Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Stede Bonnet (c. 1688 – 10 December 1718) [a] was an English pirate who was known as the Gentleman Pirate [1] because he was a moderately wealthy landowner before turning to a life of crime. Bonnet was born into a wealthy English family on the island of Barbados , and inherited the family estate after his father's death in 1694.
Around early June, near Beaufort, North Carolina, Blackbeard allowed Stede Bonnet to sail to Bath to be pardoned by Governor Charles Eden. With Bonnet away, Blackbeard and about 100 others took the entire company's plunder – including Bonnet's share – and sailed to Bath along a different route, where they too received the King's Pardon. [94]
Acts of grace, in the context of piracy, were state proclamations offering pardons (often royal pardons) for acts of piracy. General pardons for piracy were offered on numerous occasions and by multiple states, for instance by the Kingdom of England and its successor, the Kingdom of Great Britain , in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The hanging of Stede Bonnet in Charleston, 1718. Probably the least qualified pirate captain ever to sail the Caribbean, Bonnet was a sugar planter who knew nothing about sailing. He started his piracies in 1717 by buying an armed sloop on Barbados and recruiting a pirate crew for wages, possibly to escape from his wife.
Bellamy was popularly known as the "Robin Hood of pirates" and prided himself on his ideological justifications for piracy. Stede Bonnet, a rich Barbadian land owner turned pirate solely in search of adventure. Bonnet captained a 10-gun sloop named the Revenge and raided ships off the Virginia coast in 1717. He was caught and hanged in 1718.
During the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, the Royal Navy was constantly in campaign against pirates in the Caribbean and off North America. Stede Bonnet was a very successful pirate, having captured several merchant ships and assembled his own squadron of pirate ships. In August 1718, Bonnet was sailing from the Delaware Bay to
September 29 – "Gentleman Pirate" Stede Bonnet, who has traded plantation life for a pirate ship, transfers command of his sloop, the Revenge, to Blackbeard. November 28 – Blackbeard captures the French slave ship La Concorde near Martinique , equips her with 40 guns, and renames her the Queen Anne's Revenge .
Hornigold placed him in command of a sloop that he had captured, and the two engaged in numerous acts of piracy. Their numbers were boosted by the addition to their fleet of two more ships, one of which was commanded by Stede Bonnet, but Hornigold retired from piracy toward the end of 1717, taking two vessels with him.