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

by Colin Woodard

  Blackbeard's men spotted the Seaford near St. Thomas on or about December 2, and from some distance away. They identified her with certainty, probably recognizing the navy's distinctive ensign flying from her rigging. A discussion ensued. They knew they had to outman the frigate, but to realize this advantage they would need to board her. It was relatively easy to board a vessel if you surprised it at anchor, which is what the pirates had considered at Nevis, but it was far more risky to do so in a running battle at sea. Royal Navy gunners were well trained, able to fire their cannons twice as fast as their French and Spanish competitors; if they got off a well-timed broadside of grapeshot, they could cut down a hundred men in a few seconds. On the Revenge, veteran crewmen recalled the horrific carnage they witnessed when Bonnet had attacked a Spanish man-of-war, an engagement which Bonnet had only recently recovered from. In the end, they voted against the attack, which struck them as unnecessarily risky. As the pirates would later tell a captive, "They had met the man of war of this station, but said they had no business with her, but if she had chased them they would have kept their way." They stuck to their course and watched the Seaford disappear.

  Aboard the Seaford, Captain Rose and Governor Hamilton thought they had just passed a slave ship and merchant sloop, not realizing how near they had come to danger until later that day. Approaching the island of St. Eustacius, they were hailed by a sloop "sent express from St. Christopher's" ten miles to the southeast. The sloop's crew informed the governor of the pirates' identity and their raid on Sandy Point two days earlier. The attack, Governor Hamilton later recalled, "gave the people of St. Christopher's ... just apprehensions [for] my safety," prompting them to voluntarily outfit a six-gun sloop to escort the Seaford back to Antigua. A hundred militiamen volunteered to man her, and ten more came aboard the Seaford to bolster her crew in the event of a boarding by pirates. As the flustered governor sailed back to Antigua, he wrote a letter to Captain Francis Hume in Barbados, begging him to immediately bring HMS Scarborough to the Leewards to help the Seaford hunt down the pirates.

  Future generations of historians would report that Blackbeard fought the Scarborough to a draw, an event seen as one of the most fantastic of his many accomplishments. The fight never happened, however, as proven by a thorough examination of the logbooks of the Scarborough and Seaford and the letters of Captains Hume and Rose. The Scarborough and Seaford pursued the pirates, tracking Blackbeard and Bonnet's movements across the Antillies for nearly a month; but they were always more than a week behind them. They never caught up with the pirates. Instead, the naval captains received a false report that Blackbeard had been seen at Dominica, near St. Vincent, which sent them on a 300-mile wild goose chase in the wrong direction. Somehow, accounts of the Seaford's close encounter with Blackbeard got mixed up with those of the Scarborough's engagements with John Martel and other pirates, and exaggerated into an all-out naval battle that never took place.

  In reality, after passing the Seaford on the morning of December 2, Blackbeard and Bonnet sailed to St. Croix, the pirate rendezvous used by Martel and Bellamy the year before. En route they captured two sloops, one Danish and one English, which they took into St. Croix's harbor. There they stayed for a night or two, regenerating their water and firewood supply and mounting more captured cannon aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge, bringing her to thirty-six guns. For recreation, they also burnt the English sloop, adding her hulk to the burned-out bones of John Martel's pirate ship and sloops. Again, the crews of these trading vessels were not harmed. When Blackbeard was ready to leave, he put the captives aboard the Danish sloop, along with "an Indian and a Negro belonging to Bermuda." The latter individuals had probably been captives for a couple of months, apparently ingratiating themselves with the pirates, for they were carrying fifteen ounces of gold dust. (It was stolen from them by the captains of the Danish and English sloops during their trip to Tortola.)

  Blackbeard and Bonnet continued east and on December 5 were off the eastern end of Puerto Rico. That day they captured one final Leeward Islands' sloop, the Margaret of St. Christopher, after the Queen Anne's Revenge fired a single shot over her bow. The Margaret's captain, Henry Bostock, was ordered to row over to the pirate flagship with five of his men. Bostock later gave English authorities one of the most detailed accounts of Blackbeard and his ship. The pirates "did not seem to want provisions," but they did seize a number of the live cattle and hogs Bostock was carrying in his sloop, as well as his books, navigational instruments, cutlasses, and firearms. Blackbeard, Bostock reported,"was a tall sparse man with a very black beard which he wore very long." His crew numbered three hundred, and his flagship was a "Dutch built ... French guinea man" with thirty-six guns. There was a great deal of silver on board, as well as the "fine cup" taken from Captain Taylor. The pirates didn't abuse Bostock or his men, but they did force three of them to serve aboard their ship. A fourth, Robert Biddy of Liverpool, joined them voluntarily.

