The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (37 page)

The pirate fleet arrived off Charleston Bar, nine miles south of town, on May 22, 1718, and seized the pilot boat before it could sail to town to raise an alarm. Then they spread their four vessels out across the approaches to the bar and waited, spiderlike, for ships to fall into their web. Within a few days they captured at least five vessels: two ships outbound to London, two ships inbound from England, and a tiny eight-ton sloop, the
William,
headed home to Philadelphia.
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The captain of the latter, Thomas Hurst, was a familiar face: He had been in Nassau recently, where he had purchased eight "great guns" from the pirates there, guns that were still in his little sloop's hold. One day he was trading with pirates, now he was their prisoner.

The first of these captures proved the most valuable. The 178-ton ship
Crowley
had been headed out of the river, bound for London. Her holds were stuffed with over 1,200 barrels, but these turned out to be filled with pitch, tar, and rice, Carolina exports that weren't particularly useful to the pirates. In her cabins, however, the
Crowley
carried a number of paying passengers, among them many of the most distinguished citizens of Charleston. While the pirates looted the
Crowley
of provisions and supplies, the frightened passengers were rowed over to the
Queen Anne's Revenge,
where they were thoroughly interrogated: who were they, what was their vessel carrying, and what other vessels were at anchor in Charleston? One turned out to be Samuel Wragg, a member of the colony's governing council who owned 24,000 acres in the province, and was returning to England with his four-year-old son, William. Blackbeard realized these captives were worth more to the pirates than the cargo in the
Crowley's
hold. It was time to call a general council to decide their fate.

In preparation for the meeting, all the pirates' captives—a total of eighty people from various vessels—were stuffed into the
Crowley's
hold and locked in darkness. "This was done with [such] hurry and precipitation that it struck a great terror in the unfortunate people, verily believing they were then going to their destruction," the author of the
General History of the Pyrates
later wrote, apparently after speaking with witnesses. Wragg and the other passengers, having heard bloodthirsty tales of the pirates, expected their captors would light the ship on fire, "and what seemed to confirm them in this notion was that no regard was had to the qualities of the prisoners," with "merchants, gentlemen of rank, and even a child of Mr. Wragg's" being confined with common servants and sailors, a harbinger of death in their minds.

As the captives cowered in the hold "bewailing their condition," the pirates met aboard their flagship to devise a plan. They would send a boat into Charleston and demand ransom for their captives; if they were refused, they would threaten to not only kill all the captives and burn their vessels, but also to sail into Charleston Harbor, sink all the ships there, and perhaps attack the town itself. Whatever disease the pirates had contracted, it must have become extremely worrisome, for the only ransom they demanded was a chest containing a list of medicines drawn up by their surgeon, with a total value of about £400. The meeting concluded, Blackbeard had the prisoners brought before the assembled pirates and informed them of the plan. Wragg begged the pirates to send one of the captive gentlemen in with whomever delivered the ransom demand, so that they could impress on the governor how serious the situation was. The pirates agreed, with some suggesting they send Wragg himself, while keeping his son hostage. Blackbeard, always the strategist, was against this tactic; he didn't want to lose possession of his most valuable bargaining chip because if his bluff was called, he had no intention of actually murdering young William Wragg and the other captives. Instead, the pirates chose another captive, a Mr. Marks, to travel with their emissaries. If the entourage didn't return with the medicines in two days, the pirates said they would make good on their threats.

The boat departed, carrying Marks and two pirates, on what would prove a farcical journey. On the way to town, a sudden squall capsized their little boat. The three men managed to swim to safety on an uninhabited island and awaited rescue for much of the day, well aware that the clock was ticking. The next afternoon, hungry and bedraggled, they realized they would have to rescue themselves. They found a large wooden hatch cover on the shore, but it wasn't buoyant enough to support all of them. Lacking other options, Marks got onto the hatch and the pirates pushed it out into the water; when they got over their heads they clung to the edge of the hatch and swam hard, pushing the makeshift raft toward Charleston, nine miles away. They paddled this way throughout the night, making little progress. By morning they were sure they were all going to die, but were saved by some passing fishermen who brought them to their camp. Marks, realizing the captives' time was already up, paid the fishermen to go tell Blackbeard what had happened. Meanwhile, he hired a second boat to take the three of them to Charleston.

