Zebulon Wade

[golddigger105]

Hey Treasure Net,

Been doing some research and came across the name Zebulon Wade for the first time. Looks like he worked with Owen Lloyd for a bit but from what I've seen online there's not a whole ton of info about him. Didn't see him mentioned on here either. Just curious if anyone else has come across him in research before or been able to find out more about his life.

Thanks,
Golddigger105

 

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[Keppy]

Well Hi from Tnet. But i never heard of either one.What did they do ?

 

[golddigger105]

Well Hi from Tnet. But i never heard of either one.What did they do ?

Hi Keppy - they were pirates. First stumbled upon his name on the site but it comes up in a couple other searches online. None are too detailed unfortunately but it piqued my interest.
Treasure Island

 

[CPGs1]

 

[Keppy]

?? WOW i am not knowing much these days.

 

[Robot]

Capt'n Wade...1750's...Pirate King...Owen Lloyd...Treasure Island!

Capt'n Wade is best known as an associate of the Pirate Owen Lloyd

"Probably the most famous historical account of piracy involved Owen Lloyd, who was part of the crew on a Spanish treasure galleon named Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. In 1750, the ship was forced to seek shelter from a storm on the North Carolina coast, when, at the instigation of the first mate, the crew mutinied and escaped with the galleon's valuable cargo. Part of the cargo was loaded into two bilanders, one of which was commanded by Owen Lloyd. Lloyd and his associates then proceeded to St. Croix where they off loaded part of their plunder.
They then proceeded to Norman Island where the rest was stashed. Lloyd and his party then escaped to St. Eustatius where they were finally apprehended. Meanwhile, on Tortola, news had broken that this treasure existed and at the instigation of the acting President of the Colony, Abraham Chalwill, a group of prominent planters made their way to Norman Island and recovered the treasure. They divided the booty but were unable to enjoy their success for long. On hearing about the treasure, Gilbert Flemming, then Lieutenant Governor of all of the British Leeward Islands, promptly dispatched a British warship to recover the treasure from the island's planters. Fleming persuaded Chalwill (who had led the search for the treasure on Norman Island) to issue a proclamation whereby the treasure would be returned and the people who had dug it up would receive a one-third share as a reward.[SUP][5][/SUP] Reports of the content of the cargo vary - wilder accounts talk of chests of silver, more sober academic accounts suggest it was silks and spices."
"Norman Island has also been the subject of many local rumours, which may well be connected with the story of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. One of the more famous ones relates to a member of the Chalwell family[SUP][6][/SUP] had been fishing near Norman Island in 1915 and took shelter in one of the caves on the Western coast of Norman Island during a storm. The surge repeatedly banged his small boat against the walls of the cave, whilst the storm surge caused the water level to rise several feet. When the fortunate fisherman woke the next morning, a large number of rocks had broken off into his small craft, as had a small chest, supposedly filled with gold doubloons.[SUP][7][/SUP] The story cannot be verified as no legal application for treasure trove was ever made,[SUP][8][/SUP] but it is known that members of the family ceased being fisherman and left Tortola at about the time to open some shops in Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas. It is also asserted that when the first son of the fisherman in the tale got married, he gave his new daughter in law a necklace of Spanish dubloons that hung down to her knees on her wedding day."


Captain Zebulon Wade and the Seaflower

"Thirty-three-year-old Zebulon Wade, and his sloop, Seaflower,entered customs at Boston, Massachusetts on August 26, 1750. It had been another routine trip from Ocracoke, the same trip he had been making since the early days of King George’s War. He would carry American and European goods to Ocracoke which would be bartered for naval stores and produce from North Carolina plantations. Now he was headed home to Scituate where his family lived, a small seacoast village about fifteen miles south of Boston.
Zebulon greeted his wife Mercy and his three children; Zeb and Barney, twins, not yet two years old and Anna, who was just born that summer. While he was gone, she had been baptized.
Regretfully, Captain Wade told his wife that his two partners had arranged another trip to North Carolina and that he would have to return to Boston in a few days to load the Seaflower. After his brief visit, Captain Wade hitched a ride up to Boston where he then supervised the loading of his sloop. Among his crew were two sailors, Jonathan Deacon, aged twenty-seven, and Isaac Ray, aged seventeen, both of Massachusetts. There were two apprentice seamen from North Carolina. Abraham Pritchett, a gangly teenager of nineteen, was from New Bern and Thomas Hobson, was a fourteen-year-old cabin boy.
The Seaflower arrived at Ocracoke in early September where they found the Spanish galleon, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, at anchor inside the inlet in Teach’s Hole. He also met Owen and John Lloyd. Owen Lloyd was a familiar face—he had also made trading runs from Ocracoke to Boston in the 1740s.
Captain Bonilla of the Guadalupe hired Wade and the Seaflower to ferry half of his treasure to Norfolk. The other half was put on a New Jersey sloop called the Mary. The Lloyd brothers signed on for the trip to Norfolk. Owen was in need to get to St. Kitts as he and John had originally planned. As Owen Lloyd watched the unruly Outer Bankers banding together to move against the treasure-laden sloops, he came up with a plan to steal the treasure on his own. They would simply sail away with it while the Spanish guards were eating lunch. For the plan to work they needed Zebulon Wade’s cooperation. He reluctantly agreed, only because he recently suffered some financial setbacks at home. On October 20, 1750, the Seaflower unmoored and made a dash for the inlet. On board was a treasure that outdid anything the legendary Blackbeard ever scored.
Three weeks later, Owen and Zebulon Wade buried most of their treasure at Norman’s Island in the BVI and then left for St. Thomas. The Seaflower was abandoned here because her hull had become fouled which slowed the sloop down. From there, Lloyd and Wade went to St. Kitts in a sloop they had purchased and left shortly thereafter for St. Eustatius to hide out. They were soon captured and put into prison by the governor and were sentenced to hang. Lloyd, Wade, and his crew later escaped. Wade and his crew returned home but Zebulon’s life would never be the same. Because of his experience with Lloyd and the buried treasure he never returned to the sea. He died a broken man in 1759 without ever knowing that his run in with Owen Lloyd and a galleon’s treasure would be the future inspiration for Treasure Island."

