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

by Colin Woodard

  ***

  Blackbeard and Bonnet spent the winter of 1717–18 in Spanish territory, their movements and activities lost to British authorities. Spanish mariners told their Jamaican counterparts that a pirate known only as "the Great Devil" was cruising the Gulf of Mexico, his ship filled with "much treasure." Not long thereafter, Bonnet and Blackbeard were reported to be "cruising about" the Mexican gulf port of Vera Cruz with four sloops and "a ship of 42 guns." They were said to be hunting for a galley called the Royal Prince, and to have boasted that "they would have the Adventure man-of-war if they can." It was quite a boast: the thirty-six-gun HMS Adventure, a 438-ton fifth-rate based in Jamaica, was the most powerful Royal Navy frigate in the entire Western Hemisphere at the time.

  By late March, Blackbeard and Bonnet had separated in the Bay of Honduras. Blackbeard took the Queen Anne's Revenge to Turneffe Island, a great ring of mangroves and islets of coral sand located twenty-five miles off the coast of what is now Belize, and a popular rest spot for English merchantmen. Bonnet sailed the Revenge a hundred miles further south and was cruising for prizes off the Bay Islands, three coral-ringed islands off the coast of what is now Honduras.

  On March 28, 1718, Bonnet's men spotted a large ship near Roatán, the largest of the Bay Islands. The ship, the Protestant Caesar of Boston, was an enormous 400-ton merchantman, the muzzles of twenty-six cannon protruding from her gunports. She was more than four times the size of the Revenge, which carried just ten guns and fifty men. Despite the odds, Bonnet and his crew decided to attack, risking a replay of the eccentric planter's disastrous engagement with the Spanish man-of-war the year before. They caught up to the Protestant Caesar at nine at night, cleverly cutting behind the big ship's vulnerable stern. Bonnet's men fired five cannon and a volley of musket shot, only to be answered by two stern guns and a hail of bullets. As the smoke cleared, Bonnet yelled out that if the ship fired another gun, they would give "no quarter," a threat to kill everyone aboard. The Protestant Caesar's veteran captain, William Wyer of Boston, knew a bluff when he saw it. He let off another salvo of his cannon. The running battle continued for three hours, cannon flashing in the night, until Bonnet finally gave up and retreated into the darkness.

  Bonnet's men were disgruntled: Clearly their commander had learned little from his yearlong apprentinceship with Blackbeard. They voted to travel to Turneffe, where they could recuperate from their ill-advised battle. They also made it clear to Bonnet that his command was on very thin ice.

  On April 2, the Revenge sailed into Turneffe's five-mile-wide lagoon. To the crew's relief, the Queen Anne's Revenge was anchored inside. A number of them begged Blackbeard to use his influence to terminate Bonnet's command. Blackbeard asked Bonnet's men to call a meeting of their company, where he proposed they replace Bonnet with one of Blackbeard's officers, a man named Richards. The men accepted the plan, whereupon Bonnet was transported to the Queen Anne's Revenge. There Blackbeard reportedly told his wayward colleague that "as he had not been used to the fatigues and care of such a post," it would be better for him to stay with Blackbeard, where he could "live easy, at his pleasure, in such a ship as [this], where he would not be obliged to perform the necessary duties of a sea voyage." Bonnet had been placed under house arrest and would remain so for many months to come.

  The pirates stayed at Turneffe for several more days, recuperating, gorging on fish and sea turtle, and capturing wayward vessels. Their first prize was an eighty-ton logwood-cutting sloop from Jamaica called the Adventure that had blundered into Turneffe lagoon. The pirates found the sloop to their liking and kept it, and made its commander, David Herriot, a prisoner aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge. Blackbeard's mate, Israel Hands, took control of the Adventure in his stead. A few days later they seized at least four more sloops, three from Jamaica and one, the Land of Promise, from Rhode Island. Blackbeard's men burned one of the Jamaican sloops because of a grudge against its captain, but they raised red flags aboard the others and added them to what was now a five-vessel fleet. Around April 6 they left Turneffe, Blackbeard telling one of his captives that they were "bound to the Bay of Honduras to burn the ship Protestant Caesar" to ensure that Captain Wyer "might not brag when he went to New England that he had beat a pirate."

