Raiders and Rebels

by Frank Sherry

  By the middle of 1701 the pirate nation had all but disappeared. Pirate captains, deprived of both their base and their markets and unwilling to face the guns of the Royal Navy, abandoned the Indian Ocean. Some shifted their activities farther east to the Dutch East Indies, and even to the China Sea. A few gave up the sea altogether, settling down on Madagascar or in the islands of the Indian Ocean. Some wandered where the winds took them.

  It was certain, however, that the great days of Madagascar were over.

  The outlaw nation was near extinction.

  Then Louis XIV saved it.

  In far-off Europe, Charles II of Spain had died without an heir in direct line to the throne. In his will, however, he had designated a grandson of Louis XIV as inheritor of the vast Spanish Empire that stretched from the Americas to the Pacific and included possessions in Italy and the Netherlands. For the enemies of the Sun King—England, Holland, Austria, Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark—a union of the Spanish Crown with the military might of France constituted an intolerable threat. England and Holland backed a rival claimant to the Spanish throne, Archduke Charles of Austria.

  Despite the opposition of much of Europe, Louis’s grandson—prodded and protected by the Sun King’s power—ascended the throne of Spain as King Philip V, infuriating and terrifying the enemies of royal France. Louis outraged England even further by recognizing the Catholic heir of the dethroned Stuarts as the rightful king of England. In addition, Louis laid heavy duties on English trade with France and Spain.

  The result was the bloody War of the Spanish Succession, which broke out in 1701 between England, Holland, and their allies on one side, and royal France and Spain on the other.

  In England the Tories and the Whigs, parliamentary opponents, finally found a cause they could agree upon. They rallied to King William’s call for a national effort against Louis. Even after William died early in 1702, England’s resolve to fight the war as part of a Grand Alliance against Louis did not flag.

  In May 1702, England’s new queen, Anne, who had been designated by Parliament as William’s successor, issued a proclamation designed to boost Britain’s naval strength—depleted by Parliament’s budgetary constraints in the last years of William’s reign. The proclamation authorized the use of privateers against the shipping of Spain and France.

  Suddenly the Madagascar pirates, almost extinguished a year earlier, were back in business, this time as lawful brigands of the queen of England.

  For the ordinary pirates of Madagascar, the privateering life might not have been as enjoyable as the pirate life, but it paid well. And even more important, enlistment aboard a privateer exempted a man from impressment into the Royal Navy where discipline was cruel and plunder almost nonexistent.

  In the course of the long war, which lasted a total of eleven years, British and American privateers were immensely successful, capturing more than two thousand prizes. One fleet of thirteen privateers operating out of New York took thirty-six enemy prizes in three years, sharing a total of £60,000 in booty.

  In 1708, when the war was at midpoint, Parliament passed a new law that permitted the owners and crews of privateering vessels to share all the plunder, without having to forward 10 percent of the take to the Crown. As a result, privateering became even more popular, primarily because it became more profitable.

  Although England and her allies held the upper hand in the sea war from the beginning, the War of the Spanish Succession was essentially a land struggle, decided by a series of mighty, and bloody, battles. In the Battle of Blenheim, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, inflicted on France her first military defeat in more than four decades. Upwards of forty thousand French soldiers were killed or captured in the battle, which taught the English that they possessed the power to defeat Louis on land as well as at sea.

  By the time the war came to an end in 1713, England had become the dominant power in Europe. France was broken militarily and economically. At the peace of New Utrecht, which ended the struggle, Louis’s grandson, Philip V, was allowed to remain on the throne of Spain, but he was stripped of all his territories in the Netherlands. England was triumphant on land and sea.

  At the end of the war, the pirate brotherhood, left for dead on Madagascar, had also achieved a vigorous new life. Youthful seamen who had served for years on privateers and who had no experience other than sea raiding, now struck out “on their account.” The War of the Spanish Succession had trained thousands of new recruits in piracy.

  As they had in earlier times in the East, the new pirates of 1714 sought a base from which to operate. With most colonial ports still firmly closed to pirates, and with Madagascar still under watch by the Royal Navy, the new pirates—who had spent most of the war preying on Spanish shipping—searched for their base in an area they had come to know well during the war: the Caribbean.

  And there they found their new sanctuary: the Bahama Islands.

  The Bahamas consist of some seven hundred islands and islets, stretching from a point approximately fifty miles off Florida’s southeastern coast almost to Haiti, six hundred miles farther to the southeast.

  The main island of the group, New Providence, is about twenty-one miles long and only seven miles wide.

  The doleful history of the Bahamas—at least as far as Europeans are concerned—goes back to 1492 when, it is generally believed, Christopher Columbus stepped ashore on San Salvador, before going on to explore Cuba and Hispaniola. Within twenty-five years of Columbus’s landing, the native Indians of the Bahamas—the Arawaks—had disappeared from the islands, enslaved by the Spaniards and transported to work on larger islands and the mainland.

  For more than a century thereafter the islands had remained virtually uninhabited.

