“The Strongest Man Carries the Day,”

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“The Strongest Man Carries the Day,” Life in New Providence, 1716-1717

Posted on July 26, 2015 by David Fictum under Colonial History, Pirate History

Introduction

By 1716, New Providence stood as a stronghold for pirates. Since past Bahamian residents and governments allowed pirates to enter and use their harbor for generations, this news surprised few among people familiar with New World maritime activity. John Graves, a former customs collector in Nassau, published a prediction in 1707 that the Bahamas would become a, “Shelter for Pyrates, if left without good Government and some Strength.” He further predicted, “that one small Pyrat with Fifty Men that are acquainted with the Inhabitants (which too many of them are) shall and will Ruin that Place, and be assisted by the loose Inhabitants; who hitherto have never been Prosecuted to effect, for Aiding, Abetting, and Assisting the said Villains with Provision.”1 Six years later, Grave’s predictions came true.

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In the past decade, a premium channel television program, a billion-dollar video game franchise, and popular press publications all helped revive public awareness and interest in the Bahamas and its pirate past. These shows, games, and books are consistent in the manner they present the history of New Providence. In telling the stories of the pirates, the narratives usually centered on captains, their crews, and the British officials that confronted them. The recent portrayals of Nassau tend to follow what Hollywood and artistic mediums has done for generations. The romanticized image of the typical pirate base set at a remote Caribbean settlement features a group of wooden post-and-beam frame buildings, built near an elegant beach, and populated with pirates gallivanting with attractive women day and night. This common media depiction, while appealing to general audiences, is two-dimensional. This weak caricature does not delve deep into understanding what New Providence was like in 1716-1717, when Nassau’s pirate population was at its peak.

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To understand Nassau and the Bahamas in the 1710s requires an understanding of its geography. According to a writer on the history and conditions of the British colonies in 1708, New Providence measured twenty-eight miles at its longest points and eleven miles at its widest.2 Though the Bahamas has thousands of islands, New Providence stood as the center of power and population for the entire archipelago. This situation dates back well into the seventeenth century. Not long after the English began to settle the island, the core of the Bahama’s population center moved from the larger island of Eleuthera to New Providence. Sailors soon recognized the island as the center of the Bahamas. The maritime pilotage book, The English Pilot, the Fourth Book, first published in 1698 with several new editions in the early eighteenth century, described New Providence as, “the chief of all the Bahama Islands.”3

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Nassau’s harbor on New Providence presented the best harbor for trade vessels in the Bahamas. Other islands did feature their own harbors, though none of them could accommodate large-sized vessels. Royal Island could harbor vessels of one hundred tons, but offered no sizeable water source. Hockin Islands allowed vessels of seventy tons or less. The most viable harbor after Nassau was Harbour Island. This small island’s bay dropped to eighteen or nineteen feet at low tide and featured an easily defended narrow entrance, but could only receive vessels of two hundred tons or smaller. Meanwhile, New Providence offered a large harbor that accommodated vessels of three to five hundred tons, provided fresh water via its shade-covered ponds and rock reservoirs that captured rainwater, and sat on the edge of a deep, navigable underwater canyon.4 Nassau offered a convenient harbor for vessels blown off the coast of Florida or the northern British colonies. John Graves said, “Upward [of] Fourteen Sail in a Year come into Providence Harbour for Shelter.” When these vessels took shelter in Nassau, some local Bahamians kept stocks of supplies they could sell to stranded mariners.5

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The harbor of Nassau resided between the northeastern corner of New Providence and a smaller islet called Hogg Island.† This small, narrower tree-covered island, ran about four or five miles in length parallel to New Providence’s shore. The town of Nassau sat across the harbor from Hogg Island, just east of the town’s fort, and to the north of a large steep hill. Between Hogg Island and New Providence sat Nassau’s deep harbor with a depth of at least four fathoms (twenty-four feet). Within this harbor, hundreds of vessels could anchor, five hundred of them by one estimate. Oldmixon bitingly said the harbor could hold the entirety of the English Royal Navy.6 While a force of ships equal in number to the navy might anchor at Nassau, only the smaller navy vessels could have enter into this harbor because of a shallow area at the eastern end of the harbor and a sand bar at the western entrance prevented any ship larger than one of the Navy’s fourth-rate ships of the line from anchoring at Nassau. A sand bar with a depth of eight feet projected from the western end of Hogg Island, called West Point. At the end of the sand bar, directly in front of Nassau’s fort, stood a small channel of about two cables lengths (1,200 feet) in width. The channel offered an avenue around the bar. The waters near the fort also offered a sandy anchorage of eighteen feet at low tide and twenty feet during the spring tide. Even with the help of this deeper channel, a vessel with a large draft could not pass the bar nor the channel into the harbor between New Providence and Hogg Island.7

