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Port · Bahamas

Nassau and the pirate republic

Nassau, on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas, was the main pirate base of the Golden Age of Piracy. After raiders burned it in 1703 it had no working government, and by 1718 perhaps a thousand or more pirates, among them Benjamin Hornigold, Blackbeard and Charles Vane, used it to sell plunder and refit their ships. The pirate years ended when Woodes Rogers arrived as royal governor in July 1718 with a pardon for those who gave up.

Why did pirates choose Nassau?

The Bahamas belonged to a group of English noblemen, the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, who spent very little on defending them. In October 1703, during a war between England and the Bourbon kings of France and Spain, a French and Spanish force from Cuba and Hispaniola raided Nassau, burned the town, wrecked the fort and carried off the governor. Another raid followed in 1706. For the next fifteen years there was no real government on the island at all.

Nassau also had everything a pirate wanted. It had the best harbour in the Bahamas, but a sandbar at the entrance kept out the biggest warships, while small, fast pirate sloops slipped in and out easily. It sat beside the main shipping lane, where Spanish treasure ships and English merchant ships sailed home through the Florida Straits. There were plenty of hidden beaches for careening (tipping a ship on its side to scrape its hull clean), and fresh water, fish and wild fruit.

What started the pirate boom in 1715?

When the war ended in 1713, thousands of sailors who had worked on privateers, private warships licensed to attack enemy shipping, suddenly had no work. Some kept attacking Spanish ships anyway, now without a licence, and a few began doing it from New Providence.

Then on 31 July 1715 a hurricane struck a Spanish treasure fleet off the east coast of Florida. Ten or eleven ships were wrecked and around a thousand people died, and silver coins lay scattered in the shallow water. Spain set up a salvage camp on the beach. In the winter of 1715–1716 Henry Jennings, sailing from Jamaica, raided the camp and carried off a fortune in silver. After Spain complained, the raiders were no longer welcome in Jamaica, so Jennings and other treasure-hunters went to Nassau instead. Many of them stayed on as pirates.

Who were the Flying Gang?

The pirates of Nassau are often called the Flying Gang. Their best-known leader was Benjamin Hornigold, who taught a young sailor named Edward Thatch, later famous as Blackbeard. Hornigold mostly refused to attack English ships, and in 1716 his crew voted him out and chose Sam Bellamy as captain instead. Henry Jennings was Hornigold’s rival rather than his friend. Charles Vane became the most defiant of them all.

In July 1717 Captain Mathew Musson, whose ship had been wrecked in the Bahamas, reported to London that the pirate captains using Nassau included Hornigold, Jennings, Burgess, White and Thatch, each with dozens of men and up to ten guns. It is one of the earliest written records of Blackbeard. By 1718 perhaps a thousand or more pirates were using the Bahamas, and most of the island’s settlers had fled to quieter islands.

Was Nassau really a pirate republic?

Not in the way the name suggests. “Republic of Pirates” is a modern nickname. There was no town council, no one to enforce the law and no elections for the island. What existed was something rougher: each pirate crew governed itself by written articles, voting on its captain and sharing out the loot, while the strongest captains bullied or protected the townspeople as they pleased. One of them, Thomas Barrow, even called himself governor, and Hornigold declared that every pirate was under his protection.

The town itself was a camp of huts, tents and half-ruined houses beside a broken fort. Pirates sold stolen cargo cheaply to traders who sailed in from nearby Harbour Island and Eleuthera, and from farther afield. In return they bought food, rum, gunpowder and sails. Nassau was a market, not a paradise.

Were there Black pirates in Nassau?

Yes. One historian, Kenneth Kinkor, estimated that around 30 of Sam Bellamy’s roughly 180 men were of African descent, and at least six of the men with Blackbeard in his last fight were Black. Some had escaped slavery, some had been taken off captured slave ships, and some were forced to serve.

On some pirate ships a Black sailor could vote and take a share like anyone else, which was almost unheard of at the time. But that was not the rule. Freeing captives rarely happened: many pirates treated captured Africans as cargo and sold them. Slavery was part of the Bahamas too: in 1721 about a third of the people on New Providence were Black, most of them enslaved.

How did the pirate republic end?

In September 1717 King George I offered pirates a pardon if they surrendered within a year; people called it the Act of Grace. Early in 1718 a navy ship brought the news to Nassau, and Hornigold and about 200 others signed up, though several soon went back to piracy.

