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The Real Pirates of the Caribbean

Khalid Elhassan January 7, 2020 32 min

4. Accepting the King’s Pardon

The Bahamas’ new governor arrived in 1718, with a royal pardon for all who turned themselves in and refrained from further acts of piracy. Hornigold accepted, and the governor commissioned him to hunt down those who had not accepted the royal pardon. He turned upon his former friends and colleagues, and fell upon them with a will.

Hornigold turned out to be an even better pirate hunter than he had been a pirate. By December of 1718, he had captured ten recalcitrant pirate captains who had failed to accept the pardon, of whom nine were executed. His actions effectively brought the Pirates’ Republic in Nassau to an end, and reestablished law and order in the Bahamas. In late 1719, Hornigold was sailing about, hunting more pirates, when he drowned after his ship was caught in a storm and wrecked on an uncharted reef.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.