  Blackbeard interrogated Bostock and his crew, wanting to know what other merchant vessels were trading on the Puerto Rican coast. Bostock refused to talk, but Biddy and other crewmembers told him of French and Danish sloops they had passed on their way. Bonnet was sent ahead in the Revenge to chase them down, while Blackbeard's men finished transferring squealing hogs and unhappy cattle onto the Queen Anne's Revenge. The pirates bragged about meeting the Seaford and burning various ships and sloops. Bostock overheard them discussing their intention to sail for Samana Bay, Hispaniola (now within the Dominican Republic), where they would careen and "lye in wait for the Spanish Armada" they expected would sail from Havana "with money to pay the garrisons" on Puerto Rico. "They think we are gone," Blackbeard said of the Spanish, "but we will soon be at their backs unawares."

  For some reason, Blackbeard and his men were extremely eager to learn the whereabouts of one Captain Pinkentham, whom the pirates "inquired often" about. Pinkentham, a sea captain with ties to Jamaica and Rhode Island, had been a privateer during the War of Spanish Succession, commanding a swift vessel with a crew of 160 men; Blackbeard would certainly have known him, and may have even served on his crew, which raises the possibility that his motives for finding Pinkentham may have been more complicated than simply wanting to loot the man's vessel. Bostock's men told Blackbeard that they had last seen Pinkentham at St. Thomas, one of the Danish-controlled Virgin Islands, in an eight-gun sloop; he planned to sail to Jamaica and then on to Florida to dive the Spanish wrecks and already had official British permission to do so. Blackbeard probably hoped to catch up to Pinkentham on his way to Jamaica. (They didn't succeed; Pinkentham's sloop was later captured by a Bermudan pirate named Grinnaway; Pinkentham's crew of "10 men, 2 boys and 6 Negros" later managed to overpower their captors and escape.)

  ***

  Bostock had one other piece of information, one that would turn the pirates' world upside down. George I was believed to have issued an Act of Grace pardoning all pirates for their crimes, provided they surrender. The actual proclamation had not reached the authorities in the Leeward Islands, but there were mariners who had seen the decree back in England, where it had been published in the London Gazette eleven weeks earlier. A copy of the decree would arrive any day, Bostock told them. The pirates, Bostock later reported, listened to this news, "but they seemed to slight it." The information was unsettling; it could not be otherwise. Every one of the nearly 400 men in Blackbeard's flotilla had thought they'd taken an irrevocable step into criminality and rebellion, only to discover a possibility of a second chance. Each man, Blackbeard included, must have thought about quitting piracy and retiring with their ill-gotten gains.

  If Blackbeard's pirates discussed this news with one another, the content of their debates has been lost to history. In fact, Henry Bostock was the last Englishman to see Blackbeard for nearly three months. After Blackbeard let Bostock go, the pirates sailed deeper into French and Spanish territory, and the intelligence collected by the captains of HMS Scarborough and HMS Seaford dried up. Th
e last reports they received placed the pirates at Mona Island, between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, and finally near Samana Bay. There, Blackbeard faded out of the English records, and into a Spanish world where nobody knew his name.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BEGGING PARDON

  December 1717–August 1718

  HENRY BOSTOCK had not lied to Blackbeard. As part of his plan to suppress the pirates, King George I had, indeed, issued a royal proclamation on September 5,1717 decreeing that any pirate who surrendered to a British governor within one year would be pardoned for all piracies committed before January 5,1718. As Blackbeard sailed down the Greater Antilles, copies of this Proclamation for Suppressing of Pirates were on their way from England aboard merchant ships bound for Boston, Charleston, and Barbados. When the ships reached their destinations, even jailed pirates would be freed.

