Remember what I said about Benjamin? How he dressed differently, had a more military bearing. Looking back now I think he never really wanted to be a pirate; that his ambitions lay on the other side, with His Majesty’s navy. He was never especially keen on attacking ships, for one thing, which was a rarity among us. Blackbeard told the story of how a vessel under his command had once laid siege to a sloop, only for Benjamin to steal the passengers’ hats. That’s all, just their hats. And yes, you might think it was because he was an old softy and didn’t want to terrorize the passengers too much, and maybe you’d be right. But the fact is, out of all of us, Benjamin Hornigold was the least like a pirate, almost as though he wasn’t willing to accept that he was one.
All that being the case, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised by what happened next.
43
July, 1718
Dearest Caroline …
And that, on that particular occasion (location: the Old Avery, as if you needed telling), was as far as I got.
‘Putting some shape to your sentiments?’ Anne stood over me, brown and beautiful. A treat for the eyes.
‘Just a short letter home. I reckon she’s past caring anyway.’
I crumpled up the letter and tossed it away.
‘Ah, you’ve got a hard heart,’ said Anne as she moved off behind the bar, ‘it should be softer.’
Aye, I thought. Yer right, lass. And that soft heart felt like it was melting. In the months since we’d heard about the king’s pardon, Nassau was riven, divided into those who took the pardon, those who planned to take the pardon (after one final score), and those who were dead against the pardon and cursed all others, led by Charles Vane, and …
Blackbeard? My old friend was keeping his powder dry, but looking back I think he’d decided that a life of piracy was no longer for him. He was away for Nassau on the lookout for prizes. News of big scores and strange allegiances were reaching our ears. I began to think that when Blackbeard had left Nassau he never had any intention of returning. (And he never did, as far as I know.)
And me? Well, on the one hand, I was wary being mates with Vane. On the other, I didn’t want to take the pardon, which made me mates with Vane whether I liked it or not. Vane had been waiting for Jacobite reinforcements to arrive but they never had. Instead he began making plans to leave, maybe establish another pirate republic elsewhere. I would take the Jackdaw and leave with him. What other choice did I have?
And then came that morning, a few days before we were due to depart, as I sat on the terrace of the Old Avery, trying to write my letter to Caroline and passing the time of day with Anne Bonny, when we heard the sound of carriage-gun fire from the harbour. An eleven-gun salute, it was, and we knew exactly what was up. We’d been forewarned about it. The British were coming to take control of the island.
And here they were. A blockade that bottles up both entrances to the harbour. HMS Milford and HMS Rose were the muscle. Two warships escorting a fleet of five other vessels, on which were soldiers, craftsmen, supplies, building materials, an entire colony come to flush out the Pirates, drag Nassau up by its bootstraps and return it to respectability.
They were led by the flagship Delicia, which despatched rowing boats to negotiate the graveyard of ships and land on our beach. As we arrived there, along with every other jack tar in Nassau, its occupants were just landing. None other than my old friend Woodes Rogers. He was helped out of his rowing boat looking as tanned and well-kept as ever, though more careworn. You remember his promise to be governor of Havana? He’d delivered on that. Remember him telling me how he planned to rout the pirates from Nassau? Looked as though he planned on delivering on that one, too.
Never had I longed for Blackbeard more. One thing I knew was that my old friend Edward Thatch would have known which way to turn. A mix of instinct and cunning would have powered him like the wind.
‘Well I’ll be hanged,’ Calico Jack said by my side (tempting fate there, Jack), ‘King George has grown tired of our shenanigans. Who’s the grim fella?’
‘That’s Captain Woodes Rogers,’ I replied, and as I was in no hurry to reacquaint myself with him, I shrank into the crowd, but still close enough to hear as Rogers was handed a roll of parchment that he consulted, before saying, ‘we desire a parley with the men who call themselves governors of this island. Charles Vane, Ben Hornigold and Edward Thatch. Come forth, if you please?’
Benjamin stepped forward.
‘Lily-livered punk,’ cursed Jack. And never was a truer word spoken. For if there was a moment that Nassau came to an end and our hopes for the republic were dashed, then that was it.
