Between Two Rivers · Episode 2
Pirates at the Gate
May 1718: Blackbeard blockades Charles Town for a week and demands a chest of medicine. The only fully walled English town in North America, the Huguenots who helped build it, and Stede Bonnet, the gentleman pirate, caught in the Cape Fear River and hanged at White Point.
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Carol May, 1718. If you'd been standing on the waterfront in Charles Town, you'd have seen them out past the sandbar. Four ships. One of them a big, captured French ship, refitted with as many as forty guns.
Shannon The Queen Anne's Revenge.
Carol And on board, a tall man with a long black beard, who liked people to be afraid of him.
Shannon Blackbeard.
Carol Welcome back to Between Two Rivers. A history of Charleston, one era at a time.
Shannon Last time, the colony landed at Albemarle Point and moved across the river to Oyster Point. This time, the little town on the peninsula builds walls, and then finds out what's waiting on the other side of them.
Carol Episode two. Pirates at the Gate.
Shannon So picture Charles Town around 1700. Twenty years on the peninsula. It's still small. A few streets running back from the Cooper River, mostly wooden houses with a little brick, and along the waterfront, a brand-new brick seawall.
Carol Who's living there?
Shannon A real mix, for an English town. English settlers and Barbadians, of course. But also French Protestants, the Huguenots. The first of them arrived in 1680, and many more came after their king outlawed their faith in 1685.
Carol That's the religious toleration from episode one, paying off.
Shannon Exactly. They brought skills and money, and some of the old Charleston names are Huguenot names. Manigault. Ravenel. Huger. Their congregation built its first church at Church and Queen Streets in 1687, and the French Huguenot Church still stands on that corner. Today's building dates from 1844.
Carol So the town is growing. Trade is growing. And all of that makes it a target.
Shannon Here's something a lot of people don't know. For a while, Charleston was the only fully walled English town in North America.
Carol Walled, like a medieval town?
Shannon More or less. It started in the 1690s with a brick seawall along the waterfront. Then in 1704, the town closed the circle. On the land side, an earthen wall and a moat, with bastions at the corners. Cannon pointed out at the harbor and back toward the marshes.
Carol Who were they afraid of?
Shannon Everyone, a little. The Spanish in Florida. The French. And by 1715, there was a terrible war with the Yamasee and their allies that came close to wiping out the colony's frontier settlements. People fled into town behind the walls.
Carol So the walls weren't just for show.
Shannon Not at all. And they shaped the town. The walled city was small. Roughly from today's Water Street north to about Market Street, and from East Bay Street, which was the riverbank back then, west to Meeting Street.
Carol That's not very big.
Shannon You could walk across it in a few minutes. Which is why, when trouble came by sea, everyone in town knew about it at once.
Carol And trouble did come by sea.
Shannon It did. The early 1700s were what historians call the golden age of piracy. Thousands of sailors, many of them out of work after a long war ended, turned to raiding ships along the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean.
Carol And Charles Town was a perfect spot for them.
Shannon A rich port, at the end of a busy shipping lane, with ships coming and going all the time. And a generation earlier, back in the 1680s and nineties, some people in town hadn't minded pirates at all. Pirates had money, and they spent it.
Carol (laughs) A complicated relationship, again.
Shannon Charleston has a lot of those. But by 1718, that welcome was long gone.
Carol So, back to May 1718. Blackbeard arrives off the bar with his small fleet. And he simply parks there.
Shannon He blockades the harbor.
Carol For about a week. Any ship trying to come in or go out, he stops it. He takes several of them, and he takes prisoners. Among them, a member of the governor's council, a man named Samuel Wragg, and Wragg's young son.
Shannon And what does he want? Gold?
Carol That's the strange part. He wants medicine. A chest of medicines.
Shannon Medicine.
Carol Nobody knows for certain why. The usual guess is that his crew was sick. But he sends a few of his men into town with the demand, and with a message: hand over the medicine, or the prisoners die and their heads get sent to the governor.
Shannon That's a ransom note.
Carol It is. And Governor Robert Johnson has a town full of frightened people, no navy, and a pirate fleet sitting at the mouth of his harbor. So he and his council give in, reluctantly. The colony sends out a medicine chest worth three or four hundred pounds.
Shannon And the prisoners?
Carol Released. Robbed of their valuables, and by some accounts, of most of their clothes. But alive. And then Blackbeard sails away north.
Shannon Humiliating for the town.
Carol Deeply. And Charles Town did not forget it.
Shannon Which brings us to the other pirate in this story. Stede Bonnet.
Carol The gentleman pirate.
Shannon That's what they called him. He wasn't a sailor at all. He was a wealthy landowner from Barbados, who, for reasons nobody has ever fully explained, bought a ship, hired a crew, and became a pirate.
Carol Bought a ship. Pirates usually steal them.
Shannon (laughs) That's what makes him so odd. He didn't know much about sailing, either. He spent a while sailing alongside Blackbeard, who more or less took over his ship. By the late summer of 1718, Bonnet was on his own again, careening his ship in the Cape Fear River, in North Carolina.
Carol And Charles Town had had enough.
Shannon The town sent out two armed sloops, the Henry and the Sea Nymph, under a colonel named William Rhett. Rhett was actually hunting a different pirate, Charles Vane. Instead, on September twenty-seventh, 1718, he found Bonnet in the Cape Fear River. After a fight of five or six hours, Rhett captured him and his crew and brought them back to Charles Town.
Carol For trial.
Shannon For trial. But first, Bonnet escaped.
Carol He escaped?
Shannon Briefly. On October twenty-fourth he slipped away. Legend says he was dressed in women's clothes, though the early accounts don't mention it. He got as far as Sullivan's Island before Rhett caught him again, on November sixth.
Carol And then?
Shannon Twenty-nine of his crew were hanged on November eighth, at White Point, at the tip of the peninsula. Bonnet followed on December tenth, 1718.
Carol White Point. That's where the Battery is now.
Shannon Right where we stood at the very start of the last episode.
Carol So if you're in Charleston today, where can you stand in this episode?
Shannon Start at the Old Exchange Building, at the foot of Broad Street on East Bay. It was built later, finished in 1771. But down in the cellar you can see the Half-Moon Battery, part of the old waterfront wall, finished in 1701. It's the only piece of the town wall that's open to the public.
Carol Then walk down to White Point Garden. Near the northeast corner there's a granite marker for Stede Bonnet and the pirates hanged near that spot. Stand under the oaks, look out at the harbor, and imagine four ships sitting out past the bar.
Shannon And when you walk the streets between Water Street and Market, east of Meeting, remember you're inside the old walls. The town that Blackbeard held to ransom fit right in there.
Carol That's Charles Town in the age of pirates. A small walled town, a growing port, a week-long blockade, and a chest of medicine.
Shannon And a gentleman pirate who should probably have stayed home in Barbados.
Carol (laughs) Next time, the town grows past its walls and turns to the land. A young woman named Eliza Lucas, still a teenager when she starts, spends years making a blue dye called indigo pay.
Shannon And in 1740, a great fire changes how the whole town is built.
Carol Indigo and fire. That's next time, on Between Two Rivers.