CHAPTER THREE

SEA HORROR

“Blackbeard”

I

If you want to know a real pirate--a true terror of the seas--meet Mr. Blackbeard; called, in what could scarcely have been an innocent childhood, Edward Thatch, or Teach. Little Edward must have been suckled on brass filings and have cut his teeth on iron nails, for he grew up to be consistently and completely evil. Perhaps he fell when an infant and injured his head, or more probably was born with a twist to the bad; for no sane, normal man could have been so wild and wicked.

He, not Kidd, is the fellow you have in mind when you think of a pirate. He was the genuine, plank-walking, marooning, swashbuckling boy of the seven seas; Bill Kidd and Jack Quelch, so far from being in his class, would barely have been tolerated by him as ordinary seamen under the “black flagg with a humane skelleton” which terrified the old-time mariners. To win his yellow-fanged grin of approval one would have to be absolutely, unreservedly inhuman.

Blackbeard! Folks got along with him best who addressed him with that pretty name. He had no use at all for “Mister Thatch.” Plain Blackbeard to high and low, fore and aft; for his pride, his pleasure, his life were in his beard; an enormous bush, unusually, weirdly, wonderfully black; a huge mat of hair, really beginning at his ears, arching across his nose, and ending with his knees,--a regular jungle from behind which his veined and boozy eyes peeped like those of a beast spotting its prey, the while the long, leathery lips slavered with the thirst for blood. Nice-looking chap--very.

He might not take time to wash his nose--the only island of skin in that sea of hair--but no hour was too long or too tedious which was spent in curling, preening, pulling and twisting that beard into the most fantastic shapes and effects. One day he would swagger out on deck with his chin the axle for a half-dozen spokes of tightly rolled whiskers; another, it might be one great spike, thrust outward and upward in a unicorn symbol. Practically he had a fashion for every mood, especially for the belligerent.

People had to keep out of his cabin when the skipper was trimming up his beard for a fight. Really he was the first patentee of frightfulness. That was his specialty. When action threatened, those whiskers were wrought into an appearance of ferocity beyond depicting.

Nor was that all; he had other artistic touches in the nightmare line. For instance, there were those long, thin, slow-burning matches which he stuck all around his head, beneath his hat--alight they looked as if the inferno had vomited forth a demon; there were the three braces of pistols over his shoulders; the two dirks in his brilliant Caribbean sash, and the cutlass that never stammered. A gulp of raw Jamaica rum and he was ready to eat ’em alive.

How amiable an apparition to behold oozing up over your bulwarks some fine morning! No wonder the Atlantic, where it slaps the West Indian beaches on the one side and the shores of the Carolinas on the other, whispered his name with fear.

It was going to be a big job for the forces of law and order to snare this bird.

II

January, 1718, was the happy month for the Carolinas. Then it was that Blackbeard, coming from the West Indies by way of New England and the North Atlantic provinces, chose to make his hole at Ocracoke Inlet, on Pamlico Sound, North Carolina.

Not that Blackbeard came with his hat-matches lit and his beard glorious for strife, and his cutlass speaking sudden, certain death. Oh, my, no! Far indeed would this supposition be from the fact, for Blackbeard had come to Carolina to turn over a new leaf; to leave the wicked practices which had made him king of the wicked Indies; to forswear the black flag; generally to amend his way; particularly to take the Act.

“Taking the Act” was a joke beloved by all the best pirates. It was specially good after a profitable plunder cruise; useful, too, in a way, for it gave one a chance to spend one’s salt-water money without having to fight somebody every five minutes. To take the Act was the only way a hard-working pirate could get a vacation.

The thing worked something like this: George the First, of England, at about this time was having trouble with the Swedes, and in consequence the British fleet was all tucked away up in the Baltic; he was troubled, too, by the merchants of London and the colonies, who were getting rather pert about this matter of pirate depredations.

Being completely at sea in more ways than one, the British Admiralty fell back to the old pardon business that they had tried in Captain Kidd’s time, and which had been so successful that less than twenty years later the sorry scheme was dragged forth again.

Taking the technical peelings off, the meat of the matter was that if within a year from the date of the proclamation any pirate should surrender himself to any one of the king’s colonial governors and swear to renounce his criminal courses, all the past should be forgiven and forgotten. The weakness of the plan, of course, was that a man you could not catch would not care much about your pardon. And still another,--that the word of a pirate could poorly compare with a bond.

But the boys liked this Act of Grace as it was called, and some had even been known to abide quite consistently with its terms. The leading men of the business, of course, could not be expected to take it too seriously.

Blackbeard wanted a little lay-off from years of steady grind. Then, too, it was January, with its season of new resolutions; why not start the year right?

They all talked it over, coming along the Virginia coast--near where they had heard of the proclamation--and it rather appealed to everybody. They grew solemn, serious, not a little drunk, and decided to break up. Here was a chance to wipe the slate clean and start all over again.

They anchored in Ocracoke Inlet and marched off to take the Act. Let us go with them.

Lithe chaps, aren’t they? See how the muscles ripple and play under those bright silk shirts; how column-like the brown necks groove into the bulging shoulders; in the fine, perfect pink of condition every one; strong, you can easily see; strong everywhere, that is, except in the head. Weak, there, lamentably weak.

In the heart, too, for they are really bad, capable of all evil, for which their environment and early associations can extenuate but not exculpate them. In truth, these are the creatures of a dark age; these men believe in witches and fear to whistle aboard ship lest they blow up a tempest. Most of these fellows are Englishmen, with some Spaniards and Frenchmen, all caring little for international animosities, enfranchised in the Commonwealth of Crime. You can hear the outlandish burring of the Yorkshiremen, the hissing z’s of the West Englander, the pitch, too, of what is to become the Cockney whine of a little later day, tussling with a jargon made up of many languages, founded on English.

Notice, too, these negroes from Barbados and other islands of the Indies, children of slaves brought but lately from Africa for the plantations. These don’t rate as seamen on even the pirate ships, but are menials whose big job is to keep continually at the pumps. Still, it seems all a great lark to them; see how they laugh, joke, leap around in unequalled vigor, till the great gold rings in their ears, the gold chains about their necks and the heavy metal bangles on their wrists jingle and rattle with their motions. This thing of jewelry is affected by white and black alike; and how they like those wide, many-hued sashes, and the silk stockings under their knee-length breeches!

