Going to Sea

1697–1702

 

WHEN HENRY AVERY vanished into the Irish night, the men who would shape the Golden Age of Piracy were boys or very young men. Of the early lives of those who became bona fide pirates, we know very little.

Most people in late-seventeenth-century England left little record of their time on earth. An honest, law-abiding commoner’s birth, marriage, and death might be recorded by a priest in the register of the local parish church. Were they fortunate enough to own property, a will with an inventory of the person’s possessions and to whom they were bequeathed might survive. If the person had committed or had been the victim of a crime, the records of that person would likely be more voluminous, particularly if the case had gone to trial. In fact, much of what we know about the great pirates comes from depositions, trial transcripts, and other legal records stored in the archives of Great Britain, Spain, and their former colonies in the New World. Before they turned to piracy, in other words, history has little to say about them.

 

Samuel Bellamy, the man who would call himself the Robin Hood of the seas, was likely the child of Stephen and Elizabeth Pain Bellamy, born March 18, 1689, in the hamlet of Hittisleigh, Devon. If so, he was the youngest of five children, the eldest son having died in infancy five years before Samuel’s birth. As the only remaining son, he stood to inherit the family estate, which probably didn’t amount to much. Hittisleigh was an extremely modest place, a handful of cottages scattered over hills on the northern fringe of the stark wastes of Dartmoor, the setting of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles. The soil was heavy with clay, complicating both the plowing and drainage of fields; the inhabitants did their best to eke out a living farming wheat, barley, and potatoes. The region’s soil, Daniel Defoe reported in the 1720s, was “barren by nature” and “very unhealthy, especially to sheep, which in those parts are of a small kind, and very subject to rot which destroys them in great numbers.” The soil grew “nothing but rushes, or a coarse, sour kind of pasturage which the cattle will not feed upon.”

Like many boys, Bellamy probably left his farm as soon as he could to escape the growing social and economic catastrophe that was engulfing the English countryside. The old medieval system was being supplanted by capitalism, and the pain of that transition was being borne by the country’s peasant farmers. Beginning in the 1500s, English lords began driving peasants off their lands, either by purchasing their medieval tenancy rights for cash or simply refusing to renew their leases. All over England, fields and pastures once used in common by local villagers were seized by feudal lords, enclosed with walls, fences, and hedgerows, and incorporated into large private farms and sheep ranches. This “enclosure movement” turned feudal lords into landed aristocrats and turned millions of self-sufficient farmers into landless paupers.

Rural English life was increasingly perilous as a result. Without land, peasants could no longer raise livestock, meaning they could no longer produce their own milk, cheese, wool, or meat. Since they had to pay cash rents to their landlords to use their fields and live in their cottages, most were forced to hire themselves and their children out as laborers. For the typical peasant family, this represented a huge loss in real income; the annual dairy production of just one cow was worth as much as a full-grown man’s annual wages as a laborer. “The poor tenants,” one traveler observed, “cannot afford to eat the eggs their hens lay, nor the apples and pears that grow on their trees . . . but must make money of all.” Sir Francis Bacon described the tenant farmers as little better than “housed beggars.” By the year of Bellamy’s birth, three million Englishmen—roughly half the country’s population—were poised on or below the level of subsistence, and most lived in the countryside. Malnutrition and disease left their mark on this submerged half of England’s population: On average they stood six inches shorter and lived less than half as long as their middle- and upper-class countrymen.

Large numbers of them abandoned their ancestral lands and headed for England’s towns and cities in search of work. The young Sam Bellamy was likely one of them. Although we don’t know his itinerary, we do know he ultimately made his way to one of England’s ports. Perhaps he was inspired by the exploits of Henry Avery, whose stories had spread out across Devon from Avery’s hometown of Newton Ferrers, just thirty miles from Hittisleigh. Dreams of swashbuckling adventure and kingly riches may have swum in the young man’s head as he walked across the moors toward Plymouth, over the hills in the direction of Bristol, or down the long road to London, making his way toward the sea.

 

Of Charles Vane, who would one day challenge an entire squadron of His Majesty’s warships, we know even less. There is a portrait of him in the 1725 edition of A General History of the Pyrates, a woodcutting whose creator would have worked from what he had heard or read, not by what he had seen; it depicts Vane in a shoulder-length wig and soldierly long coat, sword drawn, pointing purposefully toward an unseen objective; he is of middle stature, with an aquiline nose, dark hair, a thin goatee standing out from a few days’ growth of facial hair. His birthplace and childhood have been lost to history, leaving us to guess at his origins. He is thought to be English, though his name holds out the possibility of French ancestry. Before turning pirate, he resided for a time in Port Royal, Jamaica, but was not originally from there. He was likely about the same age as Bellamy and probably went to sea around the same time. The best guess is that he was from London, which historian Marcus Rediker estimates was home to nearly a third of the pirates of Vane’s generation. Bellamy also may have sailed from there; later in his pirate career, he once claimed to have been from London.

