The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (14 page)

It began humbly enough. Hornigold and his men built or "acquired" three large wooden boats called periaguas, or canoes, capable of carrying thirty men and an ample supply of cargo. Equipped with banks of oars and a single fore-and-aft rigged sail, they were well suited to small-scale piracy: swift, able to row straight into the wind to catch or escape from a square-rigged vessel, and drawing so little water they could be rowed or sailed over shoals, coral heads, and other hazards to give would-be pursuers the slip. Armed with cutlasses, muskets, pikes and cudgels, Hornigold's men could count on easily overwhelming a lightly crewed trading sloop or the overseers of a remote Spanish or French plantation. Cuba lay just 175 miles to the south, Spanish Florida 160 miles west, and French Hispaniola 400 miles to the southeast. The little pirate gang was perfectly poised to descend on their wartime enemies.

The men organized themselves into three bands, each with twenty-five men and a canoe. Hornigold led one and John West, about whom little is known, and John Cockram, an ambitious young mariner with a head for trade, led the others. Over the next six months, they attacked small Spanish trading vessels and isolated sugar plantations from the Straits of Florida to the shores of Cuba. Hornigold's band returned to Nassau laden with bales of expensive linens from Silesia and Prussia; Cockram brought back Asian silks, copper, rum, sugar, and silver coins stolen from Spanish vessels off Florida and elsewhere; West came home with fourteen African slaves stolen from a Cuban plantation. Together they brought cargoes worth £13,175 into the ruins of Nassau, ten times the value of the annual imports of the entire colony of Bermuda.

The fledgling pirate gangs needed someone to sell these stolen goods to, preferably without undertaking the long journey to Jamaica, where officials might demand a share under threat of legal entanglements. Fortunately, they appear to have found ready buyers among the relatively stable settlers of Harbour Island, fifty miles north of Nassau, which had a population of about 200. Richard Thompson, the island's largest and wealthiest landowner and merchant, had no scruples about fencing the Nassau pirates' goods and little sympathy for the Spanish, who had done Bahamians so much harm. He and John Cockram seem to have hit it off particularly well. In fact, by March 1714 Cockram had married one of Thompson's daughters and was living contentedly with her on Eleuthera, Harbour Island's larger, less-developed neighbor. Thompson even made his new son-in-law master of one of his trading sloops, sending him on smuggling runs to the Dutch spice island of Curaçao, a thousand miles away, with loads of brasiletto wood, from which a valuable red dye could be extracted. Thompson presumably purchased most of the pirates' cargo; it wouldn't be long before he and Cockram would emerge as the leading black market traders of the Golden Age of Piracy.

By late winter 1714, rumors began circulating on New Providence that Spanish authorities in Havana were preparing a retaliatory raid on the island. The pirates consulted with one another and decided to divide their plunder—now £60,000 worth—and split up. West and many of the rank-and-file pirates apparently chose to quit while they were ahead and scattered off to Jamaica and beyond. A handful stayed on in the Bahamas, including Hornigold, who joined John Cockram and others in the relative safety of Harbour Island, with its snug, easily defended harbor and battery of cannon. Edward Thatch was very likely among them, laying low and waiting for the Spaniards' anger to subside.

***

The Peace of Utrecht had also put Sam Bellamy out of work. According to 300 years of oral history, he made his way to Eastham, Massachusetts, located on the outermost reaches of Cape Cod, in 1714 or early 1715. There's no documentary evidence to confirm their stories, though the people of the Outer Cape have been telling them in more or less the same form since the days of the great pirates; nor is there any proof to the contrary. In fact, the evidence we do have fits the Cape legend tantalizingly well.

Families who were living in and around Eastham had close ties with the English West Country, where Bellamy is believed to have been from, and some had surnames and pedigrees that suggest they might have been his mother's kinsmen. Most importantly, the primary character in the legend, the figure on which the story turns, was in fact a real person whose life details are consistent with the folk traditions of the Cape.

