Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

  According to Defoe, it was during this nightlong drinking bout, that one of Blackbeard’s men asked him whether—in case anything should happen to him in battle the following morning—his wife knew where he had buried his money. Says Defoe: “He answered, that no Body but himself, and the Devil, knew where it was, and the longest Liver should take all.”

  Blackbeard’s extraordinary lack of concern, despite his obvious peril, may have been due to confidence that the navy men would not be able to negotiate the tricky waters of Ocracoke and would therefore never get near enough to engage him at close quarters. Or was he, in his mad brain, actually looking foward to a combat and a chance at Hell?

  In the gray light of dawn, Lieutenant Maynard ordered his two sloops to hoist anchor and resume the effort to close with Blackbeard. There now ensued for the navy men a grueling struggle in the maze. Time after time their sloops went aground and had to be backed off sandbars. Tossing water casks overboard in order to lighten their vessels, the navy men used oars to work their way over the shallows. Inexorably, Maynard and his men drew nearer and nearer to Blackbeard.

  According to Defoe, Blackbeard now came to life. He cut his own cable and he began to carry on a running fight with the approaching naval force—“keeping a continual Fire at his Enemies, with his Guns,” as Defoe put it. Maynard and his men, despite their labors in the maze, managed to answer Blackbeard, keeping up a steady barrage of small-arms fire.

  At one point Blackbeard hailed the oncoming navy force. “Damn you for Villains. Who are you?” he roared, although he knew very well who his tenacious enemies were.

  Maynard pointed to the British ensign hanging limply from his mast in the light wind and shouted: “You may see by our Colors, we are no Pyrates.”

  Blackbeard then roared out an invitation for Maynard to come on board Adventure so that he could see who his enemy was. Maynard shouted in reply: “I cannot spare my boat, but I will come aboard of you, as soon as I can, with my sloop!”

  At this, Blackbeard lifted a glass of rum to Maynard in a sardonic gesture and, after drinking it, roared out: “Damnation seize my soul, if I give you quarters, or take any from you!”

  Maynard hollered back that he expected no quarter from Blackbeard, nor would he give any to the pirate.

  Now Blackbeard, with his black ensign flying, headed away from Maynard’s rowing sloops, as if, at last, he had decided to escape. It is likely that he knew of some nearby channel that would lead him to open water and escape, and he was heading for it. But the wind was very light and the current of the inlet very slow, and Adventure moved sluggishly in these conditions.

  In any event, the second naval sloop, under the command of Midshipman Baker, managed to close up on Blackbeard and threatened to intercept him. Blackbeard, seeing this threat, suddenly hauled around toward Baker and unleashed a tremendous broadside “charged with all manner of small shot.” The sudden blast killed Baker and a number of his men. It also disabled Baker’s sloop. She fell quickly astern and took little part in the action that followed.

  Now what little wind there had been failed completely. Maynard’s men continued to labor at their oars to catch up to Adventure, now moving even more sluggishly, apparently carried only by the current of the inlet.

  Soon Maynard had dramatically closed the distance between his sloop and Blackbeard. All at once Blackbeard fired another broadside of small shot. The lethal hail swept viciously across Maynard’s deck, putting twenty-one of his crew of thirty-five out of action.

  Maynard, fearing that a second broadside from Blackbeard would put an end to the enterprise, ordered his remaining crewmen to take shelter by hunkering down belowdecks. Only he, the helmsman, and the pilot, remained on deck. Crouched low, Maynard kept his sloop headed toward Blackbeard. Now, as they closed up on Adventure, Maynard ordered his men in the hold to get their pistols and their swords ready for close fighting—and to be ready to rush up on deck at his command.

  But when the two ships were alongside, it was Blackbeard who attacked first. His crew hurled hand grenades—bottles full of gunpowder, shot, and chunks of iron—onto the navy sloop. Exploding with great gouts of thick smoke, the hand grenades spewed deadly shrapnel in all directions. But because Maynard’s men were still below, the grenades had little effect.

