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

by Colin Woodard

  Like Henry Avery, Blackbeard had bought the loyalty of a colonial governor, but had yet to accumulate the sort of fortune that would allow him to live like a king for the rest of his days. Therefore, after a few weeks of rest, he returned to work.

  ***

  Back in the Bahamas, Charles Vane had no intention of taking his activities underground. After his April cruise, he had spent nearly a month stewing in Nassau, waiting for Jacobite reinforcements. These were not to come; shortly after George Cammocke forwarded his Bahamian plan to James Stuart's mother, Queen Mary of Modena, she passed away, the plot apparently dying with her. As the weeks passed, Vane realized that Woodes Rogers, George I's governor, was going to beat the Stuarts to Nassau. The pirate republic, he was coming to realize, was likely doomed. Hornigold and other reformed pirates who had returned to Nassau intended to place themselves in Governor Rogers's service. Jennings had gone further than that, having taken a privateering commission from Governor Bennett to hunt Vane down and bring him back to Bermuda to be tried for his crimes; he was said to be fitting out two or three sloops to come to Nassau for that purpose. Vane wished to continue piracy, but was aware that the walls were closing in on him.

  By late May, Vane could wait no longer. He went around Nassau calling up his old crew. Seventy-five like-minded diehards agreed to join him on the Lark, including Edward England and "Calico Jack" Rackham. The plan was to go out on one last cruise before Governor Rogers showed up and, hopefully, acquire a larger pirate vessel, one capable of operating without a home port for long periods of time. If Vane was to be pushed out of the pirate's nest, he wanted to be ready to fly as long and as far as necessary to find another.

  Vane's first capture was an audacious one. On May 23, 1718, near Crooked Island, Bahamas, 200 miles southeast of Nassau, they overtook a familiar vessel. The fourteen-ton sloop Richard & John had been a fixture in Nassau for many years, bringing supplies to the pirates from Charleston and Jamaica and trading them for pirate plunder. Vane and everyone else aboard the Lark knew it belonged to Richard Thompson, the leading citizen of Harbor Island, and his son-in-law John Cockram, one of the founders of the pirate republic, who had sailed canoes with Hornigold back in 1714. The Richard & John had always been off-limits to pirates, but not this time. Cockram had been a leading member of the pro-pardon camp and was no friend to Vane and his men. They fired on the Richard & John, forcing her captain, Cockram's brother Joseph, to come into the wind and surrender. Vane's crew dumped him on the forlorn shores of Crooked Island and sailed away with his sloop. Vane was making a clear statement: In his book, reformed pirates were fair game.

  In the first half of June, Vane captured several more vessels, including a two-masted boat and a twenty-gun French ship. The two-masted boat was turned over to Edward England, and the crew voted the flamboyantly dressed John Rackham to replace him as the company's quartermaster. The French ship, a substantial 200 to 250-ton vessel, was well suited to piracy and Vane adopted it as his new flagship. (After being disarmed, the Lark was apparently given to the Frenchmen.) On June 23, cruising outside the French port of Leogane, near modern-day Port-au-Prince, Haiti, they seized another French vessel, the brigantine St. Martin of Bordeaux, carrying sugar, indigo, brandy, claret, and white wine. Vane dumped her captain and several passengers on the shore, but kept the St. Martin and thirteen of her crewmen. Satisfied with these prizes and fortified with drink, Vane's company agreed to return to Nassau: Vane in his French ship, England in the two-masted boat, and the St. Martin and Richard & John sailed by prize crews.

  With these large vessels, the pirates were forced to take the deep-water passage around Harbour Island and Eleuthera. This route took longer than cutting directly across the Bahama Bank, but it proved fortuitous. On the morning of July 4, the pirate flotilla found themselves among a small swarm of trading sloops heading in and out of Harbour Island. In just a few hours, the pirates captured three of them: the Drake of Rhode Island (Captain John Draper), carrying wine, spirits, and rum; the Ulster of New York (John Fredd), loaded with tropical timber from Andros Island; and the Eagle of Rhode Island (Robert Brown), with sugar, bread, and two barrels of nails. No treasure fleet, this, but the sloops would make good tenders, and the alcohol would keep the men happy for a few days, at least. That evening, Vane's convoy of prizes arrived in Nassau, where his men promptly seized two more sloops, the Dove (William Harris); and the Lancaster, commanded by none other than Neal Walker, the son of former justice Thomas Walker, whose family Hornigold had driven off New Providence in 1716. Vane had left Nassau with a single sloop six weeks earlier, but was now in control of at least nine vessels.

