The Golden Age of Piracy: Lives of Infamous Buccaneers on the Carolina Coast

Three hundred years ago, when maps were mostly guesswork and the weather ruled one’s destiny, pirates plied the coastal waters of the Southeastern United States. These men and women, figures of legend, chose a life of lawlessness rather than one of convention, building up reputations of ferocity and fortunes of stolen treasure. They terrorized the American colonies, yet countless books and movies portray them as rakish, romantic adventurers. What is the myth and what is the reality? And what was life really like under the black flag?

Piracy has existed almost as long as maritime trade itself, with records of sea raiders appearing in the ancient Mediterranean more than 3,000 years ago. Around 67 B.C., plagued by pirates in the seas around its empire, Rome dispatched General Pompey the Great to clear the waters of seafaring enemies, which he did, in an extraordinarily efficient three months. Yet piracy persisted elsewhere. In the Middle Ages, pirate ships, called corsairs, routinely attacked vessels in the North Sea and other popular trade routes. By the 15th and 16th centuries, governments were frequently granting permission, via official documents called letters of marque, for privately owned ships to attack enemy vessels during times of war.

But when peace came to Europe in the early 1700s, these privateers, as they were sometimes called, found themselves without work. The thought of bringing down their sails and retiring to a more sedentary, less exciting existence, one supposes, was more than some captains could bear, and so many pirates kept their enterprises afloat, and piracy entered its so-called “golden age,” which reached its peak in the early 18th century. 

The entire coast of North America, from Boston down to Charles Town, with its corkscrew network of estuaries, coves, and inlets, was vulnerable, yet in some colonial ports, the line between legitimate commerce and criminal enterprise could be surprisingly blurry. Merchants occasionally traded with pirates and smugglers to obtain goods or avoid taxes, creating an illicit economy that flourished along the Atlantic coast. Its original purpose was commercial. Many merchants, discontent with paying taxes to the English crown, traded illegally with pirates for the goods they needed to stock. This was fine, until governments started losing money from the reduced revenue. When the enterprise was threatened, pirate captains started to become more aggressive in their tactics. Robberies at sea became more violent and the so-called “gentleman pirate” somewhat less civilized. The public rose up against the marauders quickly, and the balance shifted from a quiet sort of criminal activity to something more like the plunder and terror of Captain Blood and Long John Silver.

Although the pirates’ actions were lawless, their shipboard world was remarkably civil. At sea, the pirate ship was a micro-democracy, precisely and evenly governed—a marked contrast to the federalized navies of most countries, where all manner of painful public humiliation could be the punishment for even the smallest transgression. Britain’s Royal Navy, for example, was an autocratic institution in which the captain’s authority was absolute. A crewman could be whipped merely for wearing the wrong kind of neckerchief with his uniform. Herman Melville, the American author of Moby Dick who served aboard a US man-of-war in the 19th century, wrote that the announcement of a flogging was “a summons that…sen[t] a shudder through every manly heart in a frigate.”

In contrast, the pirates’ code of conduct was egalitarian. A council was held before each voyage and attended by all crew members. As a group, they decided where to sail and who should serve as captain and officers. All agreed that almost every crewman should be considered equals—a safeguard, perhaps, against mutiny or outright tyranny. There is even some evidence of same-sex “marriages” among buccaneers. In the Caribbean, the practice of “matelotage” was common—a formal partnership between two men that could include sharing and/or inheriting property and the like. (The pirate slang term for friend, “matey,” derives from this word.)

And most interesting of all, the booty that pirates stole was less often rubies and sapphires and more frequently medicines (syphilis being widespread) and such precious commodities as fruits and vegetables that were needed to prevent scurvy, a greater threat than the law.

Much of the lore surrounding life onboard a pirate ship was not the reality. Taking cues from Peter Pan and Pirates of the Caribbean, Hollywood has packed the genre’s screenplays with peg legs, parrots, and pantaloons, yet these things were rarely seen among real buccaneers. Walking the plank appears to have been exceedingly rare, and “X” never, ever marked the spot. 

In fact, buried treasure was not that common, although infamous Captain Kidd was rumored to have hidden a chest full of precious gemstones off the coast near Myrtle Beach, yet to be discovered to this day. Scholars have suggested that while serving in the army at Fort Moultrie in 1827, a young Edgar Allan Poe heard the legend and later transformed it into one of his most complex mystery tales, “The Gold-Bug.” 

Myth Versus Reality

The popular imagery of swashbuckling villains notwithstanding, harrowing experiences with pirates did plague South Carolina—especially around Charles Town, with its thriving population and wealth. Probably the most famous pirate ever to lay siege to the city was Blackbeard, who successfully blockaded the harbor in 1718 for five days. 

So named for the tangled mass of thick black hair that covered most of his long, scowling face, Blackbeard was born Edward Teach (or Thatch) in Bristol, England, around 1680. A physically intimidating figure, he was among the most skillfully self-promoting of all his contemporaries, cultivating the image of fearsomeness with wild, violent antics and always dressing in funereal black. With three braces of pistols in a bandolier strapped around his hulking frame, Blackbeard was known to leap aboard the ship he was attacking with lit tapers sticking out of his hair. Black smoke was said to swirl around his head, like a demon in a child’s nightmare. In fact, it was terror rather than torture that Blackbeard practiced. He killed very few of his enemies, preferring instead to nearly scare them to death.

Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was just as legendary as its captain. In May 1718, Blackbeard invaded Charles Town Harbor, taking hostages from vessels leaving and entering the port, including some of the city’s most prominent citizens. The governor, Robert Johnson, eventually met Blackbeard’s ransom demands (in this case, medical supplies for his crew), and the pirate released the unharmed townspeople he’d captured before sailing off to North Carolina. 

For a while, Blackbeard settled near Ocracoke Island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where he ran a smuggling operation, but crusaders brought him down at the urging of local residents, who were worried that he might establish a pirate cove there. In November 1718, 62 men from the Royal Navy attacked the buccaneer’s two small ships, containing a total of only 18 crewmen. Blackbeard, it’s said, took 20 cutlass wounds and five pistol shots before he died. The Royal Navy cut off his head and stuck it on the bowsprit of their flagship—a warning to others who might dare to emulate him.

Many, of course, did just that, dauntless in the face of capture and certain execution. One was Stede Bonnet, who operated alongside Blackbeard early in his career. Unlike his mentor, however, Bonnet came from a privileged background. Most pirates were lawbreakers fleeing justice or sometimes debtors who took to the sea to escape. Bonnet, in contrast, was a gentleman landowner with a plantation in Barbados. He bought, instead of stealing, his pirate ship and paid his crew of 70 with wages from his own pocket. Blackbeard took advantage of Bonnet’s inexperience and commandeered his vessel before taking him into his organization, from which Bonnet eventually broke away.

Bonnet had made forays into Charles Town and other parts of coastal South Carolina, including taking part in Blackbeard’s blockade. By September 1718, colonial authorities had intensified their campaign against pirates after months of attacks on shipping. Governor Johnson commissioned a local officer, Colonel William Rhett, to command two armed sloops against the pirates. Rhett first diverted his expedition in an unsuccessful search for Charles Vane, whose raids had again threatened shipping in Charles Town Harbor. After receiving reports of another pirate careening his vessel near the Cape Fear River—Bonnet, then sailing under the alias “Captain Thomas”—Rhett turned north to pursue him.

The expedition found Bonnet’s sloop, accompanied by two captured prize vessels, anchored in the Cape Fear River. After a nearly six-hour battle, Bonnet’s crew hoisted a white flag and surrendered. At Bonnet’s trial, Judge Nicholas Trott expressed dismay that “a Gentleman that [has] had the advantage of a liberal education, and being generally esteemed a Man of Letters” would take to such a lawless existence. Although Bonnet wrote to Johnson pleading for a pardon and promising to reform, he was hanged at White Point—near the site of today’s White Point Garden—on December 10, 1718. Thus ended the exploits of an unusually civilized criminal.

Battle of the Sexes

Female pirates, although fewer, were often as fierce as their male counterparts. In early 19th-century China, one woman, Zheng Yi Sao, commanded an immense fleet of between 1,500 and 1,800 ships and 80,000 pirate troops. Closer to home, Anne Bonny, thought to be the illegitimate daughter of a Charles Town merchant, was considered extremely violent. One story relays her stabbing of a serving-maid and severely beating a man with a chair after he had made a pass at her.

As she grew up, Anne was drawn to the city’s seedier quarters, especially around the docks. Barely out of her teens, she married a renegade seaman named James Bonny and went to live in what is now Nassau, Bahamas. There, Anne met John “Calico Jack” Rackham (a pirate so nicknamed for his garish clothing) and became his mistress. They teamed up to plunder ships off the Carolina coast until her husband appeared to reclaim her. To fend off his advances, Anne purportedly burned his ship.

She later recruited another female pirate, Mary Read, and in 1720—while Calico Jack and the other male crewmen were below decks either drunk or asleep—fought off an attack by an armed naval sloop, although they were eventually captured. A witness was startled to see these two women fighting side by side, wearing “Mens Jackets, and long Trouzers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads...each of them had a Machet and Pistol in their Hands, and cursed and swore at the men.” He continued: “They did not seem to be kept, or detain’d by Force, but of their own Free-Will and Consent.”

Calico Jack was executed, but Anne and Mary escaped the gallows because they were both found to be pregnant. Unrepentant, Anne was said to have visited Jack on the day of his execution to tell him, “I’m sorry to see this happen, but if you had fought like a man, you would not now be hanged like a dog.” The story of Anne and Calico Jack presents a strong contrast to the popularized image of pirates aboard sleek, dark-hulled schooners, sailing the high seas and taking refuge on verdant tropical isles. Yet there is an enduring appeal in these romantic outlaws that has never diminished. In Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta The Pirates of Penzance, the pirate king, full of swagger, lustily sings that it’s “Better far to live and die/Under the brave black flag I fly/Than play a sanctimonious part/With a pirate head and a pirate heart.”

Perhaps it’s the freedom that unapologetically proclaims itself in a life where no laws and regulations exist except for survival. Perhaps it’s the world of ivory shores and studding-sails lifted high in the distance. Whatever the reason, pirates represent a specific desire that has existed in humanity for a long time: the attraction of the nomadic life, tied down to no one and beholden to nothing. It’s been the journey, not the arrival, that has appealed to us all.