  Blackbeard, however, peering through the smoke from his own deck and seeing the almost-empty deck of the navy sloop, thought his grenades had destroyed his pursuers. He roared out to his own crew that their enemies were “all knock’d on the head, except three or four, and therefore, let’s jump on board and cut them to pieces.”

  No sooner had Blackbeard shouted this information than he himself swung across to Maynard’s sloop. His men, screaming and cursing, followed their giant leader.

  Now Maynard gave the signal to his waiting men to attack the boarding pirates. With a shout, Maynard’s crew poured out on deck through the swirling smoke and flung themselves upon the astonished outlaws.

  At this moment Blackbeard and Lieutenant Maynard confronted each other. In the midst of the swirling combat between the two crews, with the clanging of cutlasses and the crack of pistol shots punctuating the shouted oaths of men fighting for their lives, Maynard and Blackbeard drew pistols and simultaneously fired at each other from point-blank range.

  Somehow Blackbeard’s shot missed. But the naval lieutenant’s bullet found its mark, striking Blackbeard in the body.

  Incredibly, however, the giant seemed not to notice. Roaring curses, spewing blood, Blackbeard came at Maynard with his cutlass. In the duel Maynard’s sword broke. Leaping back from Blackbeard’s swinging cutlass, Maynard cocked another pistol. Hoping to put a final ball between the giant’s eyes, Maynard aimed his heavy pistol while Blackbeard drew back his cutlass to strike off Maynard’s head. But Blackbeard never struck the fatal blow. Instead, before Blackbeard could strike or Maynard fire, one of Maynard’s crewmen slashed Blackbeard across the throat. The pirate staggered back, streaming blood and screaming curses. At this moment Maynard fired his pistol. The heavy ball struck Blackbeard in the chest. Still the roaring giant would not fall. Instead, like a wounded elephant, he charged his enemies. Again and again the navy men fired at him and slashed at him with their swords. Struck at least five times by pistol balls, and cut at least twenty times by the swords of his antagonists, Blackbeard continued to roar defiance. Then, as he was drawing another pistol from his belt, he began to stagger. His weapons fell from his hands. Slowly, like some great beast, he toppled to the deck. He was dead.

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  Immediately his crew threw down their arms and surrendered.

  But the drama was not yet over.

  Down in the hold of the Adventure, one of Blackbeard’s most trusted lieutenants, the black former slave Caesar, now attempted to carry out instructions Blackbeard had given him to blow up the Adventure if Maynard should win the battle. In accordance with his captain’s orders, Caesar had laid a gunpowder trail to the ship’s magazine. He had only to touch a match to the gunpowder in order to blow them all, Maynard and all the survivors, pirates and navy men alike, to eternity. But as Caesar moved to carry out his final task, a prisoner being held belowdecks leaped on Blackbeard’s faithful officer and, in a desperate wrestling match, managed to keep him from igniting the gunpowder until Maynard’s men came aboard and took the ex-slave into custody.

  In the exhausted aftermath of the battle, Maynard counted up the cost of taking Blackbeard. Ten men of the naval expedition, including Midshipman Baker, had been killed and another twenty-five wounded. (One of these later died of his wounds.) Ten of the pirates had also been killed, including Blackbeard himself. Of the nine surviving outlaws—three white men and six blacks—all had been wounded, most of them more than once.

  Maynard ordered Blackbeard’s head cut from his gigantic body—and the headless corpse flung overboard. The head, its great beard matted with blood, was then hung from the bowsprit of Maynard’s sloop. Maynard and his men set sail
homeward for Virginia with this grim trophy as testimony to their epic victory over the most terrifying pirate of them all.4

  Even in death, however, Blackbeard was the stuff of legends. The story soon got around that after Maynard threw Blackbeard’s headless corpse into the water of the Ocracoke inlet, it swam several times around the sloop, as if searching for its missing head.

  But it finally sank out of sight—and Blackbeard was no more.

  14

  Rogers at Bay

  In his headquarters in Nassau, Governor Woodes Rogers—clinging to his precarious hold on his Bahamas colony—must have heard the news of Blackbeard’s death with gratification.

