Pardon For a Pirate

The Overlook

By Tom Clavin

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For many people, Christmas is about gifts and trees and church and songs and, before climate change accelerated, snow. But this week I’m thinking about pirates. One of them in particular received quite a gift in December 1717 – a king’s pardon in his stocking.

Benjamin Hornigold was born somewhere in England in 1680. His early life is unrecorded, but he probably first served at sea aboard ships whose home port was either King’s Lynn or Great Yarmouth.

His first documented acts of piracy took place in the winter of 1713–1714, when he employed sailing canoes and the sloop Happy Return to menace merchant vessels off the coast of New Providence and its capital Nassau, where he had established a “pirates republic.” Hornigold himself sailed a ship named the Marianne. After a mutiny in the summer of 1716, he and his supporters were left with a captured sloop. By 1717, Hornigold had at his command a 30-gun sloop he named the Ranger, which was probably the most heavily armed ship in the region, and this allowed him to seize other vessels with impunity.

Hornigold's second-in-command during this period was Edward Teach, who would later be better known as the pirate Blackbeard. When Hornigold took command of the Ranger, he delegated the captaincy of his earlier sloop to Teach. Together, the captains seized three merchant ships in quick succession – a Spanish one carrying 120 barrels of flour bound for Havana, another a Bermudian sloop with a cargo of spirits, and the third a Portuguese ship traveling from Madeira with a cargo of white wine.

Next, Hornigold led an attack on an armed merchant vessel sent to the Bahamas by the governor of South Carolina to hunt for pirates. The merchantman escaped by running itself aground on Cat Cay, and its captain later reported that Hornigold's fleet had increased to five vessels, with a combined crew of around 350 pirates. The ragged raiders looted several ships off Jamaica, Puerto Bello, and Cuba before being chased away by the warship a British warship.

Hornigold is recorded as having attacked a sloop off the coast of Honduras. One of the passengers of the captured vessel recounted, "They did us no further injury than the taking most of our hats from us, having got drunk the night before, as they told us, and toss'd theirs overboard.” In September 1717, Hornigold and Teach met Major Stede Bonnet and his ship Revenge. Bonnet, having been wounded in battle, ceded his command to Teach. In October, another sloop was added to the fleet.

Despite his apparent maritime supremacy, Hornigold remained careful not to attack British-flagged ships, apparently to maintain the legal defense that he was a privateer operating against England's enemies in the War of the Sanish Succession. This scrupulous approach was not to the liking of his lieutenants, and a vote was taken among the combined crews to attack any vessel they chose. Hornigold opposed the decision and was replaced as captain of Marianne by Samuel Bellamy.

Hornigold and his supporters were left with a captured sloop which was commanded by Teach after Hornigold acquired the Ranger. He continued piracy operations from Nassau until December 1717, when word arrived of a general pardon for pirates offered by the King. Hornigold sailed to Jamaica with the Ranger and one of the other sloops in January 1718 and received a pardon from the governor there. He later became a pirate hunter for the new governor of the Bahamas, Woodes Rogers.

King George I’s Proclamation of 1717 was "For Suppressing Pirates in the West Indies.” This document granted a pardon to all pirates who surrendered themselves to any colonial governor or governor under the domain of the British Empire and they were guaranteed a "clean slate" of their record. They were also offered a large sum of money for the capturing of other pirates who were guilty of piracy, murder, and treason against His Majesty. Each level of member on a pirate ship had a reward placed on their heads from this point on.

Governor Rogers commissioned Hornigold to hunt down any and all recusant pirates, including some ex-comrades such as his former lieutenant, Teach (Blackbeard). He stalked but could not apprehend Charles Vane, capturing Vane's associate Nicholas Woodall instead, followed by John Auger, both of whom had accepted the same pardon as Hornigold but later slid back into piracy. The governor wrote to the Board of Trade in London commending Hornigold's efforts to remedy his reputation as a pirate by hunting his former allies.

Alas, no good deed goes unpunished. At some point late in 1719, Rogers commissioned Captain Hornigold and a few other of Rogers's most trusted captains to help safeguard and facilitate the trade of valuable wares with the Spanish. During the voyage, Hornigold's ship was caught in a hurricane somewhere between New Providence and New Spain and was wrecked on an uncharted reef. The incident is referred to in the contemporary account A General History of the Pyrates, which states that “in one of which voyages ... Captain Hornigold, another of the famous pirates, was cast away upon rocks, a great way from land, and perished, but five of his men got into a canoe and were saved."

So, Hornigold didn’t make it to 1720 but in a way he made it into the 21^st century: He is portrayed by Stacy Keach in the 2006 miniseries Blackbeard.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. His latest book, Bandit Heaven, was published by St. Martin’s Press in October. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase a copy.