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

by Colin Woodard

  Dampier had spent months holed up with Avery and his men in the harbor of La Coruña in 1694. While Avery was serving as first mate of the Charles II, Dampier was second mate on one of her consorts, the Dove. Dampier may have provided Avery with sailing directions to Madagascar, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, as he was one of the only people in La Coruña with firsthand knowledge of those waters. Dampier had shared Avery's frustrations with how the fleet's owners were treating them, but refused to join the mutiny itself. Back in England, he joined the crewmen's lawsuit against James Houblon and the other owners and later testified in court on behalf of one of Avery's six captured crewmen, Joseph Dawson, the only one to avoid the gallows. Years later, while serving as commander of the forty-gun frigate HMS Roebuck, he encountered several of Avery's fugitive crewmen during a port call in Brazil. Rather than placing them under arrest, he socialized with them and signed one on to serve aboard his ship.

  As the heir of a growing shipping concern, the young Woodes Rogers likely looked on Avery as a villain, not a hero. But he also may have internalized some important lessons from Dampier's story of Avery's mutiny and its aftermath. In an era when most captains ruled their ships through terror, Rogers would eventually take a more lenient, fair-minded approach. Winning the crew's respect proved a much more reliable method of control than keeping them in a state of fear.

  In November of 1697, Rogers started an apprenticeship to the mariner John Yeamans, who lived just a few doors away. At eighteen, he was a bit old to be starting a seven-year tutelage, particularly given his family's seafaring background. Rogers had probably already traveled to Newfoundland with his father, and learned the essential elements of seamanship, commerce, and the art of command. Bryan Little, the best of Rogers's twentieth-century biographers, suspected that young Rogers entered Yeamans's tutelage for political purposes. Such an apprenticeship gave the newcomers from Poole an entrée into the closed circles of Bristol's merchant elite and a way of establishing the contacts and relationships essential to successful maritime trade. It was also a means by which Rogers could become a freeman, or voting citizen, although, as it turned out, the Rogers family was able to secure this coveted privilege for their son by other means.

  ***

  While Rogers was sailing with Yeamans, his father was amassing a small fortune from Bristol's growing transatlantic trade. Like many English merchants, Captain Rogers spread his risk by purchasing shares in a few different vessels, and rarely owned any vessel outright. Should one ship sink, Rogers would share the losses with other merchants and still count on profits from other ships. He also reduced uncertainty—and increased his income—by captaining some of the vessels he invested in. Captain Rogers sailed regularly to Newfoundland, spending the entire spring and summer of 1700 aboard the sixty-ton Elizabeth, buying oil from whale hunters in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, where the fish merchants of Poole had based their North American operations. He may have left servants behind to maintain the docks, storage houses, and fish-drying racks they had built there, helping to settle Newfoundland.

  It was in Newfoundland that the elder Rogers probably solidified his most important alliance. In 1696 or 1697 he met the ambitious Royal Navy captain William Whetstone. Whetstone, who was also from Bristol, was a former merchant captain with close business ties to Woods Rogers. In the mid-1690s, Captain Rogers and other fish merchants in Poole and Bristol had become increasingly concerned about an aggressive expansion of French fishing outposts in Newfoundland and French attacks on their own fishing stations. The merchants cried for help. The Admiralty responded by ordering Whetstone to sail the fourth-rate man-of-war HMS Dreadnought to Newfoundland with the fishing fleet, and once there, to protect their facilities at Trinity Bay. During the long weeks at sea, Captain Rogers and Whetstone had plenty of time to cement their friendship.

  By 1702, Captain Rogers was wealthy enough to buy property in Bristol's most fashionable new subdivision. The town fathers had decided to tear down the walls separating the town center from the marshes at the river's bend. Where the marshes had been, they built Queen's Square, Bristol's first preplanned neighborhood. It was to be a thoroughly modern place. Instead of cramped and dirty alleys, its residences would face a great square—the second largest in England—with lime trees and formal gardens, and accessed by wide, paved boulevards. Rather than frame, all the buildings would be constructed of red brick, with sash windows and stone ornamentation. In short, it would be as comfortable and uniform a district as any built in London after the Great Fire of 1666. Shortly before Christmas 1702, Captain Rogers purchased a double-sized lot at Number 31–32 Queen's Square, where workers began work on an elegant new mansion. The Whetstones, who lived on fashionable St. Michael's Hill, purchased the lot at Number 29, two doors down, along the square's southern promenade.

