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

by Colin Woodard

***

  On leaving Green Turtle Cay, Vane headed north. The intelligence he had received from Woodall suggested he would need reinforcements if he were to make good on his threat to attack Nassau. Having lost hope that the Stuarts would send assistance, Vane knew he had to turn to his old comrades for help. La Buse had vanished to the south. Williams, England, and Condent had sailed for Africa and Brazil. One pirate, however, was still in the region, and everyone knew where to find him. Vane's men agreed; they would sail for North Carolina's Pamlico Sound, where they hoped to hook up with their comrade Blackbeard.

  They arrived at Ocracoke Inlet in the second week of October. There, behind Ocracoke Island, they spotted an armed sloop that would later prove to be Blackbeard's Adventure. There must have been a few minutes of confusion until the two parties identified each other, as neither was sailing in a vessel that was familiar to the other. Somehow—probably by speaking trumpet—Blackbeard and Vane confirmed each other's identity. Vane promptly saluted his comrade, firing his brigantine's guns high in the air, Blackbeard responding in kind. Vane anchored his vessel alongside the Adventure. Men rowed from one vessel to the other, commencing a pirate festival that would last several days and spread to the shores of Ocracoke Island.

  The two men shared their experiences over the past few months. Blackbeard was probably the first to inform Vane of Stede Bonnet's capture, an event that had been on everyone's lips from Charleston to Boston. Vane told Blackbeard about his confrontations with Pearse and Rogers at Nassau, and of the progress of the latter's government. Vane may have tried to convince his former partner to join him for a joint assault on New Providence. If so, Blackbeard, comfortable in his new situation, declined. His men were safe and sound, free to continue their piracies without fear of reprisal.

  Their revelries concluded, Charles Vane and Edward Thatch took leave of each other to follow their separate paths.

  ***

  Governor Spotswood planned his attack on Blackbeard under a cloak of secrecy. He informed neither Virginia's governing council, nor its legislature, and he certainly had no intention of airing the matter with Governor Eden. The pirates, he later explained, were simply too popular. "I did not so much as communicate to His Majesty's Council here, nor to any other person but those who were necessarily to be employed in the [project's] execution, least among the many favorers of pirates we have in these parts, some of them might send intelligence to Thatch." He had grounds to worry. A few months earlier, some of Blackbeard's men had passed through the colony on their way to Philadelphia and had tried to tempt a number of merchant sailors to join them. Local officials wanted to arrest the pirates, but reported to Spotswood that they "could find none [willing] to assist them in the disarming and suppressing [of] that gang." Spotswood did manage to arrest William Howard, Blackbeard's quartermaster, but shortly thereafter one of the judges of his own Vice-Admiralty Court, a friend of Governor Eden named John Holloway, ordered the arrest of Captain George Gordon and Lieutenant Robert Maynard of HMS Pearl, on which Howard had been detained. Holloway filed a civil suit against both naval officers on the pirate's behalf, seeking £500 in damages from each of them. Fearing a jury might let Howard go, Spotswood had him tried without one, a move strongly condemned by the governing council. Virginians, Spotswood sniffed, had "an unaccountable inclination to favor pyrates."

  It was at Howard's trial that Spotswood unveiled his plan to Captain Brand and Captain Gordon, who had been sharing intelligence with him for months. It was the perfect opportunity to meet with the Royal Navy officers without raising suspicions, as both were in Williamsburg to serve as officers of the court. After the trial—at which Howard was found guilty—Brand and Gordon walked the four blocks from the handsome, H-shaped Capitol, through the market square and down the Palace Green to the Governor's Palace. Within one of the palace's opulent rooms, Spotswood outlined his plan. Since Blackbeard shared his time between Bath and Ocracoke, there would be a two-pronged assault. Brand, as the senior-most officer, would lead a contingent of marines overland to Bath, connecting with gentlemen sympathizers along the way. A second force would travel by sea to Ocracoke, ensuring no pirates escaped into the Atlantic. The Pearl (531 tons, forty guns) and the Lyme (384 tons, twenty-eight guns) were both far too large to negotiate the dangerous shoals of North Carolina's brackish creeks and barrier islands. Instead, Spotswood offered to purchase, at his own expense, two nimble sloops, which would be placed at the officers' disposal. Brand and Gordon agreed to man, arm, and supply the sloops and to place both under the command of Captain Gordon's first officer, Lieutenant Robert Maynard. (Gordon himself would stay behind with the frigates at Hampton Roads.) In addition to the possibility of claiming some of Blackbeard's treasure, naval personnel had an extra incentive to participate: Spotswood had just pushed a new law through the legislature rewarding a special bounty for the capture of Blackbeard or his minions. Gordon and Brand agreed to the plan. If it went well, it might prove both patriotic and profitable.

