Pirates: A History

by Travers, Tim

  …such a one was seen several days amongst them, sometimes below, and sometimes upon deck, yet no man in the ship could give an account of who he was, or from whence he came, but that he disappeared a little before they were cast away in their great ship [the Queen Anne’s Revenge]; but, it seems, they verily believed it was the Devil.

  Pirates, like all sailors of the day, were very superstitious, so again this story is just possible. Yet the idea of the Devil onboard ship seems more likely to fit the ‘devil’ image of Blackbeard that Johnson is creating, rather than the reality of Blackbeard. This is borne out by the two immediately previous stories that Johnson relates: the brimstone story, mentioned above, where Johnson says Blackbeard used the brimstone contest to make his men believe he was the devil incarnate, and a second story in which Blackbeard is asked whether his wife knew where his treasure was buried, in case anything should happen to him. According to Johnson, Blackbeard answers, ‘nobody but himself and the Devil knew where it was and the longest liver should take it all.’ It is unlikely that Blackbeard buried any treasure [see Chapter 1], so this is almost certainly an apocryphal story, following Johnson’s theme of emphasizing the ‘hellish’ image of Blackbeard.4

  The reality behind Johnson’s rather fantastical stories of Blackbeard is harder to pin down, including Blackbeard’s actual name. There is no evidence besides Johnson for the pirate’s real name, but it is possible that it was Edward Thatch or Teach, as related by Johnson, who is often reasonably accurate when discussing non-controversial topics. If so, Teach came from Bristol, and originally sailed as a privateer or slave trader out of Bristol, as many did at that time.5 In regard to his piracy, Teach/Blackbeard (Blackbeard will henceforth be used as the more familiar name), originally sailed with the pirate Benjamin Hornigold out of New Providence in the Bahamas, in 1714 or 1715. By 1717 Hornigold had a thirty gun ship, probably the Ranger, while Blackbeard, as Hornigold’s deputy, commanded a six gun sloop, with a crew of around seventy men. The two pirates sailed together and captured a number of small ships, and then in 1717, Blackbeard was appointed captain of the twelve gun Revenge, which belonged to Stede Bonnet – the strange, wealthy planter turned pirate, who knew little of the sea. Bonnet was happy to read his library of books onboard while Blackbeard went about the business of pirating. Meanwhile, Blackbeard and Hornigold parted company in 1717, when the latter was deposed by his crew for refusing to attack British ships. Hornigold would also shortly take the King’s pardon, issued by George I in 1717, while Blackbeard continued as a pirate.6

  Blackbeard’s career started off well in November 1717 when he captured the French slaver, La Concorde, off Martinique, which he renamed Queen Anne’s Revenge, possibly implying a preference for the Stuart cause, since Queen Anne, who died in 1714, was the last of the Stuart monarchs. Various reports give the number of the new crew of the Queen Anne’s Revenge as around 150 men, with another fifty in an accompanying sloop, or a little later as 300 men, while the number of guns aboard the larger ship reportedly ranged from twenty-two to thirty-six guns. To command this number of men and keep them happy was a very difficult task, but Blackbeard seems to have accomplished this, partly through natural ability, and partly it seems by creating an image of himself as a tougher and larger than life pirate. This is all the more curious since Blackbeard apparently never actually killed anyone until his final battle. However, when a captured ship’s captain described Blackbeard in late 1717, it was of a ‘Captain Tach’ – ‘a tall spare man with a very black beard which he wore very long.’ This image of Blackbeard is less riveting than Johnson’s description, but shows that Johnson’s lively description was not far from reality.7

  In 1718 Blackbeard was in the Bay of Honduras, where he operated with the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and the smaller sloop, the Revenge. Among the ships they took was a bark of eighty tons called the Adventure, capable of carrying twelve guns, which appears later in the story of Blackbeard. A much larger ship taken was the Protestant Caesar, out of Boston, which led them a chase before she was finally cornered. The terrified crew rowed ashore and hid in the jungle, no doubt watching as Blackbeard’s crew plundered and then burnt the prize to the waterline, so that the crew of the prize could not ‘brag when he went to New England that he had beat a Pirate.’ This was a reference to an earlier encounter between the Caesar and a sloop from Blackbeard’s small fleet, when the Caesar fought off the sloop. On the other hand, Johnson maintains that the Caesar was burnt because she came from Boston, where some men had recently been hung for piracy. Either way, Blackbeard next headed to the Atlantic seaboard of British North America in May 1718, following the pirate custom of raiding there in the summer, and shifting to the Caribbean or the Guinea coast in the winter.8

