The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (15 page)

Bellamy and Williams became fast friends and formed a partnership. With his wealth and connections, Williams was the senior partner, able to secure supplies and a seaworthy vessel for use in a maritime undertaking. Bellamy brought mariner's skills and knowledge of the West Indies. If Williams hired Bellamy to be the master of his vessel, he was entitled to shares of the profits of whatever commercial or smuggling scheme he was contemplating. Any plans they were hatching went out the window when news of a greater opportunity arrived.

***

In the Bahamas, the Spanish attack everyone expected had failed to materialize and the pirates began to regroup. On Eleuthera, Hornigold began recruiting a new gang from the ranks of willing colonists. He was helped along by one of the island's old salts, Jonathan Darvell, who as a young sailor had joined a mutiny, seized a slave ship, and sold her living cargo to Dutch merchants on Curaçao. Darvell was now too old to join a pirating venture, but he was happy to invest in one. He contributed his sloop, the
Happy Return,
as well as his seventeen-year-old son, Zacheus, and his son-in-law, Daniel Stillwell. A handful of strangers came as well, most of them from Jamaica, including Ralph Blackenshire and possibly Edward Thatch.

In the summer of 1714, Hornigold sailed the
Happy Return
out of Harbour Island for the coasts of the Spanish colonies of Florida and Cuba. The little sloop was probably no greater than fifteen tons, but it was a considerable improvement over the sailing canoes: safer, faster, and capable of carrying more men and plunder. When they returned, Darvell made out well. By lending his vessel for a short cruise, he received a share of the plunder—barrels of dry goods, tallow, and a slave worth £2,000, which was enough to buy the
Happy Return
four times over. Within a few weeks, he sent the
Happy Return
out again. Hornigold sat that voyage out, perhaps disappointed with the size of his share. He probably didn't feel particularly jealous when the
Happy Return
came back from the north coast of Cuba with only a load of pungent hides and other goods worth just £350.

In the late fall, Hornigold and two other men purchased an open boat from an Eleutheran settler. They sailed to the coast of Cuba and, in early December, intercepted a sailing canoe and a small launch belonging to the Cuban noble Señor Barrihone. The Cuban vessels were nearly as tiny as their own, but they were laden with coins and valuables worth 46,000 pieces of eight (£11,500). The capture made Hornigold and his colleagues the most respected pirates in the Bahamas. It also drew the attention of authorities from three empires.

Thomas Walker was the only official representative still living in the islands. He had been an important figure in the Bahamas since the reign of King William, having served as His Majesty's justice for the Vice-Admiralty Court. He was probably living on New Providence when the pirate Henry Avery bribed Governor Trott with his treasures. With the collapse of the colony during the War of Spanish Succession, Walker had assumed the role of acting deputy governor, although it's not entirely clear that the lords proprietor of the Bahamas had ever approved this arrangement. He had somehow survived the war on New Providence, continuing to live on his homestead three miles outside of Nassau with his wife, Sarah, who was a free black, and his mulatto children: Thomas Jr., Neal, Charles, and fifteen-year-old Sarah.
^*

Thomas Walker didn't like the arrival of the pirates one bit. The last thing he and his neighbors needed was to bring the wrath of Spain down on them once again. Hornigold and his colleagues had to be stopped, and Walker figured he was the only man to do it.

First he called for reinforcements, dispatching letters to everyone he could think of—the lords of the admiralty, the lords of trade, the Duke of Beaufort, and the other Proprietors of the Bahamas, even the
Boston News-Letter
—informing them of the increasingly dangerous situation. He assured the lords proprietor that he was a "prosecutor and disturber of all pirates, robbers, and villains that do expect to shelter themselves or take up their abode in these, their Lordships' Islands." Until a new governor was appointed, he would take it upon himself "to curbe the exorbitant tempers of some people of these islands and to execute justice upon Piratts."

Soon every sea captain from Boston to Port Royal was aware of the exploits of Hornigold and Cockram. The acting governor of Bermuda, Henry Pulleine, sent letters back to London warning that the two men were turning the Bahamas into a "nest for pyrates." Pulleine even offered to annex the Bahamas to his government, promising to destroy the "infamous rascals, who do an infinite mischiefe to trade, by making us scandalous to our neighbors."

After the pirate depredations of 1713, Walker decided letter-writing was not enough. Just after Christmas, he gathered some men together, boarded a vessel, and sailed up to Harbour Island to administer justice himself.

Walker's campaign had an auspicious start. At Harbour Island, he surprised the pirates, capturing Daniel Stillwell, teenager Zacheus Darvell, and one of their accomplices, Matthew Low. The other sea robbers fled into the woods and defended themselves "by force of Armes," but Walker was able to seize the
Happy Return,
ending her career as a pirate vessel. He compelled Low and the Darvell boy to turn on Daniel Stillwell, signing written depositions implicating him in the recent pirate raids on the Spaniards. Walker had no authority to try Stillwell, however, his commission as an Admiralty judge having expired decades before. Instead, he would have to send Stillwell to the nearest court of justice at Jamaica, a course of action the prisoner actually begged him to follow. Walker had his concerns—the long sea voyage offered the prisoner an easy chance of escape—but he didn't have a lot of other options. He placed Stillwell and copies of the damning depositions in the hands of Jonathan Chase, the captain of the sloop
Portsmouth,
who agreed to deliver them directly to the governor of Jamaica, Lord Archibald Hamilton. He departed on January 2,1715.

Walker sailed the
Happy Return
back to Nassau and hired men to help him capture Hornigold and other fugitives now hiding amid the lignum vitae and logwood trees of Eleuthera. Shortly thereafter, he received reports that the Spanish in Cuba were preparing a massive assault on the Bahamas in retribution for the piracies committed by Hornigold and his outlaw friends. A local man who had been held captive by the Spaniards told Walker that a fleet of warships were sailing from Havana with orders to "cut off" every man, woman, and child on New Providence. Walker promptly boarded the
Happy Return,
and set sail for Havana, hoping to talk the Spaniards out of invading his wayward colony.

Fortunately, the Spanish governor of Cuba, Laureano de Torres y Ayala, the Marquis Cassa Torres, was in a forgiving mood. He received the nervous Bahamian graciously, accepting his stories of having captured eight of the offending pirates and sending them to justice in Jamaica. "I return you grateful thanks and likewise [to] all the inhabitants of Providence [because] you have taken care to detect such villains who make it their evil practice to rob those who follow honest means to live," the Marquis proclaimed. Walker and his party remained at Havana for much of February, smoothing relations with their powerful neighbor for "the future safety and peace of all the inhabitants" of the Bahamas.

Walker returned home to Nassau to discover that the pirates were far from pacified. The prisoner Daniel Stillwell never made it to Jamaica. Somehow, Benjamin Hornigold and his men had managed to rescue him and were preparing to take care of Walker himself. All the colony's inhabitants knew that if Walker were out of the way, the Bahamas would belong to the pirates and to the pirates alone.

***

In Jamaica, Governor Archibald Hamilton had little time to wonder why Daniel Stillwell had failed to be delivered to him, to worry about Bahamian pirates, or, indeed, the petty colony of the Bahamas. He was involved in a far weightier and dangerous project: helping to orchestrate a secret plot to overthrow and replace the king of Britain. His efforts, strangely enough, would dramatically swell the ranks of pirates operating out of the Bahamas.

Queen Anne had died, childless, in August of 1714. Under normal circumstances, the crown would have passed to her half-brother, James Stuart, the next in the line of dynastic succession, a situation that, to the thinking of many at the time, was ordained by God himself. James was a Catholic, however, and under a law passed in 1701, no Catholic could sit on the throne. Unfortunately, there weren't any other members of the House of Stuart who weren't also Catholics. The best Protestant anyone could come up with was one of Anne's second cousins, George Ludwig, Elector of the German state of Hanover. Although he didn't speak English and wasn't interested in learning, George Ludwig was brought over to England and crowned King George I, becoming the founding member of a new ruling family, the House of Hanover, which still occupies the throne today. Many Britons were unhappy with this turn of events, especially in Scotland. The Scots were already upset about losing their independence under the 1707 Treaty of Union, but at least the Stuarts—that is, the Stewarts—had been the legitimate royal family of Scotland. Now, just seven years after the merging of the English and Scottish monarchies, the English had placed a German prince on the throne, one extremely hostile to Scottish Presbyterianism. Other Britons were upset by the coming of the Hanoverians, such as Catholics, adherents to the Church of England, and divine right enthusiasts, but it was the noble families of Scotland that spearheaded efforts to put James Stuart on the throne.