  Spotswood's plan was also entirely illegal, as neither the governor nor the officers had the authority to invade another colony. Blackbeard was, legally speaking, a citizen in good standing; he had been pardoned for his previous crimes, had applied for and received legal sanction to salvage his French "wreck" from Governor Eden, and had yet to be indicted for any crime.

  The expedition departed from Hampton on November 17. Maynard, who was the oldest naval officer serving in America, climbed aboard his flagship, the Jane, the larger of the two sloops hired by Governor Spotswood. On board the Jane were thirty-five men; an ample supply of muskets, cutlasses, and swords; a month's worth of provisions; but no cannon, the Jane being too small to bear them. The other sloop, the Ranger, was even smaller, carrying twenty-five sailors under the command of Midshipman Edmund Hyde of the Lyme. With no cannon and only sixty men, Maynard knew that if his sloops were the ones to encounter Blackbeard, they would have to surprise him at anchor. At three P.M. on that November morning, they raised their anchors and sailed out of the Chesapeake.

  A few hours later, Captain Brand of the Lyme set out on horseback from the Hampton village with a small contingent of sailors. They rode on dirt tracks through the Virginia countryside, past empty fields and teams of slaves tending racks of tobacco leaves drying in the cool fall air. The following day the last fields, plantations, and roads fell behind them as they entered the trackless wilderness of North Carolina.

  They spent three agonizing days crossing miles of pine barrens and the aptly named Great Dismal Swamp before emerging, on November 21, at Edenton, one of the colony's few settlements. Coming from the pastoral manors of Virginia, the poverty of the North Carolinians would have made an impression on Brand. "The people indeed are ignorant, there being few that can read and fewer write, even of their justices of peace," another early-eighteenth-century visitor said of the area's inhabitants. "They feed generally upon salt pork, sometimes upon beef, and their bread of Indian corn which they are forced for want of mills to beat, and in this they are so careless and uncleanly that there is but little difference between the corn in the horse's manger and the bread on their tables."

  Two men were waiting for Brand in Edenton. They introduced themselves as Maurice Moore, a colonel in the colony's militia and the son of the former governor of South Carolina; and Edward Moseley, the founding settler of Edenton, a wealthy and accomplished lawyer who had once been a member of North Carolina's governing council. Captain Brand described them as "two gentlemen that have been much abused by Thach [sic]," but they were also longstanding political opponents of Governor Eden and were probably Spotswood's chief informants in the colony. Brand's party spent the night in or near Edenton, probably at Moseley's home, where the officer let it be known that he had "come in to take Thach." The next morning Moseley and Moore arranged onward transportation across Albemarle Sound and, with several other residents, accompanied Brand on his final push to Bath, thirty miles further south.

  Brand and company reached the out
skirts of Bath at about ten o'clock on the night of November 23, six days after leaving Hampton. Moore scouted ahead and discovered that Blackbeard was not in town, as Brand had hoped he would be, but was "expected any minute" with another load of cargo "salvaged" from the French ship. Leaving most of his men behind, Brand crossed the head of Bath Creek and went straight to Governor Eden's plantation house. There, Brand later reported, "[I] applied myself to him and let him know I was come in quest of Thach." Governor Eden must have been alarmed at Brand's surprise appearance in the company of two of his political rivals. He could only hope that Blackbeard had made his escape, and that Brand would not discover the large parcel of stolen goods hidden in the barn of his neighbor, Tobias Knight. It's easy to picture Brand sitting by Eden's fireplace until dawn, loaded musket at his side, waiting for Blackbeard to come down the stone path from Eden's dock.

  Blackbeard never came.