So they roll, seaman fashion, singing and romping to the small frame house where reigns the servant of the Proprietors and the master of the colonists, his Excellency, Governor Eden. At their head goes that strangest of all the strange creatures of the sea, that powerful, ape-like figure swathed hideously in hair--to-day all curled in hundreds of ringlets smeared with pomatum--looking like a thing from a bad dream.

They bulge unafraid into the mansion; full weaponed and together, they fear nothing at sea or ashore. But nobody is of a mind to trifle with them; the folk here are used to seeing everything that is grotesque washed up by the sea; nay, these men have many acquaintances among the inhabitants, for not a few have shipped from these parts.

Governor Eden enters, portly in a London flowered-silk waistcoat, stylish French shoes and peruke, high-pointed and white-powdered. He gasps a little at the gang jammed into the room and glances sharply over at Tobias Knight, Secretary of the Province, who a moment ago was scratching with his quill pen an encouraging story of graft to the Proprietors at home, but who now is nervously pulling his sword more accessibly across his round fat knees. Neither he nor the governor had even seen anything quite like that in old Pall Mall, you know.

“Takin’ the Act, y’honor,” growled Blackbeard, leering at constituted authority.

“Aye,” chorus, froglike, his bully boys.

The job is soon done. With upraised right hands one and all swear to leave off piracy. They come in children of the rope; they depart free and law-abiding men. It is very easy.

All leave, that is, save Blackbeard.

“I salvages ships, your honors,” thunders this gentleman, spreading himself out on a chair so that his beard should flow in its glory like a blanket over his person, while all its fancy little curly-cues, ringlets and twists dance with every movement of his chin. “My real trade, your honors--ship salvager. Mebbe I’ll have business here. Lost ships is what I go for and lost ships I finds.

“No need for a good ship to be lost while Blackbeard’s around to take ’em home again. No occasion to leave a lost ship to drift around till them dirty seadogs of pirates mauls ’em over. Law says lost ships must be reported to the governor, and now I abide the law.”

“How d’ye mean, Captain?” says the governor. “D’ye pull ’em off the rocks?”

The audience chamber--if it may be so called--shakes with the visitor’s laughing.

“Ye don’t know rocks, your honor, beggin’ pardon; rocks don’t let nothing go oncet they get aholt. Deserted ships I picks up; ships with a little water in ’em don’t always go down as fast as the master fears.

“There’s where I comes in. I get a ship like that; I comes in to you. Says I, ‘Your honor, I have salvaged a ship.’ Says your honor, ‘Accordin’ to law, I declares you to have salvage of her.’ I sell her for a good price. Says I to me, ‘The governor, his honor, works hard; he ought to have his wages.’ Says I to you, ‘Your honor will perhaps accept a little present.’ ‘Captain Blackbeard,’ says you, ‘have a jog of rum.’ We all stands up and drinks the king’s ’ealth.”

Governor Eden claps his hands smartly, and the black servitor jumps in.

“Boy, bring the Madeira and glasses for three.”

III

Governor Eden, in his corrupt connivance with Blackbeard, was not representative of the public opinion of the Carolinas in 1718. The proprietary provinces--for these things were shortly before the revolution which placed them directly under the Crown--had become tired of pirates.

It’s a long story, but of powerful interest. The short of the matter is that the Carolinas had fostered pirates for her own interest until in time they became a menace. From the middle of the sixteen-hundreds the Southern provinces had been the outfitting grounds of a shoal of privateers who under royal commissions threshed the waters of the Spanish Main for Monsieur le Roy, as the French were called, or the Dons of Spain.

These letters-of-marque lads really protected the baby colonies from those two voracious wolves for quite a while, but naturally if business in the legitimate line of their letters slacked up, they were prone to mistake the ensign of St. George for that of the Fleur-de-lys, and thus kept their hands in practice by despoiling friends as well as foes. Far too often they crossed too easily the thin line which separated a privateer from a pirate, so that in something less than half a century Charles Town, which had trembled at the French and Spanish invasions, now was equally fearful of the guns of the erstwhile protectors, the pirates.

English navigation laws, which had delivered the provinces, bound hand and foot, into the hard fists of the English merchants, did not a little to promote piracy, for the sea robbers came to town with holds crammed full of all sorts of merchandise and peddled it to the colonists less the duties and imposts, and so made one of the cheapest markets in the world. Their customers all along the coast met them gladly and made no bones of the traffic, until the black flag threatened to monopolize the whole commerce, when the community awoke to the circumstance that there was a price in the cheap bazaar after all.

Consider that Blackbeard, a month or so before he took the Act of Grace, had “salvaged” no less than twenty-seven ships--nearly a ship a day--and you have a measure of the situation; add, too, this, that Blackbeard was but one of many, and you will understand why Jamaica, for instance, wailed to the home Government that it was ruined.

North and South Carolina had not formally divided at that time, though the distinction of names was used; Governor Eden ruled wickedly in the North; Governor Johnson ruled justly and wisely in the South.

IV

The vicinity where Blackbeard made his establishment was well chosen for his job. When one knew the channels between the low, sandy islands which lay all about the inlet one could run in and careen the ship, lay by and swagger alongshore, and when one got ready to abjure his oath and swing off on the plundering account again, one could intercept two lines of commerce,--the coastwise from New England to the West Indies and the provinces, and that from the provinces to the north, to the West Indies and to the mother country. Blackbeard knew his business.

It should be explained that our whiskery hero was a sort of admiral, for he commanded not only his own ship, but he was attended by three auxiliary sloops, one of which--the _Revenge_--belonged to the peculiar and picturesque Major Stede Bonnet.

What did these ships look like? Well, the old British Navy had five classes of men-of-war, rated on the number of guns; Blackbeard’s own ship, the attorney general on a later occasion said, was equal to a fifth-class man-of-war; that is, he mounted forty guns, ranged on two decks, carrying a complement of some one hundred and forty or fifty men when his articles were full. She was about twenty feet in the beam and a little more than a hundred feet long; rigged with square sails and capable of good speed.

The sloops, a general term for a variety of small ships, fought only ten guns, though the man-power was not proportionate, fifty or sixty men sometimes being crowded aboard. Shipbuilding was to wait generations for the start of the impetus which carried it to its culmination in the early nineteenth century.

