Battle of Cape Fear River
battle fought in September 1718
The Battle of Cape Fear River, also known as the Battle of the Sandbars, was fought in September 1718 between two sloops from the Province of South Carolina led by William Rhett and a group of pirate ships under the command of Stede Bonnet. Rhett's sloops defeated the pirates in the Cape Fear River estuary which led to Bonnet's eventual execution by hanging in Charleston, South Carolina.
Background
During the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, the Royal Navy was constantly in campaign against pirates in the Caribbean and off North America. Stede Bonnet was a very successful pirate, having captured several merchant ships and assembled his own squadron of pirate ships. In August 1718, Bonnet was sailing from the Delaware Bay to the Cape Fear River. He commanded his sloop-of-war flagship Royal James and two other armed sloops, Francis and Fortune. Royal James was a former flagship of Blackbeard which was armed with eight cannons.The other two sloops were similarly armed. All together, 46 pirates crewed them. Royal James was in need of careening and the hurricane season was soon to come so Bonnet chose the Cape Fear estuary as a reliable shelter against storms. For the next few weeks, Bonnet's crew repaired the Royal James with material salvaged from a captured shallop.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Battle of Cape Fear River” is battle fought in September 1718. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Battle, Cape and Fear, not as a finished interpretation.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2888243. Authority coordinates are 33.886, -78.013. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1718.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Cape Fear River” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.