Turning the Tide Against Piracy in America

The two years between April 1717 and March 1719 were the most dramatic period in the history of piracy in America. At various times, crews led by Captains Bellamy, Williams, La Buse, Bonnet, Blackbeard, Worley, Vane, Moody, and other men whose piratical deeds were of lesser consequence, terrorized the coast from Maine to South Carolina, sending tremors of fear throughout the colonies. A few of the colonies fought back, achieving great success. Their brave efforts led directly to the downfall of some of history’s most infamous pirates, like Bonnet and Blackbeard, and even though Bellamy and many of his men were destroyed by natural forces, the survivors were rounded up by Massachusetts officials who were determined to see that justice was done. At well-publicized trials in Boston, Williamsburg, and Charleston, colonial officials added to the already significant death toll of pirates by condemning sixty-eight men to the gallows, sending out an unmistakable message that the colonies had declared war on them.

This period also marked the high point for piracy along America’s coast. Between 1719 and 1726, the number of pirates plaguing the colonies would plummet to an insignificant level. Of the many factors contributing to this decline, one was, of course, colonial resolve to fight piracy at sea and in the courts. Another critical determinant was Britain’s increased efforts to eliminate pirates throughout the Atlantic, using a combination of pardons, stricter laws, naval force, executions, and the eradication of the pirate stronghold at New Providence.

The Act of Grace issued by King George on September 5, 1717, was followed by another pardon opportunity in 1719. The results were mixed, and generally disappointing. While many pirates accepted the pardons, most of them, like Bonnet and Blackbeard, returned to their old ways. But these Acts of Grace were combined with an incentive plan for capturing or turning in pirates who failed to accept the pardon by a certain date. After that time, any person who apprehended a pirate, or provided information that led to a capture, would receive a reward from the Crown—​£100 for a pirate captain, £40 for every lieutenant, master, boatswain, carpenter, and gunner, £30 for every lower-ranked officer, and £20 for other crewmembers. And if a bold pirate turned on his captain and helped bring him to justice, he would be eligible for a £200 reward. Although it is hard to measure the impact of such bounties, there is evidence that in some cases they led to arrests and convictions.

In 1721, the 1700 Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy was supplemented by another similarly named statute, which added to the Crown’s armamentarium in the battle against pirates. In addition to reiterating the penalty of death for anyone found guilty of piracy or being an accessory to piracy, and continuing financial awards for injuries sustained while engaging pirates, the new law required the officers and crew of all armed merchant ships to fight back in order to keep their ship from falling into the hands of pirates. Those individuals who failed to do their duty would be stripped of their wages and thrown into jail for six months.

The 1721 law also changed the calculus for officers aboard British naval ships. Over the years there had been many complaints from colonial officials that some of those officers, contrary to their instructions from the admiralty, spent more time trading with pirates than hunting them down, in order to supplement their naval pay. Under the new law, any officer caught trading with pirates would be brought before a court-martial and, if convicted, would lose his position and any wages due him and never again be allowed to serve in the navy. The 1721 law placed merchants, their captains and crews, and naval officers on notice that the cost of associating with pirates, or failing to fight against them, would be enormous.

Despite the existence of a number of naval officers who viewed pirates as profit centers, naval ships, for the most part, were still effective tools for fighting piracy. That is why colonial officials from America and the Caribbean had long been begging the mother country to send more naval forces to colonial ports, and in September 1717, the king finally consented. On the fifteenth of that month he issued a proclamation in which he noted, “unless some effectual means be used” to reduce the number of pirates infesting the seas near Jamaica and the American colonies, “the whole trade from Great Britain to those parts will not only be obstructed, but in imminent danger of being lost.” The means he chose was to send additional ships across the Atlantic, and give them direct orders to focus their energy on eradicating the pirates.

In subsequent years, the number of naval ships cruising the American colonies rose to five—​one more than had been on station in 1715—​and a few more ships were sent to Jamaica, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands, as well as to Newfoundland to protect the fishing fleets. They weren’t the navy’s largest ships, most being fifth- or sixth-raters according to the navy’s classification system, with between twenty and forty guns, but they were quite capable of confronting and beating almost any pirate ship they encountered. While the American colonies had certainly hoped for more firepower, especially since a handful of ships and a few hundred sailors could not possibly police the entire American coast, those five ships and their men did act as a deterrent, and in a couple of cases they fought pirates and won—​including the instance of the Lyme and the Pearl, which were instrumental in vanquishing Blackbeard. The additional naval ships in the Caribbean and off Newfoundland had some successes as well.

The navy’s most impressive victory came not in the western Atlantic, but rather off the coast of Africa, where it defeated Bartholomew Roberts, or Black Bart as he came to be known after his death, the most successful pirate of the Golden Age. Although this success was not achieved in American waters, it nevertheless had a significant impact on piracy on both sides of the Atlantic.

