The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (13 page)

The crew of the
Duke
was still repairing the ship from its battle with the
Incarnation
on Christmas Day when the
Begoña
appeared on the horizon. By the time Rogers got the
Duke
out of the harbor that evening, the
Dutchess
and
Havre de Grace
were already miles out to sea, closing in on the enormous galleon. All night long, he watched the flashes of ships' cannons exchanging broadsides. In the morning, he could see that the
Dutchess
had been hard hit, her masts damaged and rigging in disorder. That afternoon, Rogers watched the
Dutchess
and
Havre de Grace
engage the galleon for hours, only to retreat again. The
Duke
didn't catch up to the running battle until late afternoon on the twenty-seventh, at which point all three privateers circled the
Begoña,
bombarding her with cannon fire. In the action, a wood splinter tore through Rogers's left foot, leaving his heel bone sticking out and half of his ankle missing.

Cooke, commanding the
Havre de Grace,
estimated the fleet had unloaded three hundred cannonballs and fifty rounds of sail-wrecking bar shot on the
Begoña,
but their six-pound cannon had little effect on her thick, rock-hard hull. "We might as well have fought a castle of fifty guns as this ship," Cooke lamented. The
Begoña
's heavy cannon blasted the English ships, punching holes in their hulls and killing or wounding thirty-three. Running low on ammunition, the privateers had to admit they were outmatched and abandoned the
Begoña
to continue her run to Acapulco. Rogers, unable to speak or walk, prepared the fleet for the long trip home.

***

It took another twenty-two months to reach England, during which time relations between the officers deteriorated. They fought over who would take command of the
Incarnatión,
whose holds were packed with silk, spices, jewels, silver, and other finery, later found to be worth over £100,000. Amazingly, Courtney and Cooke were willing to allow Dr. Dover to command the ship. Still in unbearable pain, Rogers mustered the other officers to block the appointment, declaring Dover "utterly uncapable of the office." In the "paper war" that followed, the officers agreed to a compromise, whereby Selkirk and others would actually operate the
Incarnación,
while Dover held the ceremonial title of Chief Captain. The skirmish made Rogers some bitter enemies.

In late June 1710, they arrived at the Dutch East Indies capital of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), the first friendly port they'd seen in a year and a half. There they cleaned the weakening hulls of the
Duke, Dutchess,
and
Incarnación,
and sold the now worm-eaten
Havre de Grace
for scrap. Courtney and some of the other officers in Dover's faction would later claim that the
Duke
was still dangerously leaky and in need of a new keel, and that Rogers had refused to address the problem. They also suspected that Rogers had "insideous designs" to sail to Newfoundland or Brazil and trade in contraband East Indian goods. This was a serious allegation, for the British East India Company had a legal monopoly over all British trade with Southeast Asia. Crossing the powerful East India Company, they noted, "may endamage" the expedition. Many in the crew came to believe Rogers had stolen a large quantity of treasure and hid it at Batavia, though this seems both improbable and out of character. We do know that during his six-month stay at Batavia, he underwent surgery to repair his heel and remove the musket ball from the roof of his mouth. He also closely supervised the purchase of necessities for the trip home to avoid any entanglements with the East India Company, though even these precautions didn't save the Bristol men from the insatiable greed of the company's directors.

When the three ships finally dropped anchor in the Thames on October 14, 1711, the East India Company's agents were waiting for them. The privateers' purchase of provisions at Batavia, they argued, constituted a violation of the company's monopoly. They seized the great "Acapulco ship," already made famous by the London newspapers, and embroiled the privateers' owners in a lengthy legal dispute. In the end, over £6,000 of the £147,975 in proceeds was paid to the company's directors. Once expenses were deducted, each of the owners had doubled his investment. Rogers, his face mutilated, his foot mangled, his brother dead, received about £1,600, much of which was probably consumed by his family's debts back in Bristol. Many of the crew received nothing at all, having been pressed aboard Royal Navy ships as soon as the
Duke
and
Dutchess
reached London.

Rogers returned to his wife and children in Bristol to mend his wounds and prepare his journal for publication. His circumnavigation and successful capture of a Manila ship had made him a national hero, but it had also left him maimed, aggrieved, and little wealthier than the day he'd left home three years earlier.

***

Rogers wasn't the only one recovering from trauma in the late summer of 1712. Across the Atlantic in Jamaica, Edward Thatch and Charles Vane had been witnesses to far worse. On August 28,1712, Jamaica was struck by one of the most powerful hurricanes in its history.

Of Charles Vane, we know three things: During the War of Spanish Succession he came to reside in Port Royal, he was a professional mariner, and he was acquainted with the soon-to-be-infamous Captain Henry Jennings. When the winds suddenly shifted from north to south on the fateful August night, Vane may well have been aboard Captain Jennings's four-gun sloop
Diamond,
which was anchored among hundreds of other ships in Port Royal's harbor.

The harbor, that evening, was particularly crowded due to an embargo on shipping; a French attack was deemed imminent. Because of this, Edward Thatch was probably there as well, resting ashore at Port Royal. Also in Port Royal was the London slave ship captain Lawrence Prince and the Massachusetts merchant master William Wyer, both of whom would one day run afoul of the pirates. Jennings, an established Jamaican merchant captain "of good standing and estate" commanded a vessel with empty holds, whatever cargoes she'd been carrying having long since been unloaded during the island's weeks-long embargo.

The storm struck around eight at night, "a furious hurricane of lightning, wind, and rain without thunder." It blew down trees, flattened homes and warehouses, toppled sugar works, and tore apart entire fields of sugar cane. A number of people ashore lost their lives when their houses, the hospital, and half of Kingston's main church collapsed, but the greatest carnage took place out in the harbor. At least fifty-four vessels sank, capsized, or were driven ashore, including the sloop-of-war HMS
Jamaica
and the slaver
Joseph Galley,
which lost every member of her crew and all 107 slaves chained in her hold. Captain Wyer was on land when the storm sank his slaver, the
Ann Galley,
drowning 100 slaves and half of his twenty-eight crewmen. Lawrence Prince lost the vessel under his command, the brigantine
Adventure,
as did Henry Jennings, though neither lost any men. When the sun came up the next morning, it revealed beaches and salt marshes strewn with smashed and dismasted vessels and dozens of corpses. In addition to the slaves, an estimated 400 sailors had lost their lives.

As Jennings, Vane, Thatch, and other mariners took stock of the destruction in the following weeks, a ship arrived bearing dramatic news from Europe. Queen Anne had declared a cessation of hostilities with France and Spain. The war was coming to an end, and with it, the stream of wealth and plunder brought to Jamaica by the privateering trade. With much of the Jamaican merchant fleet lying wrecked on the shores, hundreds of seamen were out of work, left to fend for themselves amid the wreckage of Kingston and Port Royal. Ironically, another hurricane would bring them riches on a scale the wartime privateers could have only dreamed of.

1713–1715

W
I
T
H
T
H
E
E
N
D
of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, tens of thousands of sailors suddenly found themselves out of a job. The Royal Navy, bankrupted by the twelve-year-long world war, rapidly demobilized, mothballing ships and dumping nearly three-quarters of its manpower, over 36,000 men, in the first twenty-four months following the signing of the Peace of Utrecht. Privateering commissions ceased to have any value, their owners compelled to tie their warships up and turn the crews out onto the wharves of England and the Americas. With thousands of sailors begging for work in every port, merchant captains slashed wages by 50 percent; those lucky enough to find work had to survive on twenty-two to twenty-eight shillings (£1.1 to £1.4) a month.

Peace did not bring safety to those English sailors who found work in the West Indies. Spanish coast guard vessels, the
guardas costas,
continued to seize English vessels passing to and from Jamaica, declaring them smugglers if so much as a single Spanish coin were found aboard. They always found the "illicit" coins because they were the de facto currency of all of England's Caribbean colonies. Thirty-eight Jamaican vessels were so seized in the first two years of peace, costing the vessel owners nearly £76,000. When the crews resisted, the
guardas costas
often killed a few in retribution; the rest spent months or years in Cuban prisons. "The seas," the governor of Jamaica would later recall, had become "more dangerous than in time of war."

As the months passed, the streets, taverns and boarding houses of Port Royal grew crowded with angry, destitute mariners. Merchants, stung by their losses, sent out fewer vessels, further reducing the number of jobs for sailors. Those sailors who had been captured—some more than once—were physically abused by the Spanish and financially pinched by their employers, who reduced their losses by not paying them for the time they were serving in prison. "Resentment and the want of employ," one resident later recalled, "were certainly the motives to a course of life which I am of [the] opinion that most or many of them would not have taken up had they been redressed or could by any lawful mean have supported themselves."

Benjamin Hornigold was one of the very first to turn to this other "course of life," and he took Edward Thatch with him. They had both served aboard Jamaican privateers during the war and now found themselves stuck in Port Royal Harbor. By the summer of 1713, they had had enough of poverty and the Spanish coast guard. Hornigold suggested to a number of former shipmates and drinking buddies that they put their skills together to solve both problems. They should go back to attacking Spanish shipping, avenging and enriching themselves at the same time. All they needed was a small vessel, a few good men, and a secure nest from which to launch their raids. Hornigold knew just the place.

The Bahamas, every Jamaican knew, was a perfect buccaneering base. The western end of the 700-island archipelago stood alongside the Straits of Florida, the primary shipping channel for every Europe-bound vessel in South America, Mexico, and the Greater Antilles, including Spanish Cuba, English Jamaica, and the new French colony on the island of Hispaniola. Sailing vessels had little choice but to pass this way in order to reach the colonies of the Eastern seaboard, or to catch the tradewinds back to Europe. Pirates could hide among the maze of islands, taking advantage of a hundred little-known anchorages where water and fresh fruit could be collected, vessels careened and repaired, and plunder safely divided. Nobody would have dared to follow them into the tight channels between those islands without an experienced Bahamian pilot aboard; with hundreds of low, sandy scraps of land, one could easily become lost and subject their craft to sharp reefs and uncharted shoals. More importantly, since attacking the Spaniards was technically against the law, the Bahamas didn't have a government, and hadn't since the Franco-Spanish invasion of July 1703. Thus, late in that first peacetime summer of 1713, Hornigold and a small band of followers left Port Royal and sailed 450 miles north, passing between Cuba and Hispaniola, and into the coral-studded labyrinth of the Bahamas.

During the war, the Spanish and French sacked New Providence Island four times, burning Nassau to the ground, spiking the fort's guns, carrying off the governor as well as most of the island's African slaves, and forcing the rest of the population into the woods. In the aftermath, most survivors abandoned the island, leaving only a handful of settlers who, according to resident John Graves, lived "scatteringly in little hutts, ready upon any assault to secure themselves in the woods." When word of the first raid got back to London, the aristocrats who owned the Bahamas appointed a new governor, Edward Birch, and sent him across the Atlantic to reestablish order in the backwater colony. When Birch arrived in January 1704, he found New Providence almost completely deserted and, according to contemporary historian John Oldmixon,"did not give himself the trouble to open his commission." Birch tarried for three or four months, sleeping in the woods, before leaving his "government" to its own devices.

Nine years later, little had changed. When Hornigold and his companions stepped onto the beach at Nassau, they found not a town, but a collection of partially collapsed buildings overgrown with scrub and tropical vegetation gathered around the burned-out shells of a church and fort that Nicholas Trott had constructed a quarter-century earlier. On the whole island there were probably fewer than thirty families living in hovels and rudimentary houses, eking out a living by catching fish, cutting trees, or picking the bones of ships unfortunate enough to wreck on the islands' treacherous shores. Hornigold took a good look around and realized he'd made the right choice.