Episode Transcript
Transcripts are displayed as originally observed. Some content, including advertisements may have changed.
Use Ctrl + F to search
0:00
You're listening to an Airwave Media
0:03
Podcast.
0:05
Today's episode is brought to you by our supporters
0:08
on Patreon, including our
0:10
Commodore class. That's
0:12
Commodore's Obvious, Misfit,
0:16
Sean, DJJesus72,
0:20
Lee, David, Torso
0:23
and Pinches, Matt, The
0:26
Snarlin' Sea Dog, Hangman
0:29
Strain, John, Sir
0:32
Rancid Cheese, Shelby,
0:35
Andrew, Axios, Vanderwood,
0:39
Richard, Noah, Infamous
0:41
Florida Man, Hartman,
0:44
Skipper, The Sextant, Brian,
0:48
Cap'n Crunch, Roger
0:50
the Jolly, Vibran, Artemis
0:53
Killmeister, Kielhall
0:55
Chris, Karkos, Sean,
0:59
Rotary Coast, MD,
1:02
Seth, Ghost750X,
1:06
Lost Again, The Navigator, Vassios,
1:10
Doc Lindsey, Pitlock,
1:13
Ward, Workman, Chairboat,
1:16
Gunsway Sally, Cannon
1:19
Monkey, Rum Runner, Madiminita
1:22
Sparrow, Hayfay, Bull,
1:26
Vertigon, Rumgut, The
1:28
Snarlin' Sea Dog, and
1:30
Bootstraps Bailey.
1:58
Hello, welcome to the colony,
4:00
and most of the settlers of Jamestown moved
4:02
inland and had been housed at the
4:04
College of William and Mary. Now
4:07
William and Mary, as I'm sure you remember,
4:09
was a new institution that had been
4:11
paid for mostly with funds captured
4:14
from the pirate captain Edward Davis.
4:18
But William and Mary was on a much more
4:20
pleasant piece of real estate than Jamestown.
4:24
Jamestown was basically in a swamp, complete
4:27
with pestilential swarms of
4:29
malaria-riddled mosquitoes in the summertime.
4:32
It wasn't a nice place to live. So
4:35
when they began to rebuild the capital of Virginia,
4:37
they didn't do so at Jamestown. They
4:40
did so near the College of William and
4:42
Mary, on a piece of ground that
4:44
would go on to become Williamsburg.
4:47
It's kind of like what's happening with Port Royal over
4:50
in Jamaica. Port Royal
4:52
fell into the sea back in 1692,
4:55
and the government and most of the people from
4:57
Port Royal were now living in what
4:59
we would consider today Kingston, but
5:02
they still called it, for now, Port
5:04
Royal. Now John James
5:06
had been a pretty serious problem for Virginia
5:09
for about a week and done a fair bit of damage
5:11
in his short time there. But
5:14
Virginia was about to experience a rash of piracy
5:17
that would make the depredations of John James
5:19
look like child's play. This
5:22
is episode 320, Great Mischiefs. This
5:28
piracy, this epidemic of piracy that's
5:30
about to break out is bad, but
5:33
it may not actually be as bad
5:35
as the sources tell us. We've
5:38
got a lot of sources about it. We
5:40
have virtually everything that Governor
5:42
Francis Nicholson wrote to his colonial
5:45
administrators, his military leaders and
5:47
other governors in the region, as well as the Admiralty
5:50
and the Lords of Trade. He wrote a
5:52
lot of letters, and they were almost all saved
5:55
by the College of William and Mary. But
5:58
he also may have been... Exaggerating
6:01
just a bit to
6:04
make his situation seem worse than it was, because
6:06
what he really wanted were better
6:08
and more defenses. The
6:11
only ship that Virginia had with which
6:13
to defend herself was the Essex Prize,
6:16
a ship that was old, undermanned,
6:19
and only had sixteen guns on board.
