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

by Colin Woodard

  Assisted by the fallout from his invasion of North Carolina, Alexander Spotswood's political enemies succeeded in having him replaced as governor of Virginia. In September 1722, Spotswood retired to his 45,000-acre estate, where he dabbled in iron mining and production. In the 1730s he served as deputy postmaster-general of the American colonies, established postal service between Williamsburg and Philadelphia, and selected Benjamin Franklin to be Pennsylvania's postmaster. In 1740, he was appointed major general and asked to lead a detachment of troops to fight in Spain during the War of the Austrian Succession. On June 7, 1740, while overseeing their departure, he died of fever in Annapolis, Maryland.

  Ironically, Lord Archibald Hamilton, the discredited governor of Jamaica, fared better than the rest. He had left Jamaica under arrest, but despite his Jacobite scheming and encouragement of piracy, he was found innocent of all wrongdoing by British courts. In 1721, the Council of Trade and Plantations even ordered the government of Jamaica to pay Hamilton his share of the plunder seized by his privateers in 1716. He married an earl's daughter, retained estates and castles in Ireland and Scotland, and died at his comfortable home on London's Pall Mall in 1754, at the ripe old age of eighty-four, after which he was buried at Westminster Abby. He had long before given up interest in a Stuart restoration, and appears to have done nothing to assist in the final Jacobite uprising in 1745, led by James Stuart's son, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

  James Stuart and his son are interred in the crypt of St. Peter's basilica in the Vatican. The descendents of King George occupy the British throne to this day.

  ***

  As for Woodes Rogers, he spent the twilight years of the Golden Age of Piracy in London, sickly, indebted, and deeply depressed. "For some time," Rogers later wrote, I was "very much perplexed with the melancholy prospect of [my] affairs." His fellow investors had dissolved their partnership, and neither they nor the government would honor the £6,000 in debts Rogers had incurred on its behalf. In the end, it was his creditors who took pity on him, absolving his debts and getting him out of debtors prison.

  In 1722 or 1723, he was approached by a man who was researching a book about the pirates. The author needed Rogers's help to fill in details of the pirate republic that Rogers had put down and, perhaps, share copies of his official letters and reports as governor. Rogers apparently agreed, as the author included information only Rogers could have provided. The result, in May 1724, was the publication of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, which, like so many books of that era, was written under an alias, in this case, "Captain Charles Johnson." English readers were captivated by the activities of the pirates, even as they were taking place. It was an enormous hit on both sides of the Atlantic, going through numerous editions. Articles and advertisements promoting it appeared in London's Weekly Journal, as well as the Philadelphia's American Weekly Mercury. The book, still in print, almost single-handedly created the popular images of the pirates that remain with us today.

  Generations of historians and librarians have erroneously identified Captain Charles Johnson as Daniel Defoe, a contemporary of Rogers and the author of Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton. Recently, Arne Bialuschewski of the University of Kiel in Germany has identified a far more likely candidate: Nathaniel Mist, a former sailor, journalist, and publisher of the Weekly Journal. The book's first publisher of record, Charles Rivington, had printed many books for Mist, who lived just a few yards from his office. More importantly, the General History was registered at His Majesty's Stationary Office in Mist's name. As a former seaman who had sailed the West Indies, Mist, of all London's writer-publishers, was uniquely qualified to have penned the book, being well aquainted with the maritime world and the settings the pirates had operated in. Mist was also a committed Jacobite and would eventually go into exile in France, serving as a messenger between London and the Stuart court in Rome, which would explain the General History's not entirely unsympathetic account of the maritime outlaws. In 1722–1723 Mist also had the motivation to try to write a bestseller: The Weekly Journal's profits had been languishing for years due to increased competition from rival newspapers.

