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

by Colin Woodard

  After Blackbeard's departure, Hornigold put his affairs in order. Some of his preparations for his forthcoming cruise were documented, providing a window into a poorly understood aspect of pirate life. He first recruited Richard Noland, quartermaster of the late Sam Bellamy, to serve as his agent at Nassau, making him responsible for recruiting men and keeping an eye on his interests on the island. He then took a large load of plundered cargo aboard his pirate ship the Bonnet—flour, sugar, and other surplus items—and sailed it up to Harbour Island. There he spent several days, trading and visiting with Richard Thompson and the island's other merchants, who were growing rich smuggling pirate goods into Jamaica and Charleston. While on the island, he was surprised to run into Neal Walker, the son of his old nemesis Thomas Walker. The Walkers had apparently decided that if they couldn't suppress the pirates, they might as well make money off them. Neal was busy loading his sloop with barrels of pirated sugar, which members of Hornigold's crew later spotted outside Thomas Walker's new residence-in-exile on an islet off Abaco.

  In Harbour Island's snug anchorage, Hornigold also encountered a newcomer to the Bahamas, a French pirate named Jean Bondavais, whose men had already earned a reputation for "harshly treating" the island's inhabitants. Bondavais, like Hornigold, was preparing for a new pirate cruise, and the two soon found themselves competing for the same resources. His sloop, the Mary Ann may well have been the Marianne, which Williams and his company would have been happy to sell after their frightening odyssey; if so, this would have irked Hornigold, who was the pirate who had originally captured the sloop eighteen months prior. Both captains were trying to buy supplies from Harbour Island's merchants, and each needed a ship's boat and more crewmen, particularly surgeons. Hornigold had taken pity on his captive surgeon, John Howell, and released him some weeks earlier. The poor man, who loathed the pirate life, had been unable to arrange passage off New Providence, and lived in constant fear of being pressed by one pirate crew or another. Bondavais somehow got wind of this, perhaps from Hornigold's men, and quietly sent for him in Nassau.

  Howell was living with the merchant William Pindar, and both men were at home when Bondavais' men rapped on the door. Pindar opened the door to find himself face-to-face with a gang of cutlass-wielding Frenchmen. They told the merchant that they had come for Howell and "a hogshead of rum" and would "cut him with cutlass" if he did not deliver both. Pindar only had a gallon of rum, which Howell had brought from town, and when he told the pirates so, they became "very rude" and threatened to drag Howell away that instant. Howell tearfully told Pindar "that he would rather choose to go with Hornigold than [with] these Frenchmen who deal so hardly with him." Somehow he and Pindar put them off long enough for Howell to run over to the house where Richard Noland was staying. He begged Noland to recruit him, saying "he would rather serve the English than French if he was compelled to make a choice of either." Noland, pitying the man, arranged for his conscription into the Bonnet's crew. Shortly thereafter, Hornigold's quartermaster, John Martin, bundled him into a boat and carried him to Harbour Island, where Hornigold could protect him.

  At Harbour Island, Bondavais was upset to learn that the surgeon was now aboard the Bonnet. The Frenchmen approached Hornigold, demanding Howell be turned over. Hornigold slyly responded that he would be happy to comply, so long as the surgeon agreed; Howell, of course, refused. Bondavais relented, eventually sailing away without the reputed surgeon. Howell remained desperate to escape from the pirates, however, and repeatedly tried to escape, despite being placed under heavy guard. At one point he approached one of the daughters of Richard Thompson, Harbour Island's leading citizen, begging her to hide him. Nobody on the island dared to help the man, Thompson later said, "lest Hornigold should burn or destroy their houses or do some other vileness, the whole place being in such fear of Hornigold that no inhabitant dare[d] speak against or contradict any of [his] orders." When the Bonnet departed the Bahamas to meet Blackbeard, we know Howell was on board, forced into piracy for the second time in less than a year.