6:23
And the captain of Essex Prize,
6:25
John Aldred, was less than
6:27
enthusiastic about, you know, going
6:29
out there and doing his job. Governor
6:32
Nicholson was desperate for better defenses
6:34
from the Royal Authorities, which
6:37
was the case all over the Atlantic world. It
6:39
wasn't just the Chesapeake that was having a tough
6:41
time. Carolina,
6:44
Massachusetts, New York, Jamaica, the Bahamas,
6:46
everyone needed better defenses from
6:48
pirates. The home country
6:51
was having trouble providing all of these
6:53
better defenses, and you can really
6:55
begin to see why if you were a colonial
6:57
administrator, you might decide
7:00
to turn to privateers to
7:02
defend your shores. But
7:04
Nicholson wasn't there quite yet. Most
7:07
of the piracy in Chesapeake Bay immediately
7:09
after John James left was small-scale
7:13
stuff, coastal raiding. You know,
7:15
on one occasion there was a canoe
7:17
that carried maybe a dozen men
7:19
and attacked a ranch on an island
7:22
in the Chesapeake that stole
7:24
five or six cows,
7:26
which was bad news for the ranchers, absolutely.
7:29
They had to watch while the pirates slaughtered
7:31
and salted their animals and then sailed
7:33
away. But it's not like that was shaking
7:36
Virginia to her core. Now
7:39
nobody knows who these cow thieves
7:41
were, and it's possible they weren't really
7:44
pirates, maybe just a group
7:46
of people who needed some beef and knew where
7:48
to get it. There was another
7:50
case where a ship was boarded and
7:53
was ransacked, but they didn't
7:55
take anything valuable, just
7:57
water barrels and food stores. Which,
8:01
again, may not actually have been pirates,
8:04
as we understand them. You know, they were raiding
8:06
at sea, so yes, guilty of piracy,
8:10
but they may just have been people who were living
8:12
on the knife's edge of real poverty, even
8:15
starvation, and needed
8:17
water and food.
8:20
Because this kind of thing was happening a lot.
8:23
It seems like every couple of weeks there was
8:25
another raid, but it was never someone searching
8:27
for profit. It was usually somebody searching
8:29
for
8:30
supplies,
8:32
salted fish, beer, pork,
8:34
that kind of thing. But despite
8:36
this, and despite the fact that everybody knew it was
8:38
a real problem, the Essex Prize
8:41
just couldn't do anything about it. Or
8:43
maybe she wouldn't do
8:46
anything about it. Every
8:48
time that Governor Nicholson ordered Captain
8:51
Aldred to go out on patrol, Captain
8:54
Aldred just kind of didn't. Sometimes
8:58
he would write back to the Governor that he didn't have enough men,
9:01
or maybe his hull wasn't in disrepair, or
9:03
he needed to careen the ship because
9:05
she was suffering worms. And
9:08
these are all legitimate complaints that were, you
9:10
know, actually happening, but it was
9:13
so bad that he almost never
9:16
actually went out there to sail. On
9:19
the rare occasion that Essex Prize
9:21
did go out on patrol,
9:23
she would return after just a few days.
9:27
At one point, Governor Nicholson threatened
9:29
to fire and court-marshal
9:31
Captain Aldred.
9:33
Captain Aldred said, okay, fine, I'll go out
9:36
there, I'll hunt down some pirates. But just a few
9:38
days later he returned, saying
9:40
that the winter weather had been so bad he was
9:42
in danger of losing Essex Prize completely.
9:46
And he wasn't, again, he's not lying about
9:48
any of this. The winter of 1699-1700 was
9:50
terrible, and I'm sure the weather was
9:52
a real problem for his
9:55
rickety old boat. But
9:58
that doesn't do anything to change the facts. that
10:00
the pirates in Chesapeake Bay, these
10:02
reiners who just kept coming, were
10:04
a real, real problem for
10:06
Governor Nicholson, and of course the
10:09
people who actually got robbed.
