With the advent of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Captain Blood: His Odyssey by Rafael Sabatini, not to mention our forthcoming thoroughly annotated anniversary edition, a look into the largely unknown, and until now unpublished, history behind the novel is timely: of real buccaneers and mystery pirates, of an incognito pirate captain whose identity we hope to reveal for the first time, and how without them there would be no famous novel Captain Blood nor any films of Errol Flynn, at least as we know them!

One of Sabatini’s major influences was the published journal of Monmouth rebel-convict Henry Pitman who, sentenced to indentured servitude on Barbados, escaped by sea, found himself marooned on Saltudos Island, and was eventually rescued by a crew of unnamed buccaneers. His story alone is worth the telling, and frankly no one does it better than he does. But before we get to Pitman’s odyssey and how it ultimately gave birth to the novel and the film version starring Errol Flynn, and thereby made him a star, we must first slip back to 1683, to Veracruz, Mexico as most of its inhabitants slept, in spite of obvious warning signs, as buccaneers set foot ashore not far away…

English Pirates Incognito & the Sack of La Vera Cruz

In the bodegas and aduana of the city lay not only two years’ worth of the plundered wealth of New Spain, but also valuable goods from the Far East, the latter having arrived after a long voyage across the Pacific to Acapulco aboard the Manila galleons, and from there across the arid Mexican countryside via mule trains known as recuas.

Pieces-of-eight and silver bars! Jewels and gold doblóns! Gold and silver church icons! Cochineal, indigo, logwood, and cacao! Rich silks and glazed china!

It was a lure the eight hundred buccaneers could not resist—and the city was wide open. Sand dunes piled high against the cheaply-built city walls, the pirate hunting Armada de Barlovento was not in port, the governor refused to believe the two ships seen earlier were pirates, and even the three-man mounted guard who spotted the buccaneers ashore were too frightened to ride ahead and give warning.

So here we have it, fact proving that fiction and film are not too far separated from it: historical buccaneers preparing to sack a sleepy Spanish town just as depicted in The Black Swan (1940) starring Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara, or in the Disney theme park attraction, at least before it became tied to the fantasy Pirates of the Caribbean films. Surely a lovesick suitor, guitar-in-hand, is serenading his inamorata on the balcony above as buccaneers slink to the city walls and prepare to unleash a violent but, in terms of entertainment, socially acceptable assault.

But not really: Disneyland and Hollywood are fun but they’re not reality. The assault on the city was quick and brutal—and successful. The buccaneers packed the residents into the great Iglesia de San Lorenzo del Convento de la Merced, searched and found plunder everywhere, tortured residents to reveal hidden treasure, and in buccaneer fashion raped and pillaged.

First they ransacked the casas reales, or government buildings, including the governor’s palace, the customs house, and various storehouses and magazines; then the richest private homes and the city’s six churches and convents—Jesuit, Augustinian, Franciscan, and Inquisitional Dominican among them—and surely also the two church-hospitals, and likewise the two chapels outside the walls; and last, the homes and businesses likely to be of less value.

Most of the attackers were French, with a smaller number of Dutch and English buccaneers in their company. And it is with the two English captains we are concerned, even if the two most notable Dutch commanders—Laurens de Graff and Nicolas Van Horn—will be remembered in part for their brief duel on Sacrificios Island.

English buccaneer captain George Spurre discovered the Spanish governor hiding in a stable and protected him from French buccaneers who had formerly been imprisoned in the city and now sought revenge. Eventually the buccaneers set sail while the Spanish defenders and the newly-arrived treasure fleet debated, boasted of revenge, and waited on reinforcements. This bombastic do-nothingness inspired a song composed soon afterward, “La Bamba,” made famous almost three centuries later as a Top 40 Hit by 1950s pop star Ritchie Valens.

The plunderers of Veracruz sailed away with riches in their holds, divided buccaneer-fashion: two to six shares to the captain, one and a half to the quartermaster, one to most everyone else, with one vital additional spoil: a captain would typically receive anywhere from a few shares to thirty or more for the maintenance of the vessel he commanded. Any shares unused for this went into the captain’s pocket—most of them, that is. This is a fact often overlooked or even unknown to scholars and enthusiasts who over-hype the egalitarian nature of buccaneers: Successful buccaneer captains could get very rich.

George Spurre, a well-known buccaneer who commanded a sloop and sixty men, returned to Jamaica where he lived and where his plunder of broken gold, silver coin and plate, jewels, cacao, two hundredweight of cochineal dye, African or other slaves of color, and more was variously seized and embezzled by the governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Lynch, using the excuse of illegal pirate goods. Soon enough, Spurre died, leaving his wife to sue Lynch for the return of his new estate.

But it is Spurre’s compatriot, Jacob Hall, a far more fortunate pirate, who is most important to our story. He had put it about that he was from Bermuda, without doubt to cover his true origin, for he was a Carolinian from Charlestown, a place known facetiously by some as Puerto Franco thanks to the large number of French buccaneers who routinely sold their plunder and refitted there. Trading with pirates was an easy way to get cash, after all. No questions would be asked in Charlestown because everyone already knew the answers. They also knew to deny everything piratical to outsiders.