  In May 1718, Blackbeard and his fleet of one large ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and three smaller sloops, arrived off the mouth of the river leading to Charles Town, South Carolina. This was a clever move by Blackbeard, since the pirates took eight or nine unsuspecting ships as they sailed toward Charles Town, and a blockade could have done considerable damage to the economy of Charles Town and its merchants and ship owners. Out of the ships that Blackbeard took, some hostages were secured, from whom the pirates later took cash and jewelry. Yet his only demand from Charles Town was for a medicine chest. This seems a small price for raising the blockade of Charles Town, but Blackbeard’s fleet was too small to take Charles Town with its population of around 5,000, and the longer the pirate fleet waited outside the town, the greater the danger of a Royal Navy ship arriving. Moreover, a medicine chest was very valuable, and pirate ships usually compelled captured surgeons and their medicine chests to join their crews, as sickness, wounds and death were more than common onboard. Subsequently, after a week, Blackbeard sailed north, toward North Carolina and Bath Town, where Governor Eden resided, who seems to have been well disposed to the pirates.

  In fact, Blackbeard was now apparently giving thought to the problem of downsizing his large crew of pirates. He could not easily constantly satisfy these pirates with prizes, and at the same time his fleet offered a tempting target to the Royal Navy. Moreover, Blackbeard appears to have been contemplating asking for a pardon from Governor Eden. In order to achieve these aims, Blackbeard first arranged to have the Queen Anne’s Revenge run aground on the complex shoals outside Bath Town, North Carolina. After this, the Adventure also ran aground, while Stede Bonnet, still a part of Blackbeard’s crew in the Revenge, was sent to Governor Eden, to ask for a pardon. While Bonnet was away, Blackbeard stripped the grounded ships of their contents, abandoned around seventeen of the crew on a barren island nearby, and left around 300 other crew ashore in the small village of Beaufort on the outer banks of North Carolina. Blackbeard himself hid out with around twenty-five trusted pirates in a captured Spanish sloop on the north side of Ocracoke Island. All of this seems to have been part of Blackbeard’s plan to downsize and secure a pardon.9

  On his return to the original rendez vous after some days, Stede Bonnet found Blackbeard gone. Furious at being abandoned, Bonnet sailed after Blackbeard in the Revenge, but missed him, and then resumed piracy himself, capturing a number of ships. It was not long before Bonnet was taken, and despite escaping once, he was hung at Charles Town in 1718, along with twenty-nine of his crew. Meanwhile, Blackbeard settled down to live at Bath Town for some six months, and he did receive a pardon from Governor Eden. Blackbeard renamed his Spanish sloop the Adventure, and with her took a Spanish prize whose profits he shared with Governor Eden and Deputy Governor Knight. A small crew lived aboard the Adventure at Ocracoke inlet, while Blackbeard himself either lived onboard, or at Bath Town, and the rest of the pirates lived normally at Bath Town. All seemed well, but to the south, Governor Spotswood of South Carolina, determined to revenge the blockade and losses caused by Blackbeard at Charles Town, disturbed by continuing piracy off his shores, and perhaps interested in taking over North Carolina as part of his empire, set out to kill or capture Blackbeard and his men. To do
this, Spotswood chartered two sloops with shallow draughts, and manned them with about fifty-five men, under the command of two junior naval officers, Lt. Maynard and Mr. Hyde. Another force of 200 men was to march overland and roust out the nest of pirates in Bath Town – a bold and actually illegal move.

