The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (27 page)

Not half an hour later, the pirates had a stroke of luck. Drifting through the fog, straight into their midst, came a small trading sloop, the
Fisher,
on her way from Virginia to Boston. Clearly the sloop's captain knew these waters well enough to be willing to traverse them in these conditions; just the man the pirates needed. Bellamy hailed her, asking, "whether the master was acquainted here" with the coast. The
Fisher's
captain, Robert Ingols, replied, "he knew it very well." Bellamy insisted Ingols row over to lead the way. By five o'clock, Ingols and his first mate were standing on the
Whydah
's quarterdeck under heavy guard, advising Bellamy on how best to proceed up the long, harborless shore of the outer Cape.

Bellamy happily ordered his three prizes to follow the
Whydah
as Ingols guided her through the fog toward the unseen coast. It would soon be dark, as well as foggy, so they placed a large lamp on the stern of each vessel to make it easier for them to keep track of one another. They proceeded to the north: Bellamy in the
Whydah
with over 130 of the pirates and most of the captives, Noland and seventeen pirates in the
Ann Galley,
the wine-loaded
Mary Anne
under the control of eight of Bellamy's men, and a prize crew of four pirates guarding captives in the
Fisher.

Aboard the
Mary Anne,
seven of the eight pirates promptly went for the casks of wine in the hold. Thomas South, one of the carpenters forced from the
St. Michael
five months earlier, remained sullen, quiet, and unarmed, keeping his distance from the rest of the pirates. While the others shoved aside the piled-up anchor cables on top of the hatches, South whispered to one of the
Mary Anne
's captive crewmen that he was plotting to escape from the pirates as soon as possible. Meanwhile the rest of the pirates continued taking turns at the helm while the others broke open the first barrels of Madeira wine and started what they intended to be a very long night of drinking. It wasn't long before the
Mary Anne
began falling behind the rest of the vessels. Bellamy, aboard the
Whydah,
noticed this and slacked off long enough to let the wine-laden pink catch up. He yelled at the leaders of the
Mary Anne
pirates, Simon Van Vorst and John Brown, to "make more haste." Brown, already tipsy, swore he would make the vessel "carry sail till she carried her masts away." He and the other men ordered their captives to help them handle the sails and, when they realized that the
Mary Anne
had a leaky hull, to do the backbreaking work of manning the pumps. They damned the vessel herself, saying they "wished they had never seen her." By the time darkness fell, they turned the helm over to one of their captives, freeing up another pirate for the critical task of drinking wine. Brown declared himself captain, while another pirate, Thomas Baker, began bragging to the captives, telling them that their company had a privateering commission from King George himself. "We will stretch it to the world's end," Van Vorst chimed in.

At about ten at night, the weather began turning ugly. Heavy squalls of rain began to fall, the pitch black sky was shattered by bolts of lightning. Worst of all, the wind had shifted so that it was coming from the southeast and east, driving the vessels toward the unseen shore of Cape Cod. The drunken pirates aboard the
Mary Anne
soon lost sight of the other vessels. Baker, perhaps distressed, began cursing the
Mary Anne's
cook, Alexander Mackconachy, who was manning the helm and had apparently steered her closer to land. He "would make no more to shoot him, then he would a dog," Baker howled, musket in hand. "You will never go on shore to tell your story!"

Not long thereafter, the shore presented itself, as if rebuking Baker. The
Mary Anne
was now being battered by twenty to thirty foot seas, which broke in cascades of foam all around her. Everyone realized they might run aground at any moment and be dashed to pieces by the angry sea. Mackconachy begged the pirates to swing her around, bow to the beach, to give her the best chance of surviving the inevitable collision with the bottom. Just after they had swung around the
Mary Anne
struck, shaking the hull violently and sending wine casks tumbling about the decks. Baker grabbed an axe and began hacking away at her masts, as bringing them down would reduce the stress on the creaking hull. With two of the three masts down, another of the pirates cried out in terror, "For God's sake, let us go down into the hold and die together!"The men, captives and pirates alike, huddled on deck and in the hold, expecting to be drowned at any moment. The illiterate pirates begged Mackconachy to read from the Book of Common Prayer. As they listened to the prayers in the cook's Gaelic accent, lightning flashed in the sky, wind screamed through the rigging, and the wooden hull shuddered in the surf.

