On Saturday, March 9, 1723, a young fisherman named Philip Ashton — captured by pirates nine months before — was standing on the deck of a schooner when he saw a longboat approaching with seven of the pirates aboard. The men were rowing in the direction of the island of Roatan to collect fresh drinking water. Ashton called out to the ship’s cooper in the longboat, asking if they were going ashore. Yes, the cooper answered, they were. Ashton asked if he could go with them. The cooper hesitated, suspecting the pirate captain, Edward Low, would be furious if Ashton were allowed to go to the island. But Ashton kept arguing. “I urged that I had never been on shore yet, since I first came on board, and I thought it very hard that I should be so closely confined, when everyone else had the liberty of going ashore.”

So the cooper agreed to take him, “imagining, I suppose,” Ashton later recalled, “that there would be no danger of my running away in so desolate uninhabited a place as that was.” Ashton quickly climbed down and into the longboat. Ashton took nothing with him when he climbed into the boat, not even a pair of shoes. But by the time he spotted the approaching longboat, it was too late. This, Ashton thought, was the chance he had been waiting for, and he did not want to miss it or to give the cooper any reason to suspect what he had in mind.

The men continued to row the boat in toward the shore. The long island of Roatan is made up of a series of tall, mountainous hills, and the peaks towered above the men as they made their way to land. At many points along the shoreline of Port Royal harbor the land rose sharply from the water, forming steep, rocky walls. Thick patches of bush and trees clung to the tops of these walls and blanketed the hills as they reached to the sky. But at a few points along the shore, the valleys between the tall hills gave way to some small patches of flatter ground, and at several of these spots Ashton could make out some narrow strips of beach scattered along a roughly half-mile curve in the middle of Port Royal harbor. The cooper and his men rowed their boat up to one of these beaches where, hidden behind the slight rise of the sand, was the mouth of a freshwater creek, a small run no more than ten feet wide and almost completely concealed by the thick woods, where the water ran gently down from springs high in the hills. The men beached the boat and climbed ashore.

Getting out of the boat, Ashton’s bare feet touched the sandy ground. The beach was narrow and coarse, a slight rise of brown sand, pebbles, and shells that was just four or five feet wide between the water line and the beginning of the thick growth of grass and weeds. The beach ran along the water for close to a hundred yards. Just over the slight hump of the beach, not even two paces from the harbor’s edge, was the mouth of the creek, slowly running under a thick, green canopy of leaning palm trees and large bushes. Ashton helped the men drag the heavy wooden casks onto shore and rolled them over the beach and to the edge of the creek. The creek was shallow, just one or two feet deep in most places, with gently sloping edges. Ashton lay down by the trunks of some palms and mangroves lining the edge of the creek and lowered his head, taking a long drink of the cool, fresh water.

Filling the casks took some time. As the men worked, Ashton stepped back out onto the beach and started walking slowly along the sand, stopping occasionally to casually pick up a stone or shell as he moved away from the men. As the distance between Ashton and the men grew, Ashton edged slightly closer to the woods that bordered the beach. The cooper looked up and called out to him—where did he think he was going? Ashton said he was going to look for coconuts, since some coconut trees were growing near the beach. That seemed to satisfy the pirates for the moment. Ashton kept walking.

In an instant, Ashton turned away from the water and into the woods. The woods along the beach were so thick that within a dozen steps, he was completely hidden by the dense overgrowth. As quietly as he could, Ashton stepped over the roots, sticks, fallen palm branches, and dry leaves carpeting the ground. He tried to run more quickly, but the sharp broken sticks lying on the ground pierced his bare feet, and the crisscrossing web of bushes and vines made it impossible to move in a straight line. At points the overgrowth formed a barrier so thick he had to crawl on his hands and knees to get past. “I betook myself to my heels, and ran as fast as the thickness of the bushes and my naked feet would let me,” Ashton wrote.

Eventually the men finished filling each of the casks and called out to Ashton to tell him they were leaving. Ashton heard them but didn’t answer. The men started shouting for him. Between their calls, Ashton picked up bits of their conversation: “the dog is lost in the woods and can’t find his way out,” said one. Before long they realized Ashton planned to stay hidden. “He is run away and won’t come again,” a voice said. Soon after, the men headed back out towards the pirate ships and, within hours, the pirates sailed away.

The reality of Ashton’s situation was that he was not only alone on Roatan, at the time an uninhabited island off the coast of Honduras, but that he had marooned himself with practically nothing. “I was upon an island from whence I could not get off,” Ashton wrote. “I knew of no humane creature within many scores of miles of me; I had but a scanty clothing, and no possibility of getting more; I was destitute of all provision for my support, and knew not how I should come at any; everything looked with a dismal face.”
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Read more about Philip Ashton’s adventures as a pirate captive and castaway in my book, At the Point of a Cutlass. I’ll be speaking at the State House in Boston on Tuesday, May 23 about my book and the many surprising connections bietween Atlantic piracy and colonial Boston. For details, click here.

In a world where huge container ships, aircraft carriers, and cruise ships often exceed 1,000 feet in length, it’s hard to even comprehend battling a stormy ocean and massive waves in wooden vessels that were barely 50 feet long. Yet many of the fishing vessels I wrote about in my book, At the Point of a Cutlass — fishing boats that sailed in practically every month of the year from New England to the Canadian coast — were only 50 or 60 feet in length. The wooden sloop sailed in 1820 by Nathaniel Palmer from Stonington, Connecticut all the way to the bottom of South America, to just below the Antarctic Circle, was less than 50 feet long. Shipwrecks were common, and it’s a wonder many of these vessels survived.

On Cape Cod this summer, I had the chance to see one of the smallest vessels to battle a furious sea, now on display at Rock Harbor in Orleans, Massachusetts. The wooden lifeboat is just 36 feet long and played a critical role in the rescue of nearly three dozen men during a 1952 winter storm that split a cargo ship in half. The lifeboat, known as CG 36500, is featured in the book The Finest Hours by by Michael Tougias and Casey Sherman, as well as the movie released this summer.

