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

by Colin Woodard

  In the early 1700s, when Thatch arrived, the plantation owners had given up on indentured servants altogether, replacing them with armies of enslaved Africans brought to the island. Jamaica had already become more than just a society that allowed slavery, it was the slave society perfected. Every year, dozens of ships arrived from West Africa, disgorging thousands of them. Despite the fact that the Africans' mortality rate far exceeded their birth rate, the island's slave population had doubled since 1689, to 55,000, and by the early 1700s, it had exceeded the English population by a ratio of eight to one. Outside of Kingston and Port Royal, Jamaica was a land where a tiny cadre of white planters, supervisors, and servants lived in constant fear of an uprising by the sea of Africans manning their fields, pastures, and sugar works. To maintain order, the English passed draconian slave laws under which masters could discipline their black captives in pretty much any way they wished, though murdering one without cause carried a fine of £25. Slaves could be punished by castration, having their limbs cut off, or being burned alive, punishments that were meted out without a court trial. Any three land-owners could join with two justices of the peace to pass most any sentence they pleased. A resident caught hiding a runaway slave suspected of having committed a crime faced a fine of £100, more than most people earned in four years. Even so, dozens of blacks did escape each year. They established rogue settlements in the mountains, where they grew crops, raised families, practiced their religions, and trained bands of swift and effective jungle warriors to raid the plantations, free slaves, and kill Englishmen. In their capital, Nanny Town, the runaways were said to be led by an ancient and powerful witch, Granny Nanny, who protected her warriors with magical spells.

  With the outbreak of war in 1702, Jamaica's plantation owners had to worry about not just a slave rebellion, but an enemy invasion as well. Jamaica was an island in a Spanish sea, located near Spanish Cuba, hundreds of miles from any other English possession. In 1703, French and Spanish forces sacked and destroyed Nassau, Jamaica's nearest English neighbor, obliterating the government and forcing the settlers into the woods. There was good reason to fear Jamaica would be next.

  From the Spanish point of view, the English should never have settled in the New World in the first place. Christopher Columbus had "discovered" the Americas for Spain in 1492, although he never set foot on either the North or South American mainland. The year after Columbus's discovery, Pope Alexander VI, acting on God's behalf, had given the entire Western Hemisphere to Spain, even though virtually none of it had been discovered yet. From Newfoundland to the tip of South America, the pope gave it all to Spain, save for the eastern part of what is now Brazil, which he bequeathed to the king of Portugal. Unfortunately, Pope Alexander had granted the king of Spain far more territory than he could possibly manage: sixteen million square miles, an area eighty times the size of Spain itself—two continents already populated by millions of people, some organized into powerful empires. Conquering and colonizing South and Central America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stretched Spanish resources to the limit, and the kings of Spain were forced to leave the cold, gold-less forests of the northeastern Americas to the colonists of New England, New Holland, and New France. Everything south of Virginia, however, the Spanish regarded as an integral part of their empire, including Spanish Florida, the Bahamas, and the vast archipelago of the West Indies.

  By the early 1600s, it was clear that even this parcel was too big a place for the Spanish to colonize and defend, and other European powers wormed into the Caribbean basin. With an overall population of only seven million, Spain could colonize only the choicest parts of the Caribbean—the mainland coasts of South America (the so-called Spanish Main) and the big islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Hispaniola. They did their best to patrol the scraps—thousands of smaller, less valuable islands stretching from the Bahama Banks off Florida to Trinidad on the South American coast—but their rivals still managed to occupy a few, building forts to defend their infant colonies. The French grabbed tiny Martinique, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe, the Dutch took Curaçao and Bonaire, just off the Spanish Main. The English concentrated on the tiny islands at the far eastern end of the West Indies, settling St. Christopher in 1624, Nevis in 1628, Barbados in 1627, Antigua and Montserrat in the early 1630s, and some of the islets of the Bahamas in the 1640s. In 1655, an English expeditionary force attacked and conquered Jamaica, which had a landmass larger than all of these other islands combined (4,400 square miles, a bit smaller than Connecticut or Northern Ireland). Straddling the Windward Passage—one of the primary trade routes between Europe and the Spanish Main—English Jamaica was a threat to Spain's commerce and the Spanish had wanted to recover the place ever since.

