Map illustration is from Pirates on the Chesapeake by Donald Shomette, Tidewater Publishers, a Division of Schiffer Publishing; used by permission of the author.
Pirates. The word probably conjures up images of eye patches, peg legs, parrots and buried treasure. But those are all modern updates of a very real and sometimes brutal practice. Piracy on the Chesapeake Bay was part of Virginia’s history for more than 300 years. And though most people think of the pirates infesting Caribbean waters, it’s not surprising that they would also be attracted to the Atlantic coast as well. Ships traveling from England were easy picking when fledgling colonies lacked the resources to protect themselves and the supply ships coming to port.
Historian Mark Hanna, who has written about pirates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries once said, “A lot of what is known about pirates is not true, and a lot of what is true is not known.”
PIRACY COMES TO VIRGINIA’S SHORE
The first true act of piracy happened not long after Jamestown was established in 1607. Two years into the endeavor, weakened by attacks from neighboring tribes, starvation, and disease, a group of colonists was dispatched to trade with the Indians for food. Instead of returning to the fort with a quantity of corn and the ship, however, the group, led by Francis West (who happened to be the younger brother of the governor), decided to sail back to England, abandoning the starving colonists and exacerbating The Starving Times.
Another act of piracy ten years later would affect the new colony and those who would inhabit it to this day. In 1619, the slave ship San Juan Bautista was bound for Mexico when privateers on the White Lion and Treasurer attacked it in the Gulf of Mexico, taking its 50-60 slaves with them. The White Lion arrived in Point Comfort (present-day Hampton), followed by the Treasurer a few days later. Sold into slavery shortly after their arrival, these “20 and odd” enslaved Africans, as they were recorded at the time, were the first of what would eventually be millions that endured grueling slavery conditions in the colonies and American South over the next 250 years.
By the 1630s, with colonies now established in Virginia, Maryland and elsewhere along the coast, piracy began to take a foothold in the Chesapeake. But it wasn’t another country doing the plundering at first, it was colonists stealing from each other. The charter from King Charles I establishing Maryland included borders already assigned to Virginia, affecting plantations and trade that had already been established.
To discourage further encroachment by the Maryland colony, which was fighting for the same land, Virginian John Butler seized a small sailing ship bound for Maryland in the Chesapeake Bay and brought the ship, crew, and its cargo to Kent Island, then Virginia territory, near what is now Annapolis. This became the first documented act of “pyracie” on the Chesapeake.
PIRATE OR PRIVATEER?
Though it mattered little if you were the plundered vessel, there was some difference between being a pirate and a privateer. It comes down to paperwork.
Privateers carried letters of marque, which were basically licenses from a nation giving the ship the authority and permission to attack and capture enemy ships. Once captured, the spoils — the ship and its contents — would then be divvied up between the captain, crew, and of course, the nation that issued the marque.
In the colonies, this use of essentially a private navy allowed England, France, and Spain, among others, to have a military presence on the other side of the Atlantic and gain wealth, all without the expense of building their own fleets.
It was not without obvious problems. Wars were declared and ended, while news of that spread slowly. Privateers would sometimes attack ships that didn’t fall under the letter of marque, or pirates were sometimes able to get letters of marque from corrupt politicians. As a result, the line between the practices blurred.
A PIRATE ENDOWMENT
As trading between England and its colonies increased, so too, did piracy. By 1660, Virginia’s Governor William Berkeley noted that the waters off Virginia were “so full of pirates that it is impossible for any ships to go home safely.”
On June 22, 1688, a small vessel on the Chesapeake was stopped and upon inspection, four men were found with a significant amount of money and other goods. The group was arrested on charges of piracy. At first, the group maintained their innocence but then decided to take advantage of proclamation from King James II offering pardons to pirates who turned themselves in. But the strategy failed and the group continued to languish in a Jamestown jail. They were finally released on bail in July of 1689, minus their property. To make a long and twisted tale short, in 1692 King William III decreed that the men would indeed receive their property “with the exception of three hundred pounds” which would “be devoted to the building of a college in Virginia.”
Accounts of the College of William & Mary show 300 pounds received from Davis, Delawafer, and Hinson, three of the men who had been picked up in the Chesapeake four years earlier (the fourth had died in jail). One of the college’s first endowments had come from pirate booty.
The end of the oyster war.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF PIRACY
Sam Bellamy, Stede Bonnet, Benjamin Hornigold — There were many pirates in the early 1700s whose short-lived careers included hunting in the waters of the Chesapeake. But none was more famous than Edward Teach (or Thatch), best known as Blackbeard.
Little is known for certain about Teach, and many historians believe the stories about his fearsome image and behavior have been exaggerated over time, becoming the stuff of legends. It was said that he lit wicks in his full, black beard to scare men in battle and commanded hundreds of men to pillage and murder all along the East Coast, including Virginia.What is known for certain, is that Virginia Gov. Alexander Spotswood, intent on ending piracy, sent Lt. Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy to North Carolina where Blackbeard and his crew were said to be hiding. On November 22, 1718, The Battle of the Ocracoke Inlet, as it came to be known, was short and bloody. And it ended with Blackbeard’s head on the bowsprit of Maynard’s ship. It is said that the 13 men who survived from Blackbeard’s crew were taken to Williamsburg, put on trial and hung from gibbets or trees along Capitol Landing Road.
Legend also has it that Blackbeard’s head was eventually put on a pole near the mouth of the Chesapeake at Hampton River (now called Blackbeard’s Point) as a warning to other would-be pirates. After many years, the skull was supposedly plated with silver and turned into a drinking cup.
OYSTER PIRATES
The death of Blackbeard did not end piracy but other factors did. As the mid-1700s neared, the colonies were better able to defend themselves and arriving supply vessels, and there was less fighting among the European powers. In 1807, a French pirate captured the Othello in the last documented act of piracy under sail in the Chesapeake.
That should have been the final chapter on piracy, except something in the bay became incredibly valuable. Flash forward to just after the Civil War. The oyster industry had exploded, with the Chesapeake Bay providing half of the oysters to the world. Like the Gold Rush decades earlier, men rushed to capitalize on the riches just waiting for them, except this time at the bottom of the Chesapeake.
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Watermen from Maryland and Virginia had long been harvesting bay oysters, of course, and resented the invasion of outsiders. Laws were enacted and ignored. Watermen fought with one another. Oyster pirates, as they were called at the time, dredged under the cover of night.
Conflicts would continue for decades, with shots being fired and boats being sunk, until 1959, when Berkeley Muse, of Colonial Beach, was shot and killed by police while illegally dredging for oysters at night. Muse’s death would not be in vain, since the oyster patrols were disarmed and saner heads prevailed. Governments agreed to work together to protect the oyster population and improve the health of the bay.
And with the end of the Oyster Wars, the final chapter was written. After 350 years, piracy on the Chesapeake had officially come to a close.