In 1700, London dominated England like no other time before or since. It had 550,000 residents, more than a tenth of the nation’s population, and fifteen times larger than England’s second city, Norwich. It was the center of trade, commerce, society, and politics for England’s growing empire. It was also far and away its greatest port.

The city had already jumped its ancient walls and spread across the fields to the village of Westminster, three miles up the Thames, home to both Queen Anne and Parliament, and downriver as far as the Royal Navy shipyard in Rotherhithe. Its center was rebuilt on a magnificent scale after the Great Fire of 1666, the skyline punctuated by the spires of Sir Christopher Wren’s churches and the half-finished dome of Wren’s greatest project, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Tidy brick buildings on paved streets of uniform width were replacing the crooked alleys and irregular wooden homes of the medieval period. Commerce pulsed through the streets, the cobblestones echoing under wheels of tradesmen’s carts and street vendors’ wheelbarrows, the hooves of gentlemen’s carriage horses and the herds of cattle and sheep bound for slaughter in the downtown meat markets. Shops and stalls not only lined the streets and squares, they spilled out into thoroughfares and even choked the flow of traffic crossing London Bridge, the only span across the River Thames. Many of London’s fine churches were “so crowded up with shops and dwelling houses,” one writer lamented, “that one would think religion in danger of being smothered up by the growth of trade.”

The city’s main artery, the Thames, was even more crowded than the streets. Upriver from London Bridge—under whose narrow arches the tides poured like waterfalls—hundreds of watermen rowed boats ferrying passengers and cargo up, down, and across the river, into which flowed the contents of a half million chamber pots; the blood and guts of thousands of slaughtered livestock; and the bodies of cats, dogs, horses, rats, and just about anything else wanting disposal. Downriver from the bridge, hundreds, sometimes thousands of seagoing vessels waited to load and unload their cargoes, often tying up three or four abreast, a floating forest of masts extending nearly a mile. Coastal trading sloops brought heaps of coal from Newcastle; two- and three-masted ships disgorged lumber from the Baltic, tobacco from Virginia, sugar from Jamaica and Barbados, and salt cod from New England and Newfoundland. Further downriver, on the outskirts of the metropolis at the naval yards of Deptford and Rotherhithe, the warships of the Royal Navy gathered for orders, repairs, or reinforcements.

Had they come to London, Charles Vane and Samuel Bellamy would have wound up in the neighborhood of Wapping, sandwiched on the riverfront between the naval yards and London Bridge. Wapping was a crowded warren of crumbling homes and dreary alehouses interspersed with wharves, lumberyards, and warehouses. Built on ground squeezed between marshes and the river, the neighborhood had long been known as “Wapping on the Ooze,” and was home to those who couldn’t afford to live anyplace else.

Life in Wapping and the other poorer districts of London was dirty and dangerous. People often lived fifteen or twenty to a room, in cold, dimly lit, and unstable houses. There was no organized trash collection; chamber pots were dumped out of windows, splattering everyone and everything on the streets below. Manure from horses and other livestock piled up on the thoroughfares, as did the corpses of the animals themselves. London’s frequent rains carried away some of the muck, but made the overpowering stench from the churchyards even worse; paupers were buried in mass graves, which remained open until fully occupied. Cold weather brought its own atmospheric hazards, as what little home heating there was came from burning poor-quality coal.

Disease was rampant. Eight thousand people moved to London each year, but the influx barely kept up with the mortality rate. Food poisoning and dysentery carried off on average a thousand a year, and more than eight thousand were consumed by fevers and convulsions. Measles and smallpox killed a thousand more, many of them children, most of whom were already ravaged by rickets and intestinal worms. Between a quarter and a third of all babies died in their first year of life, and barely half survived to see the age of sixteen.

The streets swarmed with parentless children, some of them orphaned by accidents or disease, others simply abandoned on the church steps by parents who were unable to feed them. Overwhelmed parish officials rented babies out to beggars for use as props for four pence (£.016) a day and sold hundreds of five- to eight-year-olds into seven years of slavery for twenty or thirty shillings (£1 to £1.5) apiece. These small children were purchased by chimney sweepers, who sent them down the flues to do the actual cleaning, sometimes while fires were still burning below them, cleaning coal dust without masks or protective clothing. These “climbing boys” soon succumbed to lung ailments and blindness or simply fell to their deaths. Church officials put the children they could not sell back out on the street “to beg about in the daytime and at night [to] sleep at doors, and in holes and corners about the streets,” as one witness reported. Large numbers of these hungry, bedraggled urchins roamed the streets together in bands called the Blackguards, so called because they would shine the boots of cavalrymen for small change. “From beggary they proceed to theft,” the same Londoner concluded, “and from theft to the gallows.”

Not everyone in Wapping was destitute. There were pub keepers and dockworkers, merchants and sailmakers, brothel owners and boardinghouse keepers, even officers and ship captains of modest means. A few prominent craftsmen also lived in the precinct, including a Mr. Lash, who built the queen’s carriages, and the brewer Altoway, in whose barrels upward of £1,500 in beer and ale were stored at any given time, awaiting distribution to a thirsty city. London’s water supplies were so unhealthy that the entire population drank beer instead, children included. Nearby was Roberts’s boatyard, which afforded its workers a grandstand view of the neighborhood’s greatest attraction: Execution Dock, where the Admiralty Court sent condemned sailors and captured pirates to meet their maker.