  During the War of Spanish Succession, Jamaica's planters had reason to worry about a Spanish or French invasion. With most of its warships tied up protecting the English Channel or convoying merchantmen, England's Royal Navy could spare few resources to defend its scattered Caribbean colonies. For most of the war, the Leeward Islands colony (St. Christopher, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat) was protected by a single fifth-rate frigate and for long periods had no naval protection at all. Barbados, located dangerously close to the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, had only a fourth- and fifth-rate in the best of times. The Bahamian settlements had no protection at all and were repeatedly burned by French and Spanish invaders. Even Jamaica, the navy's regional headquarters, generally had only a half dozen warships on station, and rarely were these larger than a fourth-rate.

  Nor could the frigates stationed at the various colonies help one another effectively. Simply getting from one place to another could be next to impossible. The square-rigged warships of the day could not sail into the wind any closer than sixty-eight degrees, and with the wind and waves pushing the ships away from their destination, might make little or no progress at all. Since the trade winds blew from the east, it was very easy for ships to sail from, say, Barbados or the Leeward Islands to Jamaica with the wind at their backs—which was the direction all incoming trips from Europe sailed; sailing from Jamaica toward Barbados, on the other hand, was extremely difficult, which is why ships bound for Europe sailed up the Atlantic seaboard in the Gulf Stream instead, eventually catching prevailing westerlies back across the North Atlantic. Were Barbados to come under attack, there was little hope of anyone in Jamaica helping them. Smaller, more nimble sloops and schooners could sail closer into the wind, and carry messages back and forth between islands, but even that could take weeks, so each colony's naval detachment was usually on its own.

  The warships were, in any case, rarely in any condition to sail, let alone engage an enemy. The tropical climate rotted the sails and rigging and corroded fittings and anchors, none of which could be easily replaced in the West Indies. If a mainmast were lost in a lightning storm or battle, the ship would have to sail all the way to New England for a replacement, there being no suitable trees left in the islands. Worse yet, the sea itself was home to shipworm, a ravenous wood-eating parasite that would bore through the warships' oaken hulls, causing them to leak. The only effective means of fighting the parasite was to careen the ship every three months: emptying the entire vessel and, in shallow water, turning it first on one side, then the other, scraping and cleaning all the parasites and bottom growth that had accumulated there. Smaller vessels could do this on a gradually sloping beach, but the larger ones, like navy frigates, required some sort of base against which to rest the ship—a specially constructed wharf or the hulk of an old ship, for instance—which were generally unavailable in the islands. As a result, when the Jamaican squadron attempted to sail out of Port Royal in 1704 to beat off a rumored French attack, the twenty-gun sixth-rate HMS Seahorse was so leaky she had to immediately return to harbor, the fifth-rate Experiment was found unseaworthy, and two Jamaican support ships were judged too structurally unsound to go into combat. In 1711, the governor of the Leeward Islands reported that the sole station sh
ip there was "so foul, her sails and riggings much worn, in short everything [so] out of order for want of stores that should she go to Leeward" to protect a convoy of outgoing merchantmen "it would be impossible for her to turn to the windward again [and] she would be obliged to go either for Jamaica or New England."

  The crews were often in worse shape than the ships. Men already suffering from a poor diet, harsh discipline, exposure, and disease had difficulty acclimatizing themselves to the heat and humidity of the Caribbean. It didn't help that they wore woolen clothes and subsisted on salted meats, heavy biscuits, and large quantities of beer and rum. Once exposed to the diseases of the tropics—malaria and yellow fever, smallpox and leprosy—the sailors began dropping like flies. Commodore William Kerr, the commander at Jamaica in 1706, had lost so many men to disease he was unable to leave Port Royal's harbor to carry out a planned attack on the annual Spanish treasure fleet. In the months that followed, the English fleet ran out of food and was unable to procure sufficient provisions from the Jamaicans, who, like other English colonists, refused to grow or eat tropical produce, relying instead on imported flour and salt meats from England or North America. By the time Kerr's official supply arrived in July 1707, most of his men were dead, and he had to take large numbers of men from the newly arrived ships just to make it home.

