The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (39 page)

Suddenly, to Whitney's alarm, a flash of fire and a puff of smoke appeared from the stern of the big ship—Charles Vane's ship—in the center of the harbor. The sound came moments later—the report of a stern-mounted cannon—followed by the splash of a cannonball on the surface of the water, not far from the
Rose.
Two more cannonballs passed over his head, at least one tearing through some of the
Rose's
rigging, before Whitney raised a white flag of truce. Clearly, the young captain must have thought, this was not going to be easy.

With the pirate ship appearing to accept the flag of truce, Whitney sent his lieutenant into the harbor in a boat to, in his words, "know the reason" for the pirates' hostility. The lieutenant went alongside Vane's ship and hailed her captain, inquiring why he had fired on the king's ship. "His answer," Whitney wrote in his logbook, "was [that] he would use his utmost endeavour to burn us and all the vessels in the harbor." Vane also gave the lieutenant a letter addressed to Governor Woodes Rogers, on the outside of which was written: "We await a speedy Answer." The letter, which may or may not have been delivered to Rogers that evening, read:

July 24th, 1718

Your Excellency may please to understand that we are willing to accept his Majesty's most gracious pardon on the following terms, viz:

That you will suffer us to dispose of all our goods now in our possession. Likewise, to act as we think fit with every Thing belonging to us, as his Majesty's Act of Grace specifies.

If your Excellency shall please to comply with this, we shall, with all readiness, accept of his Majesty's Act of Grace. If not, we are obliged to stand on our own defence...

Your Humble Servants,

Charles Vane, and Company.

Vane was simply trying to buy a little time, to find a way to escape from New Providence with his new ship and all his loot. His ship was too large to pass over the Potter's Cay bar and through the harbor's shallow eastern passage. The
Rose
was anchored in the western entrance, bottling him in the harbor. Any thought of trying to run past her guns—exchanging comparable broadsides—was put to rest when, a few minutes later, the ten-gun HMS
Shark
sailed into the harbor and anchored just ahead of the
Rose,
followed by the twenty-gun transport
Willing Mind
and the ten-gun privateer
Buck.
Vane's ship was trapped, her men at the mercy of Governor Rogers's forces. The sun set, plunging the harbor into darkness.

Vane stewed for a few hours until he finally decided Rogers did not intend to honor him with a reply. His company agreed that the warships at the harbor's entrance seemed to speak for themselves. The ship was doomed, Vane told them, but there was still a way to escape the governor's clutches. The ninety men in his crew listened intently as he outlined a daring escape plan.

At two
A
.
M
.
, Captain Whitney was awakened in his cabin by a breathless subordinate. The pirates were attacking; the
Rose
was in danger. He rushed onto deck and was greeted by a horrific sight: Vane's ship, enveloped in flames, was heading straight for the
Rose
and her consorts. In the middle of the night, Vane's men had unloaded their ship and soaked its decks and rigging with pitch and tar. They had rolled all her guns out of their ports, every one packed with powder and two cannonballs. Weighing anchor, they had quietly towed her in the direction of the interlopers. As the distance closed, one pirate stayed on the helm, keeping the ship aimed directly at the anchored
Shark
and
Rose
while others dashed about the doomed ship, lowering sails and setting the pitch-soaked decks and rigging alight. If all went to plan, the ship would collide with the Royal Navy vessels, consuming them in the resulting conflagration.

As the last pirates abandoned their ship, sailors were rushing about the decks of the
Rose, Shark, Buck,
and
Willing Mind,
some loosening sails, others hacking away at the anchor lines with axes, trying to free the endangered vessels. As soon as the anchors came free, Whitney and the other captains swung their ships around—wind to their backs—toward the open sea. There was a frightening few minutes as the fireship drew closer, the first of her double-loaded guns discharging as their gunpowder charges ignited in the heat. Then, slowly, the
Rose
and the other vessels gained momentum and pulled away from the approaching inferno.

