CHAPTER III
THE BUCCANEERS IN THE VIRGIN ISLES
It was due to peculiar circumstances that the Virgin Islands and their harbors became neutral ground—or, rather, neutral waters—wherein the corsairs could be sure of safety, and where they never harmed the inhabitants or such peaceful craft as might come to trade or to seek refuge.
With the European countries constantly at one another’s throats, the men without a country, flying no flag but the Jolly Roger, could always find safety among these disputed isles, and were always sure of a welcome. The hated Spaniards were the chief sufferers from the pirates’ attacks, and while they might virtually be at peace with Spain, yet the other powers saw no real reason to interfere with the pirates’ activities merely to aid an hereditary enemy who might at any moment see fit to start another war. England, as ever, desired the supremacy of the seas, and, hard put to it to maintain her grip in the Antilles, she was quite willing that the Dons should be kept in check by fair means or foul. France was too busy with more serious matters to bother about the freebooters in the far-off Caribbean. The thrifty Dutch found it more profitable to trade with the pirates than to fight them, and the Danes,—with the adventurous blood of the Vikings in their veins,—no doubt had more or less of a fellow-feeling for the sea-robbers.
And so, although the governments of Europe sent forth royal decrees, bearing most impressive seals, gay with colored ribbons and engrossed with lengthy words and involved sentences, and on parchment frowned upon the corsairs, yet no real effort was made to enforce the law. So the buccaneers laughed at the “scraps of paper” and went merrily and virtually unchecked upon their way.
It may be well here to call attention to the fact that we should not confuse the buccaneers with ordinary pirates, for while buccaneers were pirates, yet pirates were not necessarily buccaneers; and even in their piracy the buccaneers or “Brethren of the Main,” as they called themselves, were by no means the conventional pirates of fiction.
Nearly all of them started on their careers as privateers with royal warrant to prey upon the enemy’s ships. Then, having found the game to their liking and with no other means of earning a livelihood when peace was declared, they kept it up, regardless of such trifling matters as treaties of peace between kings and emperors several thousands of miles distant. With a few exceptions, they continued their depredations in much the same manner and along the same lines as they had conducted their privateering ventures.
The British buccaneers—and the majority were of that nationality—never attacked a vessel flying the thrice-crossed flag of England; they did not molest the Dutch, who were ever friendly, for as long as there were plenty of Spaniards, Portuguese, and Frenchmen for the plucking they were quite content to pick and choose. The French buccaneers were perhaps a little less squeamish, while the Dutch and the Spanish apparently preyed on friend and foe alike.
But, no matter what their nationality or origin, all left certain places free from molestation, and among these the favorites were the Virgin Isles, the island of Tortuga off Haiti, the islets about Santo Domingo, Aves Island off Venezuela, the Caymans south of Jamaica, Jamaica itself, and the Bay Islands off Honduras. These islands, especially the Virgins, became known far and wide as lairs of the reckless sea-rovers, whither none dared to follow and where they could, for a space, cast aside all fear of shipwreck, murder, and sudden death and live in peace.
Callous, case-hardened, and ruffianly as they were, yet they knew well which side their bread was buttered on, and they made and enforced strict laws and discipline in their retreats. The natives’ lives and property were sacred, the towns were patrolled by armed men selected by the buccaneer chiefs, and death, swift and sure, was the punishment for any infringement of rules, or a violation of the hospitality accorded. Many a drunken pirate was pistoled out of hand by his own comrades for taking, or attempting to take, liberties with some Virgin Island maid. Many a buccaneer has kicked and writhed as he swung to his ship’s yard arm as a penalty for picking a quarrel with some citizen of St. John or St. Barts, and more than one corsair has been cut down without mercy and his body thrown to the waiting sharks because he refused to pay for drinks or commodities purchased in the island shops or bar-rooms.
Strange, incomprehensible, quixotic men, these reckless buccaneers. Cruel, relentless, unprincipled, and yet with their own inexorable laws, their own code of honor, their streak of gallantry and their bravery which, despite their sins and their wickedness, we cannot but admire.
