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

by Colin Woodard

  The siege of Guayaquil was a comedy of errors. Under cover of darkness, the invaders paddled up the Guaya River in the boats, while the ships remained outside its mouth. Rogers, Dover, and Courtney each led a detachment of sixty-five men, but Dover, as captain of the marines, was the overall commander. It took two nights to reach the city, the intervening day spent hiding among mosquito-infested mangroves. On approaching the city, they mistook a festive celebration for the cheers of a defending army. Rogers counseled an immediate attack, but Dover preferred to spend another day hiding in the mangroves. The next evening, Dover insisted on negotiating with the Spanish, thereby losing the element of surprise altogether. The governor of Guayaquil, Don Jeronimo Bosa y Solis y Pacheco, dithered for days over the payment of a ransom while his staff evacuated some £100,000 in valuables out of the area. Finally Rogers, disgusted with both the doctor and the governor, usurped command and launched an assault on the city. He captured it with the loss of only two men.

  As most of Guayaquil's valuables had been spirited away, the privateers found only bulky goods and barrels of alcohol. Many of the men got drunk and, in their search for plunder, started digging up corpses in the churchyard, unaware that Guayaquil had recently been stricken by bubonic plague. While the sailors rifled through the corpses, exposing themselves to the black death, Rogers and his officers enjoyed a dinner hosted by Don Jeronimo, who eventually ransomed his city for 26,810 pesos (£6,703), a fraction of what a more timely assault might have captured.

  Any celebration of the assault's success was shortlived. On May 10, 1709, two days out to sea, Rogers's men began falling sick by the dozens. Within a week 140 men were down with the plague and two had died. The fleet had trouble finding water on the rocky islands they stopped at, and the crew of one of the prize ships barely staved off a slave uprising. By June 14, when they reached the island sanctuary of Gorgona, part of modern Colombia, both Rogers and Courtney were sick, and half a dozen men had died.

  They spent six weeks recovering at Gorgona, during which time the crews cleaned and repaired the ships and fitted the Havre de Grace with new masts, rigging, and weapons, while the officers ransomed off some of the prize ships to their captains. A number of slaves were sold to local merchants who came by in canoes, and two black boys were given to Cooke and another officer as rewards for their bravery in attacking the Havre de Grace. An unlucky black girl was turned over to a lecherous Spanish priest, a reward for having helped the privateers trade goods. Rogers wrote that he was sure the priest "will crack a Commandment with her, and wipe off the sin with the Church's indulgence."

  Most of the plague-ridden men recovered in tents ashore, but the morale of the crew did not improve. Indeed, the men believed that Rogers and the officers were cheating them; sixty of them signed a document attesting that they would stop work unless the plunder were more equitably divided. Imbued by Henry Avery perhaps, they didn't feel that Rogers should get fourteen shares to an ordinary seaman's one. Rogers and Courtney had already surrendered their customary right to all plunder found in the captains' cabins of prize vessels, which Rogers reckoned had slashed their personal take by 90 percent. Now they were forced to further increase the crew's portion of the plunder. To make matters worse, the officers were still quarrelling over who should have done what at Guayaquil. Tensions mounted to the point where Rogers felt compelled to have them swear an oath on the Bible that each would come to the aid of the other in case of battle.

  Under these uneasy truces, the privateers left Gorgona in early August 1709, and by early November were off the coast of Baja California, awaiting the arrival of the Manila galleons. Weeks passed. Water and supplies dwindled, and the officers worried they wouldn't have enough to make the 7,000-mile run to Guam. Riddled with shipworm, the Duke and Havre de Grace were leaking, and each passing day made them less likely to survive the long Pacific crossing. On December 20, the officers decided to call it quits and head home while they still could."We all looked very melancholy and dispirited," Rogers wrote in his journal.

  As the ships prepared for their departure, a sail appeared on the western horizon: large, multimasted, and coming from the direction of far-off Manila.

