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Pirate Captain
About Stede Bonnet
In 1717, a man who’d never set foot on a warship before purchased the *Revenge*, a sloop he outfitted with eleven cannons and crewed with thirty men, many of them indentured servants and runaway apprentices he’d recruited from Bridgetown taverns. Stede Bonnet didn’t seize ships by force of arms or terror; he relied on meticulous logbooks, handwritten navigational corrections in the margins of stolen Dutch charts, and an obsessive insistence on paying his crew weekly wages, even as his command unraveled. His trial in Charleston wasn’t for piracy alone, but for violating the social contract: a landowner who abandoned his wife and children, donned a crimson waistcoat over a linen shirt, and insisted on being addressed as 'Captain' while misreading latitude tables aloud during court testimony. He wasn’t romanticized in his own time, he was pitied, mocked, and ultimately hanged, not for brutality, but for the sheer, stubborn incongruity of a gentleman playing pirate in a world that demanded either aristocracy or ruthlessness, not both.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Stede Bonnet:
- “How did you navigate without formal training—and what charts did you actually trust?”
- “What happened to the crew who deserted you near Cape Fear in 1718?”
- “Why did you let Blackbeard command the *Revenge*—and what did you learn from him?”
- “Did your wife ever respond to the letters you sent from Nassau?”