  William Whetstone did not have the opportunity to oversee the construction of his home, as the navy had called him back to sea. Whetstone, now a commodore, spent most of 1701 trying to sail a squadron of warships to Jamaica, but his vessels were repeatedly battered by storms and never got further than Ireland. In February 1702, he set out again, and while he was crossing the Atlantic, England went to war against France and Spain. He would not return home for nearly two years.

  War had been brewing for some time due to the political and genetic complications of royal inbreeding. For more than twenty years, the most powerful throne in Europe had been occupied by the drooling and disfigured King Charles II of Spain, who was not only mentally and physically handicapped, but impotent. Spanish authorities did their best to rehabilitate their king, but no matter how many exorcisms they subjected Charles to, he remained barely able to walk or speak. He was an overgrown child who spent his reign wallowing in his own filth, shooting firearms at animals, and gazing at his ancestors' decomposed corpses, which he had ordered his courtiers to exhume for that purpose. When he died in November 1700, the Spanish Habsburg line died with him. His out-of-town relatives immediately started squabbling over who would inherit the estate, which, in addition to Spain, included Italy, the Philippines, and most of the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately for the people of Europe, these same out-of-town relatives were the French King Louis XIV and the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I. Pretty soon armies were clashing and, for various geopolitical and genealogical reasons of their own, most of Europe's rulers were drawn in. In the spring of 1702, England went to war, siding with the Dutch, Austrians, and Prussians against France and Spain. By doing so, they were setting the stage for the greatest outbreak of piracy the Atlantic would ever know.

  The War of the Spanish Succession made life more hazardous for Captain Rogers, whose merchant ships were easy prey for French raiders. He and other merchants may have also lost ships in the horrific storm of 1703, the worst in English history, which destroyed thirteen warships and over 700 merchantmen. Despite their losses, his business must have remained profitable in the war's early years because construction continued on the Queen's Square mansion. It was completed in 1704 (the same year young Woodes finished his apprenticeship); three stories tall, with an attic for servants, the back windows looking out over the River Avon. Sometime during this period, Woodes took notice of the girl next door: eighteen-year-old Sarah Whetstone, the commodore's eldest daughter and heir.

  In January of 1705, the Rogers family and the Whetstones traveled to London and witnessed three important ceremonies. On the eighteenth, William Whetstone was appointed rear admiral of the blue by the queen's husband, Prince George, the lord high admiral of the navy. The newly appointed admiral hosted the next event six days later: the wedding of Sarah and Woodes Rogers, held at the church of St. Mary Magdalene in central London. Not long thereafter, Admiral Whetstone was reappointed commander in chief of the West Indies and began preparing to sail again for Jamaica. The newlyweds probably stayed in London through February to see Admiral Whetstone off and to witness a third ceremony: his knighthood by Queen Anne.

  At the end of February, Sir William saile
d for Jamaica, whose citizens expected an enemy attack at any moment. The Rogers and Whetstone families headed back to Bristol, where their merchant empire awaited. Captain Rogers was in a good place: his son married to the daughter of a knight and an admiral, who was also a dear friend. Little did he know he would never see Sir William again.

  A year later, Captain Rogers was dead. In the winter of 1705–1706, he died at sea and was committed to the ocean where he had spent so much of his life. His fortune, his company, and his home would pass to his widow and twenty-five-year-old son, by then a freeman of Bristol by dint of a noble marriage.

  The young gentleman merchant of Bristol was tall and strongly built, with dark brown hair and a prominent nose and strong chin. Before war's end, intelligent and ambitious Woodes Rogers would be a household name from London to Edinburgh, from Boston to Barbados. But in France and Spain, they would know him by just one word: pirate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WAR

  1702–1712

  THE ONSET of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–1712) made Sam Bellamy's life more uncertain than it already was. He was thirteen years old when the conflict began, a ship's boy on either a merchant vessel or Royal Navy warship. By the time it ended, he was a skilled mariner, able to guide a vessel a thousand miles, handle grappling hooks, firearms, and cannon.

