Brinksmanship

July–September 1718

 

WOODES ROGERS stood on the quarterdeck of the Delicia, cane in hand to support his bad foot, and peered out across the sea. His great ship heeled gently to starboard, her sails set close to the wind, the shadowy outline of New Providence Island three miles off her bow, dominating the southern horizon. Commodore Peter Chamberlaine’s flagship, HMS Milford, sailed alongside, lookouts atop her mainmast and thirty heavy guns at the ready. Behind, in the Delicias sizzling wake, the transport Willing Mind rode low in the waves with her heavy load of soldiers and supplies, with the private sloop-of-war Buck sailing nearby. From time to time Rogers peered through his looking glass to pick out the frigate HMS Rose, a lighted lantern hanging in her mizzenmast, now rounding the western end of Hog Island, three miles away. He could see the sloop-of-war HMS Shark hanging a half mile behind her. In the wee hours of the morning, Commodore Chamberlaine had put local pilots aboard the Rose and Shark and sent them ahead to Nassau to scout out the scene. Now, fifteen hours later, the moment of reckoning had come. The Rose was entering the harbor. Rogers and Chamberlaine, lacking pilots for their large, deep-draft ships, planned to spend the night sailing back and forth out in the deep water. Until daybreak, they could only wait, watching and listening, for reports from the Rose and Shark. Rogers felt a sinking feeling when, a few minutes later, he heard the unmistakable sound of cannonfire echoing from inside Nassau’s harbor.

At six thirty P.M., the captain of the Rose, Thomas Whitney, ordered the frigate’s anchors dropped just inside the harbor’s main entrance. She swung into the easterly wind so that her twenty guns pointed, uselessly, at stretches of unoccupied shoreline: the tip of Hog Island to port, the shrubby, overgrown fields outside of Nassau to starboard. The main anchorage lay dead ahead, a scene of desolation. The remains of some forty captured vessels were strewn on the shore, some burnt, and all of them ruined—Dutch ships, French brigantines, sloops of various sizes and nationalities—fittings and sails missing and stray ends of rigging blowing in the wind. In the middle of the anchorage, a large twenty- to thirty-gun ship, French-built by the look of her, rode at anchor, a St. George’s flag flying from her mainmast, a sign of allegiance to Old England rather than the decade-old nation of Great Britain. Sloops and other vessels were anchored all around her, some flying the death’s head flag. The same flag could be seen flapping over Fort Nassau, whose seaward-facing walls were so decrepit their cracks were visible from a distance. The wind carried the sickening smell of putrefying flesh across the harbor, as if the carcasses of a thousand animals were rotting somewhere on the shore.

Suddenly, to Whitney’s alarm, a flash of fire and a puff of smoke appeared from the stern of the big ship—Charles Vane’s ship—in the center of the harbor. The sound came moments later—the report of a stern-mounted cannon—followed by the splash of a cannonball on the surface of the water, not far from the Rose. Two more cannonballs passed over his head, at least one tearing through some of the Rose’s rigging, before Whitney raised a white flag of truce. Clearly, the young captain must have thought, this was not going to be easy.

With the pirate ship appearing to accept the flag of truce, Whitney sent his lieutenant into the harbor in a boat to, in his words, “know the reason” for the pirates’ hostility. The lieutenant went alongside Vane’s ship and hailed her captain, inquiring why he had fired on the king’s ship. “His answer,” Whitney wrote in his logbook, “was [that] he would use his utmost endeavour to burn us and all the vessels in the harbor.” Vane also gave the lieutenant a letter addressed to Governor Woodes Rogers, on the outside of which was written: “We await a speedy Answer.” The letter, which may or may not have been delivered to Rogers that evening, read:

 

July 24th, 1718

Your Excellency may please to understand that we are willing to accept his Majesty’s most gracious pardon on the following terms, viz:

That you will suffer us to dispose of all our goods now in our possession. Likewise, to act as we think fit with every Thing belonging to us, as his Majesty’s Act of Grace specifies.

If your Excellency shall please to comply with this, we shall, with all readiness, accept of his Majesty’s Act of Grace. If not, we are obliged to stand on our own defence. . . .

Your Humble Servants,

Charles Vane, and Company.

