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

by Colin Woodard

  The men struggled to follow the order as waves rolled over the deck. The helmsmen, their feet wide apart, spun the wheel, bringing the great ship's bow face-to-face with the wind. The anchors splashed into the water and their heavy ropes began to play out. Everyone held their breath as the lines grew taught. There may have been a moment's pause, as the Whydah briefly stopped drifting toward the foamy chaos behind them, but then they could feel the anchors dragging. The Whydah was doomed.

  There was one last chance to save the crew, to do just as the men on the Mary Anne had done. They had to try to bring the vessel ashore gracefully, bow first, hopefully making it far enough through the violently tossing surf to give a swimmer some hope of getting ashore. Bellamy yelled out to the men to cut the anchor cables. As soon as the last strokes of their axes had fallen—the thick anchor ropes snapping free—Bellamy ordered the helmsmen to swing her all the way back around, to run face first into the beach. But the vessel didn't turn. All watched in terror as the ship slipped backward, stern first, over thirty foot waves towards the white, misty chaos at the foot of the cliffs.

  The Whydah ran aground with shocking force. The jolt likely shot any men in the rigging out into the deadly surf, where they were alternately pounded against the sea bottom, then sucked back away from the beach by the undertow. Cannon broke free from their tackles and careened across the lower decks, crushing everyone in their path. One pirate was thrown across the deck so hard his shoulder bone became completely embedded in the handle of a pewter teapot. Little John King, the nine-year-old pirate volunteer, was crushed between decks, still wearing the silk stockings and expensive leather shoes his mother had dressed him in aboard the Bonetta months earlier. Within fifteen minutes, the violent motion of the surf brought the Whydah's mainmast crashing down over the side. Waves broke over the decks and water poured into the bedlam of crashing cannon and barrels of cargo below decks. At dawn the Whydah's hull broke apart, casting both the living and dead into the surf.

  As the storm raged on through the morning hours, the ebbing tide left more and more bodies piled on the shore. Amidst the bloated, mangled corpses only two men stirred. One was John Julian, the Mosquito Indian who had served with Bellamy aboard his periaguas. The other was Thomas Davis, one of the carpenters forced from the St. Michael. Samuel Bellamy and some 160 other men—pirates and captives, whites, blacks, and Indians—had perished in the storm.

  ***

  Ten miles to the south, the pirates aboard the Mary Anne were thankful to be alive. At daybreak they could see they had run aground on a half-drowned island in the middle of a small, protected bay. The crew of the Mary Anne probably recognized the place: Pochet Island, south of Eastham. With the tide down, half of the Mary Anne lay high and dry against the island, and the men could get ashore without getting their feet wet. They tarried about on the beach for several hours, eating sweetmeats and drinking more wine.

  At about ten in the morning, two local men who had noticed the wrecked vessel rowed over in a canoe and brought the castaways to the mainland. The locals, John Cole and William Smith, apparently weren't suspicious, even when the pirates got into heated discussions in a mix of English, French, and Dutch. They could overhear that a number of the shipwrecked sailors wanted to get to Rhode Island as fast as possible—presumably to seek shelter among Williams's people. The others seemed more subdued, sitting quietly by the fire in John Cole's home until, all of a sudden, one of them spoke up. This was Alexander Mackconachy, who blurted out that the other eight were ruthless pirates, members of "Black Sam" Bellamy's infamous company. The pirates knew it was time to go. They took their leave of the flabbergasted family of John Cole and scurried out into the rain.

  They got as far as the Eastham Tavern before justice of the peace John Doane and his men caught up with them. Alerted by John Cole, Doane had headed straight for the tavern, one of the few places where strangers might procure horses. Soon Doane had all the Mary Anne's complement—pirates and captives alike—under armed guard, walking down the muddy road toward the Barnstable jail.

  ***

  The pirates aboard the Ann Galley and the Fisher were luckier than the rest. Through good fortune—or perhaps by dint of the lightness of their vessels—their anchors held through the night. At ten in the morning, the rain still coming down in sheets, the wind shifted back to the west, blowing away from the land rather than into it. With great relief Noland ordered the sails and anchors raised. With the wind at their backs, they sailed away from the surf, bound for the coast of Maine, where they hoped to find the Whydah and her store of treasure.

