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I first heard about Colin Woodward’s recently published book, The Republic of Pirates, on NPR. It must have been a good feature, because I immediately asked Julie My Love to buy me a copy. (Books are like drugs for me: I’m addicted to them, but I prefer to let others handle the finances.)
This is a non-fiction examination of the actual pirates of the Caribbean, drawn from first-hand accounts, contemporary court transcripts, and period publications. Woodward’s extensively footnoted and consistently entertaining writing, however, reveals that the Pirates of the Caribbean with whom we’re all familiar are a reasonable reflection of the reality.
This is evident early in the book, when Woodward describes one engagement in the legendary pirate career of Henry Avery.
Near the Indian coast, the pirates spotted a sail on the horizon. This turned out to be the Fath Mahmamadi, a ship larger than the Fancy, but also slower and armed with only six guns. The crew of the Fath Mahmamadi fired one pathetic three-gun salvo as the pirate ships gathered around them. The Fancy responded with a deafening twenty-three-gun broadside and a volley of musket fire. The Indian captain surrendered, the Fancy came alongside, and Avery’s crew poured onto their 350-ton prize. In the holds they found the proceeds of the Fath Mahmamadi’s trade in Mocha: £50,000 to £60,000 in gold and silver belonging to the ship’s owner, the merchant Abd-ul-Ghafur. It was an impressive haul, enough to purchase the Fancy fifty times over, but Avery wanted more. He placed the vessel under the control of a detachment of his men—a prize crew—and, together with his fellow captains, continued his pursuit of the great fleet.
Two days later, along the shores of eastern India, a lookout spotted another ship in the distance bound for the Indian port of Surat. The pirates soon caught up with what turned out to be the Ganj-i-sawai, a gigantic trading vessel that belonged to Grand Moghul Aurangzeb himself. She was far and away the largest ship operating out of Surat, with eighty guns, 400 muskets, and 800 able-bodied men aboard. Her captain, Muhammad Ibrahim, had reason to be confident of fending off the raiders, having more guns and more than twice as many men as the Fancy and the three American privateers combined. The stakes were high, however, for Ganj-i-sawai was heavily laden with passengers and treasure.
As soon as the Fancy came into range, Captain Ibrahim ordered a gun crew into action. They loaded their heavy weapon and rolled it out of its port. The gunner took aim, lit the fuse, and stood back with the rest of his team, awaiting the cannon’s recoil. Instead of a loud report and a burst of smoke, there came a horrifying flash. Owing to some internal defect, the heavy cannon exploded, sending shards in all directions. The gun crew was blown to bits. As Ibrahim was taking in the gruesome spectacle, the Fancy returned fire. One of her cannonballs struck the Ganj-i-sawai in the lower part of her mainmast, the most critical of locations. The mast partially collapsed, throwing sails and rigging into disarray and compounding the chaos aboard the ship. The loss of sail area meant the Ganj-i-sawai began to slow. Her pursuers closed in.
Swords drawn and muskets at the ready, over 100 pirates crouched behind the Fancy’s rails, waiting for the ships to come together. When they did, lines snapping, sails tearing, their wooden hulls moaning and creaking with the stress, Avery and company rushed over the side and onto the decks of the crippled vessel. [pp. 21-22]
Just like in the movies, Woodward takes his reader for a ride replete with action, romance, and humour.
The pirates, whom one witness said “pretended to be Robbin Hoods [sic] men,” also had a penchant for fancy dress and took the clothes of the wealthy passengers. They also seized a black slave and an Indian boy belonging to an Antiguan planter, but were prepared to let the remaining passengers and crew go. But one of Savage’s passengers, the nine- or ten-year-old child, John King, begged the pirates to take him with them. When his mother tried to stop him, King threatened her with violence and, according to Savage, “declared he would kill himself if he was restrained” from joining Bellamy’s crew. The pirates must have been amused by the little boy, dressed in silk stockings and fine leather shoes, for they took him aboard the Marianne. There were plenty of ten-year-old ship’s boys on naval and merchant ships, and now they had two of their own. To Mrs. King’s horror, her son took an oath of loyalty to the pirates, promising not to steal even a single piece of eight from the company, and sailed away with his new companions. [pp. 148-149]
All did not go so well for the young pirate, however, when, several months later the Whydah — the ship upon which the young master sailed — encountered a storm off Cape Cod.
As the huge seas tossed the ship closer and closer to the crashing surf, Sam Bellamy may well have remembered the wrecks of the Spanish treasure fleet, great hulls battered into kindling by violent, storm-driven surf. Bellamy knew where he was. In flashes of lightning, he could see the great cliffs of Eastham looming a hundred feet above the exploding waves. If they crashed here, there would be few survivors. The surf washed nearly to the feet of the cliffs, which rose precipitously to the tablelands, that windswept, sparsely inhabited plain separating the villagers of Eastham and Billingsgate from the sea. By midnight, he knew the Whydah’s half-ton anchors were the only hope of saving her.
The men struggled to follow the order as waves rolled over the deck. The helmsmen, their feet wide apart, spun the wheel, bringing the great ship’s bow face-to-face with the wind. The anchors splashed into the water and their heavy ropes began to play out. Everyone held their breath as the lines grew taught. There may have been a moment’s pause, as the Whydah briefly stopped drifting toward the foamy chaos behind them, but then they could feel the anchors dragging. The Whydah was doomed.
There was one last chance to save the crew, to do just as the men of the Mary Anne had done. They had to try to bring the vessel ashore gracefully, bow first, hopefully making it far enough through the violently tossing surf to give a swimmer some hope of getting ashore. Bellamy yelled out to the men to cut the anchor cables. As soon as the last strokes of their axes had fallen—the thick anchor ropes snapping free—Bellamy ordered the helmsmen to swing her all the way back around, to run face first into the beach. But the vessel didn’t turn. All watched in terror as the ship slipped backward, stern first, over thirty foot waves towards the white, misty chaos at the foot of the cliffs.
The Whydah ran aground with shocking force. The jolt likely shot any men in the rigging out into the deadly surf where they were alternately pounded against the sea bottom, then sucked back away from the beach by the undertow. Cannon broke free from their tackles and careened across the lower decks, crushing everyone in their path. One pirate was thrown across the deck so hard his shoulder bone became completely embedded in the handle of a pewter teapot. Little John King, the nine-year-old pirate volunteer, was crushed between decks, still wearing the silk stockings and expensive leather shoes his mother had dressed him in aboard the Bonetta months earlier. Within fifteen minutes, the violent motion of the surf brought the Whydah’s mainmast crashing down over the side. Waves broke over the decks and water poured into the bedlam of crashing cannon and barrels of cargo below decks. At dawn the Whydah’s hull broke apart, casting both the living and dead into the surf.
As the storm raged on through the morning hours, the ebbing tide left more and more bodies piled on the shore. Amidst the bloated, mangled corpses only two men stirred. One was John Julian, the Mosquito Indian who had served with Bellamy aboard his periaguas. The other was Thomas Davis, one of the carpenters forced from the St. Michael. Samuel Bellamy and some 160 other men—pirates and captives, whites, blacks, and Indians—had perished in the storm. [pp. 184-185]
If you enjoyed these select passages, you can purchase The Republic of Pirates on Amazon.
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