Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship (7 page)

A moment later he was at the northern end of the fort and sailing the
Golden Fleece
for all she was worth, waiting for the explosion of cannons but hearing nothing more than the wind in his sails and the crashing of waves against his ship. He was perhaps ten minutes from freedom, but they would be the most dangerous minutes of his life.

Passing the first of the cannons, he braced for destruction. Any one of the guns at Fort Charles could be deadly from a half mile. Thirty-eight of them together, aimed at a single enemy just a few hundred yards away, couldn’t miss.

Bannister kept sailing, passing more of the guns, waiting for explosions, drawing nearer to the open Caribbean. Now abreast of Fort Charles, he might have begun to have hope of slipping by undetected, but as he passed the fourteenth cannon, someone at Fort Charles caught sight of him and notified Major Beckford, the fort’s commander. Moments later, Beckford sounded the alarm and ordered his cannoneers into action.

Never before fired in anger, the guns at Fort Charles rang furiously now, a series of concussions that shook all of Port Royal and must have caused townsfolk to think a foreign force was invading. At the sound, local militiamen would have been roused by their duty officer and run toward Fort Charles with their muskets. Now that the town was alert, Bannister’s only hope was that darkness would conceal him.

He would not be so lucky.

Cannonballs slammed into the
Golden Fleece
, first one, then another, then a third, but Bannister’s men stuffed the splintered holes with plugs, and the ship kept sailing, and even though the cannons continued to roar the rounds began to fall short, and in a few minutes the
Golden Fleece
had reached the open seas, and in another few she disappeared into the mist. By now, the navy ships would have been roused to action, but they were almost certainly anchored and could not hope to get going so suddenly, and soon the
Golden Fleece
and her captain were gone.

B
ANNISTER
’
S ESCAPE BLINDSIDED
Governor Molesworth. Still, he couldn’t hide a grudging respect for the captain. Writing to an English colonial official, he said of the getaway: “[It came as] a great surprise to me, for I thought Bannister’s want of credit would prevent him from ever getting the ship to sea again…yet now he has obtained credit from some persons underhand, and has his ship well fitted in every respect. It was done so artfully that no one suspected it, or I should have found some pretext for securing him.”

Impressed though he might be, Molesworth wasted little time in going after Bannister, sending Captain Edward Stanley in the four-gun sloop
Boneta
to hunt down the
Golden Fleece.
A light ship with a crew of perhaps ten, the ship was likely the smallest in the Jamaica fleet, but Bannister had surrendered to the navy with little struggle months earlier, and Molesworth surely expected more of the same.

For all she lacked in size, the
Boneta
was fast, and it didn’t take her long to catch up to the
Golden Fleece
. When she did, however, Captain Stanley thought better of engaging the more powerful ship and her thirty guns. Instead, he sent a note to Bannister warning that he would face new charges for piracy unless he returned to Port Royal with the
Golden Fleece
. Bannister denied being a pirate, telling Stanley he was simply headed to the bay of Honduras for logwood. Helpless to do more, Stanley sailed back to Port Royal empty-handed.

Bannister wasted little time adding to his pirate crew, recruiting tough guys looking for adventure and a fast path to riches—brave men who understood, with Bannister’s new reputation, that the Royal Navy was coming, and that they would be pursued by merciless hunters charged with bringing them down.

By now, Molesworth must have realized that Bannister did not intend to go gently. He sent warships to chase every report of Bannister’s plunders, but when the frigates arrived they were always too late. This
continued for months as Bannister took prizes across the Caribbean and Atlantic.

In April, however, Molesworth caught a break. The
Ruby
had tracked Bannister to the Île-à-Vache, a small island off the southwestern tip of Hispaniola (now Haiti), a notorious pirate hangout, and a place once used by Henry Morgan as an operating base. But as Captain Mitchell closed in, he found not one pirate ship but five, each nearly the size of his own. The
Golden Fleece
was among them, and Bannister was in the company of four French privateers, including the infamous Michel de Grammont.

