The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (6 page)

In 1700, London dominated England like no other time before or since. It had 550,000 residents, more than a tenth of the nation's population, and fifteen times larger than England's second city, Norwich. It was the center of trade, commerce, society, and politics for England's growing empire. It was also far and away its greatest port.

The city had already jumped its ancient walls and spread across the fields to the village of Westminster, three miles up the Thames, home to both Queen Anne and Parliament, and downriver as far as the Royal Navy shipyard in Rotherhithe. Its center was rebuilt on a magnificent scale after the Great Fire of 1666, the skyline punctuated by the spires of Sir Christopher Wren's churches and the half-finished dome of Wren's greatest project, St. Paul's Cathedral. Tidy brick buildings on paved streets of uniform width were replacing the crooked alleys and irregular wooden homes of the medieval period. Commerce pulsed through the streets, the cobblestones echoing under wheels of tradesmen's carts and street vendors' wheelbarrows, the hooves of gentlemen's carriage horses and the herds of cattle and sheep bound for slaughter in the downtown meat markets. Shops and stalls not only lined the streets and squares, they spilled out into thoroughfares and even choked the flow of traffic crossing London Bridge, the only span across the River Thames. Many of London's fine churches were "so crowded up with shops and dwelling houses," one writer lamented, "that one would think religion in danger of being smothered up by the growth of trade."

The city's main artery, the Thames, was even more crowded than the streets. Upriver from London Bridge—under whose narrow arches the tides poured like waterfalls—hundreds of watermen rowed boats ferrying passengers and cargo up, down, and across the river, into which flowed the contents of a half million chamber pots; the blood and guts of thousands of slaughtered livestock; and the bodies of cats, dogs, horses, rats, and just about anything else wanting disposal. Downriver from the bridge, hundreds, sometimes thousands of seagoing vessels waited to load and unload their cargoes, often tying up three or four abreast, a floating forest of masts extending nearly a mile. Coastal trading sloops brought heaps of coal from Newcastle; two- and three-masted ships disgorged lumber from the Baltic, tobacco from Virginia, sugar from Jamaica and Barbados, and salt cod from New England and Newfoundland. Further downriver, on the outskirts of the metropolis at the naval yards of Deptford and Rotherhithe, the warships of the Royal Navy gathered for orders, repairs, or reinforcements.

Had they come to London, Charles Vane and Samuel Bellamy would have wound up in the neighborhood of Wapping, sandwiched on the riverfront between the naval yards and London Bridge. Wapping was a crowded warren of crumbling homes and dreary alehouses interspersed with wharves, lumberyards, and warehouses. Built on ground squeezed between marshes and the river, the neighborhood had long been known as "Wapping on the Ooze," and was home to those who couldn't afford to live anyplace else.

Life in Wapping and the other poorer districts of London was dirty and dangerous. People often lived fifteen or twenty to a room, in cold, dimly lit, and unstable houses. There was no organized trash collection; chamber pots were dumped out of windows, splattering everyone and everything on the streets below. Manure from horses and other livestock piled up on the thoroughfares, as did the corpses of the animals themselves. London's frequent rains carried away some of the muck, but made the overpowering stench from the churchyards even worse; paupers were buried in mass graves, which remained open until fully occupied. Cold weather brought its own atmospheric hazards, as what little home heating there was came from burning poor-quality coal.

Disease was rampant. Eight thousand people moved to London each year, but the influx barely kept up with the mortality rate. Food poisoning and dysentery carried off on average a thousand a year, and more than eight thousand were consumed by fevers and convulsions. Measles and smallpox killed a thousand more, many of them children, most of whom were already ravaged by rickets and intestinal worms. Between a quarter and a third of all babies died in their first year of life, and barely half survived to see the age of sixteen.

The streets swarmed with parentless children, some of them orphaned by accidents or disease, others simply abandoned on the church steps by parents who were unable to feed them. Overwhelmed parish officials rented babies out to beggars for use as props for four pence (£.016) a day and sold hundreds of five- to eight-year-olds into seven years of slavery for twenty or thirty shillings (£1 to £1.5) apiece. These small children were purchased by chimney sweepers, who sent them down the flues to do the actual cleaning, sometimes while fires were still burning below them, cleaning coal dust without masks or protective clothing. These "climbing boys" soon succumbed to lung ailments and blindness or simply fell to their deaths. Church officials put the children they could not sell back out on the street "to beg about in the daytime and at night [to] sleep at doors, and in holes and corners about the streets," as one witness reported. Large numbers of these hungry, bedraggled urchins roamed the streets together in bands called the Blackguards, so called because they would shine the boots of cavalrymen for small change. "From beggary they proceed to theft," the same Londoner concluded, "and from theft to the gallows."

Not everyone in Wapping was destitute. There were pub keepers and dockworkers, merchants and sailmakers, brothel owners and boardinghouse keepers, even officers and ship captains of modest means. A few prominent craftsmen also lived in the precinct, including a Mr. Lash, who built the queen's carriages, and the brewer Altoway, in whose barrels upward of £1,500 in beer and ale were stored at any given time, awaiting distribution to a thirsty city. London's water supplies were so unhealthy that the entire population drank beer instead, children included. Nearby was Roberts's boatyard, which afforded its workers a grandstand view of the neighborhood's greatest attraction: Execution Dock, where the Admiralty Court sent condemned sailors and captured pirates to meet their maker.

If Charles Vane grew up in Wapping, he would have seen numerous pirate hangings, including those of five of Henry Avery's crew in the fall of 1696, and William Kidd and four other pirates in May of 1701. Vane would have been a boy, but in those days nobody missed an execution: It was one of the most popular forms of entertainment.