  ***

  The publication of A General History—which highlighted Rogers's role in dispersing the Bahamian pirates—revived the deposed governor's reputation as a national hero. Readers, including many members of Britain's elite, couldn't help but wonder what had happened to Rogers and were undoubtedly embarrassed to discover how poorly he had been repaid for his patriotic service. It is probably not a coincidence that Rogers's fortunes began to recover not long thereafter. In early 1726 he successfully petitioned the king for redress. Authorities were sympathetic when they read Rogers's plea, which was written in the third person: "He has lost ... eight years of the prime of his life, by his honest ambition and zeal in serving his country, and is left destitute of money for this surface or any new employ[ment], though no complaint has yet been made of any mal-administration or want of doing his duty." In the end, the king not only awarded Rogers with a pension equivalent to half the salary of an infantry captain, retroactive to June 1721, he also appointed him, in 1728, to a second term as the governor of the Bahamas.

  Before leaving for New Providence, Rogers sat for what may have been his only portrait. The painter, William Hogarth, placed Rogers in a romanticized version of Nassau. Rogers, in white wig and an elegant full-length jacket, is seated in a comfortable armchair, his face turned in profile, concealing the disfigurement left by a Spanish musket ball. At his back is the bastion of Fort Nassau, on which an ornamental plaque can be seen which bears his personal motto: DUM SPIRO SPERO, "While I breathe, I hope." Rogers, then fifty, has a globe to his left (symbolizing his circumnavigation) and a pair of dividers in his right hand, with which he is about to take the measurements of the "Island of Providence" from a map held in his son's hand. William Whetstone Rogers, who would accompany his father to Nassau, is standing wearing the wig and elegant clothing of a gentleman. Daughter Sarah Rogers sits to the left, awaiting a servant with a plate of fruit. In the harbor behind them, a large warship lets off a multigun salute.

  When Rogers and his son arrived in Nassau on August 25, 1729, Nassau wasn't quite as pleasant as Hogarth had imagined. The island had just been stricken by a hurricane, and many of its residents lay in their battered homes, weakened by contagious fever. The economy and fortifications remained a shambles, and the outgoing governor's wife had upset many of Nassau's inhabitants by trying to use her position to intimidate justices, monopolize shopkeeping, and hire away other people's servants before their terms of indenture had expired. There had been a few improvements in the eight years that Rogers had been away: a new church in the town center, a stone gatehouse at the entrance to the fort, and Government House, a two-story Georgian residence where Rogers would spend the final years of his life.

  His final term was easier than the first, but less than relaxing. He wound up locked in a bitter dispute with the representatives to the colony's new governing assembly over the imposition of local taxes. Rogers wished to raise money to repair the fort; the assemblymen did not. Frustrated with their intransigence, Rogers took the extreme step of dissolving the assembly, upsetting local planters. By early 1731, the fight had worn Rogers out. He became ill and, as before, went to Charleston to recover his health. In the meantime, his son, the governing council's clerk, did his best to build the family a proper slave plantation, making several trips to West Africa to purchase the requisite labor force. (He would die from fever in the port of Whydah during such a trip in 1735, while he was serving as one of the Royal Africa Company's three chief merchants.)

  Governor Rogers returned to New Providence in May of 1731, but he was never able to truly recover his health. He passed away on July 15, 1732, and was buried in Nassau. His grave has since been lost, but his name adorns the main street on the city's waterfront, and he is honored in the official motto of the Bahamas: EXPULSIS PIRATIS, COMERCIA RESTITUA, "Pirate
s Expelled, Commerce Restored."

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES is a history and, as such, has benefited from the work of generations of historians, archivists, genealogists, scribes, and scribblers. Our understanding of the Golden Age of Piracy would be impoverished had John Campbell not founded the Boston News-Letter in 1704 and decided to regularly cover the pirates' activities in the years following the War of Spanish Succession. Some of these dispatches made their way to London, where they joined the accounts of governors and other colonial officials in the files of the Council of Trade and Plantations and of the secretary of state for America and the West Indies. The captains of Royal Navy warships also collected intelligence on the pirates, and their letters and logbooks were eventually delivered to the Admiralty. When colonial authorities succeeded in capturing pirates, copies of the resulting trials were usually sent home to London. There, much of this mountain of information was made available to the anonymous author of A General History of the Pyrates, whose account still dominates discourse on the Bahamian pirates, nearly three centuries after its publication.