By the time the fishermen found the pirates, Blackbeard was in a fury. The deadline had come and gone more than a day earlier, and the pirate commodore had threatened Wragg and the others, "calling them villains a thousand times and swearing that they should not live two hours." Though he did his best to terrify the captives, he hadn't harmed them in any way. When the fishermen related Marks's mishap and asked, on his behalf, for two additional days, Blackbeard consented. However, when two more days passed and the emissaries did not return, Blackbeard's gang still didn't kill anyone. Instead, they resolved to sail to Charleston and terrorize the town.

Meanwhile, in Charleston, Marks was desperately searching for the two pirates he had traveled with. As soon as they had gotten to town, he had rushed to the home of Governor Robert Johnson, who had immediately agreed to Blackbeard's demands. The two pirates, however, had gone out drinking and, in the process, ran into some of their old colleagues. There were upward of a dozen Nassau pirates in town who had come to take the king's pardon. As the two pirates wandered the streets of the walled city, they discovered that many common people admired them. Enjoying the celebrity and the company of old friends, they had gone from one house to another, drinking until they forgot the time. They didn't remember their mission until, a day or two later, they heard screaming on the streets outside. Blackbeard's fleet had arrived in the harbor, frightening the inhabitants so badly that "women and children ran about the street like mad things." The two drunken pirates stumbled to the waterfront, preventing their colleagues from exacting retribution on the town.

Marks rowed out to the pirate man-of-war with the chest of medicines and a message from Governor Johnson offering to pardon Blackbeard if he wished to lay down his arms. Blackbeard rejected the overture but released all his captives and their vessels, although local officials reported they had "destroyed most of their cargoes ... and did some damage to the ships all for pure mischief sake." In the end, the pirates left with only the medicines, provisions, a few barrels of rice, 4,000 pieces of eight (£1,000) and the clothes of their gentlemen captives, whom they had stripped before releasing. They left Charleston with only one prize: a Spanish sloop they had taken off Florida. Blackbeard had paralyzed an entire colony for over a week but, for reasons unknown, was willing to settle for plunder probably worth less than £2,000.

As they sailed north, the pirate fleet detained two more South Carolina-bound vessels, the sixty-ton ship
William
of Boston, loaded with lumber and corn; and the forty-five-ton brigantine
Princess
of Bristol, carrying a cargo of eighty-six African slaves from Angola. From the
Princess,
the pirates took fourteen of what a Charleston official called "their best Negroes," adding to an already substantial number of Africans aboard the pirate fleet's four vessels. (As the slaves were transferred, Blackbeard told the
Princess's
commander, Captain John Bedford, that he "had got a baker's dozen," suggesting that he regarded these particular blacks as commodities, rather than recruits.) As for the
William
and her cargo, the pirate company's last words upon leaving Charleston had been that they would "swear revenge upon New England men and vessels" for executing Bellamy's men. However, it was the
Revenge
that actually captured the
William,
and for some reason her commander, Blackbeard's lieutenant, Mr. Richards, let the
William
go. Afterward, captives overheard Blackbeard raging at Richards for "not burning said ... vessel, because she belonged to Boston."

Blackbeard soon put aside his anger, as there were more important matters to attend to. He had secretly decided that the time had come to break up his company, but with no intention of sharing the recent plunder with all 400 men. While in Central America, some of the rank-and-file pirates had become mutinous after the rum supply had run out. "Our company somewhat sober," Blackbeard wrote at the time in his journal.
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"A damned confusion amongst us! Rogues a plotting [and] great talk of separation." Fortunately the fleet's next prize had "a great deal of liquor onboard" that "kept the company hot, damn'd hot, [and] then all things went well again." Blackbeard never forgave the plotters, however, and had no intention of rewarding such behavior. He developed a plan to rid himself of them, along with the incompetent Stede Bonnet and his loyalists. He shared it with only a few trusted colleagues, including his quartermaster, William Howard, and boatswain Israel Hands, who was in command of one of the fleet's vessels, the eighty-ton prize sloop
Adventure.
These men helped him convince the company to sail into one of North Carolina's sparsely populated bays to careen, supposedly in preparation for intercepting the annual Spanish treasure fleet in the Florida Straits.