  Ten miles out, Noland decided it was time to rid themselves of the Fisher. The pirates transferred all of the crew and valuables aboard the Ann and left the Fisher floating in the open sea, crewless and with hatches open to the storm.

  Two days later, on April 29, the Ann dropped anchor in the lee of Monhegan Island, a high, rocky island ten miles off the coast of Maine. Monhegan had been inhabited by Englishmen on and off since 1614, and was the site of one of New England's first year-round fishing stations. But on that blustery day in 1717, there may not have been anyone on the island to greet the pirates. The majority of Maine's settlements had been destroyed by Wabanaki Indians, who were allied with the French. The central and eastern portions of the coast were still contested by France and Britain, including Monhegan and other offshore islands like Damariscove and Matinicus. Monhegan had a water supply and easy access to some of the best cod-fishing grounds in the Americas. It might lack a cozy harbor, but for outlaws on the run, it was a safe place to linger and wait for the Whydah, Marianne, and Mary Anne to arrive.

  Days passed, with no sign of them. Noland and the other men began to fear the worst, that they were all that remained of the greatest pirate fleet in the Americas.

  ***

  Thomas Davis, one of the two survivors of the Whydah wreck, had dragged himself out of the surf and, shivering and exhausted, stumbled through the darkness in search of shelter. He trod down the beach a short way, pelted with rain, impassable cliffs of sand hemming him in against the sea. Illuminated by flashes of lightning, the wall of sand appeared to go on forever in both directions. There was only one way to escape. Davis began to climb.

  Fortunately he was a young man, twenty-two, and presumably in good health, for despite cold and exhaustion, he somehow managed to reach the top of the 100-foot wall of sand. He must have rested a bit at the summit, an eerie plain of grass stretched out before him in the mist. Behind him, down in the surf, the shattered remains of the Whydah flashed in the lightning like a ghostly apparition. Finally he stumbled forward, shivering in the wind and rain, away from the sea.

  At five in the morning, Davis finally arrived at the farm of Samuel Harding, two miles from the wreck site. In some form, Davis related his story to the Eastham native. Harding's ears must have pricked up when he heard of the shipwreck, for almost immediately he retrieved his horse. Davis, half-drowned, found himself stuck on its back and led to the beach by the farmer.

  Harding circled the cliffs and, guided by Davis, proceeded to the wreck site. The two halves of the Whydah had separated by now, battered further and further apart by the storm, and bits and pieces of the ship, her cargo, and crew were spreading along the base of the cliff. They lashed anything of value to the horse and, fully loaded, proceeded back to Harding's farmhouse. Harding immediately turned around and repeated the trip, multiple times through the early morning hours.

  By ten in the morning, Harding was joined by his brother Abiah, neighbors Edward Knowles and Jonathan Cole,* and some seven other men, scooping up valuables as quickly as possible, knowing the authorities could arrive at any time. They may have picked through the increasing number of storm-battered corpses piling up on the beach, more than fifty by that afternoon, relieving the dead of silver buttons and buckles, jewlery, and coins. As it turned out, they had plenty of time. Eastham's justice of the peace, Joseph Doane, was tied up for the entire day, intercepting and arresting t
he Mary Anne's crew on the other side of town and escorting them to Barnstable. Doane didn't make it to the wreck site until the following morning, Sunday the twenty-eighth, at which point he found "all was gone of value." Doane later claimed he then "commanded the inhabitants" of the area to "save what they could for the King," while the local coroner—Jonathan Cole's father-in-law—oversaw the burial of sixty-two drowned men, collecting "several things belonging to the [Wreck]" in the process. The total value of the items set aside for the king came to only £200, suggesting that many thousands of pounds of valuables made their way into the hands of the good people of Eastham. It could hardly have been otherwise. Within a couple of days, two hundred people—most of the able-bodied inhabitants of the town—were out plundering the wreck, cutting up bits of sail and taking "riches out of the sand."

  A strange occurrence was later reported to authorities sent in from Boston. On Monday the twenty-ninth, less than three days after the Whydah wrecked, a "very great sloop" arrived off the beach. The mysterious vessel approached the largest piece of the Whydah, then lowered a boat into the water. A number of its crewmen rowed over and examined the weather-battered remains. She chased off several local fishing vessels before sailing off into the open sea. Colonial authorities assumed it to have been the Whydah's consort, an error they passed on to history.

