Treasure Hunting and Pirates
To encounter a pirate craft was an episode almost commonplace and often
more sordid than picturesque. Many of these sea rogues were thieves with
small stomach for cutlasses and slaughter. They were of the sort that
overtook Captain John Shattuck sailing home from Jamaica in 1718 when he
reported his capture by one Captain Charles Vain, "a Pyrat" of 12 guns and
120 men who took him to Crooked Island, plundered him of various articles,
stripped the brig, abused the crew, and finally let him go. In the same
year the seamen of the Hopewell related that near Hispaniola they met with
pirates who robbed and ill-treated them and carried off their mate because
they had no navigator.
Ned Low, a gentleman rover of considerable notoriety, stooped to
filch the stores and gear from a fleet of fourteen poor fishermen of Cape
Sable. He had a sense of dramatic values, however, and frequently
brandished his pistols on deck, besides which, as set down by one of his
prisoners, "he had a young child in Boston for whom he entertained such
tenderness that on every lucid interval from drinking and revelling, I
have seen him sit down and weep plentifully."
A more satisfying figure was Thomas Pounds, who was taken by the
sloop Mary, sent after him from Boston in 1689. He was discovered in
Vineyard Sound, and the two vessels fought a gallant action, the pirate
flying a red flag and refusing to strike. Captain Samuel Pease of the Mary
was mortally wounded, while Pounds, this proper pirate, strode his
quarter-deck and waved his naked sword, crying, "Come on board, ye dogs,
and I will strike YOU presently." This invitation was promptly accepted by
the stout seamen from Boston, who thereupon swarmed over the bulwark and
drove all hands below, preserving Thomas Pounds to be hanged in public.
In 1703 John Quelch, a man of resource, hoisted what he called "Old
Roger" over the Charles--a brigantine which had been equipped as a
privateer to cruise against the French of Acadia. This curious flag of his
was described as displaying a skeleton with an hour-glass in one hand and
"a dart in the heart with three drops of blood proceeding from it in the
other." Quelch led a mutiny, tossed the skipper overboard, and sailed for
Brazil, capturing several merchantmen on the way and looting them of rum,
silks, sugar, gold dust, and munitions. Rashly he came sailing back to
Marblehead, primed with a plausible yarn, but his men talked too much when
drunk and all hands were jailed. Upon the gallows Quelch behaved
exceedingly well, "pulling off his hat and bowing to the spectators,"
while the somber Puritan merchants in the crowd were, many of them,
quietly dealing in the merchandise fetched home by pirates who were lucky
enough to steer clear of the law.
This was a shady industry in which New York took the more active
part, sending out supplies to the horde of pirates who ravaged the waters
of the Far East and made their haven at Madagascar, and disposing of the
booty received in exchange. Governor Fletcher had dirtied his hands by
protecting this commerce and, as a result, Lord Bellomont was named to
succeed him. Said William III, "I send you, my Lord, to New York, because
an honest and intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down, and because
I believe you to be such a man."
Such were the circumstances in which Captain William Kidd,
respectable master mariner in the merchant service, was employed by Lord
Bellomont, royal Governor of New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts,
to command an armed ship and harry the pirates of the West Indies and
Madagascar. Strangest of all the sea tales of colonial history is that of
Captain Kidd and his cruise in the Adventure-Galley. His name is reddened
with crimes never committed, his grisly phantom has stalked through the
legends and literature of piracy, and the Kidd tradition still has magic
to set treasure-seekers exploring almost every beach, cove, and headland
from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet if truth were told, he never cut a
throat or made a victim walk the plank. He was tried and hanged for the
trivial offense of breaking the head of a mutinous gunner of his own crew
with a wooden bucket. It was even a matter of grave legal doubt whether he
had committed one single piratical act. His trial in London was a farce.
In the case of the captured ships he alleged that they were sailing under
French passes, and he protested that his privateering commission justified
him, and this contention was not disproven. The suspicion is not wanting
that he was condemned as a scapegoat because certain noblemen of England
had subscribed the capital to outfit his cruise, expecting to win rich
dividends in gold captured from the pirates he was sent to attack. Against
these men a political outcry was raised, and as a result Captain Kidd was
sacrificed. He was a seaman who had earned honorable distinction in
earlier years, and fate has played his memory a shabby trick.
It was otherwise with Blackbeard, most flamboyant of all colonial
pirates, who filled the stage with swaggering success, chewing
wine-glasses in his cabin, burning sulphur to make his ship seem more like
hell, and industriously scourging the whole Atlantic coast. Charleston
lived in terror of him until Lieutenant Maynard, in a small sloop, laid
him alongside in a hammer-and-tongs engagement and cut off the head of
Blackbeard to dangle from the bowsprit as a trophy.
Back to: Plymouth and New England Colonies
