On 5 September 1717, King George I issued a Proclamation for Suppressing of Pirates, offering a free pardon for any piracies committed before 5 January 1718 to anyone who surrendered within the year. In the Bahamas, where the proclamation mattered most, it fell to the colony’s newly appointed governor, Woodes Rogers, to actually administer it. He reached Nassau on 24 July 1718 with seven ships, a hundred soldiers, and well over a hundred colonists, and found most of the pirates based there willing, at least on paper, to take the King’s offer. What happened to them afterward is where the real story starts, and it did not go the same way twice.
Benjamin Hornigold: Pardoned and Put to Work
Hornigold, one of the most established captains operating out of Nassau, accepted the pardon and immediately became useful to the man who had granted it. Governor Rogers commissioned him to hunt down pirates who had broken their own pardons or refused one outright, including men who had served under Hornigold himself. He ran down and helped convict pardon-breakers such as John Auger and Nicholas Woodall, though Charles Vane and his own former quartermaster, Edward Teach — Blackbeard — both escaped him. Rogers publicly commended Hornigold’s efforts in December 1718. The reformed pirate did not get a long retirement: in late 1719, while sailing a commission to open trade with Spanish territory, his ship wrecked on an uncharted reef in a hurricane between New Providence and the Mexican coast. Five of his crew survived the wreck by canoe; Hornigold did not.
Charles Vane: Said Yes, Meant No
Vane’s brush with the pardon came even before Rogers arrived. When Captain Vincent Pearse sailed into Nassau on 23 February 1718 to offer clemency on the Crown’s behalf, Vane initially agreed to take it. The agreement did not survive the month: by 21 March he and his men, joined by Edward England, had seized a Jamaican sloop and gone back to raiding. He spent the following months harassing shipping and dodging Pearse’s ship outright, until his own crew voted him out of command that November after he refused to fight a French frigate. Marooned on an uninhabited island near the Bay Islands during a hurricane in February 1719, Vane was eventually spotted by a passing ship sent for water and recognized by an old acquaintance aboard. He was tried in Spanish Town, Jamaica, on 22 March 1721, convicted, and hanged a week later at Gallows Point in Port Royal — his body left hanging in chains at Gun Cay afterward as a warning to the next crew tempted to pass.
Stede Bonnet: Pardoned Twice, Hanged Once
Bonnet’s pardon came through a different channel entirely. Rather than deal with Rogers in the Bahamas, he and Blackbeard travelled to Bath, North Carolina, in the summer of 1718 and accepted clemency directly from the colony’s governor, Charles Eden — evidence that the amnesty was administered piecemeal across several jurisdictions, not as one clean transaction at Nassau. Bonnet’s reform lasted only as long as it took him to discover that Blackbeard had looted his ship and marooned several of his men on a sandbar. Within weeks he was back at sea under the alias “Captain Thomas,” sailing a renamed sloop, the Royal James, and had plundered eleven vessels by July. Colonel William Rhett’s expedition finally cornered him at the mouth of North Carolina’s Cape Fear River on 27 September 1718; after a standoff of several hours, the rising tide freed Rhett’s ships while the Royal James sat stranded, and Bonnet surrendered. He escaped custody on 24 October but was recaptured within days on Sullivan’s Island. Vice-Admiralty judge Nicholas Trott sentenced him to death on 12 November, and despite pleas for clemency, Bonnet was hanged at White Point in Charleston on 10 December 1718.
Why the Pardon Still Mostly Worked
Hornigold, Vane, and Bonnet are remembered precisely because their pardons didn’t end the story — one kept his word and died doing the Crown’s work, one never meant to keep it, and one meant to but couldn’t resist the chance to settle a score. They are the exceptions that make good reading. The pardon’s actual success is harder to see in the record, because it looked like nothing happening: several hundred pirates who took the oath at Nassau in 1718 simply stopped, went home, or found other work, and never appeared in a court record or a captain’s log again. By the time Blackbeard was killed off Virginia that November and Nassau’s pirate base was fully pacified, the King’s proclamation — not any single naval victory — had done more than anything else to end the Golden Age of Piracy in the Bahamas.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia entries for Benjamin Hornigold, Charles Vane, Stede Bonnet, and Woodes Rogers; EBSCO Research Starters, “Republic of Pirates.”
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