44
November, 1718
It wasn’t until I found him that I really realized how much I had missed him.
Little did I know I was soon to lose him for good.
It was on a North Carolina beach, Ocracoke Bay, just before dawn and he was having a party – of course – and had been up all night – of course.
There were campfires dotted all over the beach, men dancing a jig to the sound of a fiddle further along, other men passing a blackjack of rum between them and guffawing loudly. Wild boar cooked on a spit and the delicious scent of it made my stomach do hungry flips. Perhaps here, on Ocracoke Beach, Blackbeard had established his own pirate republic. Perhaps he had no interest whatsoever in returning to Nassau and making things right.
Charles Vane was already there, and as I approached, trudging up the sand towards them and already anticipating the liquor on my lips and the wild boar in my belly, he was standing, his conversation with Blackbeard evidently just ending.
‘A great disappointment you are, Thatch!’ he bellowed nastily, then on seeing me said, ‘His mind is made up to stay here, he says. So sod him and hang all you that follow this sorry bastard into obscurity.’
Anybody else but Blackbeard and Vane would have slit his throat for being a traitor to the cause. But he didn’t, because it was Blackbeard.
Anybody else but Vane and Blackbeard would have had him put in leg irons for his insolence. But he didn’t. Why? Maybe out of guilt, because Blackbeard had turned his back on piracy. Maybe because no matter what you thought of Charles, you had to admire his guts, his devotion to the cause. None had fought harder against the pardon than Charles. None had been a bigger thorn in Rogers’s side than he. He’d launched a fireship against their blockade and escaped, then continued to orchestrate raids on New Providence, doing anything he could to disrupt Rogers’s governorship while he waited for reinforcements to arrive. The particular reinforcements he hoped for wore black in battle and went by the name Blackbeard. But as I arrived on the beach that balmy morning, it looked as though the last of Charles Vane’s hopes had been dashed.
He left, his feet kicking up clouds of sand as he stomped back along the beach, away from the flickering warmth of the campfires, shaking with rage.
We watched him go. I looked down at Blackbeard. His belts were unbuckled, his coat unbuttoned and his newly acquired belly thrust at the buttons of his shirt. He said nothing, simply ushered me to take a seat on the sand beside him, handed me a bottle of wine and waited for me to take a drink.
‘That man is a prick,’ he said slightly drunkenly, waving a hand in the direction of where Charles Vane had been.
Ah, I thought, but the irony is your old mucker Edward Kenway wants the same thing as the prick.
Vane might have been devoted to the cause, but he didn’t have the faith of the brethren. Always a cruel man, he’d lately become even more ruthless and savage. I’d been told that his new trick was to torture captives by tying them to the bowsprit, inserting matches beneath their eyelids – and then lighting them. Even the men who followed him had begun to question him. Perhaps Vane knew it as well as I did – that Nassau needed a leader who could inspire the men. Nassau needed Blackbeard.
He stood now, Blackbeard, Charles Vane a distant dot on the horizon, and beckoned me to follow.
‘I know you�
��ve come to call me home, Kenway.’ He looked touched. ‘Your faith in me is kind. But with Nassau done in, I feel I’m finished.’
I was telling the truth when I said, ‘I’m not of the same mind, mate. But I won’t begrudge you the state of yours.’
He nodded. ‘Jaysus, Edward. Living like this is like living with a large hole in your gut, and every time your innards spill over the ground, you’re obliged to scoop ’em up and shove ’em back in. When Ben and me first set down in Nassau, I undervalued the needs for folks of character to shape and guide the place to its full purpose. But I was not wrong about the corruption that comes with that course.’
For a moment as we walked we listened to the tide on the sand, the soft rushing, receding noise of the sea. Perhaps he, like me, when he thought of corruption, thought of Benjamin.
‘Once a man gets a taste of leadership, it’s hard for him not to wonder why he ain’t in charge of the whole world.’
He gestured behind. ‘I know these men think me a fine captain, but I bloody hate the taste of it. I’m arrogant. I lack the balance needed to lead from behind the crowd.’
