May 1, 2013 • 23 mins
In 1717, Stede Bonnet left his family and became a pirate. Despite having no seafaring experience, Bonnet's brief career as a pirate was eventful, including a stint aboard Blackbeard's ship and raids along the Atlantic coast of North America.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetop
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today we're gonna talk about
something that's come up on the podcast before, which is piracy.
But we're going to talk about a pirate that doesn't
(00:22):
always get a lot of play in history and retellings. Uh.
It's Steve Bonnet, who was often referred to as the
gentleman pirate. Right, this is a pirate that that I
have heard about because I grew up in North Carolina,
and if you grow up in North Carolina, often you
hear a lot about pirates. Yeah, and he his career,
you know, intersected with North Carolina many times, and so
(00:45):
he has often heard about there and in some of
the nautical museums there. But it's like the further inland
you get from North Carolina, the less unless you hear
about him. Uh. He had a very short career in piracy,
and it was really out of character for him. He
was a retired military man even though he was quite young,
and then he sort of seemingly suddenly left his family
(01:08):
to pursue this life of piracy. And historians have theorized
about what caused this. Some say it could have actually
been a midlife crisis of some sort. Uh. It could
have been the result of financial issues. It could have
been brought about by a mental break. Uh. And what's
really interesting is it his story is actually tied to
black Beard, but Bonnet is often left out of the
(01:31):
accounts of it, of black beards happenings, or he's just
sort of mentioned in passing. But he is really fascinating
because he had this educated demeanor and he was very stylish,
and it earned him this nickname the Gentleman Pirate. Bonnett
was born in sixteen eighty in Barbados. His great grandfather
(01:51):
was one of Barbados's first English settlers, and he was
actually orphaned as a child. Even though he was born
to a good family, he was not without uh, you know, difficulty.
But he inherited a four hundred acre estate that was
managed for him by a guardian until he reached adulthood.
He married Mary Alamby, who was also from a wealthy
(02:12):
plantation family, in seventeen o nine, so that was when
he was about twenty one, and he retired from military
life to run a sugar plantation in Barbados, and he
spent a little less than a decade after leaving the
military kind of making a go at family life and
you know, running the plantation. But that was all he
could handle, apparently. In a General History of the Pirates
(02:37):
from their first rise and settlement of the Island of
Providence to the present time, which was written by Captain
Charles Johnson and sometimes attributed to Daniel Dafoe, and first
published in sevent it is written of Bonnet he had
the least temptation of any man to follow such a
course of life. From the condition of his circumstances. It
(02:58):
was very surprising to everyone to hear of the major's
enterprise in the island where he lived, and he and
as he was generally esteemed and honored before he broke
out into open acts of piracy, for he was afterwards
rather pettied than condemned. So at the time, during the
seventeen teens, it really was not unheard of for people
(03:20):
to turn to piracy in desperation or in a bid
to fight the establishment and the growing gap between the
rich and the poor. But Bonnet was an educated man
from a good family, so it initially does seem kind
of incongruous to think of him in those terms, but
there are some clues about why he actually may have
changed the course of his life. Some historians have suggested
(03:44):
that he was probably a supporter of James Stewart as
King of England and felt a sense of rebellion against
the German born George the First, so Jacobite politics may
have played a part in that decision in his decision
to become of pirates. And it's also worth noting that
Bonnet borrowed about seventeen hundred pounds, which is the equivalent
(04:04):
of roughly four hundred thousand dollars today, around seventeen seventeen,
so it's possible that he was having financial troubles or
that the plantation wasn't going well, although it's also possible
he wanted the money to start his pirate enterprise. Nobody's
going to loan your money to start a pirate business.
He didn't tell people that's what he was doing. On
a more sad note, his firstborn son died as a baby,
(04:27):
which some believed to have catalyzed a mental break. He
was also said to have experienced some quote discomforts he
found in a married state, so in other words, some
historians theorized that he was nagged so much that he
ran away to be a pirate, So his start in
the world of piracy is really unusual. He actually had
(04:49):
his ship, which he called Revenge, built and outfitted with
cannons at a local Barbados shipyard, and he started that
around seventeen sixteen. Uh Collin Woodard, who is the author
of the books The Republic of Pirates, posits that Bonnet
likely told people the ship was intended for a legitimate
privateering plan. And I know to some people privateering and
(05:13):
piracy have sort of become a little bit interchangeable, but
there is a nuance of difference there, So just in
case you do not know, the distinction is that privateers
are acting on behalf of a governing nation, while pirates
don't really answer to anybody, but their methods are virtually
identical in many cases, which has kind of fueled the
confusion of the interchangeability of those words. In any case,
(05:36):
instead of contracting with the government, Bonnet made a nighttime
departure on the ship Revenge in April of seventeen seventeen,
and under cover of night he had he headed toward
North America, calling himself Captain Edwards. And this is a
good time to mention that Bonnett had no knowledge about seafaring.
