Blast from the Past: Scallywags of Southeastern North Carolina

Stede Bonnet’s career as a pirate came to an end after he was captured at the Battle of the Sandbars, which took place off the coast of Southport, in 1718. (Photo courtesy of the N.C. Maritime Museum at Southport) 

Editor’s Note: Blast from the Past is a recurring feature where stories from the Cape Fear region’s history are shared. For this installment, local historian and publisher Jack E. Fryar Jr. describes Stede Bonnet’s ramshackle run at piracy in the area, including his relationship with the infamous pirate Blackbeard. 

If famous English writer and spy Daniel Defoe is to be believed, Stede Bonnet took up the pirate life largely because he had a wife whose tongue could peel paint at fifty paces. Whatever compelled him to do it, Bonnet stands out as one of the most unlikely candidates to sail under the Jolly Roger flag during the golden age of piracy, roughly 1680-1720.

Bonnet was educated, well-off and a soldier in the English army who came to the New World seeking to enhance his fortune via ownership of a Caribbean plantation. But domestic discord drove him to purchase his own ship (something pirates never did), hire a crew to sail it and undertake what might be the most drastic career change one could come up with.

While Stede Bonnet was no doubt skilled at a great many things, running a ship was not one of them; he was a British army officer, not a naval officer, after all. Luckily for him he soon made the acquaintance of Edward Thatch (or Teach, if you prefer), a.k.a. Blackbeard. Blackbeard convinced Bonnet that the minutiae of running a pirate ship was beneath the status of a gentleman such as himself. Instead, Blackbeard put one of his officers aboard to handle the day-to-day operations. As a result, Stede Bonnet effectively became a prisoner aboard his own ship. 

Bonnet and his crew sailed in company of Blackbeard and his merry band of cutthroats for a while, until the British government announced one of its amnesty offers. Occasionally, the Crown would give pirates and other ne'er-do-wells a get out of jail free card, in which culprits could get forgiveness for past crimes if they came in and promised to be good boys from that point on. In 1718, Blackbeard sailed into Bath, North Carolina, about 150 miles up the coast from Wilmington, and availed himself of such an amnesty. Since Blackbeard had to stay ashore to make his pardon look good, Stede Bonnet was finally able to get is ship back.

Out from under Blackbeard's thumb and having been aboard a ship long enough to learn a little bit of how to command one, Bonnet set to pirating again. In the fall of 1718, he pulled his ship into a shallow creek just above modern Southport for maintenance. A passing vessel spied the pirates and reported it to the authorities in Charleston, South Carolina, who immediately dispatched Col. William Rhett and two sloops-of-war to bring them to heel.

Bonnet spotted the two British sloops entering the river off Bald Head Island at Old Inlet. He immediately got his ship into the Cape Fear River, hugging the east side of the channel as he made a run for it. The Cape Fear is a shallow river, and by keeping to the east side he exposed only one side of his ship to enemy fire from the pursuing sloops. Trouble was, the Cape Fear is also a tidal river, and the tide was on the wane. All three ships ran aground near what is now Battery Island off Southport.

Stranded until the tide returned, the three crews traded shots and insults in what history has come to call the Battle of the Sandbars. Eventually the ships floated free with the rising tide, and it was Rhett who got water under his keel first. Bonnet saw Rhett's ship bearing down with open gun ports threatening a broadside and hoisted a surrender flag. 

The pirates were taken to Charleston and a bunch of them hanged immediately (because that's just what you did with pirates). Bonnet, the Gentleman Pirate, followed soon after -– despite making an escape to Sullivan's Island before being recaptured. So it was that one of the most colorful buccaneers of piracy's glory days ended his short career on the Cape Fear River.