How Blackbeard Worked

Better known as Blackbeard, Edward Teach (or, alternately, Thach) started out as a lowly privateer. Listen in as Katie and Sarah explore the facts behind the legendary pirate -- as well as the history of piracy -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. So Katie, I've
always really liked pirates. In high school, my friends and
I used to have kind of good pirate jokes. I

(00:22):
don't go to conventions or anything like. No, no, no,
I actually haven't even been a pirate for Halloween, but
I have. Really I do like them a lot, And
of course one of my favorites is Blackbeard. Well, I've
got you covered because the one Halloween I was a pirate,
and then this past Halloween, I was Abraham Lincoln and

(00:43):
wore a big black Beard, but mine did not have candlewicks.
And unlike black Beard. Blackbeard was one of the most
feared pirates in history. And it's no wonder with the
smoking fuses and the sashes full of pistols and pistols
across the chest. He definitely mastered the art of intimidation,

(01:05):
and he did a lot to keep that reputation up.
He wanted people fearing him, although we don't have any
evidence that he ever killed anyone who wasn't trying to
kill him. But when you're fearsome pirate, that's not exactly
the kind of rumor you want to spread around. The
intimidation kind of saves you a lot of work. You
just fire a few warning shots and the ship gets
handed over to you. You don't have to go through

(01:27):
the trouble of actually fighting and swashbuckling. So every story
that spreads around, like black Beard slicing off a passenger's
finger when he wouldn't give him his ring, that all
builds up to the great black Beard legend. But of
course Blackbeard wasn't always a pirate, and he obviously had
another name. He was born probably in Bristol, England, although

(01:50):
that's debated around six nine, as Edward Teach or possibly
Edward Thatch, no one's quite sure, which will be a
theme in black beards life. Somebody who's so surrounded in legend,
there's going to be a lot of conflicting information about him.
So Teach enlisted as a privateer for the British in
the War of Spanish Succession, which went from seventeen o

(02:12):
one to seventeen thirteen. Privateers were right on the cusp
of legal The British government obviously wanted to have as
big of a navy as possible, but they could enhance
it a little bit with privateers, which were allowed to
sack French and Spanish ships and take a share of

(02:33):
the booty for themselves, which would help you develop your
pirating skills. But of course the war comes to an
end eventually and privateers are no longer allowed to go
around sacking French and Spanish ships, and there are a
lot of people out of work, and some of them
end up turning to piracy. And the golden age of

(02:54):
piracy was the late seventeenth to the early eighteen centuries,
and as far as a mayor could goes, there have
been a bunch of laws passed by the British Parliament
which had made smuggling something that was a bit more
desirable because British imports were so expensive British taxes, right,
you could buy things so much cheaper from a pirate
than you could from them. So they would attack merchant

(03:16):
ships carrying grain, molasses, rum, rope, tools, ammunition, pretty much everything,
and go ahead and sell it to the colonists. And
because North Carolina's outer banks have shallow sounds and inlets,
it was a pirate's favorite hideout place, which is where
black Beard established his home base, but that wasn't until
seventeen eighteen, and before that he had to get in

(03:39):
some more pirate training. He did, and he did that
with Captain Benjamin Hornigold in the Caribbean. So in Blackbeard's
sort of apprenticeship, almost with Hornigold, they depart together and
plunder a bunch of Spanish and British ships of their
coco and cordwood, sugar, rum, molass, this, all of these

(04:02):
useful things. It's not so much the gold, treasure and jewels,
which of course is what you think of when you
think of black beard buried treasure, but you might just
be finding rum and sugar instead. Yeah, and during this time,
Teach gets his first captaincy of a small sloop. And
then the big guns come out when Hornicle's fleet attacks

(04:25):
a French slave ship called the Concorde that was bound
for Martinique, and Teach makes this his flagship and renames
it Queen Anne's Revenge. And it only had fourteen guns
to start with, so he added a bunch to make
it up to forty, because you know, you need your
guns when you're a pirate. It's more than eighty feet long.
They're three masts, and he also installs a cannon. And