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Nassau’s harbor, besides possessing the deepest anchorage in the Bahamas, also commanded a strategic position between Britain’s colonies on the eastern coast of America and the rest of the Caribbean to the south. John Graves described the Bahamas as being, “the very Center between Carolina and Jamaica.”8 It took little time to sail from New Providence to several significant ports. It took three days to travel between Nassau and the city of Havana and only twenty-four hours to reach the coast of Cuba. The trip from New Providence to Charleston took seven days and ten days to sail back from Charleston.9 Vessels went to Nassau frequently enough that the English Pilot included several sets of instructions for sailing to New Providence.10 Most importantly, the Bahamas sat astride the Old Bahama Channel that flowed across the northeastern coast of Cuba, the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, and the New Bahama Channel on Florida’s eastern coast.‡ Each of these three channels featured heavy ship traffic. A vessel could strike at merchant ships traveling in these maritime corridors and retreat to the nearby protection of Nassau’s harbor or, if using a shallow-drafted vessel, hide at one of the many other islands in the Bahamas. With New Providence providing a significant shelter to trading vessels and raiders, control of Nassau was crucial, and made its control by pirates in the 1710s distressing to many colonial governments.

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The Pirates: Their Origins and Numbers

The use of the Bahamas as an undisputed base for pirate operations began several months after the War of Spanish Succession ended. The earliest pirate raid from New Providence after the war, with a known date, came in August of 1713 when John Cockram led twenty men in a canoe or a periauger to the coast of Florida. For some of Cockram’s men, sailing to Florida was a familiar activity. Bahamians held a reputation for wrecking on the Florida coast, meaning they went and found wrecked ships from which they salvaged valuable goods or anything of use. Cockram and his small crew managed to take plunder worth £2,000 in their short cruise.11 Other small boat crews with a mix of locals and new arrivals from other colonies soon followed. They all used New Providence and as a base at some point. Among the pirates who started in these boats was Benjamin Hornigold, who began using a sloop, the Happy Return, in 1714.12 These small groups of pirates had no British government to stop their raids. The Lord Proprietors had not appointed a new governor to the Bahamas since 1704. The last remnant of the prior government, Thomas Walker, petitioned for help in suppressing the pirates. On one occasion, Walker gathered a crew and captured the pirate Daniel Stillwell and his vessel after his small crew took a Spanish launch on the coast of Cuba carrying 11,050 pesos. Benjamin Hornigold reacted to Walker’s actions by freeing Stillwell, threatened to burn Walker’s house, and declaring, “That all pirates were under his [Hornigold’s] protection.”13 Little could Walker or Hornigold have guessed a Spanish Treasure Fleet would soon alter Nassau and establish a population that would dwarf Hornigold’s crew and the other pirates who operated from the Bahamas before 1716.

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On July 30, 1715, a hurricane on the coast of Florida caused an event that would spur a population boom in New Providence. Only a few days before the storm, a fleet of twelve ships containing riches belonging to Spain’s New World colonies sailed from the harbor at Havana. The fleet carried a registered treasure worth 6,388,020 pesos (or £1,437,304.10), 955 castellanos of gold dust and bars of an unspecified value, and other riches unknown in quantity since passengers and crew brought additional unregistered treasure in their personal luggage.14 On the night of July 30, the fleet happened to be sailing up the New Bahama Channel off of Florida. The hurricane wrecked eleven of the twelve vessels in the fleet, killed over 1,000 men, and stranded 1,500 more on the coast. The Spanish moved quickly to recover the fleet’s riches, salvaging 5,200,000 pesos worth of private and government treasure by the end of 1715 and 41,166 pesos worth of treasure from January to July of 1716 when they concluded their main salvaging efforts.15