  On the morning of April 8, the pirates found the Protestant Caesar at anchor off the coast of Honduras, her holds half-filled with freshly cut logwood. When Wyer spotted the pirates—"a large ship and a sloop with Black Flags and Deaths Heads and three more sloops with bloody flags"—he called all his men on deck to ask if they were willing to defend the ship from the attackers. According to Wyer, his men answered that "if they were Spaniards they would stand by him as long as they had life, but if they were pirates they would not fight." When it became clear that the attackers were the sloop they had fought earlier, now backed by the infamous Blackbeard, Wyer's men "all declared they would not fight, and quitted the ship, believing they would be murdered by the sloop's company." For three days, Captain Wyer and his men sheltered amid the jungle foliage and piles of logwood on shore, watching the pirates plunder their massive ship. On April 11, Blackbeard sent a messenger to Wyer, telling him that if he surrendered peacefully, no harm would come to him. Blackbeard had a fearsome reputation among the merchant captains of the Americas, but the pirate had never been known to go back on his word and, as far as anyone knew, had never killed a man. Wyer decided to trust him, and surrendered. He was taken to Blackbeard, who told him he had been smart not to burn or sabotage the Protestant Caesar, "else his men on board his sloop would have done him damage for fighting with them." Unfortunately Blackbeard also had some bad news. He had to burn the Protestant Caesar because she was from Boston, and his gang was committed to destroy all Massachusetts vessels in revenge "for executing the six pirates" who had survived the Cape Cod shipwrecks. The next day Wyer watched as the pirates went aboard his ship and set her alight, logwood and all. True to his word, Blackbeard released Wyer and his men unharmed, along with the crew of the sloop Land of Promise; all the captives eventually got back to Boston.

  Blackbeard's company also resolved to head north. Spring was in the air, and the time had come to shift their raids to the eastern seaboard of North America. First, however, they would stop in at New Providence Island and check up on the status of their pirate brethren.

  ***

  After humiliating Vincent Pearse, Vane and his band didn't return to Nassau for three and a half weeks, during which time they unleashed a reign of terror on the Bahamian archipelago. Unlike Bellamy and Blackbeard, who avoided unnecessary force, Vane presided over an orgy of violence and cruelty that helped royal authorities paint all the Bahamian pirates as monsters. In this single cruise, which lasted from April 4 to 28, 1718, his modest band captured a dozen merchant vessels, all surrendering without a fight. Nonetheless, they treated most of their captives barbarously.

  The worst treatment was reserved for crews hailing from Bermuda, which accounted for seven of the twelve prizes. Bermudans visited the Bahamas regularly to rake salt—the primary food preservative in those days—among the uninhabited Turks and Caicos islands, which comprised the eastern part of the archipelago. As they tended to follow the same routes to the islands, they made an especially easy target. Vane's men had recently developed a particular animus toward them, apparently because their governor had recently detained a pirate named Thomas Brown, on suspicion of piracy. Brown had been released—probably for lack of evidence—but Vane wished to retaliate all the same. It was as if someone had messed with a "made" man in the Mafia; his colleagues were bound to mete out a lesson to the neighborhood.

  Edward North's sloop William & Mary fell into Vane's hands off Rum Cay on April 14. On boarding the vessel, Vane's men immediately began beating North, his passengers, and crew, insisting they give up all their treasures. The little vessel had little of value aboard: seventeen Spanish pistoles (£17), some foodstuffs, and ten ounces of ambergris, a hard substance produced in the heads of some whales tha
t often washed up on Bahamian beaches and was collected to make jewelry. Dissatisfied with the take, Vane seized one of North's sailors, bound his hands and feet, and lashed him to the topside of the William & Mary's bowsprit. The pirates then stuck a loaded musket in the sailor's mouth and burning matches inside the helpless sailor's eyelids; if he didn't confess what money was hidden onboard, they would let the matches burn down to his eyeballs and blind him, after which he would be shot. After this, Vane felt confident that they had gotten everything of value, save for North's black crewman, whom they seized as plunder.

