The Bermudians were there to gather logwood, that important (in those days) commercial tree, “Haematoxylon campechianum,” which was used to make dye. The story starts in the Bahia de Campeche, known to the English as the Bay of Cam peachy, which is the segment of the Gulf of Mexico which lies west of the Yucatan Peninsula. Unfortunately Johnson never gives the names of any of the Bermudian seamen. The tale is pieced together from accounts in Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pirates, but the clues are strong, and as Captain Johnson’s book is one of the major sources of information about pirates, there is every reason to believe it to be true. It happened early in the 18th Century, when there were pirate strongholds on the great island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, and that seems to be where they ended up. This is the story of a group of Bermuda seamen who were also slaves and how they became pirates. The Bermudians seem to have stuck together and gained increasing influence, until at the end, they appointed the last pirate captain of their ship. It was a difficult existence among pirates, for disagreements among crew members were frequent, and plotting was a way of life. ZUILL’s book The Pirate Menace, shows what strange things could happen to a peaceful sailor and a warlike pirate. We know very little about the working lives of black or white Bermudians in the 17th and 18th Centuries, but this extract from WILLIAM S. It appears here exactly as it did originally. It appeared first in the June 1998 issue of The Bermudian.
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