  ***

  As he sailed down North Carolina's Outer Banks, Lieutenant Maynard heard all sorts of stories about Blackbeard. His pilot, a North Carolinian hired by Spotswood, said Blackbeard had been ferrying stolen cargo between Ocracoke and Bath. At Roanoke Inlet, halfway down the Outer Banks, local mariners told them that the Monday before they had seen Blackbeard's Adventure aground on Brant Island, a marshy islet on Currituck Sound, thirty miles back toward Virginia. Maynard spent the rest of the day sailing back and forth the length of Currituck Sound, but saw no sign of Blackbeard or anyone else. Spotswood himself had warned that Thatch was "fortifying an island at O[cra]acock Inlet and making that a general rendevouz of such robbers." From other mariners, Maynard probably heard another disturbing story that would reach Williamsburg a few days later: Blackbeard had "been join'd by some other pirate crews" at Ocracoke, increasing his numbers to 170 men; Maynard had no way of knowing that Vane's pirate crew had come and gone eight weeks earlier.

  At four P.M., with mounting trepidation, Maynard's small sloops reached Ocracoke Inlet, thirty miles south of Cape Hatteras. Once around the outer edge of Ocracoke Island, Maynard saw two sloops at anchor behind the island in a place now known as Thatch's Hole, one of them bearing nine guns and matching the description of Blackbeard's Adventure. The other sloop was unarmed and looked to be a coastal trading sloop. On the island, Maynard would have seen a large tent, the remains of bonfires, some empty kegs and barrels perhaps, but no sign of fortifications. He took note of the wind and currents and the sun, low in the sky, and gave the order for the Jane and Ranger to drop anchor. He didn't want to engage Blackbeard in darkness.

  Since Vane had left, Blackbeard had indeed been traveling back and forth between Bath and Ocracoke, spending a couple of weeks overseeing twenty or so men at Ocracoke, then a couple of weeks with his wife in Bath. His return to town was, by now, overdue. Five days earlier—November 17—he had received a letter from Tobias Knight urging him to "make the best of your way up as soon as possible ... [as] I have something more to say to you than at present I can write"; the justice had signed it "your real friend and servant, T. Knight." Blackbeard had more important matters to attend to than Knight or the two modest sloops that had just appeared in the inlet; his pirate gang was entertaining one of their merchant friends, Samuel Odell, whose trading vessel was anchored alongside the Adventure. While Maynard's men tried to sleep, steeling themselves for the fight ahead, Blackbeard's men drank late into the night.

  At nine o'clock the following morning, Maynard gave the command to weigh anchor and sailed straight for the Adventure, hoping to board her before Blackbeard could roll out her cannons. As they entered the anchorage on the faintest of breezes, Midshipman Hyde's Ranger ran aground on a sandbar. He ordered his men to start throwing ballast stones overboard in the hopes of making the sloop light enough to get back afloat. Maynard pressed ahead in the larger Jane, only to run aground himself, eliminating any possibility of a surprise attack. Despite their hangovers, Blackbeard's men couldn't help but take notice of the two sloops that had clearly been trying to sneak up on them, and whose suspiciously large crews were now noisily throwing ballast and water barrels over the side in an urgent attempt to get free. When it dawned on them that they were under attack, the pirates sprang into action, rushing to loosen sails, cut the anchor cables, and ready the cannons. It happened so fast that their guest, Samuel Odell, and his three crewmen didn't have time to get off Blackbeard's vessel. Just as the Adventure's sails caught their first faint breath of wind, Hyde got the Ranger afloat and headed straight for the pirates, with most of his twenty-five men straining at the oars.

  The pirates began firing their muskets, and when the vessels had closed to within "half [a] pistol shot," Blackbeard signaled the gun crews to fire. Flames blasted from the muzzles of the Adventure's cannons and, a split second later, four- and six-pound cannonballs tore across the Ranger's foredeck, demolishing foresails and killing Hyde and his second in command, the Lyme's coxswain, Allen Arlington. Wounded men convulsed on the Ranger's blood-soaked deck as the sloop slowed to a stop. Amid the confusion, some of the sailors managed to let off a volley of small arms fire as the Adventure swept past. One of the musket balls severed the jib halyard, the line holding up the pirate's foresails, causing the Adventure to lose speed. This was a critical piece of luck for Maynard's men. Having gotten the Jane free, they now rowed madly toward the pirates in the hope of boarding them. Had the halyard not been hit, the Adventure could have escaped into the open sea. Instead, the two vessels closed to within fifty feet of each other.