He was really sort of a land lover, uh, and
(06:00):
so it's unusual and bizarre. It just kind of feeds
that whole UH image of him as one of those like,
why did you do this? You're making a really rash decision,
even though he clearly had planned ahead to some degree. Well,
and it's also unusual and that most pirates would start
their career as in piracy by commandering another vessel, they
would steal somebody else's ship, but he went and built one,
(06:24):
financed and paid for everything himself or maybe with this
loan from before. Yeah, And he first headed for the
Virginia coast, and he actually successfully took several ships, But
it's probably the seventy men on his crew that really
should get the credit for that initial success, because some
(06:45):
of them were pretty experienced pirates, and it's unlikely that
he really uh had much in the way of leadership
skills since he didn't know seafaring and had never been
pirating before. The Revenge then headed to New York and
took a sloop that had been headed for the West Indies,
and they landed a group of men at Gardner's Island,
which you may remember from our Getty Garlic episode where
(07:08):
they actually bought provisions instead of stealing them. Yeah, so,
and again kind of fuels that image of him as
something of a gentleman that he's like, no, let's go
buy things instead of, uh, just plundering for what we need.
But beginning in August of that same year, so we're
still in seventeen seventeen, Captain Edwards and the Revengeance crew
(07:29):
attacked a number of vessels near the Charleston Harbor. But
after their exploits, they are culminated in setting fire to
a sloop in a North Carolina inlet, which he apparently
did become a fan of setting fire to ships after
he had taken them, bought it and his crew kind
of couldn't decide what they wanted to do for their
next course of action, and they eventually made their way
(07:50):
south to Honduras, which is where Blackbeard enters the Tail.
Because Bonnet wasn't really experienced in maritime affairs, he usually
yield to others, so when he fell into company with
Edward Teach, also known as black Beard, while he was
in Honduras, the experienced and hardened teach easily became the
(08:12):
alpha male in their relationship. Yeah, Bonnet's crew joined Blackbeards,
and Bonnet kind of became a superfluous figure rather rapidly.
Bonnet had been recovering from injuries at the time after
a bad encounter with a Spanish worship and he also
lost some of his crew, and he apparently agreed to
this situation thinking it was a temporary setup, like, oh,
(08:33):
you'll just handle things while I'm not feeling well. Right,
black Beard had something else in mine. He saw Bonnet's
weakness and decided to seize command of the Revenge. Bonnet
spent his time on black beard ship without anything to
do while Blackbeard's first mate ran the Revenge, and while
the relationships seemed to be friendly enough, Bonnet realized he
(08:54):
was basically a captive and he became, you know, kind
of depressed, melancholy. He openly told the crew that he
was unhappy and that he had tired of the pirate
life and that he would really like to start a
new life in Spain or Portugal because he would be
quote ashamed to see the face of any Englishman again.
I just I have to interject here that if I
(09:16):
were being held prisoner on black beard ship, I don't
know that I would go around saying that I was
tired of the pirate life openly to people. Yeah, but
accounts kind of painted as though he was sort of
endeared to the men and this didn't make them think
any less of him, like they almost sort of loved
him more for it in the various tellings of it.
(09:37):
So whether that's true or not, I don't know, but
I thought it was interesting. Uh. And while these two
were sailing quote together, but I mean they were technically
in the same place, but not really partners. Uh. This
is when black Beard actually took the frigate La Concorde
and then re christened it to be Queen Anne's Revenge,
which is his famous flagship. On June tenth, team the
(10:00):
Queen Ann's Revenge ran aground at Topsail Inlet, which is
now known as Beaufort Inlet. And there's actually some debate
over whether this was accidental or if Teach was trying
to break up the four men under him. Uh. He
kind of recognized that the winds were changing for pirates
and that maybe running in a big pack was not smart.
(10:21):
But again this is a matter of some historical debate. Uh,
Teacher is an accomplished sailor, so it would be a
little unusual for him to be caught off guard and
run aground. But at the same time, anything possible, So
I just feel like we should have that aside. So
while the Queen's Revenge is run aground, Bonnet went to Bath,
(10:42):
North Carolina. He wanted to take a pardon that had
been offered by the King. The King's proclamation had come
out on September fifth, seventeen seventeen, and stated that pirates
surrendering two authorities quote, should have his most gracious pardon.
But when Bonnett returned to the ships, he found that
Teach had stripped the revenge and abandoned more than two
(11:04):
dozen crew members on a small island. The stranded crew
members had believed they were doomed to die, so it's
likely that Bonnet's arrival was really quite welcome. So at
this point, having accepted the pardon, bonnets slate was clean.
