The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (47 page)

As for Mary Read and Anne Bonny, they were tried on November 28, 1720, found guilty, and sentenced to death. They had a surprise for Governor Lawes and the other officials at the Spanish Town courthouse. They "plead their bellies," claiming to be "quick with child" and, thus, ineligible for execution, as it was illegal for the court to take the lives of their fetuses. Lawes ordered that the women be examined, whereupon their claim was found to be true. Their sentences were postponed and the women were presumably returned to prison. Mary Read died there from a violent fever and was buried at St. Catherine's church in Jamaica on April 28, 1721. Anne Bonny's fate is unclear, though she was apparently not executed. During her pregnancy, her long-estranged father, a South Carolina planter of some means, may have been able to obtain her release. If she died on Jamaica, the records of her burial have been lost.

***

With the execution of Rackham and Vane, the Golden Age of Piracy was all but over. While ships would continue to be attacked—particularly off West Africa—the pirates never again had the upper hand. With few exceptions, the pirates of the 1720s spent their time playing cat-and-mouse games with the authorities; there were to be no more threats to the colonies themselves. British authorities estimated the worldwide pirate population at approximately 2,000 between 1716 and 1718, but less than 200 by 1725, a collapse of 90 percent. After 1722, most pirates had abandoned any hope of carving out their own republic or helping overthrow the Hanoverian kings of England and spent most of their time fighting for mere survival.

That's not to say that all of the Flying Gang pirates were defeated. Indeed, many of the diehards who abandoned the Bahamas in 1718 carried on for years, and a few managed to retire comfortably. Olivier La Buse, Bellamy's longtime consort, went to the Leeward Islands with his ship-of-force prior to the pirate republic's collapse. On June 12, 1718, Captain Francis Hume's HMS
Scarborough
cornered La Buse at La Blanquilla, where he had anchored to plunder a small prize sloop. As the frigate approached, La Buse and most of his crew made their escape on the faster, more nimble sloop. He eventually made his way to West Africa, meeting up with a number of Bahamian colleagues, including Edward England and Paulsgrave Williams. He had a long and generally prosperous career in Africa and the Indian Ocean until 1730, when he was apprehended by French authorities and executed on the island of Réunion. His grave is a popular tourist site there.

Paulsgrave Williams also wound up in Africa, where he was last seen in April 1720 serving as quartermaster aboard La Buse's brigantine. A man held captive on that vessel, slaver captain William Snelgrave, recalled that Williams was grouchy and despondent, threatening him with violence without provocation. "Don't be afraid of him, for it is his usual way of talking," another captive told Snelgrave. "But be sure [to] call him Captain as soon as you get aboard" his vessel. Indeed, Williams warmed to the use of his old title, as he was unhappy not being in command. Snelgrave also reported that members of the pirate fleet drank toasts to "King James the Third," suggesting continued Jacobite proclivities among Williams's associates. Williams probably sailed with La Buse for some time thereafter, possibly settling among other aging pirates in Madagascar. He never again saw his wife and children in Rhode Island, but his eldest son apparently never forgot him. When he grew up, Paulsgrave Williams Jr. became a wig-maker, specializing in the peruke his father was so fond of wearing.

The rank-and-file pirates who stole Rogers's privateer
Buck
helped spawn a new wave of outlaws who would terrorize the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Led by Howell Davis, a fearless Welshman, they plundered vessels from Virginia to West Africa. In November 1719, he forced a carpenter named Bartholomew Roberts to serve aboard the
Buck;
after Davis was killed a short time later during an attack on a Portuguese slave fortress, Roberts presided over what was probably one of the most productive pirate companies in history, taking over 400 vessels before they were captured by the Royal Navy in February 1722. Another
Buck
mutineer was Walter Kennedy, an Irishman inspired to piracy by the tales of Henry Avery. After running his own pirate sloop for a time, he returned to London to enjoy his riches, set up his own brothel on Deptford Road, and dabbled in mugging and other petty crime. He was eventually apprehended and executed for piracy in 1721 at Wapping, where he had been born twenty-six years earlier. One of Kennedy's old shipmates aboard the
Buck,
Thomas Anstis, also became a successful pirate captain, but was killed by his own crew during a 1723 mutiny.

