The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down

by Colin Woodard

  By these varied methods, thousands of boys and men left England for the sea every year. Somewhere among this mass of the naïve, the unlucky, and the desperate, were two boys who would help to bring the commerce of the British Empire to a grinding halt.

  ***

  By 1700, Edward Thatch, the man who would become Blackbeard, was already an experienced seaman. He was born about 1680 in or around Bristol, England's second-largest port and the center of its transatlantic trade. He was apparently from a reasonably comfortable family, possibly even a reputable one: He had received an education and so, unlike most of his fellow mariners, could read and write. No "Thatches" (or "Taches," "Teaches," or "Thaches") appear in the Bristol tax records for 1696—the only complete one of that city to survive this period—and this has led historians to speculate that Edward Thatch was an assumed name. He may have taken pains to obscure his true identity in order to avoid bringing dishonor upon his relations. That said, it is possible he was related to the Thatches of nearby Gloucester, one of whom, Thomas Thatch, moved to Bristol in 1712 and leased a house a mere block from the city docks.

  Thatch was tall and thin and—as you might expect—heavily bearded. These characteristics, reported by people who had met him, are reflected in three posthumous portraits prepared by engraver B. Cole for the various editions of A General History of the Pyrates. Thatch is shown in the same confident pose in all three, one hand on his hip, the other holding aloft a cutlass while his men battle their way aboard a large merchant ship in the harbor behind him. In another eighteenth-century engraving by Thomas Nicholls and James Basire, Thatch has a wild-eyed expression and fuses burning from the ends of his dreadlocked beard.

  Thatch was intelligent, capable, and charismatic, characteristics that helped him rise quickly through the ranks of the merchant or naval vessels he served on. In the process, he picked up the skills necessary to operate large armed sailing ships: sail handling, gunnery, combat tactics and, most importantly, navigation. Like Avery, Thatch had the experience to assume control of what were the most powerful and sophisticated vessels of the day.

  In Thatch's youth, Bristol was still England's primary gateway to the Americas. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its merchants had pioneered the exploration of Newfoundland's fisheries and the Gulf of Maine. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the American trade permeated almost every aspect of life in Bristol. The small city of 20,000 was still ringed by medieval walls, but its downtown was now girded with stone quays, against which were tied scores of oceangoing vessels. Shops and warehouses overflowed with American goods. The city's craftsmen grew prosperous supplying the merchants with woven cloth, cured provisions, and manufactured goods. Most of these products were sent straight back to the Americas, but some were loaded aboard ships bound for Africa, where local chiefs were happy to exchange them for slaves. The ships then carried the slaves to Barbados and Jamaica and their captains traded them for sugar, which was brought back to Bristol to complete the triangular trade. Signs of the Americas were everywhere: visiting merchants from Boston and New York, flamboyantly dressed sugar plantation owners from Barbados and Jamaica, and country squires from Virginia and the Carolinas. The great gothic seaman's church of St. Mary Redcliffe contained an entire chapel dedicated to the Americas, featuring a whale rib donated by John Cabot, the explorer who "discovered" the North American mainland in 1497. America seemed to be the place where fortunes were made. Thatch discovered that being a sailor was not the way to make it.

  ***

  Sailors stood below even farm laborers in England's pecking order. The historian David Ogg described their treatment as being "barely distinguishable from the criminal," while the eighteenth-century essayist Samuel Johnson wrote that their lot was very much the same as that of a prisoner, only with the added possibility of drowning.

  The sailor's work was extremely hazardous. Seamen got "bursted bellies," hernias, while manhandling heavy cargoes, which were transported in casks and barrels that occasionally rolled free, slicing off fingers or crushing limbs. While underway, the ship's assorted canvas sails had to be regularly adjusted, either by hauling on ropes from the deck or by climbing high up the mast. "We were often waked up before we had slept half an hour and forced to go to the maintop or foretop to take in our topsails, half awayke and half asleep, with one shoe on and the other off," sailor Edward Barlow recalled in about 1703. "In stormy weather, when the ship rolled and tumbled, as though some great millstone were rolling up one hill and down another, we [had to] ... haul and pull to make fast the sail, seeing nothing but air above us and water beneath us, and that so raging as though every wave would make a grave of us." Men fell to their deaths, while others were washed off the decks by crashing waves or crushed beneath falling rigging.

