On the 12th of August, 1710, Captain Smith of the HMS Enterprise would detail in a letter, the state of the Bahamas Islands after performing a survey of the region; and how it had become a land of pirates in the absence of the British Government.
In his letter, he explained that the scattering of French settlements in the Bahamas were faring well, unscathed by the Spanish sailing from Havana, and that the defenseless people that still lived at Nassau and the rest of the Bahamas lived by the policy of “the strongest man carries the day, with every man only doing what’s right in his own eyes” since they had no government to rely on or answer to.
He’d also come into the information that Fort Nassau still lay in ruins, with nine cannons having been stolen from it, and that any time raiders arrived on New Providence Island, the inhabitants would flee into the woods.
Nassau had been a refuge for pirates as far back as 1696, when pirate Henry Every called the place a safe port after bribing the governor with gold, silver and ivory stolen from Indian ships. After 1703, French and Spanish ships assaulted Nassau, with most colonists fleeing the settlement and England abandoning it, which allowed various pirates to use the ruins as a base of operations here and there. Three years after Captain Smith’s letter was written, the War of Spanish Succession would end, leaving hundreds of ex-privateers in the area without employment. Nassau would rise above and beyond Smith’s 1710 report, into a full blown pirate haven, not unlike St. Mary’s in Madagascar.
(Pictured is the Out Islands of the Bahamas, a 1722 sea chart showing Old Providence Island and surrounding islands in the Bahamas, and Nassau as a pirate haven in 1715 [as depicted in Black Sails])
