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 raid on Eleuthera was a complete success. The pirates came ashore, plundered the inhabitants of their liquor and as much of their livestock as could be carried away. The brigantine departed as quickly as it came, her decks crowded with live pigs, goats, sheep, and poultry, the makings of many a feast. On October 23, as they made their way south through the Bahamas, they captured two prizes: a small sloop and the forty-ton brigantine Endeavor of Salem, on her way home from Kingston. "Vane ... bore down on him, hoisted a black flag, and fired a shot at him," the captain of the Endeavor, John Shattock, later deposed. "[He] ordered him to hoist out his boat and come on board him, which [he] did." Apparently, Shattock's boat crew didn't row fast enough, because the pirates began yelling that they would "fire a volley of small shot into them if they did not make haste." The pirates kept Shattock's men aboard their vessel for two days, beating and abusing their captain while they plundered the Endeavor of her gunpowder, salt, and whale oil. When Shattock complained of his abuse, Robert Deal replied: "Damn you, old dog, then tell where your money is. If we find you in one lie, we'll damn you and your vessel also." The frightened captain told them what they wanted to know and, on the twenty-fifth, was put aboard the Endeavor and allowed to sail away. Vane kept the small sloop as a tender and took her with him to Hispaniola.

  During their passage, the pirates lived "riotously on board," drinking heavily and gorging on freshly slaughtered farm animals. Perhaps as a result of these excesses, they failed to capture a single vessel for the better part of a month. As they slaughtered the last chickens and drank the dregs of their wine casks, the pirates' morale began to wane. They had forsaken the pardon in the hopes of living merry, acquiring riches, and pestering the forces of the Hanoverian king; now they found themselves sober, bored, and filled with discontent.

  The sour mood lifted on November 23 when their lookouts spotted a large frigate-rigged ship downwind of their position. Vane ordered the brigantine and sloop to bear down on her, and ran a black flag up his mainmast, expecting the ship to surrender as almost everyone before her had done. Instead, the ship's captain ran up a white flag studded with tiny gold fleur-de-lis: the ensign of the French Navy. Cannon muzzles rolled out of her heretofore-unnoticed gun ports and, in a thunderous, rolling, explosion, the French man-of-war blasted Vane's brigantine with a full broadside. By concealing their guns until the last minute, however, the French gunners were apparently unable to aim them properly, as the brigantine suffered little or no damage from the opening salvo.

  Vane was not one to back off from a fight, but seeing himself outgunned, he ordered his vessels to swing around and run away into the wind. The French frigate trimmed her sails and, to Vane's surprise, followed them. Then, as a captive later recalled, "the pirates quarreled among themselves" about how to proceed. Vane was for escaping, but quartermaster Jack Rackham and much of the crew wanted to take on the man-of-war, arguing "that though she had more guns and a greater weight of metal, they might board her and then the best boys would carry the day." Vane responded that "it was too rash and desperate an enterprise, the man-of-war appearing to be twice their force"—twenty-four guns—"and that their brigantine might be sunk by her before they could [get] on board." Deal and fifteen other pirates agreed, but the other seventy-five supported Rackham. Unwilling to embark on what he considered a suicide mission, Vane pulled rank, forcing the pirates to retreat by dint of his absolute power as captain while "fighting, chasing, or being chased."The company was outraged but, respecting the articles they'd signed, followed orders, tightening their sails and ultimately leaving the French frigate in their wake.

  The incident cost Vane dearly. The next day the pirates were out of danger, putting an end to Vane's war powers. Jack Rackham, clad in his multicolored Indian prints, called a meeting of the ship's company to challenge Vane's rule by a vote of confidence. "A resolution passed against [Vane's] honor and dignity," the author of the General History wrote a few years later,"branding him with the name of coward, deposing him from command, and turning him out of the company with marks of infamy." Vane, Deal, and fifteen loyalists were put aboard the sloop the pirates had captured off Long Island, with some provisions and ammunition. Rackham, whom the pirates had elected as their new captain, sailed away in the brigantine, bound for Jamaica. Vane had been deposed from command.