  Sailors wrapped themselves in woolen clothing against the cold and wore leather caps and tar-dipped jackets against the spray and rain. Still, it was not unusual to spend days on end in the soaking wet clothing in winter weather, resulting in sickness or death. In the tropics, they worked shirtless, leading to terrible sunburns. Dr. Hans Sloane, traveling to Jamaica in 1687, reported that the entire company of HMS Assistance had turned a bright red and were "breaking out all over into little whales, pimples, and pustules."

  There wasn't much solace belowdecks. Merchant seamen were crammed into a communal cabin in the bow, where the movement of the vessel was most violent. They slept in densely packed rows of hammocks in this dark and poorly ventilated space, which reeked of bilge water and unwashed flesh. Lice, rats, and cockroaches swarmed the vessel, spreading diseases like typhus, typhoid, and the plague. Gottleib Mittelberger, who crossed the Atlantic in 1750, reported that the cabins were a place of "stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of seasickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, consumption, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot and the like, all of which come from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so that many die miserably."

  The food they were fed was literally sickening. The salted beef and pork that were the staples of the seaman's diet came out of barrels dry and hard at best, putrid and maggoty at worst. Sailors closed their eyes before eating the "mouldy and stinking" ship's biscuits to avoid seeing the maggots and weevils wiggling through them. After a few weeks at sea, the fresh-water supply turned green and reeking and fueled deadly outbreaks of dysentery and bloody flux. Sailors drank huge quantities of alcohol instead; Royal Navy rations gave each man a half pint of rum and a gallon of beer every day, meaning the crew was drunk most of the time.

  Bad as these victuals were, they were better than nothing, as not a few crews painfully discovered. Especially greedy merchant shipowners regularly tried to boost their profits by understocking the crew's food supply, leaving them to face starvation if storms or adverse winds caused their passage to take longer than expected. Vessels carrying poor immigrants or African slaves to the Americas were particularly vulnerable.

  On passenger vessels, people starved to death in large numbers. One ship, the Katharine, left Londonderry for Boston in 1729 with 123 crew and passengers, but limped ashore six months later in western Ireland with only fourteen left alive. Later that year, the Lothrop showed up in Philadelphia with only ninety survivors; thirty children and seventy adults had starved to death en route including all but three of the crew. When food ran low on slave ships, the captain would throw human cargo overboard.

  The captain ruled with absolute authority, and many of them exercised it with shocking brutality. The Admiralty's trial records are filled with accounts of sailors being flogged or clubbed for minor mistakes: losing an oar, forgetting a chore, or unsteady helmsmanship. More than a few lost teeth, eyes, arms, and fingers during beatings. Others lost their lives. When sailor Richard Baker became bedridden from dysentery on a passage from St. Christopher to London, his captain forced him to man the helm for four hours, then had him whipped and lashed to the mizenmast; he died four days later. Anthony Comerford, accused of stea
ling a live bird on the merchantman Ridge, was tied to the rigging and whipped to death.

