The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down
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Well fed, rested, and their numbers fortified, the pirates were ready to take on the Scarborough or any other vessel they came across. They conferred among themselves and decided that the Windward Passage would probably be the best place to ambush a large, combat-capable ship. Bellamy and Williams were returning to where they had started from, only with nearly three times the men and firepower. With each passing month, more and more of the less "respectable" sort of people seemed willing to join their gang: sailors, slaves, and servants. Bellamy and Williams had started out as thieves but were finding themselves leaders of a nascent revolution. What they really needed was a proper flagship.
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At that very moment, in Port Royal Harbor, the armed merchant ship Whydah was preparing to depart for London. The Whydah had everything a pirate might want. She was powerful, with eighteen six-pounders mounted and room for ten more in time of war. She was fast: a galley-built three-master capable of speeds of up to thirteen knots, perfect for transporting slaves across the Atlantic. Her 300-ton hull was capable of carrying between 500 and 700 slaves or a large cache of plundered treasure. It represented one of the most advanced weapons systems of its time, the sort of technology that could be extremely dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands.
The Whydah's captain, Lawrence Prince, was eager to get home. He had been at sea for the better part of a year, first sailing from London to the Slave Coast of the Gulf of Guinea, where he succeeded in buying hundreds of slaves at bargain prices, paying "thirty iron bars" for each adult female. Prince had sailed across the Atlantic to Jamaica, selling his slaves at the Kingston docks. The crew was loading the proceeds into the Whydah: Jamaican sugar, indigo dyes, and chests of silver and gold. With luck, Captain Prince and his fifty-man crew would be back in London by early June, completing the lucrative "triangle trade" that could convert a cargo of iron and colored beads into heaps of gold.
The Whydah weighed anchor the last week in February and began what Captain Prince knew would be the most dangerous leg of her journey. Before reaching the open Atlantic, the ship would have to run a gauntlet of pirate haunts: eastern Cuba, Hispaniola, and, most infamously, the Bahamas. But Prince felt confident that his fast, powerful ship could hold off a few pirate sloops. He had sailed the Whydah through these waters before, in 1714, and none of the guarda costas, French privateers, or periagua-sailing brigands of the Bahamas had dared challenge him.
The first sign of trouble came just a few days out, as the Whydah tacked her way between Cuba and Hispaniola. A lookout noticed a pair of vessels were following them through the Windward Passage and appeared to be catching up. When Prince examined the vessels—a medium-sized warship and a sloop-of-war—he may have thought the Royal Navy was approaching. They bore the Union Jack ensign and seemed the right size to be the Adventure and the Swift, His Majesty's station ships in Jamaica. The warship was, in any case, too large to be a pirate vessel. But as the day wore on, Prince grew concerned. The hull of the larger ship was a galley, not a frigate, which ruled out HMS Adventure. Both the galley and the sloop appeared to have far too many men on deck to be innocent merchantmen, and the sloop's sails were covered in patches, as if she had not seen a proper shipyard in a year or more. Most worrying, they continued to follow an intercept course and were closing in. Prince ordered more sail and placed the crew on alert. The chase was on.
It lasted for three days. When the Whydah finally came into the range of the Sultana and Marianne's guns, the vessels were halfway up the Bahamas off Long Island, some 300 miles from where they had started. The Whydah, testing her range, fired a couple of shots at the Marianne with a small, stern-mounted chase cannon; they splashed in the warm sea. A bloody fight appeared imminent.
Bellamy assessed the situation. He felt confident he and Williams could take the larger ship, but a prolonged battle would cause extensive damage to all three vessels, damage the pirates might not be able to easily repair. They would first try psychological warfare instead. He and Williams and all their men put on a wild display with their muskets, cutlasses, and long-handled pikes. A few held up hand-made grenades: hollow iron spheres filled with gunpowder and plugged with a fuse. Many of them wore fine clothing stolen from the wealthy captains and passengers they had plundered—gentlemen's waistcoats, cufflinks and collars, elaborate hats of silk and felt, perhaps even a wig or two. On these rough, wild-looking men, these could only be seen as trophies of war. Particularly terrifying to Captain Prince and his slaver crew were the twenty-five black men scattered among the pirates, their unshackled hands clutching swords and axes.
