The Gentleman Who Bought a Pirate Ship

You're standing in White Point Garden, at the very tip of the Charleston peninsula, where the Battery's seawall turns the corner and the harbor opens up in front of you. Make your way toward the northeast corner of the garden and find the small stone marker there, put up in 1943. It's for a pirate. Locals call him the Gentleman Pirate, and his name was Stede Bonnet.

Bonnet did not grow up at sea. He grew up rich on Barbados, the heir to an estate of more than 400 acres. He was educated and held the rank of major in the island militia. Then in the spring of 1717, with no knowledge of sailing at all, Stede Bonnet decided to become a pirate.

Most pirates got their ships by mutiny or by seizing one. Bonnet ordered his from a shipyard. He armed his sloop with ten guns and named her the Revenge. And here's the part that sounds like a joke but isn't: he paid his crew wages, like employees, instead of the usual share of the plunder.

It went about as well as you'd expect for a man learning seamanship on the job. Bonnet was seriously wounded on the way to Nassau, the pirate haven in the Bahamas. Eventually he was caught, and in the autumn of 1718 Colonel William Rhett captured him on the Cape Fear River, on September 27. He was brought here, to what was then Charles Town. Judge Nicholas Trott sentenced him to death. Bonnet begged Governor Robert Johnson for mercy. Johnson refused. On December 10, 1718, Stede Bonnet was hanged near this spot. The shoreline then looked nothing like this; later landfill made the sharp edge you see now.

Now look again at that marker. It says 29 of Bonnet's crew were executed close by. Twenty-nine were sentenced to death, but the evidence suggests only 22 were actually hanged. Seven men, at least, never met the rope the stone gives them.

The stone also leaves out who was allowed to stand here. From Reconstruction into the Jim Crow years, Black Charlestonians could gather in this park on Independence Day to celebrate freedom from slavery, and on every other day they were not permitted to enter it, or to sit on its benches.

When you're ready, walk east, then turn left onto High Battery; it's about 12 minutes to the Old Exchange, where a dungeon waits underneath the floor.