We cannot understand them; it would baffle the most expert psychoanalyist to fathom the workings of their brains; but we must not judge them by modern standards. In their day piracy was a profession rather than a crime and, while openly frowned upon by the powers, privately abetted and encouraged. Indeed, it was looked upon rather as a gentleman’s profession, and not a few gentlemen were engaged in it. To us these men appear bloodthirsty monsters, but we must bear in mind that in their day life was cheap and torture was legalized as a punishment for the most trivial crimes.
Such pleasantries as burning holes through liars’ tongues, cutting off eavesdroppers’ ears, branding the palms of thieves’ hands, or putting out eyes were in the same category as ten days’ imprisonment or ten dollars’ fine to-day. And death in fiendish forms was meted out for violations of the law which in our day we should think severely punished with six months in a modern jail with such accessories as motion pictures, baseball games, and musical concerts in lieu of rack, wheel, and thumb-screw.
In the days when the Virgins were a haven for pirates the bodies of men hanging in chains and surrounded by carrion crows were almost an essential part of the waterside landscape in all seaports, and attracted no more attention than an illuminated advertisement on Broadway does at the present time.
No doubt the country people who came to town for a holiday or to do their marketing, stared with bulging eyes at the rotting corpses swaying in the wind and pointed them out to their young hopefuls as awful examples of the end they would come to if they ran away to become sea-rovers, just as to-day our country cousins stare and gape at the sights of the metropolis. And unquestionably the denizens of the ports snickered and made rude jokes about the “rubes” and “bumpkins” who were such “jays” as to stare at a pirate’s body in chains.
But such a fate overtook the buccaneers only when, by some mischance, they forgot themselves and overstepped the bounds of propriety; for as a rule they had a peculiar sense of patriotism—although men without a country, legally—and seldom troubled persons or ships of the land of their birth. And as long as they confined their activities to harassing hereditary enemies, even though official peace might have been established, their countrymen put tongues in cheeks, figuratively speaking, and let well enough alone.
Indeed, from a diplomatic and economic point of view it was not a bad plan to have a score or two of corsairs preying on a competitor nation’s commerce, or within call in case of war. No small proportion of the buccaneer ships were fitted out and partly owned by law-abiding and highly respectable gentlemen and merchants who would have become apoplectic with righteous indignation if any one had dared assume that they were even morally in sympathy with piracy.
Many of the buccaneers were exceedingly interesting characters, and the pity is that, aside from Esquemelling and one or two others, they had no chroniclers, no biographers to leave us a true account of their lives, to give us a real insight into their natures, their ideals, and their aims, and to thrill us with their adventures. A few have become famous, have lived on in history and legend; but doubtless many more, whose careers were far more thrilling and whose characters were far more interesting, have been completely forgotten. Now and then some bit of tradition, some fragment of story makes us wish we knew more of them.
It is hard to imagine a swashbuckling, blood-spilling pirate, spending his leisure hours in writing poetry, but it was no other than Foster, a pirate who served under Morgan and whom the famous Sir Harry one time rebuked for his ruthlessness, that penned “Sonnyettes of Love,” which, although they may not be good verse, are certainly more intelligible than much of our modern poetry, and express delightful and tender sentiments.
No doubt the screams of captive Spanish wives and daughters maltreated by his ruffianly crew furnished the author with inspiration and turned his mind to thoughts of shady Devon lanes or ivy-clad Surrey cottages and buxom, fair-haired, red-cheeked English lassies. But this is mere speculation; all we know is that he was a romantic soul and preferred writing tender effusions of love, in his cramped, painstaking hand, to carousing ashore and making merry with negro wenches.
Old Teach, the Blackbeard associated with the castle in St. Thomas, was a most interesting type, a man such as even Poe or Stevenson could not have created out of whole cloth or vivid imagination. Born as Edward Teach, in Bristol, England,—a port, by the way, where many a redoubtable freebooter was recruited,—the youngster in due course of time became a sailor and voyaged, among other places, to the West Indies. To be sure, the heyday of buccaneering was then over, but still, in 1716, there were many freebooters afloat upon the Caribbean. Having heard, in Port Royal and other notorious resorts, glowing tales of the pirate’s life, Edward decided that life aboard a merchantman was a very unattractive and unprofitable one and that piracy was the most promising get-rich-quick scheme.