Prince surrendered, having fired but two shots. The pirates poured onto the Whydah, whooping and hollering in triumph. "Black Sam" Bellamy had acquired a ship worthy of Henry Avery. The poor boy from the West Country was now a pirate king himself.
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While Bellamy was building his pirate fleet, Hornigold and Thatch were overseeing the development of the pirates' Bahamian base. They continued to attack shipping in the Florida Straits, piling the bones of their prize vessels onto the beaches of Nassau Harbor. But in between cruises, Hornigold continued to act as the Flying Gang's leader. He and his lieutenant organized the transfer of cannon to the crumbling battlements of Fort Nassau to help repel a Spanish or British assault. In the fall of 1716, one of the pirate gangs captured a large Spanish ship from Cádiz and brought it into Nassau to plunder. This Spanish vessel, too big and clumsy to make much of a pirate vessel, would normally have been beached and burned on the shore of Hog Island. But Hornigold realized that the ship could close a gap in the harbor's defenses. The pirates armed her with thirty-two cannon scavenged from various prizes, and by late winter it stood sentry near the harbor entrance, a floating gun platform capable of fending off unwanted visitors. Such precautions worked. When a group of concerned merchants sent a pair of ships over from London to see "how the pirates might best be dislodged," the pirates captured one and sent the second packing back to England.
Word of the pirate republic spread throughout the Western Hemisphere. Disaffected people continued streaming into Nassau from other colonies, and not all of them sailors. In plantation economies like Jamaica, Barbados, South Carolina, and Virginia, there was little room for small farmers, no way for the hundreds of poor people to make a living once they finished their terms of indentured servitude. But the Bahamas had never been a plantation colony, so there was plenty of cheap land available. Even before the pirates took control, blacks and mulattos had enjoyed considerable freedom in the Bahamas, intermarrying extensively with the white settlers, including top officials like Thomas Walker. Under the pirates, New Providence became a sanctuary for runaway slaves and free mulattos alike, as many moved in to join the pirate crews or the merchants, tradesmen, and farmers who supported them. The presence of this rogue state was destabilizing the slave societies around it. The "negro men [have] grown so impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their rising [against us]," the governor of Bermuda reported. "We can have no dependence on their assistance, but to the contrary, on occasion should fear their joining with the pirates."
Among the new residents was Henry Jennings, captain of the Barsheba. He may once have had pretensions of being better than the pirates, but now he was a wanted man himself. Relations between the Jennings and Hornigold remained strained, but there was room enough for both of them in the motley pirate enclave. Jennings earned the respect of the pirate rank-and-file because he was extremely good at what he did, equally capable of capturing French prizes or leading amphibious assaults on Spanish plantations. By the end of the winter, he was recognized as one of Nassau's leading pirates, with 100 men under his command. But in one respect, Jennings continued to set himself apart from the rest of the pirates. He still refused to attack English vessels. On a cruise of Cuba, Jennings did detain one English ship, the Hamilton Galley of Jamaica, but only out of dire necessity: Days from port, his men had run out of booze. His crew boarded the ship and seized twenty gallons
of rum, leaving the rest of her cargo intact. Jennings treated the captain "civilly and told him they hurt no English men" and, in parting, gave him valuables worth far more than the rum itself.