Hall was rich now, the likely five to ten extra shares awarded him from the ownership of his small vessel—a small frigate, brigantine, or barque-longue—making him so. With them he bought a house in the city and a plantation in the country, and was well on his way to becoming the notable Carolinian gentleman he would one day be. Paraphrasing Mel Brooks in The History of the World: Part I, it was good to be the captain of a profitable buccaneer voyage!

The Lure & Allure of St. Augustine

As with many who took up sea roving, Jacob Hall would not or could not put the trade aside. Just as hope inevitably sprang eternal among buccaneers after any cruise—the next one must be more profitable!—so did success breed new attempts. James Fennimore Cooper aptly put it in The Sea Lions, a novel in part of pirates and buried treasure: “Men become adventurous by oft-repeated success…” They take greater and greater risks, in other words. And this addiction to sea thieving would one day become so incurable that it would lead to a generation of outright pirates who sailed “against all flags” under their own black ones.

St. Augustine, an outpost town established to protect the Florida Strait through which the Spanish treasure fleets passed, had long been an inviting target. The most famous of seventeenth century attacks was its sack by buccaneers under Robert Searle in 1668. Today, buccaneer re-enactors and pirate pretenders flock annually to the city to reenact the piratical slaughter of 1668 via choreographed mayhem of musket and sword, albeit in a much more civilized manner, which includes neither spillage of blood nor theft, or at least none significant, nor vandalism, burning, torture, or pillage. I did once see Tea Partiers amusingly mistaken for pirates in St. Augustine by tourists, then quickly dismissed once it became clear they were common zealots rather than trope-ish buccaneers.

At least three attacks on the city had been seriously considered or attempted in the early 1680s. The first was abandoned even before a planned rendezvous took place on Anclote in the Florida Keys in 1681. The second, from late 1681 into 1682, devolved into little more than the sacking the poor-in-everything presidio of San Marcos de Apalache and the rich-in-cattle Hacienda de la Chua in Florida, plus the capture of several vessels ranging from tiny sloops to a pair of small frigates, plus the murder by the famous buccaneer John Coxon of ten Native Americans at Matanzas—doubtless his excuse for murdering them was that they resisted—and the enslavement of fifteen more. St. Augustine was left untouched.

The third, in 1683, actually landed a force composed of buccaneers, several of whose captains hailed from English colonies in North America. Disappointed at “fishing for silver” on the wreck of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas, they turned their attention to what they hoped was easier plunder. Within a mile and a half of St. Augustine they marched, only to be driven off by valiant Capitán Antonio de Argüelles and his troops.

Although it is common to reflect from present to past and imagine pirates then as they have been portrayed in modern films, rarely is Spanish courage and martial skill on display in them, although The Black Pirate starring Douglas Fairbanks is an exception.

Digression aside, in 1684 Jacob Hall—whom we imagine Hollywood might have cast Errol Flynn to play—set sail in command of a small frigate, brigantine, or barque-longue, perhaps the same he had commanded at Veracruz, part of an English buccaneer flotilla soon joined to a French one to sack St. Augustine, Florida. The French contingent was commanded by the sieur de Grammont, the third major commander of Veracruz fame—whom we imagine Hollywood might have cast Oliver Reed to play—and the English by Thomas Jingle. Alas for the raiders, a storm dispersed the eleven vessels. Some of the plunder-seekers went on to other adventures, while a few plundered poor Spanish missions along the Georgia coast.

After the planned attack on St. Augustine was thwarted, de Grammont sailed north and plundered an English merchant ketch of provisions, forcing its crew to seek food at the San Buenaventura de Guadalquini mission on what is today St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, where the local military officer seized the ketch for any or all of several reasons, ranging from it being a dastardly pirate to a mere interloper on Spanish territory. One of the ketch’s crew was a Flemish seaman whose name, Jan Klare perhaps, was Hispanicized as Juan Clar. To the Fleming’s rescue came an English captain who followed in Grammont’s wake and recaptured the ketch.

Clar, who had the good or bad fortune to later fall into Spanish hands again, testified in St. Augustine that the pirate captain who rescued him was named “Chacopal,” which has misled some historians into thinking he was the pirate Jacob Evertson because it sounds like Jacob, which in fact it does (but wait a moment). The Spanish mangled a lot of English, French, and Dutch names, and vice versa: Bartholomew Sharp became Batharpe and Batcharpe, [Richard] Sawkins became Hawkins, [John] Watling became Bothing, and Jan Willems aka Yankey became Jan Zanques, for example. Occasionally, historians mangle the mangling in their attempts to reverse engineer the Hispanicization, hoping thereby to prove what they want to see.

In fact, Chacopal is merely the Spanish phonetic equivalent of Jacob Hall. Sound it out, if you like. From Clar that we learn that Hall owned a house and “hacienda” purchased with plunder from Veracruz. Yet there are no records of any Jacob Hall owning property in Charlestown or in the countryside. Further, Clar noted that Thomas Jingle also had a house there but there are no records of his property either. Notably, town records from the era are very complete, making an omission for one or both of these two captains highly unlikely.