  ***

  The men worked all night, preparing the Duke and Dutchess for action as they sailed through the darkness in the direction of the galleon. Daybreak found the Spanish ship to be just three miles off the Duke's bow. The Dutchess had overshot her prey in the dark and would have to tack a mile back to her. Looking over the Spanish vessel, Rogers realized that the Duke might be able to take her alone. The Nuestra Señora de la Incarnación Disenganio was not a typical galleon, but rather a lumbering ship-rigged vessel of 450 tons and twenty guns. Rogers had a tub of hot chocolate set out on deck for the men and, with this comforting beverage in hand, the crew said their prayers as the first of the Incarnación's cannonballs splashed into the water.

  Rogers ordered the Duke alongside the Spanish vessel and gave the command to fire. His ship rocked as the guns discharged, one after another. The muzzles of the Incarnación's cannon flared in response. A musket ball tore into Rogers's left cheek, splattering much of his upper jaw and a number of his teeth on the deck. As he lay in a growing pool of blood, he could see the enemy's raised forecastle passing along the length of his rail. He tried to bark out an order, but the pain was too excruciating, so he scribbled a command on a scrap of paper. Accordingly, the Duke turned sharply, passed ahead of the Incarnación's bowsprit, and discharged her guns to deadly effect. The Incarnación's French-born captain, Jean Pichberty, struck his colors and the English clambered aboard their greatest prize.

  Captain Pichberty provided his captors with a fascinating piece of information: Two treasure ships had left Manila that year, and the Incarnación was by far the smaller of them. The other, the Nuestra Señora de Begoña, was a proper treasure galleon, a mighty vessel of 900 tons, with twin gun decks and a vast store of oriental luxuries. Rogers issued further written orders for the fleet to escort the Incarnación into the secluded Baja harbor they'd been using as a base, and for the officers to prepare to intercept the Begoña. He then retreated to his cabin, his face and throat grotesquely swollen, barely able to drink. He was not yet aware that a Spanish musket ball was lodged deeply in the roof of his mouth. His colleagues tried to persuade Rogers to stay aboard the Incarnatión while they sailed off to find the Begoña, but he refused to leave the Duke.

  The crew of the Duke was still repairing the ship from its battle with the Incarnation on Christmas Day when the Begoña appeared on the horizon. By the time Rogers got the Duke out of the harbor that evening, the Dutchess and Havre de Grace were already miles out to sea, closing in on the enormous galleon. All night long, he watched the flashes of ships' cannons exchanging broadsides. In the morning, he could see that the Dutchess had been hard hit, her masts damaged and rigging in disorder. That afternoon, Rogers watched the Dutchess and Havre de Grace engage the galleon for hours, only to retreat again. The Duke didn't catch up to the running battle until late afternoon on the twenty-seventh, at which point all three privateers circled the Begoña, bombarding her with cannon fire. In the action, a wood splinter tore through Rogers's left foot, leaving his heel bone sticking out and half of his ankle missing.

  Cooke, commanding the Havre de Grace, estimated the fleet had unloaded three hundred cannonballs and fifty rounds of sail-wrecking bar shot on the Begoña, but their six-pound cannon had little effect on her thick, rock-hard hull. "We might as well have fought a castle of fifty guns as this ship," Cooke lamented. The Begoña's heavy cannon blasted the English ships, punching holes in their hulls and killing or wounding thirty-three. Running low on ammunition, the privateers had to admit they were outmatched and abandoned the Begoña to continue her run to Acapulco. Rogers, unable to speak or walk, prepared the fleet for the long trip home.

  ***

  It took another twenty-two months to reach England, during which time relations between the officers deteriorated. They fought over
who would take command of the Incarnatión, whose holds were packed with silk, spices, jewels, silver, and other finery, later found to be worth over £100,000. Amazingly, Courtney and Cooke were willing to allow Dr. Dover to command the ship. Still in unbearable pain, Rogers mustered the other officers to block the appointment, declaring Dover "utterly uncapable of the office." In the "paper war" that followed, the officers agreed to a compromise, whereby Selkirk and others would actually operate the Incarnación, while Dover held the ceremonial title of Chief Captain. The skirmish made Rogers some bitter enemies.