  He quickly consolidated control over the island. He is said to have stormed ashore with his sword drawn, threatening "to burn the principal houses of the town and to make examples of many of the people." Vane moved against Benjamin Hornigold and other reformed pirates, making "examples of many of the people" and acting "extremely insolent to all who were not as great villains as himself," according to the author of A General History of the Pyrates, who had excellent sources in Nassau. "He reigned here as governor [for] 20 days, stopped all vessels which came in and would suffer none to go out ... He swore [that] while he was in the harbor, he would suffer no other Governor than himself."

  His opponents cowed, Vane and his men set to work transferring cargo from the St. Martin to various sloops, and shifting additional cannon aboard the big French ship. His gang intended to sail for the coast of Brazil, where they could hope to join forces with La Buse, Condent, and other die-hard pirates. Maybe another pirate republic could be built on the shores of South America, beyond the reach of the Hanoverian king, and the pirates could regroup.

  On the evening of July 24, 1718, with Vane's men just three or four days from departure, the cry went out: The sails of a Royal Navy frigate had been spotted coming 'round the backside of Hog Island.

  Woodes Rogers had arrived.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BRINKSMANSHIP

  July–September 1718

  WOODES ROGERS stood on the quarterdeck of the Delicia, cane in hand to support his bad foot, and peered out across the sea. His great ship heeled gently to starboard, her sails set close to the wind, the shadowy outline of New Providence Island three miles off her bow, dominating the southern horizon. Commodore Peter Chamberlaine's flagship, HMS Milford, sailed alongside, lookouts atop her mainmast and thirty heavy guns at the ready. Behind, in the Delicias sizzling wake, the transport Willing Mind rode low in the waves with her heavy load of soldiers and supplies, with the private sloop-of-war Buck sailing nearby. From time to time Rogers peered through his looking glass to pick out the frigate HMS Rose, a lighted lantern hanging in her mizzenmast, now rounding the western end of Hog Island, three miles away. He could see the sloop-of-war HMS Shark hanging a half mile behind her. In the wee hours of the morning, Commodore Chamberlaine had put local pilots aboard the Rose and Shark and sent them ahead to Nassau to scout out the scene. Now, fifteen hours later, the moment of reckoning had come. The Rose was entering the harbor. Rogers and Chamberlaine, lacking pilots for their large, deep-draft ships, planned to spend the night sailing back and forth out in the deep water. Until daybreak, they could only wait, watching and listening, for reports from the Rose and Shark. Rogers felt a sinking feeling when, a few minutes later, he heard the unmistakable sound of cannonfire echoing from inside Nassau's harbor.

  At six thirty P.M., the captain of the Rose, Thomas Whitney, ordered the frigate's anchors dropped just inside the harbor's main entrance. She swung into the easterly wind so that her twenty guns pointed, uselessly, at stretches of unoccupied shoreline: the tip of Hog Island to port, the shrubby, overgrown fields outside of Nassau to starboard. The main anchorage lay dead ahead, a scene of desolation. The remains of some forty captured vessels were strewn on the shore, some burnt, and all of them ruined—Dutch ships, French brigantines, sloops of various sizes and nationalities—fittings and sails missing and stray ends of rigging blowing
in the wind. In the middle of the anchorage, a large twenty- to thirty-gun ship, French-built by the look of her, rode at anchor, a St. George's flag flying from her mainmast, a sign of allegiance to Old England rather than the decade-old nation of Great Britain. Sloops and other vessels were anchored all around her, some flying the death's head flag. The same flag could be seen flapping over Fort Nassau, whose seaward-facing walls were so decrepit their cracks were visible from a distance. The wind carried the sickening smell of putrefying flesh across the harbor, as if the carcasses of a thousand animals were rotting somewhere on the shore.