The fun started days or weeks ahead of time at Marshalsea or Newgate Prison, where visitors tipped the guards for a chance to gawk at the condemned. On the day of execution, thousands lined the streets along the route to Wapping, waiting for the prisoners to roll by, lashed inside carts and escorted by guards and the Admiralty marshal. So many people tried to get a glimpse of the prisoners that the three-mile trip often took as long as two hours. By the time the procession reached Execution Dock, festive crowds massed on the riverbank and wharves, choking Wapping Stairs and spreading out on the stinking mud exposed at low tide. The gallows stood out in the mud, and behind them hundreds of passenger boats jockeyed for the best view of the impending event.

Vane would have watched Avery's men say their final words. According to witnesses, each of the pirates expressed penitence, but John Sparcks clarified that his regret was confined to the "horrid barbarities" they'd committed aboard the Grand Moghul's ship."Stealing and running away with [the
Charles II
]" was, Sparcks said, a "lesser concern."Their speeches completed, they were led to the gallows one by one and hanged, kicking and gagging. When the last man finished twitching, the sheriff's deputies dragged the bodies into the mudflats, lashed them to posts, and left them to be slowly engulfed by the incoming tide. Early the next morning, the retreating tide exposed their bloated bodies for a few hours until the next flood tide submerged them again. By custom, the Admiralty authorities only took the bodies away after they had been washed by three tides. The deputies buried most pirates in shallow graves or turned them over to surgeons for dissection, but the prominent ones they covered in tar and placed in iron cages hung at prominent points along the river. Sailors and watermen sailing up and down the Thames would see these ghoulish scarecrows, intended to strike fear in the hearts of would-be pirates. Time would tell just how ineffective they were.

***

Plenty of people were trying to lure young men like Bellamy and Vane aboard their ships. Professional seamen were in short supply, and the captains of both merchant vessels and Royal Navy warships were continually shorthanded. By some estimates, even if all of England's sailors were healthy and working at the same time, they would have accounted for only about two-thirds of the manpower needed for her merchant and naval fleets. Either service welcomed volunteers—the navy offered a bounty of two month's pay to any who would sign up—but they got few takers. There was a saying: "Those who would go to sea for pleasure would go to hell as a pastime." Only the ignorant and naïve joined either service voluntarily, country boys like Sam Bellamy, itching for adventure, but there weren't nearly enough of them.

Merchants were compelled to adopt aggressive tactics to fill their crews. Some hired "spirits," or men who, in the words of sailor Edward Barlow, went about inns and taverns looking to "entice any who they think are country people or strangers ... or any who they think are out of place and cannot get work and are walking idly about the streets." The spirits promised these idlers high wages and advances of money if they signed on the dotted line. Those who did found themselves on an outbound ship as an underpaid sailor's apprentice, the spirit pocketing several months of their pay as commission. Other captains hired men called "crimps" who sought out drunk or indebted seamen and tried to persuade them to sign on in exchange for drinks or the payment of their debts. If and when that failed, particularly unscrupulous crimps simply handcuffed and kidnapped drunken sailors, locking them up overnight before selling them to merchant captains. Whatever the circumstances, the new sailor was legally bound to serve the vessel until it completed a journey that would last for months, sometimes years.

The Royal Navy had a reputation for offering poorer pay and harsher discipline than merchant service and resorted to a more sweeping and violent approach: the press gang. Led by a naval officer, press gangs stalked the streets, rounding up any seamen they came across with the aid of clubs. Mariners were easy to pick out because of their distinct way of speaking, dressing, and walking. Edward Ward, a writer and sometime tavern keeper, encountered a pack of sailors in London around this time and likened them to "a litter of squab rhinoceroses, dressed in human apparel." In their tarred jackets, the sailors catcalled women and bashed every horse-hitching post they passed with their cudgels, causing any stray dog they came across to run away with "his tail between his legs to avoid the danger of the approaching evil."

Tough as they were, the sailors fled in terror when a press gang was near. Seamen would hide in their rooms above alehouses for days at a time. One sailor fled from London to Dover only to find gangs operating there as well."I was still terrified [of] the press, for I could not walk the streets without danger, nor sleep in safety," the sailor later recalled, describing his as "a prisoner's life." Other men pretended to marry pub or coffeehouse owners so they could claim to be homeowners, who were exempt from naval service. Others avoided it by getting themselves appointed as constables or neighborhood officials, or simply signed on board a merchant vessel. Large numbers of sailors fled England altogether.

The press gangs were persistent, not least because their leaders received twenty shillings (£1) for every man they captured. They would break into homes and boarding houses in the middle of the night in search of sailors, and regularly raided merchant ships entering London and other ports. Men who had been at sea for months or years were dragged off their merchant vessels and onto warships before they could set foot on land, catch a glimpse of their families, or collect their pay. Some merchant ships were left so shorthanded they were barely able to make it to port. Occasionally, sailors returning from particularly long voyages mutinied to avoid being pressed; once in control, they either abandoned their vessel in one of its boats or took up arms and attempted to fight off the gangs when they tried to board. On colliers, the small vessels that hugged the coast, carrying coal to London and other cities, the most able-bodied sailors would hide as soon as the press gang's ketch pulled alongside. Frustrated gang leaders responded by seizing the ship's boys and whipping them until they revealed the location of the hidden men. When sailors were particularly scarce, the gangs would break into homes of potters, weavers, tailors, and other poor tradesmen, seizing the men and their apprentices who were, according to a 1705 tract by playwright and pamphleteer John Dennis, "driven from their families like dogs or the worst of criminals," often without even letting them dress. Many died of exposure for lack of clothing, "and those that remained were of little use" for lack of skills. Beggars, vagabonds, and street children were relentlessly pursued by the press. Many of these landlubbers would never see England again.