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

by Colin Woodard

  Rogers's proposal was simple. He asked the company officials to allow him to carry slaves from Madagascar to the company's base at Benkoelen, Sumatra.* The Delicia would undertake the journey as a "separate stock ship," meaning its owners would finance the journey themselves. The company would either buy the slaves Rogers had rounded up or pay him a per capita shipping fee for his services. Either way, the company would get a good return without any investment at all. The company men, perhaps tickled at having the famous author and war hero begging them for work, granted him a contract. Several weeks later, Rogers was on his way south astride the quarterdeck of his new command.

  The Delicia arrived on the eastern coast of Madagascar in March 1714. At the time there were a dozen or so English pirates living in the harbor he visited, apparently led by a Thomas Collins, one of Henry Avery's crewmen. Their "Kingdom of Pirates" was a far more modest affair than the novelists and playwrights were making it out to be back in London. Most of them had been on the island for a decade or more, a collection of pirates, ex-cons, and deserters enjoying an easier, simpler existence in this tropical no-man's-land. The local Malagasy people practiced polygamy, which seemed sensible to the English outlaws. Most of them had several wives and large numbers of mulatto children as well as a small army of slaves, whom they had acquired through trade or by intervening in the tribal wars that plagued the island. They sheltered their extended families in fortified houses hidden in the woods near the shore, which they encircled with high wooden walls and ditches. Paths to and from these compounds were made intentionally confusing and convoluted, to give their owners plenty of time to scatter into the woods if they were discovered. That's exactly what they did when Woodes Rogers arrived in the harbor. They no doubt feared his ship, which looked, with its long rows of guns, like one of His Majesty's frigates.

  When Rogers and his men first came ashore there were only Malagasy tribesmen to greet them, and no sign of the pirates. Rogers offered to trade for slaves, knowing that a slave could be had here for ten shillings (£0.50) in trade goods, a seventh or eighth the going price in West Africa. Seeing that the visitors had come to buy people, the pirates came out of the woods. "I cannot say that they were ragged, since they had no clothes," recalled the author of A General History of the Pyrates, who later interviewed Rogers about his exploits. "They had nothing to cover them but the skins of beasts without any tanning ... nor a shoe or stocking, so they looked like the pictures of Hercules in the Lion's Skin ... the most savage figures that a man's imagination can frame." A lucrative trade ensued, with Rogers buying "great numbers" of the pirates' Malagasy slaves in return for clothes, gunpowder, and metal tools.

  Rogers tarried on the island for nearly two months, entertaining the pirates and gathering intelligence on their society. He learned that the natives were involved in continuous warfare and would present little resistance to would-be colonizers. The pirates were, for the moment, weak and disorganized, lacking an ocean-going vessel to wreak any havoc. Morale was low, and Rogers felt they could easily be persuaded to surrender in return for clemency. It would need to be done quickly, however: Fifty sailors from the Dutch ship Schoonouwen were stranded on the island's western shore and were planning to join the pirates.

  The pirates, for their part, kept a close eye on the Delicia and her crew, hoping for a chance to seize the powerful ship. The plan was to wait until nightfall, then swarm onto the decks from their little boats, overwhelming the watch. They even developed friendly relations with some of Rogers's crew, and may have recruited a few conspirators among them. But Rogers had enough experience to sniff out the brewing danger. He cut off contact between the pirates and his men and organized a strong watch aboard the Delicia, day and night. The pirates "found it vain to make any attempt," and by the time Rogers departed had even told him what they'd been contemplating.

  Rogers had managed to convince many of the pirates that their best hope was to return to England. He helped them draw up a formal petition to Queen Anne, begging her forgiveness and pardon and declaring their wish to come home and live peacefully as honest men. Petition in hand and a shipload of slaves chained in the hold, Rogers ordered the anchors raised and a course set back to Cape Town. He arrived there in May 1714, put the pirates' petition on a London-bound ship, and sailed for Sumatra, where he needed to sell his slave cargo.

