Benjamin Hornigold

Overview

Benjamin Hornigold was one of the senior captains of the Nassau-based pirate community during the de facto Bahamian pirate republic of 1713–1718. He was the first commander of Edward Teach, who served as one of his lieutenants for nearly two years. Hornigold accepted Governor Woodes Rogers’s pardon offer in 1718 and spent the remaining year of his life as a pirate-hunter operating against his former colleagues, including in Spanish service.

Origins

Hornigold’s origins before about 1713 are not documented. He appears in the Bahamian record as an established captain operating out of New Providence by the time the English colonial administration had effectively withdrawn from the island. His habit of attacking only French and Spanish shipping — never English — is documented in multiple period sources, and several of his prizes were taken under what he claimed (without commission) was an informal continuation of the just-ended War of the Spanish Succession.

Career

Hornigold’s small flotilla operated out of Nassau between roughly 1713 and 1717. Edward Teach served as one of his captains during this period, taking his own command after a particularly successful 1717 cruise off the Carolina coast. Hornigold’s “no English shipping” rule became politically untenable when the Bahamian crews around him began increasingly to attack British vessels, and the rule was reportedly the principal reason Hornigold was voted out of command by his own crew in the summer of 1716. He returned to Nassau as a private captain and was among the first to take the offered pardon when Woodes Rogers arrived as governor in July 1718.

Rogers, faced with a small force of his own and the need to demonstrate that the pardon scheme would be matched by suppression of those who refused it, commissioned Hornigold as a pirate-hunter. Hornigold spent the remainder of 1718 and the first half of 1719 cruising the Caribbean against his former colleagues, taking several captures including the crew of Stede Bonnet’s shipmate James La Buse and a number of smaller operations. He was lost with his vessel in a hurricane off the New Spain coast in late 1719; the wreck has not been located.

Legacy

Hornigold illustrates the open revolving door between piracy and naval-irregular service in the early eighteenth century: a pirate captain accepting a pardon and operating against his former colleagues was not a contradiction but a recognised category, and the legal status of his prizes was understood by all sides. The arrangement broke down only when the pirate population at Nassau collapsed, by 1720, to the point at which there were no longer enough pirate captains to hunt.

Associates & contemporaries

• Edward Teach — Lieutenant under Hornigold from c. 1716 until taking his own command in 1717.