  Even when operative, the warships couldn't contend with the nimble French privateers swarming across the Caribbean from Martinique and Guadalupe. Privateers used swift sloops and two-masted brigantines that could sail much closer into the wind than a square-rigger. Captain Charles Constable, stationed at Barbados in 1711, warned its governor that the French privateers sailed "so very well" that it was usually impossible for any man-of-war to catch them. "Upon seeing any Man of War ... they only stretch farther to windward and continue cruising for our merchant vessels and often do take them." The governor, he suggested, needed to get himself "an extraordinary sailing sloop" that could challenge the privateers.

  The English needed to fight fire with fire, and the merchants of Jamaica were eager to do just that.

  ***

  Privateering had a long history in Port Royal. In the 1660s and 1670s, Henry Morgan and other buccaneers raided Spanish shipping under commissions from the governor of Jamaica. The privateers captured hundreds of Spanish ships, bringing them into Port Royal to be condemned by the Vice-Admiralty Court as legal prizes of war. The buccaneers surrendered 10 percent of the prize's value to the Admiralty, which was a small impediment to amassing incredible wealth. Individual buccaneers were said to have spent 2,000 to 3,000 pieces of eight (£500 to £750) in a single binge. While the buccaneers had faded away in the intervening decades, the Jamaican merchants were well aware of just how profitable privateering could be. They began fitting out privateering vessels as soon as they knew their nation was at war. In the summer of 1702, nine such vessels sailed from Jamaica for the Spanish Main with more than 500 men aboard. They returned to Jamaica the following spring, their ships laden with slaves, silver, gold dust, and other precious goods, having burnt and plundered several Spanish settlements in Panama and Trinidad. In 1704, a Jamaican privateer defeated a twenty-four-gun French ship and, in conjunction with Royal Navy frigates, began clearing the shipping lanes of enemy privateers.

  As the war progressed, the Jamaican privateer fleet grew to thirty vessels, carrying between seventy and 150 men each, the equivalent of three-fourths of the island's white male population."The people of this island were intent on nothing so much as encouraging the Privateers, and though they sometimes suffered considerable losses ... the many rich prizes that were daily brought in made a sufficient return," a resident recalled a quarter century later.

  Edward Thatch served aboard one of these privateering vessels, which cruised the waters around nearby Cuba and Hispaniola,* attacking poorly defended Spanish merchantmen. Occasionally they cruised in Leeward Islands, the Straits of Florida, or off Vera Cruz and other parts of the Spanish Main. In his years of service aboard the privateers, Thatch never made captain, though he probably rose to a skilled position such as mate (the captain's chief lieutenant), quartermaster (in charge of ship's operations), boatswain (commanding landing parties), or gunner. He certainly learned his way around the Caribbean: how to sail the treacherous, unmarked passages between islands, where to find hidden anchorages from which one could hunt for food, water, a good beach to careen a sloop's hull, and, most important, where to find and catch richly laden prizes.

  ***

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Woodes Rogers had also turned to privateering. The merchants of Bristol were losing large numbers of vessels to French privateers; many wanted both revenge and a chance to recover some of their losses. Dozens applied for commissions to fit out privateering vessels or, at the very least, to let them keep any prizes their armed merchantmen happened to take in their travels. The applications found a receptive audience in London. Queen Anne was sufficiently concerned about the loss of shipping to issue a 1708 decree revoking the Admiralty's share of the prize money; henceforth, the privateers' owners and crew could divide all the spoils among themselves. Privateering commissions—or letters of marque—were granted to 127 Bristol vessels during the war, including at least four partially owned by Rogers.