I thought I knew what he meant. I thought I understood. But I didn’t like it – I didn’t like the fact that Blackbeard was drifting away from us.
We walked.
‘You still looking for that Sage fellow?’ he asked me. I told him I was, but said nothing of how the search for the Sage had consisted mainly of sitting in the Old Avery drinking and thinking of Caroline.
‘Ah, well, taking a prize a month back I heard a man named Roberts was working a slave ship called the Princess. Might want to see about it?’
So – the carpenter with the dead eyes, the man with the ageless knowledge, had moved on from plantations to slave ships. That made sense.
‘The Princess. Cheers, Thatch.’
45
The British were coming after Blackbeard, of course. I later found out it was a force led by Lieutenant Maynard of HMS Pearl. A reward had been put on Blackbeard’s head by the governor of Virginia after merchants made a noise about Blackbeard’s habit of sailing from Ocracoke Bay and taking the odd prize here and there; the governor worried that Ocracoke inlet would soon become another Nassau. The governor didn’t like having the world’s most infamous pirate in his back yard. So the governor put a bounty on his head. And so they came, the British did.
The first we heard of it was a whispered alarm. ‘The English are coming. The English are coming,’ and looking through the gun hatches of Blackbeard’s sloop the Adventure we saw that they’d launched a small boat and were trying to sneak up on us. We would have completely destroyed them, of course, but for one thing. One crucial thing. You know that party I was talking about? The wine and the wild boar? It had gone on. And on.
We were very, very, catastrophically hungover.
And so the best response we could manage was warning the rowing boat off with some shot.
There were very few us aboard the Blackbeard’s ship that morning. Perhaps twenty at the most. But I was one of them, little knowing I was to play a part in what happened next: the fate of the world’s most famous pirate.
And give him his due, he may have been hungover – just as we all were – but Blackbeard knew the waterways around Ocracoke Bay and so off we went, weighing anchor and making haste for the sandbanks.
Behind us came Maynard’s men. They flew the red ensign and left us in no doubt as to what they intended. I saw it in Blackbeard’s eyes. My old friend Edward Thatch. All of us aboard the Adventure that day knew the English were after him and him alone. The governor of Virginia’s declaration had named only one pirate, and that pirate was Edward Thatch. I think we all knew we weren’t the real targets of these dogged English, it was Blackbeard. Nevertheless, not one man gave himself up or threw himself overboard. There was not a man among us who was not willing to die for him – that was the devotion and loyalty he inspired. If only he could have used those qualities in service of Nassau.
The day was calm, there was no wind in our sails and we had to use our sweepers to make progress. We could see the whites of our pursuers’ eyes, and they could see ours. Blackbeard ran to our stern, where he leaned over the gunwale and shouted across the still channel at Maynard.
‘Damn you, villains, who are you? And where did you come from?’
Those on the ship behind gave no answer, just stared at us blank-eyed. Probably they wanted to unsettle us.
‘You may see by our colours we are no pirates,’ bellowed Blackbeard waving around himself, his voice echoing strangely from the steep sandbanks on both sides of the narrow channel. ‘Launch a boat to board us. You’ll see we are no pirates.’
‘I cannot spare a boat to launch,’ called Maynard back. There was a pause. ‘I’ll board you with my sloop soon enough.’
Blackbeard cursed and raised a glass of rum to toast him. ‘I drink damnation to you and your men, who are cowardly puppies! I shall give nor take no quarter.’
‘And in return I expect no quarter from you, Edward Thatch, and nor will I give any in return.’
The two sloops under Maynard’s command came on, and for the first time ever, I saw my friend Edward Thatch at a loss for what to do. For the first time ever, I thought I saw fear in those eyes.
‘Edward …’ I tried to say, wanting to take him to one side, wanting us to sit together, as we had so many times at the Old Avery, to plot and plan and scheme, but not for the taking of a prize this time, no. To escape the English. To get to safety. Around us the crew worked in a kind of booze-soaked daze. Blackbeard himself was swigging rum, his voice rising along with his inebriation. And of course the more drunk he became, the less open to reason, the more reckless and rash his actions, such as when he ordered the guns be primed, and because we had no shot, filled with nails and pieces of old iron.
