QUARANTINE BLOG # 565

October 16, 2021

When Henry Avery vanished into the Irish night, the men who would shape the Golden Age of Piracy were boys or very young men. Little is known of their early lives.

Nearly one-third of the boys who would grow up to be pirates lived in London’s poorer districts. People often lived fifteen or twenty to a room. Life expectancy for the poor was age 20-25. 

There was no organized trash collection; chamber pots were dumped out of windows, splattering everyone and everything on the streets below. Disease was rampant. Food poisoning and dysentery carried off on average a thousand a year. Measles and smallpox killed a thousand more. London’s water supplies were so unhealthy that the entire population drank beer instead, children included.

Table of Casualties, 1629-1659

250,000 deaths in 30 years.

One of the most popular forms of entertainment was a public hanging. Nobody missed an execution. Hornigold and Blackbeard could have seen numerous pirate hangings, including that of Captain William Kidd.

On the day of execution, thousands lined the streets along the route to the gallows. So many people tried to get a glimpse of the prisoners that the three-mile trip from Newgate prison often took as long as two hours.

Most pirates were buried in shallow graves, but the prominent ones they covered in tar placed in iron cages hung at prominent points along the river Thames as warnings would-be pirates. Time would tell just how ineffective they were.

Along with brutal discipline and bad food, sailors rarely received the wages they were due. A variety of ruses shortchanged the crews. Earnings were docked for damages to the cargo, even when the damage was caused by storms or poor packaging by the merchants themselves. Some served for years on end without being paid at all.

No wonder, then, that a young sailor Edward Thatch – who would become Blackbeard – regarded Henry Avery as a hero.

For nine years, England fought against France and Spain in the War of the Grand Alliance (1688-1697). In 1701, a still exhausted England, siding with the Dutch, Austrians, and Prussians, went to war against France and Spain. This conflict, the War of Spanish Succession would last for 13 years (1701-1714).

The squabbles for territories and thrones set the stage for the greatest outbreak of piracy the Atlantic would ever know.

From the Spanish point of view, the English should never have settled in the New World. Christopher Columbus had “discovered” the Americas for Spain in 1492. 

The next year, Pope Alexander VI, acting on behalf of God, gave almost the entire Western Hemisphere to Spain.

After the war, Spanish coast guard vessels continued to seize English vessels declaring them smugglers. Merchants in Port Royal, Jamaica sent out fewer vessels, reducing the number of jobs for sailors. The Royal Navy mothballed nearly three quarters of its fleet, putting 36,000 men out of work. Unable to find honest work, many took up other means.

Benjamin Hornigold was one of the very first to turn to this other “course of life,” and he took Edward Thatch with him.

During the war, the Spanish and French had burned Nassau to the ground. On the whole island there were fewer than 30 families. There was also no government. Hornigold chose Nassau as his base of operations.

Hornigold organized his men into three bands, each with 25 men. In six months, they brought in cargoes worth $300,000 today, ten times the value of the annual imports of the entire colony of Bermuda.

A year later, their plunder was $1.2 million (today). Many of the rank-and-file pirates chose to quit while they were ahead and scattered off to Jamaica and beyond. A handful stayed on in the Bahamas, including Hornigold.

In late July, 1715, an Atlantic hurricane would change the fortunes of Hornigold, Thatch and the rest of the pirates.

On July 13,1715, a Spanish treasure fleet left Havana, bound for Cadiz. It had been several years since the Spanish had dispatched their treasure fleets, so the galleons were carrying an unusually valuable haul – estimated at seven million pieces of eight ($4.8 million today).

The commander, Captain-General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla, worried that they might not make it before the onset of hurricane season. The Spanish court desperately needed an influx of cash. Reluctantly, he set sail.

The 10-ship armada sailed out of Havana and into the Straits of Florida. By midafternoon the skies had darkened, and the winds began to strengthen. By midnight, hurricane-force winds were driving the fleet toward the Florida coast. In the end, all ten galleons were destroyed, littering the beaches with hundreds of bodies.

Along with the remains of ten ships and the corpses, $4.8 million in gold lay scattered off the beaches of east Florida, most of it in water so shallow that a good diver could reach it.

Before the first pirates could arrive, ships from Cuba recovered over half of the treasure, but the news spread faster than the plague. The fact that there was no government in the Bahamas made it even more attractive.

Benjamin Hornigold and Edward Thatch were the strongest of the pirates operating out of the Bahamas. They became the defacto government. A new age had begun.

Next week, the formation of the pirate democracy.

👉  Today’s close, “God Plus One,” is by Steve Arterburn.

“The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O Lord, endures forever – do not abandon the works of your hands” (Psalm 138:8).

In his book The Treasure Principle, Randy Alcorn tells the story of his family’s trip to Egypt. While driving through the hot and dusty streets of Cairo, they passed a graveyard for American missionaries and decided to go see it. One sun-scorched tombstone in particular caught their attention. At the top it read: William Borden, 1887-1913.

What makes Borden so interesting is that he was a Yale graduate, and the heir to great wealth. Yet he rejected a life of ease in exchange for the life of a missionary in Egypt. He gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars to missions, and after only four months of ministry in Egypt, he contracted spinal meningitis and died at age twenty-five.

At the bottom of William Borden’s tombstone, it says, “Apart from faith in Christ, there is no explanation for such a life.”

If you are a follower of Christ, you can expect that in obedience to that still, small voice of the Holy Spirit, you will do some things that make no earthly sense but are spiritually significant.

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