Norman Island and the pirates of the BVI

What the records say about pirates in the BVI

The best evidence for pirates in the Virgin Islands is the mail of the man who had to deal with them. Walter Hamilton, governor of the British Leeward Islands, reported to the Council of Trade and Plantations in London, and his letters survive in the Calendar of State Papers. On March 1, 1717 he wrote that HMS Scarborough had found pirates in the harbor of St. Croix on January 15, sunk their sloop and watched their ship, "a fine galley of about 26 guns", run aground and burn; about 20 escaped by night in a small sloop, and the rest were later "taken off by the sloop commanded by Bellamy".

That November Hamilton toured the British islands himself, and his letter of January 6, 1718 reads like a surveyor's notebook: Spanish Town, as Virgin Gorda was then called, held 54 men and not 2,000 acres of workable land; Tortola was mountainous and rocky with good timber; Beef Island had two families; Peter Island's harbor was fit only for sloops. Settlements that thin could not police their own water, and the next line of the letter shows it. Off St. Thomas a British sloop told him of a ship that had fired on it under British colors, then hoisted "a white Ensign with the figure of a dead man spread in it".

Blackbeard off the Virgin Islands, December 1717

Blackbeard was in these waters late in 1717, and the same letter names him. Two pirates had just taken trading sloops off St. Christopher's, "The ship is commanded by one Captain Teatch, the sloop by one Major Bonnett", with 22 or 26 guns mounted on a ship that all agreed could carry 40. Enclosed was the sworn statement of Henry Bostock, master of the sloop Margaret: on December 5, 1717, off Crab Island, the old English name for Vieques, "Capt. Tach" took his cargo of cattle and hogs, his arms, books and instruments. The ship, Bostock said, was a French slaver of 36 guns and 300 men, with a great deal of plate aboard, bound for Hispaniola to careen and wait for the Spanish treasure ships.

That ship was almost certainly La Concorde, the French slaver taken off Martinique late that autumn, per North Carolina's Queen Anne's Revenge project, which also notes that his real name is uncertain, usually some form of Edward Thatch or Teach. His career ended at Ocracoke Inlet in North Carolina in 1718. Nothing in the papers we read puts him ashore in the BVI. Blackbeard's Castle on St. Thomas is a name: the tower is Skytsborg, built in 1679 by the Danish governor as a watchtower, decades before Blackbeard sailed.

Norman Island's buried silver, 1750

Spanish silver really was buried on Norman Island in 1750, and here the legend has paperwork behind it. The Danish West India and Guinea Company's letters, now in the Danish national archive, carry the story. A Spanish ship, the Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, was dismasted in a gale in 1750 and towed behind the Outer Banks of North Carolina; her captain moved the cargo into two hired sloops. Around the start of October, an Englishman named Owen Lloyd took the sloops and sailed south. Probably in mid-October they reached Norman Island and found 52 chests of Spanish silver in the hold, each of three bags of 1,000 coins, and buried about 150,000 pieces of eight ashore. A British court later put the whole cargo at more than 250,000 Spanish dollars.

It did not stay buried long. Abraham Chalwell, president of the island council on Tortola, went to Norman Island and seized goods and coins; Gilbert Fleming, Lieutenant-General of the Leeward Islands, wrote from Tortola to the Danish vice-governor on St. Thomas, where the crew had sold part of the cargo, asking for his cooperation; Lloyd was arrested on St. Eustatius. One crewman, William Blackstock, gave his examination on November 26, 1750. Some 57,000 pieces of eight have never been accounted for, and that gap is the whole of the legend that something is still there.

Treasure Island and the Dead Man's Chest

Norman Island is often called the model for Treasure Island. Stevenson never said so, and his own account points elsewhere. In his 1894 essay on writing the book, he listed what he worked from: a map he drew himself, a few memories of Poe, Defoe and Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson's Buccaneers, "the name of the Dead Man's Chest from Kingsley's At Last", and some canoeing. Charles Kingsley's At Last, from 1871, passes Virgin Gorda and complains that English buccaneers had given the islands "less poetic names. The Dutchman's Cap, Broken Jerusalem, The Dead Man's Chest, Rum Island, and so forth."

Dead Chest is the islet west of Salt Island, and since 1980 it has sat inside the National Parks Trust's Dead Chest and RMS Rhone park, 800 acres where anchoring and fishing are prohibited. The legend that Blackbeard marooned fifteen men there with a bottle of rum is the song's chorus grown into a story; no record we read holds it. The Norman Island link is a legend too, though a natural one: an island with buried pirate silver, a few miles from the rock that gave Stevenson his song.

Norman Island today: the Bight, Pirates Bight and the Willy T

Today the island is privately owned and uninhabited, by the description of Pirates Bight, the restaurant on the beach of the Bight, the bay on its west side with more than 100 moorings. The pirates live on as a theme. Pirates Bight opens for a season that runs from October to July; moored in the bay, the Willy T is a floating bar and grill, and the Willy T 2, the boat before it, now lies on the bottom as a dive site with pirate sculptures, sunk by Beyond the Reef. The Caves and the Indians, the snorkel and dive sites nearby, are where most day boats stop first. Hours for both businesses are in the facts above.

The tradeoff: the island is reached by boat only, a short sail from Road Town, and it has no customs office. A boat from St. John or St. Thomas clears into the BVI at West End first, with a passport for everyone aboard; from Tortola, a charter or a day boat does the work.

Questions about the BVI