  ***

  After all of his bravado—defying the Royal Navy, blockading cities, putting entire colonies into a state of terror—Vane's pirating career ended with a whimper.

  Reduced to a single sloop, fifteen men, and a cannon or two, Vane was no longer in a position to threaten His Majesty's governments, but he tried to rebuild all the same. As they sailed south for the jungle-carpeted shores of the Bay of Honduras, he and Deal did their best to transform the puny vessel from tender to gunboat, mounting cannon, shifting ballast, and modifying the rigging. In late November they tarried several days off the northwest coast of Jamaica, capturing two periaguas and a sloop and convincing most or all of their crews to join the company. Deal took command of the second sloop and the pirates continued southwards. They reached an anchorage in the Bay of Honduras on December 16, where they surprised two merchant sloops, and kept them to help careen their vessels. A few days later, Vane made what would be his final capture: the Prince, a forty-ton sloop from Kittery, Maine, sailed by Captain Thomas Walden. His men now scattered among five vessels, Vane led the way to their ultimate destination: the Bay Islands, forty miles off the coast of Honduras.

  The Bay Islands made the perfect nest for a pirate captain on the mend. They had served as a retreat for generations of freebooters, from Henry Morgan to John Coxon. Lush, mountainous, and out of the way, the islands had everything Vane's men needed: fresh springs, secluded anchorages, timber, game, and fish-infested coral reefs located so close to the shore one could practically wade to them. Vane set up camp at Guanaja, which had an anchorage on the southern shore with no less than seven entrances and exits between sharp reefs and sandbars. Here, from late December to early February, Vane cleaned his vessels, chatted with his men, and feasted on fish, crabs, and salt pork on the island's beaches. At the end of this peaceful interlude, Vane and Deal loaded up their respective sloops and sailed out to cruise the Spanish Main, no doubt hoping to overwhelm a "ship of force" that would get them back to the top of their game.

  A few days out to sea, the pirates were overtaken by a violent hurricane. Vane and Deal lost each other amid the towering seas and screaming winds and, after being battered for two days, Vane's sloop was driven ashore on a small uninhabited island in the Bay of Honduras. The vessel was smashed to pieces and, in the process, most of her crew and all of the food and supplies aboard her were lost. Vane survived but was "reduced to great straits for want of necessaries." He lived as a castaway for several weeks, kept alive by the charity of visiting turtle hunters, who came from the mainland in dories and provided him with meat. The turtlers must have been a pathetic lot, as Vane preferred to stay on the island rather than join them in their jungle camps. He knew an English merchant vessel was bound to show up in search of water or firewood, and take him back to civilization.

  He was proven right when, sometime in the late winter or early spring of 1719, a ship from Jamaica dropped anchor off his island. Vane greeted them and was surprised to learn that their captain was an old friend, a retired buccaneer by the name of Holford. But Holford knew of his old friend's reputation and refused to take him aboard. "Charles, I shan't trust you aboard my ship unless I carry you prisoner," he is said to have told the sorry pirate. Otherwise "I shall [find] you caballing with my men [to] knock me on the head and run away with my ship a' pyrating." He put Vane ashore, telling him that he would return in about a month with a load of logwood. "If I find you upon this island when I come back," he vowed, "I'll carry you to Jamaica and hang you."

  Luckily for Vane, before the month was up, a different ship put in for water, one whose captain and crew did not know him. Eager to get off the island, Vane gav
e a false name and signed on as a crewman for the remainder of the voyage.

  Holford arrived at the anchorage shortly thereafter, and the captain of the vessel on which Vane was now crewing invited Holford aboard for dinner. While making his way down the deck to the captain's cabin, Holford happened to glance down into the hold and spotted Vane at work. He went straight to the captain, a friend of his, and advised him of the castaway's true identity and reputation. Holford, who was on his way back to Jamaica, volunteered to carry him to justice. Vane soon found himself at gunpoint while Holford's crewmen clamped him into irons. The crew of a humble trading vessel had captured the most notorious pirate in the Americas.

