The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (24 page)

One day in the fall of 1716, Hornigold's band captured a sloop of some twenty or thirty tons. Usually they brought their prizes back to Nassau to plunder the cargo, burn the vessel, and recruit as much of the crew as they could. But this sloop was swift, maneuverable, and capable of carrying a half-dozen cannon: an excellent pirate vessel. Hornigold called a council and suggested that they keep the sloop and place her in command of one of their most respected and reliable members: Edward Thatch. The company agreed. Thatch, the loyal lieutenant of the pirate republic's founder, finally had a pirate vessel of his own.

It was around this time that Thatch began calling himself Blackbeard. In his years of piracy, he had let his beard grow wild, making a fearsome appearance. "This beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant length," an early eighteenth-century historian wrote. "As to breadth, it came up to his eyes" and "like a frightful meteor, covered his whole face, and frightened America more than any Comet that has appeared in a long time." He twisted it into many little braids, each tied off with a small ribbon, some of which he tucked behind his ears. This unusual arrangement struck observers at the time as resembling the plaits that trailed down from the British infantryman's powdered Remellies wig; some late twentieth-century historians think it might be an indication that Blackbeard was himself a light-skinned mulatto, with kinky hair inherited from his African ancestors. (Thatch, the late historian Hugo Prosper Learning argued, was a slang term for bushy hair.) Either way, it was Thatch's "fierce and wild" eyes, not his beard, that commanded the respect of his men and struck fear into the hearts of his opponents.

By March 1717, Blackbeard had a company of seventy men aboard his six-gun sloop, making him the fourth most powerful pirate in Nassau after Hornigold, Jennings, and a sloop captain named Josiah Burgess. In a short time he would be the most powerful pirate in the Atlantic.

He continued to conduct joint operations with Hornigold throughout the winter and spring. His mentor was humbled by Bellamy's defection and the forced sale of the
Benjamin.
For a few months, his men were placated by small thefts: a trading sloop here, a few barrels of rum there; but Hornigold needed gold and silver to keep the allegiance of his men, the merchants who bought his goods, and the rough and tumble crowd in Nassau. There were plenty of up-and-coming pirates operating out of Nassau. Burgess, a recent arrival to the island, already had an eight-gun sloop and a company of eighty men. Then there was that prodigy of Jennings, the impulsive Charles Vane, who enjoyed terrorizing old settlers and the ale tents alike. If Hornigold was to maintain his position, he needed a big score. Blackbeard, ever loyal, agreed to sail with him. In early March, the two sloops weighed anchor and sailed south into the shipping lanes.

Some time after leaving Nassau, one of Hornigold's crewmen, a "free Mullato," became critically ill. The man needed medical attention, but there wasn't a single doctor or surgeon among the 180 pirates. As they worked their way down the Florida Straits, Hornigold and Blackbeard stopped vessels of all sorts, looking for a doctor. In mid-March they finally found their man aboard a Jamaican vessel making her way around the southern end of Florida. John Howell, a gentle soul with a talent for the healing arts, begged the men in Hornigold's boarding party to let him go. The pirates refused: A good surgeon was hard to come by, and too many of their company had suffered needlessly from toothaches, infections, and venereal disease. Before the pirates dragged him into their boat, Howell begged his captain, Benjamin Blake, "to do him justice by declaring to his friends [and] the world, the manner of his being forced." Howell was dejected when he climbed aboard the
Adventure,
but he treated the mulatto sailor without hesitation. Although the man had been very sick, Howell's treatment worked marvelously; within a few days, he was back on his feet. Hornigold was overjoyed and insisted on giving the unhappy surgeon some broken silver buttons as a reward. Howell, not wanting to implicate himself in his crimes, later passed the buttons on to another man. It was a move that would one day help to save his neck.

