The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (8 page)

Sometime between 1690 and 1696, Woodes's father moved the family to Bristol, probably to expand his trade with Newfoundland. His father had friends in Bristol, as well as a probable relative, an influential merchant named Francis Rogers, who would invest in many of their later adventures. By the time the poll-tax collector made his rounds in June 1696, the Rogers family was living in the seafarer's neighborhood of Redcliffe, across the river from central Bristol.

Bristol was a strange location for a port. It was located seven miles from the sea up a narrow, winding river—the Avon—beset by tides so powerful the watercraft of the day stood no chance of proceeding against them. The spring tides rose and fell by as much as forty-five feet, and at low tide much of the serpentine harbor turned to mudflats. Vessels under 150 tons had to wait until the tides were flowing in the direction of travel, and even then had difficulty rounding St. Vincent's Rock, halfway down the river. Larger ships were almost certain to wind up grounded on a mud bank if they tried to sail the gauntlet, and had to be towed to and from Bristol's docks by large rowboats. Many ship captains elected not to make the trip at all, anchoring instead at the mouth of the Avon, where they loaded and unloaded their cargoes onto a series of rafts and tenders that could more easily navigate the river's tides. Bristol stood on a bend in the Avon that was congested with vessels. Visiting Bristol in 1739, Alexander Pope said they extended along the riverfront as far as the eye could see, "their masts as thick as they can stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable."

The city itself was still medieval in character. Inside its walls, timber-framed, Tudor-style houses perched on streets so narrow people could shake hands across them from their upstairs windows. Principal roads were no more than twenty feet across and were the only ones paved. Other roads were surfaced in mud and garbage, in which pigs rooted about. Even the center of the city was separated by only a few hundred yards from the farms and fields that surrounded it. The focus of commerce was an artificial anchorage—the River Frome—where the ocean-going ships disgorged their cargoes onto The Quay in full view of counting houses. Only a few blocks' walk south of The Quay were the gates leading into a marsh. From there, among grazing cows, one could look across the river and see the bluffs of Redcliffe, where the Rogers family made its home.

Growing up in Redcliffe, Woodes Rogers may well have rubbed shoulders with Edward Thatch, or even been acquainted with him. They were almost the same age, engaged in the same profession, and probably lived within a few blocks of each other. Rogers the Pirate Hunter and Blackbeard the Pirate may have prayed together as teenagers, beneath John Cabot's great whalebone in the cool interior of Redcliffe's cathedral-sized parish church.

Henry Avery's exploits were well known within the Rogers household by way of one of Captain Rogers's closest friends, the mariner William Dampier, a former buccaneer who had circumnavigated the world. Dampier renewed their friendship in the mid-1690s, while preparing two books for publication. The first,
A New Voyage Round the World,
an account of his circumnavigation, would make him a national celebrity following its publication in the spring of 1697. The second,
Voyages and Descriptions
(1699), contained extracts of several letters from Captain Rogers, whom Dampier referred to as "my ingenious friend." The elder Rogers had shared his knowledge of the Red Sea and African coast; Dampier, in turn, had intimate, firsthand knowledge of Henry Avery and his fellow pirates, whose adventures were just then captivating the English public.

Dampier had spent months holed up with Avery and his men in the harbor of La Coruña in 1694. While Avery was serving as first mate of the
Charles II,
Dampier was second mate on one of her consorts, the
Dove.
Dampier may have provided Avery with sailing directions to Madagascar, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, as he was one of the only people in La Coruña with firsthand knowledge of those waters. Dampier had shared Avery's frustrations with how the fleet's owners were treating them, but refused to join the mutiny itself. Back in England, he joined the crewmen's lawsuit against James Houblon and the other owners and later testified in court on behalf of one of Avery's six captured crewmen, Joseph Dawson, the only one to avoid the gallows. Years later, while serving as commander of the forty-gun frigate HMS
Roebuck,
he encountered several of Avery's fugitive crewmen during a port call in Brazil. Rather than placing them under arrest, he socialized with them and signed one on to serve aboard his ship.