 

 

If Charles Vane grew up in Wapping, he would have seen numerous pirate hangings, including those of five of Henry Avery’s crew in the fall of 1696, and William Kidd and four other pirates in May of 1701. Vane would have been a boy, but in those days nobody missed an execution: It was one of the most popular forms of entertainment.

The fun started days or weeks ahead of time at Marshalsea or Newgate Prison, where visitors tipped the guards for a chance to gawk at the condemned. On the day of execution, thousands lined the streets along the route to Wapping, waiting for the prisoners to roll by, lashed inside carts and escorted by guards and the Admiralty marshal. So many people tried to get a glimpse of the prisoners that the three-mile trip often took as long as two hours. By the time the procession reached Execution Dock, festive crowds massed on the riverbank and wharves, choking Wapping Stairs and spreading out on the stinking mud exposed at low tide. The gallows stood out in the mud, and behind them hundreds of passenger boats jockeyed for the best view of the impending event.

Vane would have watched Avery’s men say their final words. According to witnesses, each of the pirates expressed penitence, but John Sparcks clarified that his regret was confined to the “horrid barbarities” they’d committed aboard the Grand Moghul’s ship. “Stealing and running away with [the Charles II]” was, Sparcks said, a “lesser concern.” Their speeches completed, they were led to the gallows one by one and hanged, kicking and gagging. When the last man finished twitching, the sheriff’s deputies dragged the bodies into the mudflats, lashed them to posts, and left them to be slowly engulfed by the incoming tide. Early the next morning, the retreating tide exposed their bloated bodies for a few hours until the next flood tide submerged them again. By custom, the Admiralty authorities only took the bodies away after they had been washed by three tides. The deputies buried most pirates in shallow graves or turned them over to surgeons for dissection, but the prominent ones they covered in tar and placed in iron cages hung at prominent points along the river. Sailors and watermen sailing up and down the Thames would see these ghoulish scarecrows, intended to strike fear in the hearts of would-be pirates. Time would tell just how ineffective they were.

 

Plenty of people were trying to lure young men like Bellamy and Vane aboard their ships. Professional seamen were in short supply, and the captains of both merchant vessels and Royal Navy warships were continually shorthanded. By some estimates, even if all of England’s sailors were healthy and working at the same time, they would have accounted for only about two-thirds of the manpower needed for her merchant and naval fleets. Either service welcomed volunteers—the navy offered a bounty of two month’s pay to any who would sign up—but they got few takers. There was a saying: “Those who would go to sea for pleasure would go to hell as a pastime.” Only the ignorant and naïve joined either service voluntarily, country boys like Sam Bellamy, itching for adventure, but there weren’t nearly enough of them.

Merchants were compelled to adopt aggressive tactics to fill their crews. Some hired “spirits,” or men who, in the words of sailor Edward Barlow, went about inns and taverns looking to “entice any who they think are country people or strangers . . . or any who they think are out of place and cannot get work and are walking idly about the streets.” The spirits promised these idlers high wages and advances of money if they signed on the dotted line. Those who did found themselves on an outbound ship as an underpaid sailor’s apprentice, the spirit pocketing several months of their pay as commission. Other captains hired men called “crimps” who sought out drunk or indebted seamen and tried to persuade them to sign on in exchange for drinks or the payment of their debts. If and when that failed, particularly unscrupulous crimps simply handcuffed and kidnapped drunken sailors, locking them up overnight before selling them to merchant captains. Whatever the circumstances, the new sailor was legally bound to serve the vessel until it completed a journey that would last for months, sometimes years.

The Royal Navy had a reputation for offering poorer pay and harsher discipline than merchant service and resorted to a more sweeping and violent approach: the press gang. Led by a naval officer, press gangs stalked the streets, rounding up any seamen they came across with the aid of clubs. Mariners were easy to pick out because of their distinct way of speaking, dressing, and walking. Edward Ward, a writer and sometime tavern keeper, encountered a pack of sailors in London around this time and likened them to “a litter of squab rhinoceroses, dressed in human apparel.” In their tarred jackets, the sailors catcalled women and bashed every horse-hitching post they passed with their cudgels, causing any stray dog they came across to run away with “his tail between his legs to avoid the danger of the approaching evil.”

Tough as they were, the sailors fled in terror when a press gang was near. Seamen would hide in their rooms above alehouses for days at a time. One sailor fled from London to Dover only to find gangs operating there as well. “I was still terrified [of] the press, for I could not walk the streets without danger, nor sleep in safety,” the sailor later recalled, describing his as “a prisoner’s life.” Other men pretended to marry pub or coffeehouse owners so they could claim to be homeowners, who were exempt from naval service. Others avoided it by getting themselves appointed as constables or neighborhood officials, or simply signed on board a merchant vessel. Large numbers of sailors fled England altogether.