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While the Spanish tried to recover their treasure, many mariners from British colonies also attempted to “fish the wrecks,” a term used in several period documents for the taking or salvaging of treasure from the Spanish shipwrecks. In November, several groups of British mariners began organizing and sailing to go wrecking in Florida. By December, the colonial newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, began publishing reports on British vessels visiting the wrecks. Dozens of vessels fitted out for the wrecks over the following months. Seven or eight vessel made it to the wreck from Bermuda in late November or early December, along with a few Jamaican sloops. More vessels soon followed from Jamaica, Bermuda, Barbados, St. Thomas, and other ports. Some Spanish and French crews also joined the wreckers. By early 1716, Jamaica fitted out as many as twenty-two vessels for the wrecks. In the late winter or early spring of 1716, about a dozen Jamaican vessels tried to force Bermudan vessels off the wrecks. To find the shipwreck sites, some of the wreckers captured Spaniards who knew the locations of the wrecks. These same crews claimed they had licenses or patents from their governors to fish the wrecks, including ones issued by the governor of the Bahamas, even though the Bahamas had no official government.16

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Of all the events surrounding the salvaging of Spanish treasure, the most notable came from a raid in December of 1715. On November 24, the sloops Eagle and Bersheba under Captains John Welles and Henry Jennings received their commissions from Jamaica Governor Archibald Hamilton for privateering.17 After capturing a Spanish launch, whose crew knew the location of the salvage camps, Spanish accounts said the British vessels landed 150 well-armed men between the two Spanish salvage camps. The raiders divided into three squads, each with a drum and flag. When the British force confronted the main salvage camp, the Spanish tried to bribe the raiders into leaving. Jennings’ and Welles’ men refused and left the Spanish no choice but to surrender. The British raiders took up to 120,000 pesos from the camp, along with some silver plate, three bronze swivel guns, and fifty copper ingots the size of bread loaves. The wreck robbers, carrying a fortune worth £27,000 in coinage alone, then sailed to the port of Nassau.18

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worth £27,000 in coinage alone, then sailed to the port of Nassau.18

After Captain Henry Jennings contingent of wreckers arrived in Nassau in January of 1716, the number of pirates operating from New Providence increased significantly, though determining their rate of growth and exact numbers is difficult. Pirate crews frequently came or left Nassau, fluctuated in size, swapped ships, and split off new crews from older ones. Some men stayed ashore and did not immediately rejoin another crew. All these factors create obstacles to estimating the growth of the pirate population in the Bahamas. Around March of 1716, three sloops, one French, one British, and one Spanish, spent eighteen days rallying four hundred pirates on New Providence together and then sailed to attack the Florida salvage camps. While Spanish forces prevented the pirates from taking the silver they had already collected from the wrecks, the pirates spent four days salvaging boxes containing a total of 12,000 pesos, “a lot of fabricated silver and a box marked with the Arms of the King Our Senor.”19 While stranded in the Bahamas in March of 1717, a Captain Matthew Musson reported seeing five crews using Nassau as their base with a combined strength of three hundred and sixty men. Two reports from May and October of 1717 placed the strength of the New Providence pirates between seven and eight hundred men, while another from July of 1717 stated that at least a thousand men sailed in vessels that used the Bahamas as their rendezvous.20 After news came from Bermuda of King George I’s pardon, the HMS Phoenix arrived in Nassau on February 23, 1718 and reported he saw, “about 500 [pirates], all Subjects of Great Britain & young Resolute Wicked fellows.”21 From 1716 to February of 1718, period accounts suggested New Providence harbored between 500 and 1,000 pirates at any one time.

