The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (23 page)

Martel's pirates were extremely happy to see Bellamy's men, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the authorities returned to hunt them down. The feelings of the twenty or so blacks in the Martel party is more difficult to ascertain. The fact that they survived suggests they had not been chained in the hold of the
John & Marshall
and, therefore, not regarded as cargo. When Martel captured the slave ship
Greyhound Galley,
some twenty or so of her crew may have been of African descent. It was not unusual for slavers to employ black sailors in their crews. Such men were usually born in the West Indies, some the children of Africans who had been freed by their masters. They were more resistant to the deadly tropical diseases of West Africa and the West Indies than British-born sailors, and since they (or their masters) were probably paid less, they made attractive hirelings. Pirates of this period were often known to free the Africans they found aboard slavers, finding them to be fierce and committed fighters; others treated them as cargo and sold them as such. The Martel gang may have done both: The English-speaking West Indian crew and servants were invited to join the pirate company, while the frightened Akan- and Igbo-speaking people remained in the hold. Whatever the status of the twenty blacks who survived, Bellamy and Williams appear to have welcomed them aboard as equal members of their company, along with the eighty or ninety white pirates who greeted them on that St. Croix beach.

Bellamy's manpower shortage had been solved in one fell swoop. But the sudden recruitment of some 130 men made veteran members of the crew a little uncomfortable. Bellamy and Williams's eighty original pirates, who had come to trust one another during the adventures of the past six months, were now outnumbered by nearly two to one by strangers, including the forced men. Could these new men be trusted in the heat of battle, or would they seize the first opportunity to make off with the company's treasure, as Bellamy himself had done to Henry Jennings the year before? Only time would tell.

Fearing the return of the
Scarborough,
the pirates resolved to leave St. Croix as soon as possible. They needed a new hideaway to ride out the stormy weather. Bellamy's solution was particularly audacious, and suggestive of the growing strength and confidence of his company. Rather than skulking off to some uninhabited island, the pirates made straight for the main British outpost in the Virgin Islands: Spanish Town, on the rocky shores of Virgin Gorda, sixty miles northeast of St. Croix.

Spanish Town, population 326, was the seat of the deputy governor of the British Leeward Islands, Thomas Hornby, the man who had tipped the
Scarborough
off to the Martel pirates' whereabouts. Hornby must have been alarmed when the two heavily armed pirate vessels sailed into the harbor, their cannon trained on his little town. There was little he could do to defend the settlement. A third of the population were black slaves, people more likely to join the pirates than repel them. The vast majority of the white population were children, there being only forty-two white men on the island. His defenses consisted of one unmounted, unfortified cannon. Hornby had no choice but to do as the pirates commanded, and hope that they left Virgin Gorda no worse than they found it.

Bellamy's gang took control for several days, and possibly as long as a week or two, treating the outpost as if it were one of their prizes. There wasn't a lot to plunder. Most of Virgin Gorda was barren and mountainous, restricting the settlers' production to corn, yams, potatoes, and some pathetic stands of sugar cane fit only for making cheap rum. A Royal Navy captain who visited the Virgin Islands a few months later concluded that none of them were "worthwhile to the government, either to settle them or be at any expense at all about them." Still, the pirates must have been amused by their changed circumstances, lording over one of His Majesty's possessions as if it were their own. Some of the less respectable colonists were happy to see the pirates and reportedly "caress[ed] them and gave them money." A few may have even joined Bellamy's gang, their prospects ashore as indentured servants looking less attractive by comparison. But while some of the colonists ingratiated themselves with the pirates, several of Bellamy's forced crewmen jumped ship, begging Deputy Governor Hornby to shelter them. Hornby agreed, but reneged on his promise when Bellamy sent word "that they would burn & destroy the town" if the deserters were not turned over. Hornby complied and the pirates left Spanish Town with more men than they arrived with.

