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

by Colin Woodard

  A few days after meeting Burgess, the pirates also intercepted the thirty-five-ton sloop Ann of Jamaica, commanded by another reformed pirate, Leigh Ashworth. Ashworth had sailed a different vessel from Nassau to Charleston a few weeks earlier that had been filled with contraband. Taking the pardon, Ashworth had purchased the Ann in a family member's name and filled her hold with barrels of tar, pitch, and beef to sell in Port Royal. He was ready to retire to his Jamaican manor, he told Blackbeard. Ashworth may have stiffened Blackbeard's resolve to slip into semilegitimacy, but not before raiding Charleston.

  The pirate fleet arrived off Charleston Bar, nine miles south of town, on May 22, 1718, and seized the pilot boat before it could sail to town to raise an alarm. Then they spread their four vessels out across the approaches to the bar and waited, spiderlike, for ships to fall into their web. Within a few days they captured at least five vessels: two ships outbound to London, two ships inbound from England, and a tiny eight-ton sloop, the William, headed home to Philadelphia.* The captain of the latter, Thomas Hurst, was a familiar face: He had been in Nassau recently, where he had purchased eight "great guns" from the pirates there, guns that were still in his little sloop's hold. One day he was trading with pirates, now he was their prisoner.

  The first of these captures proved the most valuable. The 178-ton ship Crowley had been headed out of the river, bound for London. Her holds were stuffed with over 1,200 barrels, but these turned out to be filled with pitch, tar, and rice, Carolina exports that weren't particularly useful to the pirates. In her cabins, however, the Crowley carried a number of paying passengers, among them many of the most distinguished citizens of Charleston. While the pirates looted the Crowley of provisions and supplies, the frightened passengers were rowed over to the Queen Anne's Revenge, where they were thoroughly interrogated: who were they, what was their vessel carrying, and what other vessels were at anchor in Charleston? One turned out to be Samuel Wragg, a member of the colony's governing council who owned 24,000 acres in the province, and was returning to England with his four-year-old son, William. Blackbeard realized these captives were worth more to the pirates than the cargo in the Crowley's hold. It was time to call a general council to decide their fate.

  In preparation for the meeting, all the pirates' captives—a total of eighty people from various vessels—were stuffed into the Crowley's hold and locked in darkness. "This was done with [such] hurry and precipitation that it struck a great terror in the unfortunate people, verily believing they were then going to their destruction," the author of the General History of the Pyrates later wrote, apparently after speaking with witnesses. Wragg and the other passengers, having heard bloodthirsty tales of the pirates, expected their captors would light the ship on fire, "and what seemed to confirm them in this notion was that no regard was had to the qualities of the prisoners," with "merchants, gentlemen of rank, and even a child of Mr. Wragg's" being confined with common servants and sailors, a harbinger of death in their minds.

  As the captives cowered in the hold "bewailing their condition," the pirates met aboard their flagship to devise a plan. They would send a boat into Charleston and demand ransom for their captives; if they were refused, they would threaten to not only kill all the captives and burn their vessels, but also to sail into Charleston Harbor, sink all the ships there, and perhaps attack the town itself. Whatever disease the pirates had contracted, it must have become extremely worrisome, for the only ransom they demanded was a chest containing a list of medicines drawn up by their surgeon, with a total value of about £400. The meeting concluded, Blackbeard had the prisoners brought before the assembled pirates and informed them of the plan. Wragg begged the pirates to send one of the captive gentlemen in with whomever delivered the ransom demand, so that they could impress on the governor how serious the situation was. The pirates agreed, with some suggesting they send Wragg himself, while keeping his son hostage. Blackbeard, always the strategist, was against this tactic; he didn't want to lose possession of his most valuable bargaining chip because if his bluff was called, he had no intention of actually murdering young William Wragg and the other captives. Instead, the pirates chose another captive, a Mr. Marks, to travel with their emissaries. If the entourage didn't return with the medicines in two days, the pirates said they would make good on their threats.