The press gangs were persistent, not least because their leaders received twenty shillings (£1) for every man they captured. They would break into homes and boarding houses in the middle of the night in search of sailors, and regularly raided merchant ships entering London and other ports. Men who had been at sea for months or years were dragged off their merchant vessels and onto warships before they could set foot on land, catch a glimpse of their families, or collect their pay. Some merchant ships were left so shorthanded they were barely able to make it to port. Occasionally, sailors returning from particularly long voyages mutinied to avoid being pressed; once in control, they either abandoned their vessel in one of its boats or took up arms and attempted to fight off the gangs when they tried to board. On colliers, the small vessels that hugged the coast, carrying coal to London and other cities, the most able-bodied sailors would hide as soon as the press gang’s ketch pulled alongside. Frustrated gang leaders responded by seizing the ship’s boys and whipping them until they revealed the location of the hidden men. When sailors were particularly scarce, the gangs would break into homes of potters, weavers, tailors, and other poor tradesmen, seizing the men and their apprentices who were, according to a 1705 tract by playwright and pamphleteer John Dennis, “driven from their families like dogs or the worst of criminals,” often without even letting them dress. Many died of exposure for lack of clothing, “and those that remained were of little use” for lack of skills. Beggars, vagabonds, and street children were relentlessly pursued by the press. Many of these landlubbers would never see England again.

By these varied methods, thousands of boys and men left England for the sea every year. Somewhere among this mass of the naïve, the unlucky, and the desperate, were two boys who would help to bring the commerce of the British Empire to a grinding halt.

 

By 1700, Edward Thatch, the man who would become Blackbeard, was already an experienced seaman. He was born about 1680 in or around Bristol, England’s second-largest port and the center of its transatlantic trade. He was apparently from a reasonably comfortable family, possibly even a reputable one: He had received an education and so, unlike most of his fellow mariners, could read and write. No “Thatches” (or “Taches,” “Teaches,” or “Thaches”) appear in the Bristol tax records for 1696—the only complete one of that city to survive this period—and this has led historians to speculate that Edward Thatch was an assumed name. He may have taken pains to obscure his true identity in order to avoid bringing dishonor upon his relations. That said, it is possible he was related to the Thatches of nearby Gloucester, one of whom, Thomas Thatch, moved to Bristol in 1712 and leased a house a mere block from the city docks.

Thatch was tall and thin and—as you might expect—heavily bearded. These characteristics, reported by people who had met him, are reflected in three posthumous portraits prepared by engraver B. Cole for the various editions of A General History of the Pyrates. Thatch is shown in the same confident pose in all three, one hand on his hip, the other holding aloft a cutlass while his men battle their way aboard a large merchant ship in the harbor behind him. In another eighteenth-century engraving by Thomas Nicholls and James Basire, Thatch has a wild-eyed expression and fuses burning from the ends of his dreadlocked beard.

Thatch was intelligent, capable, and charismatic, characteristics that helped him rise quickly through the ranks of the merchant or naval vessels he served on. In the process, he picked up the skills necessary to operate large armed sailing ships: sail handling, gunnery, combat tactics and, most importantly, navigation. Like Avery, Thatch had the experience to assume control of what were the most powerful and sophisticated vessels of the day.

In Thatch’s youth, Bristol was still England’s primary gateway to the Americas. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its merchants had pioneered the exploration of Newfoundland’s fisheries and the Gulf of Maine. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the American trade permeated almost every aspect of life in Bristol. The small city of 20,000 was still ringed by medieval walls, but its downtown was now girded with stone quays, against which were tied scores of oceangoing vessels. Shops and warehouses overflowed with American goods. The city’s craftsmen grew prosperous supplying the merchants with woven cloth, cured provisions, and manufactured goods. Most of these products were sent straight back to the Americas, but some were loaded aboard ships bound for Africa, where local chiefs were happy to exchange them for slaves. The ships then carried the slaves to Barbados and Jamaica and their captains traded them for sugar, which was brought back to Bristol to complete the triangular trade. Signs of the Americas were everywhere: visiting merchants from Boston and New York, flamboyantly dressed sugar plantation owners from Barbados and Jamaica, and country squires from Virginia and the Carolinas. The great gothic seaman’s church of St. Mary Redcliffe contained an entire chapel dedicated to the Americas, featuring a whale rib donated by John Cabot, the explorer who “discovered” the North American mainland in 1497. America seemed to be the place where fortunes were made. Thatch discovered that being a sailor was not the way to make it.

 

Sailors stood below even farm laborers in England’s pecking order. The historian David Ogg described their treatment as being “barely distinguishable from the criminal,” while the eighteenth-century essayist Samuel Johnson wrote that their lot was very much the same as that of a prisoner, only with the added possibility of drowning.