  Slave ships of this period weren't purpose-built like their nineteenth-century descendents, their holds split into low-ceilinged slave decks. Captains regarded slaves as just another cargo to pack in the hold, albeit one that needed feeding. As a veteran of the African trade, Rogers probably followed its practices on the Delicia. The slaves were typically shackled two-by-two and packed into the hold so tightly that each had barely enough space to lie down. Women and girls were confined separately from the men and boys, probably through the use of a tarp or temporary partition. An armed crewman stood sentinel at each hatchway, ready to fire upon any of the people who tried to rush the deck where a chest of loaded muskets and several explosive grenades were kept. If the slaves made for the main deck, the officers could kill great numbers of them from the raised aft deck, whose rails were mounted with small swivel cannon. When the slaves were taken out to be fed, gunners kept these swivel guns trained and ready to spray them with partridge shot. In poor weather the slaves remained confined in the hot, poorly ventilated hold, gasping amid the sweat, feces, and urine. Some inevitably came down with dysentery, which could result in the deck becoming "so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from [the slaves' sickness] that it resembled a slaughter-house." Disease spread quickly in such circumstances, and mortality was high among slaves and the crew, with both populations losing roughly 40 percent of their numbers on a typical passage. And if smallpox, malaria, dengue fever, measles, and dysentery didn't carry them off, there was also the risk of suicide: The imprisoned people were often so terrified and despondent that they had to be watched closely while on deck lest they throw themselves into the ocean, chains and all.

  Few were troubled by slavery then—Europeans, Africans, or Malagasy—for they all participated in the slave trade as buyers or sellers. Rogers was no exception. His family fortune had been largely built on the African slave trade, and slaves were a lucrative part of the spoils of his round-the-world privateering expedition. The miserable Malagasy in his ship's hold were just another way of paying the bills, a way of earning capital to invest in larger schemes. We don't know how many slaves the Delicia carried to Sumatra, only that Rogers delivered them there in the summer of 1714, loaded his ship with company freight, and headed back to England. He was eager to get home, eager to get on with his plan to flush out a pirate's nest and seize it for the empire.

  He never saw Madagascar again.

  ***

  Back in the Bahamas, Benjamin Hornigold and Henry Jennings were getting off to a bad start. There may have been bad blood from their privateering days in Jamaica; or Jennings, an educated ship captain with a comfortable estate, may have looked down on Hornigold, who was likely a penniless sailor. Jennings apparently felt that only those who had one of Lord Hamilton's privateering commissions should be attacking the Spaniards. Otherwise, you would be participating in little better than piracy.

  Shortly after arriving in Nassau, Jennings relieved Hornigold of one of his prizes, a small Spanish trading sloop. Having nearly 200 well-armed men and at least two sloops under his command, there was little Hornigold could do to stop him. Some of Jennings's men moved aboard the prize vessel, relieving the crowding on the other sloops. After a few days of revelry and the orderly distribution of the crew's portion of the prize money, the flotilla left for Jamaica. They were privateers, after all, and had to condemn their prizes at the Vice-Admiralty Court, an office presided over by none other than Governor Hamilton himself.

  They would be back sooner than they thought.

  On their way to Jamaica, Jennings's flotilla was recognized by Cuban mariners. The Spaniards followed Jennings all the w
ay down Cuba's shore, through the Windward Passage, and right to the mouth of Port Royal Harbor. Governor Torres y Ayala would hear of it, and when he did, he would be furious.

  The Barsheba dropped anchor in Jamaica on January 26,1716. Thatch, Jennings, and Wills had only been away for about two months, but in that time, Lord Hamilton's situation had changed drastically. Around New Year's, word had reached the colonies that a "Terrible, Hellish Plot and Conspiracy" against King George had been put down back in Britain. "The Tower, Exchequer, and Bank of England were all to be seized," the Boston News-Letter breathlessly reported,"the city of London to be set fire in many places [and] insurrections to have been in several places of England." James Stuart was to invade with an army from France, "all on the 25th of September last." The main Jacobite army had risen up in Scotland, with 2,000 rebels commanded by Lord Hamilton's brother, Lieutenant General George Hamilton, but they had lost the initiative to the king's forces. Simultaneous risings had been planned in Wales and Devonshire, but the authorities had gotten wind of them and arrested the plotters. By late January, the news from Britain was bad for Hamilton. The uprising was clearly failing, and the king had placed a price on his brother George's head. The governor knew the time had come to start covering his tracks.