  The General History remains an impressive work of scholarship, skillfully integrating documentary records with material clearly gathered from interviews with Woodes Rogers and other principals. It is, however, riddled with errors, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, most of which were not detected until the twentieth century, when historians finally got around to reviewing the original records for themselves. British scholars Sir John William Fortescue (1859–1938) and Cecil Headlam (1872–1934) spent years assembling the relevant volumes of the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, which contain excerpts and summaries of many of the most important documents in the British archives; in effect, they created a treasure map that has helped countless researchers locate and recover parts of America's past, long buried in a million sheets of quill-and-ink handwriting. I am indebted to them and to the work of historians who followed their leads, including Robert E. Lee's Blackbeard the Pirate: A Reappraisal of His Life and Times (1974), Robert Ritchie's Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates (1986), and Bryan Little's Crusoe's Captain, published in 1960 and still the finest biography of Woodes Rogers.

  I have also benefited from the advice, generosity, and encouragement of several of the world's leading pirate scholars. Marcus Rediker of the University of Pittsburgh helped me locate many hard-to-find sources and shared of his firsthand experience in conducting research at the new National Archives complex near London's Kew Gardens; his Villains of All Nations and Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea built the foundations for the study of pirates from their own perspective, rather than from that of their adversaries. Kenneth J. Kinkor of the Expedition Whydah Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, knows more about Samuel Bellamy than the pirate's own parents did, and he kindly shared a great number of document transcriptions, saving me weeks of work and a good deal of gasoline. Joel Baer of Macalester College in St. Paul, the leading authority on Henry Avery, graciously entertained my queries and supplied me with missing pages from some of the hard-to-find pirate trials; researchers will welcome his forthcoming British Piracy in the Golden Age. My deepest thanks to all three of you: Immersing oneself in the past can be isolating, but you helped make it a congenial experience.

  The same can be said for others who helped me along the way. Gail Swanson of Sebring, Florida, took the time to copy and send a package of translations of documents, from the Archive of the West Indies in Seville, relating to the Spanish treasure fleet of 1715. Also in Florida, Mike Daniel took the time to help clarify French accounts of Blackbeard's capture of La Concorde. Rodney Broome of Seattle shared valuable suggestions on what and whom to see in his native Bristol. Shep and Tara Smith of Norfolk, Virginia, put a roof over my head while I went to and from my sojourns in the Carolinas, while Abel Bates and my in-laws, Larry and Andrea Sawyer, arranged the same for me on outer Cape Cod. Daniel Howden introduced me to his neighborhood in London's East End, a welcome respite from days spent reading fading ink on old parchment.

  I am especially grateful to the staff of the Portland Public Library, whose interlibrary loan office kept me supplied with hard-to-find volumes throughout this project, and to the people of Maine, whose tax dollars support Maine Info Net, our extraordinary statewide lending system; knowledge is power. Also in Maine, I am grateful to the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library at Bowdoin College for repeatedly loaning their bound volumes of the Calendar of State Papers and for access to microfilms of early English newspapers; to the Ladd Library at Bates College, for making available films of early American newspapers; and to the Maine Historical Society Research Library in Portland, the Maine State Library in Augusta, and the Fogler Library at the University of Maine in Orono. I also benefited from resources at the Dimond Library of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, and the Widener Library at Harvard University, where the few surviving copies of the Jamaica Courant reside on an all-too-short roll of film. In North Carolina, thanks to the staff of the Bath Museum and to David Moore and his colleagues at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort; I hope that wreck proves to be the Queen Anne's Revenge. In England, my thanks to the remarkably efficient staff of the National Archives in Kew, especially Geoff Baxter for having a great stack of captains' logs waiting for me on my first day—your document retrieval system is the standard by which all others should be measured. Thanks also to the staff of the Bristol Records Office for indulging my searches for Teaches, Thatches, and Rogers on a gray December afternoon.