The pirates continued south, past Havana, around the eastern end of Cuba, and down the Mosquito Coast of Central America. At the end of the month they arrived off Portobello, in what is now Panama, where merchants of all nations came to trade slaves for Spanish gold and silver. On April 1, the pirates finally hit pay dirt: the
Bonnet
of Jamaica, a large armed sloop, was heading home from trading in Portobello. Outgunned by the pirates, Captain Hickinsbottern surrendered his command. In his cabin, the pirates found a chest filled with gold coins. The
Bonnet
would make a worthy upgrade: She was larger, faster, and in better condition than the
Adventure.
As Hickinsbottern had been smart enough to surrender without a fight, they would give him the
Adventure
in exchange for his vessel. While the pirates transferred their cannon and other possessions to their new flagship, Howell begged Hornigold to let him leave with the
Adventure,
but the crew refused to let him go. As one of them later put it, he was "too narrowly valuable, being the only good surgeon which Hornigold and company had dependence on."

The pirates' luck held on their return home. On April 7, south of Jamaica, Blackbeard and Hornigold captured another treasure-laden sloop, the
Revenge,
which they plundered and released. Between the two sloops, the pirates had captured a stunning 400,000 pesos (£100,000). That was more than Jennings had taken in his raid on the Spanish salvage camp of Palmar de Ayz. For the black and mulatto members of the crew, it could only have been sweeter that much of the money had belonged to the largest slave cartel in the British West Indies. For Hornigold and Blackbeard, there would no longer be any fears of a coup against them. From now on, their only serious challengers would come from outside the Bahamas.

***

Woodes Rogers was obsessed with pirates. Since returning from Madagascar in the summer of 1715 he had thought of little else. He was sure that with a careful combination of carrot and stick, a pirates' nest could be quelled, and a productive, law-abiding colony would rise in its place. Assuming that most pirates were like his own privateering crews, they might occasionally do something rash like disobey commands or seize the ship from the captain; but most of them could be brought back into the fold with an offer of pardon and a gesture of understanding. The pirates of Madagascar struck him as lonely, forlorn men desperate to return to the motherly embrace of civilization, bowing again to the dictates of their country, Crown, and God. There would be some who would remain unrepentant, who would refuse a second chance. Such men would be dealt with harshly, to make an example for the rest.

Rogers lived in London, supporting himself from the proceeds of his book and the slave-trading journey to the East Indies. He had been appalled by the Jacobite uprising against King George in 1715 and had established friendships with some of the controversial king's leading supporters. These included Richard Steele and Joseph Addison,
^*
childhood friends who had founded the influential Kit-Kat Club,
^†
a circle of prominent members of the conservative Whig Party, which supported aristocratic interests. Steele, an Irish-born writer and journalist, had just been knighted by King George, while Addison was serving as the king's secretary of state for the Southern Department, which included the West Indies. Both men had considerable influence among the empire's leading decision makers, and access to the best information and intelligence. They would play a key role in furthering Rogers's anti-piracy schemes.

Another of Rogers's acquaintances was Dr. Hans Sloane, physician to the king, who was credited with keeping Queen Anne alive long enough for the Whigs to organize the Hanoverian succession. Sloane was also an obsessive naturalist who collected specimens of plants, animals, and geological formations from around the world, which filled "every closet and chimney" of his sprawling Chelsea home, creating the greatest repository of natural history information in Britain.
^‡
In the spring of 1716 Rogers sent Sloane a letter, explaining that he was "ambitious to promote a settlement on Madagascar" and begging that Sloane send him "what accounts you have of that island."

Rogers also contacted the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, an Anglican missionary organization famous for its extensive production of religious pamphlets, books, and flyers. Hoping to reform the moral behavior of the pirates, Rogers asked for and received a shipment of Society books for distribution among "the English inhabitants of Madagascar." One wonders what the veterans of Henry Avery's 1696 campaign would have made of the Christian pamphlets, but in the end they were never distributed. In the latter part of 1716, Addison and Steele informed Rogers that his Madagascar plan had little hope of winning official support. Apparently the East India Company, which held a monopoly on British trade in the Indian Ocean, felt that a thriving royal colony would be a greater threat to their commercial interests than a few hardscrabble pirates hiding in their jungle huts. But Addison had good news as well: There was another pirate's nest in need of Rogers's services, one thousands of miles removed from the East India Company's jurisdiction.