On 26 July 1718 Woodes Rogers, a former privateer captain famous for sailing around the world, sailed into Nassau as the first royal governor of the Bahamas, escorted by warships. As they arrived, Charles Vane set a captured French ship on fire and sent it drifting toward the navy ships, then escaped out of the harbour with about 90 men. But about 300 people came to meet Rogers and accepted the pardon. Hornigold turned pirate hunter for him. In December 1718 Rogers hanged eight men who had gone back to piracy, and in February 1720 Nassau’s soldiers and militia, helped by stormy weather, fought off a Spanish attack. A few years later the colony’s official seal carried the motto Expulsis Piratis, Restituta Commercia: pirates expelled, trade restored.

Legend or fact?

Legend says: The pirates of Nassau ran a free and equal republic.

Records show: No government existed at all. Individual crews voted on their own captains, but in town the strongest men ruled, and many sailors were forced to join.

Legend says: Pirates buried their treasure on the beaches of the Bahamas.

Records show: There is no good evidence of it. Pirates spent or sold their loot quickly, often right there in Nassau. Buried treasure stories come mostly from Captain Kidd’s case and the novel Treasure Island.

Legend says: Pirates freed the enslaved people they found on captured ships.

Records show: A few Black men did find freedom and a share on pirate ships, but freeing captives rarely happened, and many pirates sold them.

Legend says: Woodes Rogers ended piracy overnight.

Records show: Many pardoned men drifted back to piracy, and Rogers struggled for years without enough soldiers or money. Still, by 1720 Nassau was no longer a pirate town.

Read next

PirateBenjamin HornigoldPirateCharles VanePirateCalico Jack RackhamPirateBlackbeardPirateBlack Sam BellamyPortPort Royal

Sources

  1. Woodes Rogers to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 31 October 1718 (Calendar of State Papers Colonial, vol. 30), ed. Cecil Headlam, via British History Online (1930). Rogers’ own account of his arrival, Vane’s escape and the surrender.
  2. Captain Mathew Musson to the Council of Trade, 5 July 1717 (Calendar of State Papers Colonial, vol. 29), via British History Online. The list of pirate captains using Nassau, including Thatch.
  3. The 1715 Plate Fleet and the Rise of the Pirates, David Wilson, History Today (2015).
  4. Site of Survivors’ and Salvagers’ Camp: The 1715 Fleet (historical marker), Florida Division of Historical Resources.
  5. Did You Know Woodes Rogers was the First Royal Governor of the Bahamas?, Queen Anne’s Revenge Project, North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources (2018).
  6. Did You Know Pirates Were Granted a Pardon?, Queen Anne’s Revenge Project, NC DNCR (2017).
  7. The Bahamas (Festival of American Folklife program essay), Gail Saunders, Smithsonian Institution (1994). Population of New Providence in 1721.
  8. Pirates: the history of the golden age of piracy, Royal Museums Greenwich. How often captives were freed or sold.
  9. Royal warrant for a seal of the Bahama Islands, 12 March 1722/23, The Newton Project, University of Oxford (National Archives MINT 19/3/468). The motto on the colony’s seal.
  10. Raid on Nassau (1703) and Raid on Nassau (1720), Wikipedia (citing Craton and Saunders, Islanders in the Stream, and Marley, Wars of the Americas). The raids of 1703 and 1706 and the attack of 1720.
  11. Woodes Rogers, Wikipedia (citing Johnson, 1724, and Cordingly). The December 1718 trial and the eight men hanged.
  12. “The Strongest Man Carries the Day”: Life in New Providence, 1716–1717, David Fictum, Colonies, Ships, and Pirates (2015). Barrow and Hornigold in Nassau, the traders from Harbour Island, and the harbour bar; footnoted to the Calendar of State Papers.
  13. Black Men under the Black Flag, Kenneth J. Kinkor, in Bandits at Sea, ed. C. R. Pennell (New York University Press) (2001). The estimate of Black men in Bellamy’s crew.
  14. Samuel Bellamy, Wikipedia. Hornigold voted out in favour of Bellamy, 1716.

Written for Silver & Sails. Facts last checked against these sources on 11 October 2026. Found a mistake? Tell us.