  My friend and colleague Samuel Loewenberg in Berlin tirelessly reviewed various versions of the manuscript and provided valuable suggestions and feedback—thanks, Sam, I really needed that extra pair of eyes. Thanks also to Brent Askari of Portland for helping to smooth the edges of those rough early drafts. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own.

  This book would not be possible were it not for the advice and acumen of Jill Grinberg, the finest agent in New York City; the enthusiasm and support of Timothy Bent, my original editor at Harcourt, now at Oxford University Press; and Andrea Schulz, whose skill, care, and attentiveness ensured a smooth editorial transition. I'm also grateful for the work of David Hough at Harcourt, copy editor Margaret Jones, and Jojo Gragasin, of LoganFrancis Design, who created the maps and illustrations that appear within.

  Last and certainly not least, thanks to my parents for their love and support, and to my wife, Sarah Skillin Woodard, who read the manuscript countless times and helped shape it into the book you now hold in your hands; thank you, my dearest, for your patience, support, and suggestions throughout this process, and for saying "I do" along the way.

  New Year's Day, 2007

  Portland, Maine

  ENDNOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ADM1/1471–2649: Admiralty Records, Letters from Captains, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  ADM33/298: Navy Board Pay Office, Ship's Pay Books, National Archives, Kew, UK

  ADM33/311: Navy Board Pay Office, Ship's Pay Books, National Archives, Kew, UK

  ADM51/606: Admiralty Records, Captain's Logs, Milford, 16 Jan 1718 to 31 Dec 1719, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  ADM51/672: Admiralty Records, Captain's Logs, Pearl, 26 July 1715 to 8 Dec 1719, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  ADM51/690: Admiralty Records, Captain's Logs, Phoenix, 8 Oct 1715 to 6 Oct 1721, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  ADM51/801: Admiralty Records, Captain's Logs, Rose, 18 Jan 1718 to 9 May 1721, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  ADM51/865: Admiralty Records, Captain's Logs, Scarborough, 11 Oct 1715 to 5 Sept 1718, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  ADM51/877: Admiralty Records, Captain's Logs, Seaford, 19 Sept 1716 to 22 Sept 1720, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  ADM51/892: Admiralty Records, Captain's Logs, Shark, 18 Jan 1718 to 23 Aug 1722, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  ADM51/4250: Admiralty Records, Captain's Logs, Lyme, 23 Feb 1717 to 14 Aug 1719, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  C10
4/160: Chancery Records, Creagh v. Rogers, Accounts of the Duke & Dutchess, 1708–1711, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO5/508: Colonial Office Records: South Carolina Shipping Returns, 1717–1719, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO5/1265: Colonial Office Records: Documents relating to Woodes Rogers's appointment, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO5/1442: Colonial Office Records: Virginia Shipping Returns, 1715–1727, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO23/1: Colonial Office Records: Bahamas Correspondence, 1717–1725, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO23/12: Colonial Office Records: Bahamas, Misc. Records, 1696–1731, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO23/13: Colonial Office Records: Bahamas, Letters from Governors, 1718–1727, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO37/10: Colonial Office Records: Bermuda Correspondence, 1716–1723, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO137/12: Colonial Office Records: Jamaica Correspondence, 1716–1718, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO142/14: Colonial Office Records: Jamaica Shipping Returns, 1709–1722, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CO152/12: Colonial Office Records: Leeward Islands Correspondence, 1718–1719, National Archives, Kew, UK.

  CSPCS 1696–1697: John W Fortescue, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and the West Indies: 15 May 1696 to October 1697 (Vol. 10), London: His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1904.

  CSPCS 1697–1698: John W Fortescue, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and the West Indies, 27 October 1697 to 31 December 1698 (Vol. 11), London: His Majety's Stationary Office, 1905.

  CSPCS 1712–1714: Cecil Headlam, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and the West Indies, July 1712 to July 1714 (Vol. 27), London: His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1926.