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

by Colin Woodard

  Thomas Walker didn't like the arrival of the pirates one bit. The last thing he and his neighbors needed was to bring the wrath of Spain down on them once again. Hornigold and his colleagues had to be stopped, and Walker figured he was the only man to do it.

  First he called for reinforcements, dispatching letters to everyone he could think of—the lords of the admiralty, the lords of trade, the Duke of Beaufort, and the other Proprietors of the Bahamas, even the Boston News-Letter—informing them of the increasingly dangerous situation. He assured the lords proprietor that he was a "prosecutor and disturber of all pirates, robbers, and villains that do expect to shelter themselves or take up their abode in these, their Lordships' Islands." Until a new governor was appointed, he would take it upon himself "to curbe the exorbitant tempers of some people of these islands and to execute justice upon Piratts."

  Soon every sea captain from Boston to Port Royal was aware of the exploits of Hornigold and Cockram. The acting governor of Bermuda, Henry Pulleine, sent letters back to London warning that the two men were turning the Bahamas into a "nest for pyrates." Pulleine even offered to annex the Bahamas to his government, promising to destroy the "infamous rascals, who do an infinite mischiefe to trade, by making us scandalous to our neighbors."

  After the pirate depredations of 1713, Walker decided letter-writing was not enough. Just after Christmas, he gathered some men together, boarded a vessel, and sailed up to Harbour Island to administer justice himself.

  Walker's campaign had an auspicious start. At Harbour Island, he surprised the pirates, capturing Daniel Stillwell, teenager Zacheus Darvell, and one of their accomplices, Matthew Low. The other sea robbers fled into the woods and defended themselves "by force of Armes," but Walker was able to seize the Happy Return, ending her career as a pirate vessel. He compelled Low and the Darvell boy to turn on Daniel Stillwell, signing written depositions implicating him in the recent pirate raids on the Spaniards. Walker had no authority to try Stillwell, however, his commission as an Admiralty judge having expired decades before. Instead, he would have to send Stillwell to the nearest court of justice at Jamaica, a course of action the prisoner actually begged him to follow. Walker had his concerns—the long sea voyage offered the prisoner an easy chance of escape—but he didn't have a lot of other options. He placed Stillwell and copies of the damning depositions in the hands of Jonathan Chase, the captain of the sloop Portsmouth, who agreed to deliver them directly to the governor of Jamaica, Lord Archibald Hamilton. He departed on January 2,1715.

  Walker sailed the Happy Return back to Nassau and hired men to help him capture Hornigold and other fugitives now hiding amid the lignum vitae and logwood trees of Eleuthera. Shortly thereafter, he received reports that the Spanish in Cuba were preparing a massive assault on the Bahamas in retribution for the piracies committed by Hornigold and his outlaw friends. A local man who had been held captive by the Spaniards told Walker that a fleet of warships were sailing from Havana with orders to "cut off" every man, woman, and child on New Providence. Walker promptly boarded the Happy Return, and set sail for Havana, hoping to talk the Spaniards out of invading his wayward colony.

  Fortunately, the Spanish governor of Cuba, Laureano de Torres y Ayala, the Marquis Cassa Torres, was in a forgiving mood. He received the nervous Bahamian graciously, accepting his stories of having captured eight of the offending pirates and sending them to justice in Jamaica. "I return you grateful thanks and likewise [to] all the inhabitants of Providence [because] you have taken care to detect such villains who make it their evil practice to rob those who follow honest means to live," the Marquis proclaimed. Walker and his party remained at Havana for much of February, smoothing relations with their powerful neighbor for "the future safety and peace of all the inhabitants" of the Bahamas.

  Walker returned home to Nassau to discover that the pirates were far from pacified. The prisoner Daniel Stillwell never made it to Jamaica. Somehow, Benjamin Hornigold and his men had managed to rescue him and were preparing to take care of Walker himself. All the colony's inhabitants knew that if Walker were out of the way, the Bahamas would belong to the pirates and to the pirates alone.

  ***

  In Jamaica, Governor Archibald Hamilton had little time to wonder why Daniel Stillwell had failed to be delivered to him, to worry about Bahamian pirates, or, indeed, the petty colony of the Bahamas. He was involved in a far weightier and dangerous project: helping to orchestrate a secret plot to overthrow and replace the king of Britain. His efforts, strangely enough, would dramatically swell the ranks of pirates operating out of the Bahamas.