Regardless of his failings, we must admit that young Teach would have won the highest esteem of an efficiency expert (had such beings existed in his day), for he believed implicitly that a thing worth doing at all was worth doing well and bent all his energies to practising his profession in a thorough manner. As an example of the rewards or successes attendant upon application to an idea, Teach was a model, for within a space of two years from the time he announced his intention of turning corsair he could lay undisputed claim to being the world’s greatest pirate.
Moreover, the amiable Edward was a firm believer in publicity and in the spectacular. Indeed, he very evidently was far in advance of his time, and to-day he would have brought untold joy to the heart of a film director and would be drawing a far larger income than he ever enjoyed through his chosen career. If ever there was an original of the buccaneer of melodrama and lurid fiction, it must have been Teach; only, no author or playwright would ever dare draw a character as bizarre, repulsive, and hideously ferocious as this Prince of Pirates.
Of immense size and coarse and brutal aspect, Teach nurtured a huge black beard which covered his ugly face to his eyes, and which, falling to his waist, was braided into innumerable small pigtails, the ends being tied together over his ears. His hair, also of inky hue, fell to his shoulders and almost met his beetling, bushy black eyebrows over his forehead. As though not ferocious-looking enough naturally, he was accustomed, when making an attack, to stick burning slow-matches in hair and beard, which surrounded his fierce face and gleaming eyes with a ring of fire and smoke and, according to a contemporaneous description, “glowed most horribly.” Unlike many of his notorious predecessors and compeers, Blackbeard was no dandy. His favorite costume was a long-skirted, deep-cuffed coat, much the worse for wear and dribbled liquor; a rough shirt open to the waist and exposing a chest as hairy as a gorilla’s; short, wide breeches, and low seaman’s shoes. Stockings he usually dispensed with, and a battered felt hat of the type made familiar by stage robbers crowned his ebon mane, while, to complete his get-up, a pair of cutlasses and a knife or two hung at his belt and half a dozen pistols were stuck through his sash.
And, in truth, Blackbeard’s character was as ferocious as his looks, and his soul as black as his whiskers. There was not a single redeeming feature about him, unless it was his sheer courage, and altogether he was a despicable scoundrel. On more than one occasion he robbed and murdered his own men, and he cared not a whit whether prizes he took were flying the flag of his mother country or of another. To him, torture and butchery were mere pastimes, and one day, just as a joke, he placed seventeen of his own crew on a tiny desert island, promising to return at intervals to see how long they could survive without food or water. Fortunately for the castaways, Teach was unable to carry out this, to him, interesting experiment in human endurance, for another corsair,—and a rank amateur, at that,—Major Stede Bonnet, rescued the marooned pirates.
No doubt time hung heavy on the pirates’ hands at times as they sailed aimlessly about waiting for a prize, but those upon Blackbeard’s ship could always be sure that tedium would not be their lot. As an entertainer Teach was a marvel, albeit his ideas of amusement were not always appreciated by others and he must have devoted a considerable portion of his spare time to inventing new schemes to relieve the monotony between fights.
Once, when his ship was becalmed on a blistering hot day and no sail broke the scintillating horizon, the resourceful Blackbeard appeared on deck hatless, coatless, and in his bare feet, and proposed that his shipmates should make a little “hell of their own,” adding that, as they were all bound for the lower regions eventually, it would be interesting to learn in advance who would be able to bear it the longest. As his crew well knew that any imitation devised would be nothing to the inferno their captain would raise if they declined his invitation, they rather hesitatingly and half-heartedly fell in with his plan. Thereupon Teach and his men—some of whom had to be urged by sundry well-aimed kicks and blows—descended into the ship’s hold and, having securely fastened the hatches, set fire to several kegs of sulphur and seated themselves upon the stone ballast.
