eparated by high seas and blinding rain, the Mary Anne ran aground.
Seeing the ship’s light, but not the shoreline, the Whydah followed. It is believed that Bellamy and his crew were intentionally lured into shallow waters by the master of the Mary Anne, who deliberately ran his own vessel aground in order to trick the pirates into following him to their destruction. Whatever happened it was enough to doom the wounded Whydah, as the force of the fierce winds off the Atlantic continued to push the large square-rigged galley towards the shore. Several miles up the coast, she was blown into a rocky shoal, broken apart by the pounding breakers … and went down.
The boastful Samuel Bellamy, who spoke what the hearts and minds of many pirates believed, had just days before vehemently proclaimed, “I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field, and this my conscience tells me…” But on that stormy April night, off the coast of Cape Cod, Bellamy went down with his ship, along with 144 members of his crew. It was every pirate’s nightmare come true. As news of the tragedy spread throughout the Pirates Republic, it was quite a sobering moment.
Ironically, more pirate ships were destroyed by such storms and other ‘acts of God,’ or by the pirates, themselves, than were ever captured by the British Royal Navy before 1718. Contemporary author Peter Earle points out in The Pirate Wars (2003) that during the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Jacobite Rebellion, Britain was reluctant to send ships to the West Indies, because they were needed elsewhere. Many of the pirates were also Jacobite sympathizers, who would attack any British ship that sailed into the region. It was under those circumstances that the privateers and the pirates kept the shipping lanes open, fought their own private wars with the Spanish, and turned profits from stolen Spanish goods into their own local ‘pirate economy’.
For years, that was the order of things. After all, as David Cordingly tells us in Under The Black Flag (1996), even when the young Welch privateer, Henry Morgan first arrived in the West Indies in 1654, he was part of a British expedition sent out to capture Spanish Hispaniola. When the attempt failed, they decided to attack the less-fortified island of Jamaica. They were successful, and Jamaica became a British settlement that evolved into one of the most important bases of operations for the Royal Navy against the Spanish during those early years.
Morgan was given letters of marquee (commissions) from the Governor of Jamaica and carried out many raids against Spanish possessions in Central America, with the blessings of the Cromwell and the English Crown. Then at age thirty-two, Henry Morgan was made Admiral of the original ‘Brethren of the Coast,’ a loose and diverse association of French, Dutch and English privateers and pirates from Tortuga, who worked together to carry out raids on Spanish ports and towns, rather than attack ships. They operated under a strict, but remarkably democratic code known as the ‘Law of the Coast,’ and shared the spoils of their efforts. Many of these ‘buccaneers,’ as they were also called, were excellent marksmen who carried French muskets rather than swords and cutlasses, as later pirates did.
During those years, the war with Spain was rekindled several times, and the French were also hostile. At one point, the settlement at Nassau had been plundered and burned three times, and the people there were left to fend for themselves. But according to Peter Earle, since there were only occasional and minor complaints about a few of the ‘masterless men’ like Benjamin Hornigold at Nassau, England was not that interested in ‘small scale villains, so far away.’
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So arose the pinnacle of the Pirates Republic, with its infamous circle of captain cohorts, Henry Jennings, Ben Hornigold, Bart Roberts, Sam Bellamy, Charles Vane and Edward Teach (or Thatch), as well as many smaller oper