a convenience, a ticket to remain at large and comfortable in Nassau until a better berth came along.

  But despite the fact that there were relatively few genuine penitents among those to whom he extended the king’s grace, Rogers continued to offer pardons as a matter of policy. He even decided to allow pardoned brigands to keep the spoils they had accumulated by their wrongdoing. Apparently, in the wake of his clash with Vane over this issue, Rogers had concluded that peace had to take precedence over principle, given the circumstances of his situation.

  His tolerant attitude soon won Rogers a number of important allies among the pirate population. These were, generally speaking, older captains like Ben Hornigold—men who had already made their fortunes in the sweet trade and who were therefore now amenable to a more lawful life (provided they were permitted to hold onto their past plunder, and were not required to give up their free and easy ways.)

  As part of his policy to wean pardoned pirates and their friends away from the reckless lives they lived in the dives of Nassau, Rogers offered free plots of land in and around the town to anyone—ex-pirate, whore, or poor trader—who would build a permanent house on it. But few took him up on his offer. Rogers thought he knew why. He wrote in his journal: “For work they mortally hate it, for when they have cleared a patch it will supply them with potatoes and yams and very little else, fish being so plentiful…they thus live, poorly and indolently, seeming content…”

  He also attempted to enlist some of his ex-pirates in a militia he was trying to form. Rogers hoped that an armed troop of ex-pirates would not only add to his own slender force of regular soldiers but also help channel the energies of his unruly ex-brigands into positive activities. But the pirates made poor soldiers. As Rogers put it in his journal: “These wretches can’t be kept to watch at night, and when they do, they come very seldom sober, and rarely awake all night.”

  Nevertheless, he persisted in his efforts to make soldiers out of his “reformed” pirates.

  Rogers did not always fail in his attempts to turn his outlaws to constructive pursuits. In one brilliant stroke of persuasion and perseverance, he induced two of Nassau’s best-known pirate captains, Ben Hornigold and Thomas Burgess, to accept pardons and to serve as privateer commanders, with the mission of guarding New Providence against attack by pirates or by the forces of other countries. The appointment of these well-known pirates convinced many of the denizens of Nassau, who had previously regarded Rogers as only a temporary irritation, that the new governor would be a permanent presence to be taken seriously.

  Rogers also set to work building a small, eight-cannon battery to cover the eastern entrance of Nassau harbor, which was currently unguarded and out of which Vane had escaped. Repair of the long-neglected main fort that served as his headquarters, which overlooked the western, and most heavily trafficked, entrance to Nassau, would be a major long-term task.

  During these early days of frenzied activity there was no overt opposition. Most of the pirates openly acknowledged Rogers’s authority, even if grudgingly, and watched his performance with often-bemused interest. Many still clung to their belief that when the Royal Navy departed—as it must eventually—Rogers would prove as corruptible as any other colonial governor, and that the sweet trade would make a comeback.

  Meanwhile, word came in that Captain Charles Vane, after his escape from Rogers and Nassau, had sailed north along the American coast, even as far as Long Island, taking and plundering numerous cargo ships and gaining a great reputation in those parts. Rumors were soon rife that Vane had turned south again and that he was still planning to raid Nassau, throw Rogers out, and burn the Delicia in the harbor. It was also said that another brigand, the gentleman pirate from Barbados, ex-army major Stede Bonnet, would join with Vane in his planned raid.

  Apparently subscribing to the adage “set a thief to catch a thief,” Rogers sent one of his new privateering captains, Ben Hornigold, out to search for Vane. Hornigold’s mission was to find Vane if he could, induce him to surrender if possible—and capture him if necessary.

  Hornigold went out on his search. Nothing was heard of him for several weeks. Rogers began to fear that Hornigold and his crew might have reverted to piracy. However, Hornigold did at last return to Nassau to report that although he had not been able to find Vane, he had spread the word that Vane was now a wanted man, and that Governor Rogers was determined to take him should he return to Bahamian waters. Hornigold’s faithful completion of his task was a great satisfaction to Rogers. It confirmed him in his policy of integrating ex-pirates into his little government.

&nbs
p; If Rogers achieved some unexpected successes during these first frantic weeks of his regime, he also suffered a near catastrophe. An epidemic of fever swept through the island, killing many of the farmer-settlers and skilled artisans that he had brought with him, as well as a score or more of his soldiers and dozens of the sailors who manned his warship escort.

