The Careers That Ran Out

Curator's note

The haven is easier to understand through the people it made and unmade than through any account of its politics. Each of the four moments in this room is documented, dated and short. Each life has its own gallery, and this room sends you to them rather than telling the story twice.

Rogers reported that on his arrival on 26 July 1718 Charles Vane set a captured French prize ablaze as a fireship to drive out the escorting warship, and that Vane sailed the next morning with about ninety men, firing guns of defiance as he went, sending word that he would return and burn the guardship.

The substance of Woodes Rogers' despatch of 31 October 1718, calendared as CSP Colonial vol 30, item 737. The original is at The National Archives, Kew, C.O. 23/1 No. 10. The wording above is the Archive's; the sequence and the figure are Rogers'. The number of men is his own report rather than a count.

That is the sharpest documented moment in the whole story of the haven: a pirate refusing the King's pardon and leaving under a black flag on the morning after the King's governor landed. It is confirmed from the despatch. Vane's own career, and its end at Port Royal, belong to his gallery.

Benjamin Hornigold went the other way. By February 1718 he had accepted the Act of Grace, and Rogers then employed him hunting pirates, a service in which, as the correspondence has it, he had "disobligd his old friends". The man the Vickers deposition shows declaring all the pirates under his protection in 1716 was, within two years, the instrument of their retaking. Both facts are confirmed.

Title leaf of the 1721 pamphlet. Large letterpress type reads: The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates, followed by ten named crewmen, then: As also, the Tryals of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, alias Bonn, on Monday the 28th Day of the said Month of November, at St Jago de la Vega. The imprint at the foot reads: Jamaica, Printed by Robert Baldwin, in the Year 1721. — The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates, Jamaica, 1721 The printed trial that records the last career to run out of Nassau harbour. Its evidence includes Captain Pearse's certificates issued at New Providence, the relapse of men who had surrendered, and the taking of the sloop William out of the harbour on 22 August 1720. Printed by Robert Baldwin, Jamaica, 1721. Public domain.

The William was stolen out of Nassau harbour on 22 August 1720, two years and a month after the governor landed to end the trade there. John Rackham, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were aboard her. The haven was still feeding pirate crews long after it had officially stopped being one, and their trial at St Jago de la Vega belongs to their own galleries.

Four documented moments, four different endings: defiance, service, relapse and the rope. The instrument all four were reacting to is held in The King's Pardon. The governor who brought it ashore is the next room.