  The pardons had been conceived of and promoted by Woodes Rogers and were intended to reduce the number of active pirates prior to King George's counteroffensive. It was hoped that those pirates who took advantage of the Act of Grace would return to being productive, law-abiding subjects. Holdouts would be hunted down without mercy. King George had ordered all military and colonial personnel to seize such dead-enders, providing a reward of £100 for every pirate captain captured, plus £50 for senior pirate "officers," and £20–30 for other members of a pirate vessel's crew. Between captures and pardons, the king's advisors reasoned, the pirates of the Caribbean would be too weak to resist Rogers when he finally arrived to reestablish control of the Bahamas.

  Official word of the pardon reached Boston first, and the text of the proclamation was published in the Boston News-Letter of December 9, 1717. It arrived too late for the surviving members of Bellamy's crew. Through the spring and summer of 1717, the eight prisoners waited in vain for rescue from their cages at Boston Prison. They were brought to trial in late October, in the second-floor courtroom of Boston's four-year-old Town House, one hundred yards down the street from the prison.* The two carpenters forced from the St. Michael—Thomas South and Thomas Davis—were found not guilty and released. The other six men were sentenced to hang.

  The condemned men spent their final two weeks in the company of perhaps the most influential man in all of New England, the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather. Mather, the fifty-nine-year-old scion of a family that had dominated the spiritual and political life of Massachusetts since its foundation, took an interest in the pirates. He visited them in their cells, where he subjected them to long-winded sermons, condemning their vile behavior and accusing them, falsely, of murdering all their captives as their ship wrecked against Cape Cod. Throughout these meetings one captive, Simon Van Vorst, maintained his innocence, noting that he had been a forced man. "Forced! No," Mather admonished the man at the time. "Better [to] have died a martyr by the cruel hands of [the pirates] than have become one of their brethren." Upon his return home, however, Mather scrawled a "to do" note in his diary: "Obtain a reprieve and, if it may be, a pardon for one of [the] Pyrates, who is not only more penitent, but also more innocent than the rest." If he indeed tried to obtain this pardon, the effort was unsuccessful.

  On the afternoon of November 15, Mather accompanied the condemned prisoners as they walked from the prison to the Charles River ferry landing. After he heard their final confessions, the sheriffs led them out to gallows that had been erected on the tidal flats. An enormous crowd watched as the men made their final speeches. According to Mather, most were "distinguishingly penitent," particularly Van Vorst, who read a psalm in his native Dutch before exhorting "young persons to lead a life of religion ... keep the Sabbath, and carry it well to their parents." Then the men were hanged until they were dead. "Behold," Mather wrote in a published account* of their final hours, "The End of Piracy!"

  The Golden Age of Piracy was far from over.

  ***

  From Boston, news of the king's pardon slowly spread in all directions. A bitter snowstorm delayed the postal riders who carried word to Rhode Island and New York, but an unnamed merchant vessel brought the news to Bermuda in little more than a week, and into the hands of Governor Benjamin Bennett. Bennett, who had long been advising his superiors in London to do something about the pirate republic in the Bahamas, took it upon himself to inform the pirates of the pardon's existence. He had copies of the proclamation printed and asked his own son to deliver them to Nassau in a swift Bermuda sloop.

  The governor's son was walking into the mouth of the lion, armed only with a stack of printed paper. The pirates had captured many of his countrymen's vessels and even threatened to attack Bermuda itself. If they reacted badly, young Bennett could wind up dead.

  By now, so many merchants were smuggling goods back and forth to the Bahamas the pirates probably didn't give the unfamiliar sloop a second thought. Although he was the first official visitor to the island in nearly two years, the pirates may not have been aware of Bennett's presence until he stepped ashore and started handing out copies of the king's offer of pardon. They were passed on to the literate among them who read out their contents to those who could not. Within hours, everyone on the island must have known they had been offered a second chance.