Nobody knows just what turned Major Bonnet to pirating. Some say he had so much domestic misery that he simply felt he would have to chaw up something or somebody; others, that the works in his brains had slipped a little out of gear.

It could hardly have been money, for Bonnet was a well-to-do planter of Barbados, where his civic spirit had been so keen that he had earned the military title of major in service against the enemies of that colony. Perhaps he had been reading the _Diamond Dick_ stories of that era, and was so fired by them as to forget his middle years, his decorous manners, his respectable standing, and craved for a taste of real life.

However that may have been, he bought a sloop, christened her romantically the _Revenge_, and, under the usual pretense of going privateering, picked up the right gang and put to sea in the late summer of 1717. He knew nothing about the sea except that under certain circumstances it would drown one.

His crew were quick to see that their commander was no sailorman. His pretense at seamanship provoked their great-mouthed grins and deriding whispers and nods. He was driven to hide behind his mate, who really worked the ship; and to the end of his career, which lasted just about one year, he employed usually a sailing master. But his courage, his hard temper, his resolution kept his feet on the quarter-deck and forced a respect that his landlubberliness denied him.

That is, he wrung a deference from all but old Blackbeard. Bonnet fell in with him in August, 1717, and they made it up to sail together.

The bearded bear, however, soon saw that his partner was no skipper, and, growling and contemptuous, he summarily removed Bonnet from his own deck and articled him in an inferior position on Blackbeard’s craft, putting one Richards, a bad egg but a good sailor, in Bonnet’s place. This was a collar that galled the neck of Bonnet.

All the ships came in to Ocracoke about the same time; but Bonnet and a large number of men disdained to palter with the Act of Grace, and lay about the settlement waiting for Blackbeard to get over his whim and down to business.

The days ashore passed in debauch. Here the softer side of Blackbeard’s character is shown in his affectionate devotion to fourteen wives,--as he called them. With them he was most playful and kittenish. He loved to make these ladies laugh by blowing out the candles with his pistols; or sometimes, crossing his arms, a weapon in each hand, he would fire promiscuously about the room, whereupon the most merry play of hide-and-seek was enjoyed by all the company, wives and visitors alike, when those who could not get under the table quickly enough would catch bullets in the funniest places,--like behind the ear or just above the heart. Everybody looked forward to these evenings.

V

Spring came on Ocracoke, and the adventure sap stirred in Blackbeard’s veins. He stood it until the end of May, then tore his oath in two, kicked the Act of Grace in the face, flung the skull and crossbones to his masthead and sailed off for Charles Town, his minion sloops dancing and bobbing on the waves beside him. He was going shopping, if you please, for medical supplies, a great necessity by reason of his fleet’s method of living and working. He was going to honor Charles Town with his patronage.

While this happy surprise for the little colonial seaport was coming around the sea-washed bulk of Cape Fear, a Mr. Wragg and a Mr. Marks, on board a merchantman, were slipping across the Charles Town bar, bound for England. Both were prominent local gentlemen, Mr. Wragg being nothing less than an assemblyman. There were several other passengers on the list, while in the ship’s chest were seven thousand five hundred dollars in broad gold coins and pieces-of-eight.

Mr. Marks stood at the stern of the ship and looked a long time at the old town as it dropped away behind them.

“Neighbor Wragg,” said he with a gently melancholic sigh, “it will be many a day before we tread the streets of Charles Town again.”

Mr. Wragg squeezed his friend’s hand sympathetically.

“Only a twelvemonth perhaps,” he suggested. “Take courage, Marks.”

They were both poor guessers. Instead of twelve months it was less than twelve days a good deal when Mr. Marks again looked his fellow citizens in the eye and face-to-face. If somebody had told his fortune at cards that night he might have truthfully said that a dark man was coming across the water to see him.

“Do you see what I see?” asked the captain of the mate next day, as the gray light of morning was turning all the waters to the look of molten slate. The mate gazed northward.

“I count four of ’em,” he said slowly. “Looks like they’re coming right for us.”

They were. Very soon a shot whistled over the nightcap of Mr. Marks, who had thrust his head from his cabin with that sense of something amiss peculiar to shipboard.

“Heave back the tops’ls,” growled the master.

The sails flatted down, and the ship came to. She was quickly circled by Blackbeard’s fleet. The skull grinned amiably at them as the black flag stood out tautly in the wind. Somebody shouted something from the pirate ships; and the merchant captain ordered the boat lowered, and with two of the crew to row him set off for the marauding flagship.

“I’ve been pirated in these waters twenty times,” grumbled the captain, steering with an oar, “so I know what they want.”

The pirates wanted everything. They put a prize crew over on the captured brig. Mr. Marks was paged.

“Mistah Blackbeard’s compliments, suh,” grinned a big black fellow, looking coy in a hat made of a twisted red silk handkerchief, “and if you be Mistah Marks, suh, will you be so ’bliging as to step over to his ship.”

Mr. Marks, with pallid face, looked pathetically at Mr. Wragg, whose sympathy was again subjected to a heavy sight draft.

“Why didn’t he send for you, Wragg?” he complained unheroically. “You’re a councilor--you’ve got the precedence.”

Mr. Wragg patted him on the shoulder encouragingly.

“I’ll advise your family, Marks, if anything happens,” he said kindly; “but I’m sure it won’t.”

He felt pretty sure it would.

All stood in for Charles Town. Mr. Wragg once or twice thought he saw Mark’s hand waving at him from Blackbeard’s ship, where he and the merchant captain were detained. Or was it poor Mark’s nightcap tossed in a dreadful struggle with the villains? Who could tell?

Captors and captives lay at the bar; and Blackbeard sent the longboat off to town, carrying Mr. Marks under guard of Richards and half a dozen nasty rascals. The astonishment of the town was unwordable when it saw the respectable Marks in company so dreadful.

But when they heard what Mr. Marks had to tell them their astonishment turned to fighting wrath. For Blackbeard ordered four hundred pounds’ worth of medical supplies delivered to Richards or, first, Mr. Marks would be shot on the spot; second, Mr. Wragg’s head and those of all the other passengers would arrive by the next boat; third, the pride of the province, Charles Town itself, would be blown from its foundations.

