On Friday, June 15, 1722, a five-man crew of Marblehead fishermen anchored their schooner for the evening in a quiet harbor along the coast of Nova Scotia. Shortly before sunset, four men from another vessel that was also resting in the harbor — the brigantine Rebecca, out of Boston — rowed over in a boat and pulled alongside the fishing schooner. The captain of the fishing schooner, Philip Ashton, assumed the men had come over for a visit, to catch up on news. But in an split second, the nightmare began. By the time the fishermen realized their mistake, it was too late for them to do anything about it.
The Rebecca had been making its way back to Boston after a five-month voyage to the Caribbean when, two weeks earlier off the coast of Maryland, it was captured by a crew of about 40 pirates under the command of Edward Low. That capture would set off a sequence of events that resulted in unimaginable violence and destruction, up and down the Atlantic coast, over the next three years. It was not just the capture of the Marblehead fisherman Philip Ashton, who would be forced to sail with the pirates until he escaped by marooning himself on an uninhabited island, as I recount in my new book, At the Point of a Cutlass. Low’s destruction was practically without bounds — Low and the pirates who sailed with him captured as many ships and killed as many men as any other pirate of his era. “A greater monster,” one British official from the Caribbean islands wrote of Low, “never infested the seas.”
One of the few collectors’ items related to the pirate captain Edward Low (most of the flags attributed to Low do not accurately represent the flag his crew actually used) and the brigantine Rebecca he captured from Boston is a gold banknote issued by the government of Antigua. The gold-plated bill depicts a two-masted vessel making its way through the water and the engraving is entitled “Edward Low’s brigantine,” which was the Rebecca.
The Edward Low 100-dollar bill is part of a series of notes issued by Antigua in what is called the “Saga of Treasure Ships & Pirates”. They are said to be “world’s first gold and silver banknotes”. The notes were made with heavily embossed, high relief details layered in 23k gold. They are apparently official legal-tender, authorized by the Government of Antigua.
The complete set includes banknotes for Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge, Bartholomew Roberts’s Royal Fortune, Captain William Kidd’s Adventure Galley, and Captain Samuel Bellamy’s Whydah, and others.
At the Point of a Cutlass will be released in June 2014 and is on sale now.
