The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (5 page)

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Having concluded their deal with Governor Trott, Avery and his men spent several days in Nassau, drinking Trott's refreshments and debating what to do next. A few men—seven or eight at least—resolved to stay right where they were and soon married local women. The remaining pirates split into three parties, each with its own idea of how best to slide into obscurity with their plunder. Twenty-three men, led by Thomas Hollingsworth, purchased a thirty-ton sloop called the
Isaac
from the islanders and sailed for England in the second week of April 1696, apparently wishing to quietly slip back to their homes. The second party of approximately fifty made their way to Charleston in Carolina, the nearest English colony, 400 miles to the north. The third group consisted of Avery and twenty others, who paid £600 for a fifty-ton ocean-going sloop, the
Sea Flower,
armed with four small cannon. Around the first of June, they loaded their possessions and treasure and made ready to depart. Henry Adams, the man who had carried Avery's messages to Governor Trott, married a Nassau girl and brought her with him aboard the sloop. Avery ordered the sails raised and the
Sea Flower
began making its way north with the Gulf Stream, bound for the north of Ireland.

Nicholas Trott spent the early part of June picking the
Fancy
clean. To make this process easier—and because the ship was in poor condition already—he ordered her run aground on Hog Island shortly before the
Sea Flower's
departure. Whether he knew the ship's true identity is unclear, but sometime that summer, other mariners passed through Nassau and recognized the beached hulk as the
Charles II.
Trott brought a few men in for questioning but claimed "they could give no information." In December he received a letter from his counterpart in Jamaica, informing him that Bridgeman was none other than the outlaw Henry Avery. Trott brought a few of Avery's colleagues in for questioning. He soon released them, noting that the governor of Jamaica "gave no proof." Months later he disingenuously ordered the
Fancy
be "seized ... in the hope that evidence might be found." Trott would ultimately lose his governorship over the incident, but ended his days prosperously enough.

Some of Avery's men found shelter in other ports. Several of those who had gone to Charleston continued on to Philadelphia, where they bought the allegiance of another governor, William Markham of Pennsylvania, for £100 per man. Markham, who apparently knew who they were, not only neglected to arrest them, he entertained them at his home and allowed one of them to marry his daughter. When one of the king's magistrates, Robert Snead, attempted to arrest the pirates, the governor had him disarmed and threatened with imprisonment. Snead, unperturbed, apprehended two of the pirates, but they "escaped" from Markham's prison within hours. The incident, Snead wrote back to authorities in London, had allowed "all the people [to] see how Arabian gold works with some consciences."

The
Isaac,
the first of the sloops carrying the England-bound pirates, landed on remote Achill Island off the west coast of Ireland during the first week in June. About a dozen pirates came ashore at the foot of Achill Head, piling bags of gold and silver coins onto the wide beach. They later made their way to Dublin and there vanished without a trace. The rest of the
Isaacs
company sailed down to Westport, County Mayo, where they hastily unloaded and broke company. They offered townspeople £10 each for nags worth not one-fifth of that, and exchanged bags of Spanish silver for purses of gold guineas at a discount, simply to lighten their loads. On small Irish horses laden down with guineas, silks, and other valuables, many rode out of town in the direction of Dublin. Hollingsworth, their leader, sold the
Isaac
to local merchants and took off himself. Local officials estimated the sloop had arrived in Westport with £20,000 in gold and silver, plus several tons of valuable Bahamian logwood, a tropical species from which dyes were extracted. Only two men, James Trumble and Edward Foreside, were apprehended, though others were seen in Dublin later that summer.

Avery and the
Sea Flower
arrived at the end of June, landing at Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, in the northeast. They were confronted by the local customs official, Maurice Cuttle, who they handled in their usual fashion; each gave Mr. Cuttle about £3 in gold and, in exchange, he not only issued them passes to go to Dublin, he escorted them part of the way there. Six miles out of Dunfanaghy, Avery parted ways with the rest of the men, saying he was bound for Scotland and, ultimately, Exeter in his native Devonshire. Only one person accompanied the pirate: Henry Adams's wife. Together Avery and Mrs. Adams made their way from Donegal Town.