Governor Johnson was a strong man, and his council were strong men; but here was a puzzle for them. Sixteen years before this they had beaten off the French invaders with a courage that is notable in the history of municipalities; but now the gun was right straight at them, and it looked like hands up.

Things were stirring about in Blackbeard’s fleet as well as in the town. Especially when two days went by and no word came over to the bar from Richards or Marks. On the evening of that day, Blackbeard, steeped in rum, lined his hostages along the deck and raved and thrust his awful beard into their faces and generally behaved in a most ungenteel manner.

“Shake your heads, my pretty landlubbers,” he bellowed; “shake ’em while they’re on your necks, for if Richards don’t come back in the mornin’ your heads will go to town at noon.”

The wretched part of it was that the ruffian meant what he said.

A messenger came from Richards, however, in the morning, and so reprieved Mr. Wragg and his fellows for a few hours more. The messenger stated that in going from the bar to town the boat in which Marks was being taken capsized and there had been no end of trouble and delay in getting ashore. Further that the provincial council had been called together and were debating Blackbeard’s proposition.

Another day or so of strain and another silence from the town. Again Blackbeard stamped about and waved his cutlass and carried on as any obstreperous and brutal drunk might be apt to do. Oh, for a king’s ship to happen along as chucker-out! But king’s ships, like the night watch, are generally anywhere but where they’re needed.

Blackbeard filed the frightened hostages forth again. This time he had the machinery of their destruction ready,--a huge black, his great-muscled right arm bare to the shoulder, his hand hefting a bright cutlass. Blackbeard, perched on a keg of powder, beckoned to his captives in mocking solicitude.

“Step up, pretties,” he leered, “and get your hair cut.”

This was no opera, comic or otherwise. It was a situation to be met, and immediately. One whom history does not remember spoke up. “Cap’n Blackbeard,” said he, talking for his life, “we’ve decided if you’ll be so good as to let us, to join with you if you’re going to take the town. We’ll help you. They’ve betrayed us for a few pills and powders, so we owe them nothing.”

“Spoke like a man,” said Blackbeard. “You’re proper men; you’ll be real cocks of the old game. Heave the anchor and shot the guns--the tide will be right in an hour.”

Perhaps this was not a heroic subterfuge; but let those judge who have been hostages, helpless in the hands of such a desperado. It saved the lives of a number of folk. For ere the tide lifted them over the bar the longboat returned with Richards, the pirate boatmen and great piles of all sorts of medicines. The town had capitulated. There would come another day, it properly figured, and its wisdom was justified by the event.

Blackbeard left the merchant brig and its passengers rocking at the bar, but by an unfortunate oversight he sailed off with the ship’s chest containing the gold coins and the pieces-of-eight.

Partnership was dissolved soon after leaving Charles Town. Blackbeard had already apparently decided to abdicate the cocked hat of an admiral and assume the subordinate rank of a captain. He planned to concentrate his power in his one vessel.

So without concern he returned the dissatisfied Bonnet to the _Revenge_ and recalled Richards and the hardiest members of the _Revenge’s_ personnel, leaving Bonnet with half a dozen hands of indifferent expertness to work the sloop.

That accounted for one of his three tenders. The second he resolved to abandon at Topsail Inlet, on his way to Ocracoke. This he effected in the regular Blackbeard fashion by ordering it driven ashore at Topsail Inlet and wrecked. Her crew might make what escape they could from the mess. They could not argue with the forty muzzles of his guns, so crack went the sloop’s hull upon the rocks, while Blackbeard lay by and laughed at the men struggling in the surf.

These unfortunates at once went to work saving the sloop’s food and powder, which hard labor was no sooner ended than Blackbeard stood in and came ashore in the boat. He took all the salvaged stores and every first-class seaman among the men and left, leaving nearly a score of his late followers destitute and marooned on a wild and isolated beach. In this way Blackbeard paid for faithfulness.

The castaways had nothing to do but huddle about the sand and hope for help. It did not occur to them to go back into the wilderness behind them, perhaps because, as sailors, they would not trust themselves to any but their wonted environment, perhaps also for the reason that the unsettled interior promised them even scantier succor than the wide sea before them, on which a coastwise ship might possibly be attracted by their signals. So they lay around listening to the _creak-creak-creak_ of the occasional sea gull, the thumping and swirling of the inrushing waves and the cracking of the ship’s gear and planking.

Before serious privation befell them, however, the hoped-for sail fluttered out of the horizon. They took the shirts from their backs and hopped vehemently up and down the beach and flew to the headlands in a frenzy of inarticulate appeal.

Joy unspeakable; they saw the topsails heaved back and the ship come to! Saved! The men massed at the very edge of the water and stared hard at the boat which now put off and came swinging in toward them.

“If it ain’t Major Bonnet!”

There was a kind of pleasure in the way they said this as the boat’s crew could be identified. They had never expected that the commander of the old _Revenge_ could ever have looked so good to them. A dozen welcoming hands pulled at the bow of his boat when it grated on the sand.

“A dirty deal, boys,” said the major; “a dirty deal to leave ye all like this--all governors of a maroon island.”

That was a loved witticism of the major; marooning with him was always to be invested with the dignity of governor of the maroon sand-spit. He had quite a turn for pleasantry. He chuckled, and then got down to business.

“Getting to the point, my lads,” he continued, “let us leave this outlaw life which has brought us nothing but grief. Come with me to St. Thomas in the Indies, and we’ll get a privateering commission there against the Spanish dogs, and show ’em the kind of metal that is in a British cutlass.”

He put a punch into his proposition by explaining, sympathetically but firmly, that if they refused his offer he would be quite obliged to sail away and leave them still in the governorship of Topsail Inlet.

Nobody wanted that distinction, and the marooned left in boatloads for Bonnet’s ship. As they came under her bows they marked that the name _Revenge_ had been painted out, and in its place were the words, _Royal James_, being the major’s compliment to the Pretender and a vivid indication of the major’s politics.

The tide crept in and washed the last heel mold out of the sands of Topsail Inlet, where the gulls were left to peck speculatively at the protruding nails and tangled cordage of the battered ship, the while they wondered at the ways of that queer creature, Man.

Commons were lean on the _Royal James_. When the rescued pirates found that there was not very much to eat on the ship, the first gush of joy at their deliverance sloughed off quickly.

