The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (28 page)

At five in the morning, Davis finally arrived at the farm of Samuel Harding, two miles from the wreck site. In some form, Davis related his story to the Eastham native. Harding's ears must have pricked up when he heard of the shipwreck, for almost immediately he retrieved his horse. Davis, half-drowned, found himself stuck on its back and led to the beach by the farmer.

Harding circled the cliffs and, guided by Davis, proceeded to the wreck site. The two halves of the
Whydah
had separated by now, battered further and further apart by the storm, and bits and pieces of the ship, her cargo, and crew were spreading along the base of the cliff. They lashed anything of value to the horse and, fully loaded, proceeded back to Harding's farmhouse. Harding immediately turned around and repeated the trip, multiple times through the early morning hours.

By ten in the morning, Harding was joined by his brother Abiah, neighbors Edward Knowles and Jonathan Cole,
^*
and some seven other men, scooping up valuables as quickly as possible, knowing the authorities could arrive at any time. They may have picked through the increasing number of storm-battered corpses piling up on the beach, more than fifty by that afternoon, relieving the dead of silver buttons and buckles, jewlery, and coins. As it turned out, they had plenty of time. Eastham's justice of the peace, Joseph Doane, was tied up for the entire day, intercepting and arresting the
Mary Anne's
crew on the other side of town and escorting them to Barnstable. Doane didn't make it to the wreck site until the following morning, Sunday the twenty-eighth, at which point he found "all was gone of value." Doane later claimed he then "commanded the inhabitants" of the area to "save what they could for the King," while the local coroner—Jonathan Cole's father-in-law—oversaw the burial of sixty-two drowned men, collecting "several things belonging to the [Wreck]" in the process. The total value of the items set aside for the king came to only £200, suggesting that many thousands of pounds of valuables made their way into the hands of the good people of Eastham. It could hardly have been otherwise. Within a couple of days, two hundred people—most of the able-bodied inhabitants of the town—were out plundering the wreck, cutting up bits of sail and taking "riches out of the sand."

A strange occurrence was later reported to authorities sent in from Boston. On Monday the twenty-ninth, less than three days after the
Whydah
wrecked, a "very great sloop" arrived off the beach. The mysterious vessel approached the largest piece of the
Whydah,
then lowered a boat into the water. A number of its crewmen rowed over and examined the weather-battered remains. She chased off several local fishing vessels before sailing off into the open sea. Colonial authorities assumed it to have been the
Whydah's
consort, an error they passed on to history.

***

On April 29, Paulsgrave Williams was 140 miles to the southeast, cruising for prizes near the entrance to Long Island Sound, still unaware of the
Whydah
's destruction.

The day before, his company had plundered a sloop from Connecticut, taking three bushels of salt and two of their sailors. One of the sailors, Edward Sargeant, knew the immediate area well and was forced to act as their pilot as they lurked in the waters between Montauk and Martha's Vineyard. Unfortunately, no captures came their way that day and for several days after that, causing much dissatisfaction among the crew.

On May 3, near the desolate island called No Man's Land, south of Martha's Vineyard, they took two trading sloops inbound from North Carolina. From the
Hannah and Mary
they seized items to help in the overhaul of the
Marianne
and a Devonshire man living in Boston who could guide them safely around Cape Cod and on to Maine. The second sloop, a smaller vessel from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had nothing of value. Such paltry pickings could not have mollified the crew; grumbling undoubtedly continued as the
Marianne
failed to catch any worthwhile prizes. Another week passed, then two, all without plunder. At this point they cruised directly for Maine, where they hoped to find Bellamy and the
Whydah:
A
trusted commander and an unstoppable ship would set things right.

Guided by her captive pilot, the
Marianne
stayed well offshore of Cape Cod on a course set straight for Cape Elizabeth, a prominent headland in southern Maine that could be seen for miles out at sea. They had no way of knowing that at that very moment the
Whydah
lay scattered in the surf just over the western horizon.

At noon on May 17,1717, some seventy-five miles offshore, they intercepted a fishing sloop, the
Elizabeth,
bound from Salem, Massachusetts, to the great cod fishing grounds of Georges Bank. There was no gold on this paltry prize, of course, just sixteen huge barrels filled with salt, bait, and food. The sloop was tiny, but Williams thought it to be about the right size to help careen the
Marianne
when they finally found their way to Damariscove. The pirates forced the
Elizabeth
's skipper to come aboard, putting some of their own number on the fishing sloop, and continued on to Maine.

After daybreak on Sunday the eighteenth, Williams's men spotted the bold outline of Cape Elizabeth. Their pilot not knowing the way to Damariscove, the pirates decided to sail the
Marianne
straight to the nearest harbor, to kidnap a local mariner. In a few hours they came to anchor between Cape Elizabeth and Richmond Island, where the docks and associated detritus of a seventy-year-old fishing station stared blankly out at them. The station's fishermen were long gone, but there was a farmhouse on the mainland shore, a small sloop anchored in the harbor, and an open boat or two pulled up on the seaweed-strewn beach. Certainly, Williams reasoned, a pilot could be found here.

Up at the farmhouse, Dominicus Jordan could smell trouble. He had been born on the shores of the little anchorage, but had seen more warfare and violence than most pirates. At the start of the War of Spanish Succession, a band of Indians had occupied his parents' fortified home; Dominicus's father, a giant of a man with a fearsome reputation, put a hatchet through an Indian's head. The other Indians killed the father and carried nineteen-year-old Dominicus, his mother, and five younger siblings into captivity in the Canadian wilderness. The family spent the next thirteen years with the Indians, learning their language and many of their ways, before being released in 1715. Dominicus took one look at the heavily manned sloop-of-war and knew enough to get away. He grabbed his wife and three-year-old son, and with the servants, fled into the woods.

