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 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.

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Captain Henry Morgan is often called the ‘King of the Pirates,’ because of the depth and breadth of allegiance sworn to him by so many of his contemporaries. After uniting the privateers of Jamaica with the ‘Brothers’ from Tortuga, he sailed with some two thousand ‘wild men,’ and one woman who was purported to be a witch, and commanded a fleet of thirty-eight ragtag buccaneer ships and boats in his last campaign to Panama. However, this last ‘big adventure’ got Morgan (and the Governor of Jamaica who issued the commission) into big trouble. At the time of the sacking of Panama, England was supposed to have been officially at peace with Spain after signing the Treaty of Madrid in 1660. In an attempt to distance themselves from the incident, British authorities called for Morgan’s arrest.

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Morgan spent two years back in London, where he was eventually knighted in 1673, for all those exploits against the Spanish. He was never convicted of piracy charges under English law, and did not consider himself a pirate by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, when he returned to Jamaica as Lieutenant Governor, Sir Henry Morgan led the attempt to rid Port Royal of privateers and pirates. He believed times were changing in favor of agriculture and legal commerce on the island, and Jamaican planters and merchants agreed. Under his leadership, the city of Port Royal grew and prospered. But years of hard living and drinking finally caught up with Morgan. He died in his mid-fifties of tuberculosis in 1688, retaining his status as statesman, aristocrat, and ‘King of the Buccaneers,’ not as ‘King of the Pirates!’

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Privateers who came after Henry Morgan received only limited, legal credentials in Jamaica, and they would never again be considered heroes. When the infamous pirate haven of Port Royal was shaken to its core by a sudden, devastating in June of 1692, the accompanying tsunami washed even Morgan’s remains in Palisadoes Cemetery out to sea. The old town eventually imploded from the loss of life. However, the wild men (and women) were still out there. Though many of the Tortuga buccaneers left the trade, and carved out settled lives on the shores of the Spanish Main, some of the displaced pirates and privateers sailed off in search of other ports of call. By the turn of the eighteenth century, legal or not, ‘privateers’ were back in business in Jamaica, the greater Caribbean, as well as up and down the coasts of the American colonies. (Remember, Captain William Kidd was hanged in May of 1701.)

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Then came the wreck of the Spanish treasure fleet in July of 1715. Earle says “there were ten shattered ships laid waste by a hurricane along a forty mile stretch of reefs, a thousand men drowned, and a fortune in silver coins and bullion lost in the shallow waters off the coast of Florida.”

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When the Spanish sent out a desperate call for help, every privateer within a thousand miles

raced to the scene, (including Samuel Bellamy who heard the news as far north as Cape Cod), and they helped, all right! They helped themselves to the Spanish treasure! Earle describes it as a frenzied ‘treasure-hunting bonanza,’ which triggered the greatest surge of piracy in the eighteenth century. Even commissioned ‘pirate hunters’ turned pirate. Henry Jennings raided the Florida storehouses where the Spanish salvers kept their recovered treasure, then he and his crew linked up with Ben Hornigold’s ‘three sets of pirates’ from New Providence Island. The numbers of pirates began to grow at Nassau, and so did the complaints against them. Whenever the Royal Navy attempted to contain them, British naval officers with limited experience in American and Caribbean waters were no matches for these resourceful, local operators, whose connections and hiding places were easily accessible.

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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 captains to honor the seven founders) now exist in many countries, including the USA.

Flying a single ensign designed specifically for the brotherhood, these twenty-first century buccaneers dress in full regalia at celebrations and share hospitalities all over the world. They strive to affirm the camaraderie of sailing, navigate the seven seas in sailing ships, and promote the preservation of the oceans, worldwide.

In many ways they are very much like the pyrates of old, but unlike the ill-fated outlaws of the Pirates Republic, these modern-day adventurers, along with their families and friends, are free to enjoy the true spirit of universality – the loftier spirit that has accompanied seafaring ever since the days of antiquity!

*Copyright 2012, A Pyrate’s Life for Me – Cynthia Farr Kinkel

(*Elements of the above story have appeared in other publications, including the Sept. 2005 issue of The Tybee Breeze and Sept/Oct 2006 issue of The South Magazine. The content has since undergone several revisions for further publication with additions and updates.)