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the true story of the pirates of the Caribbean is even more captivating: a long-lost tale of tyranny and resistance, a maritime revolt that shook the very foundations of the newly formed British Empire, bringing transatlantic commerce to a standstill and fueling the democratic sentiments that would later drive the American revolution. At its center was a pirate republic, a zone of freedom in the midst of an authoritarian age.
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 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.
Not all pirates were disgruntled sailors. Runaway slaves migrated to the pirate republic in significant numbers, as word spread of the pirates attacking slave ships and initiating many aboard to participate as equal members of their crews.
At the height of the Golden Age, it was not unusual for escaped slaves to account for a quarter or more of a pirate vessel’s crew, and several mulattos rose to become full-fledged pirate captains.
The pirate gangs of the Bahamas were enormously successful. At their zenith they succeeded in severing Britain, France, and Spain from their New World empires, cutting off trade routes, stifling the supply of slaves to the sugar plantations of America and the West Indies, and disrupting the flow of information between the continents.
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.
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.
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, a 1724 book whose author* wrote under the alias Captain Charles Johnson.
Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy, Edward “Blackbeard” Thatch, and Charles Vane, all of whom knew one another.
Bellamy and Blackbeard, following Hornigold’s lead, were more circumspect in their use of force, generally using terror only to compel their victims to surrender, thereby avoiding the need for violence.
In the voluminous descriptions of Bellamy’s and Blackbeard’s attacks on shipping—nearly 300 vessels in all—there is not one recorded instance of them killing a captive.
More often than not, their victims would later report having been treated fairly by these pirates, who typically returned ships and ca...
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all of the leading pirates of the era: the flamboyantly dressed John “Calico Jack” Rackham, the eccentric Stede Bonnet, the infamous Olivier La Buse, the wig-wearing Paulsgrave Williams, and the female pirate Anne Bonny.
Woodes Rogers, the man the Crown sent to confront the pirates and pacify the Bahamas.
More than anyone else, Rogers put an end to the Golden Age of Piracy.
The romantic myth of piracy didn’t follow the Golden Age, it helped create it. The pirates’ tale, therefore, starts with Henry Avery, and the arrival of a mysterious ship in Nassau three centuries ago.
So it was that England’s most wanted man bought off the law and sold his pirate ship to one of His Majesty’s own governors. Captain Bridgeman was in reality Henry Avery, the most successful pirate of his generation, a man whose exploits were already becoming the stuff of legend.
At that moment, dozens of ships, hundreds of officials, thousands of sailors, informers, and soldiers around the world were searching for Avery, his crew, and a king’s ransom in stolen treasure.
Few would guess that Avery and his men were, at that moment, relaxing in the shadow of an English fort.
Shortly after England went to war with France in 1688, Avery enlisted in the Royal Navy, serving as a junior officer aboard HMS Rupert and HMS Albemarle and seeing combat on both frigates. Along the way, he and his fellow sailors had experienced beatings and humiliations from officers, eaten rotten or substandard food courtesy of corrupt pursers, and their salaries had gone unpaid for years on end. It was a beggar’s life for shipmates who lost arms, legs, hands, feet, or eyes in accidents or battle. Sailors said that prisoners led a better life, and after more than two decades at sea, Avery
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Avery must have been persuasive because the men agreed to his plan and appointed him as their captain. Collectively they laid out an equitable scheme for sharing future plunder. While on most privateering vessels, the captain got between six and fourteen shares to the ordinary seaman’s one, Avery would receive only one extra share, his mate an extra half. They would make all major decisions democratically, except during combat, when Avery’s command would be absolute. They also voted to rename the ship: From here on out she would be called the Fancy.
In the bleak cove that served as Moia’s harbor, they found three English merchant ships loading salt the natives had piled for them on the beach. Faced with the Fancy’s overwhelming firepower, the captains surrendered without a fight. Avery relieved them of provisions and an anchor to replace the one he’d left on the bottom of La Coruna harbor, but politely gave them a receipt for everything he had stolen. Less thoughtfully, he forced nine members of their crew to join his pirate band, probably because they, like the doctor, had special skills required to keep the Fancy operational.
a sort of maritime Robin Hood.
He’d risen up against injustice and handled his prisoners with remarkable humanity, taking only what he and his band required for survival.
His later admirers made much of his upstanding behavior toward English and European captives, but they tended to skip over or make light of his treatment of nonwhite foreigners who fell into his clutches.
Their numbers had swollen to over one hundred, including fourteen volunteers from a Danish merchant vessel and a party of French privateers found stranded on an island near the Mozambique Straits.