  ***

  By this time, Blackbeard and company were a thousand miles to the north, patrolling the entrance to Delaware Bay, through which all of Philadelphia's commerce passed. During the trip from Nassau, Blackbeard had developed growing doubts about the Revenge's eccentric owner. Bonnet's crewmen told stories that made it clear that the planter, even in health, was entirely unfit for command, not knowing a block from a halyard. Bonnet stuck to his cabin, for the most part. When he ventured out on deck, he wore an elegant morning gown and usually carried the book he was reading in his hands. His mental state was similarly fragile, and Blackbeard suspected it would be no great feat to lift permanent control of the Revenge from his tenuous grasp. He was pleasant to Bonnet, encouraging him to rest in his cabin, easy in the assurance that the sloop was in good hands.

  They made one capture along the way, the forty-ton sloop Betty of Virginia, loaded with Madeira wine and other merchandise. On September 29, as they closed on her at the Capes of Virginia, Blackbeard donned his new, terrifying battle attire. He wore a silk sling over his shoulders, to which were attached "three brace of pistols, hanging in holsters like bandaliers." Under his hat, he tied on lit fuses, allowing some of them to dangle down on each side of his face, surrounding it with a halo of smoke and fire. So adorned, a contemporary biographer reported, "his eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, [that he] made altogether such a figure that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury from Hell to look more frightful." The crews of merchant ships would take one look at this apparition, surrounded by an army of wild men bearing muskets, cutlasses, and primitive hand grenades, and would invariably surrender without firing a shot. That was exactly what Blackbeard intended. Through terror, he eliminated the need to deplete men and ammunition in battle and ensured that the vessels he captured remained undamaged and, thus, of maximum possible value to his company. The Betty, a humble vessel that regularly worked the wine run from Virginia to Madeira, surrendered, and the pirates looted the best of her cargo. Not wanting to allow her to alert all of Virginia and Maryland to their presence, Blackbeard ordered all the captives brought over to the Revenge. William Howard, his quartermaster, drilled holes in Betty's hull and, as she sank, climbed aboard a rowboat and returned aboard the Revenge.

  It was now early October, and the Revenge stood off the high sandy capes of Delaware, five cannonballs stored alongside each of her guns, waiting for prey. The next to run afoul of Blackbeard's men was a heavily loaded merchant ship flying British colors. The ship, it turned out, was just completing the ten- to twelve-week journey from Dublin to Philadelphia, with 150 passengers crowded below her decks along with cargo. Almost all of the passengers were indentured servants and, as such, were probably in a miserable state. Disease ran rampant in the immigrants' crowded, poorly ventilated quarters, where they faced "want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampnes, anxiety, want, affliction, and lamentations, together with ... lice [that] abound so frightfully ... they can be scraped off the bottom." Such passengers would have been desperate to make land; instead, they found themselves prisoners of a wild man with fire and smoke pouring from his head.

  Under Hornigold, Blackbeard had conducted himself with restraint, taking only what he needed from the vessels he captured. Now, he was free to propose his own agenda to his crew, one far more ambitious than that of his mentor. Hornigold had limited his operations to maritime theft, but in the wake of Bellamy's death, Blackbeard sought to bring as much damage to British commerce as possible, short of the unnecessary taking of human life. He appears to have declared war on the British Empire and would use piracy and terror to bring it to its knees.

  The servants aboard the passenger ship had little to fear from this more radical approach to piracy, but the merchants sailing aboard her had plenty to lose. Like other pirates, Blackbeard's men took what cargo and valuables they fancied: things like coins, jewelry, rum, foodstuffs, ammunition, and navigational instruments. Unlike
Hornigold or Bellamy, however, they dumped the rest of the cargo into the sea. One merchant aboard the ship watched £1,000 of his personal cargo go over the side; he begged to be allowed to keep enough cloth to make just one suit of clothes, but the pirates refused, throwing the last bolt of textiles overboard. By the time they released the ship, nothing remained of its cargo.

  Over the next two weeks, Blackbeard brought a tide of terror and destruction to the mid-Atlantic coast such as had never been seen in peacetime. The Revenge cruised about the Capes of Delaware and the approaches to Bermuda, the Chesapeake and New York Harbor, never staying more than forty-eight hours in a single place. They captured vessels coming from all directions: vessels bound for Philadelphia from London, Liverpool and Madeira; sloops traveling between New York and the West Indies; Pennsylvania merchantmen outbound to England and beyond. Blackbeard took at least fifteen vessels in all, and, in the process, became the most feared pirate in the Americas practically overnight.