  A week or two later, Vane was home in Jamaica, a prisoner of the king he so despised. For reasons that are unclear, he was allowed to rot in jail for the better part of a year before being brought to trial in Spanish Town, the Jamaican capital, on March 22, 1721. He knew the verdict would not be in doubt. Numerous witnesses came to testify against him: captains, crewmen, and passengers from various vessels he had captured, and even Vincent Pearse of HMS Phoenix, who related how Vane had made a mockery of the king's pardon. When it was Vane's turn to present his defense he called no witnesses and asked no questions. His piracy career had started aboard one of Lord Hamilton's privateers. Now it was Hamilton's successor, Governor Nicholas Lawes, who pronounced what he termed "the usual sentence": to be "hanged by the neck, 'till he was dead, and the Lord have mercy on his soul."

  On Wednesday, March 29, 1721, Charles Vane was hanged at Gallows Point in Port Royal. Governor Laws had his corpse cut down, carried to Gun Cay at the harbor's entrance, where it hung in chains from a gibbet for all mariners to see. Over the months and years that followed, they watched his apparition disappear, bit by bit, ravaged by birds, insects, and the elements, until all that was left of Vane—and the Golden Age of Piracy—were the stories told by the tavern fire, or in hammocks between the decks of a thousand creaking, miserable ships.

  EPILOGUE

  PIRACY'S END

  1720–1732

  WITH THE EXECUTION of the pirates at Nassau in December 1718, Woodes Rogers no longer feared his government would be brought down by a coup, but the threat from the Spaniards remained. Throughout the winter of 1718–1719, he did his best to put the impoverished colony on a good defensive footing, prodding his indolent subjects to shore up Fort Nassau, writing requests for reinforcements, and begging, unsuccessfully, for naval support from Commodore Chamberlaine, commander of the Jamaica squadron. In March 1719 he received official word that Britain and Spain were again at war,* and he promptly handed out privateering commissions to many of the Bahamas' former pirates, most of whom were probably eager to return to pirate-like work. When his government ran out of funds shortly thereafter, Rogers paid, fed, and supplied the colony's sailors and soldiers with money out of his own pocket, expecting to be reimbursed by his fellow investors or the Crown. Despite these efforts, Rogers knew the Bahamas were in no way ready to repel a serious invasion attempt.

  A Spanish invasion fleet sailed from Cuba in May 1719 carrying 3,000 to 4,000 troops. Had it attacked New Providence as planned, it would certainly have rolled over the islands' paltry defenses. En route, however, the Spanish commodore received word that the French—Britain's allies this time around—had captured a strategically important fortress at Pensacola. The fleet therefore turned around and sailed for that settlement on Florida's Gulf Coast, sparing the Bahamas for another nine months.

  Rogers continued pushing and prodding Nassau's "very lazy" citizenry to finish the fort. A close brush with invasion prompted everyone to pitch in, but only for a couple of weeks, after which most abandoned their work sites, leaving Rogers with "a few of the best of them ... ye Negroes, and my own men." Receiving no financial assistance from the Crown, he continued to purchase vital war supplies on credit—£20,000 worth by the end of 1719, some of it under his own name, rather than on behalf of his investment group. Many suppliers started cutting him off for nonpayment. "Having no news of my bills being paid at home, I am forced to run too much in debt," he alerted officials of the Council of Trade and Plantations in early 1720. "I must [continue doing so] or ... we shall starve or be a sacrifice to the Spaniards." His letter went unanswered, as had every single letter he had sent them. In fact, he hadn't heard from anyone in the central government for the better part of a year. With the pirates defeated, King George's administration seemed to have forgotten the Bahamas' existence. Rogers hadn't gotten much support from the navy either, whose captains, in Rogers's words, had "little regard for this infant colony." In his first year as governor, only two men-of-war visited Nassau: one to deliver official mail, the other—Captain Whitney's Rose—forced in for fresh water by poor sailing conditions. "I observed a general dissatisfaction [in] the Governour," Whitney sniffed in a report to the Admiralty. Rogers was still "complaining for want of help, which I'm afraid [he and his fellow investors] will always be in 'till they have redeemed their credits"—paid their bills—"throughout America."