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The pirate population in Nassau originated from several different places, though some were not strangers to the Bahamas. Some of the pirates were those men who raided vessels with John West, Daniel Stillwell, Benjamin Hornigold, and John Cockram before 1716. These leaders started with a mix of local Bahamians and other strangers in groups of twenty-five men and smaller in periaugers and canoes. While they began using small sloops and shallops by 1714, many of these gangs of pirates remained small until 1715. In that year, Benjamin acquired a larger sloop, the Mary, which held a crew of one hundred and forty men, six guns, and eight patteraroes, a breech-loading swivel gun. While these predecessors remained pirates during the heydays of 1716-1717, the new arrivals soon outnumbered them.22

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A significant amount of pirates came from the vessels that fished the Spanish wrecks. As time progressed, it became more difficult to work on the wrecks because of competition with other wreckers, Spanish guard vessels, and the exhausting of known wreck sites. Many of these wreckers, like other maritime opportunists before them, decided to pursue wealth through piracy, spurred on by the success of the Bahama pirates before 1716. As the Attorney General of South Carolina, Richard Allein, said to the jury at the trail of Stede Bonnet, “the great Expectations which so many had from the Bahama Wrecks, where not one in ten proved succesful, gave birth and increase to all the Pirates in those Parts, English, French, and Spaniards.”23 One particular group of about fifty men left the wrecks in early 1716 and settled in Nassau. These wreckers caused havoc among New Providence’s non-pirate citizenry. Their leader, Thomas Barrow, “a mate of a Jamaica brigantine which run away some time ago with a Spanish marquiss’s money and effects,” declared himself the Governor of New Providence.24 A number of the pirates in early 1716 claimed they would only attack Spanish and French ships.25 While some might have been honest and held loyalties to the British government, other pirates had different motives for these declarations. If the authorities deemed the British pirates outlaws, it would make returning home to their friends or families difficult and would complicate commerce with the merchants that sold the pirates supplies. Other pirates had little regard to the nationality of their prizes. Most talk of forgoing British and Dutch prizes disappeared by summer when it became clear that British authorities would turn against them. The arrival of King George I’s proclamation in Jamaica in late August of 1716, demanding the wreckers surrender themselves to the authorities by December 1, convinced many of the wreckers to continue pirate raids from their base in New Providence.26

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In addition to the ex-wreckers, New Providence also welcomed many former logwood cutters. In 1715, the conflict between Spanish authorities and British logwood cutters boiled over into violence. By this year, nearly 2,000 men, many of them former mariners, cut logwood in a clandestine trade for British markets. This work employed a hundred vessels, often from New England, in carrying this logwood. These logwood cutters allowed Britain to compete with the French in the clothing dyes market. When Spain acted as an intermediary for this logwood, they sold it to the British at prices between £90 and £110 per ton. The British logwood cutters produced 12,000 tons of logwood a year and sold it for £9 per ton. The Spanish despised these “Bay-Men,” a term derived from their cutting wood in the Bay of Honduras and Bay of Campeche, and treated the logwood cutters, “as pyrates and thieves.”27 The Spanish sent ships to stop the Bay-Men’s operations. In September and October of 1715, two hundred to two hundred and fifty Bay-Men operating from two sloops and several periaugers began pirating from both the Honduras and Campeche bays.28 On November 30, a fleet of three Spanish sloops of war and a fire ship under the command of Don Alonso Philippe de Andrade arrived in the Bay of Campeche and forced the British ships in the bay to surrender and imprisoned their crews.29 Attorney General Richard Allein made the exaggerated claim that, “nine parts in ten of them [the logwood cutters] turned Pirates.”30 With opportunities to take treasure on the coast of Florida and Spaniards moving against their regular employment, New Providence soon received groups of these, “loose disorderly people from the Bay of Campeache, Jamaica, And other parts,” into their harbor, who began to collectively call themselves the, “Flying Gang.”31

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While five hundred to one thousands mariners, wreckers, bay-men, and other men turned pirate lived in or raided from Nassau, a small group of Bahama citizens remained on New Providence. In July of 1703, the Spanish and French left the settlement of Nassau in ruins. They burned most of the buildings on the island. Before these raids, Nassau featured, “about 250 white men, women and children, and as many blacks, molattoes and mustees, who live scattered in and about Nassau,” and, “about 300 houses little and great.”32 The 1703 raid and the attacks that followed caused many people to leave the Bahamas for the Carolinas, Virginia, New England, or anywhere they could procure passage. According to Governor Woodes Rogers, the inhabitants of the Bahamas told him the Spanish and French launched thirty-four raids of various sizes into the Bahamas in the fifteen years following the 1703 raid.33 The few remaining citizens of the Bahamas lived throughout the islands for the next decade, with no government, alone against the raids of their foreign enemies.