The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (44 page)

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In Charleston, the courts had not only been busy, they had literally been under siege. The inhabitants were at odds over the fate of Stede Bonnet and the other pirates Colonel William Rhett had captured at Cape Fear. Most colonists were undoubtedly pleased that perpetrators of some of the recent blockades were finally being brought to justice. This sentiment was particularly strong among merchants and planters who had lost ships and cargo in these incidents. But there were a great many people in Charleston who supported the pirates, and their passion exceeded that of their counterparts in North Carolina or Virginia. This faction included a large number of pardoned pirates and former Nassau smugglers, as well as servants, sailors, free blacks and other members of South Carolina's enormous underclass. Bonnet, they argued, was "a gentleman, a man of honour, a man of fortune, and one who has had a liberal education." His crewmen were seen as heroes, men unafraid to seize the goods of wealthy men or to drink to the damnation of Britain's so-called king. They insisted, none too quietly, that all the pirates should be freed.

Like Woodes Rogers in Nassau, Governor Johnson was not at all sure that he could keep the pirates in custody. South Carolina had just fought a major Indian war, thus manpower was in short supply. Charleston had no jail, so Johnson had been forced to incarcerate the pirates in the Court of Guard, a small two-story building that stood on the Half-Moon Battery, a fortification on the Bay Street waterfront. The structure's wooden walls had numerous windows, making it less than secure despite the presence of armed guards. As a concession to Bonnet's gentility—and to keep him from plotting with his men—Johnson had the pirate captain held at the home of Nathaniel Partridge, the colony's provost marshal, where "centinels were placed early in the evening" to guard against jailbreaks. Through these improvised arrangements, Johnson hoped to hold the pirates from October 3, when they were brought in, until October 28, when their trial was scheduled to begin.

Nonetheless, on the night of October 24, 1718, Bonnet escaped from the marshal's house with the help of Richard Tookerman, a merchant who had made a small fortune smuggling goods back and forth to the Bahamas when they were under pirate rule. Marshal Partridge may have been complicit in the escape, which apparently took place without a struggle; he was fired a few days later. Curiously, Bonnet escaped in the company of David Herriot, a forced man who would almost certainly have been acquitted, as he had turned state's evidence that very morning, giving a lengthy deposition against the pirates. He had been moved from the Court of Guard to the marshal's house as a reward for his cooperation. Yet Herriot chose to flee into the night with Bonnet. By the time the alarm was sounded, they were halfway across the harbor in Tookerman's canoe, paddled by several of his black and Indian slaves.

Not long thereafter, Charleston descended into civil disorder. The details of what came to be called "the disturbances" are unclear, but from passing references in subsequent legal documents it appears that an armed mob laid siege to the Court of Guard in an attempt to free the remaining pirates. "[We] can't forget how long this town has laboured under the fatigue of watching [the pirates], and what Disturbances were lately made with a design to release them," Assistant Attorney General Thomas Hepworth said a few days later. "We were apparently in danger of losing [our lives] in the late disturbance when, under a notion of the honor of Carolina, [the rioters] threatened to set the town on fire about our ears." The attack, Hepworth concluded, "shows how necessary it is that the law be speedily executed on them to the terror of others, and for the security of our own lives." The trials started on October 28, and when they concluded on November 5, twenty-nine of the thirty-three prisoners had been found guilty. Twenty-two were hanged three days later at White Point, a marshy tongue of land sticking out from the southern end of the Charleston peninsula.

Meanwhile, while paddling to North Carolina, Bonnet and Herriot encountered a storm that forced them ashore on Sullivan's Island, just four miles south of Charleston. There, on November 8, they were ambushed by yet another posse led by William Rhett. There was a brief exchange of gunfire in which Herriot was killed and two slaves injured. Bonnet was recaptured, carried to Charleston, and, on November 12, found guilty of piracy. By an odd coincidence, the chief justice was Nicholas Trott, nephew and namesake of the disgraced governor of the Bahamas, who had helped Henry Avery go free. If Bonnet entertained hopes that Trott's nephew might grant him leniency, he was disappointed. "You ... shall go from hence to the place of execution," Justice Trott told him, "where you shall be hanged till you are dead."

