In the Caribbean
in 1716, Sam
Bellamy terrorized shipping by robbing vessels
and passengers of their cargo and valuables. During
his course of depredations, he captured the Bonetta. Over
the fifteen days that he plundered the ship, he
allowed a boy named John King to join his crew.
In the early 1700s
it was not that unusual for boys from poor families to
sign aboard a ship as cabin boys (a type of servant to
an officer) or powder monkey.1
It was an opportunity to learn a trade from which to
earn a living. Boys were sometimes no older than eight
when they signed aboard a ship. Going to sea probably
looked better to some than being a chimney sweep or
becoming a child
laborer. It only took a few years for a boy to learn
enough to assume the duties of an adult sailor.
But King was
different. His family had money. At the time he joined
the pirates he wore French woven-silk stockings and
leather shoes fastened with buckles, both of which
reflected an “18th-century upper-class style”.
(Clifford & Kinkor, 132)
In Master Abijah
Savage’s deposition about the capture of his ship –
given before Walter Hamilton, Esq., Captain General
and Governor in Chief of all His Majesty’s Leeward
Caribbean Islands – he said that on the 9th of
November while traveling from Jamaica to Antigua, he
met with two large sloops which chased him for about
six and a half hours. When the ships caught up with
him, they fired a cannon and hoisted a black flag at
the mast, at which point he struck his sails and
lowered his boat to go meet with them. Bellamy
detained his crew and passengers until 24 November.
Before letting them go, however, the pirates took some
of their clothes, various items, a black man, and an
Indian boy.
In his deposition,
Savage gave a description of the two ships:
One of the said Sloops
called the Mary Anne was Commanded
as he was told by one Samuel Bellamy who declared
himself to be an Englishman born in London, and
that the other, called the Postillion was Commanded
by one Louis de Boure who was a French Man, and
has his Sloop chiefly Navigated with men of that
Nation. That each of the said Sloops was mounted
with Eight Guns and had betwixt Eighty or Ninety
Men apiece on Board . . . (Dethlefsen,
127-128)
Savage then goes
on to tell the story of “one John King
who was coming as a Passenger with him from the Said
Island of Jamaica
to the Island of Antigua
deserted his Sloop, and went with the Pirates, and was
so far from being forced or compelled by them as the
Deponent could perceive or learn, that he declared he
would kill himself if he was restrained, and even
threatened his Mother who was then on board as a
passenger with the Deponent.” (Dethlefsen, 129)
Ongoing
excavations of the wreck of Bellamy’s Whydah Galley
found a leg bone, or fibula, along with a silk
stocking and a leather shoe (right).2 When these items were
first discovered, most thought the items belonged to a
small man. But Barry
Clifford, head of the expedition, “showed the
short fibula to expedition archaeologist John
de Bry, and Smithsonian Institution expert David
Hunt. Both agreed that the fibula belonged to a
child age 8 to 11.” (Maugh) Kenneth
J. Kinkor, Whydah
researcher and maritime historian, said, “The stocking
is made of woven French silk, and the shoe – which is
only 2 inches in width at its widest point – is of
upper-class design and craftsmanship, consistent with
it belonging to John King.” (Maugh)
There were many
reasons that the life of a pirate might have appealed
to a young boy like King. Kinkor speculated he might
have been attracted to “a free and easy lifestyle, and
a classless democratic subculture.” (Maugh) Since his
clothing indicated that he likely came from a more
well-to-do family, perhaps the chance to break away
from the class restrictions and expectations of his
day were what attracted him. If you asked my friends
who raised boys, it would be the chance to get away
from being ordered around by his parents, carrying a
sword, bossing people around and seeing how afraid of
him they were, and not having to bathe.
King’s new life as
a pirate likely included many adventures, but also
some new responsibilities. Not long after he joined
them, the pirates anchored at St.
Croix, where they spent a couple of months
enjoying the spoils of their conquests. During their
stay, three men tried to run away. One was captured
and brought back. As punishment he was severely
whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails.3
All new pirates
had to sign the ship’s articles before they were
accepted as full members of the crew. Each crew
devised their own set of rules, but they shared some
similarities. For example, Bartholomew Roberts’s list
included:
Every man to have Equal
Right to ye Provisions or Liquors at any time
& use them at Pleasure, unless Scarcity makes
a Restriction necessary for ye Good of All.
Any man who should
Defraud ye Company, or another, to ye Vallew of a
Dollar, he shall suffer Punishment as ye Company
deeme ffit.
Any man who Deserts ye
Company, keeps any Secret, or Deserts his Station
in Time of Battle, shall be punished by Death,
Marooning, or Whipping, as ye Company shall deeme
ffit & Just. (Clifford & Kinkor, 88)
In addition, each
member of the crew was entitled to an equal share of
whatever profit was made during the voyage.
Every member of
the crew had assigned duties to perform, determined by
a watch bill, or duty roster. Unfortunately, it’s
unknown what duties a boy like King would have been
given.
Early in 1717
Bellamy and his crew spotted the Whydah Galley
sailing past the Bahamas
and gave chase. She was completing a voyage of what
was known as the “middle
passage,” a term used for ships sailing between
the African coast and the Caribbean
slave markets. This was a lucrative trade in the
early 1700s. After selling her slaves in the
Caribbean, she had been loaded with coins and other
trade goods intended for sale in England.
