Stede Bonnet: The Gentleman Pirate of the Cape Fear
Near Wilmington, North Carolina
In the summer of seventeen eighteen, the pirate Stede Bonnet used the Cape Fear River as his base of operations, making the Carolina coast one of the most dangerous stretches of American waters. Bonnet was an oddity: a wealthy Barbadian plantation owner and militia major who abandoned his family in seventeen seventeen to become a pirate, famously paying his crew wages rather than splitting plunder. He captured about a dozen ships in a few months.
A naval expedition found him anchored here in late September. After a fierce battle, Bonnet was captured, tried, and hanged in Charleston on December tenth, seventeen eighteen, marking the end of the golden age of piracy along the American coast.
