A close perusal of the “Pirate’s Own Book,” published at Portland in 1859, would no doubt reveal further adventures involving Cape Cod; and in 1717, at any rate, there was an encounter with pirates off the “Back Side” that was brought to a successful conclusion by the wit of a Cape Cod seaman. The Whidah, Samuel Bellamy, captain, of some two hundred tons burden with an equipment of twenty-three guns and one hundred and thirty men, while cruising offshore had the good fortune, which turned to ill, to take seven prizes. Seven prize crews were put aboard to take the vessels to port there, presumably, to sell them at a price. The master of one, seeing that his captors were drunk, took his boat straight into Provincetown and gave the pirate crew into custody. Nor was their chief to meet a better fate. One of his prizes was a “snow,” and seeing a storm coming up, he offered its skipper the boat intact if he would pilot the Whidah safe around to Provincetown Harbor. The bargain struck, a lantern, as guide, was hung in the snow’s rigging. Some say the skipper, trusting to the lighter draft of his boat, ran her straight for shore, the heavy pirate craft floundering after; another story has it that he put out his mast-light and flung a burning tar-barrel overboard to float ashore and lure the Whidah to her doom. Be that as it may, the sequel was successful. The Whidah and two of her attendant ships were dashed on shore near Nauset, and only two men of the crews, an Englishman and an Indian, escaped drowning. As for the storm, it was sufficiently heavy to furrow out the first Cape Cod Canal, the ocean making a clean break across the Cape near the Orleans line, and “it required a great turnout of the people and great efforts to close it up.” Captain Cyprian Southack, sent from Boston to inspect the wreck and landing on the bay shore, refers in his report to “the place where I came through with a Whale Boat,” and adds that he buried “one Hundred and Two Men Drowned.” Having buried the pirates, Southack set a watch over their property, and had some complaint to make of the inhabitants, who came from twenty miles around to share in the spoils. As usual, there seems to have been a clash between government and individual rights; but Southack advertising retribution for any private profiteers, several cartloads of the stores were retrieved and sent to Boston. And there is a story of the right pirate cast in regard to a man “very singular and frightful” in aspect who, every season for many years after, used to revisit the neighborhood of the wreck. Taciturn and uncommunicative in his waking hours, his dreams were perturbed as needs must be, and then such ribald and profane words passed his lips as proved him in league with evil spirits with whom he communed on past bloody deeds. Plainly he was the one English survivor of the Whidah returned to the scene to dig for buried treasure; and to prove the case, when he died a belt filled with gold was found on his person.
In 1772 there was a pirate story less well authenticated which served chiefly as a bone to worry between Tory and Whig. A schooner flying signals of distress was boarded off Chatham, and the single seaman found there, appearing “very much frightened,” said that armed men in four boats had overhauled the craft and murdered the master, mate, and a seaman; himself he had saved by hiding. He supposed the men, he cunningly said, came from a royal cruiser, a story ridiculous on the face of it. At any rate, a royal cruiser, the Lively, under command of Montague, the admiral who had advised the two Truro captains to undertake their whaling voyage to the Falklands, set out in pursuit of a possible pirate, with no result; and the upshot was that the whole story was suspected to be an invention of the survivor to conceal his own guilt. The jury sitting in the case disagreed, and in the fevered state of public opinion, it was used in mutual recriminations by Whig and Tory: the Whigs contending that the English navy had committed the footless outrage, the Tories, more reasonably, that the seaman was a liar and murderer. But controversy could not restore the dead, who had all hailed from Chatham.
The Cape, as it reached out for its share in the commerce that developed after the Revolution, was as intimately concerned in pirate adventures off the Spanish Main as it might have been in Cape Cod Bay. By 1822 our shipping was so harried by pirates in those southern seas that the Government sent out armed boats to protect our merchantmen, among them the sloop-of-war Alligator. And a story, in which the Alligator is concerned, typical of many another of the time, is told by one of the last of the old Cape Cod sea-captains who died some twenty years ago. He sailed, as cabin boy, for the Spanish Main in the brig Iris commanded by a Brewster man and carrying a crew of eleven and one passenger. As the Iris neared the Antilles, two suspicious ships were sighted, and suspicion turned to certainty when they hoisted the red flag, put out their “sweeps,” and one pirate made for the Iris, the other for a Yankee schooner Matanzas-bound. The Iris was no clipper, and was quickly brought to by a shot over her bow. The passenger and captain had meantime gone down to the cabin to hide their valuables; and the cabin boy also, he tells us, “went down and took from my chest a little wallet, with some artificial flowers under a crystal on its front, in which were three dollars in paper money and a few coppers. This I hid in the bo’sun’s locker and went on deck again.” The lapse of seventy years had not dimmed his memory of the precious wallet.
