Stede Bonnet

Overview

Stede Bonnet, almost universally remembered as “the Gentleman Pirate,” was a Barbadian sugar planter who, with no prior maritime career and possessed of a substantial inherited estate, bought a sloop in the spring of 1717 and turned pirate. His career lasted eighteen months; he sailed in consort with Edward Teach for several months in 1717–1718, was captured at the mouth of the Cape Fear River in September 1718, and was hanged at Charleston that December. He is, by class background, one of the few documented pirates of the Golden Age drawn from the colonial planter elite rather than from the maritime working classes.

Origins

Bonnet was born on Barbados around 1688 into a substantial sugar-planting family. He served briefly in the Barbadian militia and inherited the family estate at his father’s death in 1694. He married Mary Allamby in 1709, and by 1717 the family had three surviving children. The decision to turn pirate at age twenty-nine is unexplained in any source; the contemporary account in Johnson’s 1724 chronicle suggests a discord with his wife as the proximate cause, but this is anecdotal and not corroborated. What is documented is that he commissioned a ten-gun sloop in Bridgetown in early 1717, recruited a crew of about seventy on regular wages (rather than the customary pirate-share system), and named the vessel Revenge.

Career

Bonnet’s first cruise took the Revenge north along the American Atlantic coast, where she took several merchant vessels off Virginia and South Carolina between April and September 1717. Bonnet’s lack of nautical experience was a recurring problem; he was wounded in an action off the Carolina coast in early autumn 1717 and put into Nassau in the Bahamas to refit. There the Revenge fell in with Edward Teach, who was operating from Nassau and recognised an opportunity in a wealthy, wounded, inexperienced captain. Teach assumed effective command of the Revenge, leaving Bonnet aboard as a nominal guest captain while one of Teach’s own officers handled the navigation.

The two vessels cruised in consort through the late autumn and winter of 1717–1718, including during Teach’s capture of the French slaver that became the Queen Anne’s Revenge. When the Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, in June 1718, Teach effectively stranded Bonnet on his own sloop Revenge with a token crew and departed with the bulk of the take. Bonnet, recovered from his wounds, sailed independently again for the next three months, taking small prizes along the Delaware and Virginia capes.

Colonel William Rhett, sent by South Carolina governor Robert Johnson with two armed sloops in September 1718, located Bonnet at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. After a six-hour engagement — both Rhett’s sloops and the Revenge grounded on a sandbar during the action — Bonnet surrendered. He was brought to Charleston and held in private custody owing to his social standing; escaped once disguised in women’s clothing and was recaptured on nearby Sullivan’s Island after a few days at large. He was tried for piracy at Charleston in late November 1718.

Fate

Bonnet was convicted and sentenced to hang. He addressed several long and abject petitions for pardon to Governor Johnson in the weeks before his execution, citing his social standing and family obligations; Johnson refused. Bonnet was hanged at White Point at the southern tip of Charleston peninsula on 10 December 1718. The site is now a public park (White Point Garden), and a small plaque commemorates the execution.

Associates & contemporaries

• Edward Teach — Sailed in consort with Bonnet from autumn 1717 to summer 1718; effectively took command of the <em>Revenge</em> during that period.