  At this point, Blackbeard hailed Maynard."Damn you villains, who are you and from whence came you?" he said, according to the General History. "You can see by our colors we are no pirates," Maynard is said to have replied. Thatch, his beard tied in black ribbons, held up a glass of liquor and, according to Maynard, "drank damnation to me and my men, whom he styled Cowardly Puppies, saying he would neither give nor take Quarter." Maynard responded that that was fine with him. Blackbeard then signaled to his gunner, Phillip Morton, to unleash his other broadside. Morton had loaded the guns with grape and partridge shot that yielded a shotgunlike discharge that was extremely deadly at such close range. Other pirates threw improvised hand grenades they had made by stuffing gunpowder, musket balls, and bits of old iron into empty rum bottles. When the smoke lifted, the Jane's deck was covered with bodies. In just a few seconds, twenty-one of Maynard's crew had been killed or wounded. Only two men were still standing on the sloop's deck. The battle, Blackbeard concluded, was won. He ordered the Adventure to come alongside the Jane and for his men to prepare to board.

  Under cover of gunpowder smoke, however, Maynard had ordered a dozen or so uninjured men to hide in the Jane's hold and await his signal. Crouching at the ladder, he whispered instructions to his helmsman and his first mate, Mr. Baker, telling them to lie low and to signal to him when the pirates came over the side.

  When the Adventure banged against the Jane, Blackbeard was the first over the rail "with a rope in his hands to lash or make fast the two sloops." At Baker's signal, Maynard rushed up from the hold, sword in hand, a dozen crewmen behind him. In a scene that inspired many Hollywood movies, Blackbeard and Maynard faced off against each other—dashing naval lieutenant and fearsome pirate—swords drawn. Humphrey Johnson, the North Carolina mariner who carried the news of the battle to New England, described the fight this way. "Maynard making a thrust, the point of his sword went against Teach's cartridge box"—where he stored his ammunition—"and bended it to the hilt." Blackbeard then delivered a blow that shattered the guard of Maynard's sword, slicing the officer's fingers. Maynard jumped back, "threw away his sword and fired his pistol, which wounded Teach." By now, ten of Blackbeard's men had clambered aboard the Jane and were clashing with Maynard's men. In the chaos, the Jane's helmsman, Abraham Demelt, made his way to Maynard's side and managed to slash Blackbeard across the face. The pirates aboard the Jane were outnumbered by Maynard's men and rapidly fell to the bloodstained deck. More men trained their pistols on Blackbeard, who staggered o
n, swinging his sword at Maynard and Demelt, blood gushing from his face and body. More musket balls struck his tall frame as the sailors surrounded him, swords drawn, circling for the kill.

  According to Humphrey Johnson, the final blow came from a Scots highlander, who decapitated Blackbeard with a powerful swing of his sword, "laying it flat on his shoulder" attached by a bit of flesh. The author of the General History disagrees, saying Blackbeard expired suddenly "as he was cocking another pistol," finally succumbing to his wounds. In letters to friends and relatives, Maynard didn't say how Blackbeard died, but noted that he fell "with five shot in him, and 20 dismal cuts in several parts of his body." The melee had lasted less than six minutes, during which time all of the boarding pirates were slain without killing a single one of Maynard's men, though he reported several "were miserably cut and mangled."

  The Ranger came alongside to help finish off the pirates remaining aboard the Adventure, who were outmanned by nearly three to one. Many jumped in the water, where the naval sailors picked them off. (According to Captain Gordon's postaction report, one of the pirates made it to shore, succumbed to his injuries, and was "discovered some dayes after in the reefs by [way of] the fowls hovering over him.") One of the Ranger's sailors had been killed by friendly fire, bringing the navy's total casualties to eleven dead and over twenty wounded. The victors had one final scare outside the Adventure's powder room: They discovered a black pirate named Caesar, match in hand, struggling to get free of the merchant Samuel Odell and one of his crewmen, so he could follow Blackbeard's last command: In the event of defeat, blow them all to smithereens. Caesar was successfully restrained and became one of fourteen pirate prisoners—nine white and five black—that were taken into custody. Odell, his body bearing "no less than seventy wounds," was also taken prisoner, though he was later released.

  After the battle, Maynard's men searched the Adventure, hoping to find a horde of Spanish gold and silver. Instead they found some gold dust, a few items made of silver (including the goblet stolen from William Bell), and "other small things of plunder." They also found Tobias Knight's recent letter to Blackbeard, and a number of papers implicating Knight and Eden in Blackbeard's piracy. The tent on the shore concealed the remnants of the French ships' cargo: 140 bags of cocoa and ten casks of sugar. If Blackbeard had accumulated fantastic wealth, he had not kept it with him at Ocracoke.