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

by Colin Woodard

  De la Vega and his crew were imprisoned aboard the Barsheba, relieved of two gold pieces (worth £8) and some of their clothing, but not abused in any way. It helped that de la Vega had agreed to show the privateers the way to the Spanish salvage camp. It was easy, he told them: Just let the Gulf Stream push you along the flat, featureless Florida shore for a hundred miles and you can't miss it. There's really nothing else between here and there.

  It was as the Spaniard said. All day long and through the night the three vessels made their way up the deserted Florida shore, flying Spanish colors. The following morning, they witnessed the first signs of the destroyed treasure fleet. Bits and pieces of the patrol ship, Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, were scattered high up a barrier island beach a few miles north of the St. Lucie Inlet. The vessel's hull was visible in the shallow water a few hundred yards off the beach. It was clear that it had already been thoroughly salvaged by the Spaniards. On the shore were signs of their operations: remains of campfires and crude crosses marking the graves of those who hadn't survived. The flotilla continued northward, passing the remains of the Urca de Lima, run aground in the mouth of Fort Pierce Inlet; the galleon had also been picked clean by her surviving crew, then burned to the waterline to discourage freelance salvors.

  The campfires of the Spanish salvage camps flickered red against the pitch black shore. It was, again, as de la Vega outlined: two camps, six miles apart, near a grove of palm trees planted by Florida's natives, the Ayz Indians. Palmar de Ayz, as de la Vega called it, was the final resting place of the late General Ubilla's flagship as well as one of the treasure-laden fighting galleons, the San Cristo de San Roman. Any treasure the Spaniards had salvaged would be in the main camp, the northernmost clump of light on the shore. Jennings ordered all lamps doused, hands turned out of their hammocks, and the boats prepared for a landing.

  ***

  Admiral Francisco Salmon, the commander of the camp, was lucky to be alive. The hurricane had dismasted his ship and smashed her into three pieces on the shoals; the middle section sank, carrying a hundred men to their deaths, but the bow and stern were thrown ashore, sparing Salmon and half of his crew. By the time help arrived from St. Augustine and Havana, the survivors had already eaten the last of the dogs, cats, and horses that had made it ashore, and had moved on to devour the bitter berries of the palmetto trees growing along the beach. Salmon was ill, but refused to leave the wreck site. "I will stay on this island [sic]...in bad health and half dressed," he wrote his king, "even if it means sacrificing my life." He had posted his strongest men as sentries near the hulk of the Regla in an attempt to prevent the other men from looting the chests of treasure within. Then he set about trying to re-cover as much of the fleet's cargo as possible. It was clear that a great deal of dangerous diving work would need to be done, but few of Salmon's men were eager to enter the shark-infested water. Those who did sickened within a few weeks under the strain of the heavy work. With hundreds of tons of treasure to salvage from the ocean floor, another solution was clearly called for. Salmon sent a man to Havana with orders to round up African and Indian divers.

  Early-eighteenth-century diving techniques were primitive and extremely hazardous. Free divers—almost all of them slaves—were sent out over the wreck sites on simple rafts. Each took a large rock and a very deep breath before jumping overboard and sinking to the ocean floor twenty to fifty feet down. There they scampered about for a few minutes, scooping up coins and small objects, and marking the locations of chests, boxes, cannon and other desirable objects. On the surface they were searched, then sent back to the bottom with ropes or chains to attach to the larger objects, so they could be raised with ship-mounted windlasses. In deeper water, the divers couldn't stay down long enough to be useful, so a large bell was lowered down with them. When a diver ran out of breath, he could stick his face under the bell and take another from the pocket of air there. If they didn't take care to exhale completely before heading to the surface their lungs could rupture, resulting in an agonizing death. Others were forced to stay down so long that they built up dangerous levels of nitrogen in their blood; when they resurfaced the dissolved gas bubbled in their veins—the bends—leading to permanent paralysis, nerve damage, and death. Mortality rates were extremely high among enslaved divers, and a third of the 300 divers at Palmar de Ayz did not survive their servitude.

