Authors: Colin Woodard
Little did Bonnet know, but Blackbeard had also sailed to Bath, taking the outer passage around the barrier islands rather than the shallow sound inside them. As Bonnet was sailing back to Beaufort, his nemesis had been just on the other side of the barrier islands, headed in the opposite direction. About the time Bonnet discovered his treachery, Blackbeard's eight-gun sloop was making its way up a narrow creek leading to North Carolina's unassuming capital.
Although Bath was North Carolina's administrative center, oldest town, and official port of entry, it was little more than a village: three long streets, two dozen homes, a grist mill, and a small wooden fort set along Bath Creek, whose cypress-covered banks were so low, flat, and marshy it was impossible to tell where the water ended and land began. Blackbeard's sloop came into the wind and anchored in the brown, tannin-stained water, the town on one side, a wharf and plantation house on the other. Bath's hundred or so residents couldn't help but take notice of their visitors: With their arrival, the town's population doubled. Upon coming ashore, the pirates may well have asked where to find the courthouse or seat of government, and residents would have informed them that North Carolina had neither; the governing council was migratory, meeting at one member's home or another, sometimes many miles from the village. To take the king's pardon, Blackbeard was advised to row over to the wharf across the creek; Governor Charles Eden's house was at the end of it.
No eyewitness accounts of the initial meeting between Blackbeard and Governor Eden have survived, but apparently it went well. Eden, forty-five, was a wealthy English noble with a 400-acre estate, but he governed an impoverished colony, a pestilent backwater populated by aggrieved Indians and penniless settlers. Blackbeard's men had money— £2,500 in Spanish coin in addition to whatever they had saved from their previous year of piracy—and the means and inclination to bring in more, as long as the governor refrained from asking too many questions about where it was from. They came to an understanding. Eden would issue pardons to all of Blackbeard's men, most of whom would disperse. Blackbeard and a handful of his closest lieutenants would settle down in Bath, building homes and leading what might appear, on the surface, to be honest lives. In reality, they would quietly continue to detain vessels heading up and down the eastern seaboard or to and from nearby Virginia, whose haughty leaders had long looked down their noses at their backward southern neighbors. Eden and his friends would fence their goods, and the pirates would benefit from their protection. North Carolina would become, in effect, the new Bahamas, only better in that it had a sovereign government, and was therefore not subject to a British invasion.
Most of Blackbeard's company promptly left North Carolina for Pennsylvania and New York. William Howard went to Williamsburg with two slaves, one taken with
La Concorde,
the other from the brigantine
Princess.
Blackbeard and twenty other men, including at least six free black pirates, stayed in Bath. According to local tradition, Blackbeard took up residence on Plum Point, a promontory on the edge of the village. According to the author of
A General History of the Pyrates,
Blackbeard promptly married "a young creature of about sixteen years of age, the Governor performing the ceremony," allegedly his fourteenth wife, whom he "would force ... to prostitute herself" with "five or six of his brutal companions" as he watched. The story is greatly embellished. Blackbeard would not have found the time to marry fourteen women given the amount of time he had spent at sea. With his remarkably humane track record as a pirate, it's doubtful that he would have arranged for his teenage bride to be regularly gang raped. Blackbeard did marry someone in Bath, however, as his nuptials were later remarked on by a Royal Navy captain based in neighboring Virginia, who had been keeping tabs on his activities. Local lore holds that this bride was Mary Ormond, daughter of a future sheriff of Bath, a story supported by at least one of Ormond's early-twentieth-century descendents. Another Blackbeard story in the
General History
rings true: "He often diverted himself with going ashore among the planters, where he reveled night and day. By these [people] he was well received, but whether out of Love or Fear, I cannot say."
Like Henry Avery, Blackbeard had bought the loyalty of a colonial governor, but had yet to accumulate the sort of fortune that would allow him to live like a king for the rest of his days. Therefore, after a few weeks of rest, he returned to work.
***
Back in the Bahamas, Charles Vane had no intention of taking his activities underground. After his April cruise, he had spent nearly a month stewing in Nassau, waiting for Jacobite reinforcements. These were not to come; shortly after George Cammocke forwarded his Bahamian plan to James Stuart's mother, Queen Mary of Modena, she passed away, the plot apparently dying with her. As the weeks passed, Vane realized that Woodes Rogers, George I's governor, was going to beat the Stuarts to Nassau. The pirate republic, he was coming to realize, was likely doomed. Hornigold and other reformed pirates who had returned to Nassau intended to place themselves in Governor Rogers's service. Jennings had gone further than that, having taken a privateering commission from Governor Bennett to hunt Vane down and bring him back to Bermuda to be tried for his crimes; he was said to be fitting out two or three sloops to come to Nassau for that purpose. Vane wished to continue piracy, but was aware that the walls were closing in on him.