He invited all the abandoned men to join him, refitted
the revenge, and renamed it the Royal James. His plan
(11:25):
was to sail to St. Thomas and seek out a
privateering commission, but they never made it to St. Thomas. No,
the crew that he had invited to join him, we're
all on board with this privateering plan. But as they
were preparing to set sail, a boat that had come
up against them, just meaning adjacent to them, that to
sell apples and cider to the men, actually informed them
(11:47):
that black Beard and a small crew of eighteen or
twenty men were at Okra Cooke Inlets. They were having
a big party, which is famous in its own right.
So that's the black Beard side of the story. Uh.
But Bonnet immediately acted upon this information and went in
pursuit of Teach because he was still kind of smarting
from the way things went down. After four days of
(12:07):
looking for Teach with no success, they instead headed not
to St. Thomas, but to Virginia. So it seems that
his resolved to go legit was not really that strong, no,
And in July of seventeen eighteen, they actually took provisions,
which they were desperate for from another ship that they encountered,
but they didn't want the actively recorded as piracy, so
(12:29):
in return they gave quote eight or ten casks of
rice and an old cable in lieu thereofs so they
kind of were like, we want to make this fair,
even though we kind of rated you, but we're not pirates.
We just need stuff. Next, the major, who was now
going by the name Captain Thomas, and his crew encountered
a sloop off of Cape Henry and looted her for liquor.
(12:51):
Bonnet sent eight men over to the sloop, theoretically to
take care of the ship, but maybe to make some
kind of a deal. But they joined that crew and
sailed away with them. And at this point, somewhere around
this time, Bonnet just sort of threw all caution to
the wind and went head first back into a life
of piracy. He really abandoned that whole concept of privateering,
(13:12):
and the Royal James then made its way up and
down the Atlantic coast, taking him plundering vessel after vessel.
At the end of July sev eighteen, Bonnet had sailed
to the Cape Beer River, where he and his crew
found themselves stuck for repairs. The Royal James was terribly
leaky and it needed to be fixed to remain seaworthy,
so it's sat for nearly two months while the work
(13:34):
was done, which is a long time for a vote
to just sit there, especially when it is a boat
full of criminals. Uh So, when ordered reached the Council
of South Carolina that a pirate sloop was Korean in
Cape Fear, Colonel William Rhett set out to find and
capture Bonnet, and Rhett had under his command two ships,
the Henry and the Sea Nymph. On September eighteen, Rhet's
(13:59):
two sloops ran in round while headed up the Capeier River.
While they were getting back on float by It's pirates
found them and the crew manned three canoes to take
the ships. The pirates didn't know who they were attempting
to take, but realized quickly and turned around to deliver
a report to Bonnet. And Bonnet was incensed by this.
Uh that night he penned the letter to the Governor
(14:20):
of Carolina that said, if those two sloops had been
sent against him by that governor, and if Bonnet got
clear of those two sloops, he was going to burn
and destroy every single vessel coming and going out of
South Carolina. He's basically like, you better hope you win this,
because if you don't, and I find out you were
actually behind it. I'm basically going to ruin your life.
The next day, September eighteen, a battle ensued that lasted
(14:44):
for hours. At one point, both Retz ships and Bonnet
ship were run aground in the shallow water as they
tried to maneuver, and there was trash talking from the
pirates to the colonel's cruise. Both ships were hardly damaged.
It was really everything that you would expect to see
in a Hollywood blockbuster about pirates. But eventually rhett sloop
was the first to float, and as his command was
(15:07):
about to deliver the finishing blow to the pirate ship,
Bonnet sent up a flag of truce and his crew
surrendered themselves as prisoners. So all that trash talking got
real quiet, and they all surrendered. The Henry lost ten
men and had fourteen wounded, and the Sumph lost two
men and had four wounded. Two of those died from
their wounds not long after. Colonel Rhett then set sail
(15:30):
from Cape Fear with his captives on September and he
arrived in what was called Charlestown at the time but
as Charleston now on October three, and on October five,
the Bonnet's crew was placed in a watch house that
was guarded by the militia because there wasn't an actual
prison that could hold them. Bonnet entered the custody of
the Marshal at his house, and two other crew members
(15:53):
were eventually moved to the Marshall's house. Just a few
days later. They were determined to be important in terms
of evidence and testimony for the trial. On October twenty four,
Bonnet and one of the other men, he was named Harriet, escaped.
The third man, a Boson, refused to go with them.
Rumors of incompetency and bribery in relation to the escape
(16:16):
immediately started to circulate. The governor offered a reward of
seven hundred pounds to the person who captured the fugitives,
and it turned out that Colonel Rhett Uh, who was
pursuing them in addition to other people after the reward,
was the one that recaptured Bonnet and Harriet was actually
killed during the pursuit. He was shot on October. Trials
(16:37):
of the crew began in Charlestown before Judge Trot. All
but four were found guilty and sentenced to death, and
on Saturday, November eighth, seventeen eighteen. The guilty men were
all executed at White Point, which is near Charleston. But
on November ten, Steve Bonnet's trial began. It lasted two
days and he was found guilty. He attempted to shift
(16:59):
some of the blame to Blackbeard, but that was really futile.