  No matter the human cost, Admiral Salmon was pleased with the results. Over four million pesos (£1 million) in coins and cargo had already been salvaged, most of it from the Regla and Roman, which lay in relatively shallow water near his camp. To expedite operations, he'd set up an auxiliary camp next to the Roman, a mile down the beach from the main camp. The vast majority of the treasure Salmon recovered was already in Havana under heavy guard, yet some 350,000 pieces of eight (£87,500) were buried in the sand within his fortified main camp. These chests of silver must have been the first thing that came to mind when his aides shook him awake in the wee hours of December 27 to tell him the camps were under attack.

  ***

  As his ships tossed in the darkness, Jennings selected 150 men, armed them to the teeth, and divided them into three equal companies. Each company boarded a large boat and, at two in the morning, rowed ashore. They landed midway between the two Spanish camps. At daybreak, they marched up the beach toward the main camp, a drummer and flag bearer at the head of each company. Panic spread within the camp. Admiral Salmon's men had built a sand embankment to defend against attacks by the Ayz, but they knew it would be little match for the musket-toting English. They were also outnumbered; Salmon had only sixty soldiers and a few cannon at his command. A dozen of his men fled the scene as the rat-a-tat-tat of Jennings's drummers grew closer. Salmon, reading the writing on the wall, took a white flag and went out alone to meet the English.

  Jennings and Salmon faced each other: Is this war, Salmon asked? No, we came to fish the wrecks, to claim the "mountain of wealth,"the Englishman responded. There is nothing for you here, Salmon insisted. The wrecks "belonged to His Catholic Majesty," King Philip V, and Salmon's men were securing them for him. This line of reasoning got Salmon nowhere so he offered them 25,000 pieces of eight to leave peacefully. Jennings refused. Salmon, knowing resistance would be futile, surrendered, giving up the location of the buried treasure. Vane and Jennings's men loaded the silver into a launch, adding four bronze swivel guns and various sundries stolen from Salmon's staff. They sabotaged three cannons that were too large to carry away and returned to their sloop with £87,000 in Spanish gold and silver.

  After releasing the Spanish mail boat, the English sailed off to the southeast. They needed somewhere safe to divide their plunder. Jennings suspected the Bahamas would serve that purpose well.

  ***

  In the Bahamas, things had gotten much busier since the destruction of the treasure fleet. The wrecks were attracting rogues, adventurers, and unemployed seamen from across the English-speaking world. Most used the Bahamas as their base of operations, it being the closest nominally British territory to Palmar de Ayz. For these raiders, treasure hunters, and pirates, the absence of government in the Bahamas was an added attraction.

  In the late summer and fall of 1715, Hornigold and Thatch continued to raid Spanish trading vessels along the coasts of Cuba and Florida. They let it be known that they refused to respect the Treaty of Utrecht and considered the Spanish and French to be enemies still. The English and Dutch, they claimed, had nothing to fear from them, as they were merely avenging their countrymen for the ravages done by Spanish coastguardsmen. While they maintained this policy through the spring and summer of 1715, it began to falter by the fall. In early November, Hornigold and Thatch seized an English sloop, the Mary of Jamaica, off the coast of Cuba. The Mary represented a significant improvement for the pirates; the sloop was large enough to accommodate 140 men and six cannon, which meant she was probably thirty-five to forty tons, the size of Jennings's Barsheba and Lord Hamilton's other privateers. Hornigold and T
hatch treated the sailors well, and a few of them may have even volunteered to join them, attracted by higher wages and greater freedom.

  In November, Hornigold sailed the Mary back to the Bahamas, along with a Spanish sloop he'd captured whose hold was filled with barreled sugar and dry goods. This time however he did not return to the safety of Harbour Island but rather dropped anchor right in Nassau Harbor. He rallied the pirates, wreckers, and other ne'er-do-wells living in the ruined capital to announce that they were all under his personal protection. The pirates, who were starting to outnumber New Providence's law-abiding residents, began sauntering around the town as if they owned it. They had even taken a name for themselves: the Flying Gang.

