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

by Colin Woodard

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BLACKBEARD

  May–December 1717

  WHEN BLACKBEARD AND HORNIGOLD returned to the Bahamas from the Spanish Main in possession of the Bonnet, a fine sloop-of-war, and £100,000 in plunder, their reputations soared. Hornigold was now an undisputed leader of the pirate republic, taking his place alongside his rival, Henry Jennings. Blackbeard, who was thirty-seven at this time, was regarded as one of the finest captains in the archipelago, brave and effective. Unlike Bellamy, Blackbeard had no intention of pushing his commodore aside, especially given that Hornigold had become less reluctant to take English vessels.

  Word had gotten around that young Sam Bellamy had captured a ship-of-force and taken her north to intercept those colonies' spring shipments from Europe and the Caribbean. Several other pirate companies were preparing to follow suit, and were busy loading their sloops with the necessary supplies. The French pirate Olivier La Buse was back in Nassau and had acquired a powerful ship of his own that, at 250 tons and with twenty guns, was nearly as strong as the Whydah. The Frenchman was busy recruiting additional crewmen; when he got to 150 he intended to cruise to New England, reconnoiter with Bellamy, and continue on as far as Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Jennings, however, had no interest in sailing north; alone among the pirate captains, he continued to refuse to attack British vessels, the only sort one could expect to encounter with any regularity there. Charles Vane, for his part, also appeared to have no interest in cruising to cooler climes; like many of Jennings's company, he seemed content to enjoy his wealth and freedom on shore.

  After a short break, during which time Hornigold refit the Bonnet into a proper sloop-of-war, Blackbeard and Hornigold left to cruise, though they stayed much closer to home. In early July, they lurked off eastern Cuba in their respective sloops, hoping to intercept some well-laden transatlantic ships. Instead, they took a sloop under one Captain Bishop, bound from Havana to New York with a cargo of flour. It wasn't gold, true, but flour was always in demand in the Bahamas, where the pirates grossly outnumbered the few remaining farmers. They took the time to transfer 120 barrels of the stuff on board their own sloops before letting Captain Bishop continue on his way. A week or so later, a bit to the west, they captured another New York-bound trading vessel under a Captain Thurbar, several days out of Jamaica; the pirates found nothing of interest aboard her apart from "a few gallons of rum," which they absconded with before releasing the vessel. Slim pickings, the pirate company must have thought. Perhaps they should be following their colleagues northward after all.

  By August, Thatch and Hornigold were back in Nassau, their flour ensuring that nobody would want for bread for many months to come. They presumably spent the next few days unloading this cargo and preparing for a longer expedition up the eastern seaboard. Their brethren seemed nearly invulnerable, their control of the sea-lanes from Jamaica to New York virtually uncontested by any authority. As they shared intelligence gathered from captives and the merchants of Harbour Island with the other pirate captains, they concluded that the Royal Navy was helpless to stop them. HMS Shoreham had only recently returned to Virginia and was said to be in such poor condition that her captain didn't dare leave the protection of Chesapeake Bay. Sam Bellamy's men had so terrorized the British Leeward Islands that the mere rumor of their return had caused the colony's governor to abandon a tour aboard HMS Seaford for fear he would be captured. Out on Barbados, the Scarborough's crew was said to be all but incapacitated by disease. Outside of Jamaica, that left but two or three ships to protect thousands of miles of coastline from Barbados to Maine. There were rumors that reinforcements were on their way from England, but for the time being, it seemed, the Americas belonged to them.

  Some of the pirates, particularly Scotsmen and ex-Governor Hamilton's privateers, had started expressing wider aspirations. These individuals loathed King George and had been frustrated by the failure of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion against him. Feeling their power, these pro-Stuart pirates discussed volunteering their services to the Pretender, the would-be Stuart king James III, who was living again in exile in France. This faction, which probably included Jennings, Vane, and a number of Blackbeard's and Williams's men, were developing contacts with Jacobite sympathizers in England, through whom they hoped to one day secure privateering commissions from the Stuart king. The ragtag republic of pirates was ready to take a place on the world stage, and to take sides in the great geopolitical struggle of the time.

