Benjamin Hornigold: Founder of the Pirate Republic Turned Pirate Hunter

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Benjamin Hornigold was born in England around 1680, likely in Norfolk, and came of age as the British crown relied on privateers in the War of the Spanish Succession. When peace in 1714 left thousands of armed sailors without work, Hornigold was already operating off the Bahamas, beginning in the winter of 1713 with the sloop Happy Return and a fleet of periaguas, shallow-draft sailing canoes that could escape into waters larger ships could not enter. He helped turn Nassau on New Providence, with its deep harbor and shallow entrance, into a base where smugglers and merchants traded stolen goods, the core of the Republic of Pirates. By 1717 he commanded the 30-gun Ranger and gave his old sloop to his protégé Edward Teach, later Blackbeard. That spring the two took a Spanish ship carrying 120 barrels of flour, a Bermudian sloop of spirits and a Portuguese ship carrying Madeira wine, and his fleet grew to five ships and about 350 men.

Hornigold refused to attack British ships, insisting he was still a privateer, and his crew voted him out in favor of Samuel Bellamy, leaving him a small sloop and a few loyalists. After George I offered a royal pardon with bounties for captured pirates, Hornigold accepted it in Jamaica in early 1718 and went to work for Bahamas governor Woodes Rogers as a pirate hunter. He pursued Charles Vane, captured one of Vane's associates, and brought in John Auger to face the gallows. In late 1719, on a legal trading voyage to New Spain, his ship was driven onto an uncharted reef in a hurricane and he drowned.

• A pirate hunter armed by the governor of South Carolina was forced aground on Cat Cay by Hornigold's fleet.
• Off Honduras his crew took only the passengers' hats, explaining they had thrown their own overboard while drunk.
• Passengers from that sloop testified the pirates harmed no one.
• Rogers wrote to London praising Hornigold for repairing his reputation by hunting former allies.
• Five crewmen survived the 1719 wreck by escaping in a canoe.