“Ye see, men,” Bonnet explained, “the pantry is pretty low. The first job of a sailorman is to eat, so we may have to stop somebody on our way to St. Thomas and beg a bite.”

A very reasonable suggestion.

“Somebody” appeared before the cruise was very old. He showed no concern, however, to answer their hail but jammed up into the wind and sped away. That was certainly no proper sea courtesy.

To teach the rude fellows a lesson in manners, the _Royal James_ swung behind and followed fast, and as pursuit was quite in her line she soon pulled down the fleeing traveler and with a shot across his bow brought him to with a bang. Bonnet shoved alongside and soon stuffed his hold and his men with quarters of beef and barrels of rum.

That was a fair start. All waist belts were comfortably tight; drooping corners of lips went up and the old zest for piracy swelled and rippled like a flood tide in the veins of the men of the _Royal James_. So when with a grin the captain sped the black flag up the lines the general contentment was not grievously shaken.

Two Bermuda-bound ships were pulled in the day following the first capture, and the day after that they picked up a fourth. The tally of takes now began to run up smartly. Inside of a week five ships were looted, from which a number of recruits were made, including negroes who were delegated to the pumps and the menial jobs with the status of slaves, and whose signs to the sloop’s articles were not invited.

Here is a typical haul from one craft: Twenty-six hogsheads and three barrels of rum, valued at fifteen hundred dollars; twenty-five hogsheads of molasses, worth seven or eight hundred dollars; three barrels of sugar, value one hundred and fifty dollars; cotton, indigo, wire cable of varying values, a small amount of French and Spanish coins, one pair of silver buckles and one silver watch. Thus, you see, the boys cleaned up systematically from the hold to the captain’s waistcoat pocket.

They peddled their merchandise alongshore, where the business, though more risky than in a happier day, was still keen. They grabbed vessels on the high seas or at anchor in way ports. One captured in the latter situation was the _Francis_, and here is her mate, Mr. Killing, who is anxious to tell us himself just how it all happened. Proceed, Mr. Killing.

“The 31st of July (1718) between nine and ten of the clock, we came to an anchor about fourteen fathom of water.... In about half an hour’s time I perceived something like a canoo: So they came nearer. I said, here is a canoo a-coming; I wish they be friends. I haled them and asked them whence they came? They said captain Thomas Richards from St. Thomas’s....

“They asked me from whence we came? I told them from Antegoa. They said we were welcome.” (Pirates certainly loved their little joke!) “I said they were welcome, as far as I knew.” (Which you observe was not very far. A man of careful statement, this Mr. Killing.) “So I ordered the men to hand down a rope to them. So soon as they came on board they clapped their hands to their cutlasses; and I said we are taken. So they cursed and swore for a light. I ordered our people to get a light as soon as possible....

“When they came into the cabin the first thing they begun with was the pineapples, which they cut down with their cutlasses. They asked me if I would not come and eat along with them? I told them I had but little stomach to eat. They asked me why I looked so melancholy? I told them I looked as well as I could--” (Before we smile at the worthy mate let us wonder a moment how we would have looked in the same fix.)

“They asked me what liquor I had on board. I told them some rum and sugar. So they made bowls of punch and went to drinking the Pretender’s health, and hoped to see him king of the English nation--” (This was doubtless the result of Major Bonnet’s treasonable propaganda. Here was an incipient navy for the Pretender had he only known it.) “They then sung a song or two. The next morning ... they hoisted out several hogsheads of molasses and several hogsheads of rum. In the after part of the day two of Bonnet’s men were ordered to the mast to be whipt....

“Then Robert Tucker came to me, and told me I must go along with them. I told him I was not fit for their turn, neither were my inclinations that way. After that Major Bonnet himself came to me, and told me I must either go on a maroon shore” (no doubt with his usual little jest about the governorship) “or go along with them, for he designed to take the sloop (_Francis_) with him.

“That evening between eight and nine we were ordered to set sail, but whither I knew not. So we sailed out that night, and I being weary with fatigue, went to sleep; and whether it was with a design or not I can not tell, but we fell to leeward of the _Revenge_ (_Royal James_); and in the morning Major Bonnet took the speaking trumpet, and told us if we did not keep closer he would fire in upon us and sink us. So then we proceeded on our voyage till we came to Cape Fear.”

Thank you, Mr. Mate; you have given us an interesting and living picture of just how these wretches went about their dirty work.

VI

Cape Fear! When a “naval historian” tells us that the battle at Cape Fear was merely a matter of a few shots and a surrender, he not only understates the fact, but beclouds the due glory of a company of heroic men. Mr. S. C. Hughson, whose patient accuracy has given the complete story to the world, not only describes a serious engagement but shows that the result was so open a question that the pirates, during the fight, beckoned with their hats to their opponents in mock invitation to board and take them, in full confidence of victory.

Cape Fear is on Smith Island, at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, on the coast of North Carolina, and between Charleston and Ocracoke Inlet. At New Inlet, where the river swims into the sea, it divides what are now called Brunswick and Hanover Counties. Shoal waters and sandy islets make the work of navigation here uncertain.

Major Bonnet had made his sea-nest in this region, his knowledge of the channels and depths protecting his comings and goings. In this place he could repair and refit his ship as well as set up a sort of market for the purveying to the local folk his varied plunder. For the coastwise pirate, as distinguished from the pirate of the Kidd and Quelch school, was simply a smuggler who stole his wares, and if you hyphenate him thus, smuggler-pirate, you can separate him from the typical smuggler who acquires his contraband lawfully in a cheaper market to run it past the customs to a dearer market.

It was to Cape Fear, then, that Bonnet came in the beginning of August with his ship and two captive sloops, one of them being the _Francis_, and it was here that toward the end of the next month Justice presented her bill to him at the point of a cannon.

Colonel Rhett, of Charlestown, was the agent of Justice in this instance. Not long after Blackbeard had held up Charles Town for a quantity of pills and plasters, as we have noticed, another rascal tried the same trick but could not make it work. This fellow’s name was Vane, sometimes called Vaughan, and quite a bad actor in his own way.

Of all the citizens who sharply resented these piratical impertinences, Colonel Rhett, a noted colonist, took it most to heart. On his own initiative he fitted out as sloops-of-war two ships, the _Henry_, on which he himself sailed, and the _Sea Nymph_, which he manned with many “gentlemen of the town, animated with the same principle of zeal and honor for our public safety, and the preservation of our trade.”

