The Republic Of Pirates: A Captivating Historical Biography of the Caribbean's Infamous Buccaneers

by Colin Woodard

The Golden Age of Piracy lasted only ten years, from 1715 to 1725, and was conducted by a clique of twenty to thirty pirate commodores and a few thousand crewmen.

They ran their ships democratically, electing and deposing their captains by popular vote, sharing plunder equally, and making important decisions in an open council—all in sharp contrast to the dictatorial regimes in place aboard other ships. At a time when ordinary sailors received no social protections of any kind, the Bahamian pirates provided disability benefits for their crews.

They are distinct from privateers, individuals who in wartime plunder enemy shipping under license from their government.

They were sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves rebelling against their oppressors: captains, ship owners, and the autocrats of the great slave plantations of America and the West Indies. Dissatisfaction was so great aboard merchant vessels that typically when the pirates captured one, a portion of its crew enthusiastically joined their ranks.

By 1717, the pirates had become so powerful they were able to threaten not only ships, but entire colonies. They occupied British outposts in the Leeward Islands, threatened to invade Bermuda, and repeatedly blockaded South Carolina. In the process, some accumulated staggering fortunes, with which they bought the loyalty of merchants, plantation owners, even the colonial governors themselves.

To the consternation of the ship and plantation owners of the Americas, many ordinary colonists regarded the pirates as folk heroes. Cotton Mather, Massachusetts’ leading Puritan minister, fumed about the level of support for the pirates among the “sinful” commoners of Boston. In 1718, as South Carolina authorities prepared to bring a pirate gang to trial, their sympathizers broke the pirates’ leader out of prison and nearly took control of the capital, Charleston. “People are easily led to favor these Pests of Mankind when they have hopes of sharing in their ill-gotten wealth,” Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood complained in the same year, adding that there were “many favorers of the pirates” in his colony.

Some of Avery’s men found shelter in other ports. Several of those who had gone to Charleston continued on to Philadelphia, where they bought the allegiance of another governor, William Markham of Pennsylvania, for £100 per man. Markham, who apparently knew who they were, not only neglected to arrest them, he entertained them at his home and allowed one of them to marry his daughter. When one of the king’s magistrates, Robert Snead, attempted to arrest the pirates, the governor had him disarmed and threatened with imprisonment. Snead, unperturbed, apprehended two of the pirates, but they “escaped” from Markham’s prison within hours. The incident, Snead wrote back to authorities in London, had allowed “all the people [to] see how Arabian gold works with some consciences.”

To abused young sailors and cabin boys, Avery had become a hero. He was one of their own, a man who stuck up for his fellow sailors and led them to a promised land, a sailor’s heaven on earth. A champion of the ordinary man, the Avery of legend was a symbol of hope for a new generation of oppressed mariners, as well as a role model for the men who would one day become the most famous and fearsome pirates in history.

The old medieval system was being supplanted by capitalism, and the pain of that transition was being borne by the country’s peasant farmers. Beginning in the 1500s, English lords began driving peasants off their lands, either by purchasing their medieval tenancy rights for cash or simply refusing to renew their leases. All over England, fields and pastures once used in common by local villagers were seized by feudal lords, enclosed with walls, fences, and hedgerows, and incorporated into large private farms and sheep ranches. This “enclosure movement” turned feudal lords into landed aristocrats and turned millions of self-sufficient farmers into landless paupers.

Legally speaking, merchant captains were only supposed to employ “moderate” discipline on their crews. Not so in the Royal Navy, where captains were under standing orders to mete out brutal punishments. Petty officers whacked slow-moving crewmen across the shoulders with rattan canes. A crewman caught stealing small objects was made to “run the gauntlet,” forced to walk between parallel lines of crewmen as they lashed his bare back. Major thefts resulted in a full-on flogging with a knotted cat-o’-nine tails, as also befell “he that pisseth between decks.” The commission of serious crimes resulted in potentially fatal floggings of seventy-two to three hundred lashings, or outright hanging.

In the spring of 1702, England went to war, siding with the Dutch, Austrians, and Prussians against France and Spain. By doing so, they were setting the stage for the greatest outbreak of piracy the Atlantic would ever know.

Even so, dozens of blacks did escape each year. They established rogue settlements in the mountains, where they grew crops, raised families, practiced their religions, and trained bands of swift and effective jungle warriors to raid the plantations, free slaves, and kill Englishmen. In their capital, Nanny Town, the runaways were said to be led by an ancient and powerful witch, Granny Nanny, who protected her warriors with magical spells.

Apart from a few forced men, service aboard the pirate vessels was essentially voluntary. Most of the islands’ pirates were mariners who long suffered abuse and exploitation in the navy and merchant marine. They had no intention of replicating that system, but rather turning it on its head. They took to electing their captains and, if dissatisfied with their selections, could vote to impeach them as well. The Flying Gang pirates gave their captains absolute authority while in combat, but most other decisions were made democratically in a general council of the crew, including where to go, what to attack, which prisoners to retain or set free, and how to punish transgressions within their companies. Hornigold and other pirate captains ate the same food as their men and had to share their cabins. The crew kept their authority further in check by electing another official, the quartermaster, who ensured that food, plunder, and assignments were doled out equitably.