In the middle of the night on February 18, 1952, four Coast Guardsmen pushed CG 36500 over huge, rolling waves that towered above the little lifeboat in order to reach survivors waiting on their broken and sinking ship. Even as the lifeboat was battered by waves and swamped with seawater, the men continued further out to sea towards the ship. Hours later, the exhausted crew and survivors arrived back in Chatham.

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I’ll be speaking at the Old North Church in Boston this month about my book At the Point of a Cutlass and the many surprising connections between Atlantic piracy and colonial Boston. For details, click here.

A new archaeological discovery, even when not a long-lost mythical city, always rekindles our sense of wonder. The latest discovery: in its October issue, National Geographic follows a team of researchers who’ve uncovered the ruins of a buried city in the mountainous La Mosquitia region of northeastern Honduras, a city believed to have been built not by the dominant Maya but by a separate people of Mosquitia. The jungles of Honduras have sparked the imagination of curious adventurers since at least the 1930s, luring various shades of explorers ranging from trained archaeologists to journalists to secretive treasure hunters. Some of these explorers ventured offshore to the Bay Islands, located about thirty miles off the coast of Honduras. I first learned about these treasure hunters — and tried to separate fact from fiction in their tales — while researching my book on Philip Ashton, a pirate captive and castaway who lived on the island of Roatan, Honduras, for nearly two years in the early 1720s.

One of the first explorers to go digging on Roatan was an English adventurer named Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, who scoured the eastern end of Roatan and several neighboring islands looking for native artifacts in the early 1930s. Mitchell-Hedges found many stunning items, including jade figurines, pottery, and sculptures, some of which are still held today by the National Museum of the American Indian. But critics have questioned Mitchell-Hedges’ qualifications as an archaeologist and the legitimacy of his finds. In his Historical Geography of the Bay Islands, Honduras, William Davidson says Mitchell-Hedges would have been a “good subject” for an “exposé of pseudo-archeologists in Middle America”. And one life-long resident of Roatan told me that Mitchell-Hedges did not discover a gold statue he purportedly brought back to America; instead he bought it from an islander for $100 and a bag of flour. (Mitchell-Hedges is best known for a “pre-Columbian” crystal skull purported to have been found on the Central American mainland, but the authenticity of that piece has also been questioned based on subsequent microscopic investigation.)

Mitchell-Hedges also found buried treasure on Roatan, as the story goes — at least the story later told by several other treasure hunters, for Mitchell-Hedges does not mention this discovery in his own book. One day, a member of his crew held a ship’s compass as he walked along one of the cays that line the island’s shore. Suddenly, the needle on the compass swung wildly. The men started digging at that spot and soon, about a foot down, they unearthed a large iron chest. They broke off the rusted hasps and found that the chest was full of gold and jewels. Mitchell-Hedges soon discovered two more treasure chests on that same cay.

Several decades later, two treasure hunters named Howard Jennings and Robin Moore, who had heard about the Mitchell-Hedges discovery, went back to Roatan. They explored the area around Port Royal harbor, at the eastern end of Roatan, and found a number of old items — cannonballs, brass buttons, shoe buckles, and (reportedly) a buried chest holding a gold necklace, a gold ring, and some silver Spanish pieces of eight, blackened from years of exposure to moisture. The explorers also searched a pair of two rocky islands that lie within Port Royal harbor, known as the Cow and the Calf. Jennings claims to have found on the larger of these two islands another box containing a pair of old leather boots, a corroded navigational quadrant, some silver ingots, and a small leather pouch containing several handfuls of gold nuggets. Even today, rumors of buried treasure persist on Roatan. But not everyone who is familiar with the island and these treasure hunters is convinced that these stories are true.

At the Point of a Cutlass, out in paperback this week, is on sale now.

See the new National Geographic article on the Honduras discovery here.

I went searching the other day in the quiet Chilmark Cemetery on Martha’s Vineyard to track down the headstone of a long-time island resident, William Homes. The lettering on many of the headstones dating back to the early 1700s is worn and faded, at times nearly impossible to read, and it took some time to find Homes’ marker. It was my son who finally spotted it near the crest of a hill. William Homes had served for much of the early 1700s as a minister in Chilmark. He also kept a diary which, 300 years later, provides a rare glimpse into a vicious string of pirate attacks that occurred along the New England coast in the summer of 1722.

Homes’ church in Chilmark was only a few miles from where Thomas Mumford had likely grown up. Mumford was a young Wampanoag man who worked on whaling crews from the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket during a period when whalemen still hunted in the Atlantic and had not yet begun to venture on extended voyages to the Pacific. On the first Sunday in June 1722, Mumford’s crew was captured by the pirate Edward Low — a man who would soon be so feared that one British official claimed “a greater monster never infested the seas.” In a single day, Low’s crew captured three vessels, tearing them apart, stripping them of sails and rigging, beating the men aboard, and choosing several of the Wampanoag whalemen — including Mumford — to take with them as they sailed away.

Mumford would survive his voyage with Low’s crew, but two of the other Wampanoag men would not. They were brutally murdered within days. Mumford later told a courtroom in Newport, Rhode Island that shortly after he was captured by Low, the pirates “hanged two of the Indians at Cape Sables,” at the southern tip of Nova Scotia. Word of the executions reached the islands by summer’s end, and William Homes recounted the horrifying scene in his diary. A sea captain “sailing from the Eastward,” Homes wrote, “found the dead body of a man floating upon the water with his head cut off and his hands and feet bound, which act of cruelty is supposed to have been done by the pirates which greatly infest the coast.”

While Homes lived most of his life on Martha’s Vineyard, his diary ended up at the Maine Historical Society in Portland, Maine, where it is now archived. Homes’ diary had been kept by his daughter, Hannah, but was taken by her nephew Zebulon Allen to Farmington, Maine, in 1822. It was later deposited in the Maine Historical Society, where it remains today. (For more about Homes, Thomas Mumford, whaling, and pirates, see my article “Dangerous Waters” in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine.)

