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.