10:11
Do you
10:12
ever find yourself in need of a title
10:15
for something, only to discover
10:17
that someone else has picked the perfect
10:20
title before you get there? It's
10:24
infuriating. In Pirates
10:26
of the Chesapeake, Donald G. Shemet,
10:29
titled the chapter about this period,
10:31
the winter of 1699-1700, he calls it the winter of discontent. And
10:39
it really was. The
10:41
Council of Virginia, and you
10:45
know I had to resist the urge
10:47
to do a whole episode about the history
10:49
of Virginia. It's all pretty
10:51
interesting stuff, and there are some great rebellious,
10:54
anti-authoritarian trends running through
10:57
the whole thing, the kind of stuff I love.
11:00
But I don't want to delve too much into it. The
11:02
really abbreviated version goes
11:05
like this. The boom crop
11:07
of the 1600s was tobacco,
11:10
especially in Virginia. Small
11:12
holders in the Virginia colony could make a
11:15
living, even a good living, growing
11:17
tobacco on just a couple of acres. In
11:20
the 1670s, the navigation
11:22
acts really kind of kneecapped these
11:24
small holding planters. It
11:27
forced them to sell strictly to
11:29
English merchants, which led
11:31
to a glut of tobacco in English
11:33
warehouses and a sudden drastic
11:36
market crash. This
11:38
led to a lot of farmers losing their land,
11:41
and eventually an insurrection called
11:43
a Bacon's Rebellion. Now,
11:45
Bacon's Rebellion gets pretty dark
11:48
at times. The forces
11:50
of Bacon's Rebellion attacked a lot of Native
11:52
American settlements, settlements that
11:55
were allied with the large
11:57
holding Virginia planters. terrible
12:00
massacres took place, and then retribution
12:02
happened, and more terrible massacres took place.
12:06
It was a bloody affair. But
12:08
this rebellion led to a kind
12:10
of a culture of bottom-up politics
12:12
in Virginia. The lower
12:15
and middle classes tended to struggle pretty
12:17
hard against the aristocratic
12:19
upper classes. Eventually,
12:22
this led to the formation of the
12:24
Virginia House of Burgesses. A
12:28
burgesses is like a middle-class freemen.
12:31
It's the English version of the German burger
12:33
or the French bourgeois. By
12:36
our time, about 1700, the
12:39
burgesses had amassed quite a bit of political
12:41
power in Virginia. The
12:43
ranks of the militia were filled with
12:46
burgesses and lower-class farmers.
12:49
And when the pirates began to harass the Chesapeake
12:52
Bay, and when the pirates began
12:54
to harass Chesapeake Bay, it
12:56
was the burgesses that were hit the hardest. So
12:59
this lower house of legislature
13:01
in Virginia drafted a letter that
13:03
was intended for the governor and eventually
13:06
the king.
13:07
It read, in part, quote,
13:10
Of late many notorious robberies
13:12
have been committed by pirates within this
13:14
colony, whereby it appears that
13:16
the dangers from those people do continually
13:19
grow greater and greater. Therefore,
13:22
His Majesty's most sacred council
13:24
do pray that—and
13:26
I'm actually going to stop it there—they spend
13:28
an amazing amount of ink on useless,
13:31
flowery language for the king. To
13:34
paraphrase, though, they're asking the governor
13:36
to write to the king about the, quote, Great
13:38
Mischiefs and Prejudices that were
13:41
plaguing the colony. This was exactly
13:43
what Governor Nicholson wanted. He'd been
13:46
writing the Lords of Trade and Plantations
13:48
for months now, begging for better
13:50
defense by sea, and gotten
13:52
basically nowhere. But this letter
13:55
represented the people of Virginia,
13:57
the burgesses, as well as some of those larger
13:59
plantations.
14:01
And it proved that he wasn't just some crank,
14:03
you know, this was a real problem that everybody
14:05
recognized. The Crown
14:08
would eventually respond to
14:10
this letter, but it was going to take some time.
14:13
In the interim, the conflict between
14:16
Governor Nicholson and Captain Aldred
14:18
grew worse. The
14:21
Governor, after yet another pirate
14:23
attack and in quite a rage, sent
14:25
agents to board the Essex Prize.