Heartily seconded by Governor Johnson of South Carolina, who unlike Governor Eden of North Carolina was a terror to pirates, Rhett’s little fleet put out in pursuit of Vane; for Vane, seeing that his plans had slipped, decided that he had better also slip. He slipped so effectively that Rhett never came up with him.

Since leaving Topsail Inlet with his recruits Bonnet had taken no less than thirteen vessels, and word of this pirate had come to Charles Town while Rhett was outfitting. Missing Vane, Rhett “and the rest of the gentlemen were resolved not to return without doing some service to their country, and therefore went in quest of a pirate they had heard lay at Cape Fear.” There they certainly found their opportunity of doing a public service and most commendably appropriated that opportunity.

At evening on September 26 the _Henry_ and the _Sea Nymph_ came to Smith Island while daylight enough was left to show them the topmasts of the pirate above a spit of land behind which the _Royal James_ lay. They threw their anchors into the mud of the inlet and waited for morning. At dusk three boatloads of armed men came out of the river and coolly reconnoitered. Major Bonnet had spotted Colonel Rhett.

All that night of late summer the Charles Town gentlemen could make out the threats and persuasions of Bonnet and his officers driving on the efforts of their crew in making ready for the morrow’s deadly debate, which Bonnet, rather than surrendering, evidently chose to maintain. The tide brimmed up the river from the Atlantic and was sucked back again to those vast waters, yet it lulled no one to sleep on any of the ships.

All night the wind-blown torches and lanterns lit the work of the pirates; all night the glare of them flickered and jumped beyond the bump of land which separated the besiegers and the besieged. The pirate sloop was like a warrior unbuckled and relaxing in his tent, expecting no hostile surprise. Her deck was disorderly with bits of cargo; barrels of rum, quarters of beef, hogsheads of molasses, all to be cleared off for the free action of the guns. Her gear, too, was probably at odds and ends in course of repair.

The work of weeks had now to be punched up into the fleet hours of one night, for when the dawn should come the _Royal James_ must be a warrior harnessed and prepared. All night the men of the _Henry_ and the _Sea Nymph_ lay at watch.

Sun-up began the day of fate. Beyond the headlands which sheer above the river, the east was bannered with yellow and purple and rose-pink; a strong breeze blew directly from the land. The sails of the _Royal James_ went up with the sun, the blocks and tackle creaking like a flock of hungry gulls; the chains rattled with the hoisting of the anchor.

Bonnet had to fight two to one. His chance--and it was an approved method of pirate strategy--was to get to open water and battle on the run, broadsiding one or the other of his enemies but never permitting both to get at him at once.

The major had become quite a sailor now. He gathered all his men on the _Royal James_ and left the two captured sloops with only Mr. Killing and the other prisoners on board of them. The refusal of these latter to aid him in his fight with Rhett was allowed to pass without punishment.

“Here they come!”

Beyond the hummock the Charles Town men could see the masts of the pirate, fully freighted with sail, running swiftly toward the point. Bonnet was making a break for the sea.

Rhett’s ships quivered with action. As the _Royal James_ thrust her bowsprit into sight, the _Henry_ and the _Sea Nymph_ crowded down on either of her quarters.

They made it in time; Bonnet, dodging, was elbowed into the shore. If the channel had been deep there, he might still have made it; but the channel was shallow, and his ship thudded into the sandy bottom, and there she lay, with her full suit of canvas tugging at the sticks until they promised to snap.

Rhett grinned and swung about, but he could not make it sharply enough, and his satisfaction waned with the bump of his ship into the same bottom that gripped his enemy. The _Sea Nymph_, also turning, likewise found herself hard and fast ashore.

Here then was the situation. The _Henry_ was grounded on the pirate’s bow within pistol shot; the _Sea Nymph_ struck the sand out of range, and there she stayed for the greater part of the fight, a spectator of the struggle, unable to bear a part or give any help to the _Henry_.

And Rhett’s flagship needed help. When she hit she slanted, but in the same direction as the pirate had tilted, with the result, of course, that she presented her unprotected deck squarely to Bonnet’s broadsides, while the latter’s position offered more of his hull and less of his deck to Rhett’s ordnance.

For all of that, the South Carolinians gave the Barbados gentleman all their ten guns at once with a smart peppering of small-arm fire. Bonnet roared back with all of his pieces, smashing the _Henry’s_ deckwork and reddening her scuppers. The Charles Town boys who stood by the guns on that open, inclined deck of that Saturday morning, never letting the fight flag for a moment, certainly passed the supreme physical test one hundred per cent to the good.

But there was to be another deciding element of the contest than cannon balls, musketry or cutlasses. The tide, which was now turning and flooding in, would award the victory. For whichever ship righted herself first must have the critical advantage.

The opponents must have known this from the first, and, of course, the benefit of the tide being uncertain, each desperately strove to finish the other and thus leave no chance to the arbitrament of Nature. The mud flats disappeared beneath the oncoming waters; the lower islands sank from sight; the battling ships jerked now and then with the powerful tug of the stream at their hulls, and with the rising of the river crammed more shot into the hot guns till the smoke burned the eyelids of the fighters red, and ten good men lay in the shocked attitudes of death on the _Henry’s_ decks, and eighteen wounded groaned in her hold. Seven of Bonnet’s crew had signed on with the real skull-and-bones flag.

The tide came swirling in. High noon gave place to afternoon; the moment of decision was at hand. One or other of the ships would gain her keel in a few minutes. Which would it be?

It was the _Henry_. Bonnet, who had fought supremely, saw with vehement despair the yards of his enemy tilting up, while he himself lay in the sand inert and helpless. He rushed with his pistol cocked to the magazine of powder thus to make the grand finish, but his men threw themselves upon him to restrain his rash and horrible act, while one of them jumped in the shrouds and waved the white flag of the conquered.

Rhett boarded and chained up some thirty men, including their leader, and after repairing the _Henry_ set out for home. The public service had been rendered--by the tide.

Charles Town went wild with excitement, though not exactly in the way they mean who keep this tired phrase in currency. When Rhett came in laden with pirate prisoners and convoying the _Royal James_ and the two sloops captured by that ship, the _Fortune_ and the _Francis_, he was the hero of one faction in town and the villain of the other.