  As it happened, Blackbeard was not in Bath Town at this moment, but onboard the Adventure at Ocracoke Island, entertaining guests. He had a crew of twenty-five men, since Israel Hands and the rest of the crew were ashore in Bath Town. Lt Maynard learnt where Blackbeard was located, and, as the senior officer of the two attacking sloops, he made sure that no ships entered or exited the area, to avoid alarming Blackbeard. In the early morning of 22 November 1718, Maynard’s two sloops drifted toward Blackbeard’s Adventure, and were quickly noticed. Blackbeard could have cut his cable and fled, but he obviously determined to fight, and probably considered his armament of a number of three and four pounder cannon superior. He may also have tried to lure the naval sloops onto a sandbar, but in fact both sides ran aground close to each other. At this point, Johnson has a lively tale of Maynard and Blackbeard exchanging threats. Blackbeard shouted:

  ‘Damn you for villains, who are you? And from whence came you?’ The lieutenant made him answer: ‘You may see by our colours we are no pirates … I will come aboard of you as soon as I can, with my sloop.’ Upon this, Blackbeard took a glass of liquor and drank to him with these words: ‘Damnation seize my soul if I give you Quarters, or take any from you.’10

  Johnson was actually quite close in his reported dialogue, since Maynard later wrote that Blackbeard ‘drank Damnation to me and my Men, whom he stil’d Cowardly Puppies, saying he would neither give nor take Quarter.’ After this, the battle started with the Adventure opening fire, and nearly winning the fight with this single broadside. Around eleven Royal Navy sailors were killed, including Mr. Hyde, and twenty were wounded. However, Maynard arranged for the rest of his crew to be below decks, so these were spared. Then Blackbeard ordered his men to throw grenades onto the deck of Maynard’s sloop, and under cover of the smoke boarded Maynard’s sloop with between ten and fourteen pirates against Maynard and twelve Royal Navy sailors. The fight was very fierce, and at one point Maynard faced Blackbeard. Both fired pistols, and Blackbeard received a superficial wound. Blackbeard swung his cutlass against Maynard and cut the officer’s fingers. As Blackbeard moved in for the kill, a navy sailor cut Blackbeard in the face or neck, saving Maynard. Several shots struck Blackbeard, but he kept swinging his cutlass. Another account has Blackbeard facing a Highlander, who gave Blackbeard the cut on his neck, at which Blackbeard said, ‘well done, lad’. The Highlander was apparently quick witted, and retorted, ‘If it be not well done, I’ll do it better’. With that he gave Blackbeard a second stroke, which cut off his head … On the other hand, Johnson states that Blackbeard received twenty-five wounds, five of them by shot, and as he was cocking his pistol to fire again, he suddenly fell dead on the deck.11

  With Blackbeard’s death, the fight went out of the remaining pirates, who either surrendered or jumped overboard to be killed or captured. On board the Adventure, an African pirate named Caesar tried to blow up the ship, but was stopped from doing so. Maynard hung Blackbeard’s head from the bow sprit of his sloop, giving some credence to the story of the Highlander cutting Blackbeard’s head off. Legend has it that Blackbeard’s decapitated body then swam several times around the ship after being thrown overboard. No doubt the body was carried past the sloop by the current, but obviously did not swim. Later, ten of Blackbeard’s crew were hung in South Carolina, through the efforts of Governor Spotswood, their bodies lining the road from Williamsburg to the James River. However, Israel Hands was pardoned, probably for giving evidence against the others. Maynard apparently gathered the treasure onboard Blackbeard’s ship and split it with his surviving men, but got nothing from the Admiralty. He seems to have left the naval service shortly after the Blackbeard affair, and retreated into obscurity.12

  It was the end of Blackbeard and his legend – although it leaves open the question as to whether Blackbeard really intended to honour Governor Eden’s pardon, and whether he therefore really intended to give up piracy for ever. Blackbeard’s life showed that although he was a reasonably successful pirate, his pirate career was actually quite short, from around 1714/1715 to 1718, so that it was really the creation of his image that has made him perhaps the most famous pirate of all time. The same might be said of ‘Calico’ Jack Rackam, who was more famous for having onboard two female pirates than from anything he actually achieved himself as a pirate.