  At that time Thomas Walker had returned to Nassau from a trading voyage to Cuba with his twenty-year-old son, Thomas Jr. One day while Walker was attending to business around the house, he sent his son into town to run errands. The young man immediately sensed the changed atmosphere. Some of his friends told him of being shaken down for money by the Flying Gang brutes. Others said it was no longer safe to let their wives and daughters walk around unescorted. The pirates, it was said, had gotten "an abundance of money" out of the Spanish wrecks, and were using it to arm themselves and to buy the loyalty of whomever they needed. Then, somewhere in town, Walker came face-to-face with Benjamin Hornigold.

  "Where's that old rogue, your father?" he angrily asked Thomas Jr.

  "My father is at home," the young man replied, according to a deposition he later gave to officials in Charleston.

  "He is a troublesome old fart," Hornigold exclaimed, "and if I see him I will shoot and kill him."

  "My father is at home, and if you have anything to say to him the best way would be to go and speak to his face," the son responded.

  Hornigold warned that if the Walkers didn't mind their own business, he would burn their house down, kill the old man, and whip the rest of them senseless. With over 100 men and a well-armed sloop at his command, Hornigold was unopposed in his authority.

  The Walkers' situation became more dire by the week. In December, Hornigold and the captains of at least two other pirate sloops cruised the Florida shore to intercept Spanish shipping between Cuba and the wrecks. To the Walkers' horror, Hornigold returned at the end of the month with an even larger Spanish sloop. He renamed it the Benjamin after himself and transferred arms and material to her from the Mary. Witnesses later described the Benjamin as a "great sloop" or sloop-of-war, capable of carrying 200 men and a variety of weapons. With such a warship, Hornigold had no need for the Mary. He sent the English sloop back to Jamaica with the crew members who did not wish to join the Flying Gang.

  On or about the first of January, the Walkers watched, mouths agape, as Jennings's privateers sailed into the harbor, their holds filled with looted Spanish silver. The senior Thomas Walker gazed out at the growing fleet of warships in Nassau Harbor, and, for the first time, understood that a new age had begun.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PIRATES GATHER

  January–June 1716

  SINCE RETURNING from his round-the-world voyage, Woodes Rogers had weathered one disappointment after another.

  In Bristol he learned that his father-in-law, William Whetstone, had died. His wife and children had been living with the Whetstones during Rogers's long absence. They were compelled to turn over ownership of their Queen Square mansion to Lady Whetstone to defray the costs of supporting them all. With little to show for three years of dangerous work, Rogers also moved in with his in-laws, nursing his wounded face and leg and grieving the loss of his brother.

  Within weeks, his convalescence was interrupted by a court summons. A man named Stephen Creagh was suing Rogers on behalf of 209 of the Duke and Dutchess's former crewmen. Creagh's clients were convinced that the treasure galleon Incarnación had cargo worth not £140,000, but £3 million, and that Rogers had hidden much of the "missing" treasure in Batavia. The sailors must have felt slighted and abused. Many had been forced into the Royal Navy before they even set foot on dry land, and it was Creagh who paid the legal fees and charges to release them. In January 1712, Rogers journeyed to London to defend himself and to watch over the auction of his expedition's plunder.

  While in London, Rogers learned that his wife was pregnant with their fourth child. Perhaps buoyed by this knowledge, he threw himself into preparing his journals for publication. He was beaten even in this, by Edward Cooke's account of the voyage, which appeared in London bookstores a few months before his own. He ultimately won out, however, when his A Cruising Voyage Around the World came out and quickly outsold its hastily written competitor. Readers were particularly captivated by Rogers's account of the castaway, Alexander Selkirk, who had received scant attention in Cooke's book. Among them was writer and journalist Daniel Defoe, who sought out Selkirk in Bristol and used him as the model for the hero of his most famous novel, Robinson Crusoe. A Cruising Voyage would go through two editions and numerous reprints, providing Woodes with a much-needed source of income.