***

Between 1713 and early 1715, Sam Bellamy very likely arrived in Boston, where most inbound ships cleared customs before proceeding to other New England ports. With 10,000 people, Boston was the largest city in British North America, and the port through which most of the transatlantic commerce of the Eastern Seaboard passed. The city rose from the center of the harbor, a mass of brick and clapboard buildings around the foot of Beacon Hill, which was crowned by its namesake beacon mast. Bellamy's ship would have docked at the end of Long Wharf, a newly completed pier jutting out sixteen hundred feet into the harbor, allowing thirty ocean-going ships to tie up simultaneously in water so deep they could unload their cargoes directly onto the docks in any tide. This was more than could be said of Boston's other gateways. The city was perched on a hilly peninsula, two miles long and a half-mile wide, connected to the mainland by a neck of land so low and slender that it would be submerged during storms and spring tides. Going from Boston to Roxbury on the peninsular road was always treacherous, and numerous people drowned crossing it in fog or darkness. There were no bridges yet, and so aside from the three ferries crossing the mouth of the Charles River, Long Wharf was the city's front door. Bellamy stepped through it, passing between the warehouses constructed along its length, and onto the foot of King Street.

Climbing the freshly paved street, a visitor knew he had arrived in a particularly cultured city. In the half-mile walk up to the brand-new

brick Town House,
^*
with its impressive bell tower, Bellamy would have passed no less than five printers and nineteen booksellers, including Nicholas Boone, who sold copies of the weekly
Boston News-Letter,
the only newspaper in British America. If he paused to read the
News-Letter
—indeed if he could read at all—he would have gotten the latest news from Europe and the other colonies as reported by newly arrived ship captains and passengers, including, perhaps, word of the marauding activities of Hornigold's men. The existence of the
News-Letter
made Boston the hub of eighteenth-century America's information infrastructure. It was published by the city postmaster, John Campbell, who was first to greet the weekly post rider from New York; the dangerous weeklong journey was the longest leg in the continent's nascent postal system, which stretched from Philadelphia to Portsmouth. Were there news of relevance to the inhabitants of Boston—a pirate attack for instance—the
News-Letter
was where most of them would first hear of it. If the newspaper didn't catch Bellamy's eye, he could look at the wares in Andrew Faneuil's King Street shop,
^†
stocked with Venetian silks, French salts, and other European fineries. More likely he stopped in the Royal Exchange, a tavern at the top of the hill, well known for its food and drink. There he might have asked around about how best to book onward passage to Cape Cod, on the other side of Massachusetts Bay.

***

As a sailor, Bellamy would have felt at home on the Outer Cape. The sea's presence was everywhere in Eastham, its principal settlement: in the breezes that blew over town, in the roar of the surf rumbling from the east, and in the townspeople's household possessions, scavenged from a hundred ships wrecked on the Atlantic shore. Not all of the wrecks were purely accidental. On a dark night, a ship could be lured onto the Cape's stark, harborless eastern shore by a man standing on the beach, gently swinging his lamp. An inexperienced ship captain, nervous about navigating the dangerous Outer Cape, would follow the lamp, thinking it the stern light of another ship, discovering his mistake only when it was too late to save his ship. Of course, there could be no witnesses to such deceptions, and an unusually large number of ships were later found on these beaches with neither survivors nor cargo.

Eastham was literally an island in those days. A marshy creek south of town in the area of Nauset Harbor cut the Outer Cape off from the rest of Massachusetts. The marsh provided plenty of healthy fodder for cows, and the area quickly became known for the high quality of its dairy products. To the east, between the village and the open Atlantic, were the otherworldly tablelands—bleak, scrubby, windswept dunes that ended with frightening suddenness in sheer cliffs of sand dropping ninety feet or more to the Atlantic beaches.

According to Cape legend, Bellamy took to hanging about the taproom of an Eastham tavern. One spring night in 1715, he met a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary or Maria Hallett, charming her with tales of maritime adventure. Sam and Mary had a roll in the hay that very night and, in most versions of the story, were sufficiently smitten with each other to begin talking of marriage. Mary's parents were wealthy farmers, however, and refused to allow their daughter to marry a penniless sailor, the lowest of the low. Sam, furious, vowed that he would make his fortune and return to claim his bride. After his departure in September of 1715, the terrified girl discovered she was pregnant, and later that winter was said to have been discovered in a barn with a dead baby in her arms. The good people of Eastham, descendants of the Pilgrims, subjected Mary to a public whipping before tossing her in the town jail to await trial for her infant's murder. By some accounts, she lost her mind during her incarceration, and (with the possible assistance of the Devil) escaped to live a hermit's life on the stark tablelands above the Atlantic beach. There she roamed, scaring children, searching for Bellamy, and bringing nasty storms down on passing mariners, hobbies that earned her the epithet Sea Witch of Billingsgate, the latter being the old name for the north end of town now known as Wellfleet.