At least one scholar has suggested that Jingle’s name was the Spanish pronunciation of a famous buccaneer captain nicknamed Yankey, noted above, probably an affectionate diminutive of Jan. The same diminutive is probably the origin of Yankee as in “Yankee Doodle” and “damn Yankees.” Jingle—“Hin-glay”—does sound a little bit like it, in fact.

But, alas, no cigar, although as I’ve noted elsewhere (“Of Buccaneer Christmas, Dog as Dinner, & Cigar Smoking Women”) the Spanish did smoke them at the time: six to seven inches long, about a half inch in diameter, even Spanish women smoked them, as did Native Americans, many African slaves, and quite a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Dutchmen as well, therefore some buccaneers and pirates too, experts residing on social media and claiming otherwise notwithstanding.

Why no cigar? Because Yankey was nowhere near St. Augustine at the time.

Thomas Jingle, “privateer,” reportedly had a privateering commission from Robert Clarke, “Governor and Captain-General of the Bahamas of New Providence,” which may have been true for the governor of the tiny pirate-and-beachcomber’s-island had a habit of issuing them without any real authority to do so other than his quite correct perception that the commissions would help line his pockets. The practice also earned him a warrant for his arrest and by 1683 the loss of his post. Jingle was from New England, some said, but his name is noted in the annals of piracy only in regard to this aborted attack on St. Augustine, and for good reason: it was not his real name.

In fact, Jingle is phonetic Spanish for Hinkley.

And Thomas Hinkley was the governor of New England.

And our pirate captain Jacob Hall? The real Jacob Hall was a famous rope dancer — tightrope walker — in London. So famous was he that Nell Gynn, mistress of King Charles II, had a silver bed made that included the figure of Hall dancing on a wire. Reportedly, Barbara Villiers (Countess of Castlemain, Duchess of Cleveland), one of Charles’s former mistresses, had an affair with Hall in revenge.

In other words, “Jacob Hall” and “Thomas Jingle” were jokes at the expense of Spaniards, not to mention potential English pirate hunters, akin to signing your name as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or Ronald Reagan. Or, if you want to balance the scales of insignificant political satire, Bill Clinton.

How to reconcile this?

Easy.

Jacob Hall and Thomas Jingle were mystery pirate gentlemen sailing under false names, although doubtless everyone in Charlestown knew exactly who they were and supported them in their piratical escapades.

One of them, as we shall soon see, may have set Errol Flynn’s career in motion.

Of Pirates, Rebels, Odd Connections, & the Want of a Nail

If there is a single decade or two that may lay legitimate claim as the ultimate origin of the greatest of pirate fiction and film, it would surely be the 1680s. Counterintuitively, it is not the previous two decades, in which Henry Morgan, François l’Ollonois, and their bloody ilk reigned and whose escapades made sea roving popular in the public mind thanks to popular written accounts, nor the second and third of the next century when the pirates who sailed under the black flag reigned and centuries later became proud symbols, with little basis in fact, of social rebellion and freedom.

The 1680s gave us three series of events critical to all things piratical today, the first two of which are vital here: the Duke of Monmouth, whose brief rebellion in England and Scotland ended at the Battle of Sedgemoor on July 6, 1685; the suppression of Caribbean buccaneering which forced the rovers into the South Sea and beyond, and which would thirty years later help lead to the rise of pirates who sailed under the black flag; and the publication of popular editions in English and French of buccaneer-surgeon Alexandre Exquemelin’s The Buccaneers of America.

The Monmouth rebels are necessary to understanding one of the most common piracy tropes in fiction and film, one actually quite rare, if not entirely non-existent, in reality: that of the falsely accused who is thereby compelled by circumstance to turn pirate, excluding, of course, a few buccaneers who had become sea rovers due to Spanish confiscation of their lawful cargos. Or perhaps we should just say cargos, lawful often being in the mind of the beholder in the Caribbean at the time. And in any case these men were likely to have become buccaneers no matter their circumstances.

One of these rebels was sea surgeon Mr.—not Dr., for only physicians used the latter title—Henry Pitman. Although never in arms against his king, as he says, he was nonetheless committing treason and he knew it when he joined Monmouth’s rebel army as a surgeon after dropping by with his brother to view the Duke and his rebel army. In his defense he notes that he treated wounded rebels and Royalists alike, and claimed that he was caught up in the rebellion by misadventure when a troop of Royalist horse blocked his way home. Soon afterward he lost his mount, and, prevailed upon to assist the surgeons who had their hands full with the battle-wounded, he joined the rebels, bidden by his conscience to do his sacred medical duty.

The rebellion was crushed at the Battle of Sedgemoor, and hundreds of prisoners were hastily tried and convicted en masse in a series of trials that soon came to be known as the Bloody Assizes. Sentenced to ten years of indentured servitude in Barbados—still a far better punishment than to be hanged, disemboweled, quartered and dismembered (all members!) and hung in parts from gibbets, as happened to many rebels, and still better than to be an African slave on a New World plantation, the counter-argument of some modern racists notwithstanding—Pitman soon tired of his treatment at the hands of the owner of his indenture, Colonel Robert Bishop. The details need not concern us at the moment. In fact, you should read them for yourself later. I’ll say it over and over: the original accounts are often far better reading than any modern secondary accounts.