As the heir of a growing shipping concern, the young Woodes Rogers likely looked on Avery as a villain, not a hero. But he also may have internalized some important lessons from Dampier's story of Avery's mutiny and its aftermath. In an era when most captains ruled their ships through terror, Rogers would eventually take a more lenient, fair-minded approach. Winning the crew's respect proved a much more reliable method of control than keeping them in a state of fear.

In November of 1697, Rogers started an apprenticeship to the mariner John Yeamans, who lived just a few doors away. At eighteen, he was a bit old to be starting a seven-year tutelage, particularly given his family's seafaring background. Rogers had probably already traveled to Newfoundland with his father, and learned the essential elements of seamanship, commerce, and the art of command. Bryan Little, the best of Rogers's twentieth-century biographers, suspected that young Rogers entered Yeamans's tutelage for political purposes. Such an apprenticeship gave the newcomers from Poole an entrée into the closed circles of Bristol's merchant elite and a way of establishing the contacts and relationships essential to successful maritime trade. It was also a means by which Rogers could become a freeman, or voting citizen, although, as it turned out, the Rogers family was able to secure this coveted privilege for their son by other means.

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While Rogers was sailing with Yeamans, his father was amassing a small fortune from Bristol's growing transatlantic trade. Like many English merchants, Captain Rogers spread his risk by purchasing shares in a few different vessels, and rarely owned any vessel outright. Should one ship sink, Rogers would share the losses with other merchants and still count on profits from other ships. He also reduced uncertainty—and increased his income—by captaining some of the vessels he invested in. Captain Rogers sailed regularly to Newfoundland, spending the entire spring and summer of 1700 aboard the sixty-ton
Elizabeth,
buying oil from whale hunters in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, where the fish merchants of Poole had based their North American operations. He may have left servants behind to maintain the docks, storage houses, and fish-drying racks they had built there, helping to settle Newfoundland.

It was in Newfoundland that the elder Rogers probably solidified his most important alliance. In 1696 or 1697 he met the ambitious Royal Navy captain William Whetstone. Whetstone, who was also from Bristol, was a former merchant captain with close business ties to Woods Rogers. In the mid-1690s, Captain Rogers and other fish merchants in Poole and Bristol had become increasingly concerned about an aggressive expansion of French fishing outposts in Newfoundland and French attacks on their own fishing stations. The merchants cried for help. The Admiralty responded by ordering Whetstone to sail the fourth-rate man-of-war HMS
Dreadnought
to Newfoundland with the fishing fleet, and once there, to protect their facilities at Trinity Bay. During the long weeks at sea, Captain Rogers and Whetstone had plenty of time to cement their friendship.

By 1702, Captain Rogers was wealthy enough to buy property in Bristol's most fashionable new subdivision. The town fathers had decided to tear down the walls separating the town center from the marshes at the river's bend. Where the marshes had been, they built Queen's Square, Bristol's first preplanned neighborhood. It was to be a thoroughly modern place. Instead of cramped and dirty alleys, its residences would face a great square—the second largest in England—with lime trees and formal gardens, and accessed by wide, paved boulevards. Rather than frame, all the buildings would be constructed of red brick, with sash windows and stone ornamentation. In short, it would be as comfortable and uniform a district as any built in London after the Great Fire of 1666. Shortly before Christmas 1702, Captain Rogers purchased a double-sized lot at Number 31–32 Queen's Square, where workers began work on an elegant new mansion. The Whetstones, who lived on fashionable St. Michael's Hill, purchased the lot at Number 29, two doors down, along the square's southern promenade.

William Whetstone did not have the opportunity to oversee the construction of his home, as the navy had called him back to sea. Whetstone, now a commodore, spent most of 1701 trying to sail a squadron of warships to Jamaica, but his vessels were repeatedly battered by storms and never got further than Ireland. In February 1702, he set out again, and while he was crossing the Atlantic, England went to war against France and Spain. He would not return home for nearly two years.