Friends of piracy in general and the personal acquaintances of the enchained pirates in particular shared a common indignation. They must have been numerous, for they promised to liberate the prisoners or burn the city to the foundation blocks. Bonnet, as was fitting for a gentleman who happened to be a criminal, was locked up in the residence of the marshal, while the baser fellows were thrown into the watch-house, there being no jail in the town at that time.

The fashion of the port went out to look at the ships. The _Henry_ was all knocked about, while the _Royal James_--whose name had been immediately changed back to _Revenge_ by a proper patriotic gesture--had not much more than a chipped hull.

If the ships had not grounded as they did Bonnet would have been against overwhelming odds. The _Henry_ had eight guns and seventy men; the _Sea Nymph_ had the same number of cannon and sixty men. Bonnet fought with ten guns and about fifty men.

But the sticking of the ships had made his chance more even, for in that situation he commanded two more guns than did Rhett, and the latter’s slight excess of men was more than canceled by the bad slant of his deck, with its consequent openness to the enemy’s cannonade.

Before the trouble in town could blaze into tumult, the pirates were put to trial in the Vice-Admiralty Court, presided over by Judge Trott. Bonnet, however, did not stand among them; by bribing with a free palm he had escaped and was at that moment fleeing up the coast in a small boat, to the great scandal of all lovers of good government.

The trial was brief and characteristic of the times. The defendants, without counsel as was usual, feebly pleaded that Bonnet had deceived them at Topsail Inlet into sailing with him. Ignatius Pell, boatswain of the _Royal James_, turned state’s evidence, and other witnesses were Mr. Killing, whom we have quoted, and the captain of the _Francis_ and the captain of the _Fortune_.

There could not be a doubt of their guilt and in that age not a doubt of their fate; they were sentenced to be hanged by a judge who preached at and denounced them in the vigorous fashion of the Elizabethan courts. In less than one week all but three or four who had proved compulsory service were executed at old White Point, near the present beautiful promenade.

One cheerful ray lightened the black misery of their situation: Stede Bonnet was recaptured. “He was the great ringleader of them,” said the prosecuting attorney, “who had seduced many poor, ignorant men to follow his course of living, and ruined many poor wretches; some of whom lately suffered, who with their last breath expressed a great satisfaction at the prisoner’s (Bonnet) being apprehended, and charged the ruin of themselves and loss of their lives entirely upon him.”

Colonel Rhett had again been the fate of Major Bonnet. After Bonnet’s flight from the marshal’s home, Rhett went after him and ran him down on a little island near the city. Heriot, sometime shipmaster for the major, was shot in the short scrimmage, and his employer again brought to Charles Town in manacles.

They tried Stede Bonnet in the same court and the same fashion and with the same evidence as they had his crew. He was tried on two indictments, one for taking the _Francis_ and the other for taking the _Fortune_.

To both he pleaded not guilty and was first tried on the affair of the _Francis_. He stood up for himself in good shape; but the facts, as well as the court, crushed him. He claimed, as Captain Kidd had claimed some years before in a similar fix, that a mutinous crew drove him protesting into these criminal courses. He explained that the only piracy he had ever been in was when with Captain Thatch. One wonders how much the mutinous crew, as alleged, had to exert themselves to persuade an old Blackbeard man to steal a fat ship or two.

A curious little circumstance comes up in this trial. Pell, the boatswain, in answer to a question, said Bonnet was in command of the ship, “but the quartermaster had more power than he,” adding that the quartermaster took charge of the loot and sometimes divided it. One wonders if the crew did not have a great deal more to say about things than would be supposed, tolerating Bonnet as a business manager.

Bonnet might have come down as a somewhat romantic person, but the nerve he had always shown, even in his trial, broke at the last; and when on December 18 he was hanged in the same place as his followers had been, he was almost senseless from fear. Thus in a miserable huddle he left a stage on which he had not been too modest, on which he had even swaggered.

This is all the story of one summer. The blockade of Charles Town by Blackbeard had happened in May of 1718, and December of the same year saw the end of Stede Bonnet. And to Bonnet, as to his men, there came a spark of joy before he went to the rope--and that was the news that his old superior, Blackbeard, had died upon the cutlass on November 22.

VII

Abdicating the high estate of admiral and breaking up his fleet, leaving a part of it, as we have seen, to roll as wreckage on the tides of Topsail Inlet, Blackbeard came back to Ocracoke and a lazy summer.

Perhaps it was during these thoughtful, meditative days that he persuaded a young lady to become his fourteenth wife for there is record of a merry marriage at which Governor Eden himself condescended to appear as a well-wishing guest and give the occasion the suitable air to promote the new Mrs. Blackbeard’s social fortunes. At the feast a good deal of somebody else’s rum, somebody else’s victuals and somebody else’s money were laid under contribution. Governor Eden, however, had a peculiarly happy detachment to the minor questions of somebody else’s property. That phase of his disposition doubly endeared him to his pirate friend.

But the gold pieces that he sent spinning dwindled anon; little Toby Knight began to bore him and even the Governor commenced to get on his nerves. Respectable shore life was entirely too much for him, so Blackbeard again yearned for the reeling decks and the roar of his bully boys. With a laudable regard for the proprieties, he gave out that he was putting to sea again on a “commercial venture,” and even registered his ship at the local customs house.

“Salvage,” he murmured, looking intently into little Toby’s honest face; pressing the secretary’s round, fat hand in farewell.

“Salvage,” grinned Toby, glad to get even the friendly grip of the sea monster released, and instinctively rubbing his hand slyly on the tails of his flaring coat.

Still delicate, Blackbeard waited until the land faded into the sea line behind him ere, with the feeling that he had had a pleasant vacation and was glad to get back to work again, he threw out his sinister ensign,--the flag of skull and bones. Blackbeard was himself again.

And now there happened that which many of the crew had often fearfully predicted,--the Devil came aboard Blackbeard’s ship.

The weather had been threatening for some time, and now, on a late afternoon, the great ocean heaved murmurously beneath the bows. In the rigging the wind fretted and complained, shrilly and more shrilly as though the white-green tumult of the waters was disturbing it; in the cabin below the dark horror of delirium tremens was falling upon the bearded master. On the decks, the mate--doubtless the effective Mr. Richards--stripped his ship for the approaching combat and drove his men aloft into the swaying yards. Now and then Blackbeard, still the sailor, reeled on his cabin threshold and blurted insane orders to the gale. Whereat Mr. Richards, well accustomed to the storms of wind and waves and delirious masters, slammed the door in his face and laughingly went about his work.

