The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (2 page)

Pirates have existed for a long time. There were pirates in Ancient Greece and during the Roman Empire, in medieval Europe, and during the Qing Dynasty in China. Even today, pirates plague the world's sea lanes, seizing freighters, container ships, even passenger liners, looting their contents, and, not infrequently, killing their crews. They are distinct from privateers, individuals who in wartime plunder enemy shipping under license from their government. Some mistake Sir Francis Drake and Sir Henry Morgan for pirates, but they were, in fact, privateers, and undertook their depredations with the full support of their sovereigns, Queen Elizabeth and King Charles II. Far from being considered outlaws, both were knighted for their services, and Morgan was appointed lieutenant governor of Jamaica. William Dampier was a privateer, as were most of the English buccaneers of the late 1600s.
^*
Even the infamous Captain William Kidd was a well-born privateer who became a pirate accidentally, by running afoul of the directors of the East India Company, England's largest corporation.

The Golden Age Pirates were distinct from both the buccaneers of Morgan's generation and the pirates who preceded them. In contrast with the buccaneers, they were notorious outlaws, regarded as thieves and criminals by every nation, including their own. Unlike their pirate predecessors, they were engaged in more than simple crime and undertook nothing less than a social and political revolt. They were sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves rebelling against their oppressors: captains, ship owners, and the autocrats of the great slave plantations of America and the West Indies.

Dissatisfaction was so great aboard merchant vessels that typically when the pirates captured one, a portion of its crew enthusiastically joined their ranks. Even the Royal Navy was vulnerable; when HMS
Phoenix
confronted the pirates at their Bahamian lair in 1718, a number of the frigate's sailors defected, sneaking off in the night to serve under the black flag. Indeed, the pirates' expansion was fueled in large part by the defections of sailors, in direct proportion to the brutal treatment in both the navy and merchant marine.

Not all pirates were disgruntled sailors. Runaway slaves migrated to the pirate republic in significant numbers, as word spread of the pirates attacking slave ships and initiating many aboard to participate as equal members of their crews. At the height of the Golden Age, it was not unusual for escaped slaves to account for a quarter or more of a pirate vessel's crew, and several mulattos rose to become full-fledged pirate captains. This zone of freedom threatened the slave plantation colonies surrounding the Bahamas. In 1718, the acting governor of Bermuda reported that the "negro men [have] grown so impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their rising [against us and] ... fear their joining with the pirates."

Some pirates had political motivations as well. The Golden Age erupted shortly after the death of Queen Anne, whose half-brother and would-be successor, James Stuart, was denied the throne because he was Catholic. The new king of England and Scotland, Protestant George I, was a distant cousin of the deceased queen, a German prince who didn't care much for England and couldn't speak its language. Many Britons, including a number of future pirates, found this unacceptable and remained loyal to James and the House of Stuart. Several of the early Golden Age pirates were set up by the governor of Jamaica, Archibald Hamilton, a Stuart sympathizer who apparently intended to use them as a rebel navy to support a subsequent uprising against King George. As Kenneth J. Kinkor of the Expedition Whydah Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, puts it, "these were more than just a few thugs knocking over liquor stores."

The pirate gangs of the Bahamas were enormously successful. At their zenith they succeeded in severing Britain, France, and Spain from their New World empires, cutting off trade routes, stifling the supply of slaves to the sugar plantations of America and the West Indies, and disrupting the flow of information between the continents. The Royal Navy went from being unable to catch the pirates to being afraid to encounter them at all. Although the twenty-two-gun frigate HMS
Seaford
was assigned to protect the Leeward Islands, her captain reported he was "in danger of being overpowered" if he were to cruise against the pirates. By 1717, the pirates had become so powerful they were able to threaten not only ships, but entire colonies. They occupied British outposts in the Leeward Islands, threatened to invade Bermuda, and repeatedly blockaded South Carolina. In the process, some accumulated staggering fortunes, with which they bought the loyalty of merchants, plantation owners, even the colonial governors themselves.

The authorities made the pirates out to be cruel and dangerous monsters, rapists and murderers who killed men on a whim and tortured children for pleasure, and indeed some were. Many of these tales were intentionally exaggerated, however, to sway a skeptical public. To the consternation of the ship and plantation owners of the Americas, many ordinary colonists regarded the pirates as folk heroes. Cotton Mather, Massachusetts' leading Puritan minister, fumed about the level of support for the pirates among the "sinful" commoners of Boston. In 1718, as South Carolina authorities prepared to bring a pirate gang to trial, their sympathizers broke the pirates' leader out of prison and nearly took control of the capital, Charleston. "People are easily led to favor these Pests of Mankind when they have hopes of sharing in their ill-gotten wealth," Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood complained in the same year, adding that there were "many favorers of the pirates" in his colony.

***

I first thought of writing about these particular pirates while sitting under a palm tree with my future wife on an island off the coast of Belize, a Central American nation founded by English pirates and buccaneers, whose late-seventeenth-century words and phrases are still part of everyday speech. Three hundred years ago, this, like my native Maine, was a no-man's-land, a wilderness coastline studded with islands, its scant indigenous population still ungoverned by Europeans. I imagined a bowsprit coming into view around the end of the island, then the patched sails and tar-seamed hull of a small ship, her sides pierced with gun ports, and a death's-head flag flying from her mainmast. The vessel appeared real enough, all the way down to the scent of canvas and the abrasive nap of her thick hemp ropes. The crew was less clear, a jumble of pop culture references—bandanas and earrings, an eye patch for this one, a peg leg for that, a parrot on the captain's shoulder, knives and rum bottles all around—decorating men with mildly sinister smiles, barking out clichés frequently punctuated by the signature "Arrrr!" Realizing that for all of their popularity, through movies and merchandising, I still had no real sense of who the pirates really were. Where did they come from, what drove them to do what they did, how did they dispose of their plunder, and had any of them gotten away with it?