Suffice it that Pitman led several of his companion rebels-convict and two debtors in an escape in a ship’s boat by night. Almost immediately the rebels-convict discovered that their boat was extremely leaky and, fearing they might be overheard by an English frigate or one of the forts in Carlisle Bay, they let seawater fill the boat almost to the gunwales before they started bailing. Afterward they were forced to bail constantly, made more difficult when one of the rebels-convict accidentally threw the bailing bowl overboard.

Almost as bad, their candles had melted into a single lump, making them useless, and their tinder and matches were now wet due to the leaking boat, thus they could not steer in the darkness by their compass, having no light. And soon everyone but Pitman, the only seafarer among them, was terribly seasick.

Here we’ll take a page from fiction and film—leaving the reader or viewer in suspense, that is—and depart from Pitman and his rebels-convict confederates as they make their way toward the Dutch islands by sea, while we look at two curiously associated piratical voyages.

The South Sea and, Once Again, St. Augustine

First we return to Puerto Franco, or Charlestown if you like, where local investors and adventurers had outfitted three armed sloops crewed with roughly equal numbers of local Englishmen and visiting French buccaneers. Their plan: sail to the Caribbean, seize a Spanish ship—or Dutch, if trading with the Spanish, for a Dutch merchantman with Spanish goods was practically Spanish anyway—and sail through the Strait of Magellan into the South Sea to plunder the Pacific Spanish Main, as many English and French buccaneers were doing at the moment. The date they set sail is uncertain: it may have been late 1686 to early 1687, or even early 1686.

The Franco-Carolinian buccaneers were successful at the beginning of their voyage, capturing a “Dutch ship of force,” but were turned back at the Strait of Magellan, unable to pass through due to severe weather. They sailed back north, to the remarkably beautiful Ilha de Fernando de Noronha more than three hundred miles off the coast of Brazil. Like Juan Fernandez Island in the South Sea, it was isolated enough that a sea roving ship could water and refit after a passage around Cape Horn or through the Strait of Magellan. Here they held council and by a vote of the crew decided to turn pirate. By this they meant they would capture ships other than Spanish, or Dutch trading with the Spanish, in this case a Portuguese merchantman if they espyed one.

However, eight of the crew, all English, abandoned the enterprise, preferring not to engage in outright piracy: buccaneering against the Spanish held no qualms for them, for only occasionally were its practitioners actually hanged. But their brethren had no boat to spare, so, taking their sea chests and plunder ashore, and with the donation of some stores, tools, rigging, and a cask of dry peas, they fashioned a four-ton boat out of mangrove—a good wood for boatbuilding, actually—in six weeks. The peas they kept for sea provision, and while on the island they ate wild figs, Brown Boobies (Sula leucogaster), and Booby eggs.

Their buccaneer brethren, meanwhile, had set sail, and soon descried a large Portuguese merchantman laden with wine, linen, at least a few slaves, and other goods along the coast of Brazil. In tonnage, crew, and probably guns it was a greater ship of force than that of the pirates, yet they captured it with little resistance. The pirates told Pitman the ship was named the Grand Gustaphus, or more correctly, the Grande Gustav if this is actually the ship’s name and not one given it by the buccaneers. I found no such named ship in Portuguese or Brazilian records, but this is no surprise: records of merchant ships at the time are notoriously incomplete.

The buccaneers returned to Fernando de Noronha, put their prisoners ashore (causing the eight former crew to keep well on their guard after the buccaneers departed again), and shared the plunder. The crew divided in two, of French and English respectively, the former keeping one ship by agreement and heading home to Petit Goâve on Hispaniola, the latter keeping the other and sailing north, anchoring at “Blanco”—probably Punta de los Blanquizales, Trinidad—most likely for repairs to their now leaky ship before returning home. But first the pirates needed to know how matters stood between the English governments and pirates. Was there, for example, an amnesty available?

Now—suspensefully again—we leave these pirates for the moment as they prepare to sail into the Caribbean, and turn to another pirate voyage. Once more we head to St. Augustine, the outpost so coveted by pirates in the 1680s. In late April, 1686, the grand old buccaneer Michel, sieur de Grammont set his eye again on the Florida outpost. Once more, it was his intention to attack via the southern passage at Matanzas. Yes, this is a pattern: pirates were not going to commit suicide by sailing into the mouths of the guns of the Castillo de San Marcos. Everyone intended to attack from Matanzas instead.

Here, Capitaine Nicolás Brigaut, commanding a half-galley armed with two guns (at sea a cannon is called a gun, back then and even today) at the bow, probably a few swivels on the gunwales, and captured the year before during the sack of Campeche, Mexico (again by de Graff and de Grammont), was tasked with securing Native Americans to serve as “intelligencers” and guides, and to prevent the sentinels at the Matanzas watchtower from warning St. Augustine. He and his buccaneers easily captured the soldiers on watch: some of them rowed out to discoverer what the vessel was. The buccaneers tortured at least two for information regarding the defenses of St. Augustine.