Bonnet was said to have made such a pathetic display on hearing this sentence that a number of Charleston's citizens—most of them women—applied to the governor to spare his life. According to the author of the
General History,
the governor was also approached by "some of Bonnet's friends" with a proposal to send the gentleman pirate to England so "that his case might be referred to his majesty." Colonel Rhett is said to have offered to go with Bonnet and to raise funds to pay for the trip. These and other interventions prompted Johnson to delay Bonnet's execution seven times, the London
Original Weekly Journal
later reported, a situation that so angered the city's merchants that they approached the governor "in a mass" and demanded "immediate execution on the offender." Bonnet, fearing the end was near, wrote a plaintive letter to the governor, begging him to "look upon me with bowels of pity and compassion" and to "think me an object for your mercy." "[Make] me a menial servant to your honour and this government, and ... you'll receive the willingness of my friends to be bound for my good behavior and constant attendance to your commands." The governor was unmoved.

On December 10, 1718, Major Stede Bonnet was led to the gallows at White Point and hanged.

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News of the "disturbances" and the execution of Bonnet's men traveled quickly to Nassau, convincing Woodes Rogers and his governing council of the need to move quickly against the ten pirates they had in custody aboard the
Delicia.

Rogers was, if anything, in a more vulnerable position than Governor Johnson. Until his arrival, the Bahamas had been the epicenter of Atlantic piracy, and despite the departure of so many, the pirates and their followers still constituted the majority of inhabitants of New Providence. By late November 1718, Rogers had barely enough men to keep his ten prisoners under guard, better yet to defend the colony from Vane or a Spanish invasion fleet. His Independent Company had been reduced by disease, which even killed their surgeon. Of the four vessels he had brought with him, three were gone: the ten-gun
Buck
stolen by pirates, the twenty-gun
Willing Mind
wrecked on a sandbar, and the six-gun
Samuel
on her way to London to secure more troops and supplies. The only thing standing between Rogers and his enemies were the
Delicia,
a poorly manned ruin of a fort, and the influence of Hornigold, Cockram, and Josiah Burgess. The time had come for a final test of wills between Rogers and the island's pirate sympathizers.

On December 9, the prisoners were brought to the fort and escorted to a guardroom where the trial was to be held. Robert Beauchamp, head of the Independent Company, had all sixty of his surviving soldiers guard the entrances before going inside. There he sat down with Rogers, Chief Justice William Fairfax, and five other men Rogers had appointed as justices, including reformed pirate captain Burgess (now an officer in the militia) and Thomas Walker, who was no doubt pleased to finally be sitting in judgment over the pirates of the Bahamas. The trial lasted two days, during which time numerous witnesses testified to the guilt of nine of the pirates. The last, John Hipps, proved to have been a forced man and was acquitted. The rest, including Blackbeard's former gunner, William Cunningham, were sentenced to death by hanging, with the execution set for two days thence. A few of the men begged Rogers to delay the execution, but the governor refused. According to the trial record, "the Governor told them that from the time of their being apprehended ... they ought to have accounted themselves as condemned."

On the morning of December 12, a crowd of 300 formed at the base of the fort's northeastern rampart, a sandy shoreline where a gallows had been erected, against the water's edge. The throng consisted almost entirely of former pirates, who might have been there to interrupt the proceedings."Few men besides the governor's adherents were spectators to the tragedy," the official trial record put it, "but [those who] had lately deserved the same fate." At ten
A
.
M
.
, the nine prisoners were unchained from their ad hoc cell by the provost marshal and led, under heavy guard, to the top of the rampart. The crowd's behavior was erratic. Some cheered their former brethren, others looked warily at the heavy cannon trained on them from the ramparts and the 100 armed soldiers, sailors, and officials posted there and around the perimeter of the gallows. Standing atop the rampart, most of the prisoners were cowed, including their ringleader, John Augur, who was dressed in filthy clothes and had neither washed nor shaved. In contrast, twenty-eight-year-old Dennis McCarthy and Thomas Morris, twenty-two, were dressed flamboyantly, with long blue and red ribbons adorning their wrists, necks, knees, and skulls. Morris was in good humor, smiling frequently. McCarthy looked out on the crowd cheerfully before yelling out that "he knew a time when there [were] many brave fellows on the island that would not suffer him to die like a dog." He kicked each of his shoes over the wall and into the crowd, adding, "that some friends of his had often said he should die in his shoes, but that he would make them liars."The crowd buzzed, but nobody attempted to rush the well-guarded fort. At the prisoners' request, the island's Huguenot priest read several prayers and psalms "in which all present joyn'd." When the priest finished, the marshal conducted the prisoners, one by one, over the ramparts and down a ladder to the gallows. Thomas Morris paused at the top of the ladder to quip: "We have a good governor, but a harsh one." Near the foot of the ladder, nine nooses hung over a single wooden stage held up by three large barrels. Each was led to his appointed noose, "where the hangman fastened the cords as dexterously as if he had been a servitor at Tybourne," London's primary execution site, the trial record noted. With hands tied behind their backs and a noose in place, the prisoners were allotted forty-five minutes to say their final words, drink their last goblets of wine, and sing their last psalms before the boisterous crowd.