Well fed, rested, and their numbers fortified, the pirates were ready to take on the
Scarborough
or any other vessel they came across. They conferred among themselves and decided that the Windward Passage would probably be the best place to ambush a large, combat-capable ship. Bellamy and Williams were returning to where they had started from, only with nearly three times the men and firepower. With each passing month, more and more of the less "respectable" sort of people seemed willing to join their gang: sailors, slaves, and servants. Bellamy and Williams had started out as thieves but were finding themselves leaders of a nascent revolution. What they really needed was a proper flagship.

***

At that very moment, in Port Royal Harbor, the armed merchant ship
Whydah
was preparing to depart for London. The
Whydah
had everything a pirate might want. She was powerful, with eighteen six-pounders mounted and room for ten more in time of war. She was fast: a galley-built three-master capable of speeds of up to thirteen knots, perfect for transporting slaves across the Atlantic. Her 300-ton hull was capable of carrying between 500 and 700 slaves or a large cache of plundered treasure. It represented one of the most advanced weapons systems of its time, the sort of technology that could be extremely dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands.

The
Whydah
's captain, Lawrence Prince, was eager to get home. He had been at sea for the better part of a year, first sailing from London to the Slave Coast of the Gulf of Guinea, where he succeeded in buying hundreds of slaves at bargain prices, paying "thirty iron bars" for each adult female. Prince had sailed across the Atlantic to Jamaica, selling his slaves at the Kingston docks. The crew was loading the proceeds into the
Whydah:
Jamaican sugar, indigo dyes, and chests of silver and gold. With luck, Captain Prince and his fifty-man crew would be back in London by early June, completing the lucrative "triangle trade" that could convert a cargo of iron and colored beads into heaps of gold.

The
Whydah
weighed anchor the last week in February and began what Captain Prince knew would be the most dangerous leg of her journey. Before reaching the open Atlantic, the ship would have to run a gauntlet of pirate haunts: eastern Cuba, Hispaniola, and, most infamously, the Bahamas. But Prince felt confident that his fast, powerful ship could hold off a few pirate sloops. He had sailed the
Whydah
through these waters before, in 1714, and none of the
guarda costas,
French privateers, or periagua-sailing brigands of the Bahamas had dared challenge him.

The first sign of trouble came just a few days out, as the
Whydah
tacked her way between Cuba and Hispaniola. A lookout noticed a pair of vessels were following them through the Windward Passage and appeared to be catching up. When Prince examined the vessels—a medium-sized warship and a sloop-of-war—he may have thought the Royal Navy was approaching. They bore the Union Jack ensign and seemed the right size to be the
Adventure
and the
Swift,
His Majesty's station ships in Jamaica. The warship was, in any case, too large to be a pirate vessel. But as the day wore on, Prince grew concerned. The hull of the larger ship was a galley, not a frigate, which ruled out HMS
Adventure.
Both the galley and the sloop appeared to have far too many men on deck to be innocent merchantmen, and the sloop's sails were covered in patches, as if she had not seen a proper shipyard in a year or more. Most worrying, they continued to follow an intercept course and were closing in. Prince ordered more sail and placed the crew on alert. The chase was on.

It lasted for three days. When the
Whydah
finally came into the range of the
Sultana
and
Marianne
's guns, the vessels were halfway up the Bahamas off Long Island, some 300 miles from where they had started. The
Whydah,
testing her range, fired a couple of shots at the
Marianne
with a small, stern-mounted chase cannon; they splashed in the warm sea. A bloody fight appeared imminent.

Bellamy assessed the situation. He felt confident he and Williams could take the larger ship, but a prolonged battle would cause extensive damage to all three vessels, damage the pirates might not be able to easily repair. They would first try psychological warfare instead. He and Williams and all their men put on a wild display with their muskets, cutlasses, and long-handled pikes. A few held up hand-made grenades: hollow iron spheres filled with gunpowder and plugged with a fuse. Many of them wore fine clothing stolen from the wealthy captains and passengers they had plundered—gentlemen's waistcoats, cufflinks and collars, elaborate hats of silk and felt, perhaps even a wig or two. On these rough, wild-looking men, these could only be seen as trophies of war. Particularly terrifying to Captain Prince and his slaver crew were the twenty-five black men scattered among the pirates, their unshackled hands clutching swords and axes.

