The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (30 page)

Palmer's sloop turned out to be carrying a small but valuable cargo of Barbados's primary exports: sugar, rum, and slaves. The
Revenge,
her holds still nearly full of supplies, couldn't carry more, nor did Bonnet wish to cram slaves aboard his crowded sloop. Bonnet, perhaps advised by his quartermaster, resolved to take control of both vessels and sail to North Carolina to sort things out. A few days later, the
Revenge
anchored in the slack brown waters of one of that colony's inlets, probably on Cape Fear, a famous refuge of the buccaneers and corsairs of the previous century. They unloaded Palmer's sloop and, after using it to careen the
Revenge,
set her on fire. Palmer, along with his crew and slaves, was put aboard Porter's brigantine, which the pirates relieved of anchors and most of her sails and rigging. By reducing her means of propulsion, the pirates intended to give themselves a long head start, delaying Porter's ability to get to Charleston and sound the alarm. They may have overdone it: the brigantine was so slow that Porter was forced to put most of the slaves ashore "else they would have all been starved for want of provisions." South Carolina wasn't to learn of Bonnet's piracies until September 22, four weeks after they had taken place. By then he was long gone.

"The Major was no sailor," a historian would write of Bonnet a few years later, "and therefore [was] obliged to yield to many things that were imposed on him ... for want of competent knowledge in maritime affairs." The first such imposition took place as the
Revenge
sailed out of her North Carolina refuge. Bonnet was already beginning to lose his grip on the crew, who argued openly about where they should cruise next. Ultimately, amid "nothing but confusion," they sailed south, into the Straits of Florida, perhaps wishing to try their luck "fishing" the famed Spanish wrecks. Instead, somewhere off Cuba or Florida, they blundered into a situation that nearly cost Bonnet his life.

Savvy pirates knew better than to engage a ship far more powerful than them, and could tell a lumbering merchant ship from a deadly man-of-war. Stede Bonnet lacked these skills. Through hubris, weakness, or incompetence, he allowed the
Revenge
to engage in a full-fledged battle with a Spanish warship. By the time his crew managed to affect a retreat, the
Revenge
's decks were awash with blood. More than half his crew, thirty to forty men, was dead or wounded, and Bonnet himself had suffered a severe, life-threatening injury. The
Revenge
escaped, probably because she was faster and more agile than the Spanish man-of-war, suggesting that Bonnet could have avoided the incident altogether.

As Bonnet lay in his cabin among his books, racked with pain, the crew set a course for the ultimate sanctuary, New Providence Island and the fabled pirate base at Nassau.

***

The pirates of Nassau listened attentively to Bonnet's story, and those of his men. In the discussions that followed, the pirates resolved to grant the eccentric planter refuge, at least until he recovered from his appreciable wounds. In exchange, however, they wished to make use of his fine sloop-of-war. Blackbeard, Benjamin Hornigold maintained, could do big things if placed in charge of the
Revenge,
which was far superior to the sloop he had been using. Bonnet, who was barely able to leave his bed, could continue to occupy the captain's cabin, but Blackbeard would be in charge of the ship. Bonnet, now suffering from both mental and physical pain, was hardly in a position to refuse.

Blackbeard transferred many of his men and two cannon over to the
Revenge
and commenced repairs on the newly built sloop-of-war. Within a week or two, he was ready to depart, the
Revenge
now equipped with twelve guns and 150 men, among them Hornigold's longtime quartermaster, William Howard. Hornigold had business to attend to, but first he may have arranged to meet Blackbeard off the coast of Virginia in a few weeks' time. In the middle of September, Blackbeard was sailing up the Gulf Stream, in charge of his first independent command. It would be many months before he saw Nassau again.

After Blackbeard's departure, Hornigold put his affairs in order. Some of his preparations for his forthcoming cruise were documented, providing a window into a poorly understood aspect of pirate life. He first recruited Richard Noland, quartermaster of the late Sam Bellamy, to serve as his agent at Nassau, making him responsible for recruiting men and keeping an eye on his interests on the island. He then took a large load of plundered cargo aboard his pirate ship the
Bonnet
—flour, sugar, and other surplus items—and sailed it up to Harbour Island. There he spent several days, trading and visiting with Richard Thompson and the island's other merchants, who were growing rich smuggling pirate goods into Jamaica and Charleston. While on the island, he was surprised to run into Neal Walker, the son of his old nemesis Thomas Walker. The Walkers had apparently decided that if they couldn't suppress the pirates, they might as well make money off them. Neal was busy loading his sloop with barrels of pirated sugar, which members of Hornigold's crew later spotted outside Thomas Walker's new residence-in-exile on an islet off Abaco.