  Queen Anne had died, childless, in August of 1714. Under normal circumstances, the crown would have passed to her half-brother, James Stuart, the next in the line of dynastic succession, a situation that, to the thinking of many at the time, was ordained by God himself. James was a Catholic, however, and under a law passed in 1701, no Catholic could sit on the throne. Unfortunately, there weren't any other members of the House of Stuart who weren't also Catholics. The best Protestant anyone could come up with was one of Anne's second cousins, George Ludwig, Elector of the German state of Hanover. Although he didn't speak English and wasn't interested in learning, George Ludwig was brought over to England and crowned King George I, becoming the founding member of a new ruling family, the House of Hanover, which still occupies the throne today. Many Britons were unhappy with this turn of events, especially in Scotland. The Scots were already upset about losing their independence under the 1707 Treaty of Union, but at least the Stuarts—that is, the Stewarts—had been the legitimate royal family of Scotland. Now, just seven years after the merging of the English and Scottish monarchies, the English had placed a German prince on the throne, one extremely hostile to Scottish Presbyterianism. Other Britons were upset by the coming of the Hanoverians, such as Catholics, adherents to the Church of England, and divine right enthusiasts, but it was the noble families of Scotland that spearheaded efforts to put James Stuart on the throne.

  Lord Hamilton was a member of just such a family. His eldest brother, James, the fourth Duke of Hamilton, had headed opposition to Scotland's union with England, and was arrested on numerous occasions for pro-Stuart activities. His older brother, George, the Earl of Orkney, was deeply involved in plans for a military uprising in support of James Stuart, an effort that at least two of his nephews were also involved in. Governor Hamilton intended to do his part. Since taking up his post in 1711, he had purged Jamaica's governing council, militia, and civil service of Stuart opponents, replacing them with Catholics, Scotsmen, and other Jacobites, as supporters of James Stuart were called. He placed a fellow Scotsman in charge of Port Royal's fortifications, the chief defenses of the island, and refused to account for either the gunpowder hoarded there or the contents of merchant vessels he seized, allegedly for smuggling. The planters and merchants who sat in the Jamaican assembly were terrified at "the number of Papists and Jacobites" employed in Hamilton's administration. And as preparations unfolded toward a major Jacobite uprising back in Britain, Hamilton began assembling a fleet of private warships in Port Royal, a force that may have been intended for use as a colonial Jacobite navy.

  Hamilton denied being anything but a loyal servant of George I. The small fleet he assembled in the summer and early fall of 1715, he later insisted, was for the sole purpose of defending the island's shipping against Spanish privateers, and this is what the commissions he issued his fleet stated. Hamilton would explain that Jamaican merchants had begged his administration to protect them from the Spaniards. "We had only one man of war and one sloop [of war] left on the Jamaica station, both foul [and] unfit to go after those nimble vessels which infested us," Hamilton wrote. With those two naval ships about to leave for Britain, he added, there was little choice but to replace them with vessels of his own. Thus Hamilton contacted a number of his allies on the island, urging them to join him in investing in a flotilla of ten armed privateers. All they needed were some trustworthy and experience
d mariners to operate them. One of those mariners would be Charles Vane.

  It's reasonable to assume Vane was unemployed, roaming the docks of Port Royal and Kingston in search of work. He eventually found it, being hired by his future mentor, Captain Henry Jennings, to serve on the crew of a privateer.

  Jennings was offered the command of one of Governor Hamilton's privateers, a forty-ton sloop called the Barsheba. The Barsheba could carry eight guns and eighty men. The investors who owned her selected Jennings based on his reputation: a veteran merchant captain with wartime experience and a Jamaican estate that reliably earned him £400 annually, above and beyond what he earned at sea. Dependable, experienced, and fearless, Jennings was just the sort of man they wanted to command their warship.

  By late July, as they prepared to sail, the skies around Jamaica darkened and the wind began to blow hard from the southeast. A great storm was brewing, one that would change the fortunes of Jennings and Hornigold, Thatch and Vane, Williams and Bellamy. Indeed, after it passed, the Caribbean and the Americas would never be the same.