  Nassau's pirates promptly broke into two contending factions. At least half of the pirates were ecstatic, greeting young Bennett as their hero and savior. This group was exemplified by Henry Jennings, who had never intended to become an outlaw in the first place, and it included Leigh Ashworth, Bellamy's old quartermaster; Richard Noland; veteran pirate sloop captain Josiah Burgess; and Jean Bondavais, the French pirate who had previously tried to take the captive surgeon John Howell from Hornigold. Hornigold himself was at sea when Bennett arrived, but his sympathies lay with them. This camp consisted of the more moderate pirates—former sailors and privateersmen who had fallen into piracy with profit in mind. This pro-pardon crowd was eager for the chance to regain legitimacy, free to invest their plunder in commercial trade. Backed by the dozens of captives and forced men on the island, they celebrated by climbing to the top of Fort Nassau, where they raised the Union Jack in a display of submission to the Crown.

  The other camp was infuriated by this action. They were the die-hard outlaws, bitter, angry men who saw themselves not as businessmen or thieves, but as rebels or guerilla insurgents in a war against ship owners, merchants, and, in many cases, King George himself. This anti-pardon crowd included many of the pirates who held pro-Stuart or "Jacobite" sympathies and had been disappointed by the collapse of the 1715 uprising against King George and the House of Hanover. This faction included Paulsgrave Williams, the ruthless sloop captains Christopher Winter and Nicholas Brown, and several ambitious young men whose names would soon become infamous: Edward England, Edmund Condent, and "Calico Jack" Rackham. Their undisputed leader was Charles Vane.

  Up until now, Vane had been in the background, one of the hundreds of low-ranking pirates who caroused in the streets of Nassau, drinking, gambling, fighting, and womanizing. He had been living off his earnings while serving with Henry Jennings, particularly his shares of the plunder stolen from the Spanish wrecks in 1716. He may have gone on short cruises with other pirate captains, but it seems that he spent most of the intervening year and a half as Jennings had: resting on his laurels ashore and appreciating the freedoms offered by the existence of the Bahamian pirate republic. The news of the pardon threatened to put an end to the pirate's nest, as did rumors that King George had appointed a new royal governor for the Bahamas. Vane, who had Jacobite sympathies, could not have been pleased when he read King George's proclamation. He was furious when he saw his less-committed colleagues celebrating atop the fort beneath the newly raised British flag.

  Vane's faction rallied to the main square, which soon filled with hundreds of armed and angry men. They rushed the walls of the adjacent fort, evicted the revelers within, and pulled the Union Jack down from the flagpole. In its place they hoisted a flag that left no ambiguity about their allegiance: "the Black Flag with the Dea
th's Head in it."

  Vane's faction tried to attract outside support as well. Through their network of smugglers and Jacobite contacts in England, these pirates passed a message to Captain George Cammocke, a Royal Navy captain who had defected to the Pretender's cause and was now living in France. In the message, the pirates "did with one heart and voice proclaim James III for their King" and were "resolved to prosper or perish in their bold undertaking" against George I. As Cammocke would later tell it, the pirates wrote that "they have rejected with contempt the said pardon"; they "humbly desired" that the Stuarts would "send to them such a person as has borne some character in the Royal Navy of England" to serve as the Jacobite "Captain General of America, by Sea and Land," with the power to commission the pirates as privateers and to help organize their resistance to the Hanoverian King. With such guidance, they said they could mount a successful surprise attack on Bermuda and secure the colony for the Stuarts.

  This extraordinary proposal reached Cammocke via supporters in England in just three months. The veteran naval officer enthusiastically embraced the pirates' plan and immediately volunteered to go to Nassau himself. In a letter sent on March 28, 1718, to James Stuart's mother, the deposed Queen Mary of Modena, Cammocke proposed to purchase a fifty-gun warship in Cádiz for £15,000, crew her with English Jacobites, and sail to the Bahamas as a Stuart admiral. Once in Nassau, Cammocke would, with James Ill's permission, issue a pardon for all the pirates, commissioning them as privateers instead. He would set up scheduled mail-boat service between Nassau and Spain so that the exiled Stuart court could be kept in close communication with the pirates. "Employing them against the common enemy will be the only means to make way for a Restoration" of the House of Stuart, Cammocke wrote. "For if we can destroy the West India and Guinea trade, we shall make the English merchants ... rather desire a Restoration then [to allow] that [the reign of George,] the Duke of Brunswick should continue." Events in the Bahamas, however, would overtake Cammocke's plan before it ever got off the ground.