Williams's men spent the day and night at Cape Elizabeth, rifling through the Jordans' possessions. At one point, the pirates detained a hapless fishing boat that had entered the anchorage. One of the fishermen admitted knowing the way to Damariscove and Monhegan and was pressed into service as a pilot. His young assistant was set free ashore and ran through the woods to alert the nearest town, Falmouth, of the pirates' presence.

That afternoon they sailed thirty miles eastward to Damariscove Island, off what is now Boothbay Harbor. A long rocky island with a snug cove nestled in its southern end, Damariscove had been a rendezvous for fishermen for more than a century. Following the devastation of the Indian wars, the island was unoccupied, apart perhaps from occasional visits by fishermen needing a place to sleep after a long day spent pulling four- and five-foot-long codfish up from the cold waters of the Gulf of Maine. Anchored securely in the cove, the tops of the
Marianne
's masts were nearly hidden from view by the brambly ridges that rose from each side. It was, indeed, a safe place to hide out, rest, and repair the sloop. Of the
Whydah,
however, there was not a sign that she had ever graced the island with her presence.

Williams stayed at Damariscove for five days, vainly hoping that Bellamy would suddenly appear, ship and treasure intact. He did his best to get the
Marianne
into shape, unloading her cargo, taking out her broken mast, and careening the underside of her hull. Those not at work gathered at the gravely beach at the head of the cove, grimly taking stock of their paltry treasure hoard: ten cannon; some bails of wool and linen cloth; a bit of scavenged iron; some barrels of food, salt, and water. As the days passed and it became clearer that the
Whydah
was not coming, the image of the great heap of gold and jewels piled in her hold must have haunted the weary men.

Though they were but fifteen miles from Monhegan, Williams's company apparently never encountered their fellow pirates on the
Ann
Galley
and the
Fisher.
Like the crew of the
Marianne,
Noland and company had tarried on the outer islands of Midcoast Maine for a time, repairing their vessels and plundering the little fishing vessels that came across their path. These pirates, intimately aware of the dangers the storm had presented to the
Whydah,
had probably already given up hope and headed south for the safety of the Bahamas.

On May 23, Williams, too, was forced to accept that his friend had missed their rendezvous. With a sense of foreboding, the crew voted to start the long, dangerous trip back to Nassau. They sailed south to Cape Elizabeth, where they released the
Elizabeth
and the other fishing vessels, then set course for Cape Cod.

In the late morning of the twenty-fifth, within sight of the tip of Cape Cod, Williams's men finally learned of the
Whydah's
fate. The bearer of the ill news was Samuel Skinner, master of the schooner
Swallow
of Salem, Massachusetts, whom the pirates detained just inside Massachusetts Bay. The destruction of the
Whydah
was by now on everybody's lips, from Portsmouth to Newport and beyond, Skinner could have told them, and carried in the pages of the
Boston News-Letter.
The
Whydah,
the treasure, and Williams's friend and accomplice were all gone, destroyed by the sea itself. Williams, presumably reeling from the news, released the
Swallow
and sailed out of the bay.

***

In Boston, the greatest city on the British American mainland, the destruction of the
Whydah
had brought little solace. Every few days another ship arrived in New England's ports bearing tales of pirate attacks: fishing boats in Maine and the open gulf; trading sloops off Connecticut, Rhode Island, Martha's Vineyard, and the Cape. For the first time since the outbreak of piracy, nowhere in New England waters seemed safe from men of the black flag.

Massachusetts Governor Samuel Shute put the colony on a wartime footing. Unable to trust the safety of the sea-lanes, he ordered the nine surviving pirates transported overland from Barnstable to Boston "under a strong guard and sufficiently bound from ... county to county and sheriff to sheriff." For the first few days after the wreck, Boston remained without naval protection. Even after May 2, when the fifth-rate frigate HMS
Rose
finally arrived from the West Indies, Shute remained concerned about the safety of commerce. On the ninth, he dispatched the frigate to Cape Cod, where she spent nearly three weeks patrolling for pirates, including a day spent off the wreck site itself. News of the
Marianne's
landings at Cape Elizabeth reached the governor on May 21, and unnerved him sufficiently to order a weeklong closure of Boston Harbor. He armed a sloop, the
Mary Free Love,
and sent her out as a privateer to hunt down Williams and Noland. He even allowed the captain of the
Rose
to press twenty of Boston's men, to be sure he wasn't overwhelmed by pirates while patrolling the coast. All of New England stood on a knife's edge.

Nobody was in a greater state of fear than the captive pirates themselves. They had arrived in Boston on May 4, were marched up the hill past the Town House, and then dumped in the cages of Boston's decrepit prison. In addition to the seven men from the
Mary Anne,
the prisoners included Thomas Davis and John Julian, who had been apprehended by Justice Doane before they had gotten far from the beach. Soon afterward, Julian was separated from the rest, destined, by dint of his dark skin, for the slave market.
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The other eight prisoners may have wished for the first time that they weren't white, because unless some of their colleagues came into Boston to free them, they all knew they were likely to die on the gallows. Maybe they hoped, as they lay in their cages, that their brethren back in the Bahamas had heard of their fate and were coming to the rescue.

May–December 1717

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returned to the Bahamas from the Spanish Main in possession of the
Bonnet,
a fine sloop-of-war, and £100,000 in plunder, their reputations soared. Hornigold was now an undisputed leader of the pirate republic, taking his place alongside his rival, Henry Jennings. Blackbeard, who was thirty-seven at this time, was regarded as one of the finest captains in the archipelago, brave and effective. Unlike Bellamy, Blackbeard had no intention of pushing his commodore aside, especially given that Hornigold had become less reluctant to take English vessels.