Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

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.