(04:46):
Teach probably took this ship with his classic intimidation methods.
Rather than a bloody fight, It's likely he just fired
some warning shots and hoisted up the pirate flag, and
you know, the guys through and they don't want any
trouble with Blackbeard. But the captain of the Concorde also
reported when he got back to France that Teach gave

(05:06):
him a sloop to finish transporting his cargo of slaves,
which I was surprised to hear that. I always imagined
pirates making you walk the plank, and but that sounded
very gentlemanly, we thought. And Hornagold couldn't be Blackbeard's teacher
forever because after the war, the British government wanted to
get rid of all their pirates, so they got an

(05:27):
officer named Wood's Rogers and hired him as the governor
of the Bahamas and told him he'd better get rid
of the pirates. So he said he would grant pardons
to pirates who agreed to walk the straight and narrow,
and Hornagold is one of the ones who agreed, and
he became a pirate hunter. But that's okay with black
Beard by now, because he's really struck off on his

(05:48):
own and starts patrolling the Virginia and Carolina coasts for
his reign of terror from seventeen sixteen seventeen eighteen. So
we've already mentioned that the Outer Banks as fantastic a
place for pirates just because of how it's designed, but
it was also a great place for black Beard himself
because he met a lovely corrupt politician by the name

(06:09):
of Charles Eden there who would allow him clemency in
exchange for very generous bribes. So, in addition to the
excellent geography of North Carolina and the corrupt governor um he's,
black Beard actually ends up being kind of a folk hero.
The people of North Carolina. They're not the wealthy rice

(06:31):
growers or tobacco growers like South Carolina or Virginia, so
they're more okay with this deal where they get essentially
duty free goods from black Beard in exchange for sort
of letting him, letting him hang in the Outer Banks
and the folk here stuff also comes from Blackbeard's challenge

(06:53):
to the oppress of authority. He's lauded for sticking a
hot poker into the eye of British official, which sounds
pretty awful. But I feel that that's a running theme
and all the stuff that we've done about gangsters and
outlaws in any way, part of it is public opinion
of them being the hero who is the only one

(07:13):
who's willing to go up against corrupt authority. But it
also seems that that opinion always turned at some point
the the outlaw does something which just pushes the reputation
over the edge. And for black Beard, this is in
May seventeen eighteen in Charleston, so with four vessels and
as many as four hundred pirates, black Beard captures eight

(07:35):
or nine ships coming into and out of Charleston over
about a week, and he holds the cruise of the
ship's hostage, along with their passengers and passengers, their kids
on board, women on board, and um. Black Beard demands
a chest of medicine in exchange for the lives of
his passengers, but Charleston takes a while the pony up yes,

(07:59):
and in the mean time, the pirates have decided they're
not going to get it, and they've set all the
citizens up to be hanged like preparations are underway. They're
about to die, and Charleston eventually comes up with the
ransom and gets their people back, but not before the
pirates have taken all of their clothing and jewelry. Yeah,
they returned to shore almost naked, as the outraged description

(08:21):
is sent back to England. But all of this goes
down pretty quickly, and within a week of the Charleston
hostage situation, the Queen Ann's Revenge is grounded on a
sandbar near the entrance to present day Beefort Inlet, and
it's likely that Blackbeard beach this on purpose. He knew

(08:42):
how to sail a ship and how to scurry around
through the outer bank, so it's unlikely that he would
accidentally ground his ship um and it's possible he was
considering some kind of retirement or at least at least
trying to dismand this group of four hundred pirates and
break him up a little bit. Some people say he

(09:03):
marooned a bunch of pirates on one of the sandbars
when he left, and then took provisions from one of
the other ships and got out of there. In addition
to the blackade at Charleston. Black Beard by this point
had captured something like fifty ships, and he was also
charging tolls for other people's ships to make it through
Pamlico Sound. So things were beginning to come to a head.

(09:25):
And while North Carolina and Charles Eden were pretty okay
with the pirrating money off the whole situation right, the
rich Virginia planters and South Carolina planters were not, and
they appealed to the Governor of Virginia, Alexander spots Would
to do something about it, and he engages Lieutenant Robert

(09:45):
Maynard of the Royal Navy to hunt down black Beard.
And it's not as hard as it sounds to find
black Beard. He's you know, you'd think it would be
difficult to find a pirate, right, not if he's throwing
the biggest pirate party known to man on Ocracoke Island,
which I would kind of like to be invited to.