The crews of the other prize vessels were more sober and, possibly as a result, more fortunate. As the storm built, Richard Noland in the
Ann Galley
lost sight of the
Whydah
's lantern, but he kept close to the little
Fisher.
The mountainous waves were pushing them toward the breakers, which they could hear crashing on the Cape's deserted shore. Noland realized their only chance was to drop their anchors and hope that the great iron hooks held firm enough to keep them off the beach until the storm subsided. He swung the
Ann
around and the men flung the anchors overboard. He screamed and gesticulated to the
Fisher
to do the same. On both vessels, pirates and captives alike watched anxiously as the anchor cables played out, stiffened and, miraculously, pulled the wooden ships to a stop a few hundred yards off the beach. If prayers were said during the night, they were undoubtedly directed at the anchors, clinging to the sandy bottom as the Atlantic vented its fury.

A few miles to the north, the
Whydah
was also being driven inexorably toward shore. As the huge seas tossed the ship closer and closer to the crashing surf, Sam Bellamy may well have remembered the wrecks of the Spanish treasure fleet, great hulls battered into kindling by violent, storm-driven surf. Bellamy knew where he was. In flashes of lightning, he could see the great cliffs of Eastham looming a hundred feet above the exploding waves. If they crashed here, there would be few survivors. The surf washed nearly to the feet of the cliffs, which rose precipitously to the tablelands, that windswept, sparsely inhabited plain separating the villagers of Eastham and Billingsgate from the sea. By midnight, he knew the
Whydah's
half-ton anchors were the only hope of saving her.

The men struggled to follow the order as waves rolled over the deck. The helmsmen, their feet wide apart, spun the wheel, bringing the great ship's bow face-to-face with the wind. The anchors splashed into the water and their heavy ropes began to play out. Everyone held their breath as the lines grew taught. There may have been a moment's pause, as the
Whydah
briefly stopped drifting toward the foamy chaos behind them, but then they could feel the anchors dragging. The
Whydah
was doomed.

There was one last chance to save the crew, to do just as the men on the
Mary Anne
had done. They had to try to bring the vessel ashore gracefully, bow first, hopefully making it far enough through the violently tossing surf to give a swimmer some hope of getting ashore. Bellamy yelled out to the men to cut the anchor cables. As soon as the last strokes of their axes had fallen—the thick anchor ropes snapping free—Bellamy ordered the helmsmen to swing her all the way back around, to run face first into the beach. But the vessel didn't turn. All watched in terror as the ship slipped backward, stern first, over thirty foot waves towards the white, misty chaos at the foot of the cliffs.

The
Whydah
ran aground with shocking force. The jolt likely shot any men in the rigging out into the deadly surf, where they were alternately pounded against the sea bottom, then sucked back away from the beach by the undertow. Cannon broke free from their tackles and careened across the lower decks, crushing everyone in their path. One pirate was thrown across the deck so hard his shoulder bone became completely embedded in the handle of a pewter teapot. Little John King, the nine-year-old pirate volunteer, was crushed between decks, still wearing the silk stockings and expensive leather shoes his mother had dressed him in aboard the
Bonetta
months earlier. Within fifteen minutes, the violent motion of the surf brought the
Whydah's
mainmast crashing down over the side. Waves broke over the decks and water poured into the bedlam of crashing cannon and barrels of cargo below decks. At dawn the
Whydah's
hull broke apart, casting both the living and dead into the surf.

As the storm raged on through the morning hours, the ebbing tide left more and more bodies piled on the shore. Amidst the bloated, mangled corpses only two men stirred. One was John Julian, the Mosquito Indian who had served with Bellamy aboard his periaguas. The other was Thomas Davis, one of the carpenters forced from the
St. Michael.
Samuel Bellamy and some 160 other men—pirates and captives, whites, blacks, and Indians—had perished in the storm.

