Howard Pyle's Book of pirates : fiction, fact & fancy concerning the buccaneers & marooners of the Spanish Main
in it, and from the great Admiral Drake of the old, old days, to the
truculent Morgan of buccaneering times, the Englishman did the boldest
and wickedest deeds, and wrought the most damage.
First of all upon the list of pirates stands the bold Captain Avary,
one of the institutors of marooning. Him we see but dimly, half hidden
by the glamouring mists of legends and tradition. Others who came
afterward outstripped him far enough in their doings, but he stands
pre-eminent as the first of marooners of whom actual history has been
handed down to us of the present day.
When the English, Dutch, and Spanish entered into an alliance to
suppress buccaneering in the West Indies, certain worthies of Bristol,
in old England, fitted out two vessels to assist in this laudable
project; for doubtless Bristol trade suffered smartly from the Morgans
and the l'Olonoises of that old time. One of these vessels was named
the _Duke_, of which a certain Captain Gibson was the commander and
Avary the mate.
Away they sailed to the West Indies, and there Avary became impressed
by the advantages offered by piracy, and by the amount of good things
that were to be gained by very little striving.
One night the captain (who was one of those fellows mightily addicted
to punch), instead of going ashore to saturate himself with rum at the
ordinary, had his drink in his cabin in private. While he lay snoring
away the effects of his rum in the cabin, Avary and a few other
conspirators heaved the anchor very leisurely, and sailed out of the
harbor of Corunna, and through the midst of the allied fleet riding at
anchor in the darkness.
By and by, when the morning came, the captain was awakened by the
pitching and tossing of the vessel, the rattle and clatter of the
tackle overhead, and the noise of footsteps passing and repassing
hither and thither across the deck. Perhaps he lay for a while turning
the matter over and over in his muddled head, but he presently rang
the bell, and Avary and another fellow answered the call.
"What's the matter?" bawls the captain from his berth.
"Nothing," says Avary, coolly.
"Something's the matter with the ship," says the captain. "Does she
drive? What weather is it?"
"Oh no," says Avary; "we are at sea."
"At sea?"
"Come, come!" says Avary: "I'll tell you; you must know that I'm the
captain of the ship now, and you must be packing from this here cabin.
We are bound to Madagascar, to make all of our fortunes, and if you're
a mind to ship for the cruise, why, we'll be glad to have you, if you
will be sober and mind your own business; if not, there is a boat
alongside, and I'll have you set ashore."
The poor half-tipsy captain had no relish to go a-pirating under the
command of his backsliding mate, so out of the ship he bundled, and
away he rowed with four or five of the crew, who, like him, refused to
join with their jolly shipmates.
The rest of them sailed away to the East Indies, to try their fortunes
in those waters, for our Captain Avary was of a high spirit, and had
no mind to fritter away his time in the West Indies, squeezed dry by
buccaneer Morgan and others of lesser note. No, he would make a bold
stroke for it at once, and make or lose at a single cast.
On his way he picked up a couple of like kind with himself--two
sloops off Madagascar. With these he sailed away to the coast of
India, and for a time his name was lost in the obscurity of uncertain
history. But only for a time, for suddenly it flamed out in a blaze of
glory. It was reported that a vessel belonging to the Great Mogul,
laden with treasure and bearing the monarch's own daughter upon a holy
pilgrimage to Mecca (they being Mohammedans), had fallen in with the
pirates, and after a short resistance had been surrendered, with the
damsel, her court, and all the diamonds, pearls, silk, silver, and
gold aboard. It was rumored that the Great Mogul, raging at the insult
offered to him through his own flesh and blood, had threatened to wipe
out of existence the few English settlements scattered along the
coast; whereat the honorable East India Company was in a pretty state
of fuss and feathers. Rumor, growing with the telling, has it that
Avary is going to marry the Indian princess, willy-nilly, and will
turn rajah, and eschew piracy as indecent. As for the treasure itself,
there was no end to the extent to which it grew as it passed from
mouth to mouth.
Cracking the nut of romance and exaggeration, we come to the kernel of
the story--that Avary did fall in with an Indian vessel laden with
great treasure (and possibly with the Mogul's daughter), which he
captured, and thereby gained a vast prize.
Having concluded that he had earned enough money by the trade he had
undertaken, he determined to retire and live decently for the rest of
his life upon what he already had. As a step toward this object, he
set about cheating his Madagascar partners out of their share of what
had been gained. He persuaded them to store all the treasure in his
vessel, it being the largest of the three; and so, having it safely in
hand, he altered the course of his ship one fine night, and when the
morning came the Madagascar sloops found themselves floating upon a
wide ocean without a farthing of the treasure for which they had
fought so hard, and for which they might whistle for all the good it
would do them.
At first Avary had a great part of a mind to settle at Boston, in
Massachusetts, and had that little town been one whit less bleak and
forbidding, it might have had the honor of being the home of this
famous man. As it was, he did not like the looks of it, so he sailed
away to the eastward, to Ireland, where he settled himself at
Biddeford, in hopes of an easy life of it for the rest of his days.
Here he found himself the possessor of a plentiful stock of jewels,
such as pearls, diamonds, rubies, etc., but with hardly a score of
honest farthings to jingle in his breeches pocket. He consulted with a
certain merchant of Bristol concerning the disposal of the stones--a
fellow not much more cleanly in his habits of honesty than Avary
himself. This worthy undertook to act as Avary's broker. Off he
marched with the jewels, and that was the last that the pirate saw of
his Indian treasure.
Perhaps the most famous of all the piratical names to American ears
are those of Capt. Robert Kidd and Capt. Edward Teach, or
"Blackbeard."
Nothing will be ventured in regard to Kidd at this time, nor in regard
to the pros and cons as to whether he really was or was not a pirate,
after all. For many years he was the very hero of heroes of piratical
fame; there was hardly a creek or stream or point of land along our
coast, hardly a convenient bit of good sandy beach, or hump of rock,
or water-washed cave, where fabulous treasures were not said to have
been hidden by this worthy marooner. Now we are assured that he never
was a pirate, and never did bury any treasure, excepting a certain
chest, which he was compelled to hide upon Gardiner's Island--and
perhaps even it was mythical.
So poor Kidd must be relegated to the dull ranks of simply respectable
people, or semirespectable people at best.
But with "Blackbeard" it is different, for in him we have a real,
ranting, raging, roaring pirate _per se_--one who really did bury
treasure, who made more than one captain walk the plank, and who
committed more private murders than he could number on the fingers of
both hands; one who fills, and will continue to fill, the place to
which he has been assigned for generations, and who may be depended
upon to hold his place in the confidence of others for generations to
come.
Captain Teach was a Bristol man born, and learned his trade on board
of sundry privateers in the East Indies during the old French
war--that of 1702--and a better apprenticeship could no man serve. At
last, somewhere about the latter part of the year 1716, a privateering
captain, one Benjamin Hornigold, raised him from the ranks and put him
in command of a sloop--a lately captured prize--and Blackbeard's
fortune was made. It was a very slight step, and but the change of a
few letters, to convert "privateer" into "pirate," and it was a very
short time before Teach made that change. Not only did he make it
himself, but he persuaded his old captain to join with him.
And now fairly began that series of bold and lawless depredations
which have made his name so justly famous, and which placed him among
the very greatest of marooning freebooters.
"Our hero," says the old historian who sings of the arms and bravery
of this great man--"our hero assumed the cognomen of Blackbeard from
that large quantity of hair which, like a frightful meteor, covered
his whole face, and frightened America more than any comet that
appeared there in a long time. He was accustomed to twist it with
ribbons into small tails, after the manner of our Ramillies wig, and
turn them about his ears. In time of action he wore a sling over his
shoulders, with three brace of pistols, hanging in holsters like
bandoleers; he stuck lighted matches under his hat, which, appearing
on each side of his face, and his eyes naturally looking fierce and
wild, made him altogether such a figure that imagination cannot form
an idea of a Fury from hell to look more frightful."
The night before the day of the action in which he was killed he sat
up drinking with some congenial company until broad daylight. One of
them asked him if his poor young wife knew where his treasure was
hidden. "No," says Blackbeard; "nobody but the devil and I knows where
it is, and the longest liver shall have all."
As for that poor young wife of his, the life that he and his rum-crazy
shipmates led her was too terrible to be told.
For a time Blackbeard worked at his trade down on the Spanish Main,
gathering, in the few years he was there, a very neat little fortune
in the booty captured from sundry vessels; but by and by he took it
into his head to try his luck along the coast of the Carolinas; so off
he sailed to the northward, with quite a respectable little fleet,
consisting of his own vessel and two captured sloops. From that time
he was actively engaged in the making of American history in his small
way.
He first appeared off the bar of Charleston Harbor, to the no small
excitement of the worthy town of that ilk, and there he lay for five
or six days, blockading the port, and stopping incoming and outgoing
vessels at his pleasure, so that, for the time, the commerce of the
province was entirely paralyzed. All the vessels so stopped he held as
prizes, and all the crews and passengers (among the latter of whom was
more than one provincial worthy of the day) he retained as though they
were prisoners of war.
And it was a mightily awkward thing for the good folk of Charleston to
behold day after day a black flag with its white skull and crossbones
fluttering at the fore of the pirate captain's craft, over across the
level stretch of green salt marshes; and it was mightily unpleasant,
too, to know that this or that prominent citizen was crowded down with
the other prisoners under the hatches.
One morning Captain Blackbeard finds that his stock of medicine is
low. "Tut!" says he, "we'll turn no hair gray for that." So up he
calls the bold Captain Richards, the commander of his consort the
_Revenge_ sloop, and bids him take Mr. Marks (one of his prisoners),
and go up to Charleston and get the medicine. There was no task that
suited our Captain Richards better than that. Up to the town he rowed,