14:28
And what they were supposed to do isn't exactly
14:31
clear, but nothing good in
14:33
that case. But those agents were refused
14:36
permission to board. So the
14:38
Governor himself came down to the docks
14:41
with a party of militia men behind
14:43
him to arrest Captain
14:45
Aldred for dereliction of duty. Captain
14:49
Aldred, though, was barricaded inside
14:51
his cabin. He said that he was
14:53
very sick and probably contagious,
14:56
so he couldn't open up for the good of the Governor.
14:59
But everybody knew that this was a lie.
15:02
He was just refusing to go quietly.
15:04
Now, they could break down the door, drag
15:07
the captain away in chains, put him in jail,
15:09
maybe execute him. Or
15:12
they could just confine the captain to quarters,
15:15
and that's what they did. For
15:17
five days, Aldred
15:19
was kept under lock and key for less
15:21
than a week. But then another pirate
15:24
attack happened. The Essex Prize
15:26
was still just sitting there, her captain, in
15:29
custody, and nobody could respond.
15:32
So Governor Nicholson sighed, released
15:35
Captain Aldred, and told him, quote,
15:38
laying aside all possible excuses
15:41
and delays with all possible
15:43
speed, sail Essex Prize
15:45
into Chesapeake Bay and cruise
15:47
according to my former orders. I
15:50
require and command you not
15:52
to fail as you answer the
15:54
contrary to your peril.
15:58
End quote. He's telling Captain Aldred.
16:00
Captain Aldred that if he doesn't go out
16:02
there and do his job, he will be
16:04
arrested and court-martialed. Captain
16:07
Aldred ignored him. He had no
16:10
intention of sailing out to the bay with a
16:12
ship in such poor condition, and
16:15
the two men found themselves at a stalemate.
16:18
But winter was breaking, and with the
16:20
spring came relief. On 20
16:32
April 1700, HMS Shoreham arrived. The
16:37
Shoreham was an impressive
16:40
ship. She was
16:43
a 360-ton, 32-gun, fifth-rate
16:45
ship of the line in fantastic
16:48
condition. Now, a 32-gun
16:50
ship could usually be classed either as
16:52
a fifth-rate or a frigate, and
16:55
I've seen both referred to as a man o' war,
16:57
but I think technically it should
16:59
only refer to a fifth-rate ship of the line.
17:03
And I know that I personally have been inconsistent
17:05
about this in the past, because
17:08
it can get confusing if you don't have the specifics
17:10
of a ship. The difference
17:13
between a fifth-rate and a frigate isn't
17:15
the number of guns but where they're placed
17:17
on board a ship. A
17:20
frigate always had her guns on the
17:22
main deck, with a few
17:24
smaller guns mounted on the quarter deck
17:26
in the folksle. But a fifth-rate
17:29
ship of the line, a man o' war, had
17:31
a lower gun deck that was reserved for
17:33
even bigger guns. And
17:35
that gun deck is what makes all the difference.
17:38
They called these ships double-deckers
17:41
or two-deckers. Now,
17:43
these distinctions weren't officially codified
17:45
until the 1750s, and pirates would take
17:49
any guns they could find that they were able to use.
17:51
They didn't much care about those rules anyway.
17:54
But the guns on that lower deck were
17:57
important for ships that were not pirates.
18:00
In the case of the Shoram, there were eight
18:03
demi-culverins on the gun deck,
18:05
four on either side. The demi-culverin
18:08
was maybe the most commonly used
18:10
cannon for the first half of the 18th century.
18:14
There were 3,400-pound guns that fired 10-pound round balls.
18:20
On land, they could be drawn by a team of two
18:22
horses, and they were
18:24
capable of breaching a ship's hull or
18:27
a castle walls with only a few shots.