The other men of the
Sea Flower
traveled to Dublin. One of them, John Dan, booked passage to England and then ventured overland to London. While passing through the town of St. Albans, Hertfordshire, he ran into Mrs. Adams, who was boarding a stagecoach. She told Dan that she was going to meet Avery, but refused to take him along or tell him where he was. A few days later, at an inn in Rochester, Kent, outside London, a maid discovered the £1,100 Dan had sewn into his quilted jacket. He wound up in prison, as did seven of his former shipmates. Five of them, including the steward William May, were hanged at the Execution Dock in London on November 25,1696.

Avery was never heard from again.

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Rumors of Avery's fate circulated the English-speaking world for decades afterward, passing from deckhand to deckhand within the ships and pubs of the empire. It was said that he was literally the King of the Pirates, and had returned to Madagascar with his accomplices to reign over his own pirate domain. There he lived with his wife, the granddaughter of the Grand Moghul, in a sumptuous and well-defended palace, beyond the reach of English law. Pirates were drawing to him from the four corners of the world.

The legend gained credence in 1709, when a London bookseller published
The Life and Adventure of Capt. John Avery,
allegedly based on the journal of a man who had escaped from his pirate kingdom. The anonymous author claimed Avery presided over a fleet of more than forty large warships and an army of 15,000 men. "Towns were built, communities established, fortifications built, and entrenchments flung up, as rendered his Dominions impregnable and inaccessible by sea and land." Avery had so much silver and gold that he'd begun minting his own coins bearing his likeness. "The famous English pirate," he wrote, had gone "from a Cabin Boy to a King." The story so captivated the English public that within a few years, London's Theatre Royal staged a play based on Avery's life. In
The Successful Pyrate,
Avery lived in a vast palace, "a sceptered robber at the head of a hundred thousand ... brother-thieves ... burning cities, ravaging countries, and depopulating nations."

To abused young sailors and cabin boys, Avery had become a hero. He was one of their own, a man who stuck up for his fellow sailors and led them to a promised land, a sailor's heaven on earth. A champion of the ordinary man, the Avery of legend was a symbol of hope for a new generation of oppressed mariners, as well as a role model for the men who would one day become the most famous and fearsome pirates in history.

Only years later, as the Golden Age of Piracy was coming to an end, would a competing account of Avery's fate be published. According to
A General History of the Pyrates,
published in London in 1724, Avery never made it back to Madagascar. After taking leave of his shipmates in Ireland, he headed to his native Devon bearing a large quantity of diamonds. Through friends in Biddeford, he arranged to sell the gems to some Bristol merchants, men who, unlike Avery, were sufficiently wealthy that "no enquiry would be made [of] how they came by them." According to this account, Avery handed over the jewels, with the understanding that he would be sent most of the proceeds of their sale, and relaxed with kin in Biddeford. The payments he eventually received from Bristol "were not sufficient to give him bread." He confronted the merchants and they threatened to turn him in to the authorities, showing themselves to be "as good Pyrates at Land as he was at Sea." Reduced to beggary, Avery fell sick and died on his return to Biddeford, "not being worth as much as would buy him a coffin."

But that version of the story was to be written a quarter-century hence. For those alive in the year 1700, the only versions of the Avery story were those of a robber king and his republic of pirates.

1697–1702

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vanished into the Irish night, the men who would shape the Golden Age of Piracy were boys or very young men. Of the early lives of those who became bona fide pirates, we know very little.

Most people in late-seventeenth-century England left little record of their time on earth. An honest, law-abiding commoner's birth, marriage, and death might be recorded by a priest in the register of the local parish church. Were they fortunate enough to own property, a will with an inventory of the person's possessions and to whom they were bequeathed might survive. If the person had committed or had been the victim of a crime, the records of that person would likely be more voluminous, particularly if the case had gone to trial. In fact, much of what we know about the great pirates comes from depositions, trial transcripts, and other legal records stored in the archives of Great Britain, Spain, and their former colonies in the New World. Before they turned to piracy, in other words, history has little to say about them.