  Then, in 1648, a band of English Puritans attempted to establish a colony on the Island of Eleuthera. Other settlers from Bermuda, and elsewhere, settled on New Providence. The colonists on both islands struggled against poor soil, Spanish hostility, hurricanes, and the indifference of the English government. In 1670, the government assigned the Bahamas, with their struggling little settlements, to the lords proprietors of the Carolina colony on the mainland of North America. The proprietors, however, took little interest in the Bahamas, generally leaving its inhabitants to eke out a living as best they could.

  During the War of the Spanish Succession there was fierce fighting in and around the sparsely inhabited islands, most of it centered on the island with the most commercial importance, New Providence.

  In 1703 the French and Spanish virtually destroyed Nassau, the seat of government and chief harbor of New Providence Island. Although they burned and looted the town, they made no effort to take possession of New Providence or of any other islands in the Bahamas group.

  In the year after the sack of Nassau, the governor of the colony abdicated. In the years that followed, many of the town’s inhabitants also gave up the struggle to make the colony pay and fled to the mainland. As the population continued to decline, the lords proprietors of Carolina seemed to come to the conclusion that the islands were useless and they made no effort to reestablish government in Nassau.

  In 1713, when the war ended, the pirate brotherhood moved in.

  The first pirate captain to recognize the usefulness of New Providence as a base had been one Henry Jennings, of Jamaica, who first dropped his hook in the harbor of Nassau while the War of the Spanish Succession was still on, and while he was serving as a privateer in the queen’s service.

  When the war ended, Jennings, who had turned pirate, decided to make Nassau his headquarters. Other ex-privateers who had turned to the sweet trade soon followed. Like Jennings, they were drawn to New Providence and Nassau harbor because of a number of obvious attributes. The island was located in the center of heavily traveled sea-lanes between the Spanish possessions to the west, the North American coast only a short sail to the north, and the European trade routes between France and England and their rich sugar colonies in the West Indies.
>
  The numerous islands of the Bahamas offered wood, water, and safe areas for careening, as well as numerous creeks and inlets where swift pirate sloops could dodge away from men-of-war.

  Furthermore, there were only a few people living on the islands to dispute possession with the pirate brotherhood. According to the governor of Bermuda, the islands at this time were inhabited by approximately two hundred families, who, he reported, were “scattered up and down” and who lived “without any face or form of government, every man doing only what’s right in his own eyes.”

  Finally, the island of New Providence offered one amenity that outweighed all others: The harbor at Nassau was perfect for pirate use. According to Defoe it was “big enough to hold 500 sail of ships; before which lies a small island, making two inlets to the harbor. At either way there is a sandbar over which no ship of 500 ton can pass.”

  Moreover, hills overlooked this ideal harbor, allowing a clear view of any enemy (or possible prey) while it was still far out at sea.

  The area around Nassau was also furnished with ample supplies of fresh water and fruit, as well as fish and wild pigs.

  By 1715, two years after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, more than two thousand ex-privateers, new enlistees under the black flag, had invaded New Providence in the wake of Captain Jennings.

  The handful of local inhabitants who had remained on the island after its abandonment by government welcomed the pirates as sources of income.

  According to contemporary sources, only one man tried to resist the pirate invasion. He was a certain Captain Thomas Walker who had at one time served as a vice-admiralty judge on the island. Although his commission had long since expired, Walker boldly arrested some of the first pirates who landed at Nassau and sent them under guard to Jamaica. Needless to say, they escaped en route and made their way back to Nassau. Walker must have realized soon enough that there was no future in Nassau for honest men like himself. He fled the Bahamas for South Carolina. There he reported that the pirates had taken over the town of Nassau, even mounting guns in the fort “for the defense of their republic.” But there was little disposition in the Carolina colony to expend money and effort to expel the pirates. “Let the outlaws have it; it’s useless anyway” seemed to be the attitude in Carolina.

  Another inhabitant of New Providence, John Vickers, who had also fled the pirate invasion, stated in a deposition to the colonial governor of Virginia that the leader of the pirates of Nassau was a captain named Thomas Barrow.

  “He is the ‘Governor’ of Providence and will make it a second Madagascar,” Vickers reported.

  Vickers’s prediction proved to be deadly accurate. By 1716 the pirates based on New Providence Island had become a menace to shipping from the coast of Maine to the Spanish Main. But even this was only the beginning of the revived pirate war on the world.

  The outlaw nation—born on Madagascar and nearly dead in 1701 until resurrected by war in Europe—was about to reach its zenith under the relentless sun that shone upon the island of New Providence.

  11

  Republic of Rogues

  The town of Nassau, once a torpid waterside hamlet, had by 1716 become the capital city of the reborn pirate confederacy.

  Nassau reflected both the values and the style of the brigands who made it their headquarters: impermanent, licentious, and chaotic. A shantytown—a zany collection of stores, shacks, whorehouses, and saloons, cobbled together from driftwood and canvas with palm thatch for roofs—stretched in a half circle along the sandy shore of the harbor.

  The wreckage of captured prizes lay rotting on the beach, their ribs exposed like long-dead carcasses. Dozens of vessels—pirate sloops and captured merchants—crowded the harbor, their masts looking like a leafless forest from the shore.

