Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (6 page)

City of Port Royal, Jamaica, as it may have appeared in 1690

All seemed to spread their good fortune across Port Royal, and, in turn, many people in the town became rich. Merchants, government officials, and townsfolk profited by dealing in vast quantities of stolen goods. The town expanded, its crooked wharf-side streets filling with markets that offered anything, legitimate or lurid, that a person desired. Weekly, it seemed, new pirates and privateers arrived with prizes in hand. Every one of them needed a place to spend his money, and Port Royal obliged them on this account, too.

Brothels, taverns, and gambling joints sprang up everywhere. Of Port Royal, one visiting Englishman wrote: “The port indeed is very loose in itself, and by reason of privateers and debauched wild blades…’tis now more rude and antique than was Sodom, filled with all manner of debauchery….It is infected with such a crew of vile strumpets and common prostitutes that ’tis almost impossible to civilize it.”

Some of the prostitutes at Port Royal became known across oceans. Mary Carleton, perhaps the most famous, was said to be “as common as a barber’s chair: no sooner was one out but another was in.” In a town of fewer than three thousand inhabitants, one brothel alone, run by a man named John Starr, employed twenty-three prostitutes.

The pirates couldn’t get enough of it all. Leading lives dangerous and often measured in months, they spent money with abandon. Said one contemporary historian of the pirates of Port Royal: “Wine and women drained their wealth to such a degree that, in a little time, some of them became reduced to beggary. They have been known to spend 2 or 3,000 pieces of eight in one night and one gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked. They used to buy a pipe [105 gallons] of wine, place it in the street, and oblige everyone that passed to drink.”

Even the birds at Port Royal imbibed. Dutch explorer Jan van Riebeeck is said to have described a scene in which the parrots of the
island “gather to drink from the large stocks of ale with just as much alacrity as the drunks that frequent the taverns that serve it.”

Alcohol was everywhere. One kind of island-made rum called Kill Devil was known to contain gunpowder, and was drunk from massive steins. “The Spaniards,” wrote Jamaica’s governor, “wondered much at the sickness of our people, until they knew the strength of our drinks, but then wondered more that they were not all dead.”

Far from dying, the town and its people, strengthened by plunder, continued to thrive. Before long, one of every four buildings in Port Royal was either a whorehouse or a drinking establishment. Throwing his hands up, one clergyman wrote: “This town is the Sodom of the new World and since the majority of its population consists of pirates, cut-throats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world, I felt my permanence there was of no use.”

For all its wickedness, however, Port Royal seemed to tolerate everyone. Quakers, Catholics, atheists, Jews—all were free to worship and believe as they pleased, and they lived peacefully alongside one another as Port Royal became the richest town in the New World. Pirates and buccaneers continued to arrive, welcomed by a public that understood the wellspring of its good fortune, and who ate, drank, and lived among these fast-living men.

For years, there were few better places for pirates or privateers than Port Royal. But in the early 1670s, as trade between Jamaica and the rest of the world grew, pockets of opposition formed against these bandits of the sea. Jamaica was becoming a major producer of sugar; anything that caused mayhem or interfered with trade came to be seen as a threat by powerful merchants and government officials. A peace treaty between England and Spain made the island less vulnerable. Antipiracy laws were enacted; those who didn’t abandon the trade could be prosecuted and hanged.

The pirates did not go gently. But as London sent warships and sailors to Port Royal, the statistical life expectancy of a pirate dropped further. By 1680, the year Bannister nearly lost the
Golden Fleece
in
Port Royal harbor, many pirates and privateers had been driven from the island. Those who continued to operate there did so at great peril.

Still, opportunity beckoned. As transoceanic trade increased, ships crossed the Atlantic and Caribbean in greater numbers than ever, many loaded with valuable cargos, some with treasure. A man of a certain daring, able to secure a powerful ship and inspire a crew, could still make a fortune by hijacking these vessels on the open seas. The question, as the 1680s wore on, was whether such a man existed anymore.

B
Y
1684, B
ANNISTER HAD
been making the London–Jamaica run for at least four years, delivering his cargos and building his reputation. In June of that year, however, the lord president of the Council of Jamaica received a disturbing letter from the island’s governor, Thomas Lynch: “One Bannister ran away with a ship, the
Golden Fleece
, of thirty or forty guns, picked up over a hundred men from sloops and from leeward [at Port Royal], and has got a French commission.”

Bannister, in fact, had no commission, but he most certainly had stolen the
Golden Fleece
, and he’d done so with a single purpose—to turn pirate. His actions hardly could have been bolder. It was near unheard of for a transatlantic captain, especially one as well regarded and trusted as Bannister, to “go on the account,” as it was said of pirating. Even in Port Royal, where everything happened, few had seen anything like this.

Lynch didn’t sit around and wait for Bannister to return to his senses. Instead, he ordered the
Ruby
, the biggest and deadliest warship in the Jamaica fleet, to go after the
Golden Fleece.
A monster rated at 540 tons, with forty-eight cannons and a crew of 150, the
Ruby
was a pirate killer down to her timbers.

