Quote:
Originally Posted by Taltarzac725
The pirates had to elicit a response from the townspeople of Charleston about the pirates' needed ransom's lading of the chest of medicine. They sent envoys who took their sweet time returning. While the captive hostages waited in the musty hold many got very restless. Some historians even quote them as saying: "they would stand by [the pirates] to the last man" if the people of Charleston "put a greater value on the chest of medicines than on the lives of the fourscore men now on the verge of destruction." Some of victims of the kidnappers even said that they would pilot the pirates' ships into the harbor and help them set fire to Charleston. Fortunately for the fate of the captured Charlestonians, the Governor's Council of Charleston had decided to meet the demands of the pirates for the medicine. Unfortunately for the kidnapped victims, the pirate envoys had decided to get rip roaring drunk and could not be found to send back the Council's response. LibriVox » A General History of the Pyrates, Vol. 1 by Charles Johnson |
After the pirate envoys were found smiling and very drunk, they and another man took the chest of medicine back to Blackbeard's flotilla. He accepted it as ransom and started to form the idea of retiring from being a pirate. The huge amount of booty his various flotilla's crew had collected also entered into it. One
basic thing though came to his mind-- the fewer people he shared it with the bigger his take. He needed a plan that would not result in
mutiny. A
primer for his conspiracy to work was the September 5, 1717 offer by King George I of a pardon for all pirates giving up piracy before or by September 5, 1718 and their promise of never returning to such misdeeds. He now needed to thin his ranks by setting himself and a few others
apart from his larger force as well as turn himself into an acceptable authority as defined by the King's Proclamation.
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