Lord Hamilton was a member of just such a family. His eldest brother, James, the fourth Duke of Hamilton, had headed opposition to Scotland's union with England, and was arrested on numerous occasions for pro-Stuart activities. His older brother, George, the Earl of Orkney, was deeply involved in plans for a military uprising in support of James Stuart, an effort that at least two of his nephews were also involved in. Governor Hamilton intended to do his part. Since taking up his post in 1711, he had purged Jamaica's governing council, militia, and civil service of Stuart opponents, replacing them with Catholics, Scotsmen, and other Jacobites, as supporters of James Stuart were called. He placed a fellow Scotsman in charge of Port Royal's fortifications, the chief defenses of the island, and refused to account for either the gunpowder hoarded there or the contents of merchant vessels he seized, allegedly for smuggling. The planters and merchants who sat in the Jamaican assembly were terrified at "the number of Papists and Jacobites" employed in Hamilton's administration. And as preparations unfolded toward a major Jacobite uprising back in Britain, Hamilton began assembling a fleet of private warships in Port Royal, a force that may have been intended for use as a colonial Jacobite navy.

Hamilton denied being anything but a loyal servant of George I. The small fleet he assembled in the summer and early fall of 1715, he later insisted, was for the sole purpose of defending the island's shipping against Spanish privateers, and this is what the commissions he issued his fleet stated. Hamilton would explain that Jamaican merchants had begged his administration to protect them from the Spaniards. "We had only one man of war and one sloop [of war] left on the Jamaica station, both foul [and] unfit to go after those nimble vessels which infested us," Hamilton wrote. With those two naval ships about to leave for Britain, he added, there was little choice but to replace them with vessels of his own. Thus Hamilton contacted a number of his allies on the island, urging them to join him in investing in a flotilla of ten armed privateers. All they needed were some trustworthy and experienced mariners to operate them. One of those mariners would be Charles Vane.

It's reasonable to assume Vane was unemployed, roaming the docks of Port Royal and Kingston in search of work. He eventually found it, being hired by his future mentor, Captain Henry Jennings, to serve on the crew of a privateer.

Jennings was offered the command of one of Governor Hamilton's privateers, a forty-ton sloop called the
Barsheba.
The
Barsheba
could carry eight guns and eighty men. The investors who owned her selected Jennings based on his reputation: a veteran merchant captain with wartime experience and a Jamaican estate that reliably earned him £400 annually, above and beyond what he earned at sea. Dependable, experienced, and fearless, Jennings was just the sort of man they wanted to command their warship.

By late July, as they prepared to sail, the skies around Jamaica darkened and the wind began to blow hard from the southeast. A great storm was brewing, one that would change the fortunes of Jennings and Hornigold, Thatch and Vane, Williams and Bellamy. Indeed, after it passed, the Caribbean and the Americas would never be the same.

***

On July 13,1715,
^*
a Spanish treasure fleet left Havana, bound for Cádiz. On account of the war, it had been several years since the Spanish had dispatched their treasure fleets to the New World, so the galleons were carrying an unusually valuable haul: coins, silks, porcelain, ingots, and jewels worth an estimated seven million pieces of eight (£1,750,000). They were also departing unusually late in the season.

The combined fleets commander, Captain-General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla, had been fretting about the delays for months. First the Tierra Firma fleet under General Don Antonio de Echeverz had been delayed in Cartagena, waiting for the silver-laden llama caravans to arrive from Potosi, on the other side of the Andes. Then Ubilla's New Spain fleet had been stuck in Vera Cruz for months on end, waiting for the Manila galleons to arrive in Acapulco. By the time the two fleets joined forces in Havana, Ubilla began worrying that they might not make it out of the tropics before the onset of hurricane season. There were further delays in Cuba as Havana merchants loaded their wares and Governor Torres y Ayala insisted on the officers' attendance at his lavish parties. At the last minute, an extra vessel, the French-owned frigate
El Grifon,
joined the fleet because its commander feared his treasure-laden vessel would be easy prey for the pirate gang known to be operating out of the Bahamas. Ubilla was worried about departing so late, but he had no other choice. The court of King Philip V, the grandson of Louis XIV whose control of the Spanish throne was endorsed in the Treaty of Utrecht, desperately needed an influx of cash and had been exerting pressure on Ubilla for more than a year. Reluctantly, the Spanish commodore gave the order to set sail, clinging to the hope that no hurricanes would strike so early in the season.