Good answers were not readily available. Most pirate books, movies, and television shows continue to trade on the pirate myths, failing to distinguish between documented and demonstrably fabricated events, most of which are traceable to
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates,
a 1724 book whose author
^*
wrote under the alias Captain Charles Johnson. Those that do, tend to focus not on the true pirates, but on the buccaneers and privateers of an earlier era—more respectable men, most of whose activities were legally sanctioned. The lives of these individuals—Henry Morgan, William Kidd, or William Dampier—are documented by far more voluminous paper trails. A few excellent overviews remain, but they focus on piracy as an institution, not on the lives of specific pirates. The biographical approach, I would find in writing this book, poses an entirely different suite of questions, revealing connections, motivations, and events that would otherwise be missed.

What follows is based on material found in the archives of Britain and the Americas. No dialogue has been made up, and descriptions of everything from cities and events to clothing, vessels, and the weather are based on primary documents. Previously lost aspects of the pirates' history were recovered by integrating legal testimony and trial documents; the letters of English and Spanish governors, colonial officials, and naval captains; accounts in period pamphlets, newspapers, and books, scrawling in customs house ledgers, parish registers, and the logbooks of His Majesty's warships.

When quoting from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources, modern punctuation and, occasionally, spelling, have been applied to ensure they are comprehensible to twenty-first-century readers. All dates in the text correspond to the Julian calendar that was then in use in the English-speaking world; this has required subtracting ten or eleven days
^†
from the dates in French and Spanish sources, wherein today's Gregorian calendar was already in use. The original sources will be found in the notes in the back of this book.

My research led me to many of the settings included herein: London, Bristol, Boston, Charleston, and the Bahamas. I visited pirate haunts in eastern North Carolina, where divers from the state's Department of Cultural Resources are exploring what is believed to be the wreck of Blackbeard's flagship. Artifacts from another Golden Age pirate ship, the
Whydah,
are still being discovered off the beaches of Cape Cod. I have benefited greatly from conversations and correspondence with archeologists and historians in these and other places, who continue to sift through evidence for more clues to the pirates' past.

***

This book tells the story of the Golden Age of Piracy through the lives of four of its leading figures. Three were pirates: Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy, Edward "Blackbeard" Thatch, and Charles Vane, all of whom knew one another. Bellamy and Blackbeard were friends, having served together under their mentor, Benjamin Hornigold, who founded the pirate republic at Nassau on New Providence Island. Both were also well acquainted with Vane, the protégé of Hornigold's rival, Henry Jennings, a blustery privateersman declared an outlaw by King George. Vane shared many of his master's characteristics: a penchant for unnecessary cruelty and violence, and a sadistic streak that eventually undermined his own authority. Bellamy and Blackbeard, following Hornigold's lead, were more circumspect in their use of force, generally using terror only to compel their victims to surrender, thereby avoiding the need for violence. In the voluminous descriptions of Bellamy's and Blackbeard's attacks on shipping—nearly 300 vessels in all—there is not one recorded instance of them killing a captive. More often than not, their victims would later report having been treated fairly by these pirates, who typically returned ships and cargo that did not serve their purposes.

In the process, these pirates built powerful followings, sailing or recreating with virtually all of the leading pirates of the era: the flamboyantly dressed John "Calico Jack" Rackham, the eccentric Stede Bonnet, the infamous Olivier La Buse, the wig-wearing Paulsgrave Williams, and the female pirate Anne Bonny. At the height of their careers, each commanded a small fleet of pirate vessels, a company consisting of hundreds of men, and, in Bellamy's and Blackbeard's cases, a flagship capable of challenging any man-of-war in the Americas. So successful were their campaigns that soon governors, slave merchants, plantation owners, and shipping magnates—the entire power structure of British America—was clamoring for something to be done.

This brings us to our fourth and final subject, Woodes Rogers, the man the Crown sent to confront the pirates and pacify the Bahamas. More than anyone else, Rogers put an end to the Golden Age of Piracy. He was not a pirate, of course, but had served as a privateer during England's most recent war with France and Spain and knew how the pirates thought and operated. A war hero and celebrated author, Rogers had led a successful assault on a Spanish city, been disfigured during a pitched battle with a massive treasure galleon in the Pacific, and was one of only a handful of men who had circumnavigated the world. Despite his swashbuckling past, Rogers held no sympathy for pirates. He represented everything the pirates were rebelling against. Unlike many of his peers, Rogers was courageous, selfless, and surprisingly patriotic, selflessly devoted to king and country. While many other governors, naval officers, and government ministers routinely lined their pockets at the Crown's expense, Rogers emptied his pockets in support of projects he believed would further the public good and the established order of the young British Empire. Despite his heroic service, Rogers would suffer at the hands of his superiors and colleagues.

Bellamy, Blackbeard, and Vane didn't start their pirate society from scratch. They had a role model in Henry Avery,
^*
a "pirate king" who was said to have led his fellow crewmen from oppression between the decks to a life of unimaginable luxury in a pirate kingdom of their own. Avery's feats were accomplished while Bellamy, Blackbeard, and Vane were still children, and had become legendary by the time they were young men. His adventures inspired plays and novels, historians and newspaper writers, and, ultimately, the Golden Age pirates themselves. The romantic myth of piracy didn't follow the Golden Age, it helped create it. The pirates' tale, therefore, starts with Henry Avery, and the arrival of a mysterious ship in Nassau three centuries ago.

1696

T
H
E
S
L
O
O
P
A
R
R
I
V
E
D
in the afternoon of April Fool's Day 1696, swinging around the low, sandy expanse of Hog Island and into Nassau's wide, dazzlingly blue harbor.