Prince surrendered, having fired but two shots. The pirates poured onto the
Whydah,
whooping and hollering in triumph. "Black Sam" Bellamy had acquired a ship worthy of Henry Avery. The poor boy from the West Country was now a pirate king himself.

***

While Bellamy was building his pirate fleet, Hornigold and Thatch were overseeing the development of the pirates' Bahamian base. They continued to attack shipping in the Florida Straits, piling the bones of their prize vessels onto the beaches of Nassau Harbor. But in between cruises, Hornigold continued to act as the Flying Gang's leader. He and his lieutenant organized the transfer of cannon to the crumbling battlements of Fort Nassau to help repel a Spanish or British assault. In the fall of 1716, one of the pirate gangs captured a large Spanish ship from Cádiz and brought it into Nassau to plunder. This Spanish vessel, too big and clumsy to make much of a pirate vessel, would normally have been beached and burned on the shore of Hog Island. But Hornigold realized that the ship could close a gap in the harbor's defenses. The pirates armed her with thirty-two cannon scavenged from various prizes, and by late winter it stood sentry near the harbor entrance, a floating gun platform capable of fending off unwanted visitors. Such precautions worked. When a group of concerned merchants sent a pair of ships over from London to see "how the pirates might best be dislodged," the pirates captured one and sent the second packing back to England.

Word of the pirate republic spread throughout the Western Hemisphere. Disaffected people continued streaming into Nassau from other colonies, and not all of them sailors. In plantation economies like Jamaica, Barbados, South Carolina, and Virginia, there was little room for small farmers, no way for the hundreds of poor people to make a living once they finished their terms of indentured servitude. But the Bahamas had never been a plantation colony, so there was plenty of cheap land available. Even before the pirates took control, blacks and mulattos had enjoyed considerable freedom in the Bahamas, intermarrying extensively with the white settlers, including top officials like Thomas Walker. Under the pirates, New Providence became a sanctuary for runaway slaves and free mulattos alike, as many moved in to join the pirate crews or the merchants, tradesmen, and farmers who supported them. The presence of this rogue state was destabilizing the slave societies around it. The "negro men [have] grown so impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their rising [against us]," the governor of Bermuda reported. "We can have no dependence on their assistance, but to the contrary, on occasion should fear their joining with the pirates."

Among the new residents was Henry Jennings, captain of the
Barsheba.
He may once have had pretensions of being better than the pirates, but now he was a wanted man himself. Relations between the Jennings and Hornigold remained strained, but there was room enough for both of them in the motley pirate enclave. Jennings earned the respect of the pirate rank-and-file because he was extremely good at what he did, equally capable of capturing French prizes or leading amphibious assaults on Spanish plantations. By the end of the winter, he was recognized as one of Nassau's leading pirates, with 100 men under his command. But in one respect, Jennings continued to set himself apart from the rest of the pirates. He still refused to attack English vessels. On a cruise of Cuba, Jennings did detain one English ship, the
Hamilton Galley
of Jamaica, but only out of dire necessity: Days from port, his men had run out of booze. His crew boarded the ship and seized twenty gallons of rum, leaving the rest of her cargo intact. Jennings treated the captain "civilly and told him they hurt no English men" and, in parting, gave him valuables worth far more than the rum itself.

As the outlaws poured in, Nassau's longtime residents were fleeing "to secure themselves from the pirates." Some went to Abaco, sixty miles northeast, where Thomas Walker and his family had resettled along with several other New Providence families seeking to escape "the rudeness of the pirates." Others moved to Harbour Island and Eleuthera, in part because it was so easy to get there. The Thompsons, Cockrams, and other merchants had boats sailing back and forth between Nassau and Harbour Island to bring the pirates supplies and provisions. For a while they shipped in supplies and special orders from Charleston and Jamaica with their own sloops, but by late winter 1717, they began to buy goods from third-party merchants, who came from as far away as Boston to keep the Harbour Islanders' warehouses stocked with enough supplies to keep the expanding pirate fleet in operation. The trade was so vital to the pirates that they organized a force of fifty men to staff the battery guarding the entrance to Harbour Island's anchorage.