We can well imagine that in the ill-smelling, unventilated hold a very creditable imitation of the infernal regions soon resulted, while Blackbeard might well have served as a model for the Evil One himself. At any rate, the officers and crew soon decided that even if they were on the straight road to perdition they had no desire to arrive ahead of time, and, choking and gasping, they broke through the hatches and climbed on deck. But not so with old Teach. Long after the last of his men had deserted the hold, he remained, seated on the stones, breathing the brimstone fumes, and throughout the rest of his days it was his greatest pride that he had been the last to give in.
Indeed, when one of his officers informed him that he had looked like a half-hanged man as he emerged, Teach seemed greatly pleased and declared that at some future time he was going to make a test to see who could dangle the longest from a noose without being wholly hanged.
Blackbeard believed in keeping himself before the public and in not allowing even his friends to forget who he was or what his character, as illustrated by an incident in his career when he was entertaining his own sailing-master and a pilot in the cabin of his sloop, which was at anchor in one of the Virgin Island harbors.
After a time conversation lagged and Teach, blowing out the solitary candle, cocked his pistols, and, crossing his arms, fired point-blank toward his companions. The unfortunate sailing-master was shot through the knee and permanently crippled, but in the darkness of the cabin the other shot went wild and the pilot escaped with nothing worse than a fright. When, after this pleasantry, the candle was re-lit and the two indignant seamen demanded an explanation, Teach cursed them fluently and at length, and finished by explaining that they would forget who he was if he didn’t shoot one of them now and then.
Strangely enough, Blackbeard, despite his unattractive face and still more unattractive personality, appears to have been a good deal of a lady-killer, figuratively if not literally, for he managed to win the hearts and hands of fourteen maidens whom he married. History fails to record their subsequent fate or whether Teach devised some speedy form of divorce to suit himself. The fourteenth wife was a “most charming young creature of sixteen,” if we are to believe those who wrote of her at first hand.
Blackbeard’s courtships would have made entertaining reading had they been recorded, and it would be interesting to know what there was about him that appealed so strongly to feminine tastes, but chroniclers evidently considered such matters too trivial to record.
Of course it would be expected that a man of Edward Teach’s character and attainments would die with his boots on and fighting to the last, and he was not one to disappoint the lover of lurid adventure. In the end he completely fulfilled everything expected of him. So great a menace had he become to shipping, especially to the merchant marine of the British colonies in America, that the powers that were demanded that his activities be brought to a speedy end. Accordingly, the Governor of Virginia, in 1718, posted divers and sundry notices to the effect that forty pounds sterling would be paid as a reward for the capture of any pirate captain, and that Edward Teach, otherwise known as “Blackbeard,” was worth one hundred pounds to the authorities, whether he be brought in dead or alive. In those days such a sum was a small fortune, enough to tempt any brave and hardy soul to have a try for it, but the first to camp on Blackbeard’s trail was Lieutenant Maynard of H. M. S. Pearl. By some means never fully revealed, Maynard learned that the redoubtable pirate was enjoying a brief vacation in a secluded cove near Ocracoke Inlet (North Carolina). Gossip had it that the Governor of Carolina was on far too friendly terms with Teach, and that no small portion of that worthy gentleman’s wealth had found its way into the governor’s pockets, owing to the pirate’s appreciation of being left undisturbed in his chosen haven on the Carolina coast.
Whatever the truth may be, the young naval officer started forth in a sloop he had fitted out and manned, intent on Blackbeard’s capture or death. Although the pirate was apprised of the lieutenant’s approach, he scorned to move from his retreat, but spent the night before the expected visit in striving to outdrink a friendly merchant skipper who had dropped in for a call. Toward daylight, however, Teach’s men saw Maynard approaching, and the pirate, realizing that the officer really meant business, cut his cables, hoisted the Jolly Roger, and let his vessel drift ashore. Here, in the shoal water, he felt sure the sloop could not follow, and as, oddly enough, neither vessel carried cannon and it would be a hand-to-hand conflict, Blackbeard’s ruse was worthy of him.