It was Edward England, Vane's first quartermaster, who may have come closest to living out the Avery legend. After parting ways with Vane, England specialized in attacking slave ships on the West Coast of Africa, whose demoralized crews were reliable sources of fresh manpower. He captured nine such vessels in the spring of 1719, and more than a third of their sailors defected to his company. At Cape Corso he nearly captured Lawrence Prince's new command, the 250-ton
Whydah II,
which fled under the guns of a slave fort to avoid following her namesake into piracy. He, like Avery, spent considerable time cruising the Indian Ocean. He raided the shipping of the Moghul Empire and, upon catching a thirty-four-gun ship, named it
Fancy
as Avery had done. In the end, his men deposed him for refusing to allow them to harm their captives, marooning him on one of the islands of Mauritius, east of Africa. England managed to build a raft and conveyed himself to Madagascar, where he lived the rest of his days among Avery's surviving pirates.

***

For the most part, the pirates' nemeses and their high-level collaborators fared worse than the pirates themselves.

After abandoning Rogers in Nassau, Commodore Peter Chamberlaine of HMS
Milford
remained in charge of the Royal Navy's West Indies fleet until June 1720, when he received orders to escort fourteen merchant vessels back to London. On June 28, while passing through the Windward Passage, the fleet encountered a violent storm that drove every vessel ashore on the west end of Cuba. A witness later said, "the shore [was] covered with dead bodies." Two-thirds of the 450 sailors and passengers were killed, including Chamberlaine and the entire complement of the
Milford,
apart from thirty-four sailors, the purser, and a blind cook.

Francis Hume, commander of HMS
Scarborough,
who destroyed the pirate vessels of Martel and La Buse, was rewarded in 1723 with the command of the third-rate
Bedford,
one of only twelve ships of the line then in service. Nonetheless, he shot and killed himself in Scotland "on account of some private discontent" in February 1753.

Vincent Pearse's
Phoenix
was based in New York for many years, allowing him to build many lasting relationships among the leading citizens of that city. These led to his marriage to Mary Morris, the daughter of New Jersey governor Lewis Morris, who owned a vast estate in what is now the Bronx. The marriage was not a happy one. While Pearse was in England, Mary carried on a dalliance with another naval officer. Pearse didn't discover the affair until a few years later, when the couple was living in London. Enraged, he brought her to court for adultery. The scandal was voluminously documented in the Morris family's letters to one another, and descended into a soap opera of lawsuits, countersuits, abortive reconciliation, and intrigue. In 1742, while Pearse fought his wife in London, a New York court ruled against him in a £1,500 lawsuit on an unrelated matter, which likely ruined him. He was probably still quarrelling with his wife when he died, in May 1745.

Shortly after killing Blackbeard, Lieutenant Robert Maynard was found to have kept a number of valuables taken from the
Adventure,
having disobeyed a direct order from Captain Gordon to return them to the inventory of seized plunder. His self-aggrandizing accounts of the battle at Ocracoke further discredited him with his superiors and Governor Spotswood, in whose letters praise for the lieutenant is conspicuously absent. Maynard was not promoted to commander for another twenty-one years. He eventually made captain and was given command of the sixth-rate
Sheerness
in September 1740, when he must have been an old man. He died in England in 1750.

While cleared of wrongdoing by his governing council, Governor Charles Eden's reputation never recovered from his dealings with Blackbeard. He died of yellow fever at his home in Edenton on March 17, 1722, at the age of forty-nine. His tombstone carried the epitaph: "He brought ye country into a flourishing condition, and died much lamented."

Assisted by the fallout from his invasion of North Carolina, Alexander Spotswood's political enemies succeeded in having him replaced as governor of Virginia. In September 1722, Spotswood retired to his 45,000-acre estate, where he dabbled in iron mining and production. In the 1730s he served as deputy postmaster-general of the American colonies, established postal service between Williamsburg and Philadelphia, and selected Benjamin Franklin to be Pennsylvania's postmaster. In 1740, he was appointed major general and asked to lead a detachment of troops to fight in Spain during the War of the Austrian Succession. On June 7, 1740, while overseeing their departure, he died of fever in Annapolis, Maryland.