  The boat departed, carrying Marks and two pirates, on what would prove a farcical journey. On the way to town, a sudden squall capsized their little boat. The three men managed to swim to safety on an uninhabited island and awaited rescue for much of the day, well aware that the clock was ticking. The next afternoon, hungry and bedraggled, they realized they would have to rescue themselves. They found a large wooden hatch cover on the shore, but it wasn't buoyant enough to support all of them. Lacking other options, Marks got onto the hatch and the pirates pushed it out into the water; when they got over their heads they clung to the edge of the hatch and swam hard, pushing the makeshift raft toward Charleston, nine miles away. They paddled this way throughout the night, making little progress. By morning they were sure they were all going to die, but were saved by some passing fishermen who brought them to their camp. Marks, realizing the captives' time was already up, paid the fishermen to go tell Blackbeard what had happened. Meanwhile, he hired a second boat to take the three of them to Charleston.

  By the time the fishermen found the pirates, Blackbeard was in a fury. The deadline had come and gone more than a day earlier, and the pirate commodore had threatened Wragg and the others, "calling them villains a thousand times and swearing that they should not live two hours." Though he did his best to terrify the captives, he hadn't harmed them in any way. When the fishermen related Marks's mishap and asked, on his behalf, for two additional days, Blackbeard consented. However, when two more days passed and the emissaries did not return, Blackbeard's gang still didn't kill anyone. Instead, they resolved to sail to Charleston and terrorize the town.

  Meanwhile, in Charleston, Marks was desperately searching for the two pirates he had traveled with. As soon as they had gotten to town, he had rushed to the home of Governor Robert Johnson, who had immediately agreed to Blackbeard's demands. The two pirates, however, had gone out drinking and, in the process, ran into some of their old colleagues. There were upward of a dozen Nassau pirates in town who had come to take the king's pardon. As the two pirates wandered the streets of the walled city, they discovered that many common people admired them. Enjoying the celebrity and the company of old friends, they had gone from one house to another, drinking until they forgot the time. They didn't remember their mission until, a day or two later, they heard screaming on the streets outside. Blackbeard's fleet had arrived in the harbor, frightening the inhabitants so badly that "women and children ran about the street like mad things." The two drunken pirates stumbled to the waterfront, preventing their colleagues from exacting retribution on the town.

  Marks rowed out to the pirate man-of-war with the chest of medicines and a message from Governor Johnson offering to pardon Blackbeard if he wished to lay down his arms. Blackbeard rejected the overture but released all his captives and their vessels, although local officials reported they had "destroyed most of their cargoes ... and did some damage to the ships all for pure mischief sake." In the end, the pirates left with only the medicines, provisions, a few barrels of rice, 4,000 pieces of eight (£1,000) and the clothes of their gentlemen captives, whom they had stripped before releasing. They left Charleston with only one prize: a Spanish sloop they had taken off Florida. Blackbeard had paralyzed an entire colony for over a week but, for reasons unknown, was willing to settle for plunder probably worth less than £2,000.

  As they sailed north, the pirate fleet detained two more South Carolina-bound vessels, the sixty-ton ship William of Boston, loaded with lumber and corn; and the forty-five-ton brigantine Princess of Bristol, carrying a cargo of eighty-six African slaves from Angola. From the Princess, the pirates took fourteen of what a Charleston official called "their bes
t Negroes," adding to an already substantial number of Africans aboard the pirate fleet's four vessels. (As the slaves were transferred, Blackbeard told the Princess's commander, Captain John Bedford, that he "had got a baker's dozen," suggesting that he regarded these particular blacks as commodities, rather than recruits.) As for the William and her cargo, the pirate company's last words upon leaving Charleston had been that they would "swear revenge upon New England men and vessels" for executing Bellamy's men. However, it was the Revenge that actually captured the William, and for some reason her commander, Blackbeard's lieutenant, Mr. Richards, let the William go. Afterward, captives overheard Blackbeard raging at Richards for "not burning said ... vessel, because she belonged to Boston."

