The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (19 page)

Jennings was in no hurry to let Captain Young go. He put some of his men aboard and signaled to his consorts. The fleet would make its way to nearby Bahía Honda, a sheltered anchorage on a sparsely settled stretch of the Cuban coast. There they would decide what to do with Captain Young and his sloop.

Upon anchoring outside the narrow entrance of the anchorage a few hour later, Jennings and his men were greeted with a wonderful surprise. Lying in the keyhole-shaped harbor was a large armed merchant ship flying French colors, much of her crew on shore collecting water and firewood. With Jennings's fleet at the harbor entrance, there could be no escape. The wind was blowing off the land, however, and even in their nimble sloops it would be impossible for Jennings's fleet to tack into the narrow entrance. He gave orders for the five sloops to drop anchor while he tried to devise a plan.

Examining the ship through his eyeglass, Jennings could see it would be suicide to undertake a direct attack. Stealth, it seemed, was the best approach. He sent three of his men in a dory to assess the situation. They rowed into the harbor and up to the French ship and hailed the captain pleasantly. They were coming into the harbor to collect water, they told him. The French captain invited them onboard, and while engaging in small talk the Englishman had a look around.

They were aboard the frigate-rigged ship
St. Marie
of Rochelle under Captain D'Escoubet, a wealthy man who owned a quarter of the ship and cargo. The pirates guessed there were forty-five men aboard and fourteen to sixteen guns, though the ship was capable of carrying twice that. The
St. Marie
would make an excellent prize.

When the dory returned with this news, Jennings called a meeting of the captains. He declared his desire to ambush the
St. Marie,
label her a pirate, and take her back to Jamaica as a prize. Samuel Liddell, captain of the
Cocoa Nut,
argued this would be a terrible mistake. He told the other three captains that he'd seen the
St. Marie
in Vera Cruz, Mexico, some months before and that she was clearly "a trader on a lawful occasion."

The other men were not convinced by Liddell's argument. "What are you come out for?" one of them barked at him. "To look upon one another and return with your fingers in your mouth?" Jennings chimed in that he would be aboard the French ship that very night, but that his
Barsheba
"must not go only to be taken." If he went alongside the larger
St. Marie,
"we would probably be sunk," he declared. They would need to surprise the French ship and board her from their boats. Captains Ashworth and Carnegie agreed.

Liddell made a last ditch effort to save the situation. The
Cocoa Nut
's owners had sent him to dive the Spanish wrecks, not to engage in out-and-out piracy. Unless the
St. Marie
could be shown to be a pirate or to be carrying English goods illegally, the privateers had no grounds to seize her. He implored his colleagues to delay the attack until morning, offering to personally board the
St. Marie
to see if they could "make a lawfull prize of her." Liddell found himself outvoted, and made it clear he would have no part in this act of piracy.

Liddell's men watched enviously as the crews of the
Barsheba
and
Mary
gathered arms and prepared the boats for an assault. Finally his quartermaster announced he was joining them, abandoning Liddell with upward of a dozen men. It was going to be a risky venture rowing two miles across the bay to engage a heavily armed ship from small boats. At sunset something happened that changed the odds entirely.

***

As Bellamy and Williams escaped into the wind, they watched the English privateers board Captain Young's sloop for the inevitable consultation between captains. What happened next puzzled them. Young was clearly a legitimate trader, but instead of letting him go, the privateers put a prize crew aboard and took her along with them. Hidden amid the reefs and mangroves, they watched the little flotilla anchor at the entrance to Bahía Honda. The men in the periaguas began to realize that the men operating these sloops were not acting like sheriffs at all.

Around seven
P
.
M
.,
as the tropical sun set over the mellowing horizon, they rowed past Carnegie's and Young's sloops and among the
Barsheba, Mary,
and
Cocoa Nut.
Bellamy and Williams, who were aboard the same sailing canoe, hailed the captain of the
Barsheba.
Jennings, Vane, Bellamy, and Williams all laid eyes on one another for the first time. They needed each other, they realized, to capture this great French prize.

A little before ten o'clock, the
Barsheba
and
Mary
hauled up their anchors as their officers led a cheer: "All for one and one for all." The men let out a hurrah and somebody foolishly fired a musket. Whoever did that should be cut down, some of the men said, not wishing to place the
St. Marie
on alert.