  The death toll from the epidemic was so high among his immigrant settlers that Rogers knew he would have to forgo—at least for many months to come—his cherished plan to create a self-sufficient colony on New Providence. And, what might prove even worse, the strange illness had so crippled the crews of Rogers’s Royal Navy ships that their commanders decided to sail away from Nassau before all their men died. (One of the navy ships, the frigate Milford, had been scheduled to depart for other duty in any case.)

  With the departure of the Royal Navy, Rogers was left to deal as best he could with the epidemic and with Nassau’s rowdy populace.

  As autumn approached, the fever that had oppressed the colony waned. At the same time Rogers’s pardoned pirates began to grow troublesome. With the Royal Navy gone, more and more of them began to resume their former style of life. Some sailed away to join pirate crews elsewhere. Many of those who remained began to fall back into the old ways of drunken, brawling lawlessness.

  Soon Rogers, with his little band of surviving soldiers and settlers, found himself isolated in his ramshackle capital, surrounded by hundreds of grumbling pirates who were now quickly reverting to type, even if they were not yet prepared for open confrontation. Any small incident, a misunderstood word, an insult, even a moment of drunken bravado, Rogers realized, might set off an explosion of violence.

  Rumors persisted that several pirate captains who had left Nassau, both before Rogers’s arrival and after, were now cruising in Bahamas waters with the aim of attacking the island. To make matters worse, there were also rumors of another war between England and Spain. If war did break out, Rogers reckoned, Nassau would certainly be a target of the Spanish.

  Rogers, who was himself recovering from a bout of the mysterious fever, knew that he could not put up much of a fight, whether it was the Spanish or vengeful pirates who attacked.

  For defense at sea he had only his own ship, the Delicia, and the privateer sloops skippered by the ex-pirate captains Burgess and Hornigold, who might in the crunch prove less than reliable. On land Rogers could count on his newly built little redoubt of eight guns overlooking the eastern channel of the harbor. But the fort, which would have to serve as the island’s main defense in time of attack, was still a dilapidated jumble of tumbled walls, hodgepodge tents, and temporary shacks, manned by a few sick soldiers, untrained volunteers, and several boozy ex-pirates who had, so far at least, remained loyal.

  Despite the setbacks he had suffered and the pressures under which he had to labor, Rogers now proceeded, with outward calm, to do what he could to repair the fort. Yet for all his exterior tranquillity, Rogers must often have wondered as that summer of 1718 turned to fall, what would happen if Spanish men-of-war, loaded with real soldiers, suddenly appeared off Nassau and trained their heavy cannon on his little settlement. He must also have worried that Charles Vane, alone or with others, would make good his threat to return to Nassau and blast Rogers and his colonists off the map to reclaim the pirate lair for himself.

  But if Rogers worried about Vane, he must have worried even more about a second pirate captain, a man who had departed from New Providence Island before Rogers had arrived but who, according to reports from the mainland, had been terrorizing the coast of America for months. For all his demonstrated pluck, Governor Rogers must have realized in his heart that should this captain attack Nassau, he would prove far more formidable than Vane. He was the savage giant, the terrible Captain Teach, better known as Blackbeard.

  13

  Blackbeard Himself

  He was a monster.

  Tall, burly, enormously strong, he spoke in a booming voice, and his appetites were as ferocious as his temper. He derived his name from the matted sable-colored beard that grew from just below his dark eyes to the middle of his belly.

  Defoe says Blackbeard would twist his enormous growth of beard into “small tails” and decorate them with tiny ribbons. In time of action, Defoe adds, he would stick “lighted matches” under his tricornered hat. These were long, slow-burning hempen cords used in those days for firing cannon and grenades. When lit and thrust under the brim of his hat, these slow matches would create a swirl of smoke around his fierce head, giving him the appearance, according to Defoe, “of a Fury from Hell.” To complete the picture of the fiendish firebrand, Blackbeard usually carried a naked cutlass in his wide leather belt—and three pairs of cocked and loaded pistols tucked in a bandolier across his chest.

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  Many who knew him thought him insane. He had an explosive nature that could lurch from evil irritation to murderous rage in a moment. He enjoyed humiliating other men, and he never hesitated to use his fists to impose discipline on his crew. He resorted to the most outlandish terror tactics to cow his victims. It was said that he once forced a captive to eat his own ears.

