The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (42 page)

While awaiting Hornigold's return, Rogers tried to put Nassau's defenses in order. Nassau's governing council agreed to impose martial law, setting up "a very strick't watch" and ordering the island's subjects and their slaves to help repair the fortress. Practically every night, however, pirates stole boats and fled the island, hoping to join Vane. Rogers estimated that 150 had abandoned him between the end of July and late October. As the days turned to weeks, Rogers began to fear that Hornigold "was either taken by Vaine or [had] begun his old practice of pirating again." Most islanders concurred. But three weeks after his departure, Hornigold's sloop sailed back into the harbor with a prize and a handful of pirate captives.

Hornigold told everyone how he and Cockram had spent most of the time hiding out near Green Turtle Cay, observing Vane and waiting for an opportunity to ambush him when away from his main force. Unfortunately, that chance never presented itself, and Hornigold and Cockram judged Vane's company too powerful to take on directly. In addition to his pirate brigantine, Vane had the
Neptune
and
Emperor
with him, the two ships he had captured at the Charleston bar, and his party spent most of their time plundering these ships and careening their vessels. After nearly three weeks had elapsed, the pirates said good-bye to the captive crews of the
Neptune
and
Emperor,
"wishing them a good voyage home," but as they sailed from the anchorage they spotted another sloop coming in. This, Hornigold was able to report, was the thirty-ton sloop
Wolf,
which had sailed out of Nassau a few days earlier with Rogers's permission to hunt sea turtles. In reality, the
Wolf
's captain, a pardoned pirate named Nicholas Woodall, was smuggling ammunition, supplies, and intelligence to Vane. Vane dropped anchor and consulted with Woodall, who gave him a detailed description of Rogers's activities and defenses. Vane, perhaps hoping his fellow pirates had risen up against the governor, was apparently disappointed. When one of the captives asked the pirates what news they had of Nassau, they replied, "none good," and told them not to ask too many questions. The pirates, "being very much disturbed with the news," voted to maroon the captives and destroy the
Neptune
by hacking down her masts and rigging and then firing a gun "double loaded with shot" straight into her hold. Vane's pirates left the harbor in the brigantine and the
Wolf,
at which point Hornigold sailed in to give the captives provisions and to let them know that help had arrived. That night, Hornigold sailed out in pursuit of the pirates and, a few days later, intercepted the
Wolf
and brought her with him to Nassau.

Hornigold's capture of the
Wolf
boosted Rogers's morale. "Captain Hornigold having proved honest," Rogers wrote his superiors in London, "disobliged his old friends ... divides the people here, and makes me stronger than I expected." Unsure of his authority to try Woodall, Rogers kept him in irons and sent him back to England on the next outward-bound ship. With the change in seasons, the weather also improved, and Rogers's people began recovering from their sickness. A convoy of trading sloops left the island to trade with friendly contacts in Cuba, from whom they hoped to secure additional supplies. With the fort almost complete and one of the leading pirates on his side, Rogers felt a growing sense of security.

On November 4, Rogers received word that the crews of all four trading sloops he had sent to Cuba had gone pirate and were intending to join Vane. The renegades were said to be at Green Turtle Cay, however, and might still be caught. Rogers again turned to Hornigold and Cockram, who sailed to the island and engaged the recidivists in an all-out battle. The pirates-turned-pirate hunters came back to Nassau on November 28 with ten prisoners—including Blackbeard's former gunner, William Cunningham—and the corpses of three more. Rogers was ecstatic. "I am glad of this new proof [that] Captain Hornigold has given the world to wipe off the infamous name he has hereto been known by," he wrote the British secretary of state, "though in the very acts of piracy he committed most people spoke well of his generosity."

The pirate prisoners presented a challenge, as Rogers lacked the men to ensure they stayed locked up. Trying and executing them in Nassau might spark an uprising. He called a secret session of his governing council, which now included the former chief justice, Thomas Walker, and laid out the options. More than anything, the councilors worried that Vane, tipped off by his numerous informants, might attempt to free the captives. "If any fear be shown on our part," they resolved, "it might animate several [pirates] now here to incite the pirates without to attempt the rescue of those in custody. Therefore ... to prevent the designs of Vane the pirate," the council concluded they should "as soon as possible ... bring the prisoners to trial." Lacking a jail, Rogers had the ten prisoners chained aboard the
Delicia
before setting about what he knew was to be a risky confrontation with the island's pirate sympathizers.

***

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 outskirts 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.