And then everything went to hell. A Spanish force from St. Augustine counter-attacked but was beaten back. Even so, all good so far, in spite of the loss of surprise. Then the half-galley wrecked on Matanzas Bar, changing the situation entirely. Brigaut—whom we imagine might have been played by Basil Rathbone, pity about the French accent though—sent several men in a ship’s boat to warn de Grammont and tell him they would retreat to Mosquito Bar, the location today of New Smyrna Beach, where it would be easier to rescue them. The buccaneers set out on the five league march and twice more fought off attackers, including forty or fifty Native Americans. Finally, they faced Capitán Francisco de Fuentes—who might have been played by Pedro de Cordoba or perhaps by Ricardo Montalbán channeling Khan Noonien Singe—and fifty Spanish soldiers.

The buccaneers faced a naked truth: they were trapped on the beach. We imagine soldiers and pirates sweating profusely in the combination of heat, humidity, rage, and fear, their hands and faces blackened with spent gunpowder, their burning eyes squinting from salt and the sea glare. We imagine the sand sticking to the blood of those killing and of those dying or dead, most of whom probably called upon God both to kill and to save. We imagine the flies swarming over and upon the dark purple that now stained, however briefly, the windswept battlefield dotted with the living and the dead among the coastal scrub.

Here was life and death laid plain in the form of raw survival. Unfortunately for the buccaneers, luck was on the side of the Spanish by means of the timely accident that Brigaut’s men were separated into two parties. Luck, or Fortune if you will, often has poor timing, almost as if on purpose. The Spaniards slaughtered the nineteen pirates in the smaller group, then attacked the larger and massacred all but three, their desperate courage notwithstanding.

The official French account of the incident at Matanzas, sent from Governor de Cussy of Tortuga and Saint-Domingue to his superior in France, the Marquis de Seigneley, only barely resembled reality. Brigaut wasn’t a pirate, he was merely seeking provisions. The law permitted this seeking of provisions, water, and shelter in extremis. In fact, Brigaut wasn’t even mentioned, although his commander, the sieur de Grammont, briefly was.

Most of the few lines describing the incident were devoted to the sad story of a young Parisian of good family, the sieur de Chauvelin, who was reportedly given quarter, taken before the governor of St. Augustine, then put to death in spite of his quality as a gentleman. Further, during the battle itself it was twenty, or maybe seventy, pirates—or rather, twenty or seventy innocent French privateers attacked while innocently seeking provisions per international agreement—standing valiantly against three hundred Spaniards, who prevailed only after reinforcements arrived. All we really know—maybe—from this version of the story is that a young man named Chauvelin, of adventurous spirit, joined a band of flibustiers and probably died on or near a pretty Florida beach.

The most notable takeaway from the failed attack is that one of the survivors, quartermaster Diego the Black Pirate (a quartermaster was second-in-command among buccaneers and pirates), is the highest ranking Black man of full African blood noted among the predominantly white buccaneer or pirate crews. He, along with Captain Brigaut, were soon hanged or garroted at St. Augustine.

Grammont blockaded St. Augustine for two weeks, doubtless hoping for the arrival of the situado or payroll ship from Veracruz, and perhaps hoping to starve the city into negotiations. St. Augustine was not self-sufficient, so a ship had been sent to Havana for corn, or maize as it was better known then—corn was wheat, after all. Afterward de Grammont set sail to Charlestown, South Carolina where he almost certainly refreshed, refitted, and recruited as he had done before. Edward Randolph, the king’s special representative to New England, claimed that the Carolina governor had turned the pirate away. He was surely mistaken.

But 1686 was not yet finished with pirates lusting after the Florida outpost. Near the year’s end, and inspired by de Grammont’s unfortunate recent failure, Dutch pirates Jan Willems, aka Captain Yankey, and Jacob Everson—it really is them this time—along with their largely English crews from Jamaica, with some French and Dutch as well, along with a pack of Carolinians who determined that piracy might be a better way of life than farming or trading for deer skins and Native American slaves, were recruited by the governor of Carolina to attack St. Augustine in reprisal for recent Spanish reprisals on the Carolina coast.

One recent attack had just destroyed the Scottish colony at Stuarts Town in Carolina, plundered English plantations, and even threatened Charlestown itself, at least until a hurricane ended the retaliatory effort. Ironically, Brigaut’s half-galley had been refitted for Spanish use and sent on the raid. The Spanish attacks were reprisals for Carolinian-instigated reprisals by Native Americans (not that they did not have good reason without English instigation) on Spanish properties and subjects, and doubtless as general reprisals for Carolinian support for pirates. Alas, or happily perhaps, delays left many of the pirates dispirited, and added to this a new governor arrived and ordered a stop to the attack.

But thankfully for our tale, a few of the pirates Yankey had sent to steal canoes from Native Americans in the Gulf of Florida (known today as the Strait of Florida) to use in the attack via the Matanzas River were attacked by Native Americans when they went ashore to “turn turtle” for provisions. Two pirates died in the attack, and two more afterward, including the quartermaster, from cyanide poisoning caused by eating improperly-prepared cassava root.