  Even as these interrogations were taking place, Vane's company captured a second Bermuda sloop, the Diamond, and brought her alongside the William & Mary. As before, they began beating Captain John Tibby and his crew and picked out one of his sailors for further torture. They tied up the unlucky man, Nathaniel Catling, put a noose around his neck and hoisted him up the mast, kicking and gagging. There he hung, face turning blue, until he passed out. The pirates cut him down and left him for dead on the deck. Some time later, Catling began to regain consciousness. One of the pirates drew his cutlass and slashed the prostrate seaman across his collarbone. He raised his cutlass to continue hacking the man to death, but one of the other pirates stopped him, saying, as Catling later recalled, that it was "too great a cruelty." The pirates looted the Diamond of valuables—300 pieces of eight (£75) and "a negro man"—and forced all her crew aboard the Lark, which the pirates were now calling the Ranger. Then they hacked down both of the Bermudan vessel's masts and set the Diamond on fire. Before letting the men go on the crippled William & Mary, they bragged about mistreating the crews of two other Bermuda sloops the week before. They told North and Tibby that when they got home to Bermuda, they should tell Governor Bennett that the pirates "will join all the forces they can and come and take [his] country" and "make a new Madagascar out of it." During their drunken celebrations, North and other witnesses recalled Vane's men toasting "damnation to King George," the government, and "all the Higher Powers," while threatening to occupy Bermuda that very summer. Vane's men, it seems, were well apprised of the appeals the pirates had forwarded to the exiled James Stuart, and were optimistic they would soon be receiving support from that quarter.

  By the time he returned to Nassau on April 28, Vane had taken three more sloops from Bermuda, three from Jamaica, one from New York, and a Boston-bound ship. In the process, his crew had swelled to ninety or more, most recruited from the Jamaican vessels, whose sailors may have known Vane from his Port Royal days. They had probably garnered only £1,000 or so in treasure, but their actions had snuffed out legitimate trade into the Bahamas. If the pirates weren't in control of the archipelago's commerce, Vane reasoned, then nobody would be.

  Vane must have been pleased to find that HMS Phoenix had withdrawn from Nassau, leaving the pirates' control of the island uncontested. He was even happier when a massive warship came into the harbor a few days later, the death's head flag at her masthead, accompanied by a pirate sloop-of-war and two prize sloops. Blackbeard had returned.

  Blackbeard was in command of some 700 men, which nearly quadrupled the pirate population of New Providence Island overnight. For a few short days, the streets of Nassau returned to life as Blackbeard traded stories with Vane, Paulsgrave Williams, and the city's other die-hard pirate captains. His company likely divided their plunder at this point, as some three hundred of his men left his company. Some undoubtedly planned to wait until Governor Rogers arrived to take the king's pardon. Others, including Blackbeard's gunner, William Cunningham, wanted to enjoy himself ashore before returning to piracy. Some may have been Jacobite stalwarts who wished to stay behind with Vane to await reinforcements from the Stuart court-in-exile. A few may have snuck off with Paulsgrave Williams, who let it be known that he was soon to leave the island for Africa to prey on European slaveships.

  One can imagine Williams and Blackbeard sharing a drink under the sailcloth awnings of one of Nassau's open-air alehouses, exchanging the stories of the destruction of the Whydah, the capture of the Queen Anne's Revenge, and close encounters with His Majesty's warships. They likely compared notes on their former commodore, Benjamin Hornigold, then in Jamaica, wondering if he had really given up piracy. Blackbeard heard that a fellow Bristolian, Woodes Rogers, was to be the new governor of the Bahamas. If Edward Thatch was indeed a pseudonym to protect Blackbeard's family, this news ruled out any possibility of accepting the pardon in Nassau, as Rogers would recognize him. Blackbeard had two choices: stay with Vane and try to resist Rogers or leave Nassau for good.

  A day or two later, Blackbeard called all hands aboard his five-vessel fleet. A few new faces appeared, pirates who had no intention of giving up life "on the account," including Hornigold's old quartermaster, John Martin. The greatest pirate fleet afloat weighed anchor from Nassau, sails set for the Straits of Florida, Palmar de Ayz, and the Spanish wrecks.

  ***

  At virtually the same moment, thousands of miles away, another fleet was weighing anchor in the River Thames, south of London, the one that would carry Woodes Rogers to the Bahamas.

  It was an impressive expedition, one that had taken Rogers many months to assemble. There were seven vessels in all, five of them the property of Rogers and his business partners. He sailed on the Delicia, his 460-ton private man-of-war, with a crew of ninety and thirty guns, accompanied by the 300-ton transport Willing Mind (twenty guns, twenty-two crewmen); the 135-ton ship Samuel (six guns, twenty-six crewmen); and the private sloop-of-war Buck (six guns, twelve men). Together these four vessels carried the Independent Company of one hundred soldiers, many of them recently discharged from the Chelsea military hospital; 130 male colonists with their wives and children, most of them Protestant refugees from France, Switzerland, or Germany's Palatinate; food and supplies to feed and clothe all of these people for fourteen months; all of the necessary tools and materials to, in the words of Roger's coinvestors, "build forts & houses," clear fields, and plant them with "sugar, ginger, indigo, cotton ... and tobacco for snuff equal to that of Havana." Rogers, convinced the pirates would respond to spiritual teachings, had even brought aboard a parcel of religious pamphlets from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Altogether, the expedition represented an investment by the Copartners of £11,000, toward which Rogers had contributed £3,000.