Ironically, Lord Archibald Hamilton, the discredited governor of Jamaica, fared better than the rest. He had left Jamaica under arrest, but despite his Jacobite scheming and encouragement of piracy, he was found innocent of all wrongdoing by British courts. In 1721, the Council of Trade and Plantations even ordered the government of Jamaica to pay Hamilton his share of the plunder seized by his privateers in 1716. He married an earl's daughter, retained estates and castles in Ireland and Scotland, and died at his comfortable home on London's Pall Mall in 1754, at the ripe old age of eighty-four, after which he was buried at Westminster Abby. He had long before given up interest in a Stuart restoration, and appears to have done nothing to assist in the final Jacobite uprising in 1745, led by James Stuart's son, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

James Stuart and his son are interred in the crypt of St. Peter's basilica in the Vatican. The descendents of King George occupy the British throne to this day.

***

As for Woodes Rogers, he spent the twilight years of the Golden Age of Piracy in London, sickly, indebted, and deeply depressed. "For some time," Rogers later wrote, I was "very much perplexed with the melancholy prospect of [my] affairs." His fellow investors had dissolved their partnership, and neither they nor the government would honor the £6,000 in debts Rogers had incurred on its behalf. In the end, it was his creditors who took pity on him, absolving his debts and getting him out of debtors prison.

In 1722 or 1723, he was approached by a man who was researching a book about the pirates. The author needed Rogers's help to fill in details of the pirate republic that Rogers had put down and, perhaps, share copies of his official letters and reports as governor. Rogers apparently agreed, as the author included information only Rogers could have provided. The result, in May 1724, was the publication of
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates,
which, like so many books of that era, was written under an alias, in this case, "Captain Charles Johnson." English readers were captivated by the activities of the pirates, even as they were taking place. It was an enormous hit on both sides of the Atlantic, going through numerous editions. Articles and advertisements promoting it appeared in London's
Weekly Journal,
as well as the Philadelphia's
American Weekly Mercury.
The book, still in print, almost single-handedly created the popular images of the pirates that remain with us today.

Generations of historians and librarians have erroneously identified Captain Charles Johnson as Daniel Defoe, a contemporary of Rogers and the author of
Robinson Crusoe
and
Captain Singleton.
Recently, Arne Bialuschewski of the University of Kiel in Germany has identified a far more likely candidate: Nathaniel Mist, a former sailor, journalist, and publisher of the
Weekly Journal.
The book's first publisher of record, Charles Rivington, had printed many books for Mist, who lived just a few yards from his office. More importantly, the
General History
was registered at His Majesty's Stationary Office in Mist's name. As a former seaman who had sailed the West Indies, Mist, of all London's writer-publishers, was uniquely qualified to have penned the book, being well aquainted with the maritime world and the settings the pirates had operated in. Mist was also a committed Jacobite and would eventually go into exile in France, serving as a messenger between London and the Stuart court in Rome, which would explain the
General History
's not entirely unsympathetic account of the maritime outlaws. In 1722–1723 Mist also had the motivation to try to write a bestseller: The
Weekly Journal's
profits had been languishing for years due to increased competition from rival newspapers.

***

The publication of
A General History
—which highlighted Rogers's role in dispersing the Bahamian pirates—revived the deposed governor's reputation as a national hero. Readers, including many members of Britain's elite, couldn't help but wonder what had happened to Rogers and were undoubtedly embarrassed to discover how poorly he had been repaid for his patriotic service. It is probably not a coincidence that Rogers's fortunes began to recover not long thereafter. In early 1726 he successfully petitioned the king for redress. Authorities were sympathetic when they read Rogers's plea, which was written in the third person: "He has lost ... eight years of the prime of his life, by his honest ambition and zeal in serving his country, and is left destitute of money for this surface or any new employ[ment], though no complaint has yet been made of any mal-administration or want of doing his duty." In the end, the king not only awarded Rogers with a pension equivalent to half the salary of an infantry captain, retroactive to June 1721, he also appointed him, in 1728, to a second term as the governor of the Bahamas.