 

Vane was simply trying to buy a little time, to find a way to escape from New Providence with his new ship and all his loot. His ship was too large to pass over the Potter’s Cay bar and through the harbor’s shallow eastern passage. The Rose was anchored in the western entrance, bottling him in the harbor. Any thought of trying to run past her guns—exchanging comparable broadsides—was put to rest when, a few minutes later, the ten-gun HMS Shark sailed into the harbor and anchored just ahead of the Rose, followed by the twenty-gun transport Willing Mind and the ten-gun privateer Buck. Vane’s ship was trapped, her men at the mercy of Governor Rogers’s forces. The sun set, plunging the harbor into darkness.

Vane stewed for a few hours until he finally decided Rogers did not intend to honor him with a reply. His company agreed that the warships at the harbor’s entrance seemed to speak for themselves. The ship was doomed, Vane told them, but there was still a way to escape the governor’s clutches. The ninety men in his crew listened intently as he outlined a daring escape plan.

At two A.M., Captain Whitney was awakened in his cabin by a breathless subordinate. The pirates were attacking; the Rose was in danger. He rushed onto deck and was greeted by a horrific sight: Vane’s ship, enveloped in flames, was heading straight for the Rose and her consorts. In the middle of the night, Vane’s men had unloaded their ship and soaked its decks and rigging with pitch and tar. They had rolled all her guns out of their ports, every one packed with powder and two cannonballs. Weighing anchor, they had quietly towed her in the direction of the interlopers. As the distance closed, one pirate stayed on the helm, keeping the ship aimed directly at the anchored Shark and Rose while others dashed about the doomed ship, lowering sails and setting the pitch-soaked decks and rigging alight. If all went to plan, the ship would collide with the Royal Navy vessels, consuming them in the resulting conflagration.

As the last pirates abandoned their ship, sailors were rushing about the decks of the Rose, Shark, Buck, and Willing Mind, some loosening sails, others hacking away at the anchor lines with axes, trying to free the endangered vessels. As soon as the anchors came free, Whitney and the other captains swung their ships around—wind to their backs—toward the open sea. There was a frightening few minutes as the fireship drew closer, the first of her double-loaded guns discharging as their gunpowder charges ignited in the heat. Then, slowly, the Rose and the other vessels gained momentum and pulled away from the approaching inferno.

Vane himself watched these events from the deck of the Katherine, a swift Bermuda-built sloop that he had commandeered from another pirate in the middle of the night. Katherine’s owner, a minor pirate named Charles Yeats, remained onboard and was none too happy about having his vessel taken from him. Vane’s men had loaded their possessions into the sloop and augmented her armament to ten or twelve guns. They watched with disappointment as the Rose and Shark escaped out to sea, but the action had bought them time. In the four hours remaining until sunrise, they would have the run of Nassau. Vane sent men into town, to seize anything they thought useful: equipment, supplies, weapons, valuables, and the island’s best pilot and carpenter, whom they roused out of bed and carried aboard the Katherine. Then they waited, black flag at the mast, for the dawn.

At seven A.M., shortly after daybreak, Rogers’s entire fleet appeared at the entrance to the harbor. The governor’s first glimpse of his new capital was of the smoldering timbers of a large ship bobbing in the middle of the channel, embers hissing, the boneyard of ruined vessels on the shore, and a pair of pirate vessels anchored up the harbor, just behind Potter’s Cay. If he had wished to make a dignified entrance, Rogers was disappointed. On their way into the harbor, both the Delicia and Milford ran aground on a sandbar and had to wait two hours for the rising tide to lift them off. Vane’s men presumably had a good laugh, watching ships bearing the governor and commodore’s personal flags loll on the Hog Island sandbar. The laughing stopped around ten o’clock when, with the tide now high, the shallow-drafted Buck and another sloop began sailing around Potter’s Cay bar, their decks filled with soldiers. Vane knew they had lingered long enough. He ordered anchors lifted and sails raised. The Katherine turned and headed out the narrow eastern entrance of the harbor, with the Buck in hot pursuit.

The winds blew strong from the south-southeast that morning, and the chase proceeded close on the wind. Vane had a worried few hours, as the Katherine proved slower than her pursuers on this point of sail. He was relieved when they finally rounded the eastern end of New Providence, let out their sails, and began gaining ground. Vane’s men fired their guns in defiance, and the Buck was forced to give up the chase and return to Nassau. Vane and his men were to remain at large, but New Providence Island, for the time being at least, would be in the possession of Governor Rogers.

