For roughly five years, the Bahamian port of Nassau had no functioning government at all. No governor collected taxes, no magistrate held court, and no garrison enforced the king’s law. In their place were several thousand pirates, a harbor shaped perfectly for their needs, and a rough code that passed for order. Historians call the period from about 1713 to 1718 the “Republic of Pirates,” and while the name overstates how organized it was, the basic fact is not exaggerated: for those five years, Nassau really did run itself.
A Harbor Built for the Job
New Providence island had one major asset: a shallow, well-protected harbor that large naval warships could not enter, but the smaller, faster sloops pirates favored could. That made it an ideal place to careen a ship, beaching it at low tide to scrape barnacles and weed off the hull, work that could otherwise take a vessel out of action for weeks in a less defensible spot. The Bahamas had also been left administratively adrift; the proprietors nominally responsible for governing the islands had all but abandoned the colony after French and Spanish raids during the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in 1713 and threw large numbers of privateers out of legal work at the same moment.
The Flying Gang
Nassau’s pirate population grew fastest after 1715, when a hurricane wrecked Spain’s treasure fleet off the Florida coast and Spanish crews set up salvage camps to recover the sunken silver. Pirate captains, among them Henry Jennings and Benjamin Hornigold, raided those camps and made off with silver that had already been pulled from the wrecks, a far easier haul than taking a fortified galleon at sea. The windfall drew still more captains to New Providence, and by 1716 a loose alliance of crews, later nicknamed the Flying Gang, was operating out of the harbor. Edward Teach, later known as Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Stede Bonnet, and Samuel Bellamy all passed through Nassau during this period, though they answered to no single commander; each ship still elected its own captain and quartermaster in the usual pirate fashion.
Rum, Gambling, and No Magistrate
The Bermuda governor reported to London that Nassau held over a thousand pirates against barely a hundred established residents, though other accounts suggest the town’s population, counting the camp followers and merchants who serviced it, swelled well beyond that at its peak; the numbers come from colonial officials with every reason to alarm their superiors, and should be read as an order of magnitude rather than a census. Whatever the exact count, day-to-day life centered on the same handful of activities: repairing ships, drinking, gambling, and visiting the town’s brothels. A small legitimate economy grew up around the pirates’ spending, and a makeshift fort went up on the harbor to warn off unwelcome visitors, but there was no formal court, no jail, and no one collecting customs duties. Disputes among pirates were settled the way they were settled aboard ship, by vote or by force, not by any Bahamian authority.
The Governor Who Shut It Down
The disorder eventually became too costly for the Crown to ignore, and in 1717 King George I appointed Woodes Rogers, a former privateer captain, as royal governor of the Bahamas with the authority to offer a formal pardon to any pirate willing to surrender. An advance ship carrying news of the pardon reached Nassau in February 1718; by the time Rogers himself arrived that July with a small fleet, at least two hundred pirates, including Hornigold, had already declared their intention to accept it. Charles Vane refused outright, torching a captured ship in the harbor in a final act of defiance as Rogers’s fleet sailed in. Not every pardoned pirate stayed pardoned, and piracy in the Caribbean did not end with Rogers’s arrival, but Nassau’s five years as a town with no government of its own were over; on December 12, 1718, several pirates who had returned to their old trade were tried and hanged there under Rogers’s new administration.
Sources consulted: EBSCO Research Starters, “Republic of Pirates”; Wikipedia, “Flying Gang” and “Republic of Pirates”; Golden Age of Piracy, “Nassau.”
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