Woodes Rogers: Rescuing Alexander Selkirk, Then Purging Pirate Nassau

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Woodes Rogers was born around 1679 and in 1706 inherited his father's Bristol shipping business, which was involved in the Atlantic slave trade. With French raiders taking his ships during the War of the Spanish Succession, he raised money from Bristol investors, including his father-in-law, for a privateering voyage on the Duke and the Duchess, with William Dampier as navigator. Leaving in August 1708, he flogged a mutiny leader who wanted to plunder a neutral Swedish ship, was blown to almost 62 degrees south, and carried limes against scurvy. In February 1709 at the Juan Fernández Islands his men found Alexander Selkirk, marooned for four years after leaving Dampier's earlier expedition, and took him aboard.

Off Mexico he captured a Spanish galleon after a musket ball shattered his upper jaw, and he gave orders in writing as he bled. He reached the Thames in October 1711, but the East India Company sued for 6,000 pounds over his stop in Dutch Batavia, his crew sued, and he went bankrupt. His 1712 book, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, sold well, and in July 1718 he arrived in Nassau as governor with the King's Pardon. Charles Vane escaped using a fire ship, disease killed nearly 100 of his men, and Rogers sent the pardoned Benjamin Hornigold after holdouts. In 1720 a militia of about 500 repelled a Spanish attack, but he ended up in debtor's prison in London before a second term. He died in Nassau in 1732.

• His crew sailed toward the far south with wine from Tenerife instead of winter coats and cut up bedding to make warm clothing.
• At Guayaquil his men dug up fresh graves looking for jewelry, and several died of a disease caught there.
• Hornigold brought back John Augur and other relapsed pirates; in December 1718 nine were convicted and eight hanged.
• On the gallows, Thomas Morris said, "We have a good governor, but a harsh one."
• He supplied material for Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates, and the Bahamas motto until 1973 was "Piracy expelled, commerce restored."