Palely the day expired in the west, and as though they had only been waiting for the night, wind and water strengthened to the struggle and now persuaded a third element, the rain, to join them in the conspiracy of destruction. These three witches began to make the cauldron boil.

Mr. Richards still laughed; his sails were in and he was with the helmsman, sweating to keep the vessel from a fatal lurch.

“What’s that sound?” gasped the steersman to his officer, leaning full weight to his work. Forward they could see nothing but the black void and a white wash of sea where their decks and bowsprit should ordinarily be, nor could look in that direction long for the whips of rain with which the screaming winds lashed them.

“The wind,” hollered Richards, bending close to be heard.

The steersman shook his head. “No--that!” he shouted.

The gale paused in one of those lulls by which it seems to recover for a effort of fresh fury. And in the second of quietness there rose and fell a long, horrible scream of inhuman defiance. Richards grinned and pointed with his finger below. Blackbeard was wrestling with the principalities and powers of darkness.

“Who’s that?” bellowed the steersman, his momentary reassurance flown. His face was turned with a gaze of inexpressible fear at the gleaming, plunging masts. “There--there--”

Richards peered in the rain-whipped night; peered and shrank back, his mouth open wide and his eyes protruding. He rallied, pulled out a heavy wooden pin from the ship’s side and started forward. Within ten paces of the main-mast he stopped, and gathering his strength, hurled the pin with all his force crashingly against the mast. The pin fell into an invading sea and was whirled overboard. But the Thing stood, dark and sinister.

Richards felt the ship getting beyond control of the cowering helmsman. He rushed back in time to save them from ruin; the man had dropped to the deck, a bundle of abject fright. While the mate was still calling for help, the boatswain crawled up on hands and knees and turned an ashen face to his superior.

“There’s a strange man,” he shouted as loudly as a quavering voice would permit, indicating with a backward jerk of his thumb. “Aloft--”

The Thing was moving about the yards; there was a sort of solid blackness to It that somehow made It visible even against its somber background.

Turning the helm over to the boatswain, the mate rushed below for his pistol, but when he came back to the deck the Thing was gone.

Richards laughed thinly. “The Devil’s signed on with us, boys!”

“Then that’s the end o’ us,” groaned the boatswain.

But the fact that a New Hand was on the ship if not on her articles was not immediately disastrous. For very shortly after that vivid night, Blackbeard, recovered now of his bout, met and took a very fine French ship, which was in so excellent a condition that to call it “salvage” was indeed the very subtlest of piratical jokes.

And the joke was made good, too, when, taking her at once into Ocracoke, His Excellency, with little hesitation, gave her captor a certificate of salvage, accepting as his fee for the certificate some sixty hogsheads of sugar. What the Governor did not use, Toby Knight obligingly allowed to be stored in the Knight barn.

This was the final straw that caused the proverbial fatal accident to the camel. North Carolina, at the end of patience, now flared up, and, ignoring her own corrupt authorities, appealed to the capable Alexander Spotswood, Governor of Virginia, for the extermination of the pest of Ocracoke Inlet.

Virginia heard and responded and despatched Captain Brand and Lieutenant Maynard, each in command of a small ship of war, to the Carolina coast in quest of Blackbeard.

Brand and Maynard appreciated the size of their job, so they gathered into their crews picked men who were volunteering for the duty, and who would be likely to keep the same zestful lookout for the oncoming terror as does a whaler in fat and profitable fishing grounds for the dark bulk which shall fill all his barrels with oil.

They reached Pamlico Sound, of which Ocracoke Inlet is a part, toward the evening of November 21, and with jumping pulses spotted the masts of the black beast as he lay in wait for prey. Blackbeard was surprised just as Bonnet had been, and like Bonnet spent the night in getting ready for battle.

The Virginians had to lie outside the inlet all night and wait for the morning to light them through the risky channels. When next day they sailed in, Blackbeard, knowing the soundings, was able to make the running-fight pirate tactics prescribed for such emergencies, and blasted Brand and Maynard with his broadsides; and though steeped to the eyebrows in rum, he was at all times the adept and finished sailor.

But the enemy were getting at him, too, and his decks were cluttered with the slain. He was undermanned, having only some twenty men at the time, so that his losses from the attackers’ fire left him but a sparse crew to work his ship and man eight guns, as well as keep going an effective musketry volleying. There was left but one resource, and that was hand-to-hand conflict.

He got within grappling distance of Maynard’s ship, and with his usual ferocity of appearance and manner threw himself and his surviving men into the Virginian’s rigging, and plunged, demoniacally fighting, to the decks. For a second the pirates shook their enemy with the shock of the impact, but not long; with that roaring vigor which gave the English-speaking sailors their dominion of the oceans of the world, Maynard’s men rallied and an indescribable butchering ensued.

Blackbeard made for the commander, and Maynard met him with equal courage and the added strength which the moral side of the matter always lends a warrior’s arm. The arch-pirate’s body was open at more than twenty places; but on those heaving, blood-wet decks he fought the lieutenant with the verve of an athlete fresh for the field. A sudden chance and he thrust a cocked pistol straight into his opponent’s chest, but before the finger could pull the trigger back, Maynard laid the cutlass squarely across the pirate’s throat. He sank to the deck like a slaughtered bull.

It was all over. Those pirates who could, leaped over the bulwarks and swam to the shore, leaving a red trail in the water behind them.

[Illustration: He fought the lieutenant with the verve of an athlete fresh for the field.]

Twilight came down on the sea. Beneath the shallow waters the bodies of the slain quivered with the motion of the waves as if they were still alive and still struggling, and among them was the headless corpse of Blackbeard.

For that terrible head was hung at the bowsprit of Maynard’s ship. All the way back to Virginia the gruesome figurehead swung and dipped and ducked with the movements of the vessel; the ocean pounded and played with it and twisted that strange beard into more fantastic shapes than Blackbeard had ever dreamed of, weaving into it the weeds and slime-flora of the sea, and for a last touch washed from their sockets the baleful eyes which glared in the fixed glassiness of death.