Then amidst the flickering light of the sloops' lanterns, the privateers saw a most unusual thing. Bellamy's and Williams's great canoes rowed among the sloops, their crews stripped naked, pistols and cutlasses in their hands, like a pack of savages. The
Barsheba
s
men threw a bowline out to one of the periaguas; the crew of the
Mary
tossed theirs to the other. Bellamy's and Williams's canoes proceeded across the bay, their men straining at their oars, each canoe towing a sloop-of-war packed with heavily armed men.

They must have made a terrible sight to Captain d'Escoubet and the bewildered men aboard the
St. Marie:
two Indian-style war canoes filled with naked, wild-looking men tearing across the water, the sloops-of-war in tow. D'Escoubet had been suspicious of the English sloops from the start, and had even hidden a chest of treasure ashore, for fear they might attack. Even so, he was unprepared. As the periaguas closed in, Bellamy's men let go of the sloops and charged directly at his ship. "Where are you going?" one of Escoubet's men yelled at the men in the canoes. "Aboard, where do you think?!" came the reply, followed by a fusillade of musket shot. A blast of fire let loose from the
Barsheba,
and a cannonball tore over Escoubet's head. He was outnumbered by at least six to one. Escoubet ordered a number of his men aboard his dory, which then tried to make it ashore. One periagua overtook and captured them, while the men from the other charged onto her decks. From the second periagua, Bellamy warned the Frenchmen that if they resisted, they would all be slaughtered. Escoubet surrendered. His men hadn't fired a single musket.

For Sam Bellamy, it was a lesson in the value of terror. They had taken a well-armed, but lightly manned frigate, without harming the crew, ships, or cargo. They'd gone into battle looking like they were capable of anything and, as a result, they hadn't had to do anything at all. For Bellamy, it was a lesson on how to conduct piracy: that fear can be the most powerful of weapons.

As the
Barsheba
and
Mary
came to anchor alongside their prize, Jennings's men joined in the search of the
St. Marie
's holds and the interrogation of her men. Charles Vane, hotheaded and violence prone, may have shaken hands and shared rum with Bellamy and Williams. This was not the sort of fellow Bellamy and Williams needed in their crew. They intended to fight smart, harm few, and score big.

The next morning, April 4, 1716, Jennings began questioning the French crew. Escoubet later reported that the English "tormented the crew to [such an] inhumane degree" and in "the vilest manner," forcing them to reveal where they had hid 30,000 pieces of eight (£7,500) ashore. Jennings also kept the
St. Marie,
appointing Carnegie as her master, and giving Escoubet and his men Carnegie's wayward
Discovery
instead. The pirates had captured a ship, treasure, and cargo worth 700,000 French livres or £30,300. Jennings also forced the French captain to write a letter to Lord Hamilton in Jamaica, absolving the privateers of any wrongdoing. "I must acquaint your Excellency that those gentlemen treated me very civilly and were very willing to give me so much per month for the hire or freight of my vessel," Escoubet wrote. The privateers only "took my vessel because she was fit for the expedition they were going on."

While the pirates and privateers busied themselves with dividing the plunder and transferring cargo and personnel from one ship to another, a large sailing canoe arrived in Bahía Honda. Its crew innocently made their way up to
St. Marie,
asking for Captain d'Escoubet. On board were a French merchant officer and eighteen men who had been sent from Mariel, twenty miles farther up the coast, where their vessel, the sloop
Marianne,
lay at anchor. They had come to trade with Escoubet, but found themselves prisoners of the English instead. Jennings "inflicted punishments" on his new captives, who, after "several torments," agreed to lead them back to their vessel. Jennings held a conference with Bellamy and Williams, who agreed to send one of their canoes to Mariel with the
Discovery
to capture this second French vessel.

The following morning, Bellamy's two periagua crews split up. One headed to Mariel with Carnegie. Bellamy and Williams stayed behind with the other to make sure their newfound colleagues didn't try to cheat them out of their share of the plunder on the
St. Marie.
A few hours later, the
Cocoa Nut
weighed anchor and headed out in the opposite direction; Liddell wanted nothing to do with these piracies and was headed back to Jamaica minus twenty-three members of his crew.