It was obvious that he had willingly participated in a
lot of these activities. In the Lord Chief Justices speech
pronouncing bonnets sentence, he said, while talllying the major's many
acts of piracy, not to mention the many acts of
piracy you committed before, for which if your pardon from
(17:21):
man was never so authentic, yet you must expect to
answer for them before God. His speech goes on for many,
many pages of the seventeen quote General History of Pirates,
which you can read online because we will link to
it in our show notes. Uh yeah. Also in the
Chief justice is speech there is a lot of talk
(17:42):
about not only was he a pirate, but he was
also a murderer, and it was a lot of the
wrath of God is coming for you. He was so
incensed that this man had been pardoned and then went
back to this life and did a lot of horrible things.
He really was uh not short of breath when it
came to condemnation in that speech. And Bonnet was executed
by hanging on December tenth of seventeen eighteen. And he
(18:05):
was only thirty at that point and he had spent
less than two years living the life of a pirate.
So after his what may have been a mental break,
he kind of burned it out. He just gunned it,
uh and then was no more. So he kind of
did the live fast, die young thing in the Sevres.
In my imagination, I feel like he was going for
(18:27):
han solo and wound up his two biascume K. Yeah,
but still sort of oddly beloved, which is the interesting
part of it. It kind of oddly beloved to biascume K.
That's true. It all makes sense. So, yeah, that is
the story of Steve Bonnets, which is a brief but
fascinating life as a pirate. Yeah, kind of from the
(18:50):
almost a pretender's perspective, since he kind of buys his
way into that world, right, I feel like it's the
eighteenth century version of buying a shiny sports car and
then going on a cross country spree of crime. Yeah.
And as I said at the top of the podcast,
there are historians who have likened it to his midlife crisis,
(19:10):
but hopefully you know, most midlife crises don't end quite
so dramatically. But now I wanted to talk about the
history of midlife crises because that seems to me like
a very modern invention too. Was stow upon a pirate?
I concur so we can put them on the list
for future podcast. Yes, I believe you also have some
list I do. This email came from our listener Kelly Joe,
(19:32):
and it is about Happy Birthday, and she says, Hi, ladies,
I enjoyed your Happy Birthday podcast and wanted to drop
a quick note with a story. I work at a university.
In my office, like many offices, has a tradition of
celebrating staff birthdays with cake and a rendition of Happy Birthday.
This past year, I had a graduate assistant, Kunlun, who
was from China, and on Kunlun's birthday, we of course
(19:55):
saying her Happy Birthday. Out of curiosity, I asked her
if there was a Happy a Day type song in China.
Much to my surprise, she broke into a song in
Mandarins set to the exact tune of Happy Birthday. Little
did I know that the tune a cross cultural borders
as well. Thanks for your working the podcast. So I
love that story, Kelly Joe uh And that's one of
those things that I we even talked about how it's
(20:17):
been published in many languages, but for some reason, if
it's not like a Germanic or a romance language. It
seems really almost startling to me when the standard Happy
Birthday tune gets used, especially since and a lot of
other cultures that the scale for music is entirely different
from the one used for Happy Birthday. Yes, and when
I read this, it reminded me of a restaurant that
(20:40):
we have here in Atlanta that is a really fantastic
Viennamese restaurant, and if you've ever been there, when they've
celebrated a birthday, they do this really interesting recording that
they play through the loud speakers in the restaurant, and
it starts out like the standard Happy Birthday, but then
it rifts into some whole other song, and that's their standard.
I've been there several times when they've done it, and
(21:00):
it's always that and I always mean to ask them
if that's the normal way that uh, they would sing
Happy Birthday of Vietnam, or if that is a special
recording that they just think is fun. But then I
always forget and get distracted by my delicious dessert. So
so I want to find out now and if we
have any listeners that are Vietnamese or are really familiar
(21:22):
with Vietnamese culture and can answer that question, feel free. Yes,
we also have lots of people who linked us up
with awesome other alternatives to Happy Birthday on our Facebook wall.
We reposted some of them, but not all. Yes, my
personal favorite still the Simpsons. Yes, you were the Birthday,
You're the Birthday. You're the birthday boy or girl, although
it's sung, but I will not say no. If you
(21:42):
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or anything else, uh, you may do so at History
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(22:03):
more about what we talked about today, you can go
to our website and type in the word piracy in
the search bar, and you will get how pirates work.
I wrote that, I know you're a smarty pant Uh.
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(22:23):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetop
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today we're gonna talk about
something that's come up on the podcast before, which is piracy.