  ***

  On July 13,1715,* a Spanish treasure fleet left Havana, bound for Cádiz. On account of the war, it had been several years since the Spanish had dispatched their treasure fleets to the New World, so the galleons were carrying an unusually valuable haul: coins, silks, porcelain, ingots, and jewels worth an estimated seven million pieces of eight (£1,750,000). They were also departing unusually late in the season.

  The combined fleets commander, Captain-General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla, had been fretting about the delays for months. First the Tierra Firma fleet under General Don Antonio de Echeverz had been delayed in Cartagena, waiting for the silver-laden llama caravans to arrive from Potosi, on the other side of the Andes. Then Ubilla's New Spain fleet had been stuck in Vera Cruz for months on end, waiting for the Manila galleons to arrive in Acapulco. By the time the two fleets joined forces in Havana, Ubilla began worrying that they might not make it out of the tropics before the onset of hurricane season. There were further delays in Cuba as Havana merchants loaded their wares and Governor Torres y Ayala insisted on the officers' attendance at his lavish parties. At the last minute, an extra vessel, the French-owned frigate El Grifon, joined the fleet because its commander feared his treasure-laden vessel would be easy prey for the pirate gang known to be operating out of the Bahamas. Ubilla was worried about departing so late, but he had no other choice. The court of King Philip V, the grandson of Louis XIV whose control of the Spanish throne was endorsed in the Treaty of Utrecht, desperately needed an influx of cash and had been exerting pressure on Ubilla for more than a year. Reluctantly, the Spanish commodore gave the order to set sail, clinging to the hope that no hurricanes would strike so early in the season.

  The eleven-ship armada sailed out of Havana and into the Straits of Florida, their sails full and flags waving. Ubilla and Echeverz's massive fighting galleons took the lead, their raised aft decks towering above both the main deck and the ocean waves like wooden skyscrapers. Six treasure galleons made up the body of the fleet, their cargo-laden hulls riding low in the water. El Grifon, the French frigate, darted back and forth, being more nimble than her fortresslike consorts. Two more fighting galleons brought up the rear, dozens of heavy bronze cannon concealed behind their gun ports.

  On Friday, July 19, the easterly winds blowing off the Florida coast began to fail. The air turned unusually hot and humid and some of the veteran sailors began feeling pains in their joints. Slowly the winds began picking up, but this time from the eastern horizon, where thin, wispy clouds had been hovering since morning. By midafternoon the skies had darkened, rain squalls passed over the galleons, and the winds began to strengthen from the east-northeast. First to twenty miles an hour, then to thirty, and forty. Sailors clung to the masts in the growing seas as they struggled to shorten sail. On every ship, cannons were secured, hatches battened down, and cargo double-checked as the Spaniards prepared to meet the coming storm.

  By midnight, the Spanish vessels were plowing into hurricane-force winds. Fear turned to terror as the clumsy galleons began climbing mountainous waves, forty and fifty feet tall. As the winds reached a hundred miles an hour, the furled sails loosened and were torn to ribbons, and bits of heavy rigging began crashing onto the decks. All the while, Ubilla and his fellow officers kept looking over their shoulders, knowing that the wind and waves were driving the fleet toward the treacherous Florida coast. They were also aware that there wasn't a single refuge between Key West and the great Spanish outpost of St. Augustine, and there was little hope of making it that far.

  In the small hours of the morning, the men spotted roaring surf off their ship's aft port quarters. Struggle as they might, the crew could do nothing to prevent the galleons from being driven onto the reefs and sand by the mountainous seas. One by one the ships struck. Ubilla's 471-ton flagship, Nuestra Señora de la Regla, had her bottom torn off by a reef and sank in thirty feet of water. One of the rear galleons vanished under a wave, while another, the 450-ton Santo Cristo de San Roman, capsized in the surf a few miles south of the Regla and disintegrated. The commander of one of the treasure galleons, the Urca de Lima, managed to run his ship aground in the shelter of a river mouth, but she was still battered apart by the storm. In the end, all ten were destroyed, littering the beaches with hundreds of bodies. Only El Grifon, which had sailed ahead of the fleet, was able to escape the hurricane.*

  Fewer than half of the 2,000 men aboard the doomed ships made it to the beaches alive, crawling in terror through the stinging rain and darkness to shelter themselves amid the dunes. Dozens more died from their wounds and dehydration over the next few days while they huddled on the beach, looking out for hostile Indians. Both Ubilla and Echeverz had drowned, but Admiral Don Francisco Salmon made it to shore and put the survivors to work digging for water and building crude shelters from the wreckage of their ships. Several men made for St. Augustine in one of the surviving ship's boats. A week later they made it into that harbor, rowing beneath the giant fort, Castillo de San Marcos,* to break the news of one of the greatest maritime disasters in the history of the Americas. Along with the remains of ten ships and a thousand corpses, seven million pesos in treasure lay scattered off the beaches of east Florida, most of it in water so shallow that a good diver could reach it all.