  In August there was another cause for happiness when Sarah gave birth to a son. The boy was christened Woodes, after his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. The war was also coming to a close, raising the prospect of better times ahead for the financially troubled family.

  Then their fortunes changed yet again. In December, Lord Chancellor Simon Harcourt announced his ruling in the case of Creagh v. Rogers. Rogers had lost, and the terms of the judgment forced him into bankruptcy. A few months later, while Rogers was still spinning from this disaster, his eight-month-old son died and was buried in St. Michael's churchyard. The stress of these losses seems to have finally undone the Rogers' marriage. Sarah and Woodes began living apart, he in London, she in Bristol, and soon weren't speaking at all. Within a few years, they were pretending each other were dead.

  True to form, Rogers threw himself into another daring project. With the end of the war, piracy was bound to rear its ugly head, and nowhere more so than that most famous den of pirates, Madagascar. Madagascar, the fabled kingdom of Henry Avery, the haunt of Thomas Tew and the late Captain Kidd, was a nest of anarchy and disorder perched astride the primary shipping lanes connecting Europe with India and the Dutch Indies. Rogers had heard the tales from Dampier and others, and he'd undoubtedly heard a lot more from Dutch merchants, officers, and officials in Batavia and Cape Town. He must have sweated a bit, back in December 1710, when his worm-eaten, treasure-laden ships passed around the south end of Madagascar on their long journey home, expecting at any moment to see a pack of pirate sloops appear over the horizon. Rogers was a merchant, after all, and nothing was worse for trade than piracy. In the summer of 1713, Rogers began hatching a scheme to suppress the pirates and, ultimately, to bring their rogue state under the control of the proper authorities.

  The first phase of this effort would involve a stealth mission to the island, where he would make contact with the pirates, assess their strength and numbers, and try to negotiate their peaceful surrender. If successful, Rogers may have intended to approach the king, volunteering to oversee the peaceful settlement of the island as its first governor. The benefits of this colony to Britain would be legion. Not only would it displace one of the primary threats to the empire's Asian trade, it would serve as a vital sanctuary and naval and resupply base halfway between England and the East Indies. At this stage, though, Rogers knew he needed to lie low. The British East India Company had already demonstrated that it would go to any lengths to maintain its royal monopoly on the lucrative Asia trade. Rogers couldn't risk having them squash his project before it even got off the ground.

  His first trip to Madagascar would, therefore, proceed under cover of trade. He approached his old business partners in Bristol—and probably some new ones in London as well—and negotiated the purchase of a suitable ship. The result was the Delicia, a 460-ton merchantman armed with thirty-six-guns, slightly larger than the Dutchess and roughly equivalent to one of the navy's larger fifth-rate friga
tes. With a large rounded hull, the Delicia was capable of carrying large cargoes, making her perfect for long-distance trade and supply. She would become Rogers's constant companion for the next eight years. The penniless but well-connected young captain had to confront a more difficult challenge: securing a trading contract with his old enemies at the East India Company.

  On October 2, 1713, Rogers traveled down Leadenhall Street, past the sprawling central city market, and rolled up to the entrance of the East India House, the company's global headquarters. His nose likely stung from the stench of the adjacent market, where hundreds of animals were butchered daily, their entrails lying in huge piles just a few yards away. He stood on a cobblestone sidewalk before the imposing, four-story edifice. The company's sixty-five-year-old mansion was built of wood, and was opulently paned and ornamented. A balcony overhung the street, on which company officials could observe the comings and goings in the courtyards of the market below. Leaden-glass windows in patterns of tiny, diamond-shaped panes faced out onto the street from the second and third floors, except for the center of the third floor, which was adorned with a ten-foot-tall carving of the company's coat of arms. The building was crowned by an enormous mural, twenty-five feet long and fifteen high, of three of the company's great ships under sail, as well as two carvings of angry sea monsters and an Englishman leaning on a rapier. At street level, a doorman stood behind a counter. He would have asked Rogers if he had an appointment before leading him into the sprawling headquarters.