At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.

What surprised me the most, perhaps, while researching my book on Philip Ashton was discovering just how common young captives were aboard pirate ships during the early 1700s. Ashton’s story stands out because of its spectacular details — a young fisherman, captured by one of the worst pirates of the era, escapes and survives as a castaway on an uninhabited Caribbean island. But the more I pursued Ashton’s story, I uncovered the reports of dozens of other young men who were captured by pirates during this period — including many who sailed with Ashton — and who were forced at gunpoint or through ceaseless whippings to sail with these lawless crews.

Almost as famous as Philip Ashton was another young man named John Fillmore, also a fisherman from a small village in Massachusetts, who was captured in 1723 by the pirate John Phillips. This month marks the anniversary of the death of John Fillmore (February 22, 1777), who lived a full life after surviving his pirate capture and would become the great-grandfather of future the future U.S. president, Millard Fillmore. In fact, President Fillmore was said to be familiar with his great-grandfather’s experiences as a pirate captive and may have owned the sword that once belonged to the pirate captain John Phillips — a sword John Fillmore was given for his role in one of the most dramatic uprisings against a pirate crew in the history of the Atlantic.

Fillmore was one of the first captives taken by John Phillips and his fledgling pirate crew. Just twenty-two years old in 1723, Fillmore had grown up near Ipswich, Massachusetts, a small coastal village about twenty-five miles north of Boston. Like Philip Ashton and many other young men forced aboard pirate ships, Fillmore’s narrative about his captivity recounts a seemingly endless stream of brutality. Fillmore repeatedly asked to be set free, but every request was denied. Instead, he was forced to help sail the ship, to move heavy weapons, casks, and equipment off captured ships, and beaten with a whip or sword for any perceived infraction. Many of the men aboard Phillips’ ship — not only the captives but some of the pirates, too — soon became tired of Phillips, the short-tempered and ferociously-violent captain. “Phillips was completely despotic, “Fillmore later recalled, “and there was no such thing as evading his commands.”

Fillmore quickly learned that the pirate captain John Phllips was not to be challenged. One of the vessels Phillips’ crew captured in early 1724 had some geese and hogs aboard, which presented the tasty prospect of fresh meat to men who spent virtually all of their time at sea eating dried and salted food. Phillips demanded the live animals, but the ship’s captain refused and struck Phillips with a handspike. Phillips quickly drew his sword and plunged it into the captain, killing him. This was only months after Phillips killed one of the initial members of his own crew for trying to escape. Yet by April of 1724, Fillmore and several other captives aboard Phillips’ ship were desperate enough to fight back.

The break they were looking for came on April 14, off the coast of Nova Scotia.  The pirates captured a sloop, the Squirrel, and took the new vessel as their own, moving their equipment, supplies, and weapons over the next day. The pirates allowed most of the captured sloop’s crew to go free, but kept its young captain, Andrew Harradine, from Gloucester, Massachusetts. Within a day of Harradine’s capture, Fillmore quietly approached him with the idea of planning an attack on the pirate crew. There were seven captives in on the plot, including Fillmore and Harradine, and it seemed possible that they might be able to overpower the eight pirates if circumstances were right.

Three days later, they were. The pirates were in an especially raucous mood and had spent most of April 17 celebrating their recent successes, eating and drinking late into the night. Sometime that evening, Captain Phillips gave two orders: for a captive named Edward Cheesman, the carpenter, to bring his tools up onto the deck so he could make some repairs early the next morning, and for the crew to make sure they took an observation of the sun at noon the next day to determine their position at sea. This gave the captives the opportunity they needed. Late that night, the pirates finally passed out. Some went to sleep in Phillips’ cabin near the back of the ship and two others — the quartermaster John Rose Archer and a pirate named William White — lay down in the cook’s area near the fireplace on deck. The two of them must have been drunk beyond comprehension because after they’d been asleep for a while, Fillmore was able to sneak up to Archer and White with a hot stick from the fire and burn the soles of their bare feet so badly that they would not be able to walk on the deck the next day. But the captives apparently decided not to try and overpower the pirates in their drunken state that night, perhaps wanting to wait until daylight.

When morning broke, the captives began their work, but there was no sign of the pirates, who remained fast asleep. Finally, close to noon, Phillips and several other men stumbled out of the cabin. One of the pirates got ready to measure the angle of the sun with a wooden quadrant, its arm-length slats connected in the shape of a long and narrow triangle. Cheesman was standing with him. The sails were full and the ship was moving through the water at a good rate, with one of the captives at the helm. Fillmore and Harradine were standing on the deck with several of the other pirates. Cheesman had intentionally left a broad axe resting on the deck after finishing his work that morning, and Fillmore stood casually spinning the broad axe with his foot.

In an instant the men attacked. First Cheesman grabbed the pirate standing next to him and threw him overboard. Fillmore bent over and picked up the broad axe at his feet and bore down on another of the pirates who was busy cleaning his gun, striking him over the head and killing him. Alarmed by the shouts and commotion on deck, Phillips came out of his cabin to see what was going on. The captive who was manning the tiller, a Native American named Isaac Lassen, jumped at Phillips and grabbed his arm while Harradine struck him over the head with an adze. Finally, two French captives jumped a fourth pirate, killed him, and threw him overboard.

In less than two minutes’ time, four of the most active pirates on the crew, including Phillips, had been killed. The remaining pirates were now far outnumbered and immediately surrendered. The captives took control of the ship and headed home, arriving in Boston on Sunday, May 3. The captives’ stunning overthrow of the pirate crew fascinated the town. The Boston News-Letter, the Boston Gazette, and the New England Courant each published accounts of how Fillmore, Cheesman, and Harradine brought down Phillips and his men. One report even suggested that the captives brought Phillips’ head back to Boston with them. The pirates were put on trial nine days later, on May 12. Two members of Phillips’ crew, William White and the quartermaster John Rose Archer, were convicted and hanged. After the execution, the bodies of White and Archer were hauled back out to Bird Island in Boston Harbor. White was buried on the island, while Archer’s body was hung there in a gibbet “to be a spectacle, and so a warning to others.”

