i'm studying the golden age of piracy in my spare time and I wanna share a good story. if you're the most famous pirate in the world... How do you get rid of a Man-of-war?
Henry Avery! The pirate who inspire that Whole Big Thing. at age 35, he mutinies aboard a privateer vessel called Charles II that was working for Spain. tl;dr being a sailor sucked
even more tl;dr the Charles II is renamed the Fancy by the fresh pirate crew and does many piratical things. in 1696 (at least by one account) a ship by that name arrives in New Providence in the Bahamas. The captain, a merchant called Bridgeman, meets with the governor (a dude named Sir Nicholas Trott. he offers Trott a very generous bribe for his crew to come ashore. the bribe itself was supposed to be paid by having each crew member offer 20 spanish pieces of eight and two gold pieces. Bridgeman would give a double share for a total of about £860. Trott's salary was £300!!!. and by the one account he also offers to let Trott keep the Fancy which had 46 guns!
Trott gathers his council (not telling them of the money he's been offered) and says "hey, this big ship will convince France to leave us the fuck alone" since the French were supposedly ~140-~150 miles away in Exuma. so they're like yeah we'll take the boat.
so they do and the boat supposedly also has: 50 tons of elephant tusks, 100 barrels of gunpowder, tons of guns, and apparently a lot of ship's anchors. oh wow! these people were obviously totally not pirates! Trott naturally ignored moral scruples.
aannnnyway, the pirate crew splits into three groups and there's a lot of stories about what happens to avery. no one really knows and some of you probably know he might've died penniless in Devon after trying to fence diamonds to dudes who fucked him over. it's a famous story. at least more well-known casually than this thing with the Fancy
but hey! sometimes when a guy says "I'll give you my gunship for free" he actually does possibly maybe who knows what really happened... give you the gunship for free