  Blackbeard soon put aside his anger, as there were more important matters to attend to. He had secretly decided that the time had come to break up his company, but with no intention of sharing the recent plunder with all 400 men. While in Central America, some of the rank-and-file pirates had become mutinous after the rum supply had run out. "Our company somewhat sober," Blackbeard wrote at the time in his journal.* "A damned confusion amongst us! Rogues a plotting [and] great talk of separation." Fortunately the fleet's next prize had "a great deal of liquor onboard" that "kept the company hot, damn'd hot, [and] then all things went well again." Blackbeard never forgave the plotters, however, and had no intention of rewarding such behavior. He developed a plan to rid himself of them, along with the incompetent Stede Bonnet and his loyalists. He shared it with only a few trusted colleagues, including his quartermaster, William Howard, and boatswain Israel Hands, who was in command of one of the fleet's vessels, the eighty-ton prize sloop Adventure. These men helped him convince the company to sail into one of North Carolina's sparsely populated bays to careen, supposedly in preparation for intercepting the annual Spanish treasure fleet in the Florida Straits.

  Six days after leaving Charleston—sometime around June 3, 1718— Blackbeard's fleet turned into what is now called Beaufort Inlet, halfway up North Carolina's low, swampy coast. To avoid the sandy, uncharted shoals, the vessels had to negotiate a narrow, comma-shaped channel created by a tidal creek, whose sluggish mouth provided a quiet anchorage. Although this harbor was located right in front of the hamlet of Beaufort, the pirates had nothing to fear from the handful of families living there, who had no practical way to send for help overland. The sloops—the Adventure, Revenge, and the small Spanish prize—went in first, crossing the fifteen-foot-deep outer bar and proceeding up the curving channel to the anchorage. Blackbeard safely sailed the Queen Anne's Revenge over the outer bar, but as he approached the entrance to the tidal channel under full sail, he apparently ordered the helmsman to maintain a course that took her straight onto the shoals. The great ship shuddered to a stop, the force of the collision so powerful it threw men off their feet and snapped the lines of one of the ship's bow anchors, which splashed into the water. According to plan, Blackbeard sent William Howard up the channel in a boat to tell Israel Hands to come down with the Adventure, supposedly to help get the Queen Anne's Revenge off the shoal before the tide went out. Hands sailed the Adventure straight into the shoal a gunshot away from the flagship, tearing enormous holes in her hull. By the time the Revenge and the Spanish sloop reached the scene, Blackbeard's ship had started listing to port, her holds filling with water. The pirates rowed one of the Queen Anne's Revenge's anchors four hundred yards into the channel, set it, and tried to drag the ship off the shoal with their anchor winch, but the effort failed. The company realized that their Queen Anne's Revenge was doomed. Everyone transferred to the Revenge and the Spanish sloop, which took them up to Beaufort.

  As the pirates took stock of the situation, Blackbeard set the next part of his plan into motion. Stede Bonnet had been in a state of utter depression for weeks, declaring to one and all that he would gladly give up piracy, but on account of his actions was so "ashamed to see the face of any English man again" that he would have to "spend the remainder of his days" living incognito in Spain or Portugal. Accordingly, the pirates must have been very surprised when Blackbeard announced that he was returning command of the Revenge to the pathetic fellow.

  Bonnet, hardly able to believe his ears, decided to secure a pardon as soon as possible. Beaufort's villagers could have told him that the governor of North Carolina, Charles Eden, lived in the tiny village of Bath, a day's sail up the sound and Pamlico River. Bonnet and a handful of loyalists hopped in a shallow-draft boat and sailed immediately, promising to return shortly for the rest of his men.

  No sooner had Bonnet left then Blackbeard and his hundred or so co-conspirators drew their weapons and took their shipmates into custody. They stranded sixteen of them—and the Adventure's captain, David Herriot—on Bogue Bank, a sandy uninhabited island a mile from the mainland. Another 200 pirates were left to fend for themselves in Beaufort. Blackbeard and his colleagues—"forty white men and sixty Negroes"—clambered aboard the Spanish sloop and departed, taking all the company's plunder with them, about £2,500."'Twas generally believed the said Thatch run his vessel a-ground on purpose," Herriot later told authorities, so that he could "break up the Companies and to secure what moneys and effects he had got for himself." When Bonnet returned with his pardon three days later, the Revenge was waiting for him in Beaufort, but the treasure was gone. He rescued the Bogue Bank castaways and vowed to avenge himself on his double-crossing mentor.