Most of the prisoners set to drinking to deaden their fear, particularly William Lewis, a former prizefighter who was eager to toast fellow prisoners and bystanders alike. When Lewis asked for more wine, one of the sullen prisoners, William Ling, shot back that "water was more suitable to them at [this] time." William Dowling, a twenty-four-year-old Irishman, became so drunk that "his behavior was very loose on stage." McCarthy and Morris hadn't given up on the crowd, exhorting them to rush the stage. According to the
General History,
Morris began "taxing [the spectators] with pusilanimity and cowardice, as if it were a breach of honour in them not to rise and save them from the ignominious death they were going to suffer." Some of "their old cohorts" and others surged forward and "got as near to the foot of the gallows as the marshal's guard would suffer them," according to the official account, "... but their wills saw too much power over their heads to practice anything."

The moment passed, Rogers stepped forward to announce the last-minute reprieve of young George Rounsivell because, as he later explained, "I hear [he] is the son of loyal and good parents at Weymouth," in Rogers's native Dorset. The fortunate young man was untied and brought off the stage. The marshal's men then gripped the ropes tied to the barrels supporting the stage and waited for Rogers's signal. In these last moments, Morris yelled out that he "might have been a greater plague to these islands and now wished he had been so."

Rogers gave the signal, the guards heaved on their ropes, and, in the words of the official record, "the stage fell, and the eight sprang off." As the eight corpses swung from the gallows before the placid blue waters of Nassau Harbor, Rogers knew he had finally gained the upper hand.

Indeed, Rogers would realize that the executions had dealt a mortal blow to those on the island who wished to overthrow his government. Sometime after Christmas, several disgruntled residents held a secret meeting where they hatched a plot to kill Rogers and his officers "and then to deliver up the fort for the use of the pirates." But opinion in Nassau was against the plotters. Some privy to the conspiracy passed word to Rogers, who had three of the ringleaders seized "and punished ... with severe whipping." In the wake of the executions, the coup had garnered so little support that Rogers decided his new prisoners could do him no harm."I shall release them," he wrote the British secretary of state a few weeks later, "and be the more on my guard" in the future.

The home front was secure, but Rogers faced other threats. He was still keeping a lookout for the Spanish and also for Charles Vane and the handful of other pirates-at-large still operating in and around the Bahamas.

***

As Vane sailed south from Ocracoke in mid-October 1718, he must have felt disappointed. He had been unable to convince Blackbeard to join forces with him against Nassau and had but ninety men aboard his twelve-gun brigantine. Based on what his informants had told him, even Rogers's depleted forces at New Providence would be able to resist an attack by such a small contingent. If he were to oust the governor and restore the pirate republic, he would have to wait until he had accumulated a stronger force or hope the Spanish would once again invade, destroy the government, and abandon the island. For now he would have to content himself with smaller, softer targets. Harbour Island was also too strong for him, its fortifications well manned and maintained by Richard Thompson and the Cockrams. The farming hamlet on adjacent Eleuthera was another matter. There were only families living on the entire 200-square-mile island, and between them they could only muster a militia force of seventy. Vane proposed that they sack Eleuthera, pillage supplies, and make south for sparsely populated Hispaniola, to establish their own pirate camp and wait for events to unfold in the adjacent Bahamas. The company, which included quartermaster "Calico Jack" Rackham and first mate Robert Deal, agreed.