  According to popular belief, Blackbeard “married” no fewer than fourteen wives, most of them teenage girls. Defoe recounts that at least one of Blackbeard’s “wives”—a sixteen-year-old North Carolina girl whom Blackbeard had wed in a ceremony performed by his good friend the corrupt governor of North Carolina—was regularly made to have sex with members of Blackbeard’s crew who had pleased him in some way.

  As Defoe put it: “He would force her to prostitute her self to them all, one after another, before his Face.”

  In his brief two-year career as a pirate captain, Blackbeard terrorized the American coast, took dozens of prizes, formed a powerful pirate fleet under his sole command, betrayed his companions, and created a legend that etched for all time the popular image of the pirate: roaring, bloodthirsty, recklessly brave, cruel, crazed in battle, hard-drinking, outlandish, and larger-than-life.

  His personality and his crimes were equally prodigious—and if only half the stories told of him are true, he was, beyond doubt, the madman that many thought him to be.

  The origins of this astounding malefactor are unknown.

  Defoe states as a fact that he was born in Bristol. Other accounts, however, give his birthplace as Jamaica, or Virginia. His real name is also unknown, although Defoe states he was baptized Edward Drummond. By the time he came to public attention, however, he was calling himself Edward Teach, or Thatch.

  It is known that he served aboard a privateer in the War of the Spanish Succession. According to Defoe, during the hostilities Blackbeard “distinguished himself for uncommon boldness and personal courage,” although he never achieved any command. Calling Blackbeard a “courageous brute,” Defoe adds that, in a good cause, he might have been a hero.

  But Blackbeard was not a man to respond to a good cause. When the war ended in 1713, Blackbeard showed no interest in finding a berth aboard an honest vessel. No doubt, like many others who had served as privateers, he had spent too many years as a freebooter to follow any other calling. Like many others he drifted to Nassau sometime around 1715. Here he enlisted in the crew of the pirate captain Benjamin Hornigold, who was later to become Woodes Rogers’s own privateer.

  In 1716 Hornigold, impressed with Blackbeard’s toughness and ship-handling abilities, gave him command of a sloop in a small pirate fleet that Hornigold was then leading in a foray along the American coast.

  At some point in this cruise Hornigold’s fleet engaged and captured a big French prize. Hornigold, as leader of the pirate fleet, gave this ship to his favorite subordinate, Blackbeard.

  Blackbeard christened his new command Queen Anne’s Revenge. Returning in her to Nassau, he mounted some forty guns in her, transforming her into one of the most formidable pirate vessels then operating out of the Bahamas. Then, in the early spring of 1717, Blackbeard set off on his own to plunder
shipping in the nearby Caribbean—and he began almost immediately to build his legend.

  Within weeks after leaving Nassau, Blackbeard took his first prize in Queen Anne’s Revenge. She was the English merchant vessel the Great Allan, which he captured off the island of St. Vincent. Blackbeard plundered her, transferring most of her cargo to his own hold. Then he marooned her crew and set the Great Allan afire.

  When intelligence of the Great Allan’s loss reached the Royal Navy, the thirty-gun frigate Scarborough, stationed in Barbados, was sent out in search of Queen Anne’s Revenge.

  Sighting Blackbeard’s ship after several days, the naval vessel bore down on the pirate, expecting Queen Anne’s Revenge either to flee or to strike her colors—as pirates usually did when encountering a ship of the Royal Navy. Blackbeard, however, far from fleeing, swung into battle. For hours Queen Anne’s Revenge exchanged heavy broadsides with Scarborough. Finally Scarborough, wounded and outgunned, withdrew from the engagement and limped back to Barbados.

  Blackbeard’s victory over a ship of the Royal Navy, following upon his savage capture of the Great Allan, made his name known in short order throughout the Caribbean.

  In May 1717, not long after his victorious encounter with Scarborough, Blackbeard set sail for the Bay of Honduras, where he cruised successfully for several months. Then one day he encountered the gentleman pirate and ex-army major, Stede Bonnet, who was working the same territory with his little ten-gun sloop Revenge.

  According to one story Blackbeard took one look at the chubby, bewigged Bonnet and burst into contemptuous laughter. Whether the tale is true or not, there is no doubt that Blackbeard regarded Bonnet as an incompetent. Without much ceremony, he relieved Bonnet of his command and took him aboard Queen Anne’s Revenge. He then put one of his own lieutenants in charge of Bonnet’s sloop. After that the two ships operated in tandem, taking numerous prizes together in the Bay of Honduras and West Indian waters.