  In the early years of the conflict, the English and French navies clashed in two massive fleet engagements. These battles involved only the Royal Navy's largest vessels, the ships of the line: enormous, lumbering, wooden fortresses bristling with three stories of heavy cannon. These ships, the first-, second-, and third-rates, were too slow and cumbersome to use in more subtle operations such as convoying merchantmen, attacking enemy shipping, or patrolling the unmarked reefs and shoals of the Caribbean. They were built for one purpose: to join a line of battle in a massive set-piece engagement.

  Had the teenage Bellamy been unlucky enough to be grabbed by a press gang, he may well have ended up aboard one of these ships of the line, for they soaked up much of the available manpower. Each of the navy's seven first-rate ships had a crew of 800 men, who were crammed into a 200-foot-long hull with a hundred heavy cannon, and months of supplies and food stores, including live cows, sheep, pigs, goats, and poultry. Bellamy would have awoken in his hammock to the rolling of drums, the cries calling all hands to stations as the massive ship maneuvered into the line of battle, two hundred yards ahead of one ship, two hundred yards behind another. The enemy ships lined up in similar fashion and, after hours or even days of maneuvers, the two lines passed each other, discharging broadsides. The ships would sometimes pass within a few feet, blasting thirty-two-pound cannonballs into each other's hulls. These balls punched straight through people, eviscerating or decapitating, and spraying the cramped gun decks with body parts and wooden splinters. Cannon trained on exposed decks were generally loaded with grapeshot or with a pair of cannonballs chained together, either of which could reduce a crowd of men into a splay of mangled flesh. From the rigging, sharpshooters picked off enemy officers or, if the ships came together, dropped primitive grenades on their opponent's deck. Above and below, every surface was soon covered with blood and body parts, which oozed out of the scuppers and drains when the ship heeled in the wind. "I fancied myself in the infernal regions," a veteran of such a battle recalled, "where every man appeared a devil."

  These early engagements took the lives of thousands of men but they were hardly conclusive. Seven English and four French ships of the line fought a six-day battle off Colombia in August 1702, for example, with neither side losing a single ship. Two years later, fifty-three English and Dutch ships of the line squared off with some fifty French vessels off Málaga, Spain, in the largest naval engagement of the war; the daylong bout of fleet-scale carnage ending in a draw.

  By happenstance, the Royal Navy wiped out its French and Spanish rivals early in the war. In October 1702, an English battle fleet trapped twelve French ships of the line and most of the Spanish navy in a fjordlike inlet on Spain's northern coast, destroying or capturing all of them. Five years later, an Anglo-Dutch force captured the French port of Toulon and so many men-of-war that the French were unable to engage in further fleet actions. Thereafter on many English ships of the line, crewmen had substantially reduced odds of dying in battle, though disease, accident, and abuse still carried off nearly half the men who enlisted.

  Were Bellamy serving in the merchant marine rather than the navy, these early English victories would have made his life a good deal more hazardous. After these defeats, the French and Spanish decided to focus their war at sea not on the English navy, but on its merchant vessels, hoping to cut off the island kingdom from its sources of wealth and supplies. The French navy assembled a few squadrons of swift warships for the purpose. However, King Louis XIV decided it would be cheaper to outsource most of the work to the private sector, offering generous subsidies to encourage subjects to build their own privateers. After the Battle of Málaga, the French sent out huge numbers of heavily manned privateers, which typically carried anywhere from ten to forty guns. Over 100 privateers operated out of the French channel port of Dunkirk alone. Together with their counterparts in dozens of other French ports from Calais to Martinique, French privateers took 500 English and Dutch vessels every year; dozens more fell victim to Spanish privateers operating out of Cuba and other parts of the Spanish West Indies. English merchant vessels couldn't leave Dover and other English ports for fear of being captured.

  France and Spain were soon to get a taste of their own medicine, and Thatch and Rogers would be among those administering it.