But we're going to talk about a pirate that doesn't
(00:22):
always get a lot of play in history and retellings. Uh.
It's Steve Bonnet, who was often referred to as the
gentleman pirate. Right, this is a pirate that that I
have heard about because I grew up in North Carolina,
and if you grow up in North Carolina, often you
hear a lot about pirates. Yeah, and he his career,
you know, intersected with North Carolina many times, and so
(00:45):
he has often heard about there and in some of
the nautical museums there. But it's like the further inland
you get from North Carolina, the less unless you hear
about him. Uh. He had a very short career in piracy,
and it was really out of character for him. He
was a retired military man even though he was quite young,
and then he sort of seemingly suddenly left his family
(01:08):
to pursue this life of piracy. And historians have theorized
about what caused this. Some say it could have actually
been a midlife crisis of some sort. Uh. It could
have been the result of financial issues. It could have
been brought about by a mental break. Uh. And what's
really interesting is it his story is actually tied to
black Beard, but Bonnet is often left out of the
(01:31):
accounts of it, of black beards happenings, or he's just
sort of mentioned in passing. But he is really fascinating
because he had this educated demeanor and he was very stylish,
and it earned him this nickname the Gentleman Pirate. Bonnett
was born in sixteen eighty in Barbados. His great grandfather
(01:51):
was one of Barbados's first English settlers, and he was
actually orphaned as a child. Even though he was born
to a good family, he was not without uh, you know, difficulty.
But he inherited a four hundred acre estate that was
managed for him by a guardian until he reached adulthood.
He married Mary Alamby, who was also from a wealthy
(02:12):
plantation family, in seventeen o nine, so that was when
he was about twenty one, and he retired from military
life to run a sugar plantation in Barbados, and he
spent a little less than a decade after leaving the
military kind of making a go at family life and
you know, running the plantation. But that was all he
could handle, apparently. In a General History of the Pirates
(02:37):
from their first rise and settlement of the Island of
Providence to the present time, which was written by Captain
Charles Johnson and sometimes attributed to Daniel Dafoe, and first
published in sevent it is written of Bonnet he had
the least temptation of any man to follow such a
course of life. From the condition of his circumstances. It
(02:58):
was very surprising to everyone to hear of the major's
enterprise in the island where he lived, and he and
as he was generally esteemed and honored before he broke
out into open acts of piracy, for he was afterwards
rather pettied than condemned. So at the time, during the
seventeen teens, it really was not unheard of for people
(03:20):
to turn to piracy in desperation or in a bid
to fight the establishment and the growing gap between the
rich and the poor. But Bonnet was an educated man
from a good family, so it initially does seem kind
of incongruous to think of him in those terms, but
there are some clues about why he actually may have
changed the course of his life. Some historians have suggested
(03:44):
that he was probably a supporter of James Stewart as
King of England and felt a sense of rebellion against
the German born George the First, so Jacobite politics may
have played a part in that decision in his decision
to become of pirates. And it's also worth noting that
Bonnet borrowed about seventeen hundred pounds, which is the equivalent
(04:04):
of roughly four hundred thousand dollars today, around seventeen seventeen,
so it's possible that he was having financial troubles or
that the plantation wasn't going well, although it's also possible
he wanted the money to start his pirate enterprise. Nobody's
going to loan your money to start a pirate business.
He didn't tell people that's what he was doing. On
a more sad note, his firstborn son died as a baby,
(04:27):
which some believed to have catalyzed a mental break. He
was also said to have experienced some quote discomforts he
found in a married state, so in other words, some
historians theorized that he was nagged so much that he
ran away to be a pirate, So his start in
the world of piracy is really unusual. He actually had
(04:49):
his ship, which he called Revenge, built and outfitted with
cannons at a local Barbados shipyard, and he started that
around seventeen sixteen. Uh Collin Woodard, who is the author
of the books The Republic of Pirates, posits that Bonnet
likely told people the ship was intended for a legitimate
privateering plan. And I know to some people privateering and
(05:13):
piracy have sort of become a little bit interchangeable, but
there is a nuance of difference there, So just in
case you do not know, the distinction is that privateers
are acting on behalf of a governing nation, while pirates
don't really answer to anybody, but their methods are virtually
identical in many cases, which has kind of fueled the
confusion of the interchangeability of those words. In any case,
(05:36):
instead of contracting with the government, Bonnet made a nighttime
departure on the ship Revenge in April of seventeen seventeen,
and under cover of night he had he headed toward
North America, calling himself Captain Edwards. And this is a
good time to mention that Bonnett had no knowledge about seafaring.