  Suddenly, to Whitney's alarm, a flash of fire and a puff of smoke appeared from the stern of the big ship—Charles Vane's ship—in the center of the harbor. The sound came moments later—the report of a stern-mounted cannon—followed by the splash of a cannonball on the surface of the water, not far from the Rose. Two more cannonballs passed over his head, at least one tearing through some of the Rose's rigging, before Whitney raised a white flag of truce. Clearly, the young captain must have thought, this was not going to be easy.

  With the pirate ship appearing to accept the flag of truce, Whitney sent his lieutenant into the harbor in a boat to, in his words, "know the reason" for the pirates' hostility. The lieutenant went alongside Vane's ship and hailed her captain, inquiring why he had fired on the king's ship. "His answer," Whitney wrote in his logbook, "was [that] he would use his utmost endeavour to burn us and all the vessels in the harbor." Vane also gave the lieutenant a letter addressed to Governor Woodes Rogers, on the outside of which was written: "We await a speedy Answer." The letter, which may or may not have been delivered to Rogers that evening, read:

  July 24th, 1718

  Your Excellency may please to understand that we are willing to accept his Majesty's most gracious pardon on the following terms, viz:

  That you will suffer us to dispose of all our goods now in our possession. Likewise, to act as we think fit with every Thing belonging to us, as his Majesty's Act of Grace specifies.

  If your Excellency shall please to comply with this, we shall, with all readiness, accept of his Majesty's Act of Grace. If not, we are obliged to stand on our own defence...

  Your Humble Servants,

  Charles Vane, and Company.

  Vane was simply trying to buy a little time, to find a way to escape from New Providence with his new ship and all his loot. His ship was too large to pass over the Potter's Cay bar and through the harbor's shallow eastern passage. The Rose was anchored in the western entrance, bottling him in the harbor. Any thought of trying to run past her guns—exchanging comparable broadsides—was put to rest when, a few minutes later, the ten-gun HMS Shark sailed into the harbor and anchored just ahead of the Rose, followed by the twenty-gun transport Willing Mind and the ten-gun privateer Buck. Vane's ship was trapped, her men at the mercy of Governor Rogers's forces. The sun set, plunging the harbor into darkness.

  Vane stewed for a few hours until he finally decided Rogers did not intend to honor him with a reply. His company agreed that the warships at the harbor's entrance seemed to speak for themselves. The ship was doomed, Vane told them, but there was still a way to escape the governor's clutches. The ninety men in his crew listened intently as he outlined a daring escape plan.

  At two A.M., Captain Whitney was awakened in his cabin by a breathless subordinate. The pirates were attacking; the Rose was in danger. He rushed onto deck and was greeted by a horrific sight: Vane's ship, enveloped in flames, was heading straight for the Rose and her consorts. In the middle of the night, Vane's men had unloaded their ship and soaked its decks and rigging with pitch and tar. They had rolled all her guns out of their ports, every one packed with powder and two cannonballs. Weighing anchor, they had quietly towed her in the direction of the interlopers. As the distance closed, one pirate stayed on the helm, keeping the ship aimed directly at the anchored Shark and Rose while others dashed about the doomed ship, lowering sails and setting the pitch-soaked decks and rigging alight. If all went to plan, the ship would collide with the Royal Navy vessels, consuming them in the resulting conflagration.

  As the last pirates abandoned their ship, sailors were rushing about the decks of the Rose, Shark, Buck, and Willing Mind, some loosening sails, others hacking away at the anchor lines with axes, trying to free the endangered vessels. As soon as the anchors came free, Whitney and the other captains swung their ships around—wind to their backs—toward the open sea. There was a frightening few minutes as the fireship drew closer, the first of her double-loaded guns discharging as their gunpowder charges ignited in the heat. Then, slowly, the Rose and the other vessels gained momentum and pulled away from the approaching inferno.

  Vane himself watched these events from the deck of the Katherine, a swift Bermuda-built sloop that he had commandeered from another pirate in the middle of the night. Katherine's owner, a minor pirate named Charles Yeats, remained onboard and was none too happy about having his vessel taken from him. Vane's men had loaded their possessions into the sloop and augmented her armament to ten or twelve guns. They watched with disappointment as the Rose and Shark escaped out to sea, but the action had bought them time. In the four hours remaining until sunrise, they would have the run of Nassau. Vane sent men into town, to seize anything they thought useful: equipment, supplies, weapons, valuables, and the island's best pilot and carpenter, whom they roused out of bed and carried aboard the Katherine. Then they waited, black flag at the mast, for the dawn.