(10:06):
I don't know, it might sound more fun than it
really was. Drinking, womanizing, and pirates from all over the
world were invited to come, and come they did and
made a complete spectacle out of themselves. So during this
drunken pirates shindig, Maynard shows up with his sloops intending

(10:26):
to kill or capture Blackbeard, and the pirates are aware
that Maynard is there, but they're trapped between this island
and a sandbar, so they prepare themselves over the night,
and well accounts a Blackbeard was very calm. His pirates
were starting to get worried. Yeah, they were freaking out

(10:48):
a little bit. He kept drinking. Everyone else went out
and put sand on the decks in case there was blood,
and so blankets and water in case there were fires,
and began preparations battle. And Teach only has twenty men too,
while Mannard has about sixty. But teach his man advantage
here is mounted weapons on his sloop, which is called

(11:10):
the adventure. So in the morning, everyone's kind of expecting
Teach to try to make a getaway. Instead he waits
and Maynard's men start to approach, and then at the
last minute, Teach just shoots off to a little winding
channel which no one else saw. Yes, it's right by
a sandbar, and Mannerd's men all get stuck. But Mannard

(11:33):
is pretty good captain, and he tells everybody to start
throwing extra supplies overboard, and so they lighten the ships
enough that they're able to sail free, and Maynard recounts
that Teach drink damn nation to me and my men,
whom he styled cowardly puppies an insult. Iron're going to
be your new insult, killing someone a cow actually beware.

(11:56):
And at this point Blackbeard's crew is bombarding Synard's ship
with iron scraps and nails from the guns, basically everything
they've got, and so Maynard and his men going hide
below deck, all tricky like, and because the ship is
so quiet after this bombardment, they're even grenades involved. Teach
thinks that they're dead, and the pirates board the ship,

(12:19):
black Beard included, and all of a sudden, Maynards men
rush out their lives prize the gotcha moment and teaching
Maynard go to a face to face battle that actually
gets written about in the London papers, and it's really

(12:39):
it looks like it should be in an action movie
Maynards story, if it hasn't already. Maynards sort has spent.
He shoots black Beard. Um black Beard survives after being shot,
and obviously guns are they put a big hole in you.
At this point, and one of Maynard's men jumps in

(13:02):
that the last minute of this brutal fight between these
two men and slashes Blackbeard's neck, and um, I don't
know how he did this with a with a bloody
slash neck, but black Beard apparently says, well done, lad
are maybe apocryphal, but it's still a good detail. But

(13:23):
when he died, he'd been shot multiple times and stabbed
multiple times and kept fighting until the very very end.
And Maynard's man actually cuts off black Beard's head, which
is strung up on the ship as a warning to
other pirates. And Maynards searched and searched for black Beard's treasure,
as people have been doing for years, but all he
found were supplies and letters. And during the fight, eight

(13:47):
of the other pirates were killed. Some cried for mercy
and some were arrested and they were brought to trial,
and all but two were hanged. So the pirates didn't
get off so easily either. And this was pretty much
the end of piracy, or at least the golden age
of piracy. That was November twenty, seventeen eighteen, when black
Beard was killed. So in addition to the legend about

(14:10):
the treasure, there's another pretty amazing one about Black Beards skull.
So his head is hung up on the ship. But
what happens to the skull? Maybe it went to the
University of Virginia. There's a legend that says the skull
was dipped in silver and kept by the university, where
fraternity members were once required to drink from it upon

(14:34):
their initiation of a great grandfather who went to the
University of Virginia. Now I'm starting to wonder was he
in a fraternity as a former member of the Greek system.
I salute to uv A for a great rumor. You
can actually go visit black Beard Island. It was acquired
by the Navy Department and then in nineteen twenty four
was made a preserve and breeding ground for wildlife and birds.

(14:57):
You can only go there by boat, which I feel
is fitting quaint now is it? Do so? If you'd
like to learn more about piracy from Black Beards Time
to today, check out How Pirates Work at how stuff
works dot com, and if you have any suggestions you'd
love to send us, email us at History Podcast at
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(15:19):
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