Vane himself watched these events from the deck of the
Katherine,
a swift Bermuda-built sloop that he had commandeered from another pirate in the middle of the night.
Katherine
's owner, a minor pirate named Charles Yeats, remained onboard and was none too happy about having his vessel taken from him. Vane's men had loaded their possessions into the sloop and augmented her armament to ten or twelve guns. They watched with disappointment as the
Rose
and
Shark
escaped out to sea, but the action had bought them time. In the four hours remaining until sunrise, they would have the run of Nassau. Vane sent men into town, to seize anything they thought useful: equipment, supplies, weapons, valuables, and the island's best pilot and carpenter, whom they roused out of bed and carried aboard the
Katherine.
Then they waited, black flag at the mast, for the dawn.

At seven
A
.
M
.
, shortly after daybreak, Rogers's entire fleet appeared at the entrance to the harbor. The governor's first glimpse of his new capital was of the smoldering timbers of a large ship bobbing in the middle of the channel, embers hissing, the boneyard of ruined vessels on the shore, and a pair of pirate vessels anchored up the harbor, just behind Potter's Cay. If he had wished to make a dignified entrance, Rogers was disappointed. On their way into the harbor, both the
Delicia
and
Milford
ran aground on a sandbar and had to wait two hours for the rising tide to lift them off. Vane's men presumably had a good laugh, watching ships bearing the governor and commodore's personal flags loll on the Hog Island sandbar. The laughing stopped around ten o'clock when, with the tide now high, the shallow-drafted
Buck
and another sloop began sailing around Potter's Cay bar, their decks filled with soldiers. Vane knew they had lingered long enough. He ordered anchors lifted and sails raised. The
Katherine
turned and headed out the narrow eastern entrance of the harbor, with the
Buck
in hot pursuit.

The winds blew strong from the south-southeast that morning, and the chase proceeded close on the wind. Vane had a worried few hours, as the
Katherine
proved slower than her pursuers on this point of sail. He was relieved when they finally rounded the eastern end of New Providence, let out their sails, and began gaining ground. Vane's men fired their guns in defiance, and the
Buck
was forced to give up the chase and return to Nassau. Vane and his men were to remain at large, but New Providence Island, for the time being at least, would be in the possession of Governor Rogers.

***

On the morning of the twenty-seventh, Rogers landed ashore, an event punctuated by much pomp. The
Rose
and
Shark
fired eleven-gun salutes as Rogers's boat hit the beach, where, to his considerable relief, he was joyously received by pro-pardon residents. Thomas Walker, who had returned to the island in recent weeks, was the first to greet the governor, along with his old nemesis, Benjamin Hornigold. These two men—the "pirate governor" and the former justice—led Rogers and his entourage to the crumbling mass of Fort Nassau. Along the way the crews of several pardoned pirate captains—Hornigold, Josiah Burgess, and others—formed orderly lines on either side of the road, each man firing his musket into the air as Rogers walked past, creating a running salute all the way to the fortress gates.

Rogers climbed to the top of the fort to address the gathering crowd. He could see in an instant that the fort was in terrible disrepair. The seaward facing bastion looked like it might collapse at any moment, having, as Rogers put it, "only a crazy crack'd wall in its foundation." The parade ground was overgrown with weeds, and instead of longhouses for the garrison it contained a single hut, in which a pathetic old man was living. The pirates had absconded with the cannon, leaving behind a single nine-pounder, which explained why Vane hadn't tried to hole up in the fort. By the time Rogers reached the roof, William Fairfax, Walker, and Hornigold at his side, and a group of soldiers behind, some three hundred people had assembled in the square below. Rogers unrolled a scroll and read aloud the king's commission, appointing him governor of the Bahamas. The people, Rogers said, "showed many tokens of joy for the re-introduction of government."

Rogers spent the next few days consolidating control of the island and surveying its conditions. His 100-man Independent Company took control of Fort Nassau, constructing shelters out of sticks and palmetto leaves, while the sea-weary colonists set about building tents made from sails borrowed from the
Delicia, Buck,
and
Willing Mind.
Sailors from the
Rose
secured in the name of the king the
St. Martin, Drake, Ulster, Dove, Lancaster,
and other vessels that happened to be in the harbor. Rogers moved into the old governor's house—one of the only buildings that had survived the War of Spanish Succession. In his makeshift office he held consultations with various residents, looking for "inhabitants who had not been pirates ... that were the least encouragers of trading with them" to serve on his twelve-man governing council. His initial appointees, announced on August 1, included Harbour Island smuggling king Richard Thompson and several men who had come with Rogers, including Fairfax (the new justice) and the
Delicia
's captain and first mate. The council met at Rogers's house that very day and spent hours accepting the surrenders of some two hundred pirates who had not yet taken the king's pardon.

