The Republic of Pirates

Letterpress title page reading: A General History of the Pyrates, from their first Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, to the present Time. With the remarkable Actions and Adventures of the two Female Pyrates Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Below sits a two-column list of sixteen chapters, from Captain Avery to Captain Spriggs, and a note of a short abstract of the statute and civil law in relation to piracy. A line between rules reads: The second Edition, with considerable Additions, By Captain Charles Johnson. The imprint reads: London, printed for, and sold by T. Warner, at the Black-Boy in Pater-Noster-Row, 1724. — Title page, A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London 1724 The title page names the island first: "from their first Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence". This is the book that gives the period its republican vocabulary, the "Commonwealth of Pyrates" and the New Providence men treating "upon the Foot of a Commonwealth". Johnson is the sole carrier of that reading, which is why the Collection carries it as possible only and keeps it beside the words the depositions use. Digitised open-access copy. Public domain.

For about two years Nassau was run by pirates, and not one of them ever called it a republic.

The haven had a physical reason to exist, and it is still there on the chart. Nassau stands on the north shore of the island of New Providence, and its harbour is sheltered by Hog Island, now Paradise Island, with two entrances, each crossed by a shallow bar. Johnson's sailing description of 1724 says the harbour could hold five hundred sail and that no ship of five hundred tons could pass the bars, and the modern survey agrees with him. That is the whole point of the place. A fleet of sloops could lie inside where a deep-draught man-of-war could not follow.

The self-rule was real in the plainest sense. From about 1703 to 1717 the islands had no legitimate resident governor, the proprietary government having collapsed after the wartime raids, and the pirates moved into the space it left. At the height, around 1716, roughly a thousand of them were present, the majority of the town's inhabitants. They had a name for themselves, and it survives in their own words: in the deposition John Vickers swore in 1716 they are the "flying gang", and in that same paper Benjamin Hornigold declares that all the pirates are under his protection. This was a port held by its pirates.

The republic is a later arrival. The fixed phrase "Republic of Pirates" was popularised by Colin Woodard's book of 2007, and no pirate used it. The period had republican words of its own, and they are worth more than the modern one. Johnson, writing in 1724, uses "Commonwealth", the period English for a republic, of pirates, and records the New Providence men debating "Treating with the Government upon the Foot of a Commonwealth". Other period writers called the place a nest of pirates, and Johnson a "Colony of Rogues". So the idea has a period cousin. What it lacks is a founding document. The picture of a formal, articled, elected self-government, a constitution of the sea, comes to us through one early chronicler. The men ran the port. How far they governed it as a commonwealth is a question the surviving paper cannot settle.

The ending was chosen. The Crown resumed the government, and Woodes Rogers arrived at Nassau on 26 July 1718 as the first royal governor, with the King's pardon in one hand and a garrison in the other. Charles Vane answered him on the day of his arrival by setting a captured French prize ablaze as a fireship to drive off the escort, then fled next morning under a black flag with about ninety men, firing guns of defiance and sending Rogers word that he would come back and burn the guardship. Others took the pardon. Hornigold, the haven's early leader, had accepted the Act of Grace by February 1718 and became Rogers' own pirate hunter, disobliging his old friends by seizing them for the Crown. In December 1718 Rogers made the point in the hardest form available to him: ten recaptured pirates of the Auger company were tried at Nassau, nine were convicted, and eight were hanged there on 12 December 1718. The haven was governed back into the empire on purpose.

Every part of that story carries a different weight of evidence. The harbour and its bars stand on a period sailing description that matches the modern survey. The government vacuum, the thousand pirates and the Flying Gang stand on the depositions and state papers of the haven. Rogers' arrival and Vane's fireship stand on Rogers' own despatch. The December trial and its condemnations stand on the trial itself, with the exact number who went to the gallows the one detail the surviving record leaves open.

The rooms

What it adds up to

Two things are true at once here, and the Collection keeps them apart on purpose. The pirates' control of the port is documented: the depositions name the men, the vacuum is on the state papers, and the harbour's bars are on the chart. The picture of an articled, elected, constitutional pirate democracy reaches us through one early chronicler and is possible. Every room holds one of those two things at a time, and the walk moves from the harbour that made the haven possible to the gallows that closed it.

The pardon itself lives in its own gallery. The King's Pardon holds the two royal proclamations verbatim and the relapse problem behind them; this Collection is where the pardon reaches a place and a governor, and shows what three men did with it. The end of the Golden Age holds the wider suppression that Rogers' landing belongs to.

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