The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (31 page)

The swaggering pirates had boasted how they were awaiting their consort, "a ship of thirty guns," and that once she arrived they intended to sail up the Delaware and lay siege to Philadelphia itself. Others bragged that they planned to sail down to the Capes of Virginia, to capture "a good ship there, which they very much wanted." Blackbeard made a special point of terrorizing captives from New England on behalf of the surviving members of Bellamy's crew, then rotting in the Boston Prison, telling them that if "any of their fellow pirates suffer [in Boston] that they will revenge it on them."

Blackbeard garnered considerable intelligence from his captives. The survivors from Bellamy's wrecks, they learned, were to be tried at any time, and likely faced the gallows. If Blackbeard intended to rescue them, he was dissuaded by news that King George had ordered "a proper force" to suppress piracy in the Americas. Two frigates were said to be at Boston, HMS
Rose
and
Squirrel.
HMS
Phoenix
had arrived at New York, and in Virginia, the sixth-rate
Lyme
was now backing up the decrepit
Shoreham.
One of Blackbeard's captives, Peter Peters, told him that while he was loading his wine at Madeira, off the coast of Africa, two Royal Navy frigates had come into the harbor, one en route to New York, the other to Virginia.
^*
If they had not arrived already, Peters reported, they soon would be. Blackbeard recognized that the east coast of North America was becoming a risky place for a pirate sloop. It was time to conclude their business and head south to the islands of the Caribbean, indefensible in their multitude, at least until he could gain control of a ship-of-force.

Toward the end of October, Blackbeard's sloop and prizes were spotted sailing along the outside of Long Island, in the direction of Gardiner's Island or Block Island. They may have been going to one or the other to pick items left behind by Williams, or perhaps to drop off some of their own treasure. Whatever the reason for their trip, the pirates headed south very soon afterward, sailing for the islands of the eastern Caribbean.

***

Contrary to many popular accounts, Blackbeard did not return to the Bahamas on his way to the Caribbean, nor is there compelling evidence that he joined forces with Benjamin Hornigold, who appears to have been working his way north at this time in his "great sloop" named, confusingly enough, the
Bonnet.
Blackbeard had so terrorized the coast that his men were ascribed to a number of attacks that they could not possibly have taken part in, as more detailed and credible accounts place him hundreds or thousands of miles away at the time they occurred. Several of these erroneous reports had placed him operating with Hornigold, suggesting that his old mentor may have in fact been responsible, but operating with a new consort similar to the
Revenge
.
^*
If so, Hornigold was sailing north while Blackbeard and his men were sailing south, probably well offshore, on their way to the far eastern Caribbean, where the Windward Islands brace themselves against the open Atlantic.

Increasing the confusion, Blackbeard was now operating two sloops himself: the
Revenge
and one of his prizes, a forty-ton Bermuda-built sloop, most likely the vessel taken from Captain Sipkins. This second sloop, which the surviving documents fail to name, now carried eight guns and some thirty pirates; the larger
Revenge
had twelve guns and 120 men. Mariners had been conditioned to expect Blackbeard and Hornigold to be operating together, each in his own sloop; now that each was operating separately, but with two vessels each, it's not surprising that each man's victims wrongly assumed that the other was in charge of the second sloop.

Like Bellamy before him, Blackbeard was looking to capture a ship-of-force that would allow his pirate gang to take on even the frigates of the Royal Navy. With two sloops-of-war at his disposal, the pirates knew they had a reasonably good chance of overwhelming one, and Blackbeard knew just the place to look. Out in the sea, just beyond the arc of the Windward Islands that marks the leading edge of the Caribbean, the transatlantic shipping lanes converged. One could find ships bound from France to Martinique and Guadeloupe, from England to Barbados, and from Spain to the Spanish Main, through the deepwater passages between the islands. There, Blackbeard's men decided, was where they would cast their net.

It was a good choice. On November 17, within days or even hours of arriving, the lookout let out a cry. There, on the horizon, were the sails of an approaching ship.