  Even so, when a Spanish invasion fleet appeared off Nassau on February 24, 1720, Rogers was able to face them with a fifty-gun fort, the ten-gun eastern battery, the Delicia, 100 soldiers, and 500 armed militiamen. By fortune, the sixth-rate frigate HMS Flamborough (twenty-four guns) was in Nassau at the time, although Rogers had to browbeat her abrasive captain, John Hildesley, to stay and defend the island. The Spanish, by contrast, had three frigates of forty, twenty-six, and twenty-two guns, a twelve-gun brigantine, eight armed sloops, and an invasion force of 1,300 men. Rogers's defenses dissuaded the Spanish from a direct assault on the harbor. Instead, they landed on the backside of Hog Island and, in the middle of the night, attempted to cross the narrow eastern channel in small boats. A pair of heroic sentries—both free blacks—somehow managed to fire enough musket rounds to frighten the Spaniards into retreat. Ironically, two men who had probably been slaves themselves had saved Rogers, a professional slave dealer.

  The Bahamas were secured, but the effort exhausted Rogers's physical and financial resources. The imperial government continued to ignore his letters, merchants denied him credit, and his colony's economy remained paralyzed for lack of productive settlers. Rogers was in such poor health that he nearly died on two occasions. In November 1721 he spent six weeks in South Carolina, hoping a rest in the cooler climate and more genteel surroundings of Charleston would repair his health. Instead, he found a city in political upheaval and, while there, was wounded in a duel with Captain Hildesley of HMS Flamborough relating to "disputes they had at [New] Providence." He sent one last set of letters to London before returning to Nassau, begging support and instructions. They, like many others before them, went unanswered.

  By midwinter, Rogers could bear it no longer. "I can subsist no longer on the foot[ing] I have been left ever since my arrival," he wrote the Council of Trade on February 23, 1722. "I have no other satisfactions left me in this abandoned place and condition, [except] having done my duty to His Majesty and my country, though at the hazard of my entire ruin." Leaving the colony in the hands of William Fairfax, Rogers sailed for England a month later, hoping face-to-face meetings would prove more productive than his correspondence. He arrived in London in August to learn that King George had fired him, and a new governor was already on his way to Nassau. Worse, his fellow investors had liquidated the Co-partners for Carrying on a Trade & Settling the Bahama Islands, making no allowance for the £6,000 Rogers had personally advanced on their behalf. Rogers was ruined once again. His creditors moved in on him and, before long, he found himself locked in debtors prison. The man who had captured a Manila galleon, dispersed the pirates of the Caribbean, and successfully defended a critical strategic asset from an invasion force twice his strength was left behind bars.

  ***

  Many former pirates became privateers during the course of the War of the Quadruple Alliance, with varying degrees of success. Benjamin Hornigold, founder of the pirate republic, took his
commission from Rogers and cruised against Spanish pirates from the familiar shelter of Nassau Harbor. In the spring of 1719, while lurking near Havana, his vessel was captured by a Spanish ship and brigantine; he either died in the engagement or in a Cuban prison, as his Bahamian colleagues never saw him again. Josiah Burgess, once Nassau's third most powerful pirate, served Rogers as a lieutenant of the Independent Company, a justice of the Vice-Admiralty Court, and a privateer. In the latter capacity, his vessel was wrecked near Abaco; Burgess drowned, along with George Rounsivell, the young man Rogers pardoned at the gallows, who had gone back into the water to try to rescue him.

  Henry Jennings and Leigh Ashworth both operated privateers out of Jamaica. Jennings was particularly successful, arriving in New York in October 1719 on his trusty Barsheba with two brigantines and a sloop taken from the Spaniards off Vera Cruz. Jennings survived the war and returned to respectable merchant service out of Bermuda. In 1745, during the War of the Austrian Succession, his sloop was captured in the West Indies; prison may have proven fatal to a man in his early sixties. Ashworth's fate is unclear, but in May 1719 he was again stepping over the line between privateering and piracy, by attacking one of Rogers's privateers and kidnapping one of Thomas Walker's sons off Cuba.