War had been brewing for some time due to the political and genetic complications of royal inbreeding. For more than twenty years, the most powerful throne in Europe had been occupied by the drooling and disfigured King Charles II of Spain, who was not only mentally and physically handicapped, but impotent. Spanish authorities did their best to rehabilitate their king, but no matter how many exorcisms they subjected Charles to, he remained barely able to walk or speak. He was an overgrown child who spent his reign wallowing in his own filth, shooting firearms at animals, and gazing at his ancestors' decomposed corpses, which he had ordered his courtiers to exhume for that purpose. When he died in November 1700, the Spanish Habsburg line died with him. His out-of-town relatives immediately started squabbling over who would inherit the estate, which, in addition to Spain, included Italy, the Philippines, and most of the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately for the people of Europe, these same out-of-town relatives were the French King Louis XIV and the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I. Pretty soon armies were clashing and, for various geopolitical and genealogical reasons of their own, most of Europe's rulers were drawn in. In the spring of 1702, England went to war, siding with the Dutch, Austrians, and Prussians against France and Spain. By doing so, they were setting the stage for the greatest outbreak of piracy the Atlantic would ever know.

The War of the Spanish Succession made life more hazardous for Captain Rogers, whose merchant ships were easy prey for French raiders. He and other merchants may have also lost ships in the horrific storm of 1703, the worst in English history, which destroyed thirteen warships and over 700 merchantmen. Despite their losses, his business must have remained profitable in the war's early years because construction continued on the Queen's Square mansion. It was completed in 1704 (the same year young Woodes finished his apprenticeship); three stories tall, with an attic for servants, the back windows looking out over the River Avon. Sometime during this period, Woodes took notice of the girl next door: eighteen-year-old Sarah Whetstone, the commodore's eldest daughter and heir.

In January of 1705, the Rogers family and the Whetstones traveled to London and witnessed three important ceremonies. On the eighteenth, William Whetstone was appointed rear admiral of the blue by the queen's husband, Prince George, the lord high admiral of the navy. The newly appointed admiral hosted the next event six days later: the wedding of Sarah and Woodes Rogers, held at the church of St. Mary Magdalene in central London. Not long thereafter, Admiral Whetstone was reappointed commander in chief of the West Indies and began preparing to sail again for Jamaica. The newlyweds probably stayed in London through February to see Admiral Whetstone off and to witness a third ceremony: his knighthood by Queen Anne.

At the end of February, Sir William sailed for Jamaica, whose citizens expected an enemy attack at any moment. The Rogers and Whetstone families headed back to Bristol, where their merchant empire awaited. Captain Rogers was in a good place: his son married to the daughter of a knight and an admiral, who was also a dear friend. Little did he know he would never see Sir William again.

A year later, Captain Rogers was dead. In the winter of 1705–1706, he died at sea and was committed to the ocean where he had spent so much of his life. His fortune, his company, and his home would pass to his widow and twenty-five-year-old son, by then a freeman of Bristol by dint of a noble marriage.

The young gentleman merchant of Bristol was tall and strongly built, with dark brown hair and a prominent nose and strong chin. Before war's end, intelligent and ambitious Woodes Rogers would be a household name from London to Edinburgh, from Boston to Barbados. But in France and Spain, they would know him by just one word: pirate.

1702–1712

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of the War of Spanish Succession (1702–1712) made Sam Bellamy's life more uncertain than it already was. He was thirteen years old when the conflict began, a ship's boy on either a merchant vessel or Royal Navy warship. By the time it ended, he was a skilled mariner, able to guide a vessel a thousand miles, handle grappling hooks, firearms, and cannon.

In the early years of the conflict, the English and French navies clashed in two massive fleet engagements. These battles involved only the Royal Navy's largest vessels, the ships of the line: enormous, lumbering, wooden fortresses bristling with three stories of heavy cannon. These ships, the first-, second-, and third-rates, were too slow and cumbersome to use in more subtle operations such as convoying merchantmen, attacking enemy shipping, or patrolling the unmarked reefs and shoals of the Caribbean. They were built for one purpose: to join a line of battle in a massive set-piece engagement.