While embellished, the legend may have been based on historical events. In recent years, historians have discovered there was a young girl named Mary Hallett living in Eastham in 1715, and what we know of her life is surprisingly consistent with the legend. The historical Mary Hallett was about twenty-two years old in 1715, the daughter of one of the wealthiest settlers in the area, John Hallett of Yarmouth. Like his legendary counterpart, Hallett, a former constable and a veteran of the Indian Wars, appears to have cared deeply about property, having been involved in a bitter and protracted dispute with his brother over the division of their late father's pastureland. In March of 1715, Mary's older brother, John Hallett Jr., married an Eastham girl named Mehitable Brown, whose family is believed to have operated the Great Island Tavern, a Billingsgate establishment catering to mariners. Mary, the sixth of ten Hallett children, may well have been living with her brother and his wife in 1715, helping out in the kitchen, serving customers in the taproom, and cleaning the upstairs rooms they let to sailors. Furthermore, records show that Mary Hallett never married and died childless in her sixties in April 1751. In her last will and testament, discovered by Kenneth Kinkor of the Expedition Whydah Museum in Provincetown, she bequeathed all her possessions to her surviving siblings and their children; she had appointed her brother, John Jr., to execute her will, suggesting they were indeed close, even after the events of 1715, if they occurred at all.

Whatever the truth about Mary Hallett, we do know that Sam Bellamy made another, more lasting acquaintance while in New England. Thirty-nine years old when they met, Paulsgrave Williams was a silversmith from an influential Rhode Island family, with a wife and two young boys at home. At first glance, Williams would have seemed the most unlikely pirate. His father, John Williams, was the attorney general of Rhode Island, an exceptionally wealthy merchant who split his time between a Boston mansion and estates in Newport and Block Island. His mother, Anna Alcock, was a descendent of the Plantagenet kings of England and the daughter of a Harvard-trained physician. Yet Paulsgrave would choose the life of an outlaw, joining a society of impoverished mariners fighting for the wealth and freedom that he had enjoyed since birth. It makes no sense, until you take his stepfather and childhood neighbors into account.

John Williams died in 1687, when his son was eleven years old, leaving the execution of his will and the guardianship of his children in the hands of his friend, a Scottish exile named Robert Guthrie. Guthrie married Paulsgrave's mother a year and a half later, permanently settling the family on their estate at Block Island in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, a move that profoundly altered the trajectory of young Williams's life. Guthrie's father had been a famous Scottish nationalist and preacher and had been executed by the English in front of his family when Guthrie was still an infant. Guthrie's mother and siblings were banished from the country, joining a large contingent of Scottish prisoners of war transported to New England to slave in the ironworks of Lynn and Braintree, Massachusetts. A large number of these Scots eventually relocated to Block Island, becoming part of a community with a reputation for organized crime. Through Guthrie, young Williams likely was introduced to some unpleasant truths about the English conquest of Scotland, and some radical notions about who should be sitting on the British throne. On Block Island, Paulsgrave's family became connected with some of the leading smugglers, money launderers, and black marketers in New England. His eldest sister, Mary, married Edward Sands, a personal friend of Captain Kidd; the couple had helped hide some of Kidd's contraband at their home while he was on the run from the law. His younger sister, Elizabeth, had also been implicated in helping Kidd; her husband, Thomas Paine, was likely the nephew and namesake of a retired pirate, Thomas Paine the elder, who also lived in the area and had a long history of buying and selling plunder. In this company, Williams may have become inclined to pursue extralegal ventures. All he needed was a willing partner, someone who knew more than he did about sailing ships and the sea.