Raiders and Rebels by Frank Sherry

Author:Frank Sherry
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061982651
Publisher: HarperCollins

11

Republic of Rogues

The town of Nassau, once a torpid waterside hamlet, had by 1716 become the capital city of the reborn pirate confederacy.

Nassau reflected both the values and the style of the brigands who made it their headquarters: impermanent, licentious, and chaotic. A shantytown—a zany collection of stores, shacks, whorehouses, and saloons, cobbled together from driftwood and canvas with palm thatch for roofs—stretched in a half circle along the sandy shore of the harbor.

The wreckage of captured prizes lay rotting on the beach, their ribs exposed like long-dead carcasses. Dozens of vessels—pirate sloops and captured merchants—crowded the harbor, their masts looking like a leafless forest from the shore.

In this place, their own crazy metropolis, the pirates of the western world drank, argued among themselves, gambled away fortunes, paid in stolen coin for the bodies of the prostitutes who flocked to the town, and lived in an uproarious present until their coin was gone and they had to go to sea once more.

It was said that the stench from Nassau—a combination of roasting meat, smoke, human offal, rum, unwashed bodies, and rotting garbage, all stewing together under the tropical sun—could be detected far out to sea, long before the island itself was visible.

New Providence and its wild harbor town were in many ways a pirate heaven as well as a pirate haven. Free from all laws other than the laws of piracy, it made available all the rough joys that the outlaw brotherhood held dear. Although, as with most pirate organizations, there was no strict or formal structure of command, the New Providence pirates did make provision for defense of their realm, raising a battery and appointing a guard of fifty to man it should any enemy appear. In addition, any pirate captains who happened to be in the port were expected to look to its defense should Nassau come under attack.

As more and more freebooters came to regard Nassau as their home port, the pirate capital flourished so greatly that Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia began to refer to New Providence as a “New Madagascar.”

It was an apt description, for many of the forms and customs that the outlaw fraternity had first developed there almost twenty years earlier now bloomed again on New Providence.

Defoe makes it clear that as with the Madagascar pirates of earlier days, the brigands of New Providence were also passionately democratic, insisting on majority rule. Says Defoe: “Each Captain and Company were regulated by their own Laws, independently of the rest; nor were the Captains themselves always obey’d, every thing of Moment being carried by the Vote of the Company.”

Nevertheless, despite the fundamental independence of each pirate ship (and of each individual pirate), a rough-and-ready republic was formed under the direction of a council of captains and quartermasters. According to Governor Spotswood, who had informers on the island, the pirates also chose a “governor” for themselves, although it appears the title was more honorary than real.

Although actual government on New Providence was exceedingly lax, since individual

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.