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

by Colin Woodard

  Bellamy and La Buse were outgunned two-to-one, so they had to count on outmaneuvering their powerful opponent. They weren't able to do so, unfortunately. The French ship delivered a broadside against the Marianne, cannonballs tearing through her decks, sending splinters in all directions. After an hour's engagement, Bellamy called off the attack. One of his men was dead and three were seriously wounded. The French ship proceeded on her way.

  They spent October and November prowling the Virgin Islands, then a sparsely-populated archipelago contested by four nations. Five hundred Danish colonists lived on St. Thomas, overseeing the labor of more than 3,000 African slaves; several hundred English lived on Tortuga, the westernmost part of the sprawling British Leeward Islands colony, which stretched out 300 miles down the Antillies to Antigua and Nevis. The Danes and English both claimed uninhabited St. John, the French and Danes argued over St. Croix, while the Spaniards held onto several other islands. With so many rival nations squabbling over such a small area, the Virgin Islands provided ideal conditions for swift commerce raiders like Bellamy and La Buse. They could steal a merchantman and take off "over the border" if a warship or coast guard vessel tried to pursue them. The prizes proved small, but they kept themselves in food and drink by seizing a variety of hapless fishing vessels and a French cargo ship carrying flour and salted cod. On at least one occasion they forced unmarried men to join them, but let the married men go free, knowing their family bonds made them much harder to mold into committed bandits.

  On the morning of November 9, as the pirates cruised the wide passage between St. Thomas and St. Croix, the rising sun revealed a sloop approaching from the west. It was a still morning, the wind barely filling their sails, but it was behind them. Bellamy and La Buse were able to overtake the vessel, a merchantman flying British colors. Bellamy ordered his gunner to fire a cannon over the sloop's bow, while La Buse had a large black flag "with a death's head and bones across" hoisted to the top of the Postillion's mast.

  The master of the sloop, Abijah Savage, saw there was no point in resisting. Each of the pirate sloops had eight guns and between eighty and ninety men. Savage's vessel, the Bonetta, was unarmed and crowded with passengers traveling from Jamaica to his home island of Antigua, the capital of the British Leeward Islands. There was an excitable nine-or ten-year-old traveling with his mother, an Antiguan planter heading home in the company of his Indian slave boy, a Negro or two, and some hired hands; no match for the approaching sloops, their decks packed with armed, wild-looking men. Savage did what virtually every shipmaster did when confronted with well-organized pirates. He struck his sails, pointing his vessel into the wind, where her sails flapped uselessly like laundry hung out to dry—the universal maritime signal of submission. The Bonetta drifted to a stop, rolling gently in the swells. Savage and his men hoisted a boat over the side, climbed in, and rowed over to see what their captors wanted of them.

  In council, the pirates resolved to detain the Bonetta and her complement for the time being. It wouldn't be long before the sloops would need to be cleaned again, and they would need a spare vessel to careen against. Savage and his men were confined aboard the Marianne while the pirates took possession of his sloop and set course for the all-but-deserted island of St. Croix. Savage and his crew remained prisoners for fifteen days, almost all of which were spent at anchor in the harbor of St. Croix. During this time, Savage later reported, Bellamy and La Buse were primarily concerned with exchanging their sloops for a combat-capable ship, which, with luck, they believed they "should be able to conquer and make a voyage." While the pirates cleaned the hulls of their vessels, three of the forced men fled into the dense foliage surrounding the harbor. The pirates recaptured one of the escapees, the Swede Peter Hoff, whom they "severely whipped" for the infraction.

  The sloops cleaned, Bellamy informed Savage that he, his men, and cargo would be free to go. The pirates, whom one witness said "pretended to be Robbin Hoods men," also had a penchant for fancy dress and took the clothes of the wealthy passengers. They also seized a black slave and an Indian boy belonging to an Antiguan planter, but were prepared to let the remaining passengers and crew go. But one of Savage's passengers, the nine- or ten-year-old child, John King, begged the pirates to take him with them. When his mother tried to stop him, King threatened her with violence and, according to Savage, "declared he would kill himself if he was restrained" from joining Bellamy's crew. The pirates must have been amused by the little boy, dressed in silk stockings and fine leather shoes, for they took him aboard the Marianne. There were plenty of ten-year-old ship's boys on naval and merchant ships, and now they had two of their own. To Mrs. King's horror, her son took an oath of loyalty to the pirates, promising not to steal even a single piece of eight from the company, and sailed away with his new companions.