  In late June 1710, they arrived at the Dutch East Indies capital of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the first friendly port they'd seen in a year and a half. There they cleaned the weakening hulls of the Duke, Dutchess, and Incarnación, and sold the now worm-eaten Havre de Grace for scrap. Courtney and some of the other officers in Dover's faction would later claim that the Duke was still dangerously leaky and in need of a new keel, and that Rogers had refused to address the problem. They also suspected that Rogers had "insideous designs" to sail to Newfoundland or Brazil and trade in contraband East Indian goods. This was a serious allegation, for the British East India Company had a legal monopoly over all British trade with Southeast Asia. Crossing the powerful East India Company, they noted, "may endamage" the expedition. Many in the crew came to believe Rogers had stolen a large quantity of treasure and hid it at Batavia, though this seems both improbable and out of character. We do know that during his six-month stay at Batavia, he underwent surgery to repair his heel and remove the musket ball from the roof of his mouth. He also closely supervised the purchase of necessities for the trip home to avoid any entanglements with the East India Company, though even these precautions didn't save the Bristol men from the insatiable greed of the company's directors.

  When the three ships finally dropped anchor in the Thames on October 14, 1711, the East India Company's agents were waiting for them. The privateers' purchase of provisions at Batavia, they argued, constituted a violation of the company's monopoly. They seized the great "Acapulco ship," already made famous by the London newspapers, and embroiled the privateers' owners in a lengthy legal dispute. In the end, over £6,000 of the £147,975 in proceeds was paid to the company's directors. Once expenses were deducted, each of the owners had doubled his investment. Rogers, his face mutilated, his foot mangled, his brother dead, received about £1,600, much of which was probably consumed by his family's debts back in Bristol. Many of the crew received nothing at all, having been pressed aboard Royal Navy ships as soon as the Duke and Dutchess reached London.

  Rogers returned to his wife and children in Bristol to mend his wounds and prepare his journal for publication. His circumnavigation and successful capture of a Manila ship had made him a national hero, but it had also left him maimed, aggrieved, and little wealthier than the day he'd left home three years earlier.

  ***

  Rogers wasn't the only one recovering from trauma in the late summer of 1712. Across the Atlantic in Jamaica, Edward Thatch and Charles Vane had been witnesses to far worse. On August 28,1712, Jamaica was struck by one of the most powerful hurricanes in its history.

  Of Charles Vane, we know three things: During the War of Spanish Succession he came to reside in Port Royal, he was a professional mariner, and he was acquainted with the soon-to-be-infamous Captain Henry Jennings. When the winds suddenly shifted from north to south on the fateful August night, Vane may well have been aboard Captain Jennings's four-gun sloop Diamond, which was anchored among hundreds of other ships in Port Royal's harbor.

  The harbor, that evening, was particularly crowded due to an embargo on shipping; a French attack was deemed imminent. Because of this, Edward Thatch was probably there as well, resting ashore at Port Royal. Also in Port Royal was the London slave ship captain Lawrence Prince and the Massachusetts merchant master William Wyer, both of whom would one day run afoul of the pirates. Jennings, an established Jamaican merchant captain "of good standing and estate" commanded a vessel with empty holds, whatever cargoes she'd been carrying having long since been unloaded during the island's weeks-long embargo.

  The storm struck around eight at night, "a furious hurricane of lightning, wind, and rain without thunder." It blew down trees, flattened homes and warehouses, toppled sugar works, and tore apart entire fields of sugar cane. A number of people ashore lost their lives when their houses, the hospital, and half of Kingston's main church collapsed, but the greatest carnage took place out in the harbor. At least fifty-four vessels sank, capsized, or were driven ashore, including the sloop-of-war HMS Jamaica and the slaver Joseph Galley, which lost every member of her crew and all 107 slaves chained in her hold. Captain Wyer was on land when the storm sank his slaver, the Ann Galley, drowning 100 slaves and half of his twenty-eight crewmen. Lawrence Prince lost the vessel under his command, the brigantine Adventure, as did Henry Jennings, though neither lost any men. When the sun came up the next morning, it revealed beaches and salt marshes strewn with smashed and dismasted vessels and dozens of corpses. In addition to the slaves, an estimated 400 sailors had lost their lives.