18:30
Now, naturally, there were much bigger guns
18:33
out there, but those
18:35
were usually only found in maritime
18:37
situations on much larger ships
18:40
of the line. On land,
18:42
they would usually only be employed in
18:44
major sieges because getting
18:47
them to the fortress you were trying to
18:49
besiege was difficult. The
18:52
demi-culverin was the biggest easy-to-move
18:54
cannon available, but
18:56
of course we'd never see one on board a pirate
18:58
ship. Sinking the ship that
19:01
you were attacking was never the
19:03
goal, and while they were useful
19:05
for open combat, pirates
19:07
wanted to avoid combat if at
19:10
all possible. Pirates almost exclusively
19:13
stuck to smaller bore cannon, but
19:16
it made the Shoram, and really, any
19:18
vessel that carried these guns
19:20
a major threat to any pirates
19:22
that they might encounter. And it was
19:25
the sort of thing that any pirate who spotted
19:27
a ship like that would know that they
19:29
carry. The demi-culverin was a ship-sinker
19:32
and pirate-killer. Way
19:36
back in 1144, the
19:38
bishop of a city and fridence called Sanmalo,
19:41
named Jean de Chateaune, made
19:43
Sanmalo a haven for those seeking
19:46
asylum. Sanmalo
19:48
was a city in Brittany, in what
19:50
is today northwest France, that sits
19:52
on the English Channel. Now,
19:54
at the time, Brittany wasn't really part
19:57
of the Kingdom of France. independent
20:00
barony, or dukedom, depending on
20:02
who was in charge, that had ties
20:05
of fealty to the king of Francia,
20:07
but was not part of the kingdom. But
20:10
in 1144 all of that was up in the air. This
20:14
was a tumultuous period in Western
20:17
Europe. In England they were going
20:19
through something called the Anarchy, when multiple
20:22
claimants vied for the English throne.
20:25
On the continent the Baron of Anjou
20:27
was conquering land all over
20:29
Normandy and Brittany, and even in France.
20:32
Now in just a few years' time all of that's
20:34
going to be settled, thanks mostly
20:36
to the Empress Matilda, who's going to play a key
20:39
role in founding the Engèvement Empire.
20:42
But in 1144 it was all warfare
20:45
and chaos and blood. Northwest
20:47
France, which was one of the centers of chaos
20:50
and blood, needed a place like
20:52
Sommalo was a haven, a refuge
20:54
for the people who were suffering, and
20:56
it served admirably as such. But
21:00
its place as a city of asylum
21:02
made Sommalo a desirable
21:04
location for people on the run from the
21:07
law, and its place
21:09
on the Channel ensured that it quickly
21:11
turned into a haven for pirates,
21:14
and the independent-minded in France.
21:19
Sommalo had a little revolution back in the
21:21
1590s and declared their independence from
21:23
France. The slogan
21:26
was, not Breton, not French,
21:28
but I am of Mallow. It
21:30
was Sommalo IV who finally corralled
21:33
these rebellious tendencies, but
21:35
he didn't do so by laying down the law.
21:39
Instead he issued letters
21:41
of mark to the sea rovers from Sommalo,
21:44
and they were called the French Corsairs. And
21:47
it actually plays an interesting role
21:49
in the etymology of the word corsair.
21:53
You can trace it back to ancient Latin, where
21:55
it meant basically what it means today, it's another
21:57
word for pirate. But it had fallen
21:59
out of use almost completely until the French
22:01
resurrected it thanks to the citizens of Sanmalo.
22:05
While the Dutch had the sea dogs, the French
22:07
had the corsairs, and that was
22:10
the word that the Spanish adopted to mean
22:12
pirates, their corsarios, because
22:15
the French from Sanmalo spent so much time
22:17
fighting the Spanish in the Bay of Biscay. And
22:20
Sanmalo was home to a lot of
22:22
French privateers, you know, Jean
22:24
Bart was one of their number, and
22:27
more than a few of these privateers turned pirate.