Six days after leaving Charleston—sometime around June 3, 1718— Blackbeard's fleet turned into what is now called Beaufort Inlet, halfway up North Carolina's low, swampy coast. To avoid the sandy, uncharted shoals, the vessels had to negotiate a narrow, comma-shaped channel created by a tidal creek, whose sluggish mouth provided a quiet anchorage. Although this harbor was located right in front of the hamlet of Beaufort, the pirates had nothing to fear from the handful of families living there, who had no practical way to send for help overland. The sloops—the
Adventure, Revenge,
and the small Spanish prize—went in first, crossing the fifteen-foot-deep outer bar and proceeding up the curving channel to the anchorage. Blackbeard safely sailed the
Queen Anne's Revenge
over the outer bar, but as he approached the entrance to the tidal channel under full sail, he apparently ordered the helmsman to maintain a course that took her straight onto the shoals. The great ship shuddered to a stop, the force of the collision so powerful it threw men off their feet and snapped the lines of one of the ship's bow anchors, which splashed into the water. According to plan, Blackbeard sent William Howard up the channel in a boat to tell Israel Hands to come down with the
Adventure,
supposedly to help get the
Queen Anne's Revenge
off the shoal before the tide went out. Hands sailed the
Adventure
straight into the shoal a gunshot away from the flagship, tearing enormous holes in her hull. By the time the
Revenge
and the Spanish sloop reached the scene, Blackbeard's ship had started listing to port, her holds filling with water. The pirates rowed one of the
Queen Anne's Revenge
's anchors four hundred yards into the channel, set it, and tried to drag the ship off the shoal with their anchor winch, but the effort failed. The company realized that their
Queen Anne's Revenge
was doomed. Everyone transferred to the
Revenge
and the Spanish sloop, which took them up to Beaufort.

As the pirates took stock of the situation, Blackbeard set the next part of his plan into motion. Stede Bonnet had been in a state of utter depression for weeks, declaring to one and all that he would gladly give up piracy, but on account of his actions was so "ashamed to see the face of any English man again" that he would have to "spend the remainder of his days" living incognito in Spain or Portugal. Accordingly, the pirates must have been very surprised when Blackbeard announced that he was returning command of the
Revenge
to the pathetic fellow.

Bonnet, hardly able to believe his ears, decided to secure a pardon as soon as possible. Beaufort's villagers could have told him that the governor of North Carolina, Charles Eden, lived in the tiny village of Bath, a day's sail up the sound and Pamlico River. Bonnet and a handful of loyalists hopped in a shallow-draft boat and sailed immediately, promising to return shortly for the rest of his men.

No sooner had Bonnet left then Blackbeard and his hundred or so co-conspirators drew their weapons and took their shipmates into custody. They stranded sixteen of them—and the
Adventure's
captain, David Herriot—on Bogue Bank, a sandy uninhabited island a mile from the mainland. Another 200 pirates were left to fend for themselves in Beaufort. Blackbeard and his colleagues—"forty white men and sixty Negroes"—clambered aboard the Spanish sloop and departed, taking all the company's plunder with them, about £2,500."'Twas generally believed the said Thatch run his vessel a-ground on purpose," Herriot later told authorities, so that he could "break up the Companies and to secure what moneys and effects he had got for himself." When Bonnet returned with his pardon three days later, the
Revenge
was waiting for him in Beaufort, but the treasure was gone. He rescued the Bogue Bank castaways and vowed to avenge himself on his double-crossing mentor.