  Jennings and Wills brought their treasure to Hamilton in accordance with their commissions. They may not have volunteered that they had seized the treasure from the salvage camp, as opposed to the wrecks themselves, but they didn't really need to. There was simply far too much money for the privateers to have salvaged in so brief a time. Still, it was in nobody's interest to ask. Hamilton later alleged that he didn't take the shares of the treasure that were due him, "for that I heard it was taken from the shoar." He didn't arrest Jennings and his colleagues, either. They went about, free and at liberty, enjoying the pleasures of the land and spending their ill-gotten gains, as did the crews of several other privateers Hamilton had commissioned. At the end of February, when Jennings approached the governor about obtaining permission to depart on another cruise, Hamilton personally signed his departure papers. As he awaited further news of the rebellion, Hamilton kept his privateers at arm's length, neither stopping them nor arresting them.

  In early March, Jennings sent word to his men and fellow captains that he was making another cruise to the Spanish wrecks. Several responded, happy for a chance to get some treasure of their own. One was Leigh Ashworth, who had assumed the command of one of Hamilton's other privateers, the fifty-ton sloop-of-war Mary. Two others joined without commission—Samuel Liddell of the Cocoa Nut and James Carnegie of the Discovery—placing their small sloops under Jennings's overall command. Charles Vane, rough and mean, eagerly rejoined Jennings's crew.

  The sloops left Bluefields on the morning of March 9, racing out of the harbor and away from Jamaica. That night the four vessels were separated by the wind, but a day or two later they regrouped at Isla de los Piños,* an uninhabited little island nestled behind Cuba's easternmost point. Their plan was to sail around the far end of Cuba, follow the Gulf Stream straight to the wrecks, and loot whatever was found. They rounded Cape Corrientes on April 2, and on the third were beating their way along Cuba's northeastern coast when the lookout on the Barsheba cried out.

  ***

  A few miles to the west, Sam Bellamy saw the unidentified sloop fall off the wind, bearing down toward him, followed by four consorts. He and Paulsgrave Williams didn't like the look of her.

  Bellamy and Williams, deeply tanned, their hair bleached from months under the tropical sun, had likely arrived at the Spanish wrecks in January, shortly after Jennings's men had raided Palmar de Ayz. The work was hard, dangerous, and competitive. By the end of the month, there were seven or eight other English vessels anchored where the Regla and San Roman had gone down, but try as they might, none of them were able to locate the main hull sections of the great ships. Instead they had to content themselves with scattered cargo and coins; after weeks of work, the wreckers had scrounged up only 5,000 to 6,000 pieces of eight (£1,250–1,500) to share between hundreds of men. When Captain Ayala Escobar arrived from Havana with reinforcements on January 22 and dispersed the Englishmen, Bellamy and Williams were probably just as happy to have been driven off.

  They made their way south, past the tip of Florida and the western end of Cuba, and down to the shores of Central America to the Bay of Honduras. They probably came to recruit men. The area was then a rough no-man's-land inhabited by Mosquito Indians and gangs of rough and wild English loggers called Baymen. The latter lived in huts in the steaming swamps of what are now Belize, and the Yucatán and Campeche, in Mexico. They were in desperate shape, their food supplies having run short during the previous fall, causing the death by starvation of several loggers at their main camp in Campeche. At least 200 others decided to turn pirate, building great sailing canoes and heading out on the dangerous passage to New Providence or the Spanish wrecks at Palmar de Ayz. In February 1716, the Spanish attacked Campeche, capturing and killing many of the remaining loggers and dispersing the rest. By the time Bellamy and Williams reached the Bay of Honduras a few weeks later, most everyone in the logging camps was looking for a way out. The two had little trouble finding men willing to become pirates.