Roberts was second mate on a British slaver sailing to the Gulf of Guinea when the pirate Howell Davis captured his ship in early 1720. Roberts quickly warmed up to the pirate life, and when Howell was killed less than two months later, Roberts, already a favorite among the crew, was elected captain. Over the next two years, he and his small but powerful squadron of pirate ships reportedly plundered more than four hundred ships along the coasts of Africa, Brazil, and Newfoundland, as well as in the Caribbean, though none off the American colonies.

Captain Samuel Cary, whose ship Samuel was attacked in July 1720 by Roberts off the coast of Newfoundland, provides a fascinating glimpse of the pirates’ marauding behavior. Upon boarding, they stripped the passengers and crewmen of all their money and clothes, with the exception of what they were wearing, while aiming guns at their breasts, threatening to shoot anyone “who did not immediately give an account of both, and resign them up.” Then, “with madness and rage,” the pirates ripped open the hatches and entered the hold “like a parcel of furies,” blasting the locks off trunks, slashing their way into boxes of goods, taking what they wanted, and throwing what they didn’t over the side. All the while, the pirates were “cursing, swearing, damning, and blaspheming to the greatest degree imaginable,” proclaiming that they would never be hung up along the Thames like Captain Kidd because if they were ever beaten by a superior force, they would “fire one of their pistols to their powder, and all go merrily to hell together!” The pirates ridiculed the king’s Act of Grace, saying that they didn’t have enough money yet, but when they did, they would certainly take the king up on his offer, and “thank him for it.” Despite the fact that Roberts had onboard his own ship a reported twenty tons of brandy, he and his men were more than happy to break into the cargo of fine wine that Captain Cary was carrying to Boston, cutting off the necks of the bottles with their cutlasses and chugging their contents. Just as the pirates were debating whether to burn Cary’s ship, they saw another merchant vessel in the distance, and set Cary free in order to capture a new prize.

Roberts’s pillaging alarmed British authorities, and in February 1722, the fifty-gun HMS Swallow finally caught up with him on the Guinea coast. In two separate and fierce battles, Captain Chaloner Ogle of the Swallow captured the three vessels under Roberts’s command, including his flagship, the Royal Fortune. According to Johnson, Roberts, standing on the main deck of the Royal Fortune at the outset of the fight, “made a gallant figure . . . ​dressed in a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, with a diamond cross hanging to it, a sword in his hand, and two pair of pistols hanging at the end of a silk sling, hung over his shoulders.” His gallantry and sartorial splendor notwithstanding, Roberts was mortally struck during one of the Swallow’s initial broadsides, a round of grapeshot piercing his neck. The death of their leader disheartened the pirates and they soon surrendered, but not before dumping Roberts’s body overboard, with all his arms and finery on, as had been his long-standing request should he expire.

More than a score of Roberts’s men were killed or wounded during these engagements. Ogle brought 262 captives to Cape Coast Castle, the capital of British possessions on the Gold Coast of Africa (modern-day Ghana). Nineteen of the wounded pirates died of their injuries soon thereafter, and the seventy-five black men Ogle had captured were sold into slavery. The rest of the pirates were put on trial, and while most were acquitted, imprisoned, reprieved, or sent into indentured servitude, fifty-two of them were executed. This singular event—​the largest group hanging during the Golden Age of Piracy—​was a major blow to piracy throughout the Atlantic. But it was only a part of a much larger whole. Between 1716 and 1726, more than four hundred pirates were reportedly hanged for their crimes, though it is likely that the true number was considerably higher. And for every pirate hanged, there was one or, possibly, two more who were killed by those who were sent to hunt them down. All of these grisly executions and battle deaths were a further sign to pirates that theirs was a losing game, and that an era was coming to an end.

Yet another critical setback was the extirpation of the pirates in New Providence, the Bahamas. For years, government officials and merchants alike had been vigorously complaining about the “nest of rogues” operating out of this island and the serious threat they posed to trade. A contemporary government report on the situation in New Providence painted a troubling picture. “Here they [pirates] now reign, and being, as we hear, about four thousand men, and twenty or thirty vessels of all sorts, they rove about the sea, scouring the coasts of our colonies of Carolina, Virginia, nay, up as high as New-England, to the inconceivable prejudice of commerce, and ruin of our people.” The mounting complaints finally compelled the king to take action, and when a private group of investors approached the government with a plan to get rid of the pirates and reclaim New Providence, the Crown gave its enthusiastic support.