  While Blackbeard’s demise did not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that Rogers could now rest secure on New Providence, it did mean that one more threat to his colony had been removed. Further, the news of Blackbeard’s grisly end no doubt helped sober many of those pirates who, although they had elected to stay in Nassau under Rogers’s nominal rule, had never in their hearts renounced their allegiance to the outlaw nation. These pirates—among them longtime acquaintances of Blackbeard—had followed the giant’s rampage along the American coast and in the Bay of Honduras with growing interest. It is possible that if Blackbeard had continued to enjoy success, his example might have encouraged many more Nassau pirates to resume careers on the account. But the news of Blackbeard’s death had dampened any revival of enthusiasm for the sweet trade in Nassau—at least for a while.

  Around this time, news reached Rogers that the gentleman pirate Stede Bonnet had also met his end. This intelligence, too, must have been most welcome to Rogers, holed up in his unfinished fort. For although Bonnet—unlike Blackbeard—had never posed a serious threat to Nassau, the circumstances of his death had a further chilling effect on the pardoned brigands of New Providence.

  According to the story that reached Nassau, the bumbling Bonnet had again gone pirating on his own after Blackbeard had so abruptly dissolved their incongruous partnership.

  During the summer of 1718, Bonnet, once more the captain of his little ten-gun sloop Revenge, had managed to take several prizes off the American coast. Although these prizes were of no outstanding value, the governor of South Carolina, apparently still smarting from Blackbeard’s outrageous blockade of Charleston, had commissioned two sloops to hunt down Bonnet and his thirty crewmen.

  Bonnet, still an amateur at pirating, had been trapped by his pursuers when he had foolishly entered the Cape Fear River. Although the gentleman pirate had fought back briefly, he and his crew were captured and taken to Charleston for trial. Somehow Bonnet had then contrived to escape. But he was soon recaptured. He had then been swiftly tried and convicted in November 1718. In a despairing letter, he had pleaded with the governor for a pardon, promising to render himself unable to pursue piracy again by “separating all my Limbs from my Body, only reserving the Use of my Tongue, to call continually on, and pray to the Lord.” But his plea had fallen on deaf ears. The people of Charleston regarded Bonnet not as a gentleman planter who had inexplicably gone mad, but as a partner of the terrible Blackbeard in the blockade of Charleston.

  Bonnet, clutching a nosegay, had been hanged during the same week that saw Maynard’s victory over Blackbeard.

  With Blackbeard’s destruction and Bonnet’s execution, Rogers probably felt that there was only one more pirate captain he needed to worry about. This was Charles Vane, who was still at large and whose oath to avenge himself on Rogers was not forgotten in Nassau.

  The last reports on Vane indicated that he was operating off the American coast, and had eluded several attempts to capture him. Rogers believed it was entirely possible that Vane would still try to carry out his threat to invade New Providence. If he did so, Rogers was convinced that most of the Nassau pirates would side with Vane.

  “Should their old friends have strength enough to design to attack me,” Rogers wrote at this time, “I must doubt whether I should find one-half of the Nassau pirates to join me.”

  In addition to the threat from Vane, Rogers fretted about renewed hostilities with Spain. For months rumors had persisted that war with Spain was imminent. In such an eventuality, Rogers was certain the Spanish would attempt to invade New Providence. In that event, however, he was sure that his pirates would join with him and his few armed men to defend the island against the Spanish.

  “I don’t fear but they’ll all stand by me in case of any attempt except pirates,” he wrote. The question in his mind was whether a ragtag force of boozy pirates, untrained farmers, and a handful of soldiers could resist an invasion by professional troops.

  With his usual indomitable coolness, however, Rogers continued the slow and laborious task of rebuilding the fort of Nassau, necessarily the main defense against any attack, whether by Captain Vane or by Spanish ships and soldiers.

  Then, in December 1718, only a month after Blackbeard’s death, Rogers faced a new crisis, one whose outcome, he knew, would probably determine his own fate as well as the future of his struggling little colony.

  The roots of the crisis stretched back several weeks to when Rogers, faced with a shortage of food supplies and with his naval escorts departed, had sent off three ships—manned and commanded by pirates he had previously pardoned—to trade for fresh supplies in Hispaniola and other nearby islands.

