![]() ![]() What Bonnet did catch up with, in the latter half of 1718, were the consequences of his own actions. He reclaimed his ship and manned it with the sailors Blackbeard had abandoned, setting off in search of the man who’d betrayed him. He seems like he was probably dramatic like that. Bonnet swore that he’d get his retribution, presumably shaking his fist in the air and cursing the heavens. His method: The subtle art of ineptitude.īlackbeard offered Stede a sort of Big Brothers/Big Sisters piracy mentorship program that ended with the notorious brigand stripping the Revenge for parts and marooning a good chunk of the crew while Bonnet wasn’t looking. Luckily for him, the only barriers to entry were abandoning his wife and children, and owning a pretty big boat.īorrowing a genuinely staggering amount of money – roughly half a million dollars, adjusted for 300 years of inflation – Bonnet purchased a ship, named it Revenge for no apparent reason aside from that it was a pretty popular name for ships around that time, and promptly got down to the business of making his 70-man crew hate him. There are other theories, too: records indicate that he’d lost a child, and that things weren’t perfect at home, but nothing about the man’s relatively privileged history screams “it’s no wonder he blew up his life.” Like in Our Flag Means Death, it seems likely that he got caught up in a fantasy, wanting to be one of the romantic vigilante brigands of folk legend. ![]() That’s about as close to a solid explanation as anyone’s ever come up with for why the 29-ish-year-old retired British Army major and sugar plantation owner flipped the proverbial table in 1717, leaving his life behind for the promise of adventure at sea. By all available accounts, the real Stede Bonnet was all of us, in that the lead-up to his 30s hit him like a freight train.
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