By late May, Vane could wait no longer. He went around Nassau calling up his old crew. Seventy-five like-minded diehards agreed to join him on the
Lark,
including Edward England and "Calico Jack" Rackham. The plan was to go out on one last cruise before Governor Rogers showed up and, hopefully, acquire a larger pirate vessel, one capable of operating without a home port for long periods of time. If Vane was to be pushed out of the pirate's nest, he wanted to be ready to fly as long and as far as necessary to find another.
Vane's first capture was an audacious one. On May 23, 1718, near Crooked Island, Bahamas, 200 miles southeast of Nassau, they overtook a familiar vessel. The fourteen-ton sloop
Richard & John
had been a fixture in Nassau for many years, bringing supplies to the pirates from Charleston and Jamaica and trading them for pirate plunder. Vane and everyone else aboard the
Lark
knew it belonged to Richard Thompson, the leading citizen of Harbor Island, and his son-in-law John Cockram, one of the founders of the pirate republic, who had sailed canoes with Hornigold back in 1714. The
Richard & John
had always been off-limits to pirates, but not this time. Cockram had been a leading member of the pro-pardon camp and was no friend to Vane and his men. They fired on the
Richard & John,
forcing her captain, Cockram's brother Joseph, to come into the wind and surrender. Vane's crew dumped him on the forlorn shores of Crooked Island and sailed away with his sloop. Vane was making a clear statement: In his book, reformed pirates were fair game.
In the first half of June, Vane captured several more vessels, including a two-masted boat and a twenty-gun French ship. The two-masted boat was turned over to Edward England, and the crew voted the flamboyantly dressed John Rackham to replace him as the company's quartermaster. The French ship, a substantial 200 to 250-ton vessel, was well suited to piracy and Vane adopted it as his new flagship. (After being disarmed, the
Lark
was apparently given to the Frenchmen.) On June 23, cruising outside the French port of Leogane, near modern-day Port-au-Prince, Haiti, they seized another French vessel, the brigantine
St. Martin
of Bordeaux, carrying sugar, indigo, brandy, claret, and white wine. Vane dumped her captain and several passengers on the shore, but kept the
St. Martin
and thirteen of her crewmen. Satisfied with these prizes and fortified with drink, Vane's company agreed to return to Nassau: Vane in his French ship, England in the two-masted boat, and the
St. Martin
and
Richard & John
sailed by prize crews.
With these large vessels, the pirates were forced to take the deep-water passage around Harbour Island and Eleuthera. This route took longer than cutting directly across the Bahama Bank, but it proved fortuitous. On the morning of July 4, the pirate flotilla found themselves among a small swarm of trading sloops heading in and out of Harbour Island. In just a few hours, the pirates captured three of them: the
Drake
of Rhode Island (Captain John Draper), carrying wine, spirits, and rum; the
Ulster
of New York (John Fredd), loaded with tropical timber from Andros Island; and the
Eagle
of Rhode Island (Robert Brown), with sugar, bread, and two barrels of nails. No treasure fleet, this, but the sloops would make good tenders, and the alcohol would keep the men happy for a few days, at least. That evening, Vane's convoy of prizes arrived in Nassau, where his men promptly seized two more sloops, the
Dove
(William Harris); and the
Lancaster,
commanded by none other than Neal Walker, the son of former justice Thomas Walker, whose family Hornigold had driven off New Providence in 1716. Vane had left Nassau with a single sloop six weeks earlier, but was now in control of at least nine vessels.
He quickly consolidated control over the island. He is said to have stormed ashore with his sword drawn, threatening "to burn the principal houses of the town and to make examples of many of the people." Vane moved against Benjamin Hornigold and other reformed pirates, making "examples of many of the people" and acting "extremely insolent to all who were not as great villains as himself," according to the author of
A General History of the Pyrates,
who had excellent sources in Nassau. "He reigned here as governor [for] 20 days, stopped all vessels which came in and would suffer none to go out ... He swore [that] while he was in the harbor, he would suffer no other Governor than himself."
His opponents cowed, Vane and his men set to work transferring cargo from the
St. Martin
to various sloops, and shifting additional cannon aboard the big French ship. His gang intended to sail for the coast of Brazil, where they could hope to join forces with La Buse, Condent, and other die-hard pirates. Maybe another pirate republic could be built on the shores of South America, beyond the reach of the Hanoverian king, and the pirates could regroup.
On the evening of July 24, 1718, with Vane's men just three or four days from departure, the cry went out: The sails of a Royal Navy frigate had been spotted coming 'round the backside of Hog Island.
Woodes Rogers had arrived.
July–September 1718
W
O
O
D
E
S
R
O
G
E
R
S
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.