Bannister did not intend to make it easy for Lynch’s enforcers. Since stealing the
Golden Fleece
, he had picked up additional crew, robbed a Spanish vessel, and made his way to the Cayman Islands to
take turtles and gather wood. But the
Ruby
surprised him there, and her captain, David Mitchell, and his crew captured Bannister and put an end to his six-week pirate career.

Lynch was delighted.

“Last night,” he wrote, “the
Ruby
brought in Bannister. He took him at Caymanos; he has about 115 men on board, most of the veriest rogues in these Indies. I have ordered the ship and the men to be delivered into the Admiralty and commanded the judge immediately to proceed against them, because we do not know how to secure or keep such a number. We conclude they’ll be found guilty of piracy.”

The case against Bannister was airtight. Not only had he stolen the
Golden Fleece
, he had taken two Spaniards captive after attacking their boat. The testimony of those two men alone would secure a conviction. By now, Bannister could only hope for leniency, but if he expected it, he’d chosen the wrong governor under which to become pirate.

“I intend if it proves so to make a terrible example of the captain, his lieutenant, officers, and all the men that have committed other crimes as many of them have,” Lynch wrote, “and hope the severity may have some influence on the other rogues that swarm in these Indies.”

By that, Lynch meant Bannister would hang. His crew, if lucky, might be whipped, jailed, or put into irons or stockades. If unlucky, they might follow Bannister to the gallows.

The pirates were returned to Port Royal and held aboard the
Ruby
pending trial. One might have expected Bannister to use the time to pen letters of good-bye or to contemplate eternity; instead, he waited for a break in his captors’ attention, then managed to get word to onshore associates to bribe the two Spanish witnesses against him. It was an audacious plan and one that, even if the connections were made, seemed doomed given that the Spaniards had been rescued by the Royal Navy.

At trial, a strong case was made against the pirates. But when it
came time for the Spaniards to testify, they swore “backward and forward” that they had sold their boat and cargo to Bannister, and that he had paid them to serve as crew aboard the
Golden Fleece.

If that testimony shocked the prosecution, at least the governor could still rely on the jury, who were certain to see through the ruse. But this was Port Royal, where ordinary folk, remembering who’d made their town rich and had infused it with spirit, still counted pirates as neighbors and friends. They returned with a verdict: not guilty. Bannister had cheated the hangman.

Already a sick man, Lynch suffered “such disturbance of mind” from the verdict that, according to accounts, he died of it a week later. By all rights, his replacement should have set Bannister free. Instead, Hender Molesworth tried to convince the jury to reverse itself, but the jurors wouldn’t budge. Worse, Bannister threatened to sue the captain of the
Ruby
, “as though [Bannister] were the honestest man in the world.” That was more than Molesworth could take. Stretching the boundaries of the law—if not breaking them—he had Bannister rearrested and charged. Bail was set at three hundred pounds, a staggering amount in an age when the annual wage for a seaman might be twenty pounds.

Somehow, Bannister raised the money and, at least for the moment, remained free. He was not, however, permitted to leave Port Royal, and in any case was likely too broke to do it. To make certain he entertained no thoughts of fleeing, officials cut down the sails of the
Golden Fleece.
By January 1685, five months after the original charges against him were thrown out, Bannister was still languishing in Port Royal, waiting to be retried.

He was still waiting when, on a dark night in late January, he began to make his way through the narrow streets of Port Royal. As he crept past taverns and brothels and sleeping families, fifty men were already at work aboard the
Golden Fleece
, moving furiously but making no sound. Before long, Bannister reached Thames Street, which ran along the wharf on the northern side of town. There, he rushed for the
Golden Fleece
, tied up at the docks, and stole aboard his former ship. Sails were hoisted and lines cut, and soon the vessel picked up the breeze and moved out into the harbor.

Landlocked to the east, the harbor offered only one way out, to the south, and that is where Bannister steered. To make it into the open Caribbean, he had to hope that no one in town noticed the
Golden Fleece
missing, or sounded the alarm at the sight of a ship moving in the dead of night. Even then, he would have to pass the twenty-six cannons at Fort James and, in the unlikely event he were still living after that, turn south and get by the thirty-eight cannons, and hundreds of men, at Fort Charles. At any point along the way, he might be spotted by Royal Navy ships anchored just a mile to the west, or by men at work in nearby Chocolata Hole. If such a thing as a suicide mission existed in seventeenth-century Port Royal, Joseph Bannister had just embarked on it.

Generally, winds were calm at night in Port Royal, but on this evening Bannister picked up a fresh breeze off the land and began moving west along the town’s docks, maybe as fast as five knots, or about six miles per hour. Before long, he reached Fort James. Perhaps because of the hour, or because the garrisons there never expected such an unlikely event, it seems no one fired on the
Golden Fleece
, or even took notice of her. For the moment, Bannister and his crew remained safe.

Now rounding Port Royal’s western shore, Bannister headed south toward Fort Charles, about a half mile in the distance. By now, he might have been fifteen minutes into his rush toward freedom, but he had at least another fifteen minutes to go—critical moments that would determine whether he and his crew lived or died.

Soon, he could see the guns at Fort Charles, the most heavily fortified place in all of Jamaica. Staying within a few hundred yards of the shore, he ordered his men to ready their “plugs,” chunks of mattress or wood they’d brought to fill holes in the ship they knew would be made when the cannons at Fort Charles began firing.