Henry Jennings, The Jacobite Cause

A landowner in Jamaica, Henry Jennings served as a privateer in Queen Anne’s War and then as part of Archibald Hamilton’s scheme to raise a Jacobite navy.  Jennings took three ships and 300 men in 1716 to ambush the salvage efforts of the sunken 1715 Spanish treasure fleet on the coast of Florida. After raiding the Spanish salvage camp he left with around 350,000 pieces of eight, and on the way back to Jamaica they captured another Spanish ship for 60,000 more pieces of eight.

Forced to flee Jamaica following Hamilton’s arrest, Jennings moved to Nassau where he displaced Benjamin Hornigold as the pirate leader and recruited over a thousand pirates to the Jacobite cause.  When amnesty was announced, however, he recognized that most of the pirates would accept it and realized the cause was lost.  He moved to Bermuda where he accepted King George’s amnesty and retired there as a wealthy man.