***

Pierre Dosset, captain of the French slaver
La Concorde,
could not have been happy to see two large sloops approaching from the west. He knew it meant trouble. Because of the prevailing winds, many ships sailed to the Caribbean at this latitude, but nobody sailed in the opposite direction.
La Concorde
was a large, swift, powerful vessel: a 250-ton ship-rigged slaver, with a strong oaken hull and enough gun ports to accommodate up to forty cannon. Dosset's crew, however, was in no condition to go into battle.

The Frenchmen had left their homeport of Nantes eight months earlier, with a crew of seventy-five and a hold full of goods to trade with the kings and princes of Whydah, on Africa's Bight of Benin.
La Concorde'
s owner, the merchant Réne Montaudoin, had given Captain Dosset a competitive advantage over the captains of rival slavers, a cargo the Africans would pay many slaves to possess. The people of the Kingdom of Whydah had a penchant for the colorful cotton prints produced in India. Montaudoin, the richest man in Nantes, had built his own textile factory near the mouth of the Loire, which turned out knockoffs of the Calico and Indiennes patterns. His ship full of colorful cotton, Dosset looked forward to a smooth and profitable journey.

Things went badly from the start. A few days from Nantes, Dosset encountered a pair of powerful storms that damaged his ship, causing the loss of an expensive anchor and the death of a crewman. He arrived in Whydah in July after seventy-seven days at sea, and succeeded in trading his goods for 516 slaves and a small quantity of gold dust. He also picked up enough tropical microbes and bacteria to sicken many of the crew members. Sixteen crewmen died during their three-month stay in Africa or during the six weeks they had been crossing the Atlantic. Thirty-six others were sick with "scurvy and the bloody flux." Sixty-one slaves had also died. Now Dosset feared he might not make it to the slave markets of Martinique at all.

With 70 percent of his crew dead or incapacitated, Dosset lacked the manpower to handle the ship's cannon and rigging at the same time. A captain in his situation could bluff, displaying his guns to ward off the attackers, but on this occasion Dosset was deprived of that option as well. Because he was carrying an unusually large number of slaves—nearly a hundred more than in any of
La Concorde
's previous trips—he had to increase his cargo capacity by mounting only sixteen guns. If the strangers turned out to be pirates, Dosset knew he was in trouble.

As the sloops closed within range, he and his lieutenant, François Ernaud, must have felt a growing sense of terror. A spyglass revealed two sloops-of-war, with guns run out of their ports, and their decks jammed with men. Any further doubt about their intentions vanished when the sloops displayed a black flag with a death's head, and smoke and fire began to swirl around the head of the fearsome bearded man on the biggest sloop's quarterdeck.

Puffs of smoke appeared along the length of one of the sloops as she fired a full volley of cannon at
La Concorde.
Cannonballs splashed in the water and flew over the deck, followed shortly by a cascade of musket balls. Dosset stayed his course and tried to rally the crewmen, but a second volley of cannon and musketry sapped the last bit of morale from them. Dosset ordered the flag struck and the helmsman swung
La Concorde
into the wind, and she drifted slowly to a stop. Monsieur Montaudoin was going to be very angry.

***

As he looked over his new prize, Blackbeard knew he had finally found a proper flagship.
La Concorde
was as big, fast, and powerful as Bellamy's now infamous
Whydah,
maybe more so. With such a vessel, Blackbeard knew his men could cause more havoc than the rest of the old Flying Gang put together. All the French slaver needed was a little refitting and a change of name.

The pirates took
La Concorde
to Bequia, a hilly, forested island with a large protected anchorage located nine miles southeast of St. Vincent. Blackbeard knew they were unlikely to be bothered there, for unlike most of the surrounding islands, St. Vincent and Bequia were not controlled by Europeans, but by the mixed-race descendents of Carib Indians and the African survivors of the 1635 wreck of two slave ships.
^*
These people, the Garifuna, had tenaciously defended their land from the Europeans, but their naval operations were limited to a handful of Carib-style war canoes. Even if they did show up in force, they were likely as not to be pleased with the pirates for stopping a slave ship from reaching its destination.

