Jon Hagadorn

They made a battery of four guns upon the island and another battery of two guns on the north point of the road and warped in one of the sloops with eight guns at the mouth of the channel to hinder any vessels from coming in.

When this was done they went to work on their ship unrigging and unloading in order to clean where I shall leave them for a while till I bring another company to them.

In the month of November, 1716, General Hamilton, commander-in-chief of all the leeward Caribbean islands, sent a sloop express to Captain Hume, at Barbados, commander of his majesty's ship Scarborough, of thirty guns and a hundred and forty men, to acquaint him that two pirate sloops of twelve guns each molested the colonies, having plundered several vessels.

The Scarborough had buried twenty men, and had near forty sick, and therefore was but in ill state to go to sea.

However, Captain Hume left his sick men behind, and sailed to the other islands for a supply of men, taking twenty soldiers from Antigua.

At Nevis he took ten, and ten at St.

Christopher's, and then sailed to the island of Anguilla, where he learned that some time before two such sloops had been at Spanish Town, otherwise called, one of the Virgin Islands.

Accordingly, the next day the Scarborough came to Spanish Town, but could hear no news of the sloops, only that they had been there about Christmas time, it being then the 15th of January.

Captain Hume, finding no account could be had of these pirates, designed to go back the next day to Barbados, but it happened that night that a boat anchored there from Santa Cruz, and informed him that he saw a pirate ship of twenty-two or twenty-four guns with other vessels going into the northwest part of the island aforesaid.

The Scarborough weighed immediately, and the next morning came in sight of the rovers, and their prizes, and stood to them, but the pilot refused to venture in with the ship.

All the while the pirates fired red-hot bullets from the shore.

At length the ship came to an anchor, alongside the reef near the channel, and cannonaded for several hours both the vessels and batteries.

About four in the afternoon the sloop that guarded the channel was sunk by the shot of the men aboard.

Then she cannonaded the pirate ship of twenty-two guns that lay behind the island.

The next night, the eighteenth, it falling calm, Captain Hume weighed, fearing he might fall on the reef, and so stood off and on for a day or two to block them up.

On the twentieth, in the evening, they observed the man of war to stand off to sea, and took the opportunity to warp out, in order to slip away from the island.

But at twelve o'clock they run aground, and then seeing Case was desperate, and then seeing the Scarborough about, standing in again, as their Case was desperate, so they were put into the utmost confusion.

They quitted their ship, and set her on fire, with twenty negroes in her, who were all burnt.

Nineteen of the pirates made their escape in a small sloop.

But the captain and the rest, with twenty negroes, betook to the woods, where it was probable they might starve, for we never heard what became of them afterwards."