Cohasset’s Pirate Ship
David Wadsworth​

​

"Reprinted with permission from the Cohasset Historical Society, Cohasset, MA (Town of Cohasset, Mass.,, 2005), pp.50-52.
An unusual tale of an early Cohasset-owned merchant sailing vessel engaged in activities bordering on seafaring piracy recently [late 1980s] came to light in the maritime archives of the Cohasset Historical Society. An old hand-written paper was found, telling of an eighteenth-century sea voyage that led to stolen Spanish silver and then to a Caribbean island prison. The writer of the paper was Benjamin Pratt, Sr.; the vessel was his great-grandfather Aaron Pratt's Three Sisters, an early Cohasset sloop; its shipmaster of piratical nature was Captain Zebulon Wade, and the year was 1750. According to the writer . . . , the Three Sisters actually was owned by Cohasseters Aaron Pratt (born in 1690), Stephen Stoddard (born in 1674), and Israel Whitcomb (born in 1700), and an otherwise unidentified Mrs. Binney "of Nantastick."
The seventy-five-ton sloop, locally built and on its maiden voyage, left local waters in late spring of 1750, presumably bound on a trading voyage to southern ports. Three Sisters soon was in sight of the dreaded shoals of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. There, the ship's crew spotted a vessel in distress, shipwrecked on the treacherous sands near the Cape. The wrecked vessel was found to be Spanish, and its crew was still on board. Captain Wade and Three Sisters "fell in" with the Spanish ship and found her to be carrying a cargo of silver bars, coined. Her voyage had originated in Spain's American colonies, called New Spaine, and her destination had been "Old Spaine" in Europe. The ship was carrying part of the Spanish treasure famed in both the Old and New Worlds.
A second vessel soon arrived on the scene of the wreck, and both captains struck a bargain with the doomed vessel's master, each agreeing to take aboard part of the silver treasure and to transport it to the original destination in Old Spaine. Captain Wade's Three Sisters took on board seventy tons of silver bars, and the remainder was placed aboard the other vessel, whose identity is not given. Unknown to the Spanish captain, the masters of both ships had already reached an agreement not to take the silver to Spain, but to take it to a West Indies island and bury it for their own future use. Thus it was that Three Sisters and its captain, Zebulon Wade, soon arrived at “Statia” (St. Eustacius, today an island of the Netherlands Antilles), and part of the silver was buried. The piratical venture soon was discovered by the authorities, however, when the second vessel became stranded on a sand bar and was boarded. Before he could bury all of the silver, Captain Wade was “found, taken, and put into Jail.”
Benjamin Pratt’s story continues, “Wade, by having so much silver, managed to get out of Jail and came home, but the vessel was detained and became a total loss to her owners.” It then appeared that the two like-minded ship’s captains, by now apparently experienced in the ways of pirates, “became adventurers all over the world . . . The buried silver was recovered by the Spanyards.” Pratt reported that a second vessel was sent to Statia by Mrs. Binney, one of the owners of Three Sisters. Aboard was Stephen Stoddard’s “Negro man” named Mingo, who had been on [the ship] and had helped Captain Wade bury the silver originally. Mingo and the second ship returned home empty handed. “It was reported,” wrote Pratt, “that the Spanyards had ploughed and dug the island near all over and had found probably the most of it.”
The Cohasset owners of Three Sisters, Aaron Pratt, Stephen Stoddard, and Israel Whitcomb, were neighbors residing on Beechwood Street. The story of Captain Zebulon Wade and the sloop . . . had been passed down through several generations of Aaron Pratt’s descendants before Benjamin wrote it down . . . Aaron’s son Thomas had recalled having helped his father “haul the timber to build the vessel, and she was builded over in Briggs’ building yard, being on the Scituate side of the Gulf Stream [River] on Turner’s pasture.”
As for Three Sisters, her first voyage for her owners also was her last, for she never returned to her original home port. Of Captain Zebulon Wade, he was known to have moved from his native Scituate to “Carolina,” where his son later was found to be a ship’s pilot on the North Carolina Rivers . . .
This story, written perhaps a century and a half ago, was recently found among papers in the account book of Marshall Pratt’s store, Beechwood Street. The tale of Captain Wade and the sloop Three Sisters is unusual, for it dates from the earliest years of Cohasset’s maritime era, a time from which few records have survived and of which little is known."

 

[golddigger105]

?? WOW i am not knowing much these days.

Me neither Keppy!!!

Nice to meet you cpgs1!

 

[golddigger105]

Thank you Robot! Looking forward to checking this out today!

 

[CPGs1]

Me neither Keppy!!!

Nice to meet you cpgs1!

always a pleasure to meet a nice golddigger hopefully the rockstar energy drink will help you get all the gold in the world