Against any one of these pirates the
Ruby
held an advantage. Against them all, she couldn’t hope to survive. So Mitchell demanded of Grammont, likely by pulling up alongside his ship and shouting, that Bannister be arrested and turned over for serving under a foreign commission. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Grammont and the other French pirates refused to give over Bannister to the
Ruby.
That kind of flouting of English authority must have rankled an accomplished navy captain like Mitchell, but he deemed it prudent “not to insist further.”

Three months later, in July 1685, Grammont helped lead a historic pirate raid on the Mexican port city of Campeche, in which a landing force of seven hundred pirates sacked the town, took prisoners, and burned the city before leaving with their plunder. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that Bannister and his crew were among those invading pirates, as he was in Grammont’s company in the months leading up to the raid. But no one knows for sure.

Later that year, the
Golden Fleece
was spotted sailing alone off the western coast of Jamaica. This time, Molesworth sent two ships after Bannister, but neither could find him. Every month, Bannister took more prizes and, with quick footwork and deft escapes, continued to blacken the eyes of Molesworth, the Royal Navy, and England. By January 1686, Molesworth seemed to be losing hope. “Captain Mitchell will receive orders…for the arrest of Bannister,” he wrote to an
official in London, “whom he is as likely to encounter on this voyage as on any other.” Meaning he was not likely to find him at all.

Still, Molesworth continued to plan for the day, however unlikely, that he would lay his hands on Bannister. Rather than allow him to bribe another witness or go free on bond, he would bring him to trial “very suddenly,” and not at Port Royal but at a court outside the town, with a jury “more sensible of the damage we suffer by privateering than are the generality of people in Port Royal.”

By May, Molesworth might have abandoned all hope of capturing Bannister, but it was in that month that two vessels arrived at Port Royal from Dublin with a report from their captains that Bannister had plundered their cargos. That news should have hardly surprised Molesworth, but a last bit of information stood him up in his seat. Bannister, the men said, was headed to Samaná Bay to careen—a process that could take weeks and would immobilize his ship. Molesworth issued an order to two of the navy’s powerful warships, the
Falcon
and the
Drake.
Their mission: find and destroy Bannister.

The Royal Navy ship
Falcon,
drawn by Dutch marine artist Willem Van de Velde the Elder, about 1677. The artist filled all the gun ports with cannon, but in practice several would have been left empty so that some weapons could be shifted from side to side as needed.

The
Drake,
drawn by Willem Van de Velde the Younger, about 1681.

At Molesworth’s order, the two frigates sailed for Samaná Bay. The
Falcon
, commanded by Captain Charles Talbot, could carry up to forty-two guns; the
Drake
, helmed by Captain Thomas Spragge, sixteen.

They arrived several days later and found Bannister and the
Golden Fleece
, along with a smaller vessel, identity unknown, “fit to go on the careen.” Here was the chance Molesworth had been waiting for. A ship on the careen, even one as strong and well commanded as the
Golden Fleece
, remained highly vulnerable to attack. The warships began to close in.

For an ordinary pirate captain, this meant the end. But Bannister had taken precautions, having ordered several of his cannons onto land in two separate batteries, hidden in trees and aimed into the bay. Whether he would attempt to use them against two Royal Navy frigates, armed with as many as fifty-eight guns and manned by superior personnel, was another matter entirely.

By surrendering now, Bannister would have hope. He would have his day in court, where he could deny being a pirate, or claim he’d
been forced into it by the French, or beg Molesworth for leniency, or bribe another witness or jury. If he chose to fight now, he could never know if his crew, outmanned, outclassed, and pinned down, would follow him into battle and engage a world-class force like the Royal Navy. Far better, it would have seemed to ordinary pirates, to suffer the lashes in Port Royal than go to their dooms like that.

The warships drew closer. It was now midafternoon, and the navy captains should have seen signs of surrender. Instead, they heard the sounds of a trumpet.