The hundreds of slaves in
La Concorde's
hold had little reason to celebrate, however. While Blackbeard had several crewmen of African descent, they had probably been born in the West Indies, men familiar with European customs, language, and technology. Most Africans Blackbeard's men encountered "straight off the boat" appear to have been treated as cargo, creatures from an alien culture who were ineligible to join the pirates' ranks. The vast majority of the 455 slaves chained in
La Concorde
's hold were turned over to Captain Dosset, whose men guarded them on the shore of Bequia. Blackbeard kept sixty-one slaves aboard
La Concorde,
probably for use as laborers, although a few may have been inducted into his company. On this point, sadly, the historical record has little to say.

The pirates forced ten of Dosset's crewmen, and their choice illustrates their company's needs: the chief surgeon and his deputy, a pilot, both gunsmiths; the master carpenter and his deputy, an expert in the art of caulking hulls; a cook; and one seaman with unspecified skills. In addition, four of Dosset's men begged the pirates to let them join, including the coxswain and both of his cabin boys. The boys, fifteen-year-old Louis Arot and slightly older Julien Joseph Moisant, were the worst-paid members of the slaver's crew, receiving a paltry five and eight livres (£0.2 and £0.35) a month respectively. Young Arot may have had reason to dislike Dosset and his officers, as he went out of his way to cause them harm, informing the pirates that they had a secret stash of gold dust hidden somewhere on the ship or their persons. Blackbeard's men interrogated Dosset and his officers, threatening to cut their throats if they failed to turn over the gold. The Frenchmen complied, and were rewarded with the pirates' small, forty-ton sloop; the pirates were keeping
La Concorde
for themselves. The pirates also gave them "two or three tons of beans" to prevent the slaves from starving. Dosset dubbed this sloop the
Mauvaise Recontre,
the "Bad Encounter," and used it to transport his crew and slaves back to Martinique, a task that took two separate voyages.

Blackbeard oversaw the transfer of his personal effects from the
Revenge
to
La Concorde,
along with cannon and supplies from the forty-ton sloop, and much of the pirate company. Stede Bonnet had recovered from his battle wounds and, despite his inexperience, was allowed to resume command of the
Revenge
and a crew of at least fifty men. From eyewitness accounts a few days later, we know that
La Concorde
now carried twenty-two guns and 150 men, indicating that at least some of the Africans retained by the pirates had been inducted into the crew. The pirates also gave
La Concorde
a new name:
Queen Anne's Revenge.
The choice of names suggests Jacobite political leanings among Blackbeard's crew, evoking the name of the last Stuart monarch and promising vengeance in her name against King George and his Hanoverian line.

Now in command of a powerful warship, Blackbeard was ready to make his mark. He was, by now, aware of the relatively weak state of the European colonies in the Lesser Antillies, which Sam Bellamy's men would have attested to on the basis of their raids the year before. He proposed to the company that they sweep the 1,400-mile island chain from end to end, raiding ships and harbors alike until they reached the Windward Passage, where they might snare a Spanish galleon carrying the payroll to Cuba. This strategy agreed upon, the
Revenge
and
Queen Anne's Revenge
sailed out of the harbor to the south, a course set for Grenada, the first island in the chain. When they reached the French island, they would backtrack their way to St. Vincent and continue north, hopping from island to island and stripping them of valuables as if they were walking through a row of fruit trees.

This first leg of the journey, which lasted but two days, was of mixed success. Despite, or possibly because of the presence of their French pilot, the pirates managed to run one of their vessels aground on Grenada. They were able to get her off whatever reef she had struck, and while it didn't suffer any serious damage, the pirates did find it necessary to abandon a number of the slaves. (Dosset was later able to re-cover them, in part because he had branded them with
La Concorde
's initials.) But they also made their first capture: a large brigantine, a seaworthy, two-masted vessel, armed with ten guns. No account of the capture of this vessel survives, so there is no way of knowing where she came from or what was onboard, but the pirates kept her as a third member of their fleet. Presumably a few of her crew were forced into service and the remainder released on one of the ship's boats or put ashore on St. Lucia. In any event, the pirates acquired this brigantine between the time they left Captain Dosset on Bequia and when they encountered their next quarry a day or so later, in the deepwater passage north of St. Vincent.