  Then bad news came.

  The Marianne, her sails ragged and her mast jury-rigged, limped into Nassau Harbor, followed by the storm-damaged Ann Galley under Richard Noland. Paulsgrave Williams could be seen on the Marianne's quarterdeck, but Sam Bellamy, his inseparable companion, was nowhere to be seen.

  Williams and Noland related the tragic news of the Whydah's destruction, how nine survivors were said to be awaiting trial in Boston with little hope of acquittal, and that Bellamy was not among them. The governors of Massachusetts and Rhode Island had outfitted at least three privateers to hunt Williams down, forcing the pirates out of New England waters. Williams had continued plundering vessels as he worked his way down the coasts of New Jersey, Delaware, and the Carolinas, scoring enough wine and provisions to keep his men alive. Through death or desertion, his company was down to just over thirty men. Noland, who he had reunited with along the way, had some twenty men aboard. Of the 125 or more pirates who had left the southern Bahamas with Bellamy early that spring, only fifty remained.

  Blackbeard was particularly incensed by the news. His friend Bellamy was dead, and the pious fools in Boston were bent on executing the last of the survivors. This could not be allowed to happen, and if it did, Blackbeard would exact a terrible revenge on the people of New England. While conversing with Williams and Noland, he likely contemplated the possibility of attacking Boston and breaking the captives out of its aging prison. To carry out such a bold plan, Blackbeard would need his own ship-of-force.

  At the end of August, an unfamiliar vessel entered the harbor, her sails and rigging frayed, her decks scarred with the telltale wounds of a prolonged battle. She was a sloop-of-war flying the black flag, but nobody in Nassau had ever seen her before. When her captain showed himself, onlookers were aghast. Clad in a fine dressing gown, his body patched with bandages, was a plump gentleman who looked as if he'd hardly spent a day at sea in his life. None of the people who saw this genteel landsman hobble across the deck would ever have imagined that he was destined to become Blackbeard's leading accomplice.

  ***

  Stede Bonnet, the man in the dressing gown, was the most unlikely of pirates. He had been born on Barbados twenty-nine years earlier, in 1688, to an affluent family of sugar planters. The English had settled Barbados in the late 1620s, a generation earlier than Jamaica or the Bahamas, and Stede's great-grandfather, Thomas, had been among its pioneers. In the nine decades since then, the Bonnets had cleared hundreds of acres of lowland jungle to the southeast of the colony's capital, Bridgetown, planting it first with tobacco and, more successfully, with sugarcane. Like other successful planters, they had purchased African slaves to tend the crops and the sweltering tubs of cane syrup in the sugarhouses. By the time of Stede's birth, the Bonnets had one of the most prosperous estates on the island, 400 acres of sugar with two windmills and a cattle-operated mill to grind the syrup from the cane. Stede's early years were spent on the sprawling plantation, his family attended to by three servants and ninety-four slaves. His life was not without tragedy. In 1694, when he was just six years old, his father passed away, and his mother appears to have died not long thereafter. The estate was placed in the care of his guardians until he came of age. He became an orphan child with a small army of servants and slaves.

  Bonnet was groomed to take his place among the Barbadian aristocracy. He received a liberal education, served as a major in the island's militia, and courted the daughter of another leading planter, William Allamby. In 1709, when Bonnet was twenty-one,
he and young Mary Allamby were married in Bridgetown's St. Michael's Church, a stone's throw from the sparkling surface of Carlisle Bay. They set up house just south of Bridgetown Harbor, where Bonnet was "generally esteemed and honoured." Then everything began to go wrong.

  Their first child, Allamby Bonnet, died in early childhood. This had a lasting impact on Stede Bonnet. Three more children followed—Edward, Stede Jr., and Mary—yet Bonnet's spirits did not rise. He fell into depression, even insanity. His friends felt he suffered from "a disorder in his Mind, which had been but too visible in him [for] some time," and which was supposedly caused "by some discomforts he found in a married state."