These incidents caused these buccaneers to miss their rendezvous with Captain Yankey and their shipmates, leaving them to sail back to the Caribbean where they imagined the pickings were better. A few months later, by dint of unknown circumstances, they ended up on tiny Isla Tortuga—Saltatudos or “Salt Tortuga” as the English called it, not the Tortuga of buccaneering fame on the Hispaniola coast—near Isla Margarita along the Venezuelan coast, the latter island once a center of Spanish pearl diving until its beds were destroyed by rapacious overharvesting. Saltudos was a desert isle most of the year, except for a few months when ships, often English, dropped by to “rake salt,” and Spanish guardas-costas dropped by looking for them.

Apparently abandoned by their comrades again, or lost, a handful of Yankey’s turtle-turning buccaneers found themselves marooned, their canoe unfit for anything but shoreline voyages or a quick attack on a small Spanish merchantman that might anchor at the island.

But a new arrival would soon change this!

Marooned!

On May 16, after several days of trials and mistrials at sea, the rebels-convict, whose destination was Curacao, sighted Saltatudos Island. As they approached they saw a canoe paddling toward them. Quickly they loaded their muskets and blunderbuss with broken glass—in their haste they had left their bag of musket balls behind on the wharf—and prepared for a fight, fearing the two men in the canoe were Native Americans, given that they paddled rather than rowed as most Europeans did, even in canoes.

In fact, the men were not merely “Englishmen in distress, &c.,” as they claimed at first, but some of Yankey’s long lost buccaneers. The rebels-convicts and buccaneers went ashore together and brought each other up-to-date on world and local affairs, such as they had heard. The buccaneers, nodding with approval at learning that the new arrivals were Monmouth’s men, said, “That if the Duke of Monmouth had had One Thousand of them [buccaneers], they would soon have to put to flight the King’s Army.” Quite a boast, but then buccaneers were prone to such fanfaronades.

Almost immediately the marooned buccaneers were interested in Pitman’s boat. Leaky as it was, it was no use for sea roving, at least not as a water craft. The buccaneers’ canoe had low sides, but the lowly dugout canoe was otherwise a great craft for small piracies. It was swift, could be hidden easily among mangrove while buccaneers lay in wait for passing Spanish vessels, and required little maintenance. However, to be truly seaworthy for open water voyages, rather than coastal cruising (clearly the buccaneers had become separated from a larger vessel), it required raised sides to keep out the sea. This required boards, which they had, and nails, which they did not.

Pitman’s boat had a purpose after all: the buccaneers wanted to burn it for the ironwork, which was the easiest way to get at its nails and spikes, but Pitman and his companions refused. The buccaneers, being buccaneers, burned it anyway. As soon as they had raised the sides of the canoe they put out to sea, on May 25 in fact, leaving Pitman and his companions to live a marooner’s life for three months, the sort that would soon inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Pitman and his companions built rude huts of scrap wood and sea grass, gathered sea turtle eggs, “turned turtle” and cooked “calipash and calipee” in the sand or dried the flesh in the sun, and for a change gathered and ate “whelks,” probably conchs. A Native American, purchased by Pitman from the buccaneers for thirty pieces-of-eight, fished for his owner with bow and arrow. The rebels-convict roasted the catch on the beach. Their clothes soon wore out, and their shoes too, but by walking so much on rocks, the “Bottoms of our Feet was hardened into such a callous substance, that there was scarce any Rocks so hard but we could boldly trample them under our feet.”

Pitman, trying to be prepared for any and every eventually, even concocted a plan of escape should they be captured by an enemy: he dissolved “a sufficient quantity of Opium in a Bottle of rich Cordial Water” and planned to give it to “those Persons that should take us,” and put them to sleep.

In the meantime, the now once more sea roving buccaneers sailed across the course of the English buccaneers who had captured the Portuguese ship and informed its captain and crew of Pitman and his companions. The buccaneer ship sailed to the island, brought Pitman aboard, and at the captain’s suggestion but via vote of the crew—buccaneers were democratic, remember—graciously took him aboard, probably because he was a surgeon, but left his companions behind. The captain sadly pointed out that he had only two votes and two shares, and could not overrule his crew. Even so, they gave the remaining marooners some provisions and promised to send a ship after them when they could.

Importantly, Pitman was extremely circumspect when it came to this pirate captain, for he never identifies him by name although he surely knew it. Without doubt, the captain did not want it put about, much less published. The names of most buccaneer captains are well-recorded, but some had good reason for remaining incognito, as we have already seen.

Learning from the Saltatudos buccaneers that New Providence Island was again inhabited, the buccaneers laid a course to the island haven of outcasts and all sorts piratical. There they unladed their ship, including its guns, and burned it. All went their separate ways, some to remain on the island, others to return to Carolina.

A few built a fort on nearby Eleuthera Island and armed it with eight of the ship’s guns, only to lose it later in the year when privately commissioned pirate hunter George Lenham in the sloop Ruby raided it, arrested the pirates, confiscated their “spoil…of little value,” and got testimony from the five Portuguese Black slaves—four men and a boy—in their possession. The pirates claimed they were preparing to sail to New England to accept a pirate amnesty. Lenham and his superior consort Captain Thomas Spragge of the HMS Drake were also accused by the residents of nearby New Providence of plundering their homes. The pirate hunters admitted to this, noting that their accusers were in fact pirates.