He was really sort of a land lover, uh, and
(06:00):
so it's unusual and bizarre. It just kind of feeds
that whole UH image of him as one of those like,
why did you do this? You're making a really rash decision,
even though he clearly had planned ahead to some degree. Well,
and it's also unusual and that most pirates would start
their career as in piracy by commandering another vessel, they
would steal somebody else's ship, but he went and built one,
(06:24):
financed and paid for everything himself or maybe with this
loan from before. Yeah, And he first headed for the
Virginia coast, and he actually successfully took several ships, But
it's probably the seventy men on his crew that really
should get the credit for that initial success, because some
(06:45):
of them were pretty experienced pirates, and it's unlikely that
he really uh had much in the way of leadership
skills since he didn't know seafaring and had never been
pirating before. The Revenge then headed to New York and
took a sloop that had been headed for the West Indies,
and they landed a group of men at Gardner's Island,
which you may remember from our Getty Garlic episode where
(07:08):
they actually bought provisions instead of stealing them. Yeah, so,
and again kind of fuels that image of him as
something of a gentleman that he's like, no, let's go
buy things instead of, uh, just plundering for what we need.
But beginning in August of that same year, so we're
still in seventeen seventeen, Captain Edwards and the Revengeance crew
(07:29):
attacked a number of vessels near the Charleston Harbor. But
after their exploits, they are culminated in setting fire to
a sloop in a North Carolina inlet, which he apparently
did become a fan of setting fire to ships after
he had taken them, bought it and his crew kind
of couldn't decide what they wanted to do for their
next course of action, and they eventually made their way
(07:50):
south to Honduras, which is where Blackbeard enters the Tail.
Because Bonnet wasn't really experienced in maritime affairs, he usually
yield to others, so when he fell into company with
Edward Teach, also known as black Beard, while he was
in Honduras, the experienced and hardened teach easily became the
(08:12):
alpha male in their relationship. Yeah, Bonnet's crew joined Blackbeards,
and Bonnet kind of became a superfluous figure rather rapidly.
Bonnet had been recovering from injuries at the time after
a bad encounter with a Spanish worship and he also
lost some of his crew, and he apparently agreed to
this situation thinking it was a temporary setup, like, oh,
(08:33):
you'll just handle things while I'm not feeling well. Right,
black Beard had something else in mine. He saw Bonnet's
weakness and decided to seize command of the Revenge. Bonnet
spent his time on black beard ship without anything to
do while Blackbeard's first mate ran the Revenge, and while
the relationships seemed to be friendly enough, Bonnet realized he
(08:54):
was basically a captive and he became, you know, kind
of depressed, melancholy. He openly told the crew that he
was unhappy and that he had tired of the pirate
life and that he would really like to start a
new life in Spain or Portugal because he would be
quote ashamed to see the face of any Englishman again.
I just I have to interject here that if I
(09:16):
were being held prisoner on black beard ship, I don't
know that I would go around saying that I was
tired of the pirate life openly to people. Yeah, but
accounts kind of painted as though he was sort of
endeared to the men and this didn't make them think
any less of him, like they almost sort of loved
him more for it in the various tellings of it.
(09:37):
So whether that's true or not, I don't know, but
I thought it was interesting. Uh. And while these two
were sailing quote together, but I mean they were technically
in the same place, but not really partners. Uh. This
is when black Beard actually took the frigate La Concorde
and then re christened it to be Queen Anne's Revenge,
which is his famous flagship. On June tenth, team the
(10:00):
Queen Ann's Revenge ran aground at Topsail Inlet, which is
now known as Beaufort Inlet. And there's actually some debate
over whether this was accidental or if Teach was trying
to break up the four men under him. Uh. He
kind of recognized that the winds were changing for pirates
and that maybe running in a big pack was not smart.
(10:21):
But again this is a matter of some historical debate. Uh,
Teacher is an accomplished sailor, so it would be a
little unusual for him to be caught off guard and
run aground. But at the same time, anything possible, So
I just feel like we should have that aside. So
while the Queen's Revenge is run aground, Bonnet went to Bath,
(10:42):
North Carolina. He wanted to take a pardon that had
been offered by the King. The King's proclamation had come
out on September fifth, seventeen seventeen, and stated that pirates
surrendering two authorities quote, should have his most gracious pardon.
But when Bonnett returned to the ships, he found that
Teach had stripped the revenge and abandoned more than two
(11:04):
dozen crew members on a small island. The stranded crew
members had believed they were doomed to die, so it's
likely that Bonnet's arrival was really quite welcome. So at
this point, having accepted the pardon, bonnets slate was clean.
He invited all the abandoned men to join him, refitted
the revenge, and renamed it the Royal James. His plan
(11:25):
was to sail to St. Thomas and seek out a
privateering commission, but they never made it to St. Thomas. No,
the crew that he had invited to join him, we're
all on board with this privateering plan. But as they
were preparing to set sail, a boat that had come
up against them, just meaning adjacent to them, that to
sell apples and cider to the men, actually informed them
(11:47):
that black Beard and a small crew of eighteen or
twenty men were at Okra Cooke Inlets. They were having
a big party, which is famous in its own right.