The sailor’s work was extremely hazardous. Seamen got “bursted bellies,” hernias, while manhandling heavy cargoes, which were transported in casks and barrels that occasionally rolled free, slicing off fingers or crushing limbs. While underway, the ship’s assorted canvas sails had to be regularly adjusted, either by hauling on ropes from the deck or by climbing high up the mast. “We were often waked up before we had slept half an hour and forced to go to the maintop or foretop to take in our topsails, half awayke and half asleep, with one shoe on and the other off,” sailor Edward Barlow recalled in about 1703. “In stormy weather, when the ship rolled and tumbled, as though some great millstone were rolling up one hill and down another, we [had to] . . . haul and pull to make fast the sail, seeing nothing but air above us and water beneath us, and that so raging as though every wave would make a grave of us.” Men fell to their deaths, while others were washed off the decks by crashing waves or crushed beneath falling rigging.

Sailors wrapped themselves in woolen clothing against the cold and wore leather caps and tar-dipped jackets against the spray and rain. Still, it was not unusual to spend days on end in the soaking wet clothing in winter weather, resulting in sickness or death. In the tropics, they worked shirtless, leading to terrible sunburns. Dr. Hans Sloane, traveling to Jamaica in 1687, reported that the entire company of HMS Assistance had turned a bright red and were “breaking out all over into little whales, pimples, and pustules.”

There wasn’t much solace belowdecks. Merchant seamen were crammed into a communal cabin in the bow, where the movement of the vessel was most violent. They slept in densely packed rows of hammocks in this dark and poorly ventilated space, which reeked of bilge water and unwashed flesh. Lice, rats, and cockroaches swarmed the vessel, spreading diseases like typhus, typhoid, and the plague. Gottleib Mittelberger, who crossed the Atlantic in 1750, reported that the cabins were a place of “stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of seasickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, consumption, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth rot and the like, all of which come from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so that many die miserably.”

The food they were fed was literally sickening. The salted beef and pork that were the staples of the seaman’s diet came out of barrels dry and hard at best, putrid and maggoty at worst. Sailors closed their eyes before eating the “mouldy and stinking” ship’s biscuits to avoid seeing the maggots and weevils wiggling through them. After a few weeks at sea, the fresh-water supply turned green and reeking and fueled deadly outbreaks of dysentery and bloody flux. Sailors drank huge quantities of alcohol instead; Royal Navy rations gave each man a half pint of rum and a gallon of beer every day, meaning the crew was drunk most of the time.

Bad as these victuals were, they were better than nothing, as not a few crews painfully discovered. Especially greedy merchant shipowners regularly tried to boost their profits by understocking the crew’s food supply, leaving them to face starvation if storms or adverse winds caused their passage to take longer than expected. Vessels carrying poor immigrants or African slaves to the Americas were particularly vulnerable.

On passenger vessels, people starved to death in large numbers. One ship, the Katharine, left Londonderry for Boston in 1729 with 123 crew and passengers, but limped ashore six months later in western Ireland with only fourteen left alive. Later that year, the Lothrop showed up in Philadelphia with only ninety survivors; thirty children and seventy adults had starved to death en route including all but three of the crew. When food ran low on slave ships, the captain would throw human cargo overboard.

The captain ruled with absolute authority, and many of them exercised it with shocking brutality. The Admiralty’s trial records are filled with accounts of sailors being flogged or clubbed for minor mistakes: losing an oar, forgetting a chore, or unsteady helmsmanship. More than a few lost teeth, eyes, arms, and fingers during beatings. Others lost their lives. When sailor Richard Baker became bedridden from dysentery on a passage from St. Christopher to London, his captain forced him to man the helm for four hours, then had him whipped and lashed to the mizenmast; he died four days later. Anthony Comerford, accused of stealing a live bird on the merchantman Ridge, was tied to the rigging and whipped to death.

Then there were the truly sadistic captains. On a journey from Charleston to Bristol, Captain John Jeane took a dislike to his cabin boy, whom he had whipped “several times in a very cruel manner” and increased the pain by pouring pickle brine into the wounds. Jeane strung the child up to the mast for nine days and nights with his arms and legs fully extended. He then dragged him to the gangway and trod up and down over his body, and ordered the rest of the crew to do the same. The other sailors refused, so he kicked the boy repeatedly and “stamped upon his breast so violently that his excrement came involuntarily from him”; Jeane finally scooped up the excrement and “forced it several times down his throat.” The youngster took eighteen days to die, despite being whipped every day. Just before expiring he asked for water. Jeane rushed to his cabin and returned with a glass of his own urine and forced the boy to drink it. When sailors prepared the body to be thrown over-board, they found “it was as many colours as the rainbow” with “flesh in many places like jelly” and a “head swollen as big as two men’s of the largest size.” Jeane was eventually executed for his actions. Other captains got away with murdering men they disliked by denying them rations or beating them until they were barely able to stand and forcing them to climb the mainmast, while some disposed of unwanted men by turning them over to the navy, which could be tantamount to a death sentence.