  ***

  The news spread across the Americas faster than the plague, from St. Augustine and Havana to Jamaica and the Bahamas. Ship captains carried the word to Charleston, Williamsburg, Newport, and Boston. The Boston News-Letter did the rest, its late summer editions carried far and wide by ships, sloops, and post riders alerting readers from Cape Cod to London of the disaster. Soon, from every corner of British America, men were piling onto vessels of all sorts bound "to fish upon ye wrecks."

  For Williams and Bellamy, it was a dream come true. Sometime in the early fall they headed for the Florida wreck sites. Perhaps there were tearful good-byes between Sam and Mary Hallett, between Paulsgrave and his wife, Anna. When the two men eventually returned to New England, it would be under far different circumstances.

  ***

  When the news of the wreck of the treasure fleet reached Jamaica, all hell broke loose. Every mariner in town seemed to be readying himself to sail to get his bit of Spanish treasure. Sailors were soon deserting the Port Royal-based naval frigate HMS Diamond at a rate of five a day, even as she was preparing to sail home to England. "If I had stayed a week longer I do believe I should not have had men enough to have brought me home," the Diamond's commanding officer, John Balchen, reported. The mariners were "all mad to go a wrecking, as they term it, for the generality of the island think they have [the] right to fish upon the wrecks, though the Spaniards have not quitted them."

  Rather than suppressing the wreckers, Governor Hamilton tried to get in on the action. He approached Captain Davis of HMS Jamaica, suggesting the young officer sail his sloop-of-war up to Florida, loot the wrecks, and share the proceeds with
Hamilton. Davis was offended by the request, as was Commodore Balchen, who informed the governor in no uncertain terms that he would not permit his ships to be used in such an ignoble errand. Rebuffed by the navy, Hamilton quickly moved to purchase shares in the privateers he had commissioned. His official orders to the privateers were to "execute all manner of acts of hostility" against pirates. Privately, he directed them to go straight to the Spanish wrecks and to bring back whatever treasure they could.

  Henry Jennings took his mission to heart. He signed on fourteen skilled divers—some black, some white—and loaded the Barsheba with "warlike stores." In December, he sailed out of Bluefields, Jamaica, in the company of another privateer, the thirty-five-ton sloop Eagle commanded by one John Wills. Jennings's Barsheba had eighty men and eight guns. The Eagle was even stronger, with twelve guns and 100 men. Together they could hold their own against the Spanish guardas costas and easily overwhelm the Spaniards' lightly manned trading vessels. They sailed along the mountainous shores of Cuba, stopping in the wild harbors of Honda and Mariel until, sometime after Christmas, they began making their way into the Florida Straits, searching for the signs of the ruined treasure fleet.

  On Christmas morning 1715, the privateers stood just off Key Biscayne,* a well-known watering hole at the mouth of the Florida Straits. Around eight o'clock, a small sailing launch approached them from the north, bucking the warm flow of the Gulf Stream. It turned out to be the San Nicolas de Vari y San Joseph, an official Spanish mail boat on her way from St. Augustine to Havana. Her master, a forty-six-year-old seaman named Pedro de la Vega, offered no resistance. Yes, he knew where the treasure wrecks were: His vessel had stopped at the main Spanish salvage camp on the way down from St. Augustine. No, Jennings wasn't the first person to ask; the San Nicolas had been looted the day before by a pair of English sloops at the site of one of the wrecked treasure galleons. Those Englishmen had also wanted to know about the strength of the Spanish camp, the nature of its defenses, and the quantity of treasure accumulated there. Pedro de la Vega told Jennings, Wills, and Vane what he had told the others: that he'd only anchored off the shores of the camp for a few hours and knew little of the proceedings there. If de la Vega did know more, he wasn't volunteering. He also neglected to mention the 1,200 pieces of eight hidden aboard the San Nicolas.