Pitman took passage from New Providence aboard an English ketch. He might have gone ashore at Charlestown, but for the ketch captain’s fear of arrest for having been dealing at New Providence with “privateers”—with pirates, that is. He probably had nothing to fear. Pitman remained aboard and went ashore at New York instead, yet another colony known for looking the other way when the subject was piracy. Not long after, Pitman returned to England in disguise.

In 1689 he published his short memoir, A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 ultimately gave freedom back to the rebels-convict two to three years later, although those in Barbados were required to remain on the island due to a shortage of white men for the militia and trades due to disease. In 1691 Pitman voluntarily returned to Barbados, where he died two years later.

Behold Captain Blood: His Odyssey and Errol Flynn! And Just Who Was that Unknown Pirate Captain?

So why is all of this important?

Because this is why we have Captain Blood: His Odyssey, and therefore the 1935 film which made Errol Flynn a star, and more.

Because “for want of a nail,” or of a few, there would be no canoe full of pirates to sail across the path of an incognito pirate captain who would, via their timely information, rescue a marooned rebel-convict surgeon.

Because without this captain and his crew Pitman might very likely have died on a mostly desert isle, in which case he would never have written the story of his adventures, most importantly of those with pirates. At the very least he would probably not have been rescued by pirates. And if Pitman’s odyssey were never published, Rafael Sabatini would never have read it and there would be no inspiration for Captain Blood as we know it.

And if there were no Captain Blood then there might be no films with Errol Flynn, therefore no famous Disney pirates ride as we know it—the ship versus fort scene is straight out of the novel—and therefore perhaps no famous Disney pirate films, and therefore we might have a very different modern pirate culture for everyone from scholars to writers of bodice-ripping romances to misapprehend.

Still, three questions remain unanswered: who were Jacob Hall and Thomas Jingle, the mystery pirate captains of Charlestown, South Carolina? Likewise the mystery pirate captain who rescued Henry Pitman, without whom we might have no great pirate film to make Errol Flynn a star? And might Hall or Jingle have been Pitman’s mystery captain?

To find the answer we turn first to the South Carolinian raid on St. Augustine in 1702. Led by Governor James Moore, the attacking forces moved by land and sea, sacking missions and outposts on route, and besieged the Spanish outpost but failed to capture the Castillo de San Marcos—a grand Spanish Main fortress and icon of American history, still standing and straight out of both Hollywood and reality, well worth a visit, as is the much smaller mid-18^th century Fuerte Matanzas not far away—and the fifteen hundred souls packed inside.

The land forces were commanded by Colonel Robert Daniell (or Daniel), a noted Carolinian gentleman who had emigrated from Barbados. He had first purchased land in Carolina in 1677, owned a house in the city, a plantation in the countryside, and had long served in various military and naval capacities, including briefly assisting the soon-to-be famous Commodore Charles Wager during King William’s War. Daniell would one day become Lieutenant-Governor of North Carolina.

He was also, according to Don Josef de Zúñiga y Zerda, Gobernador de Florida, “one of the Jamaica pirates” (he actually he calls them as corsarios, which may refer to pirates or privateers), and “a renowned and experienced pirate, one of those who sacked Vera Cruz.”

Put plainly, Jacob Hall could be none other than Robert Daniell, who deserves not only the appellation of noteworthy early Carolina citizen and politician, but also of its most famous pirate. His list of piratical depredations includes the sack of Veracruz in 1683 and the attempted sack of St. Augustine in 1684. His is the classic exception that proves the rule, in this case of the gentleman pirate in disguise, another classic Hollywood trope that was quite rare in reality.

And Thomas Jingle? He may well have been Daniell’s occasional comrade-in-arms, James Risby, a buccaneering, pirateering, quasi-gentleman with a list of borderline skullduggeries as long as his arm. He had begun his career cutting logwood—a highly desirable dyewood—in Spanish territory circa 1669, a practice the Spanish considered highly illegal but the English government and merchant traders encouraged. In 1677 he was captured by a Spanish guardacosta and later released, but the Spaniards confiscated his vessel and cargo, perhaps provoking a career as a buccaneer in retaliation as was the case with a number of merchant captains who would turn to sea roving.

In 1683 he was sent on a mission by the governor of Jamaica to Petit Goâve, the French buccaneer haven on Hispaniola (Tortuga was largely abandoned by now, novelists and Hollywood notwithstanding), to demand the return of plunder taken by buccaneer George Spurre at Veracruz and by the notorious pirate Jean Hamlin at sea, and to forbid French buccaneers from English ports—which also means he had not accompanied Hall-Daniell at the sack of Veracruz.

Assuming his nom de guerre was Thomas Jingle, or rather, Hinkley, he commanded a vessel at the attempted sack of St. Augustine in 1684 under the sieur de Grammont. In 1696, under his real name and during a long association with the quasi-piratical sorts at New Providence Island, he ferried twenty-six fugitive crewmen of the notorious Red Sea pirate Henry Every, who had captured the Great Mughal’s treasure ship, not to mention whose crew had raped the many women aboard, from New Providence to Carolina and then across to Galloway, Ireland, where they landed discreetly and dispersed, for which he would have been paid handsomely.