 

On the morning of the twenty-seventh, Rogers landed ashore, an event punctuated by much pomp. The Rose and Shark fired eleven-gun salutes as Rogers’s boat hit the beach, where, to his considerable relief, he was joyously received by pro-pardon residents. Thomas Walker, who had returned to the island in recent weeks, was the first to greet the governor, along with his old nemesis, Benjamin Hornigold. These two men—the “pirate governor” and the former justice—led Rogers and his entourage to the crumbling mass of Fort Nassau. Along the way the crews of several pardoned pirate captains—Hornigold, Josiah Burgess, and others—formed orderly lines on either side of the road, each man firing his musket into the air as Rogers walked past, creating a running salute all the way to the fortress gates.

Rogers climbed to the top of the fort to address the gathering crowd. He could see in an instant that the fort was in terrible disrepair. The seaward facing bastion looked like it might collapse at any moment, having, as Rogers put it, “only a crazy crack’d wall in its foundation.” The parade ground was overgrown with weeds, and instead of longhouses for the garrison it contained a single hut, in which a pathetic old man was living. The pirates had absconded with the cannon, leaving behind a single nine-pounder, which explained why Vane hadn’t tried to hole up in the fort. By the time Rogers reached the roof, William Fairfax, Walker, and Hornigold at his side, and a group of soldiers behind, some three hundred people had assembled in the square below. Rogers unrolled a scroll and read aloud the king’s commission, appointing him governor of the Bahamas. The people, Rogers said, “showed many tokens of joy for the re-introduction of government.”

Rogers spent the next few days consolidating control of the island and surveying its conditions. His 100-man Independent Company took control of Fort Nassau, constructing shelters out of sticks and palmetto leaves, while the sea-weary colonists set about building tents made from sails borrowed from the Delicia, Buck, and Willing Mind. Sailors from the Rose secured in the name of the king the St. Martin, Drake, Ulster, Dove, Lancaster, and other vessels that happened to be in the harbor. Rogers moved into the old governor’s house—one of the only buildings that had survived the War of Spanish Succession. In his makeshift office he held consultations with various residents, looking for “inhabitants who had not been pirates . . . that were the least encouragers of trading with them” to serve on his twelve-man governing council. His initial appointees, announced on August 1, included Harbour Island smuggling king Richard Thompson and several men who had come with Rogers, including Fairfax (the new justice) and the Delicia’s captain and first mate. The council met at Rogers’s house that very day and spent hours accepting the surrenders of some two hundred pirates who had not yet taken the king’s pardon.

The pirate population on the island was estimated at 500 to 700, suggesting that a great number of those who had left Nassau to accept pardons in other colonies had come back. Another 200 nonpirates were also on the island, people who, in the words of one of Rogers’s officials, “had made their escape from ye Spainards” during the war and now “lived in the woods destitute of all neccessarys.” Rogers set all of these people to work clearing a thick layer of vegetation the pirates had allowed to smother buildings, yards, and fields. Others were recruited to assist the soldiers in arming and repairing the fort and in setting up a separate battery to guard the harbor’s eastern entrance. The last vessel in Rogers’s fleet, the supply ship Samuel, finally arrived, safe and sound in the harbor, her capacious hold filled with food and supplies. After the first week of his governorship, Rogers was likely optimistic for success.

Reports of piracy in the surrounding waters shattered the mood. First came a message from Charles Vane, who had detained two inbound vessels and said that he would join with Blackbeard, planning, as Rogers described it, “to burn my guardship and visit me very soon to return the affront I gave him on my arrival in sending two sloops after him instead of answering him.” Shortly thereafter, on August 4, a Philadelphia mariner named Richard Taylor arrived with more ominous news. Taylor had been captured in the southern Bahamas by Spanish privateers who, despite the peace, had proceeded to sack the English villages on Catt Island and Crooked Island. The leader of the privateers had told Taylor that a new Spanish governor had arrived in Havana “with orders from King Phillip to destroy all the English settlements in the Bahama Islands”; he had five warships and upward of 1,500 men to accomplish this task. If the English surrendered, Taylor explained, the Spanish governor had instructions to deport them to Virginia or the Carolinas, “but in case of resistance to send them to Havana and thence [as prisoners] . . . to Old Spain.”