But the one hundred pounds still glittered before the lieutenant’s eyes, and, determined to do or die, he cast everything possible overboard, including the water-casks, set his sails, and headed directly for the pirate vessel. Thereupon Blackbeard, with his slow-matches smoking and sputtering in hair and beard, “hailed him in a most rude manner,” cursed him, defied him, and, to show his utter contempt, stood in plain view upon his ship’s rails and drank a goblet of liquor to Maynard’s damnation. Finding that, even with everything movable jettisoned, his sloop still drew too much water to grapple with the pirate, the lieutenant manned small boats and attempted to board Blackbeard’s craft. He was met with so hot a welcome of musketry and pistols that twenty-nine men were killed and wounded, and the boats retreated to the sloop.
Meanwhile the tide was rising, and Maynard’s sloop was constantly drifting closer to the pirate. Still confident of success, the lieutenant ordered all his men below, he alone remaining on deck with the helmsman. Presently, the sloop grated and bumped against the other vessel, and immediately the pirates began to pelt her with fire-grenades. Then, drawing cutlasses and pistols, they sprang over the bulwarks and swarmed upon the sloop’s decks in true melodramatic piratical style. Up from the hold poured Maynard’s men, and hot and furious was the battle. Teach and the lieutenant were face to face. Both fired at the same instant, at point-blank range, but while the officer dodged, Teach was less fortunate, and Maynard’s bullet buried itself in the pirate’s face.
With blood streaming from the wound and dripping from the braided ends of his beard, the maddened pirate flung down his pistol, whipped out his cutlass, and, swearing horribly, leaped at the officer, who also had drawn his sword. Then followed a duel, a hand-to-hand struggle to the death between the gigantic, cursing, horrible-featured pirate and the young officer—a contest between brute strength and trained swordsmanship. Chasing each other back and forth across the blood-covered deck, stumbling and tripping over dead and wounded men, they hacked and parried and thrust. Again and again the officer’s sword went home, more than once the pirate’s cutlass found its mark, until at last a terrific blow of Blackbeard’s heavy blade snapped his opponent’s light sword at the hilt and the lieutenant was at the pirate’s mercy.
With a blood-curdling yell and a terrible oath, Teach swung his cutlass and struck with all his failing strength, expecting to cut his enemy down with a single blow. But Maynard, leaping back, escaped, the stroke falling short and merely slicing off several fingers from the officer’s hand. Before Teach could strike again, ere he could raise his arm, one of Maynard’s men leaped forward, his naval hanger flashed, and the pirate chief staggered back, his head lolling on one side, his neck half severed. But even then, with his life-blood spouting like a crimson fountain from the gaping wound, with his head rolling horribly on his shoulders, Blackbeard swung his cutlass and with a mighty blow cut the brave sailor down.
Knowing his doom was sealed, realizing his death was but a matter of moments, the pirate was still game. Kicking off his shoes, that his feet might not slip upon the bloody planks, he backed to the bulwarks, fighting off a half-dozen men who fell upon him. Dripping with blood from a score of wounds, holding his all but decapitated head in place with one hand, he roared like a maddened bull, drew a pistol from his sash, cocked it, and with a last superhuman effort aimed at the oncoming men. But the piece was never fired; before his finger could pull the trigger, before a swinging blade could reach him, his hands fell at his sides, his head dropped forward in ghastly fashion on his blood-drenched beard, and he slumped to the deck, dead.
Those of the pirate crew still alive had leaped into the water; the fight was over, the battle won, the notorious, inhuman Blackbeard was no more. Cutting the sinews and muscles that still kept Teach’s head and body together, the victorious Maynard suspended the gruesome trophy at his sloop’s bowsprit end, and with thirteen captured pirates under hatches, sailed into Bath Town, North Carolina, where the unlucky thirteen were promptly hanged and Lieutenant Maynard received his well-merited and hard-won reward.
Oddly enough, the one man of Blackbeard’s crew who escaped unscathed was his sailing-master, Israel Hands, the selfsame man whom Teach had wounded in the knee a short time previously, and who, owing to his late captain’s practical joke, was ashore nursing his injured leg at the time of Maynard’s attack.