  As Jennings, Vane, Thatch, and other mariners took stock of the destruction in the following weeks, a ship arrived bearing dramatic news from Europe. Queen Anne had declared a cessation of hostilities with France and Spain. The war was coming to an end, and with it, the stream of wealth and plunder brought to Jamaica by the privateering trade. With much of the Jamaican merchant fleet lying wrecked on the shores, hundreds of seamen were out of work, left to fend for themselves amid the wreckage of Kingston and Port Royal. Ironically, another hurricane would bring them riches on a scale the wartime privateers could have only dreamed of.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PEACE

  1713–1715

  WITH THE END of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, tens of thousands of sailors suddenly found themselves out of a job. The Royal Navy, bankrupted by the twelve-year-long world war, rapidly demobilized, mothballing ships and dumping nearly three-quarters of its manpower, over 36,000 men, in the first twenty-four months following the signing of the Peace of Utrecht. Privateering commissions ceased to have any value, their owners compelled to tie their warships up and turn the crews out onto the wharves of England and the Americas. With thousands of sailors begging for work in every port, merchant captains slashed wages by 50 percent; those lucky enough to find work had to survive on twenty-two to twenty-eight shillings (£1.1 to £1.4) a month.

  Peace did not bring safety to those English sailors who found work in the West Indies. Spanish coast guard vessels, the guardas costas, continued to seize English vessels passing to and from Jamaica, declaring them smugglers if so much as a single Spanish coin were found aboard. They always found the "illicit" coins because they were the de facto currency of all of England's Caribbean colonies. Thirty-eight Jamaican vessels were so seized in the first two years of peace, costing the vessel owners nearly £76,000. When the crews resisted, the guardas costas often killed a few in retribution; the rest spent months or years in Cuban prisons. "The seas," the governor of Jamaica would later recall, had become "more dangerous than in time of war."

  As the months passed, the streets, taverns and boarding houses of Port Royal grew crowded with angry, destitute mariners. Merchants, stung by their losses, sent out fewer vessels, further reducing the number of jobs for sailors. Those sailors who had been captured—some more than once—were physically abused by the Spanish and financially pinched by their employers, who reduced their losses by not paying them for the time they were serving in prison. "Resentment and the want of employ," one resident later recalled, "were certainly the motives to a course of life which I am of [the] opinion that most or many of them would not have taken up had they been redressed or could by any lawful mean have supported themselves."

  Benjamin Hornigold was one of the very first to turn to this other "course of life," and he took Edward Thatch with him. They had both served aboard Jamaican privateers dur
ing the war and now found themselves stuck in Port Royal Harbor. By the summer of 1713, they had had enough of poverty and the Spanish coast guard. Hornigold suggested to a number of former shipmates and drinking buddies that they put their skills together to solve both problems. They should go back to attacking Spanish shipping, avenging and enriching themselves at the same time. All they needed was a small vessel, a few good men, and a secure nest from which to launch their raids. Hornigold knew just the place.

  The Bahamas, every Jamaican knew, was a perfect buccaneering base. The western end of the 700-island archipelago stood alongside the Straits of Florida, the primary shipping channel for every Europe-bound vessel in South America, Mexico, and the Greater Antilles, including Spanish Cuba, English Jamaica, and the new French colony on the island of Hispaniola. Sailing vessels had little choice but to pass this way in order to reach the colonies of the Eastern seaboard, or to catch the tradewinds back to Europe. Pirates could hide among the maze of islands, taking advantage of a hundred little-known anchorages where water and fresh fruit could be collected, vessels careened and repaired, and plunder safely divided. Nobody would have dared to follow them into the tight channels between those islands without an experienced Bahamian pilot aboard; with hundreds of low, sandy scraps of land, one could easily become lost and subject their craft to sharp reefs and uncharted shoals. More importantly, since attacking the Spaniards was technically against the law, the Bahamas didn't have a government, and hadn't since the Franco-Spanish invasion of July 1703. Thus, late in that first peacetime summer of 1713, Hornigold and a small band of followers left Port Royal and sailed 450 miles north, passing between Cuba and Hispaniola, and into the coral-studded labyrinth of the Bahamas.