  Then there were the truly sadistic captains. On a journey from Charleston to Bristol, Captain John Jeane took a dislike to his cabin boy, whom he had whipped "several times in a very cruel manner" and increased the pain by pouring pickle brine into the wounds. Jeane strung the child up to the mast for nine days and nights with his arms and legs fully extended. He then dragged him to the gangway and trod up and down over his body, and ordered the rest of the crew to do the same. The other sailors refused, so he kicked the boy repeatedly and "stamped upon his breast so violently that his excrement came involuntarily from him"; Jeane finally scooped up the excrement and "forced it several times down his throat."The youngster took eighteen days to die, despite being whipped every day. Just before expiring he asked for water. Jeane rushed to his cabin and returned with a glass of his own urine and forced the boy to drink it. When sailors prepared the body to be thrown over-board, they found "it was as many colours as the rainbow" with "flesh in many places like jelly" and a "head swollen as big as two men's of the largest size." Jeane was eventually executed for his actions. Other captains got away with murdering men they disliked by denying them rations or beating them until they were barely able to stand and forcing them to climb the mainmast, while some disposed of unwanted men by turning them over to the navy, which could be tantamount to a death sentence.

  Legally speaking, merchant captains were only supposed to employ "moderate" discipline on their crews. Not so in the Royal Navy, where captains were under standing orders to mete out brutal punishments. Petty officers whacked slow-moving crewmen across the shoulders with rattan canes. A crewman caught stealing small objects was made to "run the gauntlet," forced to walk between parallel lines of crewmen as they lashed his bare back. Major thefts resulted in a full-on flogging with a knotted cat-o'-nine tails, as also befell "he that pisseth between decks." The commission of serious crimes resulted in potentially fatal floggings of seventy-two to three hundred lashings, or outright hanging.

  It's a wonder any sailors survived. Mortality rates among the crews of vessels employed in the African slave trade were comparable to those of the slaves themselves. It was not unusual for 40 percent of the crew to perish during a single voyage, most from tropical diseases against which they had no resistance. About half the sailors pressed into the Royal Navy died at sea. Captains of both types of vessels had to carry extra men as insurance against the inevitable loss of hands.

  Even sailors who managed to survive their terms of service rarely received the wages they were due. Merchant captains used a variety of ruses to shortchange their crews. Sailors often found their earnings had been docked for damages to the cargo, even when the damage was caused by storms or poor packaging by the merchants themselves. Edward Barlow, who was one of the few ordinary sailors of the age to record his experiences, reported that his captain typically deducted £3 from each man's salary, the equivalent of two months of an ordinary sailor's wage. Some captains would pay in colonial currencies, which were worth only 25 to 50 percent of pounds sterling. Men whose ships were wrecked or who were pressed into the navy at sea rarely received any of the wages they were owed, spelling disaster for the families they left behind.

  The navy had a semiofficial policy summed up in the maxim "Keep the pay, keep the man." On arrival in port, sailors were often not paid until just before the vessel sailed again, and any who left before that moment automatically sacrificed all of their back wages. Payment was often made in the form of "tickets," official IOUs issued by the government that would be honored at some unspecified time in the future. Sailors in need of ready cash were forced to sell their tickets to loan sharks at a fraction of their face value. Finally there were those who served for years on end without being paid at all.

  No wonder, then, that young sailors like Samuel Bellamy, Charles Vane, and Edward Thatch regarded Henry Avery as a hero.

  ***

  Woodes Rogers, the man who would confront the pirates, knew there was money to be made in merchant shipping, provided, that is, that one owned the vessels. Like Bellamy, Vane, and Thatch, Rogers went to sea at a young age. He did so from a different starting point, however; his father was a successful merchant captain and owned shares in numerous ships. Woodes was his heir.

  The Rogers family was among the leading families of Poole, a modest seaport on the English Channel, sixty miles south of Bristol in County Dorset. Several of Woodes's ancestors had served as mayor. Woodes's, father, Captain Woods Rogers, became successful in the Newfoundland fishing trade, and as a merchant captain he had been to Spain, the Red Sea, and the coast of Africa. He would regale listeners with tales of hippopotami attacking his ship's boats. Woodes, born in 1679, was the eldest of Captain Rogers's three children, a year older than Mary Rogers, and nine years older than John.