Legally speaking, merchant captains were only supposed to employ “moderate” discipline on their crews. Not so in the Royal Navy, where captains were under standing orders to mete out brutal punishments. Petty officers whacked slow-moving crewmen across the shoulders with rattan canes. A crewman caught stealing small objects was made to “run the gauntlet,” forced to walk between parallel lines of crewmen as they lashed his bare back. Major thefts resulted in a full-on flogging with a knotted cat-o’-nine tails, as also befell “he that pisseth between decks.” The commission of serious crimes resulted in potentially fatal floggings of seventy-two to three hundred lashings, or outright hanging.

It’s a wonder any sailors survived. Mortality rates among the crews of vessels employed in the African slave trade were comparable to those of the slaves themselves. It was not unusual for 40 percent of the crew to perish during a single voyage, most from tropical diseases against which they had no resistance. About half the sailors pressed into the Royal Navy died at sea. Captains of both types of vessels had to carry extra men as insurance against the inevitable loss of hands.

Even sailors who managed to survive their terms of service rarely received the wages they were due. Merchant captains used a variety of ruses to shortchange their crews. Sailors often found their earnings had been docked for damages to the cargo, even when the damage was caused by storms or poor packaging by the merchants themselves. Edward Barlow, who was one of the few ordinary sailors of the age to record his experiences, reported that his captain typically deducted £3 from each man’s salary, the equivalent of two months of an ordinary sailor’s wage. Some captains would pay in colonial currencies, which were worth only 25 to 50 percent of pounds sterling. Men whose ships were wrecked or who were pressed into the navy at sea rarely received any of the wages they were owed, spelling disaster for the families they left behind.

The navy had a semiofficial policy summed up in the maxim “Keep the pay, keep the man.” On arrival in port, sailors were often not paid until just before the vessel sailed again, and any who left before that moment automatically sacrificed all of their back wages. Payment was often made in the form of “tickets,” official IOUs issued by the government that would be honored at some unspecified time in the future. Sailors in need of ready cash were forced to sell their tickets to loan sharks at a fraction of their face value. Finally there were those who served for years on end without being paid at all.

No wonder, then, that young sailors like Samuel Bellamy, Charles Vane, and Edward Thatch regarded Henry Avery as a hero.

 

Woodes Rogers, the man who would confront the pirates, knew there was money to be made in merchant shipping, provided, that is, that one owned the vessels. Like Bellamy, Vane, and Thatch, Rogers went to sea at a young age. He did so from a different starting point, however; his father was a successful merchant captain and owned shares in numerous ships. Woodes was his heir.

The Rogers family was among the leading families of Poole, a modest seaport on the English Channel, sixty miles south of Bristol in County Dorset. Several of Woodes’s ancestors had served as mayor. Woodes’s, father, Captain Woods Rogers, became successful in the Newfoundland fishing trade, and as a merchant captain he had been to Spain, the Red Sea, and the coast of Africa. He would regale listeners with tales of hippopotami attacking his ship’s boats. Woodes, born in 1679, was the eldest of Captain Rogers’s three children, a year older than Mary Rogers, and nine years older than John.

He spent his childhood in Poole, which sat at the head of a large, well-protected bay. The town was famous for two things: oysters and fish. Poole oysters were said to be the best and biggest in the region and the finest in all of England for their pearls; the townspeople pickled huge numbers of these oysters every year, shipping them by the barrel to London, Spain, Italy, and the West Indies. The fish—split, sun-dried salt cod—came from farther away; Woodes’s father and other merchants led a small fleet of fishing vessels across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland every year. These fleets could be gone for nine months or more at a time, hauling hooked cod up from the deep and drying them on Newfoundland’s cold, stark shores. While his father was away, young Woodes likely attended the local school, for his later writings reveal a man of considerable education. On Sundays, he and his siblings listened to the sermons of their Puritan pastor, Samuel Hardy, in St. James Church. As he grew older, Woodes likely accompanied his father on short trips up the channel, helping him unload salt cod on the London docks and load salt and other provisions for his father’s next voyage.

Sometime between 1690 and 1696, Woodes’s father moved the family to Bristol, probably to expand his trade with Newfoundland. His father had friends in Bristol, as well as a probable relative, an influential merchant named Francis Rogers, who would invest in many of their later adventures. By the time the poll-tax collector made his rounds in June 1696, the Rogers family was living in the seafarer’s neighborhood of Redcliffe, across the river from central Bristol.

Bristol was a strange location for a port. It was located seven miles from the sea up a narrow, winding river—the Avon—beset by tides so powerful the watercraft of the day stood no chance of proceeding against them. The spring tides rose and fell by as much as forty-five feet, and at low tide much of the serpentine harbor turned to mudflats. Vessels under 150 tons had to wait until the tides were flowing in the direction of travel, and even then had difficulty rounding St. Vincent’s Rock, halfway down the river. Larger ships were almost certain to wind up grounded on a mud bank if they tried to sail the gauntlet, and had to be towed to and from Bristol’s docks by large rowboats. Many ship captains elected not to make the trip at all, anchoring instead at the mouth of the Avon, where they loaded and unloaded their cargoes onto a series of rafts and tenders that could more easily navigate the river’s tides. Bristol stood on a bend in the Avon that was congested with vessels. Visiting Bristol in 1739, Alexander Pope said they extended along the riverfront as far as the eye could see, “their masts as thick as they can stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable.”