The pirate population on the island was estimated at 500 to 700, suggesting that a great number of those who had left Nassau to accept pardons in other colonies had come back. Another 200 nonpirates were also on the island, people who, in the words of one of Rogers's officials, "had made their escape from ye Spainards" during the war and now "lived in the woods destitute of all neccessarys." Rogers set all of these people to work clearing a thick layer of vegetation the pirates had allowed to smother buildings, yards, and fields. Others were recruited to assist the soldiers in arming and repairing the fort and in setting up a separate battery to guard the harbor's eastern entrance. The last vessel in Rogers's fleet, the supply ship
Samuel,
finally arrived, safe and sound in the harbor, her capacious hold filled with food and supplies. After the first week of his governorship, Rogers was likely optimistic for success.

Reports of piracy in the surrounding waters shattered the mood. First came a message from Charles Vane, who had detained two inbound vessels and said that he would join with Blackbeard, planning, as Rogers described it,"to burn my guardship and visit me very soon to return the affront I gave him on my arrival in sending two sloops after him instead of answering him." Shortly thereafter, on August 4, a Philadelphia mariner named Richard Taylor arrived with more ominous news. Taylor had been captured in the southern Bahamas by Spanish privateers who, despite the peace, had proceeded to sack the English villages on Catt Island and Crooked Island. The leader of the privateers had told Taylor that a new Spanish governor had arrived in Havana "with orders from King Phillip to destroy all the English settlements in the Bahama Islands"; he had five warships and upward of 1,500 men to accomplish this task. If the English surrendered, Taylor explained, the Spanish governor had instructions to deport them to Virginia or the Carolinas,"but in case of resistance to send them to Havana and thence [as prisoners] ... to Old Spain."

Facing simultaneous threats from Charles Vane and the king of Spain, Rogers knew he needed to complete his fortifications as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, his labor supply began to disappear. First, the soldiers, sailors, and colonists he brought with him fell ill by the dozens. The unidentified disease—and the putrid stench that had hung over the town for weeks—was blamed on the huge piles of rotting animal hides the pirates had abandoned on the shore. Although the illness had broken out two weeks before Rogers's arrival, he wrote it was "as if only fresh European blood could ... draw the infection"; longtime residents "quickly became free" of contagion while the newcomers were "seized so violently that I have had above 100 sick at one time and not a [single] healthful officer." Eighty-six of Rogers's party died, as did six crewmen from the
Rose
and
Milford
and two of the locals who served on Rogers's governing council. Rogers himself came down with "intestine commotions and ... contagious distempers" and, by mid-August, was unable to attend council meetings. Most of the island's cattle also perished, striking a blow to the food supply.

Longtime Nassau residents resisted not only the illness, but Rogers's efforts to put them to work. "Most of them are poor and so addicted to idleness that they would choose rather almost to starve than work," Rogers reported home. "They mortally hate it, for after they have cleared a patch that will supply them with potatoes and yams and very little else [and] fish being so plentiful and either turtle or [iguanas available] on the neighboring islands, they eat [them] instead of meat and covet no stock or cattle; thus [they] live poorly [and] indolently ... and pray for nothing but [ship]wrecks or the pirates ... and would rather spend all they have in a punch house than pay me [a tax] to save their families and all that is dear to them." The locals proved unreliable militiamen as well. "These wretches can't be kept to watch at night and when they do they come very seldom sober and rarely [stay] awake all night, though our officers or soldiers very often surprise their guard and carry off their arms and punish, fine, or confine them almost every day," the governor complained. "I don't fear but they'll all stand by me in case of any [invasion] attempt, except [one by] pirates. But should their old friends have strength enough to designe to attack me, I much doubt whether I should find one half to join me."