Trial documents and accounts of Indian witnesses and English officials make it clear that Avery presided over an orgy of violence. For several days, the pirates raped female passengers of all ages. Among the victims was one of the Moghul emperor’s relatives—not a young princess, but the elderly wife of one of his courtiers. Khafi Khan reported that a number of women killed themselves to avoid such a fate, some by jumping into the sea, others stabbing themselves with daggers.
One of Avery’s crew, Philip Middleton, later testified that they murdered several men aboard the captured ship. Fact and legend only agree on the scale of the treasure the pirates loaded aboard the Fancy: a trove of gold, silver, ivory, and jewels worth £150,000 or more.
On the island of Réunion, halfway to the Cape, Avery and the privateer captains divided their plunder and went their separate ways. Most of the crew received an individual share of £1,000, the equivalent of twenty years’ wages aboard a merchant ship.
The remaining pirates split into three parties, each with its own idea of how best to slide into obscurity with their plunder. Twenty-three men, led by Thomas Hollingsworth, purchased a thirty-ton sloop called the Isaac from the islanders and sailed for England in the second week of April 1696, apparently wishing to quietly slip back to their homes. The second party of approximately fifty made their way to Charleston in Carolina, the nearest English colony, 400 miles to the north. The third group consisted of Avery and twenty others, who paid £600 for a fifty-ton ocean-going sloop, the Sea
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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.
Samuel Bellamy, the man who would call himself the Robin Hood of the seas,
born March 18, 1689,
My birthday day :)
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.
By the year of Bellamy’s birth, three million Englishmen—roughly half the country’s population—were poised on or below the level of subsistence, and most lived in the countryside. Malnutrition and disease left their mark on this submerged half of England’s population: On average they stood six inches shorter and lived less than half as long as their middle- and upper-class countrymen.
The best guess is that he was from London, which historian Marcus Rediker estimates was home to nearly a third of the pirates of Vane’s generation. Bellamy also may have sailed from there; later in his pirate career, he once claimed to have been from London.
In 1700, London dominated England like no other time before or since. It had 550,000 residents, more than a tenth of the nation’s population, and fifteen times larger than England’s second city, Norwich. It was the center of trade, commerce, society, and politics for England’s growing empire. It was also far and away its greatest port.
Life in Wapping and the other poorer districts of London was dirty and dangerous. People often lived fifteen or twenty to a room, in cold, dimly lit, and unstable houses. There was no organized trash collection; chamber pots were dumped out of windows, splattering everyone and everything on the streets below. Manure from horses and other livestock piled up on the thoroughfares, as did the corpses of the animals themselves.
paupers were buried in mass graves, which remained open until fully occupied.
Disease was rampant. Eight thousand people moved to London each year, but the influx barely kept up with the mortality rate. Food poisoning and dysentery carried off on average a thousand a year, and more than eight thousand were consumed by fevers and convulsions. Measles and smallpox killed a thousand more, many of them children, most of whom were already ravaged by rickets and intestinal worms. Between a quarter and a third of all babies died in their first year of life, and barely half survived to see the age of sixteen.
The streets swarmed with parentless children, some of them orphaned by accidents or disease, others simply abandoned on the church steps by parents who were unable to feed them. Overwhelmed parish officials rented babies out to beggars for use as props for four pence (£.016) a day and sold hundreds of five- to eight-year-olds into seven years of slavery for twenty or thirty shillings (£1 to £1.5) apiece.
London’s water supplies were so unhealthy that the entire population drank beer instead, children included.
The deputies buried most pirates in shallow graves or turned them over to surgeons for dissection, but the prominent ones they covered in tar and placed in iron cages hung at prominent points along the river.
Other captains hired men called “crimps” who sought out drunk or indebted seamen and tried to persuade them to sign on in exchange for drinks or the payment of their debts. If and when that failed, particularly unscrupulous crimps simply handcuffed and kidnapped drunken sailors, locking them up overnight before selling them to merchant captains.
the press gang. Led by a naval officer, press gangs stalked the streets, rounding up any seamen they came across with the aid of clubs.
By 1700, Edward Thatch, the man who would become Blackbeard, was already an experienced seaman. He was born about 1680 in or around Bristol, England’s second-largest port and the center of its transatlantic trade. He was apparently from a reasonably comfortable family, possibly even a reputable one: He had received an education and so, unlike most of his fellow mariners, could read and write.
The small city of 20,000 was still ringed by medieval walls, but its downtown was now girded with stone quays, against which were tied scores of oceangoing vessels. Shops and warehouses overflowed with American goods. The city’s craftsmen grew prosperous supplying the merchants with woven cloth, cured provisions, and manufactured goods. Most of these products were sent straight back to the Americas, but some were loaded aboard ships bound for Africa, where local chiefs were happy to exchange them for slaves. The ships then carried the slaves to Barbados and Jamaica and their captains traded
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