After three days
the captain of the Whydah,
Lawrence Prince, surrendered without a fight. This was
normal behavior during this period of time; Prince
hoped that if he surrendered without resisting he
and/or his crew might avoid being beaten or tortured,
as was known to happen at the hands of pirates. Since
Captain Prince gave in so quickly, Bellamy allowed him
and the members of his crew who desired to leave to
sail away in Bellamy’s old ship the Sultana. The
pirates claimed the Whydah as
their own.
26 April 1717
started out like any other day for the pirates. In the
morning, they captured “a pink with more than 7,000
gallons of Madeira wine on board” and “a small sloop
with a cargo of deer hides and tobacco, in the
afternoon.”(Clifford & Kinkor, 130) Per customary
pirate procedure, smaller groups of pirates were sent
over to these ships from the Whydah to act as
the new crews of their prizes.
Bellamy and his
crew were sailing north along the east coast of the
American Colonies. Cape Cod folklore says their
destination was Eastham, Massachusetts, where Sam
intended to pick up Maria
Hallett, believed to be his lover, on their way
to Rhode Island or Maine. He might also have been
hoping to sell some of their booty.
At this time, the
Whydah
boasted a crew of approximately 150 men, all crammed
into a ship that measured about thirty feet wide and
one hundred feet long. With the bulk of the pirate's
booty stored on the Whydah, the
decks were probably starting to sag. Along with such
items as “[e]lephant tusks, sugar, molasses, rum,
cloth, quinine bark, indigo, and . . . dry goods”,
there were 180 sacks of coins, weighing fifty pounds
each.4 (Clifford, 260) What this
meant was that the Whydah would
have been very low in the water, a dangerous condition
for a ship in a storm.
That evening a
dense fog rolled in, which should have been an early
storm warning for the pirates, and the storm began to
manifest itself. The capture of the Fisher
helped the pirates to navigate through the increasing
fog. Instead of steering out to sea, Bellamy chose to
stay close to land, a move which leads many to believe
that he did indeed wish to try and make port somewhere
in Cape Cod.
Sometime after 5:00
p.m., Bellamy ordered all three ships to light
lanterns on their sterns, a common navigational aide.
Conditions continued to worsen. “An arctic storm from
Canada was driving into the warm air that had swept up
the coast from the Caribbean. The last gasp of a
frigid New England winter, the cold front was about to
combine with the warm front in one of the worst storms
ever to hit the Cape.”5 (Clifford, 262) “According
to
eyewitness accounts, gusts topped 70 miles [113
kilometers] an hour and the seas rose to 30 feet [9
meters].”(Donovan)
Square-rigged
ships like the Whydah Galley
did not handle so well in high winds, and since the
winds were coming from the northeast, it was now
pretty much out of the question for Bellamy to even
try to attempt to head back out to sea. With each
swell, the ship was pushed west by the winds, no
matter how hard the pirates tried to keep heading
north. Then one of them would have heard the sound of
the waves hitting the shore and shouted “Breakers,
breakers!” But it was simply too late. The accident
was succinctly described by Thomas
Davis in his deposition before his trial for
piracy in Boston, Massachusetts, in October of 1717.
Ship being at an Anchor,
they cut their Cables and ran a shoar, in a
quarter of an hour after the Ship struck, the
Main-mast was carried by the board, and in the
Morning She was beat to pieces. About Sixteen
Prisoners drown'd, Crumpstey Master of the Pink
being one, and One hundred and forty-four in all.
(Trials, 318)
What Davis said
here was that the pirates attempted to save themselves
by anchoring the ship to the sea bottom. When the
anchors dragged, meaning they failed to get a grip on
the sea bed, they cut the cables. They then made a
last-ditch effort to save themselves by trying to turn
the ship into the wind. But the Whydah was so
heavy she slid back down a wave and crashed into a
sand bar, spelling the end of ship and all but two
members of her crew.
Although the beach was
just 500 feet away, the bitter ocean temperatures
were cold enough to kill the strongest swimmer
within minutes. Other crew members were crushed by
the weight of falling rigging, cannon, and cargo
as the ship, her treasure, and the remaining men
on board plunged to the ocean floor, swallowed up
by the shifting sands of the cape. (Clifford and Kinkor, 131)
Local residents
arrived on the shore the next morning to find “more
than a hundred mutilated corpses lay at the wrack line
with the ship's timbers.” (Donovan) But John King’s
body was not among them. During excavation of the
wreck site it was determined that he died because one
of the cannon had pinned him to the seabed.
John King is the
youngest recorded member of a pirate crew during the
Golden Age of Piracy. His time as a pirate lasted for
three months.
Pirates
and Privateers
Laura Nelson
lives in the Denver Metropolitan area and is an
Unemployment Fraud Investigator for the state of
Colorado. When she's not researching or reading
about pirates, she enjoys Tai Chi, walking, cats,
and reading adventure and true crime, and watching
way too much TV. Her short story, "Rosa and the
Pirate," was recently published by Dark Oak Press in
the pirate anthology 