ators like Calico Jack Rackham (with Anne Bonny and Mary Read) and James Bonny. But after several seasons of ‘lawlessness,’ London began to wonder if the Bahamas might not be turning into another Madagascar.
The King’s Pardon in 1718 created a short period of relief for British authorities. Some of the outlaws accepted the reprieve, came ashore and stayed there, including Ben Hornigold and Henry Jennings. The rest of them were hell-bent upon ‘sailing under their own flags.’ Attacks against virtually all seagoing vessels along the coasts, and in the shipping lanes of the Atlantic seaboard and Eastern Caribbean reached new heights between 1719 and 1720. When the British finally decided to act, they were decisive. This time, many Royal Naval ships were sent, and authorities began soliciting aid from local captains. Even newly reformed pirates (including Ben Hornigold) became pirate hunters. Suddenly there was a local threat, just as formidable as any hurricane or Spanish fleet … right on the doorstep of the Pirates Republic.
Late in the game, some of the pirates like Captain Bartholomew Roberts and his crew had extended their operations to the coast of West Africa and as far east as the Indian Ocean. But off Cape Lopez, Gabon, in February of 1722, Robert’s gallant ship, Royal Fortune met its fate at the hands of Royal Navy Captain Challoner Ogle, commander of the Swallow. Roberts lost his life, and two hundred sixty-two pirates from two pirate ships were captured in a humiliating defeat. But the body of ‘Black Bart,’ still dressed in his scarlet waistcoat, was thrown over-board by the members of his crew, rather than let it be taken by the British.
Although the last execution of a pirate from the Golden Age on an island in the Indian Ocean didn’t take place until 1730, David Cordingly writes, ‘Of twenty-seven trials held between 1700 and 1728, in only five cases were the executions restricted to the ringleaders…,’ so as the total number of pirates operating in the Atlantic in 1720 was only about two thousand strong, the last days of the Pirates Republic were swift and final.
It’s also interesting to note that when the first city of Port Royal founded in 1650 was completely destroyed in the summer of 1692, four years after Henry Morgan’s death, nearly two thousand lives were lost, and everything in the old city was washed away from its sand foundations by the tsunami. Many to this day believe that such a natural disaster was a form of divine judgment on what had been a hellish ‘pirates’ den of iniquity.’
Although the old town, which remains underwater, was never rebuilt, Port Royal continued as the seat of commerce in Jamaica. The new town survived a fire in 1703, a major hurricane in 1722, and several more earthquakes, before it’s final decline. Nassau was spared the earthquake, survived the fall of the pirate economy, and eventually recovered from frequent abandonment by aggressive British colonial interests.
The robber barons of the Pirates Republic would never again rule the waves, but pirates would, at various times in American history, sail again as heroes. The Patriot, John Paul Jones sought to deter English shipping during the Revolution. Countless others were captured and detained as pirates in British prison ships off the coasts of New England during the War for Independence. Later, the French pirate, Jean Laffite aided General Andrew Jackson in the battle against the British at New Orleans in 1814.
“The Law of the Coast” also survives, and in the early fifties, a group of seven seamen from Chile decided to revisit the tradition. Searching for a means to restore that early spirit of democratic egalitarianism, and preserve the skills and joys of seafaring, they revived the name and formed a fraternity, adopting principles of conduct much like the custom of the coast that guided the original ‘brethren of the coast’ in the seventeenth century.
As word spread out from Chile, the association quickly grew into an international organization known as Brotherhood of the Coast.‘Tables’ (memberships of at least seven sailing 