The pirate ship, bristling with guns, was now alongside, her deck crowded with men dressed in white linen and broad straw hats, quite like Southern gentlemen, and soon a yawl filled with men armed to the teeth put off from her side. The Iris, with forced courtesy, lowered a gangway for their reception, and six of the strangers climbed on deck. Their leader inquired of the cargo, and was told that the Iris was practically in ballast.
“Have you any provisions to spare? We’re a privateer out for pirates. Seen any?” asked the officer.
“No,” answered the captain, looking him in the eye. “I can let you have some salt beef and pork.”
The play at civility was soon ended, the ship searched, and the stranger, reappearing on deck dressed out in the captain’s best clothes, cried jovially: “Well, sirs, we’re pirates, and you’re our prisoners.”
The Iris under her new command tacked back and forth toward the shore, and the prize crew found some rum for their refreshment, and thought, by threatening the cabin boy, to find treasure concealed in the ship. Trembling, he climbed up to the locker, and produced his wallet, but so far from being placated by this offering one pirate knocked him down and made as if to skewer him with a cutlass, while another vowed to throw him overboard. Then they ordered him off to bed, and he crept into the sailroom. Next morning all were called up to man ship, and captor and prize beat down the coast to “Point Jaccos” where the boats lay-to and the pirates spent the night in drinking and the Yankees in keeping out of their way. The captain and the cabin boy hid under the longboat. In the morning they put into a bay, a true pirate rendezvous, with mangroves growing down to the water’s edge. The cargo was transferred to the pirate ship, and their captain, boarding the Iris, ordered his officer to get money from the Yankees or kill all hands and burn the brig. But the Yankees understood his Spanish, and Captain Mayo, averring still that he had no money aboard, offered if the pirates would send him into Matanzas to return with any ransom they should name.
“Very good,” said the pirate. “I give you three days. If you aren’t back then with six thousand dollars, I’ll kill all the crew and fire the brig.”
Then they gave him back his best clothes and his watch, and put him aboard a passing fishing-smack with orders to land him at Matanzas. There he was not too generously received, and all but despairing of help, as he walked on the quay next morning he spied an American man-of-war coming in—a schooner with fourteen guns and well manned—in short, the Alligator. Captain Mayo aboard, the Alligator put about, and on the morning of the third day, with no time to spare, sighted the pirate rendezvous and four vessels at anchor, the two pirates, the Iris, and the schooner that had been Matanzas-bound, her fellow-prisoner. The pirates were brave fighters of unarmed men, but had no taste for warships. At sight of the Alligator, the men on one boat fired a gun to warn their comrades on the prizes, took to their sweeps and made off to sea. The Yankees on the Iris had been confined in fo’c’s’le and cabin, and were awaiting with some perturbation the dawn of the third day that was to bring them Captain Mayo and the ransom or death, when they were startled by a cannon shot that was succeeded by a stillness above decks. Rushing up, they saw their captors making off, the first pirate schooner showing a clean pair of heels well out at sea, the second rounding the harbor point with three boats in chase. The sun rode high in the heavens, the sea was like glass, and it seems that Lieutenant Allen, of the Alligator, unable to handle his vessel in the calm and eager to secure at least one of the pirates, had attacked from his small boats, with disastrous results. The pirate escaped, he himself was mortally wounded, several of his men were wounded, and a retreat was ordered to the Alligator, which withdrew, Captain Mayo and the ransom still aboard, without further casualties. But the second pirate craft remained, a speck to the sight, at the head of the bay, and as the cabin boy was pouring coffee for the meal that had been laid on the quarter-deck, a boat was seen to put off from her and pull toward the Iris. The Iris hailed her sister captive, the Matanzas schooner, which begged her to take off the crew when they would make common cause against the pirate. Nothing was more certain than that the boat that swiftly drew nearer was intent on their destruction. The first mate of the Iris and one sailor jumped into a boat and, pulling for the schooner, took off her crew, but instead of returning, made for the shore. Now, indeed, all seemed lost for the hapless men and the boy aboard the Iris. He and the sailors fled for the hold, while on deck the second mate and the passenger awaited what should come. The pirates, once aboard, slashed at the mate and threw him overboard, the sailors were haled on deck and forced to run for their lives, forward and aft, the pirates cutting at them as they ran. Poor Crosby, the mate, half drowned and weak from loss of blood, clambered aboard again, sank down on the windlass, and gasped out: “Now, then, kill me if you like.” Perhaps thinking him worth a ransom, the pirates ordered him into their small boat alongside.