Facing simultaneous threats from Charles Vane and the king of Spain, Rogers knew he needed to complete his fortifications as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, his labor supply began to disappear. First, the soldiers, sailors, and colonists he brought with him fell ill by the dozens. The unidentified disease—and the putrid stench that had hung over the town for weeks—was blamed on the huge piles of rotting animal hides the pirates had abandoned on the shore. Although the illness had broken out two weeks before Rogers’s arrival, he wrote it was “as if only fresh European blood could . . . draw the infection”; longtime residents “quickly became free” of contagion while the newcomers were “seized so violently that I have had above 100 sick at one time and not a [single] healthful officer.” Eighty-six of Rogers’s party died, as did six crewmen from the Rose and Milford and two of the locals who served on Rogers’s governing council. Rogers himself came down with “intestine commotions and . . . contagious distempers” and, by mid-August, was unable to attend council meetings. Most of the island’s cattle also perished, striking a blow to the food supply.

Longtime Nassau residents resisted not only the illness, but Rogers’s efforts to put them to work. “Most of them are poor and so addicted to idleness that they would choose rather almost to starve than work,” Rogers reported home. “They mortally hate it, for after they have cleared a patch that will supply them with potatoes and yams and very little else [and] fish being so plentiful and either turtle or [iguanas available] on the neighboring islands, they eat [them] instead of meat and covet no stock or cattle; thus [they] live poorly [and] indolently . . . and pray for nothing but [ship]wrecks or the pirates . . . and would rather spend all they have in a punch house than pay me [a tax] to save their families and all that is dear to them.” The locals proved unreliable militiamen as well. “These wretches can’t be kept to watch at night and when they do they come very seldom sober and rarely [stay] awake all night, though our officers or soldiers very often surprise their guard and carry off their arms and punish, fine, or confine them almost every day,” the governor complained. “I don’t fear but they’ll all stand by me in case of any [invasion] attempt, except [one by] pirates. But should their old friends have strength enough to designe to attack me, I much doubt whether I should find one half to join me.”

It was at this time that Commodore Chamberlaine announced that his three men-of-war were leaving. Rogers was flabbergasted. The colony was at its most vulnerable, its defenders ill and its fortifications unfinished. The Milford, Rose, Shark and the three hundred men serving on them were essential to its defense. Chamberlaine was adamant however: He had cleaned his vessel’s hull, taken his share of the loot seized from pirate prizes in the harbor, and, frankly, “had no orders” to stay any longer. Rogers had no power over naval personnel and so was forced to beg the commodore not to abandon the colony. Begrudgingly, Chamberlaine agreed to leave the twenty-gun Rose behind for three weeks longer, at which point Rogers said he “was in hopes my men and the fortification would be in a better state” to stand alone against the pirates and Spaniards. Accordingly, at nine thirty A.M. on August 16, the Milford and Shark departed for New York.

Rogers’s situation deteriorated. Over the next few days, the Bahamas were racked with lightning, thunder, and rain, and Captain Whitney, expecting a hurricane, had his men take down the Rose’s topmasts. Rogers tossed and turned in his humid bedroom, with wrenching guts and a high fever. Progress on the fort moved at a snail’s pace, Rogers’s lieutenants barely able to get the reformed pirates to clear the scrub from around the fort, better yet to take part in the strenuous labor of salvaging cannon from the Hog Island wrecks and transporting them to the fort’s bastions. The rain continued for two weeks, toward the end of which a boat arrived carrying men who, on examination, turned out to be members of Vane’s company. These men confessed that Vane, in a brigantine, was headed north, but had promised to meet them around September 14 at Abaco, one of the Bahama Islands, sixty miles from Nassau. Was he headed north to join forces with Bonnet or Blackbeard? If so, was he preparing to make good on his threat to attack Nassau? On September 8, there was more bad news. A boat arrived carrying John Cockram’s brother Phillip, and several other men who had been held captive by Spanish guardas costas for two months. During that time they had been forced to serve as pilots for the Spaniards as they sailed around Abaco and New Providence, gathering intelligence for an imminent invasion. They had released Cockram and his colleagues so that they could bring Rogers a message: Prove to us that you are a legitimate governor and not a pirate, or expect the worst.

