Benjamin Hornigold

Benjamin Hornigold founded the pirate republic at Nassau, taught Blackbeard the trade, and ended his life hunting his own former crews for the crown. He began as a privateer in the War of the Spanish Succession, and when the peace of Utrecht in 1713 threw thousands of sailors out of work he simply carried on, operating from New Providence in the Bahamas, which had no functioning government and an anchorage too shallow for warships. The loose association of captains there - Hornigold, Jennings, Vane, Bellamy, later Rackham - is what gets called the Republic of Pirates. He had a scruple that eventually cost him his command: he refused to attack English ships, taking only French and Spanish, on the theory that he was still a privateer of sorts. His crew deposed him for it in 1717 and elected Blackbeard, who had sailed under him as Edward Teach and had no such reservations. When Woodes Rogers arrived at Nassau in 1718 with a royal pardon and a commission to end the trade, Hornigold took the pardon at once and was made a pirate-hunter, catching several of his old associates and delivering them to be hanged. He is reported to have been wrecked on a reef in a hurricane in 1719. One of his recorded captures was a ship taken solely for the crew's hats, the pirates having lost their own drinking the night before. The Nassau period lasted about five years and is the source of most of what popular culture means by pirates: the black flag, the articles that divided plunder by share, the election and deposition of captains. Hornigold's own career shows how thin the line was. A privateer, a pirate and a pirate-hunter were often the same man in different years, and the difference was usually a piece of paper.

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