After the trial, Fillmore was reportedly given Captain Phillips’s sword, which in time would become a possession of his great grandson, Millard Fillmore, who became the thirteenth president of the United States in 1850 following the death of Zachary Taylor. For his part, after surviving the brief voyage with Phillips’ pirate crew, John Fillmore returned briefly to Ipswich and then moved to Franklin, Connecticut, where he spent most of the remainder of his life. His headstone remains today at the Plains Cemetery in Franklin.

At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.

This month marks the 333rd anniversary of the birth of John Barnard, an adventurous New Englander whose curiosity about the world broke the mold of the traditional Puritan minister. Barnard spent hours talking with sea captains who arrived in colonial Marblehead, Massachusetts in the early 1700s, fascinated by their work and strategies for selling the tons of fish caught by local fishermen. In his younger years, Barnard never passed up a chance to travel. He sailed to Barbados and England in 1709 and, two years before, in May of 1707, Barnard sailed as a chaplain when a large fleet left Boston to attack a French fort in Nova Scotia. That was the trip that got him into trouble.

Intensely curious, Barnard spent much of his time in Nova Scotia talking with military leaders about battle strategy and sketching a map of the area around the fort. The fleet of more than two dozen vessels had been charged with taking the French fort at Port Royal (now called Fort Anne in Annapolis Royal), on the western edge of Nova Scotia, facing the Bay of Fundy. In the end, the colonists never attacked the fort and ended up leaving after only a few weeks. But one day, as the men were relaxing, Barnard joined them in a game of cards — something a chaplain, at that time, should never have been caught doing. This landed the young pastor in hot water with Cotton Mather, America’s foremost Puritan minister, when the troops arrived back in Boston. Mather publicly disciplined Barnard for the “scandalous game of cards,” and Barnard later noted that he suffered “my share of obloquy for a little piece of imprudence while I was absent, for which my pastors treated me cruelly for reasons best known to themselves.”

Barnard became the minister of the First Church in Marblehead in November of 1715. He was a major force in the history of the small fishing village. Barnard found it frustrating that the salt cod caught by Marblehead fishermen was sold by merchants in Salem or Boston, who kept the profits for themselves, even as many of the local fishermen borrowed heavily on credit to pay for food and clothing and spent most of their lives in debt. Barnard described the fishermen in his community as “slaves that digged in the mines,” and he set out to change this. Barnard loved to fish himself and was fascinated by the trade. He found it easy to talk to the men who worked in the harbor, including captains from foreign ports who came to Marblehead to load their ships with fish. He learned as much as he could about the salt cod trade and urged local ship owners to start exporting the catch themselves rather than through middlemen in Salem or Boston. After some initial reluctance, Marblehead ship owners began exporting their catch directly to Europe and the Caribbean. Not long after, Boston merchants complained they were “almost entirely stripped” of cod exports because the trade was now “confined to the fishing towns who generally send it abroad in their own vessels, especially Marblehead, Salem, and Plymouth.”

Barnard also pursued the incredible story of Philip Ashton, a young Marblehead fisherman who was captured by pirates in 1722 and then escaped on an uninhabited Caribbean island where he lived alone as a castaway for close to two years. When Ashton reappeared after his three-year odyssey — to a village that had given him up for lost — Barnard recorded the young fisherman’s amazing story and used it as a basis for his Sunday sermon the very week Ashton arrived home. Ironically, Barnard preserved Ashton’s story not for the sake of history but because he believed it contained a powerful religious message. Like many Puritan ministers at the time, Barnard worried about a weakening of faith in his community and a disregard for the teachings of the church — “they were,” he wrote of Marblehead during his early years there, “generally as rude, swearing, drunken, and fighting a crew as they were poor.” But Ashton’s story, Barnard believed, offered a real-life example he could hold up as proof that God watches over and protects people, even an ordinary fisherman. “In you, we see that our God whom we serve is able to deliver out of the fiery furnace and from the den of lions!” Barnard proclaimed in his sermon that Sunday in May, 1725. “In you, we see that nothing is too hard for the Lord and that ’tis not in vain for us to call upon Him!”

Later that summer, Barnard published a full narrative recounting Ashton’s incredible journey, a fascinating and rare document that forms the core of my new book, At the Point of a Cutlass. Barnard lived and worked in Marblehead until his death at age eighty-eight in 1770. He is buried high on the rise of on Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, overlooking the harbor. The large Bible that Barnard used during many of his years in Marblehead still sits at the front of the First Church today.

At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.

Late in the day on July 19, 1723, the bodies of 26 executed men were brought by boat from Newport, Rhode Island over to a narrow strip of land called Goat Island, barely 1,500 feet from the town’s shoreline. Hanged for being pirates, the men were all buried near the north end of the island, not far from where the Goat Island Lighthouse stands today. Their burial marked just one of a series of events that, over the years, have made little Goat Island a figure in many chapters of American history. Smallpox victims were also buried on the island in the 1700s. Colonists fired in anger at the British schooner St. John from the island in 1764, an event some claim marked the first shots of the American Revolution. Years later, many of the torpedoes used in World War I and World War II were developed and built in a plant on Goat Island.

My fascination with Goat Island came through researching my new book about the dreaded pirate Edward Low and the young men he held captive for months on end, At the Point of a Cutlass. Goat Island figures prominently in Edward Low’s career as a pirate following the capture of one of Low’s two sloops by a British warship, the Greyhound, in June of 1723. Low himself escaped in another sloop, but all of the men aboard the captured sloop were brought back to Newport and put in jail (a few of the men escaped briefly when the jail-keeper brought them breakfast one morning, but the fugitives were soon captured again). At their trial, many of the young men pleaded their innocence, telling the court they were forced men and had sailed with the pirates only with “the greatest reluctancy and horror of mind and conscience.”