  Bellamy was well aware that once Captain Savage reached Antigua, the alarm would spread across the Leeward Islands. The pirates needed to stay ahead of their former prisoners by quickly sailing down the chain toward the Spanish Main. From St. Croix they made for Saba, a tall, jagged, Dutch island seventy-five miles farther east, their eyes peeled for a combat-suitable ship.

  They didn't wait long. The very next day, with Saba looming to the northeast, they spotted and overtook an armed merchantman. The Sultana, a British ship-rigged galley with twenty-six guns, was a formidable vessel but considerably smaller than the forty-gun French ship they'd tried to take several weeks earlier. Bellamy and La Buse raised the skull-and-crossbones, confident that this time they had found an opponent they could handle. Little did they know how easy the engagement would be. Sultana's captain, John Richards, was in his cabin, suffering from wounds he'd received earlier in the voyage and entirely unable to organize her defense. The Marianne and Postillion quickly outmaneuvered her. The Sultana would never arrive at the Bay of Campeche to take on a cargo of logwood as planned. She would become a pirate ship instead.

  With the approval of the crew, Bellamy assumed command of the Sultana. The ship represented a marked increase in power. As a galley, she was constructed for speed and maneuverability, with flush decks and a sleek and narrow hull. The Sultana was not as big as Bellamy would have liked, but she made an excellent stepping-stone, a tool that would win him a proper frigate. Bellamy's prestige among the crew was so great that they selected his friend and confidante, Paulsgrave Williams, to assume command of the Marianne. The silversmith and the farmer's boy were now in a position to do serious damage to the merchants of the Atlantic.

  Within hours, the pirates captured a second ship, a clumsy merchant vessel under a Captain Tosor, who had been sailing for Campeche under the protection of the Sultana's guns. Tosor's vessel was plundered and, because the pirates were running increasingly short of manpower, several of his men were forced into service. Tosor himself was allowed to proceed on his way to Campeche in his ship. One of Bellamy's crewmen, Simon Van Vorst, a twenty-four-year-old Dutchman born in the former Dutch city of New York, later recalled seeing many of the forced men "cry and express their grief" at their fate. More than a few would change their minds as the treasure piled up over the coming months.

  ***

  The three-vessel squadron continued along the Leeward Islands, passing the British outposts on St. Christopher, Nevis, and Montserrat. Wishing to avoid entanglements with the Royal Navy, they gave Antigua a wide birth. They needn't have worried. At that time, there wasn't a single British warship between Jamaica and Barbados. On Antigua, the governor of the British Leeward Islands, Walter Hamilton,* had been apprised of the pirates' presence by the arrival of Captain Savage, but had no means to respond. At that moment, a merchant sloop was racing for Barbados with an urgent message for his counterpart there, asking that he dispatch his guardship, HMS Scarborough, to protect English shipping from the "vermine of pirates." But it was 250 miles to Barbados, and if his request was granted Hamilton knew it would be three weeks before help could get to his sprawling, poorly-defended colony.

  In the seco
nd week of December, the pirates captured a pair of trading vessels within sight of the French island of Guadeloupe, which they looted of food and other necessities. Then they turned south-southwest, letting the Lesser Antillies and their angry governors sink slowly behind the horizon. Bellamy knew it was time to find a hideaway to overhaul his new flagship and prepare for bigger things. They sailed for Spanish waters, for the remote island of La Blanquilla, where they could expect to conduct such business without disturbance.

  On December 19, twenty-seven miles short of La Blanquilla, they made yet another capture. They swarmed around the St. Michael, a British ocean-going merchant ship on its way from Bristol to Jamaica. Captain James Williams was carrying a cargo of provisions he had picked up in Cork three months earlier: barrels of flour, grains, salted pork, and the cured beef so prized by the people of Kingston and Port Royal. The St. Michael was lightly armed and resistance was pointless. Men from the Marianne and Postillion took control of the ship and set a course for La Blanquilla.