The investors were granted a lease to govern the Bahamas for twenty-one years, during which time they were entitled to any income derived from trade and agriculture on the islands. In exchange, the investors agreed to send a sizable force of soldiers and colonists, along with armed ships and supplies, to colonize and fortify New Providence. The pardon issued by the king on September 5, 1717, was one of the key elements of the investors’ plan, the hope being that it would induce the pirates in Nassau (as well as other places) to renounce piracy, thereby making the job of implementing civil rule on the islands much easier.

Woodes Rogers, a major booster of the plan, and one of its investors, was chosen to be the new governor of the Bahamas. He was already famous for his privateering voyage around the world during the War of the Spanish Succession, in which he not only captured a treasure-laden Spanish galleon, but also rescued Scotsman Alexander Selkirk from Más a Tierra, one of the Juan Fernández Islands located about 350 miles off the coast of Chile. Selkirk was a sailing master on an English privateer, the Cinque Ports, in 1704 when his rising animosity toward the captain, Thomas Stradling, combined with his fear that the ship was so leaky as to be unseaworthy, led him to ask to be set ashore on Más a Tierra. Stradling consented, and when Selkirk had a change of heart, the captain refused to let him back onto the ship, no doubt happy to be rid of this troublesome fellow. By the time Rogers found him in early 1709, Selkirk had spent four years and four months without any human contact, a trial of endurance and solitude that made him a minor celebrity upon his return to London. Many think that Selkirk’s amazing tale of survival, recounted in Rogers’s subsequent book, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, was the basis for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 classic, Robinson Crusoe, although there are those who argue that Defoe’s inspiration was gleaned from multiple sources. In 1966, the Chilean government renamed Más a Tierra as Robinson Crusoe Island, in honor of its most legendary resident. As for the seaworthiness of the Cinque Ports, Selkirk was prescient. It later sank, and half the men aboard drowned, while the rest survived on rafts that deposited them on the South American mainland.

Rogers arrived at Nassau at the end of July 1718 at the head of a convoy of four ships, carrying roughly three hundred colonists and soldiers supplied by the partnership. Accompanying them were three British naval ships, ordered by the king to protect them on their journey and offer support during the first few weeks of Rogers’s mission. Word of the pardon had arrived at the Bahamas months earlier, and many pirates had already taken advantage of the Act of Grace, most notably Benjamin Hornigold, erstwhile leader of the Flying Gang, who was among the crowd that enthusiastically greeted Rogers when he stepped ashore. “I landed and took possession of the fort,” Rogers would later write, “where I read out his majesty’s commission in the presence of my officers, soldiers and about three hundred of the people found here, who received me under arms, and readily surrendered showing then many tokens of joy for the reintroduction of government.”

Two hundred more pirates quickly accepted the pardon, but as Rogers ruefully noted a few months later, about one hundred of them had by then returned to piracy. Still, many didn’t, and the changes that Rogers had instituted, including establishing a working government and strengthening the fort, were already having a positive effect. But what truly transformed the island was a trial, and subsequent executions, at the end of 1718.

In the fall of that year, Rogers commissioned Hornigold and another reformed pirate, John Cockram, to become pirate hunters. Soon thereafter, they captured a pirate sloop off the Bahamian island of Exuma. Three of the pirates were killed during the brief battle, and ten were brought back to Nassau. Nine of them were subsequently found guilty of mutiny and piracy during the two-day trial, but in the end only eight were hanged on December 12. The ninth pirate was very lucky indeed. Just before he was to be sent to eternity, Rogers announced that the young man was “the son of loyal and good parents in Dorsetshire,” and, therefore, deserved a reprieve. No sooner had the beneficiary of Rogers’s mercy stepped down from the stage beneath the gallows, than the wooden barrels holding up the stage were yanked away, causing it to drop, leaving the eight pirates dangling in midair, each doing his own version of the Tyburn jig. All the while, the black flag that had once united them fluttered in the breeze overhead.

On the way to the gallows, one of the condemned men “looked cheerfully” upon the assembled crowd and shouted “he knew a time when there were many brave fellows on the island, who would not have suffered him to die like a dog.” But those days were gone, and nobody came to his aid. As historian David Cordingly notes, the hangings “marked the end of Nassau and the island of New Providence as a base for the pirates, and it was a clear signal to the hundreds of pirates still operating in the Caribbean that the Bahamas were no longer a free zone for piracy.” This turn of events greatly weakened the Atlantic pirate community and was another step on the road to its ultimate dissolution. From this point forward, pirates would have no place of refuge, no “republic of pirates,” but instead would be increasingly isolated and on the run.

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Excerpted from BLACK FLAGS, BLUE WATERS: THE EPIC HISTORY OF AMERICA’S MOST NOTORIOUS PIRATES by Eric Jay Dolin. Copyright © 2018 by Eric Jay Dolin. Excerpted by permission of W. W. Norton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.