  When they were only two days out from Nassau, Rogers’s pirates had reverted to their old habits. They had gone off on their own account.

  When Rogers had gotten wind of this betrayal, he had dispatched the dauntless—and now loyal—Ben Hornigold to pursue the backsliders.

  Hornigold had eventually caught up with his quarry. But when he did, he found that they had been badly mauled by Spanish warships and only thirteen of the turncoats were still alive—and three of those were badly wounded.

  Hornigold had put his prisoners aboard his own sloop and had loyally transported them back to Nassau. Rogers, pleased that Hornigold had so demonstrably justified his faith in him, wrote: “I am glad of this new proof Captain Hornigold has given the world to wipe off the infamous name he has hitherto been known by, though in the very acts of piracy he committed, most people spoke well of his generosity.”

  After placing the thirteen backsliders under guard aboard the Delicia, Rogers had decided to take a daring action—one that if successful would enhance his authority, but if unsuccessful, could spell the end of his efforts on New Providence. He decided that instead of sending the pirates to Jamaica for trial (as a strict interpretation of the law demanded) he would stretch his prerogative as governor and try them himself.

  Three of those caught by Hornigold died of their wounds before they could be tried. The other ten had to face Roger’s justice.

  On December 9 and December 10, 1718, Rogers convened his court in the guardroom of his still unfinished fort. The court consisted of eight judges, among them the governor himself and two of Rogers’s pardoned pirate captains, Thomas Burgess and Peter Courant.

  To conduct such a trial, under the circumstances, was an incredibly bold stroke. Here was the beleaguered governor, lacking naval support, with only an inadequate militia to rely on, surrounded by hundreds of armed pirates in his colony, and with many more loose among the islands—and lacking authority to hold such proceedings to boot—convening an open Admiralty court to try pirates, with ex-pirates as judges.

  If any action of Rogers’s ever demonstrated his unflappable audacity and self-assurance, this trial of the turncoat pirates of Nassau was it.

  For the rest of the pirates of Nassau, who were free to observe the trial of their former colleagues, Governor Rogers’s cool aplomb at this time must have seemed still another sign of England’s determination to suppress piracy. If Governor Rogers did not fear the pirates of Nassau, it must be because England did not fear them and because the governor knew that—now or later—he had the might of the Royal Navy behind him.

  During the two-day trial, incontrovertible evidence was present
ed against the defendants. In the end nine of the ten were found guilty. The court exonerated one defendant, concluding that he had been forced by the others to participate in their criminal behavior.

  The nine convicted men were sentenced to be hanged two days later—on the morning of Friday, December 12, 1718.

  On the appointed day, the convicted pirates, guarded by one hundred picked men from Rogers’s soldiery, were taken to the gallows, which had been specially built for the occasion on a strip of beach under the ramparts of the fort.

  According to Defoe, several hundred of the Nassau pirates gathered to watch their comrades hang. Rogers, no doubt, sweated out this crucial hour of the executions. Would the sullen pirate audience watch their fellows swing without an eruption of violence?

  At the last moment Rogers granted a reprieve to one of the nine condemned, George Rounsivil, eighteen, who was from Rogers’s own home county of Dorset and who had “loyal and good” parents still living there.

  For the other eight, however, there was no reprieve. In the shadow of the gibbet the eight condemned were given time for their final words and last prayers. Although Rogers knew that he was risking a possible riot among the onlookers by permitting this customary final ritual, he probably reasoned that to deny the condemned the chance to utter their last words in public would be riskier than to allow them.

  According to Defoe, at least some of the convicted men tried to stir up their fellows to rescue them, crying that “they never thought to have seen the Time, when such Men as they, should be ty’d up, and hanged like Dogs and four hundred of their sworn Friends and Companions, quietly standing by to behold the Spectacle.”

  Defoe goes on to say that another of the condemned taxed his audience with “Pusilanimity and Cowardice, as if it were a Breach of Duty in them not to Rise, and save them from the ignominious Death they were going to suffer.”