  La Blanquilla, "the white one," lay 100 miles off the coast of what is now Venezuela, a low limestone island ringed with wide, gently sloping white sand beaches. A lonesome backwater, La Blanquilla had long been a favorite rest stop for mariners. Its beaches were perfect for careening and the only inhabitants were parrots and boobies. The pirates stayed for at least two weeks, through Christmas and New Year's, during which time they converted the Sultana into a man-of-war and added four of St. Michael's guns to the Marianne. They intended to let Captain Williams and the St. Michael go, but forced fourteen of her men to help crew the Sultana. Bellamy must have been concerned about maintaining his new flagship because four of the pressed men were carpenters. Many of these men were horrified and begged the pirates to let them leave on the St. Michael. One, Tom South, was told by the ship's company that they "swore that they would shoot him before they should let him go from them"; when South persisted, Bellamy threatened to dump him on a desolate island to die of thirst or hunger. Another carpenter, Owen Williams, was promised that if he came quietly and helped the pirates with their ongoing repairs, they would release him on the next prize they plundered. Quietly or not, the forced men watched miserably as the St. Michael weighed anchor and continued on her way for Jamaica. Shortly thereafter, the Postillion raised her anchor as well. Olivier La Buse's men had decided to take their share of the plunder and head out on their own. They left on good terms with their English brethren, but must not have been interested in Bellamy's master plan: to capture an even bigger ship and make a man-of-war capable of destroying HMS Scarborough or any other British warship serving in the West Indies.

  Bellamy and Williams reckoned things might have cooled off enough for them to return up the Leeward Islands. They would make their way back toward the Windward Passage, ready to intercept any ships that crossed their paths. Then, perhaps, it would be time to return to the Bahamas. They swore in the new men taken from the St. Michael, reading them the ship's articles and making them promise not to steal from the communal plunder. This was kept in one large stash aboard the Sultana, carefully inventoried by Bellamy's newly elected quartermaster, Richard Noland. Captives later reported that Noland declared, "If any man wanted Money, he might have it." Withdrawals he marked in an account book, deducting them from the client's share of the plunder, as if he were running a sort of pirate credit union. The new men sworn, the two pirate vessels began their run back to the Virgin Islands.

  The weather had been heretofore consistent: the trade winds blowing steadily from the northeast and east-northeast, sometimes carrying patches of rain clouds, a welcome shower of fresh water to cool the men's bodies and wash off days of accumulated salt and grime. But in late January the winds began picking up, sculpting angry whitecaps in the surface of the sea that grew into high waves. Hurricane season was over, but the gale was becoming dangerous nonetheless. The pirates decided not to take any chances and sought shelter in the nearest harbor. This turned out to be a familiar one: St. Croix, the uninhabited Virgin Island where they'd spent much of November. But there was a surprise waiting for them in the harbor.

  The deserted anchorage was littered with the detritus of battle. On the reef guarding the harbor entrance, the surf battered at the charred remains of a vessel, which had apparently burned to the waterline. Another large sloop sat half-submerged inside the harbor, her hull riddled with wounds from four- and six-pound cannonballs. As the Sultana came alongside, Bellamy could see that someone had stripped her mast, bowsprit, anchors, cargo, and rigging. A small battery had been set up behind earthen ramparts on the shore, but it had clearly been bombarded from the sea.

  Bellamy didn't have to wait long to find out what had happened. Ragged-looking men crept out of the woods and began waving and calling to them from the beach. Some were white, some black, others in-between, but all looked tired and hungry. These men turned out to be pirates themselves, the 100 or so survivors of a six-vessel flotilla commanded by John Martel, another Jamaican privateer-turned-pirate. Like Bellamy and Williams, the Martel gang had been marauding the Antilles for months, capturing ships and sloops of all sorts, and had come to St. Croix in early January to clean their vessels. Unfortunately for them, on January 16 HMS Scarborough* anchored at the mouth of the harbor and began battering their vessels with her guns. The pirates fought back from the four-gun battery they had set up on the shore, but the Scarborough's guns soon took them out of action. For a short time, the pirates thought they might be spared: The fifth-rate frigate was too big to enter the harbor and retreated. The pirates piled aboard Martel's flagship, the twenty-two-gun galley John & Marshall, to make a run for it, only to run aground on the reef. Seeing the Scarborough tacking back toward them, Martel ordered the men to abandon and burn the galley, which carried forty black slaves the pirates had taken some weeks earlier. Twenty slaves burned to death, presumably because they were still chained in the hold. Martel and nineteen of the pirates made their escape in a small prize sloop before the Scarborough arrived, but the other 100 or so pirates and slaves were left to hide in the woods. The Scarborough's sailors and marines recaptured eight of the slaves and looted the sloops of cargo and valuables before sailing off with the rest of their prizes.