22:33
In 1699, one Sanmalo sloop,
22:35
a privateer, abandoned their
22:38
home city, sailed for Saint-Domingue,
22:40
and turned pirate. They had
22:43
very little success finding and capturing
22:45
prizes, though. They just didn't know anything
22:47
about the geography or the wind patterns,
22:50
they didn't know the good shipping lanes. They
22:52
were just too ignorant of the region
22:55
to be very successful. And
22:58
then one night, in early 1700, a
23:02
young man named Louis Guitard
23:04
took his canoe out for a midnight
23:06
cruise. Reportedly
23:09
he was on his way to a midnight liaison
23:11
with a woman who was regrettably
23:14
married. He set out from his
23:16
home in Pointe-Guevara, but he
23:18
was never going to reach that late-night liaison.
23:21
He was happened upon by that pirate
23:24
sloop lurking in the darkness. They
23:26
overtook his canoe, scooped him up,
23:29
and forced him to serve as their pilot.
23:32
As it happened, Guitard was perfect for
23:34
the job. He had some experience in this
23:36
field, having been a privateer
23:39
in the past. Thanks
23:41
to Guitard, the pirate's fortunes
23:43
immediately improved. They
23:45
took a Dutch trader that was carrying linen
23:48
and brandy over in the Leeward
23:50
Islands. They impressed
23:53
the surgeon into service, but released
23:55
the ship and the rest of her crew. immediately
24:00
led them to success they had not yet
24:02
seen, they elected Louis
24:05
Guitard as their captain. And
24:08
as surgeon, he gave Guitard some fantastic
24:11
intel about a rich prize. He
24:14
told the pirates that there was a ship sailing
24:16
near Salt Tortuga off
24:18
the coast of Venezuela carrying an impressively
24:21
rich cargo. One of the pirates
24:23
would say later on that
24:25
the surgeon told Guitard about this
24:28
ship, in spite, to
24:30
be revenged upon the master of the ship
24:32
who had wronged him of six or seven hundred
24:35
crowns.
24:36
End quote.
24:38
Their little pirates loop headed south and
24:40
they found their Dutch prize. The
24:43
vessel was called Vrede, or
24:45
Peace, in the Dutch, Captain
24:47
Cornelius Isaac. The
24:50
cargo turned out to be less
24:52
impressive than the surgeon had suggested,
24:55
but the ship itself was a fine
24:57
prize. She was eighty-four
24:59
feet long, twenty-five feet
25:01
wide, one hundred and forty tons,
25:04
and twenty-eight guns. She
25:06
would serve the pirates well as a flagship.
25:09
Louis Guitard dubbed her the French translation
25:12
of peace.
25:13
Lapat.
25:14
Guitard offered a place on board to any
25:17
crewman who chose to join him from
25:19
the Vrede. And if you did willingly,
25:22
but since he intended to
25:24
keep both Lapat and his old
25:27
sloop, he had to impress more than
25:29
a few into service. One
25:31
of these impressed pirates, named
25:34
John Huling, asked Captain
25:36
Isaac to write him a ticket to
25:39
declare his innocence in any piracy
25:41
in which he might be forced to engage. Captain
25:45
Isaac wrote him a letter that read, quote, We
25:48
underwritten do declare that John
25:50
Huling is forced against his will to
25:52
stay and remain upon the ship Lapat
25:55
under the command of Louis Guitard, and
25:58
have set our hands to witnesses. yet to
26:00
ye end, nobody should trouble
26:02
him or should pretend he was there by
26:04
his own consent." Cornelius
26:07
Isaac. With his flagship
26:09
lapa and a sloop in tow, Captain
26:12
Guitar set out on a cruise of the West
26:14
Indies and beyond that
26:17
would eventually go on to rival some of the most
26:19
notorious cruises of even the pirates
26:21
of Nassau. Over the following
26:24
couple of months, Guitar captured
26:26
at least four different merchant ships,
26:29
and every time they took one they offered the men
26:31
an opportunity to join their ranks, which
26:34
swelled every time. Apparently
26:37
though, the pirates took to doling out retribution
26:40
against the captains of the merchant ships
26:43
they took. On one
26:45
occasion, where nearly everybody
26:47
on board was eager to join
26:49
the pirates, Guitar noticed
26:52
that they were a lot more willing
26:54
than most others to join a pirate ship.