  In addition to the soldiers, crew, and colonists, Rogers was accompanied by several gentlemen who intended to help him bring order to the fallen colony. Chief among them was Sir William Fairfax, a twenty-six-year-old nobleman whose family owned 5.3 million acres of Virginia, who intended to serve as Rogers's chief justice. Fairfax, like his aristocratic colleagues, considered the Bahamas too dangerous for his wife to join him for the time being. "Though I expect to be [but] a little while separated from my wife ... I trust in God she will not want anything to comfort her sorrows," he wrote his mother from aboard the Delicia just before departing.

  Escorting Rogers's vessels to Nassau were three Royal Navy warships: the fifth-rate frigate HMS Milford (420 tons, thirty guns) under Commodore Peter Chamberlaine; the sixth-rate HMS Rose (273 tons, twenty guns) and the sloop-of-war Shark (113 tons, ten guns), each of which carried 100 men. These men-of-war represented the most concentrated naval force ever deployed against the Bahamian pirates. Taken with Rogers's well-armed vessels, they represented an overwhelming force: seven armed ships manned by 550 soldiers and sailors. As they sailed out of the mouth of the Thames on the twenty-second of April 1718, few aboard the ships had any doubt that the Republic of Pirates was about to meet its end.

  ***

  Blackbeard had come to a decision that he hadn't shared with his crew: The time for overt piracy was coming to a close. King George's pardon had split the pirates' ranks, causing the surrender of a great many of their best leaders and the scattering of so many others. He may have been impressed at Charles Vane's commitment to hold down the pirate base at all costs, but Blackbeard was too prudent a strategist to comm
it to a lost cause. Unless they received reinforcements from the Stuart king, the few hundred pirates in Nassau had little hope of repelling a concentrated military force of the kind Governor Rogers could be expected to have with him. Blackbeard wasn't like Vane. He didn't want to go out in a blaze of glory. Blackbeard would rather be the pirate who got away with it all, perhaps setting himself up as an eighteenth-century version of The Godfather: a wealthy and powerful crime boss operating with the collusion of some authorities, his role undetectable or impossible to prove to the rest. He had a good idea where to set himself up in this role. First, however, he needed one more big score.

  The disgraced Stede Bonnet could have given him the idea to blockade Charleston, whose commerce was forced to travel over a shoal and through the narrow mouth of the harbor. Bonnet had blockaded the South Carolina capital in the Revenge the year before, but had to confine himself to a hit-and-run operation, fleeing the scene before the city's residents came after him in their own sloops. With his powerful fleet, however, Blackbeard had nothing to fear from the little armed sloops of Charleston's merchants. The Royal Navy had no permanent presence in the Carolinas, and even if a frigate happened to be in the harbor, it would be grossly outgunned by the Queen Anne's Revenge and her three consort sloops. The pirates could bring the entire colony to its knees and might even consider plundering the town itself. The pirates agreed to set a course for Charleston.

  As they sailed north, some of the men came down with an unspecified ailment, possibly syphilis acquired from the prostitutes of Nassau. Their surgeon lacked the medicines considered necessary for treatment, and their acquisition was quickly becoming a priority. The pirate fleet took several vessels in the Florida Straits, including two sloops and a brigantine, hoping to garner intelligence as well as plunder. They hit pay dirt. Two of these were commanded by members of the old Flying Gang. Josiah Burgess, one of Nassau's veteran pirate sloop captains, was sailing back to the Bahamas from Charleston in the ten-ton sloop Providence with bottled ale and two earthenware plates, two products apparently in demand at the pirates' lair. Burgess was happy to share what he knew of Charleston, where he had spent several weeks after receiving his pardon. He'd traveled there with a number of their pirate friends, many of whom were there now, and would be happy to see their old pals. Blackbeard was pleased to hear there were no naval vessels in the harbor, but there were a number of merchant ships preparing to depart for London and New England. Blackbeard's men bought all of Burgess's cargo and sent him back to Charleston to act as their eyes and ears ashore; South Carolina's customs records show that he returned in Charleston only a few days after he had departed, his vessel empty, just hours before Blackbeard's fleet cut off the harbor.