Benjamin Hornigold - Early Career

Early Career

Hornigold's early life is unrecorded, though it is possible he was born in Norfolk, England, and, if so, he might have first served at sea aboard ships whose home port was either King's Lynn or Great Yarmouth. His first documented acts of piracy were in the winter of 1713-1714, when he employed periaguas (sailing canoes) and a sloop to menace merchant vessels off the coast of New Providence and its capital Nassau. By 1717 Hornigold had at his command a thirty-gun sloop he named the Ranger, which was likely the most heavily armed ship in the region and allowed him to seize other vessels with impunity.

His second-in-command during this period was Edward Teach, who would later be better known as the pirate Blackbeard. When Hornigold took command of the Ranger he delegated the captaincy of his earlier sloop to Teach. In the spring of 1717 the two pirate captains seized three merchant ships in quick succession, one carrying 120 barrels of flour bound for Havana, another a Bermudan sloop with a cargo of spirits and the third a Portuguese ship travelling from Madeira with a cargo of white wine.

In March 1717 Hornigold attacked an armed merchant vessel sent to the Bahamas by the Governor of South Carolina to hunt for pirates. The merchantman escaped by running itself aground on Cat Cay, with its captain later reporting that Hornigold's fleet had increased to five vessels with a combined crew of around 350 pirates.

Hornigold is recorded as having attacked a sloop off the coast of Honduras, but as one of the passengers of the captured vessel recounted, they did us no further injury than the taking most of our hats from us, having got drunk the night before, as they told us, and toss'd theirs overboard.