  By late March, Bellamy and Williams were heading a pirate band operating out of a pair of periaguas, the very same type of sailing canoe that Hornigold and Thatch had started with two years earlier. Somewhere in the Bay of Honduras they boarded their first known prize, a Dutch vessel commanded by a John Cornelison. The band looted the vessel and forced a sailor to join them on pain of death, and shortly thereafter, seized control of an English sloop under a Captain Young. While their band of wreckers and Baymen searched the sloop for valuables, Bellamy and Williams tied their periaguas astern and forced Young to take them back over to Cuba. Unlike Hornigold and Jennings, they had no illusions about being privateers. They were pirates, pure and simple, and Bellamy had little sympathy for the shipowners and captains who had made his life so miserable. He argued that the band should act as Robin Hood's men, taking from the wealthy merchants and enriching the poor sailors. Williams, a wealthy merchant himself, was likely to have been motivated by sympathy for the Scots and their deposed Stuart king, or simply by the money.

  When, off the coast of Cuba, Jennings's four sloops began bearing down on them, Bellamy and Williams saw their British colors and, fearing capture, decided to make a run for it. They ordered their men—who numbered around forty—to get all the valuables in the periaguas and prepare to abandon ship. As Jennings's Barsheba came up alongside, Bellamy's gang jumped into the sailing canoes, cast off the lines, and began rowing as hard as they could, straight into the wind.

  ***

  From the deck of the Barsheba, Jennings watched the periaguas cast off. He could see there was little point in pursuing them: Tacking against the wind, his sloops wouldn't be able to catch them before they made it inside the reefs protecting the Cuban shore. Instead, he came alongside the sloop and hailed its master, Captain Young. Young, expecting rescue, explained that the people in the two periaguas "were a parcel of villains" and had just made off with all his money. Young assumed that Governor Hamilton's privateers were there to fight pirates and protect merchants like him. He was soon disappointed.

  Jennings was in no hurry to let Captain Young go. He put some of his men aboard and signaled to his consorts. The fleet would make its way to nearby Bahía Honda, a sheltered anchorage on a sparsely settled stretch of the Cuban coast. There they would decide what to do with Captain Young and his sloop.

  Upon anchoring outside the narrow entrance of the anchorage a few hour later, Jennings and his men were greeted with a wonderful surprise. Lying in the keyhole-shaped harbor was a large armed merchant ship flying French colors, much of her crew on shore collecting water and firewood. With Jennings's fleet at the harbor entrance, there could be no escape. The wind was blowing off the land, however, and even in their nimble sloops it would be impossib
le for Jennings's fleet to tack into the narrow entrance. He gave orders for the five sloops to drop anchor while he tried to devise a plan.

  Examining the ship through his eyeglass, Jennings could see it would be suicide to undertake a direct attack. Stealth, it seemed, was the best approach. He sent three of his men in a dory to assess the situation. They rowed into the harbor and up to the French ship and hailed the captain pleasantly. They were coming into the harbor to collect water, they told him. The French captain invited them onboard, and while engaging in small talk the Englishman had a look around.

  They were aboard the frigate-rigged ship St. Marie of Rochelle under Captain D'Escoubet, a wealthy man who owned a quarter of the ship and cargo. The pirates guessed there were forty-five men aboard and fourteen to sixteen guns, though the ship was capable of carrying twice that. The St. Marie would make an excellent prize.

  When the dory returned with this news, Jennings called a meeting of the captains. He declared his desire to ambush the St. Marie, label her a pirate, and take her back to Jamaica as a prize. Samuel Liddell, captain of the Cocoa Nut, argued this would be a terrible mistake. He told the other three captains that he'd seen the St. Marie in Vera Cruz, Mexico, some months before and that she was clearly "a trader on a lawful occasion."