  Rogers was an active slave trader throughout his life, and his earliest privateering venture was no exception. He received his first commission for the 130-ton Whetstone Galley, which he co-owned with three Bristol merchants. While she carried sixteen cannon, the vessel Rogers named for his father-in-law was not a private warship per se, but rather an armed slave ship. Bristol customs records show the Whetstone Galley leaving that city on February 3, 1708, bound for the Slave Coast of Africa, with £1,000 worth of trade goods. On arrival in Guinea, Captain Thomas Robbins was to use the goods to buy 270 slaves and then carry them to Jamaica to be sold. He never made it to Africa. On the way out of England, the Whetstone Galley was captured by French privateers.

  In March 1707, Rogers received letters of marque for the Eugene Prize, an outright privateer that he co-owned with another merchant. This 100-ton vessel carried eight guns and twenty well-armed men, and apparently cruised close to home; Rogers had provided only one ball for each of the Eugene Prize's cannon. The next privateers he would invest in would cruise farther afield.

  Rogers spent the early years of the war in Bristol, starting a family and managing his growing business. At the end of 1707, he received a visitor, one of his father's old friends, the navigator William Dampier. Dampier had left Bristol four and a half years earlier, at the start of the war, on a most daring and unusual privateering mission to the Pacific Ocean. He had come to Bristol in the hopes of convincing merchants to bankroll another such mission. The fifty-one-year-old sea captain would have been upset to learn of the elder Woods Rogers's death, but found an even more capable backer in his son.

  For most English merchants, the Pacific Ocean was still terra incognita. Spain monopolized all European trade on this vast ocean, having colonized the Philippines, Guam, and the entire Pacific coast of the Americas, from the glaciated fjords of southern Chile to the arid missionary pueblos of Nuestro Señora de Loreto on the Baja peninsula. The Spanish considered their Pacific holdings to be safe from attack, particularly from the east, where ships could access it only by braving the horrific conditions in the Drake Passage at the southern tip of South America, home to the world's most frequent and ferocious storms. Englishmen agreed, calling the Pacific "the Spanish Lake."

  Dampier knew this was not entirely true. He had sailed around the world three times, twice via the Drake Passage, plundering towns in Panama and Peru, and, as captain of HMS Roebuck, exploring Australia and New Guinea. Great riches, Dampier knew, awaited those who found a way into the Spanish Lake.

  The Spanish Empire was fueled by the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, where armies of enslaved Indians were worked to death. The Peruvian "silver mountain" at Potosi alone produced two million pesos' (�
�500,000) worth of that precious metal each year, and the other gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru added another 8.7 million (£2,175,000). There was little to buy in the new world, so all those riches had to be shipped to Spain. Thus the need for the great treasure fleets.

  By the time of the War of Spanish Succession, Spain had three treasure fleets in all. The first two sailed across the Atlantic every year or so from Cádiz, Spain, their holds filled with the soldiers, weapons, wines, mining equipment, and manufactured goods needed in their American colonies. One, the Tierra Firma (or mainland) fleet, sailed to Cartagena, in what is now Colombia, where it exchanged its cargo for millions of pesos' worth of Potosi silver. The other, the New Spain fleet, made for Veracruz, Mexico, where it loaded gold and silver from the mines of Mexico and the cargoes brought in from the third fleet. This latter fleet sailed across the Pacific from Acapulco, on Mexico's Pacific coast, to Manila in the Philippines, 9,000 miles away, carrying silver and gold. There, the captains of these "Manila galleons"—normally only one or two—bought huge quantities of silks, porcelain, and other high-end products from Asian merchants. The galleons then turned around, carrying the luxuries back across the Pacific to Acapulco. These goods were transported across Mexico to Veracruz in armed mule trains and loaded aboard the galleons of the New Spain fleet, which joined the Tierra Firma fleet in Havana before sailing through the Straits of Florida and back to Cádiz.