Stede Bonnet was born into a wealthy English family on the island of Barbados. He inherited the family estate after his father’s death in 1694. In 1709, he married Mary Allamby, and engaged in some level of militia service. Bonnet decided he should turn to piracy in the summer of 1717. He bought a sailing vessel, named it Revenge, and travelled with his paid crew along the Eastern Seaboard.
About Stede Bonnet in brief
Stede Bonnet was born into a wealthy English family on the island of Barbados. He inherited the family estate after his father’s death in 1694. In 1709, he married Mary Allamby, and engaged in some level of militia service. Bonnet decided he should turn to piracy in the summer of 1717. He bought a sailing vessel, named it Revenge, and travelled with his paid crew along the Eastern Seaboard of what is now the United States. He was pardoned by North Carolina governor Charles Eden and received clearance to go privateering against Spanish shipping. In August 1718, Bonnet anchored the Royal James on an estuary of the Cape Fear River to careen and repair the ship. In late August and September, Colonel William Rhett, with the authorization of South Carolina governor Robert Johnson, led a naval expedition against pirates on the river. Rhett and Bonnet’s men engaged in combat for hours, but the outnumbered pirates ultimately surrendered. On 10 November,Bonnet was brought to trial and charged with two acts of piracy. Judge Nicholas Trott sentenced Bonnet to death, but Bonnet wrote to Governor Johnson to ask for clemency, and he was hanged in Charles Town on 10 December 1718.Bonnet’s granddaughter, Anne Thomasine Clarke, was the wife of General Robert Haynes, for 36 years Speaker of the Assembly of Barbado. In A General History of the Pyrates, Charles Johnson wrote that Bonnet. was driven to piracy by Mary’s nagging and \”iscomforts he found in a married State\”.
Bonnet died on December 10, 1718 in a Barbados prison. He is buried in Bridgetown, where he had a house built for his family in 1709. He had three sons and a daughter, Mary, who died before 1715, while the other children survived to see their father abandon them for piracy. He held the rank of major in the Barbados militia. The rank was probably due to his land holdings, since slave revolting was an important function of the militia. There is no record in the Spanish Succession that he took part in the fighting of the Spanish War of the Succession, but there is no evidence he was involved in it. He enlisted a crew of more than seventy men and relied on his quartermaster and officer for their knowledge of sailing, and as a result, he was not respected by his crew. In the spring of 17 1717, despite having no shipboard knowledge, he contracted a local shipyard to build him a sixty-ton sloop, which he equipped with ten guns and named the Revenge. In another unusual move, he seized another pirates’ ship by mutiny or by converting a privateer by converting them by boarding or by boarding them by them by converting their vessel to privateer. He stayed on Blackbeard’s ship as a guest, and did not command a crew again until summer 1718,. He was recaptured on 24 October, but was recapture on Sullivan’s Island.
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This page is based on the article Stede Bonnet published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