  In this place, their own crazy metropolis, the pirates of the western world drank, argued among themselves, gambled away fortunes, paid in stolen coin for the bodies of the prostitutes who flocked to the town, and lived in an uproarious present until their coin was gone and they had to go to sea once more.

  It was said that the stench from Nassau—a combination of roasting meat, smoke, human offal, rum, unwashed bodies, and rotting garbage, all stewing together under the tropical sun—could be detected far out to sea, long before the island itself was visible.

  New Providence and its wild harbor town were in many ways a pirate heaven as well as a pirate haven. Free from all laws other than the laws of piracy, it made available all the rough joys that the outlaw brotherhood held dear. Although, as with most pirate organizations, there was no strict or formal structure of command, the New Providence pirates did make provision for defense of their realm, raising a battery and appointing a guard of fifty to man it should any enemy appear. In addition, any pirate captains who happened to be in the port were expected to look to its defense should Nassau come under attack.

  As more and more freebooters came to regard Nassau as their home port, the pirate capital flourished so greatly that Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia began to refer to New Providence as a “New Madagascar.”

  It was an apt description, for many of the forms and customs that the outlaw fraternity had first developed there almost twenty years earlier now bloomed again on New Providence.

  Defoe makes it clear that as with the Madagascar pirates of earlier days, the brigands of New Providence were also passionately democratic, insisting on majority rule. Says Defoe: “Each Captain and Company were regulated by their own Laws, independently of the rest; nor were the Captains themselves always obey’d, every thing of Moment being carried by the Vote of the Company.”

  Nevertheless, despite the fundamental independence of each pirate ship (and of each individual pirate), a rough-and-ready republic was formed under the direction of a council of captains and quartermasters. According to Governor Spotswood, who had informers on the island, the pirates also chose a “governor” for themselves, although it appears the title was more honorary than real.

  Although actual government on New Providence was exceedingly lax, since individual crews settled their own disputes and for the most part made their own decisions, many of the pirate usages and attitudes first in evidence on Madagascar were easily transplanted—and sometimes took on new life—in the rogues’ republic of New Providence. For example, the black flag, the Jolly Roger, had by now become the universal and standard ensign of the outlaw brotherhood.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Like their predecessors, the pirates of New Providence put loyalty to the brotherhood above any loyalty to nation, religion, or race. Ethnic and racial freedom was the rule, and the ship’s articles of many New Providence crews contained forthright declarations of war “against the whole world.”

  Pirate tactics of speed, stealth, and terror—first developed in the East—had become standard operating procedure. Furthermore, their effectiveness was greatly enhanced by the fact that the New Providence pirates occupied a highly favorable strategic position from which to carry on their sea war.

  From their capital of Nassau the pirates of New Providence could sail north to patrol the busy harbors of South Carolina and Virginia, or to intercept ships bound for ports on the Gulf of Mexico. They could sail westward to Central America in search of Spanish plunder, or south into the Caribbean to take the shipping of European merchants supplying the plantation colonies of that region. And always after any raid, they could speed away to lose themselves among the isles and inlets of their Bahamas home, or betake themselves to their impregnable sanctuary at Nassau.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Although they attacked the shipping of all nations, the pirates of New Providence made Spanish shipping, and Spanish treasure, a special target.

  An incident that took place in 1716, involving an immense amount of Spanish silver, illustrates why the freebooters of the Caribbean were particularly attracted to Spanish prey. (The Story of the Spanish Silver also illustrates, in an almost incidental way, how nat
ural and even inevitable it was for the ex-privateers of the War of the Spanish Succession to become pirates in time of peace.)

  Defoe says that the Story of the Spanish Silver actually began in 1714, when a fleet of Spanish galleons carrying a great load of silver sank in a storm in the Gulf of Florida. Two years later, Defoe continues, several Spanish vessels from Havana located the sunken fleet and began working with diving equipment “to fish up the silver that was on board the galleons.”

  The Spaniards had managed to recover millions of pieces of eight, most of which they had transported to their fortress at Havana. But there were some 350,000 pieces of eight still awaiting transport. This silver was being held in a guardhouse on shore under the watchful eyes of sixty armed men.

  Unknown to the Spanish, word of their salvage operation had reached the ears of several enterprising ex-privateers based on the English-held islands of Jamaica and Barbados. Despite the fact that the war had been over for three years, these freebooters still thought of the Spanish as “the enemy.” It seemed natural to them that they should try to take some of the Spanish Silver for themselves. They therefore set sail in five ships for the Gulf of Florida.

  Defoe tells, in his own inimitable style, what happened next: “The Rovers came directly upon the Place, bring their little Fleet to an Anchor, and in a Word, landing 300 Men, they attack’d the Guard, who immediately run away; and thus they seized the Treasure, which they carried off, making the best of their Way to Jamaica.”

  Defoe adds in a casual aside that on their way to Jamaica with their booty, the freebooters took another Spanish ship carrying some additional 60,000 pieces of eight.