The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (64 page)
Authors: Colin Woodard
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* Mary's first husband, Edward Sands, friend of Captain Kidd, had died in 1708. Paulsgrave's half-sister Catherine (1690–1769) married his nephew John Sands (1683–1763), while Mary remarried one Robert Westcott.
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* The island, located off East Hampton, NY, has remained in the same family for four hundred years. Robert David Lion Gardiner, the last to hold the family name, called himself the "16th Lord of the Manor" until his death in 2004.
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* Jonathan was the son of John Cole, one of the two men who rowed out to rescue the
Mary Anne
pirates that morning, ten miles to the south. It's possible that the son had sent word of the wreck to his father, and alerted him to the possibility of other wrecked pirate vessels in the area, which might explain the elder Cole's apparent nonchalance at the castaways' appearance and behavior.
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* It's possible that John Julian became a slave to the family of a future president. Around this time, a man named John the Indian was sold to John Quincy of Braintree, great-grandfather of president (and abolitionist) John Quincy Adams, and grandfather of President John Adams's wife, Abigail.
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* These were, in fact, two forty-gun fifth-rates, HMS
Pearl,
bound for Virginia to relieve the troubled
Shoreham,
and HMS
Diamond,
headed to fleet headquarters in Jamaica.
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* This would place Hornigold well offshore of the upper North Carolina coast on October 17, 1717 (when he captured two vessels) and off the Capes of Virginia on November 26, 1717 (where he captured a Maryland-bound ship). On 17 October, Thatch appears to have still been operating around the Delaware Capes, where he took a number of vessels between October 12 and 22, before sailing north to Long Island. On November 26 (English or Julian calendar), Thatch was 2,000 miles to the southeast, near St. Vincent, in the Windward Islands.
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* The Garifuna people survive today, though the British deported them from St Vincent in the late eighteenth century. Today they have their own communities in the Bay Islands of Honduras and around Placencia, in southern Belize.
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* Boston Prison, where Captain Kidd was also detained in 1699, was located at what is now 26 Court Street, a stone's throw uphill from the Town House (1713), now known as the Old State House. The prison is described, somewhat fancifully, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter.
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* One week after the executions, Mather wrote in his diary: "May I not do well to give the Bookseller something that may render the condition of the pirates, lately executed, profitable?"The result was his
Instructions to the Living, from the Condition of the Dead,
published shortly thereafter in Boston.
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* These vessels were the ship
Crowley
(Captain Robert Clark); the fifty-ton ship
Ruby
of Charleston (Jonathan Craigh); the sloop
William
of Philadelphia; the sixty-ton ship
William
of Weymouth, England (Naping Kieves); and the eighty-ton ship
Arthemia
of London (Jonathan Darnford).
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* This journal later fell into the hands of the Royal Navy but, sadly, was subsequently lost. This appears to be the only excerpt ever recorded.
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* The War of the Quadruple Alliance (December 1718 to February 1720) pitted Spain against Britain, France, Austria, and the Netherlands. In this war, which one British historian aptly termed "the most forgotten of our conflicts," Spain unsuccessfully sought to add the Bahamas, Carolinas, and French Louisiana to its empire. Rogers received the official declaration of war on March 16, 1719, though he had been expecting it since the previous November.
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*
A General History
incorrectly identifies him as John Haman. Rogers, who would have known the man personally, provides more accurate information in his official proclamation of September 5, 1720.