  Martel's pirates were extremely happy to see Bellamy's men, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the authorities returned to hunt them down. The feelings of the twenty or so blacks in the Martel party is more difficult to ascertain. The fact that they survived suggests they had not been chained in the hold of the John & Marshall and, therefore, not regarded as cargo. When Martel captured the slave ship Greyhound Galley, some twenty or so of her crew may have been of African descent. It was not unusual for slavers to employ black sailors in their crews. Such men were usually born in the West Indies, some the children of Africans who had been freed by their masters. They were more resistant to the deadly tropical diseases of West Africa and the West Indies than British-born sailors, and since they (or their masters) were probably paid less, they made attractive hirelings. Pirates of this period were often known to free the Africans they found aboard slavers, finding them to be fierce and committed fighters; others treated them as cargo and sold them as such. The Martel gang may have done both: The English-speaking West Indian crew and servants were invited to join the pirate company, while the frightened Akan- and Igbo-speaking people remained in the hold. Whatever the status of the twenty blacks who survived, Bellamy and Williams appear to have welcomed them aboard as equal members of their company, along with the eighty or ninety white pirates who greeted them on that St. Croix beach.

  Bellamy's manpower shortage had been solved in one fell swoop. But the sudden recruitment of some 130 men made veteran members of the crew a little uncomfortable. Bellamy and Williams's eighty original pirates, who had come to trust one another during the adventures of the past six months, were now outnumbered by nearly two to one by strangers, including the forced men. Could these new men be trusted in the heat of battle, or would they seize t
he first opportunity to make off with the company's treasure, as Bellamy himself had done to Henry Jennings the year before? Only time would tell.

  Fearing the return of the Scarborough, the pirates resolved to leave St. Croix as soon as possible. They needed a new hideaway to ride out the stormy weather. Bellamy's solution was particularly audacious, and suggestive of the growing strength and confidence of his company. Rather than skulking off to some uninhabited island, the pirates made straight for the main British outpost in the Virgin Islands: Spanish Town, on the rocky shores of Virgin Gorda, sixty miles northeast of St. Croix.

  Spanish Town, population 326, was the seat of the deputy governor of the British Leeward Islands, Thomas Hornby, the man who had tipped the Scarborough off to the Martel pirates' whereabouts. Hornby must have been alarmed when the two heavily armed pirate vessels sailed into the harbor, their cannon trained on his little town. There was little he could do to defend the settlement. A third of the population were black slaves, people more likely to join the pirates than repel them. The vast majority of the white population were children, there being only forty-two white men on the island. His defenses consisted of one unmounted, unfortified cannon. Hornby had no choice but to do as the pirates commanded, and hope that they left Virgin Gorda no worse than they found it.

  Bellamy's gang took control for several days, and possibly as long as a week or two, treating the outpost as if it were one of their prizes. There wasn't a lot to plunder. Most of Virgin Gorda was barren and mountainous, restricting the settlers' production to corn, yams, potatoes, and some pathetic stands of sugar cane fit only for making cheap rum. A Royal Navy captain who visited the Virgin Islands a few months later concluded that none of them were "worthwhile to the government, either to settle them or be at any expense at all about them." Still, the pirates must have been amused by their changed circumstances, lording over one of His Majesty's possessions as if it were their own. Some of the less respectable colonists were happy to see the pirates and reportedly "caress[ed] them and gave them money." A few may have even joined Bellamy's gang, their prospects ashore as indentured servants looking less attractive by comparison. But while some of the colonists ingratiated themselves with the pirates, several of Bellamy's forced crewmen jumped ship, begging Deputy Governor Hornby to shelter them. Hornby agreed, but reneged on his promise when Bellamy sent word "that they would burn & destroy the town" if the deserters were not turned over. Hornby complied and the pirates left Spanish Town with more men than they arrived with.