Jennings and his men waited in Bahía Honda, hoping their colleagues would soon return with another prize. A day and night passed, and in the morning light a pair of sloops was seen passing by the harbor entrance. One, the prisoners from Mariel confirmed, was their vessel, the
Marianne.
The other, an armed sloop of ten guns, flew a black flag. Jennings and Vane recognized it immediately. It was the great sloop of Captain Benjamin Hornigold.

***

Hornigold had stayed at New Providence for two months after Jennings's departure, no doubt seething at the shoddy treatment he'd received at the privateer's hands and hoping to even the score.

Meanwhile, the outlaw population of Nassau was increasing by the day. Some fifty men had abandoned the sloops working on the nearby Spanish wrecks, most of them after waves of Spanish reinforcements arrived in February and early March. These men, resident John Vickers would later report, were committing "great disorders ... plundering the inhabitants, burning their houses, and ravishing their wives." The wreckers were led by Thomas Barrow, formerly a mate on a Jamaican brigantine who had run off with a cache of valuables said to have belonged to "a Spanish marquis." Barrow had no vessel of his own, but swaggered about the island, claiming to be "Governor of Providence" and promising to "make it a second Madagascar." Dozens of logwood cutters arrived every week from Campeche, attracted by inflated tales of Spanish treasure, turning to piracy upon their arrival. Others came from New England, South Carolina, and Jamaica: unemployed seamen, indentured servants, criminals on the run, even a few escaped slaves from Cuba, Hispaniola, and beyond. Ordinary settlers grew increasingly fearful, and many of them were quietly making plans to leave. Others—prostitutes, smugglers, and arms dealers—were pouring in. New Providence had turned into an outlaw state.

Hornigold had started the Bahamas' burgeoning pirate republic, but between Barrow's wreckers and Hamilton's privateers, he must have felt his leadership of the Flying Gang was starting to slip. After all, unlike the privateers, his 200 crewmen didn't serve under legally sanctioned contracts that gave most of the plunder to the owners and captains. Apart from a few forced men, service aboard the pirate vessels was essentially voluntary. Most of the islands' pirates were mariners who long suffered abuse and exploitation in the navy and merchant marine. They had no intention of replicating that system, but rather turning it on its head. They took to electing their captains and, if dissatisfied with their selections, could vote to impeach them as well. The Flying Gang pirates gave their captains absolute authority while in combat, but most other decisions were made democratically in a general council of the crew, including where to go, what to attack, which prisoners to retain or set free, and how to punish transgressions within their companies. Hornigold and other pirate captains ate the same food as their men and had to share their cabins. The crew kept their authority further in check by electing another official, the quartermaster, who ensured that food, plunder, and assignments were doled out equitably. Captains typically received only 50 percent more plunder than an ordinary sailor, as opposed to perhaps 1400 percent more on a privateer. If the men trusted their leader and were satisfied with his performance, they would follow him to the bitter end. If not, they might depose him in the blink of an eye. Hornigold needed to show results, or his tenure as a pirate leader might soon be over.

With Thatch aboard, he set course for the sparsely settled coast of northeastern Cuba, which straddled the shipping lanes connecting Havana and the Spanish Main, New Orleans, and France. Along those poorly patrolled shores, prizes were waiting.

Hornigold made his way through the Straits of Florida, probably giving Havana a wide berth, and made landfall on Cuba around April 8, near the secluded harbor of Mariel. Sitting at anchor was a large merchant sloop flying French colors. This was the
Marianne
of Santo Domingo, en route from Hispaniola to the swampy French hamlet of New Orleans under the command of a French naval officer, Ensign Le Gardew. He had stopped to send a packet of mail to Havana and, while there, Le Gardew heard that his colleague, Captain d'Escoubet of the
St. Marie,
was just down the shore. Eager to trade provisions and advice, Le Gardew sent half his crew down to Bahía Honda in the ship's boat. Undercrewed and lightly armed, she was no match for the
Benjamin,
with her ten guns and 200 men. Le Gardew promptly surrendered, and Hornigold took possession of the sloop and £12,500 in cargo. A prize crew was put aboard, and the two sloops made their way down the coast, perhaps hoping to take the
St. Marie,
as well.