One of these men was Joseph Libbey, a 19-year old fisherman from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who had been captured a year earlier along with Philip Ashton, Libbey’s friend and crewmate. Ashton, as I recount in my book, was able to escape from the pirates by marooning himself on an uninhabited Caribbean island. But Joseph Libbey was still sailing with the pirates when the sloop was overpowered by the Greyhound and, with many others, he was forced to stand trial in Newport. Libbey showed the court a deposition from several ship captains attesting that he had been forced aboard the pirate ship, but that was not enough to counter the testimony of other witnesses. John Kencate, a doctor who had also been held aboard the pirate ship, told the court that Libbey was an “active man aboard the Ranger, and used to go on board vessels they took and plundered, and that he saw him fire several times.”

In the third week of July in 1723, Libbey and twenty-five other condemned men were hanged on Gravelly Point in Newport in what remains one of the largest mass executions in American history. Their bodies were then taken over to Goat Island to be buried. Today, there is no evidence of the pirates’ burial on Goat Island, or of many of the other events that colored the island’s rich history. The island is fairly well-developed, with a hotel, other buildings and boatyards, and several long piers jutting at angles from the shore.

At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.

On the quiet Tuesday afternoon that follows Labor Day weekend, my son and I took a walk in the Chilmark Cemetery on Martha’s Vineyard in search of the headstone of Benjamin Skiffe, a prominent figure in early Tisbury and Chilmark before his death in 1717. The Skiffe family had settled near Mill Brook along what is today South Road in Chilmark and, during his lifetime, Benjamin Skiffe was owner of the fulling mill, captain of the local militia, and the island’s representative to the Massachusetts General Court for many years.

Benjamin Skiffe was also the uncle of a whaleship captain named Nathan Skiffe. I came to learn about Nathan Skiffe — and the tortuous final hours of his life — while writing my new book about New England pirate captives, At the Point of a Cutlass, published this summer. The younger Skiffe died at sea, the victim of one of the worst pirates to sail the Atlantic. But other members of the Skiffe family are buried in Chilmark, including Nathan’s uncle Benjamin. We found his worn headstone near the top of the gentle hill that sits at the back of the quiet cemetery.

It was a tragic twist of fate that placed Nathan Skiffe in the path of a pirate crew under the command of Edward Low on June 12, 1723. Low was racing out to sea, having barely survived a day-long battle with a British warship, HMS Greyhound, in which one of Low’s two sloops and about half of his men were captured. Low was in a rage when he spotted Skiffe’s whaling sloop about eighty miles offshore from Nantucket.

Boarding Skiffe’s sloop, Low’s pirates immediately singled out Skiffe as the captain of the whaling crew. Shouting and cursing, they “cruelly whipped him about the deck,” according to a report by one surviving member of Skiffe’s crew. Then Low raised his cutlass and hacked off both of Skiffe’s ears, one after the other. As Skiffe stood bleeding on the wooden deck of his sloop he may have begged for mercy, as many of Low’s captives did. Or other whalemen may have pleaded with the pirates saying that Skiffe was a fair and decent man, since pirates so often tortured captains that mistreated crews. But none of that mattered. “After they had wearied themselves of making a game and sport of the poor man,” a survivor recalled, “they told him that because he was a good master, he should have an easy death.”

That was little consolation for the Skiffe. Moments later, the pirates pointed a pistol squarely at Skiffe and shot him in the head.

At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.

Read more about the hazards of early New England whaling and encounters with pirates in my recent article in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine here.

 

Two hundred and ninety one years ago today — on August 29, 1723 — a young fisherman on his first voyage at sea was captured by a small pirate crew off the coast of present-day Canada. That fisherman was John Fillmore, who would become the great-grandfather of the future U.S. president, Millard Fillmore. Just twenty-two years old, Fillmore had grown up near Ipswich, Massachusetts, a small coastal village about twenty-five miles north of Boston. The stories brought back to the village by men who worked at sea had a powerful impact on the young man’s desire to set sail himself: “hearing sailors relate the curiosities they met with in their voyages, doubtless had a great effect, and the older I grew the impression became the stronger,” Fillmore recalled.

In the summer of 1723, Fillmore took his first job at sea, working aboard the fishing schooner Dolphin. It was on August 29 that the Dolphin was captured by a crew of pirates under the command of a man named John Phillips. Phillips and four other men had been part of a fishing crew working near Newfoundland when, only days before, they deserted their captain in a stolen schooner and set out as pirates. The Dolphin was one of the pirate Phillips’ first captures.

John Fillmore would sail as a captive aboard Phillips’ ship for eight long months — one of many men forced aboard pirate ships during this era, as I recount my new book, At the Point of a Cutlass. The pirate John Phillips had a temper so violent, Fillmore later recalled, that even members of his own crew hated him — and some even tried, unsuccessfully, to desert. “Phillips was completely despotic,” Fillmore recalled, “and there was no such thing as evading his commands.” Phillips nearly sliced Fillmore’s head off with a sword at one point and threatened to kill him at another, but Fillmore and several other captives were ultimately able to stage one of the most successful uprisings in the history of Atlantic piracy.

The break Fillmore and the other captives were desperately looking for came in April 1724. By now, Phillips’ crew had sailed to the Caribbean and back, returning again to the coast of Nova Scotia. They captured a sloop, the Squirrel, and took the new vessel as their own, moving their equipment, supplies, and weapons over the next day. The pirates allowed most of the captured sloop’s crew to go free, but kept its young captain, Andrew Harradine, from Gloucester, Massachusetts. Within a day of Harradine’s capture, Fillmore quietly approached him with the idea of planning an attack on the pirate crew. There were seven captives in on the plot, including Fillmore and Harradine, and it seemed possible that they might be able to overpower the eight pirates if circumstances were right.