  ***

  On April 29, Paulsgrave Williams was 140 miles to the southeast, cruising for prizes near the entrance to Long Island Sound, still unaware of the Whydah's destruction.

  The day before, his company had plundered a sloop from Connecticut, taking three bushels of salt and two of their sailors. One of the sailors, Edward Sargeant, knew the immediate area well and was forced to act as their pilot as they lurked in the waters between Montauk and Martha's Vineyard. Unfortunately, no captures came their way that day and for several days after that, causing much dissatisfaction among the crew.

  On May 3, near the desolate island called No Man's Land, south of Martha's Vineyard, they took two trading sloops inbound from North Carolina. From the Hannah and Mary they seized items to help in the overhaul of the Marianne and a Devonshire man living in Boston who could guide them safely around Cape Cod and on to Maine. The second sloop, a smaller vessel from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had nothing of value. Such paltry pickings could not have mollified the crew; grumbling undoubtedly continued as the Marianne failed to catch any worthwhile prizes. Another week passed, then two, all without plunder. At this point they cruised directly for Maine, where they hoped to find Bellamy and the Whydah: A trusted commander and an unstoppable ship would set things right.

  Guided by her captive pilot, the Marianne stayed well offshore of Cape Cod on a course set straight for Cape Elizabeth, a prominent headland in southern Maine that could be seen for miles out at sea. They had no way of knowing that at that very moment the Whydah lay scattered in the surf just over the western horizon.

  At noon on May 17,1717, some seventy-five miles offshore, they intercepted a fishing sloop, the Elizabeth, bound from Salem, Massachusetts, to the great cod fishing grounds of Georges Bank. There was no gold on this paltry prize, of course, just sixteen huge barrels filled with salt, bait, and food. The sloop was tiny, but Williams thought it to be about the right size to help careen the Marianne when they finally found their way to Damariscove. The pirates forced the Elizabeth's skipper to come aboard, putting some of their own number on the fishing sloop, and continued on to Maine.

  After daybreak on Sunday the eighteenth, Williams's men spotted the bold outline of Cape Elizabeth. Their pilot not knowing the way to Damariscove, the pirates decided to sail the Marianne straight to the nearest harbor, to kidnap a local mariner. In a few hours they came to anchor between Cape Elizabeth and Richmond Island, where the docks and associated detritus of a seventy-year-old fishing station stared blankly out at them. The station's fishermen were long gone, but there was a farmhouse on the mainland shore, a small sloop anchored in the harbor, and an open boat or two pulled up on the seaweed-strewn beach. Certainly, Williams reasoned, a pilot could be found here.

  Up at the farmhouse, Dominicus Jordan could smell trouble. He had been born on the shores of the little anchorage, but had seen more warfare and violence than most pirates. At the start of the War of Spanish Succession, a band of Indians had occupied his parents' fortified home; Dominicus's father, a giant of a man with a fearsome reputation, put a hatchet through an Indian's head. The other Indians killed the father and carried nineteen-year-old Dominicus, his mother, and five younger siblings into captivity in the Canadian wilderness. The family spent the next thirteen years with the Indians, learning their language and many of their ways, before being released in 1715. Dominicus took one look at the heavily manned sloop-of-war and knew enough to get away. He grabbed his wife and three-year-old son, and with the servants, fled into the woods.

  Williams's men spent the day and night at Cape Elizabeth, rifling through the Jordans' possessions. At one point, the pirates detained a hapless fishing boat that had entered the anchorage. One of the fishermen admitted knowing the way to Damariscove and Monhegan and was pressed into service as a pilot. His young assistant was set free ashore and ran through the woods to alert the nearest town, Falmouth, of the pirates' presence.

  That afternoon they sailed thirty miles eastward to Damariscove Island, off what is now Boothbay Harbor. A long rocky island with a snug cove nestled in its southern end, Damariscove had been a rendezvous for fishermen for more than a century. Following the devastation of the Indian wars, the island was unoccupied, apart perhaps from occasional visits by fishermen needing a place to sleep after a long day spent pulling four- and five-foot-long codfish up from the cold waters of the Gulf of Maine. Anchored securely in the cove, the tops of the Marianne's masts were nearly hidden from view by the brambly ridges that rose from each side. It was, indeed, a safe place to hide out, rest, and repair the sloop. Of the Whydah, however, there was not a sign that she had ever graced the island with her presence.