In 1698 he was dubiously commissioned by the governor of New Providence as a pirate hunter along with three others including Colonel Read Elding, a mulatto sea captain of the same island and who would two years later become the de facto, if unlawfully commissioned, wife-swapping adventurer-governor of the piratical island. The pirate hunters failed to capture a real pirate, but did plunder an innocent merchant sloop for which they were accused of piracy. In 1702 Risby commanded the small naval force in the attack on St. Augustine.

In 1706, now Colonel Risby, he played an active role defending Charlestown against a Franco-Spanish attack. So famous and respected was he that “several gentlemen and others who were willing to share in the danger and honour” were adamant about serving at his side aboard a separate Dutch privateer sloop during the attack French fleet, rather than aboard the Seaflower commanded by famous slave trader, merchant trader, pirate hunter, and private naval seaman Colonel William Rhett who would later gain fame as the captor of gentleman pirate and general fool Stede Bonnet.

Which brings us to the question of the identity of the captain incognito who rescued Henry Pitman.

We assume he was almost certainly a Carolinian, given the voyage’s origin, although it’s entirely possible he might not have been. If he were, Daniell and Risby are therefore by far the two most likely candidates, being the two predominant buccaneer captains operating out of South Carolina at the time—in fact, they are the only known such English sea roving captains ported there, although others clearly touched there. My romantic inclination, never a good path on a factual quest except for inspiration, is on Daniell.

He fits the character of Pitman’s captain exactly as Governor William Markham of Pennsylvania described Daniell in 1697: “an easy good-natured man.” Likewise his vital need to remain incognito. Certainly his buccaneer experience and contacts lend him to the position, and nearly every buccaneer in the mid-1680s had his eye set on the South Sea. The Caribbean was becoming too dangerous, especially for English sea rovers.

Unfortunately, if Pitman’s statement is correct, that the pirates had been at sea roughly eighteen months, Daniell could not have been the captain because his signature is on a South Carolina document dated October 15, 1686. Of course, eighteen months, although a short cruise for buccaneers sailing into the South Sea, might be a bit long for those who failed to round Cape Horn. Eight months is more reasonable, and perhaps the longer period is a transcription or hearsay error, leaving open the window in which Daniell could very well have commanded the expedition.

Is this even partial proof? Of course not. It’s merely strong conjecture, with questions that must first be answered—and we may never have answers to some. Even so, this will not prevent the hypothesis from being posted to Wikipedia or other online pages as “fact.” There might even be other known candidates, including not only Risby, whom my objective analysis points to as the most likely, assuming the captain was a Carolinian.

There is, for example, “marriner of Charles Towne” John Williamson who when he died in 1688 had £192 in silver and gold in coin and plate (the equivalent of roughly 855 pieces-of-eight), an enormous cash sum to have on hand for any seaman, even a merchant captain! That is, unless the seaman were a successful buccaneer, or at least a frugal successful one, unlike the majority who typically spent their booty in debauchery. In fact, we have already seen that eight hundred pieces-of-eight was each common buccaneer’s share of plunder at Veracruz, suggesting Williamson may have at least been one of the crewmen of Jacob Hall aka Robert Daniell.

Another possibility for the captain of the English buccaneers is argued for by scholar Raynald Laprise. You can read about it in the pdf paper located here: Henry Pitman, ou les rendez-vous de Salt Tortuga. (I’ll also note that M. Laprise argues Thomas Handley aka Henley was Thomas Jingle, a suspect I placed on the back burner given that I could find no record of a Handley owning property in Carolina. The rest of M. Laprise’s excellent, extensive research is also well worth reading.)

Still, in my heart I stand, at least until I’m overwhelmed with evidence otherwise (which may be sooner than later) with Colonel Daniell as Pitman’s captain and therefore the secret progenitor of Rafael Sabatini’s famous Captain Peter Blood. For better and, too often, for worse, this is how the process works: heart over head. In other words, my desire-based reasoning, even if ultimately incorrect (Risby’s ghost, or that of whoever the captain really was, is surely furious and may haunt me for this), helps satisfy my need to reconcile fact with fiction, if only temporarily: in this case the romance versus reality of a gentleman pirate from Barbados one day becoming governor of Jamaica, a fiction we now know might very well have had its origin in a mystery gentleman pirate of South Carolina who one day became Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina.

Or, how the combination of mystery pirates, an obscure account of a marooned rebels and pirates, and the want of a few nails can inspire famous popular fiction and strongly influence culture three centuries later.

This tenuous adventure-romance of connections little-known and well-known, of tales rightly- and wrongly-known, this odyssey of seeking fact, creating fiction, and balancing both, is much of what the manuscript this has been excerpted and edited from is about: how fact becomes fiction, fiction fact, and how we do—and, more importantly, how we should—regard both.

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Copyright Benerson Little 2021. First posted November 23, 2021. Last revised August 17, 2022.