  ***

  At some point before or during the War of Spanish Succession, Edward Thatch made his way to the Americas in search of better fortunes, and on some unidentified vessel he sailed into the capacious harbor of Port Royal, Jamaica.

  Jamaica had been an English colony for half a century. Nonetheless, it was about as un-English a place as one could find. The sun was overpowering. Instead of fog and chill, the sea carried in hot, heavy air, smothering its wool-wearing English residents. Thatch found nothing resembling the gently rolling hills of the Avon valley. The ridges of volcanic mountains sliced through their jungled skin, belching steam and sulfur. En route from Europe, the sea had lost its pigment, becoming so clear one could see her sandy, coral-studded footings and colorful inhabitants, even at a depth of a hundred feet or more. There were fish that could fly and birds that could speak. Legions of gigantic turtles crawled from the sea by the thousands, laying piles of eggs, each as big as a grown pheasant. In the fall, storms lashed the island, some so powerful they would flatten towns and leave the beaches littered with broken ships. Sometimes the island itself awoke in an earthquake, shaking off towns, plantations, and people like so many bedbugs. Moreover, Jamaica and her fellow islands welcomed their new residents with invisible contagions: malaria and yellow fever, dysentery, and plague.

  To enter the colony's main harbor, Thatch's vessel sailed around a long sandy spit protecting the anchorage's southern approaches. At its tip stood Port Royal, once the largest and wealthiest English settlement in the Americas, whose merchants achieved the "height of splendor" through a brisk trade in sugar and slaves. When Thatch arrived, much of Port Royal was underwater, the result of a devastating earthquake in 1692 that swallowed part of the town and flattened most of the rest, killing at least 2,000 of its 7,000 residents. In 1703, a fire burned what was left to the ground, sparing only the stone forts guarding the harbor entrance and one house, which lay stranded on what was now an island, part of the sand spit having collapsed during the earthquake. A city once known for its splendor and decadence, Port Royal was, by Thatch's time, little more than a slum with "low, little, and irregular" houses and streets that visitors compared unfavorably with those of London's poorest neighborhoods. To make matters worse, Jamaican authorities forced local slaves to carry their chamber pots to a central waste heap located upwind from Port Royal, creating
a terrible stench that overpowered residents when the sea breezes kicked up in the afternoon.

  Circling Port Royal and its foul-smelling wind, incoming ships crossed Jamaica's busy harbor, passing coastal trading sloops, ocean-going slave ships and naval frigates. Most ships anchored near the north shore, where the survivors of the 1703 fire had founded the new settlement of Kingston at the foot of the Blue Mountains. To the east, a dirt road wound past slaves' hovels and fields of sugarcane in the direction of the settlement of St. Jago de la Vega or Spanish Town, five miles away, which Queen Anne had recently designated as the colony's new capital.

  Jamaica had a dubious reputation. After a visit in 1697, the London writer Edward Ward had nothing nice to say about it. "The receptacle of vagabounds, the sanctuary of bankrupts, and a [toilet] stool for the purges of our prisons," he declared. Jamaica was "as sickly as a hospital, as dangerous as the plague, as hot as hell, and as wicked as the Devil." It was "the Dunghill of the Universe" the "shameless Pile of Rubbish ... neglected by [God] when he formed the world into its admirable order." Its people, he harangued, "regard nothing but money, and value not how they get it, there being no other felicity to be enjoyed, but purely riches."

  Beyond the docks of Kingston and Port Royal, the island was carved up into huge cattle ranches and sugar plantations, many of them the property of absentee owners who lived in the comparative safety and comfort of England on the profits sent home to them. For decades, English authorities had used the island's plantations as a dumping ground for people they found undesirable: Puritans and other religious deviants, Scottish and Irish nationalists, followers of failed rebellions against the crown, landless peasants, beggars, and large numbers of common criminals all found themselves in bondage to the sugar and cotton planters. Hoards of these indentured servants died, overwhelmed by tropical diseases as they worked the planters' fields under the unrelenting sun; others simply ran off and joined the privateers who used Port Royal as a base to attack Spanish shipping during the wars of the 1660s and 1670s.