***

Ten miles to the south, the pirates aboard the
Mary Anne
were thankful to be alive. At daybreak they could see they had run aground on a half-drowned island in the middle of a small, protected bay. The crew of the
Mary Anne
probably recognized the place: Pochet Island, south of Eastham. With the tide down, half of the
Mary Anne
lay high and dry against the island, and the men could get ashore without getting their feet wet. They tarried about on the beach for several hours, eating sweetmeats and drinking more wine.

At about ten in the morning, two local men who had noticed the wrecked vessel rowed over in a canoe and brought the castaways to the mainland. The locals, John Cole and William Smith, apparently weren't suspicious, even when the pirates got into heated discussions in a mix of English, French, and Dutch. They could overhear that a number of the shipwrecked sailors wanted to get to Rhode Island as fast as possible—presumably to seek shelter among Williams's people. The others seemed more subdued, sitting quietly by the fire in John Cole's home until, all of a sudden, one of them spoke up. This was Alexander Mackconachy, who blurted out that the other eight were ruthless pirates, members of "Black Sam" Bellamy's infamous company. The pirates knew it was time to go. They took their leave of the flabbergasted family of John Cole and scurried out into the rain.

They got as far as the Eastham Tavern before justice of the peace John Doane and his men caught up with them. Alerted by John Cole, Doane had headed straight for the tavern, one of the few places where strangers might procure horses. Soon Doane had all the
Mary Anne
's complement—pirates and captives alike—under armed guard, walking down the muddy road toward the Barnstable jail.

***

The pirates aboard the
Ann Galley
and the
Fisher
were luckier than the rest. Through good fortune—or perhaps by dint of the lightness of their vessels—their anchors held through the night. At ten in the morning, the rain still coming down in sheets, the wind shifted back to the west, blowing away from the land rather than into it. With great relief Noland ordered the sails and anchors raised. With the wind at their backs, they sailed away from the surf, bound for the coast of Maine, where they hoped to find the
Whydah
and her store of treasure.

Ten miles out, Noland decided it was time to rid themselves of the
Fisher.
The pirates transferred all of the crew and valuables aboard the
Ann
and left the
Fisher
floating in the open sea, crewless and with hatches open to the storm.

Two days later, on April 29, the
Ann
dropped anchor in the lee of Monhegan Island, a high, rocky island ten miles off the coast of Maine. Monhegan had been inhabited by Englishmen on and off since 1614, and was the site of one of New England's first year-round fishing stations. But on that blustery day in 1717, there may not have been anyone on the island to greet the pirates. The majority of Maine's settlements had been destroyed by Wabanaki Indians, who were allied with the French. The central and eastern portions of the coast were still contested by France and Britain, including Monhegan and other offshore islands like Damariscove and Matinicus. Monhegan had a water supply and easy access to some of the best cod-fishing grounds in the Americas. It might lack a cozy harbor, but for outlaws on the run, it was a safe place to linger and wait for the
Whydah, Marianne,
and
Mary Anne
to arrive.

Days passed, with no sign of them. Noland and the other men began to fear the worst, that they were all that remained of the greatest pirate fleet in the Americas.

***

Thomas Davis, one of the two survivors of the
Whydah
wreck, had dragged himself out of the surf and, shivering and exhausted, stumbled through the darkness in search of shelter. He trod down the beach a short way, pelted with rain, impassable cliffs of sand hemming him in against the sea. Illuminated by flashes of lightning, the wall of sand appeared to go on forever in both directions. There was only one way to escape. Davis began to climb.

Fortunately he was a young man, twenty-two, and presumably in good health, for despite cold and exhaustion, he somehow managed to reach the top of the 100-foot wall of sand. He must have rested a bit at the summit, an eerie plain of grass stretched out before him in the mist. Behind him, down in the surf, the shattered remains of the
Whydah
flashed in the lightning like a ghostly apparition. Finally he stumbled forward, shivering in the wind and rain, away from the sea.