  Traumatized captains poured into New York and Philadelphia bearing tales of woe. Captain Spofford told how, not a day out of Philadelphia, he had been forced to watch Blackbeard's men dump a thousand barrel staves into the sea, and then fill his cargo hold with the terrified crewmen of the Sea Nymph, a snow from Bristol they had captured as it started its journey to Portugal. One of the Sea Nymph's men, the merchant Joseph Richardson, had been "very barbarously used" by the pirates, who threw his cargo of wheat into the sea. Captain Peter Peters told how the pirates had seized his sloop, stolen twenty-seven barrels of Madeira wine, hacked away his mast, and left him to run aground. The pirates left Captain Grigg's sloop at anchor at the mouth of the bay, his masts chopped off and his cargo of thirty indentured servants whisked away. The pirates took all the wine from a Virginia-bound sloop before sinking her. Captain Farmer's sloop had already been looted by other pirates on its way from Jamaica, but Blackbeard's men insisted on unrigging it and removing her mast and anchors to serve as spares for the Revenge, before they put thirty servant captives aboard and left her to drift ashore near Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Captain Sipkins was relieved of his command of a "great sloop" from New York, which Blackbeard's men kept as a consort, mounting her with thirteen guns.

  The swaggering pirates had boasted how they were awaiting their consort, "a ship of thirty guns," and that once she arrived they intended to sail up the Delaware and lay siege to Philadelphia itself. Others bragged that they planned to sail down to the Capes of Virginia, to capture "a good ship there, which they very much wanted." Blackbeard made a special point of terrorizing captives from New England on behalf of the surviving members of Bellamy's crew, then rotting in the Boston Prison, telling them that if "any of their fellow pirates suffer [in Boston] that they will revenge it on them."

  Blackbeard garnered considerable intelligence from his captives. The survivors from Bellamy's wrecks, they learned, were to be tried at any time, and likely faced the gallows. If Blackbeard intended to rescue them, he was dissuaded by news that King George had ordered "a proper force" to suppress piracy in the Americas. Two frigates were said to be at Boston, HMS Rose and Squirrel. HMS Phoenix had arrived at New York, and in Virginia, the sixth-rate Lyme was now backing up the decrepit Shoreham. One of Blackbeard's captives, Peter Peters, told him that while he was loading his wine at Madeira, off the coast of Africa, two Royal Navy frigates had come into the harbor, one en route to New York, the other to Virginia.* If they had not arrived already, Peters reported, they soon would be. Blackbeard recognized that the east coast of North America was becoming a risky place for a pirate sloop. It was time to conclude their business and head south to the islands of the Caribbean, indefensible in their multitude, at least until he could gain control of a ship-of-force.

  Toward the end of October, Blackbeard's sloop and prizes were spotted sailing along the outside of Long Island, in the direction of Gardiner's Island or Block Island. They may have been going to one or the other to pick items left behind by Williams, or perhaps to drop off some of their own treasure. Whatever the reason for their trip, the pirates headed south very soon afterward, sailing for the islands of the eastern Caribbean.

  ***

  Contrary to many popular accounts, Blackbeard did not return to the Bahamas on his way to the Caribbean, nor is there compelling evidence that he joined forces with Benjamin Hornigold, who appears to have been working his way north at this time in his "great sloop" named, confusingly enough, the Bonnet. Blackbeard had so terrorized the coast that his men were ascribed to a number of attacks that they could not possibly have taken part in, as more detailed and credible accounts place him hundreds or thousands of miles away at the time they occurred. Several of these erroneous reports had placed him operating with Hornigold, suggesting that his old mentor may have in fact been responsible, but operating with a new consort similar to the Revenge.* If so, Hornigold was sailing north while Blackbeard and his men were sailing south, probably well offshore, on their way to the far eastern Caribbean, where the Windward Islands brace themselves against the open Atlantic.