Rogers quickly drew up a letter to the governor of Havana, while his lieutentants set about loading the Buck with goods to trade in Cuba. The sloop-of-war departed on September 10, in the company of a smaller sloop, the Mumvele Trader. The Buck, however, never made it to Havana. En route, her crew—a mix of reformed pirates and Rogers’s sailors—turned pirate. A number of the sailors who had come from England with the Buck apparently found piracy attractive. The motivations of one of these men, Walter Kennedy, were later recorded. Kennedy, the young son of a Wapping anchorsmith, had served in the Royal Navy during the War of Spanish Succession, where he “had occasion to hear of the exploits of the pirates . . . from the time of Sir Henry Morgan . . . to Captain Avery’s more modern exploits at Madagascar.” Inspired by these tales, Kennedy thought “he might be able to make as great a figure as any of these thievish heroes, whenever a proper opportunity offered.” Kennedy seized that opportunity, apparently killing the Buck’s captain, Jonathan Bass, and other resistors before sailing away to Africa.

With the loss of the Buck, Rogers implored Captain Whitney to stay and help protect the island from Vane, who was now expected any day. Whitney delayed his departure by a week, but in the early morning hours of September 14, over Rogers’s strong objection, the Rose left Nassau. Whitney promised Rogers he would return in three weeks. It was a promise he had no intention of keeping. Rogers watched as his last naval escort vanished over the horizon on a southwesterly breeze.

A few hours later another boat came into the harbor bearing alarming news: Charles Vane had arrived at Abaco.

 

After escaping from the Buck on the evening of July 26, Vane’s exact movements remain sketchy. His company appears to have continued sailing south with the sloop Katherine, whose original pirate captain, Charles Yeats, remained aboard, resentful and disgruntled. The pirates appear to have spent the first half of August bouncing between the southern Bahamas and the Cuban coast. On July 28 they captured a sloop from Barbados, which was given to Yeats and his men under the condition that they continue sailing in consort with Vane. Two days later, another sloop, the John & Elizabeth, fell into their clutches, and not long after that a brigantine, which Vane took command of. A London paper later reported that at about this time two London-bound ships were set upon as they left Nassau by a pirate who, based on his behavior, was very likely Vane. The London Weekly Journal reported that the pirate captain had wanted to sink both ships “with their commanders and men,” but that his crew would not consent “to such an inhuman piece of barbarity.” The pirates kept their captives for five days, during which time their captain promised to capture two more London ships that were expected to come to Nassau, saying he would “cut ’em into pound-pieces.” While these pirates drank and cleaned their vessels at some secluded Bahama hideaway, another vessel arrived with supplies for them, plus “news [of] where other pirates cruiz’d and what Men of War [were] out in chase after them.” The captain was heard to brag “that if there came two Men-of-War to attack him, he would fight ’em and if he could not escape them, he would go into his Powder Room and blow up his ship, and send [any of] them on board and himself to Hell together.”

In mid-August Vane sent several men to Nassau to gather information and provisions, which they were to bring back to him at a secluded anchorage near Abaco. Vane appears to have been biding his time, observing his enemy and hoping to eventually join forces with Blackbeard or Bonnet to attack the island; he may have even hoped that the Spaniards would attack, weakening or destroying Rogers’s forces, creating a vacuum into which the pirates could return. In the meantime, he counted on old friends to buy his goods, smuggle vital provisions to his gang, and keep him abreast of happenings on New Providence.

Toward the middle of August, his company’s morale may have started to flag, because he decided to take a short cruise to Charleston in the hopes of filling the crewmen’s purses. The pirates blockaded the harbor on August 30, 1718, Vane in his twelve-gun brigantine with ninety men and Yeats in a sloop—presumably the Katherine—of eight guns and twenty men. The merchants of South Carolina had to have been appalled to be at the mercy of pirates once again, as vessel after vessel fell into their clutches. Over a thirty-six-hour period, Vane and Yeats took eight in all, from the little fifteen-ton sloop Dove of Barbados to the 300-ton ship Neptune of London. From the eighty-ton brigantine Dorothy of London, Vane seized ninety slaves from Guinea and forced them aboard Yeats’s sloop, which he intended to use as a floating warehouse. Yeats, however, had other plans. His sloop full of valuable human cargo, he took off in the other direction, intending to make his escape from his overbearing commander. Vane put up a chase and got off at least one broadside, but was unable to prevent his underling’s escape. Yeats hid his vessel in Edisto Inlet, thirty-five miles south of Charleston, and sent a messenger to that city offering to surrender if the governor would grant his men pardon. The governor ultimately agreed.