As the outlaws poured in, Nassau's longtime residents were fleeing "to secure themselves from the pirates." Some went to Abaco, sixty miles northeast, where Thomas Walker and his family had resettled along with several other New Providence families seeking to escape "the rudeness of the pirates." Others moved to Harbour Island and Eleuthera, in part because it was so easy to get there. The Thompsons, Cockrams, and other merchants had boats sailing back and forth between Nassau and Harbour Island to bring the pirates supplies and provisions. For a while they shipped in supplies and special orders from Charleston and Jamaica with their own sloops, but by late winter 1717, they began to buy goods from third-party merchants, who came from as far away as Boston to keep the Harbour Islanders' warehouses stocked with enough supplies to keep the expanding pirate fleet in operation. The trade was so vital to the pirates that they organized a force of fifty men to staff the battery guarding the entrance to Harbour Island's anchorage.
One day in the fall of 1716, Hornigold's band captured a sloop of some twenty or thirty tons. Usually they brought their prizes back to Nassau to plunder the cargo, burn the vessel, and recruit as much of the crew as they could. But this sloop was swift, maneuverable, and capable of carrying a half-dozen cannon: an excellent pirate vessel. Hornigold called a council and suggested that they keep the sloop and place her in command of one of their most respected and reliable members: Edward Thatch. The company agreed. Thatch, the loyal lieutenant of the pirate republic's founder, finally had a pirate vessel of his own.
It was around this time that Thatch began calling himself Blackbeard. In his years of piracy, he had let his beard grow wild, making a fearsome appearance. "This beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant length," an early eighteenth-century historian wrote. "As to breadth, it came up to his eyes" and "like a frightful meteor, covered his whole face, and frightened America more than any Comet that has appeared in a long time." He twisted it into many little braids, each tied off with a small ribbon, some of which he tucked behind his ears. This unusual arrangement struck observers at the time as resembling the plaits that trailed down from the British infantryman's powdered Remellies wig; some late twentieth-century historians think it might be an indication that Blackbeard was himself a light-skinned mulatto, with kinky hair inherited from his African ancestors. (Thatch, the late historian Hugo Prosper Learning argued, was a slang term for bushy hair.) Either way, it was Thatch's "fierce and wild" eyes, not his beard, that commanded the respect of his men and struck fear into the hearts of his opponents.
By March 1717, Blackbeard had a company of seventy men aboard his six-gun sloop, making him the fourth most powerful pirate in Nassau after Hornigold, Jennings, and a sloop captain named Josiah Burgess. In a short time he would be the most powerful pirate in the Atlantic.
He continued to conduct joint operations with Hornigold throughout the winter and spring. His mentor was humbled by Bellamy's defection and the forced sale of the Benjamin. For a few months, his men were placated by small thefts: a trading sloop here, a few barrels of rum there; but Hornigold needed gold and silver to keep the allegiance of his men, the merchants who bought his goods, and the rough and tumble crowd in Nassau. There were plenty of up-and-coming pirates operating out of Nassau. Burgess, a recent arrival to the island, already had an eight-gun sloop and a company of eighty men. Then there was that prodigy of Jennings, the impulsive Charles Vane, who enjoyed terrorizing old settlers and the ale tents alike. If Hornigold was to maintain his position, he needed a big score. Blackbeard, ever loyal, agreed to sail with him. In early March, the two sloops weighed anchor and sailed south into the shipping lanes.
Some time after leaving Nassau, one of Hornigold's crewmen, a "free Mullato," became critically ill. The man needed medical attention, but there wasn't a single doctor or surgeon among the 180 pirates. As they worked their way down the Florida Straits, Hornigold and Blackbeard stopped vessels of all sorts, looking for a doctor. In mid-March they finally found their man aboard a Jamaican vessel making her way around the southern end of Florida. John Howell, a gentle soul with a talent for the healing arts, begged the men in Hornigold's boarding party to let him go. The pirates refused: A good surgeon was hard to come by, and too many of their company had suffered needlessly from toothaches, infections, and venereal disease. Before the pirates dragged him into their boat, Howell begged his captain, Benjamin Blake, "to do him justice by declaring to his friends [and] the world, the manner of his being forced." Howell was dejected when he climbed aboard the Adventure, but he treated the mulatto sailor without hesitation. Although the man had been very sick, Howell's treatment worked marvelously; within a few days, he was back on his feet. Hornigold was overjoyed and insisted on giving the unhappy surgeon some broken silver buttons as a reward. Howell, not wanting to implicate himself in his crimes, later passed the buttons on to another man. It was a move that would one day help to save his neck.