  At seven A.M., shortly after daybreak, Rogers's entire fleet appeared at the entrance to the harbor. The governor's first glimpse of his new capital was of the smoldering timbers of a large ship bobbing in the middle of the channel, embers hissing, the boneyard of ruined vessels on the shore, and a pair of pirate vessels anchored up the harbor, just behind Potter's Cay. If he had wished to make a dignified entrance, Rogers was disappointed. On their way into the harbor, both the Delicia and Milford ran aground on a sandbar and had to wait two hours for the rising tide to lift them off. Vane's men presumably had a good laugh, watching ships bearing the governor and commodore's personal flags loll on the Hog Island sandbar. The laughing stopped around ten o'clock when, with the tide now high, the shallow-drafted Buck and another sloop began sailing around Potter's Cay bar, their decks filled with soldiers. Vane knew they had lingered long enough. He ordered anchors lifted and sails raised. The Katherine turned and headed out the narrow eastern entrance of the harbor, with the Buck in hot pursuit.

  The winds blew strong from the south-southeast that morning, and the chase proceeded close on the wind. Vane had a worried few hours, as the Katherine proved slower than her pursuers on this point of sail. He was relieved when they finally rounded the eastern end of New Providence, let out their sails, and began gaining ground. Vane's men fired their guns in defiance, and the Buck was forced to give up the chase and return to Nassau. Vane and his men were to remain at large, but New Providence Island, for the time being at least, would be in the possession of Governor Rogers.

  ***

  On the morning of the twenty-seventh, Rogers landed ashore, an event punctuated by much pomp. The Rose and Shark fired eleven-gun salutes as Rogers's boat hit the beach, where, to his considerable relief, he was joyously received by pro-pardon residents. Thomas Walker, who had returned to the island in recent weeks, was the first to greet the governor, along with his old nemesis, Benjamin Hornigold. These two men—the "pirate governor" and the former justice—led Rogers and his entourage to the crumbling mass of Fort Nassau. Along the way the crews of several pardoned pirate captains—Hornigold, Josiah Burgess, and others—formed orderly lines on either side of the road, each man firing his musket into the air as Rogers walked past, creating a running salute all the way to the fortress gates.

  Rogers climbed to the top of the fort to address the gathering crowd. He could see in an instant that the fort was in terrible disrepair. The seaward facing bastion looked like it might collapse at any moment, having, as Rogers
put it, "only a crazy crack'd wall in its foundation." The parade ground was overgrown with weeds, and instead of longhouses for the garrison it contained a single hut, in which a pathetic old man was living. The pirates had absconded with the cannon, leaving behind a single nine-pounder, which explained why Vane hadn't tried to hole up in the fort. By the time Rogers reached the roof, William Fairfax, Walker, and Hornigold at his side, and a group of soldiers behind, some three hundred people had assembled in the square below. Rogers unrolled a scroll and read aloud the king's commission, appointing him governor of the Bahamas. The people, Rogers said, "showed many tokens of joy for the re-introduction of government."

  Rogers spent the next few days consolidating control of the island and surveying its conditions. His 100-man Independent Company took control of Fort Nassau, constructing shelters out of sticks and palmetto leaves, while the sea-weary colonists set about building tents made from sails borrowed from the Delicia, Buck, and Willing Mind. Sailors from the Rose secured in the name of the king the St. Martin, Drake, Ulster, Dove, Lancaster, and other vessels that happened to be in the harbor. Rogers moved into the old governor's house—one of the only buildings that had survived the War of Spanish Succession. In his makeshift office he held consultations with various residents, looking for "inhabitants who had not been pirates ... that were the least encouragers of trading with them" to serve on his twelve-man governing council. His initial appointees, announced on August 1, included Harbour Island smuggling king Richard Thompson and several men who had come with Rogers, including Fairfax (the new justice) and the Delicia's captain and first mate. The council met at Rogers's house that very day and spent hours accepting the surrenders of some two hundred pirates who had not yet taken the king's pardon.