  He spent his childhood in Poole, which sat at the head of a large, well-protected bay. The town was famous for two things: oysters and fish. Poole oysters were said to be the best and biggest in the region and the finest in all of England for their pearls; the townspeople pickled huge numbers of these oysters every year, shipping them by the barrel to London, Spain, Italy, and the West Indies. The fish—split, sun-dried salt cod—came from farther away; Woodes's father and other merchants led a small fleet of fishing vessels across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland every year. These fleets could be gone for nine months or more at a time, hauling hooked cod up from the deep and drying them on Newfoundland's cold, stark shores. While his father was away, young Woodes likely attended the local school, for his later writings reveal a man of considerable education. On Sundays, he and his siblings listened to the sermons of their Puritan pastor, Samuel Hardy, in St. James Church. As he grew older, Woodes likely accompanied his father on short trips up the channel, helping him unload salt cod on the London docks and load salt and other provisions for his father's next voyage.

  Sometime between 1690 and 1696, Woodes's father moved the family to Bristol, probably to expand his trade with Newfoundland. His father had friends in Bristol, as well as a probable relative, an influential merchant named Francis Rogers, who would invest in many of their later adventures. By the time the poll-tax collector made his rounds in June 1696, the Rogers family was living in the seafarer's neighborhood of Redcliffe, across the river from central Bristol.

  Bristol was a strange location for a port. It was located seven miles from the sea up a narrow, winding river—the Avon—beset by tides so powerful the watercraft of the day stood no chance of proceeding against them. The spring tides rose and fell by as much as forty-five feet, and at low tide much of the serpentine harbor turned to mudflats. Vessels under 150 tons had to wait until the tides were flowing in the direction of travel, and even then had difficulty rounding St. Vincent's Rock, halfway down the river. Larger ships were almost certain to wind up grounded on a mud bank if they tried to sail the gauntlet, and had to be towed to and from Bristol's docks by large rowboats. Many ship captains elected not to make the trip at all, anchoring instead at the mouth of the Avon, where they loaded and unloaded their cargoes onto a series of rafts and tenders that could more easily navigate the river's tides. Bristol stood on a bend in the Avon that was congested with vessels. Visiting Bristol in 1739, Alexander Pope said they extended along the riverfront as far as the eye could see, "their masts as thick as they can stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable."

  The city itself was still medieval in character. Inside its walls, timber-framed, Tudor-style houses perched on streets so narrow people could shake hands across them from their upstairs windows. Principal roads were no more than twenty feet across and were the only ones paved. Other roads were surfaced in mud and garbage, in which pigs rooted about. Even the center of the city was separated by only a few hundred yards from the farms and fields that surrounded it. The focus of commerce was an artificial anchorage—the River Frome—where the ocean-going ships disgorged thei
r cargoes onto The Quay in full view of counting houses. Only a few blocks' walk south of The Quay were the gates leading into a marsh. From there, among grazing cows, one could look across the river and see the bluffs of Redcliffe, where the Rogers family made its home.

  Growing up in Redcliffe, Woodes Rogers may well have rubbed shoulders with Edward Thatch, or even been acquainted with him. They were almost the same age, engaged in the same profession, and probably lived within a few blocks of each other. Rogers the Pirate Hunter and Blackbeard the Pirate may have prayed together as teenagers, beneath John Cabot's great whalebone in the cool interior of Redcliffe's cathedral-sized parish church.

  Henry Avery's exploits were well known within the Rogers household by way of one of Captain Rogers's closest friends, the mariner William Dampier, a former buccaneer who had circumnavigated the world. Dampier renewed their friendship in the mid-1690s, while preparing two books for publication. The first, A New Voyage Round the World, an account of his circumnavigation, would make him a national celebrity following its publication in the spring of 1697. The second, Voyages and Descriptions (1699), contained extracts of several letters from Captain Rogers, whom Dampier referred to as "my ingenious friend." The elder Rogers had shared his knowledge of the Red Sea and African coast; Dampier, in turn, had intimate, firsthand knowledge of Henry Avery and his fellow pirates, whose adventures were just then captivating the English public.