blue waters of the Caribbean Gulf Stream were swift and full of unpredictable currents; and the threat of tropical disease lurked in every watering pail. Sometimes even earthquakes shook the region. Above all else, nothing was as costly as the hurricanes.
Many pirate vessels and their consorts had a cyclical route of plundering called the ‘pirate round,’ sailing out of the West Indies, and up the American coastline as far as Newfoundland to escape the summer’s heat. Then in the winter, they’d sail southward to the Leeward Islands or Barbados, and lie in wait for the Christmas provision ships. Some of the later pirate crews would even sail to Brazil, Africa and over to the Indian Ocean, before returning to the West Indies to start the round over again. This took them out of the warm waters of the Caribbean during the most threatening months of the year, and often ensured that they wouldn’t get caught in the paths of the biggest storms.
But as we all know, sometimes hurricanes follow a path that takes them right up the eastern seaboard, and at any time of year, smaller storms, and Nor’easters can take their toll. The account that appeared in The General History of the Pyrates of two ferocious gales that pounded Captain Samuel Bellamy and his crew in the Whydah Galley off the coast of the South Carolina in early 1717 stands as a grim reminder. The writer says that during the first storm, the ship was nearly ‘quick going down into Hell,’ and sustained such damage that they were forced to keep the pumps running day and night to get rid of the seawater.
Several weeks later, as they were making their way off a lee shore around the treacherous shoals near Cape Cod, Rhode Island, the Whydah was caught in the second storm. Cape Cod had been Bellamy’s home before he took up piracy, and he often went back up there to visit. This time he was sailing at night with a small fleet of captured ships, one of which was ‘a pink’ named the Mary Anne. The master of the Mary Anne had been left on board his ship, and when the fleet was separated 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 w