  ‘Calico’ Jack Rackam (Hung 1720)

  ‘Calico’ Jack Rackam was so called because of his habit of wearing calico (white cotton cloth exported from Calicut in India, hence the name calico). His past is a mystery, and Johnson does not give any details of his earlier life, but he was originally probably a privateer, trader or slaver, as were so many others. Rackam actually emerges in history as the quartermaster of the pirate ship captained by the pirate Charles Vane. The rank of quartermaster was second only to the captain and required a responsible and capable leader. It was the quartermaster who spoke for the crew, managed discipline onboard, supervised the division of booty, called meetings when policy decisions had to be made, and acted as judge in ship board cases. Rackam must have been such a leader, and trusted by the crew.13 Rackam’s moment came when a French man of war hove into view in 1718, near Dominica. In the initial action, the French ship fired a broad side, which caused Vane to reconsider the wisdom of taking on such a large well armed ship. An argument broke out onboard Vane’s ship, with Rackam leading the majority group that wanted to board the French ship, and Vane in the minority wanting to avoid battle. According to pirate rules, Vane, as captain in the middle of an action, had the authority to make critical decisions. Hence, Vane made the decision to flee, but this decision was later branded as cowardice by Rackam and the majority onboard. So a vote was called by Rackam, Vane was deposed by his crew, and Rackam was elected captain. Another source simply says that Vane’s ship was beaten off by the French ship, so perhaps Vane was a little less cowardly than supposed, but he obviously did not satisfy his crew.14

  Rackam allowed Vane and his sixteen supporters to sail off in a small sloop. Vane did not last much longer, because after a few piracies, his next ship was dismasted in a gale and driven ashore. Vane was captured in 1719, and hung in 1720. Meanwhile, Rackam plundered a few small prizes around the Leeward Islands, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, before deciding to accept a pardon offered by Woodes Rogers in the Bahamas in 1719. Perhaps the reason behind Rackam’s desire for a pardon was that he was hoping to become a privateer, because Britain was at war with Spain from 1718 to early 1720. After the war was over, Rackam probably lacked a source of income in the Bahamas, because in August 1720 he and a dozen supporters rowed out at night to the sloop William, and sailed from the Bahamas to continue piracy. Significantly, Rackam used his time in New Providence, Bahamas, to court a woman named Anne Bonny, or Anne Bonn, who was married to a penniless sailor. She abandoned her husband, and, disguised as a sailor, joined Rackam onboard as his lover. According to Johnson, she was soon discovered to be pregnant, and later went ashore in Cuba to deliver the child, before rejoining Rackam’s ship. Strangely enough, among the other pirates who joined Rackam and Bonny in their escape from the Bahamas was another woman, also disguised as a man, Mary Read.15

  The voyage of Rackam’s sloop, accompanied by Bonny and Read, was short and not very rewarding. The William took fishing boats and a few small craft off Hispaniola and Jamaica, and then Rackam came across a group of nine turtle hunters from Jamaica in a small boat. These men allegedly came aboard Rackam’s ship to exchange their catch for a bowl of punch, but were afterwards to bitterly regret this move because Rackam was shortly after surprised by a privateer, captained by a pirate hunter named Jonathan Barnet. Rackam apparently ordered the nine turtle hunters to immediately help weigh up the anchor
, in order for the William to escape from Barnet. According to the turtle hunters, they refused, despite Rackam using violent means to persuade them. No doubt the turtle hunters coloured the story in their favour when on trial later, but it seems likely that Rackam wanted to escape from Barnet, and needed the man power to speedily weigh anchor, a heavy task that takes some time. On the other hand, a witness alleged that the turtle hunters had brought muskets and cutlasses onboard Rackam’s ship, possibly with the idea of joining the pirate crew, and when the anchor was up, they helped in rowing the William away in the light breeze, in order to try and escape. Meanwhile, Rackam’s crew refused to surrender – shouting ‘they would strike no Strikes’ – and, unable to flee, someone fired a swivel gun at Barnet’s ship from Rackam’s sloop. The privateer responded with cannon and musket fire, which brought down the William’s boom and cowed Rackam’s crew. It appears that Rackam’s crew surrendered very easily but that Read and Bonny and one other pirate continued the fight.16

  At the various pirate trials in Jamaica in 1720, Rackam’s male crew were found guilty and were hung, except for two Hispaniola-based French buccaneers who had been taken prisoner by Rackam, and were important witnesses. In a probable miscarriage of justice, the nine turtle hunters were also found guilty and hung, despite being onboard the William for a very short time before Barnet’s privateer arrived. When it came time to try Read and Bonny, one or two interesting facts came up. One witness, Dorothy Thomas, who had been captured while paddling a canoe loaded with provisions, reported that the two women were onboard Rackam’s sloop: