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.