Vane was undoubtedly furious about Yeats’s defection, but two other prizes gave him consolation. These were the fifty-ton ship Emperor and the Neptune, both bound for London with pitch, tar, rice, and turpentine. These cargoes would find a ready market in the Bahamas, but they comprised 2,900 large barrels, far too bulky to transfer to Vane’s modest brigantine. Instead, Vane’s company resolved to take both ships to the Bahamas, where they could plunder at their leisure. They would go to their hideaway near Abaco, where they expected their informants and suppliers from Nassau to be waiting.

Vane’s men left Charleston not a day too early, for a posse was setting out to bring them to justice. The merchants of South Carolina had fitted out two well-armed, well-manned sloops under the command of militia colonel William Rhett, a wealthy merchant who had lost a good deal of money to the pirates over the years. By the time Rhett’s vessels got out of Charleston’s harbor, Vane was nowhere to be seen. Rhett decided to snoop around the North Carolina coast, hoping to find the pirates in one of their hideaways. On the afternoon of September 27, he found some in Cape Fear harbor—not Vane’s crew, who were halfway to the Bahamas by then, but another pirate company that just couldn’t seem to catch a break.

 

Poor Stede Bonnet. After Blackbeard had double-crossed him at Topsail Inlet, vanishing with the Spanish prize sloop and much of the company’s treasure, Bonnet spent much of June 1718 trying to hunt him down. When he heard a rumor that Blackbeard was at Ocracoke Inlet, fifty miles up the North Carolina coast, he sailed there in the Revenge, only to find a couple of deserted, sandy islands.

Bonnet fell into despair. He had been a pirate for more than a year and had little more than what he had started out with: his sloop Revenge, a crew of forty men, and, thanks to the pardon from the governor of North Carolina, a clean legal record. As a pirate captain, he had been a total failure, his poor decisions having cost the lives of many of his men and the rest of his treasure. Any hopes he might have had to take part in a Jacobite uprising against King George had been dashed: The “true” king, known to them as James III, could barely help himself, better yet the pirates of the Americas. Bonnet had a ruinous reputation in both respectable and outlaw circles, and he could not bear the humiliation of returning to either his old life among the slave plantations of Barbados or living among his pirate peers in the Bahamas. He would have to live on the fence. While getting his pardon in Bath, Bonnet learned that the king of Denmark—one of Britain’s minor allies in the War of Spanish Succession—was still at war with Spain. Perhaps if Bonnet were to go to St. Thomas, Denmark’s principal Caribbean colony, he could persuade its governor to grant him a privateering commission. His company thought it a good idea; some of the pirate’s former captives, like Captain David Herriot, signed up for the plan.

When they left Beaufort Inlet, the pirates elected Robert Tucker as their quartermaster. Tucker was a mariner from Jamaica whom Blackbeard had seized from a merchant sloop some weeks earlier. Like many other captives, he found that he liked the pirate’s life and had become a popular member of the crew. He had little respect for Bonnet and wasn’t particularly interested in returning to being a law-abiding subject. When the crew discovered that the Revenge had but ten or eleven barrels of food aboard—Blackbeard having stolen the rest—Tucker resolved that they should simply seize more from the next merchant vessel they encountered. Bonnet was opposed to this plan and even threatened to resign and leave the Revenge, but the crew didn’t seem to mind the thought of losing him, and a majority threw their votes behind Tucker. The pirates seized the very next vessel they encountered, taking provisions. Then they took another. Pretty soon they were off the Capes of Virginia taking every vessel they could lay their hands on.

Bonnet tried to keep the company from invalidating his pardon. To conceal his identity, he insisted that he be called Captain Edwards or Captain Thomas, a ruse that didn’t fool all their captives. To hide their tracks further, the pirates renamed the Revenge the Royal James in homage to James Stuart. Bonnet also insisted that the pirates give their captives “payment” for the goods they stole, so that they might later claim that they were traders, not pirates. Their first two victims received small parcels of rice, molasses, and even an old anchor cable in exchange for the barrels of pork and bread that were taken from them. After a week or two, however, most of the pirates refused to participate in this subterfuge, and some of Tucker’s clique took to threatening and abusing captives instead. On July 29, off Cape May, New Jersey, Tucker boarded the fifty-ton sloop Fortune and “fell to beating and cutting people with his cutlass and cut one man’s arm,” according to an eyewitness. Two days later they boarded a sloop anchored in the harbor of Lewes, Delaware, and threw themselves a party in the captain’s cabin, eating pineapples, drinking rum punch, singing songs, and toasting the health of James Stuart, saying they “hoped to see him King of the English nation,” according to one of the sloop’s crewmen. Tucker was, by now, captain in everything but name, and the pirates had even taken to referring to him as their “father.”