So that's the black Beard side of the story. Uh.
But Bonnet immediately acted upon this information and went in
pursuit of Teach because he was still kind of smarting
from the way things went down. After four days of
(12:07):
looking for Teach with no success, they instead headed not
to St. Thomas, but to Virginia. So it seems that
his resolved to go legit was not really that strong, no,
And in July of seventeen eighteen, they actually took provisions,
which they were desperate for from another ship that they encountered,
but they didn't want the actively recorded as piracy, so
(12:29):
in return they gave quote eight or ten casks of
rice and an old cable in lieu thereofs so they
kind of were like, we want to make this fair,
even though we kind of rated you, but we're not pirates.
We just need stuff. Next, the major, who was now
going by the name Captain Thomas, and his crew encountered
a sloop off of Cape Henry and looted her for liquor.
(12:51):
Bonnet sent eight men over to the sloop, theoretically to
take care of the ship, but maybe to make some
kind of a deal. But they joined that crew and
sailed away with them. And at this point, somewhere around
this time, Bonnet just sort of threw all caution to
the wind and went head first back into a life
of piracy. He really abandoned that whole concept of privateering,
(13:12):
and the Royal James then made its way up and
down the Atlantic coast, taking him plundering vessel after vessel.
At the end of July sev eighteen, Bonnet had sailed
to the Cape Beer River, where he and his crew
found themselves stuck for repairs. The Royal James was terribly
leaky and it needed to be fixed to remain seaworthy,
so it's sat for nearly two months while the work
(13:34):
was done, which is a long time for a vote
to just sit there, especially when it is a boat
full of criminals. Uh So, when ordered reached the Council
of South Carolina that a pirate sloop was Korean in
Cape Fear, Colonel William Rhett set out to find and
capture Bonnet, and Rhett had under his command two ships,
the Henry and the Sea Nymph. On September eighteen, Rhet's
(13:59):
two sloops ran in round while headed up the Capeier River.
While they were getting back on float by It's pirates
found them and the crew manned three canoes to take
the ships. The pirates didn't know who they were attempting
to take, but realized quickly and turned around to deliver
a report to Bonnet. And Bonnet was incensed by this.
Uh that night he penned the letter to the Governor
(14:20):
of Carolina that said, if those two sloops had been
sent against him by that governor, and if Bonnet got
clear of those two sloops, he was going to burn
and destroy every single vessel coming and going out of
South Carolina. He's basically like, you better hope you win this,
because if you don't, and I find out you were
actually behind it. I'm basically going to ruin your life.
The next day, September eighteen, a battle ensued that lasted
(14:44):
for hours. At one point, both Retz ships and Bonnet
ship were run aground in the shallow water as they
tried to maneuver, and there was trash talking from the
pirates to the colonel's cruise. Both ships were hardly damaged.
It was really everything that you would expect to see
in a Hollywood blockbuster about pirates. But eventually rhett sloop
was the first to float, and as his command was
(15:07):
about to deliver the finishing blow to the pirate ship,
Bonnet sent up a flag of truce and his crew
surrendered themselves as prisoners. So all that trash talking got
real quiet, and they all surrendered. The Henry lost ten
men and had fourteen wounded, and the Sumph lost two
men and had four wounded. Two of those died from
their wounds not long after. Colonel Rhett then set sail
(15:30):
from Cape Fear with his captives on September and he
arrived in what was called Charlestown at the time but
as Charleston now on October three, and on October five,
the Bonnet's crew was placed in a watch house that
was guarded by the militia because there wasn't an actual
prison that could hold them. Bonnet entered the custody of
the Marshal at his house, and two other crew members
(15:53):
were eventually moved to the Marshall's house. Just a few
days later. They were determined to be important in terms
of evidence and testimony for the trial. On October twenty four,
Bonnet and one of the other men, he was named Harriet, escaped.
The third man, a Boson, refused to go with them.
Rumors of incompetency and bribery in relation to the escape
(16:16):
immediately started to circulate. The governor offered a reward of
seven hundred pounds to the person who captured the fugitives,
and it turned out that Colonel Rhett Uh, who was
pursuing them in addition to other people after the reward,
was the one that recaptured Bonnet and Harriet was actually
killed during the pursuit. He was shot on October. Trials
(16:37):
of the crew began in Charlestown before Judge Trot. All
but four were found guilty and sentenced to death, and
on Saturday, November eighth, seventeen eighteen. The guilty men were
all executed at White Point, which is near Charleston. But
on November ten, Steve Bonnet's trial began. It lasted two
days and he was found guilty. He attempted to shift
(16:59):
some of the blame to Blackbeard, but that was really futile.