The city itself was still medieval in character. Inside its walls, timber-framed, Tudor-style houses perched on streets so narrow people could shake hands across them from their upstairs windows. Principal roads were no more than twenty feet across and were the only ones paved. Other roads were surfaced in mud and garbage, in which pigs rooted about. Even the center of the city was separated by only a few hundred yards from the farms and fields that surrounded it. The focus of commerce was an artificial anchorage—the River Frome—where the ocean-going ships disgorged their cargoes onto The Quay in full view of counting houses. Only a few blocks’ walk south of The Quay were the gates leading into a marsh. From there, among grazing cows, one could look across the river and see the bluffs of Redcliffe, where the Rogers family made its home.

Growing up in Redcliffe, Woodes Rogers may well have rubbed shoulders with Edward Thatch, or even been acquainted with him. They were almost the same age, engaged in the same profession, and probably lived within a few blocks of each other. Rogers the Pirate Hunter and Blackbeard the Pirate may have prayed together as teenagers, beneath John Cabot’s great whalebone in the cool interior of Redcliffe’s cathedral-sized parish church.

Henry Avery’s exploits were well known within the Rogers household by way of one of Captain Rogers’s closest friends, the mariner William Dampier, a former buccaneer who had circumnavigated the world. Dampier renewed their friendship in the mid-1690s, while preparing two books for publication. The first, A New Voyage Round the World, an account of his circumnavigation, would make him a national celebrity following its publication in the spring of 1697. The second, Voyages and Descriptions (1699), contained extracts of several letters from Captain Rogers, whom Dampier referred to as “my ingenious friend.” The elder Rogers had shared his knowledge of the Red Sea and African coast; Dampier, in turn, had intimate, firsthand knowledge of Henry Avery and his fellow pirates, whose adventures were just then captivating the English public.

Dampier had spent months holed up with Avery and his men in the harbor of La Coruña in 1694. While Avery was serving as first mate of the Charles II, Dampier was second mate on one of her consorts, the Dove. Dampier may have provided Avery with sailing directions to Madagascar, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, as he was one of the only people in La Coruña with firsthand knowledge of those waters. Dampier had shared Avery’s frustrations with how the fleet’s owners were treating them, but refused to join the mutiny itself. Back in England, he joined the crewmen’s lawsuit against James Houblon and the other owners and later testified in court on behalf of one of Avery’s six captured crewmen, Joseph Dawson, the only one to avoid the gallows. Years later, while serving as commander of the forty-gun frigate HMS Roebuck, he encountered several of Avery’s fugitive crewmen during a port call in Brazil. Rather than placing them under arrest, he socialized with them and signed one on to serve aboard his ship.

As the heir of a growing shipping concern, the young Woodes Rogers likely looked on Avery as a villain, not a hero. But he also may have internalized some important lessons from Dampier’s story of Avery’s mutiny and its aftermath. In an era when most captains ruled their ships through terror, Rogers would eventually take a more lenient, fair-minded approach. Winning the crew’s respect proved a much more reliable method of control than keeping them in a state of fear.

In November of 1697, Rogers started an apprenticeship to the mariner John Yeamans, who lived just a few doors away. At eighteen, he was a bit old to be starting a seven-year tutelage, particularly given his family’s seafaring background. Rogers had probably already traveled to Newfoundland with his father, and learned the essential elements of seamanship, commerce, and the art of command. Bryan Little, the best of Rogers’s twentieth-century biographers, suspected that young Rogers entered Yeamans’s tutelage for political purposes. Such an apprenticeship gave the newcomers from Poole an entrée into the closed circles of Bristol’s merchant elite and a way of establishing the contacts and relationships essential to successful maritime trade. It was also a means by which Rogers could become a freeman, or voting citizen, although, as it turned out, the Rogers family was able to secure this coveted privilege for their son by other means.

 

While Rogers was sailing with Yeamans, his father was amassing a small fortune from Bristol’s growing transatlantic trade. Like many English merchants, Captain Rogers spread his risk by purchasing shares in a few different vessels, and rarely owned any vessel outright. Should one ship sink, Rogers would share the losses with other merchants and still count on profits from other ships. He also reduced uncertainty—and increased his income—by captaining some of the vessels he invested in. Captain Rogers sailed regularly to Newfoundland, spending the entire spring and summer of 1700 aboard the sixty-ton Elizabeth, buying oil from whale hunters in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, where the fish merchants of Poole had based their North American operations. He may have left servants behind to maintain the docks, storage houses, and fish-drying racks they had built there, helping to settle Newfoundland.