  Toward the end of 1716 he reached a breaking point. His fellow planters were in an uproar over the depredations of Bellamy and Williams, who had caused much damage to the trade of the nearby Leeward Islands. Bonnet became enchanted. Though he was a landsman through and through and entirely unversed in the arts of seamanship and navigation, he decided to build his own warship. He contracted a local yard to construct a sixty-ton sloop-of-war capable of carrying ten cannon and seventy or more men. He must have told the authorities that he intended to use it as a privateer, claiming he would go to Antigua or Jamaica, where he might expect to be granted a commission to hunt down the pirates. In reality, he wished to become one himself.

  When the sloop was completed, Bonnet christened her the Revenge and set about hiring a crew. Betraying his ignorance of privateer and pirate custom alike, he paid the men a cash salary instead of shares. He would have to pay his officers well, as he would be entirely reliant on them to operate his vessel. The crewmen may have had political reasons for joining the eccentric planter; they included an unusually large number of Scotsmen and, in the months to come, some of them would express Jacobite proclivities. While the officers set about ordering appropriate arms, stores, and provisions, Bonnet concentrated on the matter he thought most important to successful buccaneering: equipping his cabin with an extensive library.

  One night in the late spring of 1717, he boarded the Revenge and ordered his hired hands to make ready for departure. Under cover of darkness, the sloop sailed out of Carlisle Bay, leaving Bonnet's wife behind with his infant daughter and young sons, aged three and four. He would never see any of them again.

  Fearing, perhaps, he would be recognized in the Leeward Islands, Bonnet ordered his quartermaster to take the Revenge straight to the North American mainland. His hirelings told him he could expect to find ample prizes at the approaches to Charleston, South Carolina. Presumably nobody would recognize Bonnet there, but on the way he told his crew to refer to him as Captain Edwards, just in case.

  Though separated by 1,900 miles of ocean and islands, Barbados and Charleston were remarkably alike. Charleston had been founded less than fifty years earlier by a group of Barbadian planters who had successfully replicated their West Indian slave society in the coastal swamps of southern Carolina. A compact, walled city of 3,000, Charleston's streets and low, swampy shoreline were lined with Barbadian-style homes, high-ceilinged frame structures with large windows, balconies, and tiled roofs. Outside the walls, rice and sugar plantations spread for miles up and down the Ashley and Cooper rivers, their sweltering fields tended by armies of black slaves overseen by a handful of armed whites. As in Barbados, the colony's whites were outnumbered by their slaves, in this case, by a ratio of two to one. By land, the town was entirely isolated from the rest of English America, all communication taking place by sea. South Carolina was, effectively, a West Indian slave island stranded on the swampy shores of North America.

  Charleston, the only proper town in all of South Carolina, was particularly vulnerable to naval attack. It was located on a peninsula at the confluence of two rivers, five miles from the sea. The entrance to this estuary was partially blocked by a long sandbar, and three pilots were kept busy guiding vessels over it as they passed to and from the ocean. The coast itself, where "thousands of mosquitoes and other troublesome insects [were] tormenting both man and beast," was sparsely populated. Adjacent North Carolina was barely governed at all, there being only a handful of villages and fewer than 10,000 impoverished souls scattered over thousands of square miles of swampy, slow-moving creeks and bayous between Charleston and the Capes of Virginia.

  For a pirate, this was a prefect setup. They could patrol the entrance of the bar, spiderlike, collecting all vessels in their web. When the time came to find a refuge to plunder the vessels and evade the law, there were hundreds of miles of creeks, inlets, and islands on the North Carolina coast to hide among, places with entrances too shallow or convoluted for a large warship to follow them. For a novice pirate with a powerful vessel, the Carolinas provided a perfect sandbox in which to learn the trade.

  Bonnet's men guided the Revenge to the outside of the Charleston Bar in late August 1717 and waited for their prey. On August 26 it came in the form of a brigantine under Captain Thomas Porter, from Boston. The Revenge, her decks crammed with men and guns, overtook Captain Porter and compelled him to surrender. Bonnet's prize crew was disappointed to find the brigantine devoid of worthwhile plunder, but they held her just the same so that Porter couldn't alert the town to their presence. A few hours later, they spotted a sloop approaching from the south. They closed in on her and rolled out their guns, compelling her prompt surrender. Bonnet ordered the sloop searched while he consulted with her captain. Bonnet had been telling everyone that he was Captain Edwards, but the sloop's captain, Joseph Palmer, was not fooled; he was from Barbados and was probably surprised to find Major Stede Bonnet in command of a pirate sloop. Bonnet, engaged in piracy for less than a day, had already had been found out.