  Little did Bonnet know, but Blackbeard had also sailed to Bath, taking the outer passage around the barrier islands rather than the shallow sound inside them. As Bonnet was sailing back to Beaufort, his nemesis had been just on the other side of the barrier islands, headed in the opposite direction. About the time Bonnet discovered his treachery, Blackbeard's eight-gun sloop was making its way up a narrow creek leading to North Carolina's unassuming capital.

  Although Bath was North Carolina's administrative center, oldest town, and official port of entry, it was little more than a village: three long streets, two dozen homes, a grist mill, and a small wooden fort set along Bath Creek, whose cypress-covered banks were so low, flat, and marshy it was impossible to tell where the water ended and land began. Blackbeard's sloop came into the wind and anchored in the brown, tannin-stained water, the town on one side, a wharf and plantation house on the other. Bath's hundred or so residents couldn't help but take notice of their visitors: With their arrival, the town's population doubled. Upon coming ashore, the pirates may well have asked where to find the courthouse or seat of government, and residents would have informed them that North Carolina had neither; the governing council was migratory, meeting at one member's home or another, sometimes many miles from the village. To take the king's pardon, Blackbeard was advised to row over to the wharf across the creek; Governor Charles Eden's house was at the end of it.

  No eyewitness accounts of the initial meeting between Blackbeard and Governor Eden have survived, but apparently it went well. Eden, forty-five, was a wealthy English noble with a 400-acre estate, but he governed an impoverished colony, a pestilent backwater populated by aggrieved Indians and penniless settlers. Blackbeard's men had money— £2,500 in Spanish coin in addition to whatever they had saved from their previous year of piracy—and the means and inclination to bring in more, as long as the governor refrained from asking too many questions about where it was from. They came to an understanding. Eden would issue pardons to all of Blackbeard's men, most of whom would disperse. Blackbeard and a handful of his closest lieutenants would settle down in Bath, building homes and leading what might appear, on the surface, to be honest lives. In reality, they would quietly continue to detain vessels heading up and down the eastern seaboard or to and from nearby Virginia, whose haughty leaders had long looked down their noses at their backward southern neighbors. Eden and his friends would fence their goods, and the pirates would benefit from their protection. North Carolina would become, in effect, the new Bahamas, only better in that it had a sovereign government, and was therefore not s
ubject to a British invasion.

  Most of Blackbeard's company promptly left North Carolina for Pennsylvania and New York. William Howard went to Williamsburg with two slaves, one taken with La Concorde, the other from the brigantine Princess. Blackbeard and twenty other men, including at least six free black pirates, stayed in Bath. According to local tradition, Blackbeard took up residence on Plum Point, a promontory on the edge of the village. According to the author of A General History of the Pyrates, Blackbeard promptly married "a young creature of about sixteen years of age, the Governor performing the ceremony," allegedly his fourteenth wife, whom he "would force ... to prostitute herself" with "five or six of his brutal companions" as he watched. The story is greatly embellished. Blackbeard would not have found the time to marry fourteen women given the amount of time he had spent at sea. With his remarkably humane track record as a pirate, it's doubtful that he would have arranged for his teenage bride to be regularly gang raped. Blackbeard did marry someone in Bath, however, as his nuptials were later remarked on by a Royal Navy captain based in neighboring Virginia, who had been keeping tabs on his activities. Local lore holds that this bride was Mary Ormond, daughter of a future sheriff of Bath, a story supported by at least one of Ormond's early-twentieth-century descendents. Another Blackbeard story in the General History rings true: "He often diverted himself with going ashore among the planters, where he reveled night and day. By these [people] he was well received, but whether out of Love or Fear, I cannot say."