Their chance came close to noon on April 18 as the pirates sailed north. Fillmore and Harradine were standing on the deck with several of the other pirates. Fillmore stood casually spinning a broad axe that was lying on the deck with his foot. Then, in an instant, the men attacked. One captive grabbed the pirate standing next to him and threw him overboard. Fillmore bent over and picked up the broad axe at his feet and bore down on another of the pirates who was busy cleaning his gun, striking him over the head and killing him. Alarmed by the shouts and commotion on deck, Captain Phillips came out of his cabin to see what was going on. The captive who was manning the tiller, a Native American named Isaac Lassen, jumped at Phillips and grabbed his arm while Harradine struck him over the head with an adze. Finally, two French captives jumped a fourth pirate, killed him, and threw him overboard.

The remaining pirates were now far outnumbered and immediately surrendered. Fillmore and the other captives took control of the ship and headed home, arriving in Boston harbor on Sunday, May 3. The captives’ stunning overthrow of the pirate crew fascinated the town. The Boston News-Letter, the Boston Gazette, and the New England Courant each published accounts of how Fillmore and Harradine brought down Phillips and his men. Two members of Phillips’ crew, William White and the quartermaster John Rose Archer, were convicted and hanged. After the execution, the bodies of White and Archer were hauled back out to Bird Island in Boston Harbor (Bird Island no longer exists today, once standing where Logan Airport is today). White was buried on the island, while Archer’s body was hung there in a gibbet “to be a spectacle, and so a warning to others.”

At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.

 

The Charles W. Morgan, the “last wooden whaleship in the world,” spent the weekend in Boston, tied up in Charlestown in the shadow of the USS Constitution. The beautifully-restored Morgan set sail from Mystic Seaport this summer for the first time in nearly 100 years on a three-month cruise along the New England coast.

Even before boarding the Morgan this weekend, I was struck by its size. The whaleship has a length of 113 feet, with a 27-foot 6-inch beam. That sounds like a big ship — until you imagine being aboard as she struggled around the notoriously brutal Cape Horn, weathered storms in the wide-open Pacific, or navigated Arctic ice. All of which men did a century ago aboard this 113-foot vessel.

Whaling has a rich history in New England, dating as far back as the early 18th century. I became interested in early New England whaling while researching my new book, At the Point of a Cutlass, since a number of young men who worked the whaleboats from Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket were captured by pirate crews and forced aboard. Many of these whalemen were young Wampanoag men like Thomas Mumford, who I wrote about in a recent post here.

At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because Edward Low and generations of pirates before and after him spent so much time near Roatan, many modern treasure hunters have searched the island and cays for buried treasure. But the one treasure hunter who may have actually uncovered gold stashed away by the pirate Edward Low made his discovery on an unlikely island two thousand miles to the north — off the coast of Nova Scotia.

In 1947, Massachusetts historian and author Edward Rowe Snow bought what he believed was a treasure map that may have belonged to Low. The one-page map was nothing more than a simple, hand-drawn sketch on a torn piece of paper. The strip of land drawn on the map is labeled “Island Haute.” At the bottom of the paper is the name “E. Low.” Snow identified the land depicted on the map as Isle Haute, a one and a half mile long island just off the Nova Scotia shoreline at the top of the Bay of Fundy. The name written on the map, Snow believed, belonged to the pirate Edward Low.

In June 1952, Snow took a boat out to Isle Haute to explore the site marked as “The Place” on the map. He stayed with the island’s lighthouse keeper, the only residence on the rocky island, and spent his days digging in several spots near the lake, scanning the dirt, gravel, and stones with a metal detector. On his first day of digging, Snow found a large iron spike and the broken ribs and skull of what he believed was a human skeleton. After digging for several more hours the next day, Snow found what we was looking for — eight small, blackened disks buried in the soil. When Snow cleaned the disks off, they were Spanish and Portuguese coins of gold and silver.

Snow’s discovery is recounted in my new book on the dreaded captain Edward Low and his most famous pirate captives, At the Point of a Cutlass. Based on this mysterious map, a copy of which is published in my book, and the notations and ship name seemingly printed on it, Snow believed the coins were part of the pirate treasure buried by Edward Low.

At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.

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.

 

As the historic Charles W. Morgan sets sail this month — for the first time in 93 years — its voyage along the coast commemorates thousands of New Englanders, from all walks of life, who went to sea in search of the most powerful creature they had ever known. Massive in size, larger than any other animal in North America, the whale and all that it provided was a treasured by the Wampanoag people long before white settlers established a whale oil trade here. On Martha’s Vineyard, the dramatic cliffs at Aquinna are colored red, according to Wampanoag tradition, by the blood of whales that the legendary giant Moshup caught by hand — indeed, the mighty Moshup is often portrayed holding a whale in his raised hand. Drift whales that occasionally washed up along the shore were a celebrated find, providing Wampanoag with a bounty of meat and blubber as well as whalebone that was shaped into tools.

Wampanoag men continued to be a major force in the New England whale oil trade after colonists arrived. At least half the men on many early whaling crews — and often more than that — were Wampanoag whalers. Decades later, a Martha’s Vineyard man, Tashtego, would become the islands’ most famous Wampanoag whaler, a central figure in Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick. Tashtego was no fictional character, according to some Wampanoag living on Martha’s Vineyard today, but an actual resident of Aquinnah. “He was a real person,” Captain Buddy Vanderhoop, a lifelong Vineyard native, told me. “He lived up here in Gay Head.”

I learned about the dramatic stories of Wampanoag whalers while writing my new book on American pirate captives, At the Point of a Cutlass. Pirate crews in the early 18th century frequently impressed young men aboard their ships — including men from whaleships. In June 1722, a band of pirates under the command of Edward Low took as captives at least six men from a whaleboat off the coast of Nantucket — two white men and four or five Wampanoag, including a young man named Thomas Mumford from Martha’s Vineyard. The pirates hanged two of the Wampanoag whalemen, but Mumford survived and was forced to sail with Low’s crew for about a year before he was finally freed.

Read more about Wampanoag whaling and Thomas Mumford’s dramatic voyage in my new article in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine here.