26:57
The captain was apparently a
26:59
brutal man and wound
27:01
up hanged by the yard-arm while
27:04
his officers were put in the ship's longboat
27:06
and set adrift. The
27:08
rest of the crew from that particular prize
27:11
just stayed on board and joined
27:13
up with lapa, which
27:16
brings his total number of ships now to
27:18
three in his growing fleet.
27:21
In April 1700, Guitar
27:24
spotted a one hundred ton pink out of
27:26
Bristol called Baltimore under
27:28
a Captain John Lovejoy. They
27:30
were in the waters just between the Bahamas
27:33
and Florida. Guitar sent
27:35
the other ships away and raised Dutch
27:37
colors. He struck
27:39
sail and made it look as though his ship were
27:41
unable to sail, just drifting
27:44
in the water. Captain Lovejoy,
27:46
being a decent human being, stopped
27:48
to help. Baltimore came
27:50
up alongside lapa, hailed her,
27:53
and got a response in Dutch. The
27:55
pirates kept up the ruse until Baltimore
27:58
was right up alongside them. Then,
28:01
Captain Guitar's men burst out of their hiding
28:03
places and opened fire, a combination
28:05
of both small arms and big guns.
28:08
One man, on board Baltimore, James
28:11
Waters, was killed. The
28:13
pirates leapt over the rail to board the merchant
28:15
ship with their swords drawn. The
28:18
crew of the Baltimore didn't even have time to
28:20
respond, but even if they did, it's
28:23
unlikely they would have resisted. They
28:25
were a very small ship with a very small
28:27
crew and no big guns on
28:29
board. Louis Guitar decided
28:32
that the Baltimore would make a fine addition
28:34
to his collection of ships and
28:36
made her part of the fleet. Now,
28:39
the men were somewhere around Florida and they had
28:41
a decision to make. They
28:43
could head back to the West Indies, but that
28:45
was getting a little hot after their recent piracies.
28:48
They could make for Africa, let the heat die
28:50
down in America, and maybe steal
28:53
some Muslim gold or they
28:55
could sail up the Atlantic seaboard of America.
28:58
It was Captain Lovejoy of the Baltimore
29:01
that decided the issue. He
29:03
was questioned by the pirates, probably pretty
29:06
brutally, and Lovejoy told
29:08
Guitar that Chesapeake Bay was guarded
29:10
only by Essex Prize, a
29:13
small, slow ship in poor
29:16
repair, hardly any defense
29:18
at all. It made Chesapeake
29:20
Bay and all of her rich shipping seem
29:22
like a prime target. The
29:24
pirates took a vote and headed north.
29:28
Of course, what Lovejoy didn't know and what
29:30
the pirates therefore did not know was that
29:33
HMS Shoreham was waiting for
29:35
them. Next
29:38
time, we'll see what happens when an entire
29:40
fleet of pirate ships comes into conflict
29:43
with one Royal Naval Ship
29:45
of the Line. I'd
29:47
like to thank everybody for listening. I'd
29:50
like to thank everybody who has helped to support
29:52
the show, all of our patrons on Patreon,
29:55
everybody who has left us ratings or reviews,
29:58
and everybody who has recommended this show. You
30:00
all make it possible. Thank you. The
30:03
Pirate History Podcast is a member of
30:05
the Airwave Media Podcast Network.
30:08
If you'd like to check out some of their other fine shows,
30:10
like Southern Gothic, you can do
30:13
so at airwavemedia.com. Our
30:16
theme music was, as always, The
30:18
Old Captain by the Fantastic Band
30:20
Brilliant. You can find more of their work
30:22
on Facebook, YouTube, Bandcamp, and anywhere
30:25
else fine music is to be found. As
30:28
always, most importantly, thank
30:30
you for listening.
Podchaser is the ultimate destination for podcast data, search, and discovery. Learn More