It was obvious that he had willingly participated in a
lot of these activities. In the Lord Chief Justices speech
pronouncing bonnets sentence, he said, while talllying the major's many
acts of piracy, not to mention the many acts of
piracy you committed before, for which if your pardon from
(17:21):
man was never so authentic, yet you must expect to
answer for them before God. His speech goes on for many,
many pages of the seventeen quote General History of Pirates,
which you can read online because we will link to
it in our show notes. Uh yeah. Also in the
Chief justice is speech there is a lot of talk
(17:42):
about not only was he a pirate, but he was
also a murderer, and it was a lot of the
wrath of God is coming for you. He was so
incensed that this man had been pardoned and then went
back to this life and did a lot of horrible things.
He really was uh not short of breath when it
came to condemnation in that speech. And Bonnet was executed
by hanging on December tenth of seventeen eighteen. And he
(18:05):
was only thirty at that point and he had spent
less than two years living the life of a pirate.
So after his what may have been a mental break,
he kind of burned it out. He just gunned it,
uh and then was no more. So he kind of
did the live fast, die young thing in the Sevres.
In my imagination, I feel like he was going for
(18:27):
han solo and wound up his two biascume K. Yeah,
but still sort of oddly beloved, which is the interesting
part of it. It kind of oddly beloved to biascume K.
That's true. It all makes sense. So, yeah, that is
the story of Steve Bonnets, which is a brief but
fascinating life as a pirate. Yeah, kind of from the
(18:50):
almost a pretender's perspective, since he kind of buys his
way into that world, right, I feel like it's the
eighteenth century version of buying a shiny sports car and
then going on a cross country spree of crime. Yeah.
And as I said at the top of the podcast,
there are historians who have likened it to his midlife crisis,
(19:10):
but hopefully you know, most midlife crises don't end quite
so dramatically. But now I wanted to talk about the
history of midlife crises because that seems to me like
a very modern invention too. Was stow upon a pirate?
I concur so we can put them on the list
for future podcast. Yes, I believe you also have some
list I do. This email came from our listener Kelly Joe,
(19:32):
and it is about Happy Birthday, and she says, Hi, ladies,
I enjoyed your Happy Birthday podcast and wanted to drop
a quick note with a story. I work at a university.
In my office, like many offices, has a tradition of
celebrating staff birthdays with cake and a rendition of Happy Birthday.
This past year, I had a graduate assistant, Kunlun, who
was from China, and on Kunlun's birthday, we of course
(19:55):
saying her Happy Birthday. Out of curiosity, I asked her
if there was a Happy a Day type song in China.
Much to my surprise, she broke into a song in
Mandarins set to the exact tune of Happy Birthday. Little
did I know that the tune a cross cultural borders
as well. Thanks for your working the podcast. So I
love that story, Kelly Joe uh And that's one of
those things that I we even talked about how it's
(20:17):
been published in many languages, but for some reason, if
it's not like a Germanic or a romance language. It
seems really almost startling to me when the standard Happy
Birthday tune gets used, especially since and a lot of
other cultures that the scale for music is entirely different
from the one used for Happy Birthday. Yes, and when
I read this, it reminded me of a restaurant that
(20:40):
we have here in Atlanta that is a really fantastic
Viennamese restaurant, and if you've ever been there, when they've
celebrated a birthday, they do this really interesting recording that
they play through the loud speakers in the restaurant, and
it starts out like the standard Happy Birthday, but then
it rifts into some whole other song, and that's their standard.
I've been there several times when they've done it, and
(21:00):
it's always that and I always mean to ask them
if that's the normal way that uh, they would sing
Happy Birthday of Vietnam, or if that is a special
recording that they just think is fun. But then I
always forget and get distracted by my delicious dessert. So
so I want to find out now and if we
have any listeners that are Vietnamese or are really familiar
(21:22):
with Vietnamese culture and can answer that question, feel free. Yes,
we also have lots of people who linked us up
with awesome other alternatives to Happy Birthday on our Facebook wall.
We reposted some of them, but not all. Yes, my
personal favorite still the Simpsons. Yes, you were the Birthday,
You're the Birthday. You're the birthday boy or girl, although
it's sung, but I will not say no. If you
(21:42):
would like to write to us with happy birthday stories
or anything else, uh, you may do so at History
Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can also connect with
us on Twitter at missed in History, on Facebook at
Facebook dot com, slash history class stuff on tumbler at
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and you can
find us on Pinterest. If you would like to learn
(22:03):
more about what we talked about today, you can go
to our website and type in the word piracy in
the search bar, and you will get how pirates work.
I wrote that, I know you're a smarty pant Uh.
You can learn about any number of other things as
well at our website, which is how stuff Works dot com.
(22:23):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, does
it how stuff works dot com. Netflix streams TV shows
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