Addison and other government officials were being bombarded by alarming reports about the pirates of the West Indies, who appeared to be gaining strength at a remarkable rate. The Bahamas, Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood warned in the summer of 1716, had become "a nest of pirates" and would "prove dangerous to British commerce if not timely suppressed." That December, the governor of Jamaica reported that the pirates "take more than half the ships and vessels" bound for Jamaica or Hispaniola, crippling his colony's trade. By midwinter, even the captains of His Majesty's warships feared for their safety. The captain of the six-gun sloop-of-war
Swift
^*
was afraid to venture out of Port Royal, and Leeward Islands governor Walter Hamilton was forced to cancel an official tour of the Virgin Islands on the sixth-rate frigate HMS
Seaford
for fear they would be captured by "the pirate ship and sloop commanded by Bellamy." In the spring, London's top diplomats informed Addison that the pirates had "grown so numerous that they infest not only the seas near Jamaica, but even those of the northern Continent." "Unless some effectual and immediate protection is sent," they warned, "the whole trade from Great Britain to those parts will not only be obstructed, but in imminent danger of being lost." With the empire's transatlantic trade at stake, something needed to be done about the pirates, and Addison knew just the man to do it.

Rogers took to the idea immediately. His plans for Madagascar were easily applicable to the Bahamas, he told Addison, and with proper support were sure to rid the Americas of piracy. Rogers envisioned a public-private partnership by which the government would outsource the management of the Bahamas to a corporation of private investors. The corporation would supply the necessary soldiers, colonists, and supplies, plus several private warships and a governor, in the person of Rogers himself. The Crown would contribute a squadron of frigates to support the initial landing and issue a pardon for those pirates who agreed to peacefully surrender to the new governor. The pirates expunged, Rogers and his fellow investors would recoup their investment from the colony's profits. All that was needed was the approval of the Crown and the acquiescence of the lords proprietor, the circle of aristocrats who still held title to the colony.

Rogers spent much of 1717 building political support for the venture. He called in every favor he could think of, exploiting his business network in Bristol, his personal relationships in London, and his late father-in-law's contacts within the Admiralty. He formed an alliance with the wealthy merchant Samuel Buck, the longtime agent of the lords proprietor for the Bahamas, who had personally lost over £2,700 to the pirates. Together they formed a corporation with the verbose name The Copartners for Carrying on a Trade & Settling the Bahama Islands, recruiting five other investors from across England. The two men got 163 leading merchants in London and Bristol to sign petitions to the king in support of the venture. "Woodes Rogers," petitioners informed the government, "is a person of integrity and capacity, well affected to his Majesty's government
^*
... a person in every way qualified for such an undertaking."

Rogers and Buck managed to induce the lords proprietor to relinquish to the Crown their right to govern the Bahamas by pointing out that the pirates represented a grave threat to their far more valuable Carolina holdings. The proprietors may also have been swayed by the involvement of a well-known slave trader like Rogers, who would be likely to shape the wayward colony into a proper plantation society, making it harder for the slaves of South Carolina to make their escape. The proprietors would maintain their property and commercial rights in the Bahamas, but agreed to lease them to Rogers and his partners for twenty-one years for a token fee. Meanwhile, Joseph Addison shepherded the Copartners' proposal through the halls of power and onto King George's desk.

On September 3, 1717, Addison had the king's answer: Woodes Rogers would be appointed governor and garrison commander of the Bahamas. There was one small catch: If Rogers wanted the job, he would have to do it pro bono. There would be no salary. He had already committed £3,000—most of his estate—to the Copartners' corporation, but such was his enthusiasm for the project that he agreed to take it on without pay. It was a decision that would eventually bankrupt him, once again.