Nearly 300 years ago today, on April 26, 1717, the pirate ship Whydah, under the command of Samuel Bellamy, approached Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The Whydah was originally a slaving ship, captured by Bellamy in the Caribbean in February, with more than 130 men aboard and mounted with 23 guns. On the morning of April 26, the pirates captured a pink, a large vessel with two or three masts and a distinctive narrow, rounded stern, which was on its way from Boston to New York. Bellamy sent seven of his men aboard the pink, the Mary Anne from Ireland, with orders to follow him. But those pirates “drank plentifully” of the wine they found aboard the pink, which meant their leadership of the vessel they had taken charge of was half-hearted, at best.

Making matters worse, the weather deteriorated throughout the day. The men aboard the pink had been told to follow Bellamy, in the Whydah, but by about four o’clock that afternoon, there was almost no way for the vessels to see each other in the “very thick, foggy” weather. That night, sometime after 10 o’clock, a horrendous storm struck, bringing lightning and heavy rain. The storm pushed the pink Mary Anne close to an island that was, at the time, located just off what is today Nauset Light. The Whydah was about four miles north, off the coast of Marconi Beach not far from the Marconi Wireless Station. At some point during the night the Whydah was slammed into the shallow sand off the coast and sunk to the bottom of the sea floor.

There are two notable epilogues to the Whydah sinking:

1) A team of divers led by Barry Clifford discovered the Whydah wreck on the ocean floor about three decades ago, and they continue to pull up gold, weapons, and other incredible artifacts — many of which are on display at the Pirate Museum in Provincetown, MA (see www.nationalgeographic.com/whydah).

2) Only two of more than 130 men aboard the Whydah survived — an “Englishman” named Thomas Davis and the other, according to newspaper reports and trial records, was an “Indian” named John Julian. Davis was tried in Boston, but acquitted because we was a forced captive. It is widely assumed (and written) that Julian is the same Julian the Indian who, as a runaway slave, was convicted of murder and executed on Boston Neck in a snowstorm sixteen years later. But there’s no conclusive proof that is true. You can read my column in today’s Cape Cod Times on the anniversary of the Whydah sinking: www.capecodonline.com

As I note in my new book, At the Point of a Cutlass, the captive and castaway Philip Ashton almost certainly heard about the Whydah sinking just weeks after it happened, as the repercussions were felt in his home town of Marblehead, as well.

 

Philip Ashton’s nine months of captivity aboard a pirate ship came to an abrupt end 291 years ago this month, as the pirates got ready to set sail away from the secluded and uninhabited island of Roatan, Honduras. On Saturday, March 9, 1723, Ashton was on the deck of one of the pirate ships when he saw a longboat from another of the vessels approaching with seven men aboard. The men were rowing in the direction of the island of Roatan to fill the ship’s casks with fresh water. Ashton called out to the ship’s cooper in the longboat, asking if they were going ashore. The cooper initially hesitated to take Ashton along, but Ashton pleaded with him. So the cooper agreed to take him, “imagining, I suppose,” Ashton later recalled, “that there would be no danger of my running away in so desolate uninhabited a place as that was.”

While the men were filling the water casks near the wooded shore of Roatan, Ashton stepped onto the beach and started walking slowly along the sand, stopping occasionally to casually pick up a stone or shell as he moved away from the men. As the distance between Ashton and the men grew, Ashton edged slightly closer to the woods that bordered the beach. The cooper looked up and called out to him — where did he think he was going? Ashton said he was going to look for coconuts, since some coconut trees were growing near the beach. That seemed to satisfy the pirates for the moment and Ashton kept walking. Then, in an instant, Ashton turned away from the water and into the woods. The woods were so thick that within a dozen steps, he was completely hidden by the dense overgrowth and was able to hide silently until the pirates were gone.

While researching Ashton’s incredible story, I spent close to a week on this remote section of Roatan — even today, accessible only by boat — where he escaped. The reality of Ashton’s situation was that he was not only alone on an uninhabited island, but that he had marooned himself with practically nothing. “I was upon an island from whence I could not get off,” Ashton wrote. “I knew of no humane creature within many scores of miles of me; I had but a scanty clothing, and no possibility of getting more; I was destitute of all provision for my support, and knew not how I should come at any; everything looked with a dismal face.” How did Ashton survive? What did he eat, where did he live, and where would he have set up lookouts to watch for passing ships? During my time in Roatan, I uncovered new evidence about Ashton’s experiences. I used a rare 1742 survey to identify the creek where the pirates likely stopped for water and roamed the island to locate and taste the tropical fruits that sustained Ashton.

To learn more about my exploration of Roatan in pursuit of Ashton’s story, check out my new article in the latest issue of Bay Islands Voice.

As the Somali pirates drew close to the Maersk Alabama in the film Captain Phillips — nominated for Oscars in six categories Sunday night — the ship’s captain, Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), radios the UK Maritime Operations Center for help. On the other end of the line, the dispatcher tells Phillips to ready his fire hoses as a defensive measure, but not to be overly alarmed since the approaching boats are most likely fishermen. Even then, Captain Phillips knew that was wrong. “They’re not here to fish,” he replies.

The capture of the Maersk Alabama is hauntingly similar to another pirate capture nearly 300 years ago, but the events depicted in the Captain Phillips movie (and book) also reveal stark differences between piracy then and now. Back in the summer of 1722, a small crew of six young New England fishermen anchored for the evening in a remote Nova Scotia harbor. Just before sunset, four men from another vessel anchored nearby rowed over in a boat and climbed aboard. At first, the fishermen thought the four men had come over to trade stories — but in an instant they saw how wrong they were. The four men were pirates, members of one of the worst crews to sail the Atlantic, and they immediately attacked with pistols and guns. These men, too, were not here to fish.