In Harbour Island's snug anchorage, Hornigold also encountered a newcomer to the Bahamas, a French pirate named Jean Bondavais, whose men had already earned a reputation for "harshly treating" the island's inhabitants. Bondavais, like Hornigold, was preparing for a new pirate cruise, and the two soon found themselves competing for the same resources. His sloop, the
Mary Ann
may well have been the
Marianne,
which Williams and his company would have been happy to sell after their frightening odyssey; if so, this would have irked Hornigold, who was the pirate who had originally captured the sloop eighteen months prior. Both captains were trying to buy supplies from Harbour Island's merchants, and each needed a ship's boat and more crewmen, particularly surgeons. Hornigold had taken pity on his captive surgeon, John Howell, and released him some weeks earlier. The poor man, who loathed the pirate life, had been unable to arrange passage off New Providence, and lived in constant fear of being pressed by one pirate crew or another. Bondavais somehow got wind of this, perhaps from Hornigold's men, and quietly sent for him in Nassau.

Howell was living with the merchant William Pindar, and both men were at home when Bondavais' men rapped on the door. Pindar opened the door to find himself face-to-face with a gang of cutlass-wielding Frenchmen. They told the merchant that they had come for Howell and "a hogshead of rum" and would "cut him with cutlass" if he did not deliver both. Pindar only had a gallon of rum, which Howell had brought from town, and when he told the pirates so, they became "very rude" and threatened to drag Howell away that instant. Howell tearfully told Pindar "that he would rather choose to go with Hornigold than [with] these Frenchmen who deal so hardly with him." Somehow he and Pindar put them off long enough for Howell to run over to the house where Richard Noland was staying. He begged Noland to recruit him, saying "he would rather serve the English than French if he was compelled to make a choice of either." Noland, pitying the man, arranged for his conscription into the
Bonnet
's crew. Shortly thereafter, Hornigold's quartermaster, John Martin, bundled him into a boat and carried him to Harbour Island, where Hornigold could protect him.

At Harbour Island, Bondavais was upset to learn that the surgeon was now aboard the
Bonnet.
The Frenchmen approached Hornigold, demanding Howell be turned over. Hornigold slyly responded that he would be happy to comply, so long as the surgeon agreed; Howell, of course, refused. Bondavais relented, eventually sailing away without the reputed surgeon. Howell remained desperate to escape from the pirates, however, and repeatedly tried to escape, despite being placed under heavy guard. At one point he approached one of the daughters of Richard Thompson, Harbour Island's leading citizen, begging her to hide him. Nobody on the island dared to help the man, Thompson later said, "lest Hornigold should burn or destroy their houses or do some other vileness, the whole place being in such fear of Hornigold that no inhabitant dare[d] speak against or contradict any of [his] orders." When the
Bonnet
departed the Bahamas to meet Blackbeard, we know Howell was on board, forced into piracy for the second time in less than a year.

***

By this time, Blackbeard and company were a thousand miles to the north, patrolling the entrance to Delaware Bay, through which all of Philadelphia's commerce passed. During the trip from Nassau, Blackbeard had developed growing doubts about the
Revenge
's eccentric owner. Bonnet's crewmen told stories that made it clear that the planter, even in health, was entirely unfit for command, not knowing a block from a halyard. Bonnet stuck to his cabin, for the most part. When he ventured out on deck, he wore an elegant morning gown and usually carried the book he was reading in his hands. His mental state was similarly fragile, and Blackbeard suspected it would be no great feat to lift permanent control of the
Revenge
from his tenuous grasp. He was pleasant to Bonnet, encouraging him to rest in his cabin, easy in the assurance that the sloop was in good hands.