Not all of the men aboard the Royal James wished to return to piracy, and took great risks to escape Tucker’s clutches. Seven men successfully escaped on July 21 by stealing a prize sloop, which they took to Rhode Island; authorities there imprisoned them but five managed to escape before being brought to trial. When, after taking at least thirteen vessels off New Jersey, Delaware, and Virginia, the pirates returned to Cape Fear to wait out the hurricane season, several forced men fled into the woods. Unable to find food, shelter, or inhabitants in the swampy wilderness, the men had no choice but to return several days later and were put to work “among the Negroes” cleaning the Royal James. One of the captives, a mulatto, lamented to another that “he was not able to bear any longer, but was forced to comply with [the pirates], for they told him they would have no regard for the colour [of his skin] but would make a slave of him.” On another occasion, a pirate told the same mulatto captive that he “was but like a negro, and they made slaves of us all of that colour if they did not join” with the pirates. In Bonnet’s company, it seems, blacks could choose between slavery and piracy.

Bonnet did not try to escape from the Royal James when the company returned to piracy. The pirates planned to continue on to St. Thomas after hurricane season had passed, so he may have held out hope that he could still become a legitimate privateer in the service of Denmark.

On September 27, 1718, the two South Carolina pirate-hunting sloops under Colonel William Rhett found the Royal James at anchor behind Cape Fear. The pirates were outnumbered by nearly two to one, Rhett having the sloops Henry (eight guns, seventy men) and Sea Nymph (eight guns, sixty men) against Bonnet’s ten-gun, forty-five-man sloop. Rhett lost the element of surprise, though, when he ran aground and was forced to take on the pirates in a full-on naval battle. Bonnet’s company raised anchor and attempted to run straight between the South Carolinian sloops to the open sea. Instead, all three sloops ran aground, the Royal James and Henry within short range of each other. The pirates had the advantage as the Royal James happened to list on the starboard side so that her raised rail protected the pirates during the musket battle that followed. Colonel Rhett’s Henry, by contrast, listed to port, exposing her entire deck to the pirates’ fire. The two parties exchanged fire for the next five hours until the rising tide lifted the Henry free. Still immobilized and facing the Henry’s cannon, the pirates surrendered. Nine died as the result of wounds received in the battle, as did fourteen of Colonel Rhett’s men.

Bonnet, who had survived unscathed, was brought into Charleston on October 3 and placed in armed custody, to the considerable joy of some, but not all, of the colony’s inhabitants. He was the first prominent pirate captain to be captured by British authorities.

 

By late July 1718, Blackbeard decided it was time to get back to work. He and his men had been involved in minor thefts: Witnesses reported that he was “insulting and abusing the masters of all trading sloops and taking from them what goods or liquors he pleased.” In their drunken revelries, he and his men had committed “some disorders” in Bath itself, according to North Carolina Governor Charles Eden, who perhaps encouraged Blackbeard to take his men to sea for a time. Governor Eden had already granted Blackbeard undisputed ownership of the Spanish prize sloop in which he had come from Beaufort; now he signed customs papers clearing him to take the sloop—which Blackbeard unoriginally renamed Adventure—to St. Thomas, where he could keep his men occupied as privateers if he so desired. As it turns out, he didn’t.

Instead of going to St. Thomas, Blackbeard and his men apparently sailed up the Delaware River, 250 miles north, where he quietly went ashore at Philadelphia to sell some select treasures. Pennsylvania Governor William Keith later reported that Blackbeard had been seen on the city’s streets, and that he was well known among many people there because of visits to the city years earlier while serving as a mate on a Jamaican vessel. In the early 1840s a number of elderly Philadelphians would tell historian John Watson that in their youth they or their relatives had encountered Blackbeard and members of his crew, one of whom had been “an old black man” who lived with the family of the brewer George Gray. According to their accounts, Blackbeard visited a store at 77 High Street where “he bought freely and paid well.” He also was said to frequent a High Street inn, always wearing “his sword by his side.” Nobody dared arrest him for fear that his crew would come ashore “and avenge his cause by some midnight assault.”