It was in Newfoundland that the elder Rogers probably solidified his most important alliance. In 1696 or 1697 he met the ambitious Royal Navy captain William Whetstone. Whetstone, who was also from Bristol, was a former merchant captain with close business ties to Woods Rogers. In the mid-1690s, Captain Rogers and other fish merchants in Poole and Bristol had become increasingly concerned about an aggressive expansion of French fishing outposts in Newfoundland and French attacks on their own fishing stations. The merchants cried for help. The Admiralty responded by ordering Whetstone to sail the fourth-rate man-of-war HMS Dreadnought to Newfoundland with the fishing fleet, and once there, to protect their facilities at Trinity Bay. During the long weeks at sea, Captain Rogers and Whetstone had plenty of time to cement their friendship.

By 1702, Captain Rogers was wealthy enough to buy property in Bristol’s most fashionable new subdivision. The town fathers had decided to tear down the walls separating the town center from the marshes at the river’s bend. Where the marshes had been, they built Queen’s Square, Bristol’s first preplanned neighborhood. It was to be a thoroughly modern place. Instead of cramped and dirty alleys, its residences would face a great square—the second largest in England—with lime trees and formal gardens, and accessed by wide, paved boulevards. Rather than frame, all the buildings would be constructed of red brick, with sash windows and stone ornamentation. In short, it would be as comfortable and uniform a district as any built in London after the Great Fire of 1666. Shortly before Christmas 1702, Captain Rogers purchased a double-sized lot at Number 31–32 Queen’s Square, where workers began work on an elegant new mansion. The Whetstones, who lived on fashionable St. Michael’s Hill, purchased the lot at Number 29, two doors down, along the square’s southern promenade.

William Whetstone did not have the opportunity to oversee the construction of his home, as the navy had called him back to sea. Whetstone, now a commodore, spent most of 1701 trying to sail a squadron of warships to Jamaica, but his vessels were repeatedly battered by storms and never got further than Ireland. In February 1702, he set out again, and while he was crossing the Atlantic, England went to war against France and Spain. He would not return home for nearly two years.

War had been brewing for some time due to the political and genetic complications of royal inbreeding. For more than twenty years, the most powerful throne in Europe had been occupied by the drooling and disfigured King Charles II of Spain, who was not only mentally and physically handicapped, but impotent. Spanish authorities did their best to rehabilitate their king, but no matter how many exorcisms they subjected Charles to, he remained barely able to walk or speak. He was an overgrown child who spent his reign wallowing in his own filth, shooting firearms at animals, and gazing at his ancestors’ decomposed corpses, which he had ordered his courtiers to exhume for that purpose. When he died in November 1700, the Spanish Habsburg line died with him. His out-of-town relatives immediately started squabbling over who would inherit the estate, which, in addition to Spain, included Italy, the Philippines, and most of the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately for the people of Europe, these same out-of-town relatives were the French King Louis XIV and the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I. Pretty soon armies were clashing and, for various geopolitical and genealogical reasons of their own, most of Europe’s rulers were drawn in. In the spring of 1702, England went to war, siding with the Dutch, Austrians, and Prussians against France and Spain. By doing so, they were setting the stage for the greatest outbreak of piracy the Atlantic would ever know.

The War of the Spanish Succession made life more hazardous for Captain Rogers, whose merchant ships were easy prey for French raiders. He and other merchants may have also lost ships in the horrific storm of 1703, the worst in English history, which destroyed thirteen warships and over 700 merchantmen. Despite their losses, his business must have remained profitable in the war’s early years because construction continued on the Queen’s Square mansion. It was completed in 1704 (the same year young Woodes finished his apprenticeship); three stories tall, with an attic for servants, the back windows looking out over the River Avon. Sometime during this period, Woodes took notice of the girl next door: eighteen-year-old Sarah Whetstone, the commodore’s eldest daughter and heir.

In January of 1705, the Rogers family and the Whetstones traveled to London and witnessed three important ceremonies. On the eighteenth, William Whetstone was appointed rear admiral of the blue by the queen’s husband, Prince George, the lord high admiral of the navy. The newly appointed admiral hosted the next event six days later: the wedding of Sarah and Woodes Rogers, held at the church of St. Mary Magdalene in central London. Not long thereafter, Admiral Whetstone was reappointed commander in chief of the West Indies and began preparing to sail again for Jamaica. The newlyweds probably stayed in London through February to see Admiral Whetstone off and to witness a third ceremony: his knighthood by Queen Anne.

At the end of February, Sir William sailed for Jamaica, whose citizens expected an enemy attack at any moment. The Rogers and Whetstone families headed back to Bristol, where their merchant empire awaited. Captain Rogers was in a good place: his son married to the daughter of a knight and an admiral, who was also a dear friend. Little did he know he would never see Sir William again.

A year later, Captain Rogers was dead. In the winter of 1705–1706, he died at sea and was committed to the ocean where he had spent so much of his life. His fortune, his company, and his home would pass to his widow and twenty-five-year-old son, by then a freeman of Bristol by dint of a noble marriage.

The young gentleman merchant of Bristol was tall and strongly built, with dark brown hair and a prominent nose and strong chin. Before war’s end, intelligent and ambitious Woodes Rogers would be a household name from London to Edinburgh, from Boston to Barbados. But in France and Spain, they would know him by just one word: pirate.