  Increasing the confusion, Blackbeard was now operating two sloops himself: the Revenge and one of his prizes, a forty-ton Bermuda-built sloop, most likely the vessel taken from Captain Sipkins. This second sloop, which the surviving documents fail to name, now carried eight guns and some thirty pirates; the larger Revenge had twelve guns and 120 men. Mariners had been conditioned to expect Blackbeard and Hornigold to be operating together, each in his own sloop; now that each was operating separately, but with two vessels each, it's not surprising that each man's victims wrongly assumed that the other was in charge of the second sloop.

  Like Bellamy before him, Blackbeard was looking to capture a ship-of-force that would allow his pirate gang to take on even the frigates of the Royal Navy. With two sloops-of-war at his disposal, the pirates knew they had a reasonably good chance of overwhelming one, and Blackbeard knew just the place to look. Out in the sea, just beyond the arc of the Windward Islands that marks the leading edge of the Caribbean, the transatlantic shipping lanes converged. One could find ships bound from France to Martinique and Guadeloupe, from England to Barbados, and from Spain to the Spanish Main, through the deepwater passages between the islands. There, Blackbeard's men decided, was where they would cast their net.

  It was a good choice. On November 17, within days or even hours of arriving, the lookout let out a cry. There, on the horizon, were the sails of an approaching ship.

  ***

  Pierre Dosset, captain of the French slaver La Concorde, could not have been happy to see two large sloops approaching from the west. He knew it meant trouble. Because of the prevailing winds, many ships sailed to the Caribbean at this latitude, but nobody sailed in the opposite direction. La Concorde was a large, swift, powerful vessel: a 250-ton ship-rigged slaver, with a strong oaken hull and enough gun ports to accommodate up to forty cannon. Dosset's crew, however, was in no condition to go into battle.

  The Frenchmen had left their homeport of Nantes eight months earlier, with a crew of seventy-five and a hold full of goods to trade with the kings and princes of Whydah, on Africa's Bight of Benin. La Concorde's owner, the merchant Réne Montaudoin, had given Captain Dosset a competitive advantage over the captains of rival slavers, a cargo the Africans would pay many slaves to possess. The people of the Kingdom of Whydah had a penchant for the colorful cotton prints produced in India. Montaudoin, the richest man in Nantes, had built his own textile factory near the mouth of the Loire, which turned out knockoffs of the Calico and Indiennes patterns. His ship full of colorful cotton, Dosset looked forward to a smooth and profitable journey.

  Things went badly from the start. A few days from Nantes, Dosset encountered a pair of powerful storms that damaged his ship, causing the loss of an expensive anchor and the death of a crewman. He arrived in Whydah in July after seventy-seven days at sea, and succeeded in trading his goods for 516 slaves and a small quantity of gold dust. He also picked up enough tropical microbes and ba
cteria to sicken many of the crew members. Sixteen crewmen died during their three-month stay in Africa or during the six weeks they had been crossing the Atlantic. Thirty-six others were sick with "scurvy and the bloody flux." Sixty-one slaves had also died. Now Dosset feared he might not make it to the slave markets of Martinique at all.

  With 70 percent of his crew dead or incapacitated, Dosset lacked the manpower to handle the ship's cannon and rigging at the same time. A captain in his situation could bluff, displaying his guns to ward off the attackers, but on this occasion Dosset was deprived of that option as well. Because he was carrying an unusually large number of slaves—nearly a hundred more than in any of La Concorde's previous trips—he had to increase his cargo capacity by mounting only sixteen guns. If the strangers turned out to be pirates, Dosset knew he was in trouble.

  As the sloops closed within range, he and his lieutenant, François Ernaud, must have felt a growing sense of terror. A spyglass revealed two sloops-of-war, with guns run out of their ports, and their decks jammed with men. Any further doubt about their intentions vanished when the sloops displayed a black flag with a death's head, and smoke and fire began to swirl around the head of the fearsome bearded man on the biggest sloop's quarterdeck.

  Puffs of smoke appeared along the length of one of the sloops as she fired a full volley of cannon at La Concorde. Cannonballs splashed in the water and flew over the deck, followed shortly by a cascade of musket balls. Dosset stayed his course and tried to rally the crewmen, but a second volley of cannon and musketry sapped the last bit of morale from them. Dosset ordered the flag struck and the helmsman swung La Concorde into the wind, and she drifted slowly to a stop. Monsieur Montaudoin was going to be very angry.