Pirate tales from the law

by Arthur M. Harris

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.