The pirates continued south, past Havana, around the eastern end of Cuba, and down the Mosquito Coast of Central America. At the end of the month they arrived off Portobello, in what is now Panama, where merchants of all nations came to trade slaves for Spanish gold and silver. On April 1, the pirates finally hit pay dirt: the Bonnet of Jamaica, a large armed sloop, was heading home from trading in Portobello. Outgunned by the pirates, Captain Hickinsbottern surrendered his command. In his cabin, the pirates found a chest filled with gold coins. The Bonnet would make a worthy upgrade: She was larger, faster, and in better condition than the Adventure. As Hickinsbottern had been smart enough to surrender without a fight, they would give him the Adventure in exchange for his vessel. While the pirates transferred their cannon and other possessions to their new flagship, Howell begged Hornigold to let him leave with the Adventure, but the crew refused to let him go. As one of them later put it, he was "too narrowly valuable, being the only good surgeon which Hornigold and company had dependence on."
The pirates' luck held on their return home. On April 7, south of Jamaica, Blackbeard and Hornigold captured another treasure-laden sloop, the Revenge, which they plundered and released. Between the two sloops, the pirates had captured a stunning 400,000 pesos (£100,000). That was more than Jennings had taken in his raid on the Spanish salvage camp of Palmar de Ayz. For the black and mulatto members of the crew, it could only have been sweeter that much of the money had belonged to the largest slave cartel in the British West Indies. For Hornigold and Blackbeard, there would no longer be any fears of a coup against them. From now on, their only serious challengers would come from outside the Bahamas.
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Woodes Rogers was obsessed with pirates. Since returning from Madagascar in the summer of 1715 he had thought of little else. He was sure that with a careful combination of carrot and stick, a pirates' nest could be quelled, and a productive, law-abiding colony would rise in its place. Assuming that most pirates were like his own privateering crews, they might occasionally do something rash like disobey commands or seize the ship from the captain; but most of them could be brought back into the fold with an offer of pardon and a gesture of understanding. The pirates of Madagascar struck him as lonely, forlorn men desperate to return to the motherly embrace of civilization, bowing again to the dictates of their country, Crown, and God. There would be some who would remain unrepentant, who would refuse a second chance. Such men would be dealt with harshly, to make an example for the rest.
Rogers lived in London, supporting himself from the proceeds of his book and the slave-trading journey to the East Indies. He had been appalled by the Jacobite uprising against King George in 1715 and had established friendships with some of the controversial king's leading supporters. These included Richard Steele and Joseph Addison,* childhood friends who had founded the influential Kit-Kat Club,† a circle of prominent members of the
conservative Whig Party, which supported aristocratic interests. Steele, an Irish-born writer and journalist, had just been knighted by King George, while Addison was serving as the king's secretary of state for the Southern Department, which included the West Indies. Both men had considerable influence among the empire's leading decision makers, and access to the best information and intelligence. They would play a key role in furthering Rogers's anti-piracy schemes.
Another of Rogers's acquaintances was Dr. Hans Sloane, physician to the king, who was credited with keeping Queen Anne alive long enough for the Whigs to organize the Hanoverian succession. Sloane was also an obsessive naturalist who collected specimens of plants, animals, and geological formations from around the world, which filled "every closet and chimney" of his sprawling Chelsea home, creating the greatest repository of natural history information in Britain.‡ In the spring of 1716 Rogers sent Sloane a letter, explaining that he was "ambitious to promote a settlement on Madagascar" and begging that Sloane send him "what accounts you have of that island."