"They made a Bowl of Punch, and went to drinking the Pretender's Health."

From left to right: boatswain Ignatius Pell, quartermaster Robert Tucker, captain Major Stede Bonnet, and mariner William Hewet.

This is a rough attempt to imagine the scene in the cabin of the sloop Francis on the night of July 31, 1718 (Old Style) after Bonnet and his men captured it. In one version, the Francis's mate, James Killing testified that "they cursed and swore for a Light . . . cut down the Pine-Aples with their Cutlasses . . . made a Bowl of Punch, and went to drinking the Pretender's Health, and hoping to see him King of England." Bonnet claimed to have been asleep when the Francis was taken, but this picture discounts that story.

There were at least two persons of African descent on Bonnet's sloop Revenge, but there is no evidence whether Hewet was one of them; his homeland, Jamaica, was overwhelmingly black in population, but the fact that he stood trial rather than being immediately sold into slavery like the black men on Roberts' Royal Fortune may point at his being white. I showed Tucker dipping his mug into the punch bowl, on the theory that a small trading sloop would be unlikely to have such luxuries as serving spoons, and pirates unlikely to use them even if they were available. I tried to depict the square pipe for an old-fashioned elmwood bilge pump running from floor to ceiling, but Bonnet's shadow ended up obliterating most of that. Also, in reality, a sloop wouldn't have nearly this much headroom below deck.

I'm a beginner at pencil drawing, and this picture was way more ambitious than I had any business trying, but c'est la vie. Maybe the next one will be better.