In March 1717, Hornigold attacked an armed merchant vessel sent to the Bahamas by the Governor of South Carolina to hunt for pirates. In the spring of 1717 the two pirate captains seized three merchant ships in quick succession, a Spanish one carrying 120 barrels of flour bound for Havana, another a Bermudian sloop with a cargo of spirits and the third a Portuguese ship travelling from Madeira with a cargo of white wine. When Hornigold took command of the Ranger, he delegated the captaincy of his earlier sloop to Teach. Hornigold's second-in-command during this period was Edward Teach, who would later be better known as the pirate Blackbeard.
By 1717, Hornigold had at his command a thirty-gun sloop he named the Ranger, which was probably the most heavily armed ship in the region, and this allowed him to seize other vessels with impunity. After a mutiny in the summer of 1716, he and his supporters were left with a captured sloop. Hornigold himself sailed a ship named the Marianne. His first documented acts of piracy took place in the winter of 1713–1714, when he employed periaguas (sailing canoes) and the sloop Happy Return, alongside Daniel Stillwell, John Cockram, and John West to menace merchant vessels off the coast of New Providence and its capital Nassau, where he had established a 'Privateers' or ' Pirates' republic. If so, he might have first served at sea aboard ships whose home port was either King's Lynn or Great Yarmouth. Hornigold's early life is unrecorded, although sometimes people claim he was born in the English county of Norfolk, where the surname Hornigold or Hornagold appears. He was killed when his ship was wrecked on a reef near New Spain during the hurricane season of 1719. In December 1718, Hornigold accepted a King's Pardon for his crimes and became a pirate hunter, pursuing his former allies on behalf of the Governor of the Bahamas, Woodes Rogers. Mindful not to attack British-led ships during his career, his crew eventually grew tired of the tactic and Hornigold was voted out as captain. It was at this time he appointed Edward Teach, best known in history books as "Blackbeard", as his second-in-command.
He helped to establish the " Republic of Pirates" in Nassau and by 1717 was the captain of one of the most heavily armed ships in the region, called the Ranger. Captain Benjamin Hornigold (1650–1719) was an English pirate who operated during the tail end of the Golden Age of Piracy.īorn in England in the late-17th century, Hornigold began his pirate career in 1713, attacking merchant ships in the Bahamas.
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