  Palmer's sloop turned out to be carrying a small but valuable cargo of Barbados's primary exports: sugar, rum, and slaves. The Revenge, her holds still nearly full of supplies, couldn't carry more, nor did Bonnet wish to cram slaves aboard his crowded sloop. Bonnet, perhaps advised by his quartermaster, resolved to take control of both vessels and sail to North Carolina to sort things out. A few days later, the Revenge anchored in the slack brown waters of one of that colony's inlets, probably on Cape Fear, a famous refuge of the buccaneers and corsairs of the previous century. They unloaded Palmer's sloop and, after using it to careen the Revenge, set her on fire. Palmer, along with his crew and slaves, was put aboard Porter's brigantine, which the pirates relieved of anchors and most of her sails and rigging. By reducing her means of propulsion, the pirates intended to give themselves a long head start, delaying Porter's ability to get to Charleston and sound the alarm. They may have overdone it: the brigantine was so slow that Porter was forced to put most of the slaves ashore "else they would have all been starved for want of provisions." South Carolina wasn't to learn of Bonnet's piracies until September 22, four weeks after they had taken place. By then he was long gone.

  "The Major was no sailor," a historian would write of Bonnet a few years later, "and therefore [was] obliged to yield to many things that were imposed on him ... for want of competent knowledge in maritime affairs." The first such imposition took place as the Revenge sailed out of her North Carolina refuge. Bonnet was already beginning to lose his grip on the crew, who argued openly about where they should cruise next. Ultimately, amid "nothing but confusion," they sailed south, into the Straits of Florida, perhaps wishing to try their luck "fishing" the famed Spanish wrecks. Instead, somewhere off Cuba or Florida, they blundered into a situation that nearly cost Bonnet his life.

  Savvy pirates knew better than to engage a ship far more powerful than them, and could tell a lumbering merchant ship from a deadly man-of-war. Stede Bonnet lacked these skills. Through hubris, weakness, or incompetence, he allowed the Revenge to engage in a full-fledged battle with a Spanish warship. By the time his crew managed to affect a retreat, the Revenge's decks were awash with blood. More than half his crew, thirty to forty men, was dead or wounded, and Bonnet himself had suffered a severe, life-threatening injury. The Revenge escaped, probably because she was f
aster and more agile than the Spanish man-of-war, suggesting that Bonnet could have avoided the incident altogether.

  As Bonnet lay in his cabin among his books, racked with pain, the crew set a course for the ultimate sanctuary, New Providence Island and the fabled pirate base at Nassau.

  ***

  The pirates of Nassau listened attentively to Bonnet's story, and those of his men. In the discussions that followed, the pirates resolved to grant the eccentric planter refuge, at least until he recovered from his appreciable wounds. In exchange, however, they wished to make use of his fine sloop-of-war. Blackbeard, Benjamin Hornigold maintained, could do big things if placed in charge of the Revenge, which was far superior to the sloop he had been using. Bonnet, who was barely able to leave his bed, could continue to occupy the captain's cabin, but Blackbeard would be in charge of the ship. Bonnet, now suffering from both mental and physical pain, was hardly in a position to refuse.

  Blackbeard transferred many of his men and two cannon over to the Revenge and commenced repairs on the newly built sloop-of-war. Within a week or two, he was ready to depart, the Revenge now equipped with twelve guns and 150 men, among them Hornigold's longtime quartermaster, William Howard. Hornigold had business to attend to, but first he may have arranged to meet Blackbeard off the coast of Virginia in a few weeks' time. In the middle of September, Blackbeard was sailing up the Gulf Stream, in charge of his first independent command. It would be many months before he saw Nassau again.