Nassau
Republic of Pirates
1706 – 1718
Nassau sits on the northern shore of New Providence Island, in the Bahamas — a harbor sheltered by Hog Island (today Paradise Island), shallow enough to keep deep-draft warships out and broad enough to fit several hundred small sloops. For roughly a decade in the early eighteenth century it was the most important pirate haven in the Atlantic.
A vacuum of authority
In 1703, during the War of the Spanish Succession, a combined Franco-Spanish expedition sacked Nassau, burned the fort, and carried off the inhabitants. The British proprietors never rebuilt. By 1706 the town was effectively abandoned — and abandoned harbors with deep approaches, sheltered careenage, and proximity to the homeward shipping lane of the Spanish treasure fleet attract the obvious clientele.
The pirates' republic
By 1713 — at the end of the war, when thousands of privateers found themselves unemployed — Nassau hosted hundreds of pirates and a handful of merchants willing to fence their goods. The leading captains, including Benjamin Hornigold, Henry Jennings, and later Charles Vane, Edward Teach, Sam Bellamy, and Calico Jack Rackham, used the harbor as a base for cruises against shipping in the Florida Straits and the Windward Passage.
There was no government in any formal sense. Disputes were settled by the captains in concert, occasionally violently, more often by the threat of being expelled from harbor.
Woodes Rogers and the pardon
In 1717 King George I issued a proclamation offering pardon to all pirates who surrendered themselves before September 1718. In July 1718 the former privateer Woodes Rogers arrived at Nassau as Royal Governor of the Bahamas, with a small naval escort and copies of the pardon. The majority of the pirates accepted it — including Hornigold, who promptly turned pirate-hunter for the Crown.
A minority refused. Vane fired the harbor's powder magazine in defiance as Rogers entered, and slipped out to sea. Teach had already departed for North Carolina. Rackham later broke his pardon and returned to sea, where he was caught off Negril Point.
Rogers's motto — Expulsis Piratis, Restituta Commercia (the pirates expelled, commerce restored) — survives on the Bahamian coat of arms.
Related: Blackbeard · Calico Jack · Anne Bonny