  Williams stayed at Damariscove for five days, vainly hoping that Bellamy would suddenly appear, ship and treasure intact. He did his best to get the Marianne into shape, unloading her cargo, taking out her broken mast, and careening the underside of her hull. Those not at work gathered at the gravely beach at the head of the cove, grimly taking stock of their paltry treasure hoard: ten cannon; some bails of wool and linen cloth; a bit of scavenged iron; some barrels of food, salt, and water. As the days passed and it became clearer that the Whydah was not coming, the image of the great heap of gold and jewels piled in her hold must have haunted the weary men.

  Though they were but fifteen miles from Monhegan, Williams's company apparently never encountered their fellow pirates on the Ann Galley and the Fisher. Like the crew of the Marianne, Noland and company had tarried on the outer islands of Midcoast Maine for a time, repairing their vessels and plundering the little fishing vessels that came across their path. These pirates, intimately aware of the dangers the storm had presented to the Whydah, had probably already given up hope and headed south for the safety of the Bahamas.

  On May 23, Williams, too, was forced to accept that his friend had missed their rendezvous. With a sense of foreboding, the crew voted to start the long, dangerous trip back to Nassau. They sailed south to Cape Elizabeth, where they released the Elizabeth and the other fishing vessels, then set course for Cape Cod.

  In the late morning of the twenty-fifth, within sight of the tip of Cape Cod, Williams's men finally learned of the Whydah's fate. The bearer of the ill news was Samuel Skinner, master of the schooner Swallow of Salem, Massachusetts, whom the pirates detained just inside Massachusetts Bay. The destruction of the Whydah was by now on everybody's lips, from Portsmouth to Newport and beyond, Skinner could have told them, and carried in the pages of the Boston News-Letter. The Whydah, the treasure, and Williams's friend and accomplice were all gone, destroyed by the sea itself. Williams, presumably reeling from the news, released the Swallow and sailed ou
t of the bay.

  ***

  In Boston, the greatest city on the British American mainland, the destruction of the Whydah had brought little solace. Every few days another ship arrived in New England's ports bearing tales of pirate attacks: fishing boats in Maine and the open gulf; trading sloops off Connecticut, Rhode Island, Martha's Vineyard, and the Cape. For the first time since the outbreak of piracy, nowhere in New England waters seemed safe from men of the black flag.

  Massachusetts Governor Samuel Shute put the colony on a wartime footing. Unable to trust the safety of the sea-lanes, he ordered the nine surviving pirates transported overland from Barnstable to Boston "under a strong guard and sufficiently bound from ... county to county and sheriff to sheriff." For the first few days after the wreck, Boston remained without naval protection. Even after May 2, when the fifth-rate frigate HMS Rose finally arrived from the West Indies, Shute remained concerned about the safety of commerce. On the ninth, he dispatched the frigate to Cape Cod, where she spent nearly three weeks patrolling for pirates, including a day spent off the wreck site itself. News of the Marianne's landings at Cape Elizabeth reached the governor on May 21, and unnerved him sufficiently to order a weeklong closure of Boston Harbor. He armed a sloop, the Mary Free Love, and sent her out as a privateer to hunt down Williams and Noland. He even allowed the captain of the Rose to press twenty of Boston's men, to be sure he wasn't overwhelmed by pirates while patrolling the coast. All of New England stood on a knife's edge.

  Nobody was in a greater state of fear than the captive pirates themselves. They had arrived in Boston on May 4, were marched up the hill past the Town House, and then dumped in the cages of Boston's decrepit prison. In addition to the seven men from the Mary Anne, the prisoners included Thomas Davis and John Julian, who had been apprehended by Justice Doane before they had gotten far from the beach. Soon afterward, Julian was separated from the rest, destined, by dint of his dark skin, for the slave market.* The other eight prisoners may have wished for the first time that they weren't white, because unless some of their colleagues came into Boston to free them, they all knew they were likely to die on the gallows. Maybe they hoped, as they lay in their cages, that their brethren back in the Bahamas had heard of their fate and were coming to the rescue.