These two pirate attacks — both true stories — also reveal the way piracy has changed over time. The Somali pirates who boarded the Maersk Alabama were primarily looking for money — lots of it. Some pirates in the region who successfully took a ship hostage won millions of dollars in ransom money. In contrast, money was not the only motivation for pirate crews that attacked ships during the age of sail centuries ago. To be sure, a haul of gold or silver aboard was always cause for celebration. But pirates during this era were motivated as much by the lifestyle that piracy offered, a welcome change from the harsh conditions and cruel discipline they faced working on trading vessels or naval warships. Most of the ships pirates captured were not packed with gold, but were loaded with routine trading goods — lumber, grain, sugar, and molasses. The pirates typically stripped these vessels of food, drinking water, sails, weapons, and equipment, which helped sustain their extended voyages across the Atlantic and Caribbean.

How did victims of pirate attacks defend themselves? In Captain Phillips, the crew — remarkably — was unarmed. There were no guns aboard, and the Maersk Alabama could only try to avoid the attack by spraying its powerful fire hoses and zigzagging through the water. During the golden age of piracy 300 years ago, most vessels did have weapons aboard to defend themselves — but many crews chose not to fight because pirates so brutally tortured those who resisted their attacks. As I note in my new book, At the Point of a Cutlass, some pirate crews flew not only a black pirate flag, but a sequence of black and red flags. The black flag was flown during an approach as a warning to surrender, but when the black flag was pulled down and the “bloody” red flag was raised in its place, it meant the chance to surrender and for captured sailor to be given safe quarter had passed — all would be killed.

When the infamous pirate Blackbeard approached a merchant vessel in 1718, the sea captain from Boston asked his crew if they would defend their ship. The men said that if the attackers were Spanish they would fight back — but if they were pirates they would not. A few men rowed over to the approaching ships and came back with word that they were pirates — all under the command of Blackbeard. The crew quickly abandoned ship — “all declared they would not fight and quitted the ship, believing they would be murdered by the sloop’s company, and so all went on shore.” Surrender seemed to be the safest option.

One of the more surprising repercussions of Atlantic piracy during the 17th and 18th centuries was the tendency of Puritan leaders to drag sensational stories about pirates and their captives — and sometimes the pirates themselves — into the pulpit. The exploits of pirates and the adventures of captives who returned safely home were used time and again by religious leaders who wanted to illustrate stark warnings against a sinful lifestyle. Nobody in colonial America did this more forcefully than Cotton Mather.

The month of February marks the anniversaries of Mather’s birth (February 12, 1663) and his death (February 13, 1728). During his long lifetime, Mather offered counsel to a long line of condemned pirates, ranging from Captain William Kidd in the year 1700 to William Fly, who was executed in Boston several decades later, in 1726. Mather and other Puritan leaders saw piracy as a vivid symbol of everything that was wrong with colonial New England at a time of deteriorating social and religious values — and pirates awaiting execution provided rich, engaging material for sermons. “It was the hand of the Glorious God which brought these criminals to die,” Mather proclaimed in his sermon about the pirates from Edward Low’s crew executed in Newport in 1723. “Take a due notice of what you have seen in the way which these wicked men have trodden, and in the fearful end in which their way has brought them to.”

Mather died in 1728 and is buried in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End.

The year that forever altered Philip Ashton’s life started with a blaze of destruction in Boston Harbor. The first week of January 1722 was bitterly cold in Boston, and just after noon on Monday, January 1, a huge fire tore through a sailmaker’s warehouse on Long Wharf, the massive pier at the center of Boston’s large inner harbor. The fire completely destroyed at least two of the warehouses that lined one side of Long Wharf and damaged several others nearby. A large quantity of sailcloth that had been in the buildings was burned before the roaring flames could be put out. The fire was caused, it was discovered several days later, by a chimney in disrepair.

Long Wharf and the crowded layout of Boston — at the time America’s busiest seaport, with more than fifty wharves reaching into the harbor — are clearly evident in John Bonner’s 1722 Map of Boston. Boston was, in many ways, still a young city in the year 1722. Massachusetts Bay was a British colony, and the men and women who lived there thought of themselves as British subjects. New England vessels flew the British flag. The colonists’ rebellious Boston Tea Party, the first battles of the American Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence were still half a century away. But in the hundred years since its founding, Boston had also grown into a noteworthy and spreading city. Cramped blocks of brick and wooden houses now lined the streets, home to some twelve thousand people, more than lived in either New York or Philadelphia at the time. Many of the main streets running through the city were paved with cobblestone, though they were often covered with a layer of dirt and dust and, in the springtime, with nearly ankle-deep mud. The streets were crowded from sunup to sundown with horse-drawn carts, peddlers, pedestrians, and stray dogs. Anyone walking along Cornhill, King Street, or Boston’s other main roadways would pass dozens of signs advertising the shops, coffee houses, and taverns that sold merchandise, food, and drink.

Long Wharf, where the fire broke out on New Year’s Day 1722, reached some 1,600 feet out into the harbor and was lined with a row of warehouses on its northern edge, each facing the water on one side and, on the other, the wharf’s thirty-foot-wide roadway that ran directly into King Street. The warehouses along Long Wharf were packed with sails, rope, and a sea of wooden casks filled with merchandise. Carts and wagons rumbled up and down the wharf and onto the cobblestoned way of King Street, which ran directly into the heart of Boston. Fourteen shipyards in Boston produced several hundred new ships every year. At least half a dozen merchant ships arrived or sailed out of Boston every week, and the harbor was crowded with vessels—the “masts of ships here, and at the proper seasons of the year,” one observer wrote, “make a kind of wood of trees like that which we see upon the River of Thames.”

What was particularly ominous about that first week of January 1722 is that one of the vessels that set sail from Boston Harbor was a ninety-ton brigantine called the Rebecca. It would be an unforgettable journey. The Rebecca would safely reach its destination, the small sugar-producing island of St. Kitts in the British West Indies, without serious incident. But the journey home would be different, for on May 28, 1722, the Rebecca would be taken by a pirate crew under the command of Edward Low, who would sail the brigantine north to the Canadian coastline and capture Philip Ashton.