‘Edward, no …’
I tried to stop him, knowing there had to be a better, more tactful way to escape the English. Knowing that to fire upon them would be to sign our own death warrants. We were outnumbered, outgunned. Their men were not drunk or hungover and they had the burning light of zealotry in their eyes. They wanted one thing and that thing was Blackbeard – drunk, angry, raging and probably, secretly, terrified Blackbeard.
Boom.
The spread of the gun shot was wide, but we saw nothing beyond a shroud of smoke and sand, which obscured our vision. For long moments we waited with bated breath to see what damage our broadside had inflicted, and all we heard were screams and the sound of splintering wood. Whatever damage we’d done, it sounded grievous, and as the fog cleared we saw that one of the pursuing ships had veered off to the side and beached, while the other seemed to have been hit as well, with no sign of any crew aboard and parts of its hull shredded and splintered. From the mouths of the crew came a weak if heartfelt cheer and we began to wonder if all was not lost after all.
Blackbeard looked at me, next to him at the gunwale, and winked.
‘The other one’s still coming though, Edward,’ I warned. ‘They’ll return fire.’
Return fire they did. They used chain shot, which destroyed our jib, and in the next moment victorious cheers had turned to shouts as our ship was no longer seaworthy, lurching to the side of the channel and listing, its splintered masts grazing the steep-sided banks. Meantime, as we bobbed uselessly in the swell, the chasing sloop nosed up on our starboard side, giving us a good opportunity to see what strength they had remaining. Precious little, it looked like. We could see a man at the tiller, with Maynard by his side gesturing as he cried, ‘Pull alongside, pull alongside …’
Which is when Edward decided attack was the best form of defence. He gave word for the men to arm themselves and prepare to board, and we waited with our pistols primed and cutlasses drawn, a final stand in a deserted back channel in the West Indies.
Powder smoke shrouded us, thick layers of it hanging like hammocks in the air. It stung our eyes and gave the scene an eerie feel, as though the English s
loop was a ghost ship, appearing from within the folds of a spirit-mist. To add to the effect, its decks remained empty. Just Maynard and the mate at the helm, Maynard shouting, ‘Pull alongside, pull alongside …’ his eyes wild and rolling like a madman. The look of him, not to mention the state of his ship, gave us hope – it gave us hope that maybe they were in even worse shape than we’d at first thought; that this wasn’t the final stand after all; that maybe we’d live to fight another day.
A false hope, as it would turn out.
All was quiet, just Maynard’s increasingly hysterical shrieking as we crouched hidden behind the gunwale. How many men were still left alive on the sloop, we had no real way of telling, but one of us was confident at least.
‘We’ve knocked them on their heads except three or four,’ shouted Blackbeard. He was wearing his black hat, I noticed, and he’d lit the fuses in his beard, was shrouded in smoke, his hangover cast off, he glowed like a devil. ‘Let’s jump aboard and cut them to pieces.’
Only three or four? There had to be more of them left alive than that, surely?
But by then the two hulls had bumped, and with a shout, Blackbeard led us over the side of the Adventure and on to the British sloop, roaring a brutal warrior roar as the men flooded towards Maynard and the first mate at the tiller.
But Maynard, he was as good a performer as my friend Mary Read. For as soon as our dozen pirates boarded his ship, that wild hysterical look left his face, he shouted, ‘Now, men, now!’ and a hatch in the quarterdeck opened and the trap was sprung.
They’d been hiding from us, playing possum, pretending to be dead, luring us on board. And now out they came, like rats escaping bilge water, two dozen of them to meet our plucky twelve, and straight away the clashing of steel, the popping of gunshot and the screams filled the air.
A man was upon me. I punched him in the face and engaged my blade at the same time, dodging to the side to avoid a fountain of blood and snot that erupted from his nose. In my other hand was my pistol, but I heard Blackbeard calling me, ‘Kenway.’
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