Bannister’s cannons roared to life from behind the trees, and after that the muskets rang out—a barrage by the pirates that rained down on the navy ships. The frigates returned fire, maneuvering into position and trading salvos into the evening, each side pounding the other, men dying and suffering, the
Golden Fleece
and the smaller vessel alongside her being torn into by navy cannonballs and musket fire. By all rights, the battle should have lasted an hour or two. Yet the next morning, it was still going strong.

And it continued, bloody and violent, into a second day, until both the
Falcon
and the
Drake
found themselves out of gunpowder and ammunition. By this time, the pirates had killed or wounded twenty-three navy crewmen, and stood poised to kill more. Unable to mount any further offensive, the frigates sailed away—a stunning, almost unbelievable victory for the pirates.

At least for the moment.

The navy ships, Bannister knew, would return as soon as they could be rearmed and refitted. That meant he and his remaining crew needed to leave Samaná Bay in a hurry. But the
Golden Fleece
had been badly damaged and lay nearly sunk. The smaller vessel, however, must have remained seaworthy, as Bannister and most of his men seemed to have made their escape on her.

On returning to Port Royal, the navy captains were “much censured” for failing to capture or kill Bannister. Censure was a serious business, and penalties could range from a reduction in pay to banishment
or even execution. Officials, however, must have appreciated that Talbot and Spragge had expended all their gunpowder and ammunition—and that they had gone up against a pirate of exceptional talents. Rather than inflict a severe punishment, Molesworth instead ordered the frigates refitted and resupplied, then sent the captains back to Hispaniola to “seek out and destroy the pirate Bannister.”

The
Drake
was the first to reach Samaná Bay. By now, most of the pirates had fled the island. At the battle scene, Captain Spragge found the
Golden Fleece
burned to her decks and sunk. He did not report finding treasure (the wreck’s cargo hold might have been too deep for breath-hold divers to reach) but his men recovered many of the ship’s cannons. Bannister himself, as always, was gone.

Governor Molesworth, however, was not finished. Bannister had stolen his own ship (and an English one, at that), escaped retrial and likely execution, vexed Governor Lynch into an early grave, threatened to sue government officials, consorted with notorious pirates, took prizes across the high seas, and defeated the Royal Navy in battle. If it took Molesworth the rest of his life, he would get the pirate captain.

It would not take him nearly that long.

Late that year, the
Drake
tracked Bannister to the Mosquito Coast, a no-man’s-land of tropical forest and swamp along the eastern coast of present-day Nicaragua and Honduras. In January 1687, Spragge and his men captured Bannister and a handful of his men, led them aboard the
Drake
, and set sail back to Port Royal.

During the journey, it was likely that Bannister was planning for the trial to which he was legally entitled. But Molesworth wasn’t willing to risk any such thing. Instead, he issued orders to Spragge to execute Bannister on board the ship as the
Drake
pulled into Port Royal—no charges, no trial, no verdict. Such an action against an English citizen by English officials was highly unusual and absolutely illegal. The only question was whether Captain Spragge would go through with it.

On January 28, 1687, as the
Drake
pulled into Port Royal harbor, nooses were affixed to the ship’s yardarm, the horizontal beam that held up the sail, and Bannister’s arms were bound. Then, in view of the town and its residents, Bannister and three of his cohorts were hauled up and hanged by the neck until dead. Their bodies were then cut down and thrown into the sea.

Delighted, Molesworth issued a report to London. The hanging, he said, was: “a spectacle of great satisfaction to all good people and of terror to the favorers of pirates, the manner of his punishment being that which will most discourage others, which was the reason why I empowered Captain Spragge to inflict it.”

No matter the legality of his actions, Molesworth had been unwilling to try Bannister again in the courts. “I find from letters that [Bannister] wrote…that he intended to plead that he had been forced into all that he had done by the French. How far this would have prevailed with a Port Royal jury I know not, but I am glad that the case did not come before one.”

J
OHN
M
ATTERA COULD FIND
no further information on Bannister. So, nearly a month after he’d begun research, he packed his bags and booked a flight from London back to the Dominican Republic. In a taxi on the way to the airport, he sent Chatterton an email.

“Partner,” he wrote, “have I got a story for you.”