They made one capture along the way, the forty-ton sloop
Betty
of Virginia, loaded with Madeira wine and other merchandise. On September 29, as they closed on her at the Capes of Virginia, Blackbeard donned his new, terrifying battle attire. He wore a silk sling over his shoulders, to which were attached "three brace of pistols, hanging in holsters like bandaliers." Under his hat, he tied on lit fuses, allowing some of them to dangle down on each side of his face, surrounding it with a halo of smoke and fire. So adorned, a contemporary biographer reported, "his eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, [that he] made altogether such a figure that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury from Hell to look more frightful." The crews of merchant ships would take one look at this apparition, surrounded by an army of wild men bearing muskets, cutlasses, and primitive hand grenades, and would invariably surrender without firing a shot. That was exactly what Blackbeard intended. Through terror, he eliminated the need to deplete men and ammunition in battle and ensured that the vessels he captured remained undamaged and, thus, of maximum possible value to his company. The
Betty,
a humble vessel that regularly worked the wine run from Virginia to Madeira, surrendered, and the pirates looted the best of her cargo. Not wanting to allow her to alert all of Virginia and Maryland to their presence, Blackbeard ordered all the captives brought over to the
Revenge.
William Howard, his quartermaster, drilled holes in
Betty
's hull and, as she sank, climbed aboard a rowboat and returned aboard the
Revenge.

It was now early October, and the
Revenge
stood off the high sandy capes of Delaware, five cannonballs stored alongside each of her guns, waiting for prey. The next to run afoul of Blackbeard's men was a heavily loaded merchant ship flying British colors. The ship, it turned out, was just completing the ten- to twelve-week journey from Dublin to Philadelphia, with 150 passengers crowded below her decks along with cargo. Almost all of the passengers were indentured servants and, as such, were probably in a miserable state. Disease ran rampant in the immigrants' crowded, poorly ventilated quarters, where they faced "want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampnes, anxiety, want, affliction, and lamentations, together with ... lice [that] abound so frightfully ... they can be scraped off the bottom." Such passengers would have been desperate to make land; instead, they found themselves prisoners of a wild man with fire and smoke pouring from his head.

Under Hornigold, Blackbeard had conducted himself with restraint, taking only what he needed from the vessels he captured. Now, he was free to propose his own agenda to his crew, one far more ambitious than that of his mentor. Hornigold had limited his operations to maritime theft, but in the wake of Bellamy's death, Blackbeard sought to bring as much damage to British commerce as possible, short of the unnecessary taking of human life. He appears to have declared war on the British Empire and would use piracy and terror to bring it to its knees.

The servants aboard the passenger ship had little to fear from this more radical approach to piracy, but the merchants sailing aboard her had plenty to lose. Like other pirates, Blackbeard's men took what cargo and valuables they fancied: things like coins, jewelry, rum, foodstuffs, ammunition, and navigational instruments. Unlike Hornigold or Bellamy, however, they dumped the rest of the cargo into the sea. One merchant aboard the ship watched £1,000 of his personal cargo go over the side; he begged to be allowed to keep enough cloth to make just one suit of clothes, but the pirates refused, throwing the last bolt of textiles overboard. By the time they released the ship, nothing remained of its cargo.

Over the next two weeks, Blackbeard brought a tide of terror and destruction to the mid-Atlantic coast such as had never been seen in peacetime. The
Revenge
cruised about the Capes of Delaware and the approaches to Bermuda, the Chesapeake and New York Harbor, never staying more than forty-eight hours in a single place. They captured vessels coming from all directions: vessels bound for Philadelphia from London, Liverpool and Madeira; sloops traveling between New York and the West Indies; Pennsylvania merchantmen outbound to England and beyond. Blackbeard took at least fifteen vessels in all, and, in the process, became the most feared pirate in the Americas practically overnight.

Traumatized captains poured into New York and Philadelphia bearing tales of woe. Captain Spofford told how, not a day out of Philadelphia, he had been forced to watch Blackbeard's men dump a thousand barrel staves into the sea, and then fill his cargo hold with the terrified crewmen of the
Sea Nymph,
a snow from Bristol they had captured as it started its journey to Portugal. One of the
Sea Nymph's
men, the merchant Joseph Richardson, had been "very barbarously used" by the pirates, who threw his cargo of wheat into the sea. Captain Peter Peters told how the pirates had seized his sloop, stolen twenty-seven barrels of Madeira wine, hacked away his mast, and left him to run aground. The pirates left Captain Grigg's sloop at anchor at the mouth of the bay, his masts chopped off and his cargo of thirty indentured servants whisked away. The pirates took all the wine from a Virginia-bound sloop before sinking her. Captain Farmer's sloop had already been looted by other pirates on its way from Jamaica, but Blackbeard's men insisted on unrigging it and removing her mast and anchors to serve as spares for the
Revenge,
before they put thirty servant captives aboard and left her to drift ashore near Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Captain Sipkins was relieved of his command of a "great sloop" from New York, which Blackbeard's men kept as a consort, mounting her with thirteen guns.