By the second week of August, the pirates having accomplished their business, the Adventure slipped out of Delaware Bay and into the open sea. It was time to refill their coffers far from their familiar stomping grounds. They sailed straight into the Atlantic, in the direction of Bermuda, looking for foreign ships whose crews would be unlikely to be able to finger them for their crimes. They may have taken some vessels along the well-traveled sailing route from Philadelphia, but their first documented captures were on August 22, 1718, to the east of Bermuda. The victims were a pair of French ships, one heavily laden, the other largely empty, on their way home to France from Martinique. The French put up a fight, damaging the Adventure and wounding some of her men, but were ultimately overwhelmed by the pirates. Blackbeard’s crew transferred all of the cargoes to one ship, which they kept, and all the French crewmen to the other, which was sent on its way. As Blackbeard began sailing back to North Carolina, he had no idea how much trouble this incident was to bring him.

Around September 12, they anchored their prize behind the sandy mass of uninhabited Ocracoke Island and began to unrig her, stripping the valuable masts, spars, and lines, and unloading the cargoes of sugar and cocoa. Blackbeard refused to allow anyone to board his vessels, a passing mariner later reported, “except a doctor to cure his wounded men,” who claimed to have been injured when a cannon shifted in rough seas.

Leaving both vessels at Ocracoke on the afternoon of the thirteenth, Blackbeard and four black sailors headed up the Pamlico to Bath in one of their boats. He carried sweetmeats, loaf sugar, a bag of chocolate, and some mysterious boxes found aboard the French ship, all presents for Governor Eden’s next-door neighbor, Tobias Knight, North Carolina’s chief justice and His Majesty’s collector of customs. According to his four black crewmen, Blackbeard arrived at Knight’s plantation “about twelve or one o’clock in the night,” gave Knight his gifts, and went into the house with him “till about an hour before the break of day,” at which point he ordered the men to head back down to Ocracoke. Three miles down the Pamlico River, Blackbeard noticed a periagua tied up at the landing of an isolated farmhouse with two men and a boy aboard. Blackbeard decided to plunder this trading canoe, and ordered his men to row alongside.

William Bell, the owner of the periagua, had spent the night at John Chester’s landing and had seen Blackbeard’s boat pass by earlier that evening. Bell’s crew consisted only of his young son and an Indian servant, so when the five pirates came alongside his boat, he knew resistance would be difficult. At first, Blackbeard simply asked if Bell had anything to drink, to which Bell answered that “it was so dark he could not well see to draw any” from the cask. Blackbeard turned to one of his black sailors, who handed him a sword. He then jumped into the periagua and commanded Bell “to put his hands behind him in order to be tyed” and “swearing damnation seize him, he would kill [Bell] if he did not tell him truly where the money was.” Bell, who was from Currituck, near the Virginia border, did not recognize Blackbeard and demanded to know who he was. “Thache [sic] replied that he came from Hell and he would carry him presently [there],” Bell was able to tell authorities, despite having been foolish enough to have grabbed Thatch and tried to force him from the periagua. Blackbeard called to his men, who quickly subdued Bell. They then rowed the periagua out to the middle of the river with them and plundered her of pistols, brandy, a box of clay pipes, £66 in cash, and “a silver cup of remarkable fashion.” Blackbeard then threw Bell’s oars and sails overboard and, in retribution for his resistance, beat him with the flat end of his sword until it broke. Blackbeard continued on his way to Ocracoke. Bell must have gotten replacement oars at Chester’s landing, because two hours later he was at Tobias Knight’s house in Bath to report the crime. Knight, Bell would later testify in court, listened patiently and filed a report, but never mentioned that the perpetrators had spent the night at his house.

On September 24, Blackbeard sailed up to Bath in the Adventure, where he reported to Governor Eden, under oath, that the French “ship and goods were found by him as a wreck at sea.” When an arch pirate comes to one’s door, claiming to have “found” a vessel floating in the middle of the ocean, filled with valuables and sufficiently seaworthy to be sailed some 700 miles back to North Carolina, one might have grounds to be suspicious. Eden and Blackbeard apparently had an understanding. The governor promptly declared the French ship to be Blackbeard’s property by right of salvage, and a large parcel of sugar from the wreck somehow found its way into Chief Justice Knight’s barn and hid itself under a pile of hay. Eden also gave Blackbeard permission to promptly burn the French ship as a hazard to navigation, conveniently eliminating any physical evidence that piracy had taken place.

With the governor and chief justice in his pocket, North Carolina was shaping up to be a safer pirate lair than the Bahamas ever were. Blackbeard never would have guessed that the governor of another colony would have the audacity to invade.