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Samuel Bellamy, the man who would call himself the Robin Hood of the seas, was likely the child of Stephen and Elizabeth Pain Bellamy, born March 18,1689, in the hamlet of Hittisleigh, Devon. If so, he was the youngest of five children, the eldest son having died in infancy five years before Samuel's birth. As the only remaining son, he stood to inherit the family estate, which probably didn't amount to much. Hittisleigh was an extremely modest place, a handful of cottages scattered over hills on the northern fringe of the stark wastes of Dartmoor, the setting of Arthur Conan Doyle's
Hound of the Baskervilles.
The soil was heavy with clay, complicating both the plowing and drainage of fields; the inhabitants did their best to eke out a living farming wheat, barley, and potatoes. The region's soil, Daniel Defoe reported in the 1720s, was "barren by nature" and "very unhealthy, especially to sheep, which in those parts are of a small kind, and very subject to rot which destroys them in great numbers." The soil grew "nothing but rushes, or a coarse, sour kind of pasturage which the cattle will not feed upon."

Like many boys, Bellamy probably left his farm as soon as he could to escape the growing social and economic catastrophe that was engulfing the English countryside. The old medieval system was being supplanted by capitalism, and the pain of that transition was being borne by the country's peasant farmers. Beginning in the 1500s, English lords began driving peasants off their lands, either by purchasing their medieval tenancy rights for cash or simply refusing to renew their leases. All over England, fields and pastures once used in common by local villagers were seized by feudal lords, enclosed with walls, fences, and hedgerows, and incorporated into large private farms and sheep ranches. This "enclosure movement" turned feudal lords into landed aristocrats and turned millions of self-sufficient farmers into landless paupers.

Rural English life was increasingly perilous as a result. Without land, peasants could no longer raise livestock, meaning they could no longer produce their own milk, cheese, wool, or meat. Since they had to pay cash rents to their landlords to use their fields and live in their cottages, most were forced to hire themselves and their children out as laborers. For the typical peasant family, this represented a huge loss in real income; the annual dairy production of just one cow was worth as much as a full-grown man's annual wages as a laborer. "The poor tenants," one traveler observed, "cannot afford to eat the eggs their hens lay, nor the apples and pears that grow on their trees ... but must make money of all." Sir Francis Bacon described the tenant farmers as little better than "housed beggars." By the year of Bellamy's birth, three million Englishmen—roughly half the country's population—were poised on or below the level of subsistence, and most lived in the countryside. Malnutrition and disease left their mark on this submerged half of England's population: On average they stood six inches shorter and lived less than half as long as their middle- and upper-class countrymen.

Large numbers of them abandoned their ancestral lands and headed for England's towns and cities in search of work. The young Sam Bellamy was likely one of them. Although we don't know his itinerary, we do know he ultimately made his way to one of England's ports. Perhaps he was inspired by the exploits of Henry Avery, whose stories had spread out across Devon from Avery's hometown of Newton Ferrers, just thirty miles from Hittisleigh. Dreams of swashbuckling adventure and kingly riches may have swum in the young man's head as he walked across the moors toward Plymouth, over the hills in the direction of Bristol, or down the long road to London, making his way toward the sea.

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Of Charles Vane, who would one day challenge an entire squadron of His Majesty's warships, we know even less. There is a portrait of him in the 1725 edition of
A General History of the Pyrates,
a woodcutting whose creator would have worked from what he had heard or read, not by what he had seen; it depicts Vane in a shoulder-length wig and soldierly long coat, sword drawn, pointing purposefully toward an unseen objective; he is of middle stature, with an aquiline nose, dark hair, a thin goatee standing out from a few days' growth of facial hair. His birthplace and childhood have been lost to history, leaving us to guess at his origins. He is thought to be English, though his name holds out the possibility of French ancestry. Before turning pirate, he resided for a time in Port Royal, Jamaica, but was not originally from there. He was likely about the same age as Bellamy and probably went to sea around the same time. The best guess is that he was from London, which historian Marcus Rediker estimates was home to nearly a third of the pirates of Vane's generation. Bellamy also may have sailed from there; later in his pirate career, he once claimed to have been from London.