August 11, 2025 • 62 mins
Join us on an intriguing journey as we unravel the mysterious origins and legacy of the notorious pirate Captain Blackbeard, also known as Edward Teach or Edward Tatch. Listen in as we explore the various theories surrounding his birthplace, from the bustling port city of Bristol, England, to the sun-soaked shores of Jamaica, and even Bath County, North Carolina. We'll paint a vivid picture of the world Blackbeard inhabited, a time marked by England's colonial expansion and the flourishing Atlantic trade that provided fertile ground for piracy. Through our conversation, we distinguish between privateers and buccaneers, highlighting the socio-political forces that shaped the early 18th-century piracy landscape.
As we navigate the uncertain waters of the early 18th century, we'll trace Blackbeard's transformation from an English privateer to one of history's most infamous pirates. Discover how the end of the War of the Spanish Succession left many privateers, including Blackbeard, seeking new avenues of survival and infamy. Our discussion delves into his alliances with fellow pirates like Steed Bonnet and Benjamin Hornigold, culminating in the capture of the French ship La Concorde, rechristened as the Queen Anne's Revenge. Through tales of pirate havens and lucrative captures, we'll reveal how Blackbeard cemented his legendary status.
In the gripping conclusion, we follow Blackbeard's dramatic final stand and the legacy he left behind. We recount the strategic moves of Virginia's Governor Spotswood and Lieutenant Robert Maynard, leading to the fierce battle at Ocracoke Inlet and Blackbeard's eventual demise. Reflecting on the decline of piracy during this era, we also touch on the fate of his contemporaries like Stede Bonnet and Calico Jack Rackham. Blackbeard's story lives on through publications that have elevated his status to that of an iconic pirate captain. Join us as we ponder whether his brief yet impactful career truly warrants the legendary status he holds today.
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The man known to history as the pirate Captain Blackbeard is an
historical enigma. There is a considerable debate
as to where he was born and grewup.
Accounts from the early 18th century suggest his name was
Edward Teach, Edward Tach, or some variant of that kind.
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Yet even this information is notreliable, as those who engaged
in piracy in early modern times often adopted pseudonyms for
legal reasons and to ensure no social stigma was attached to
their more law abiding relatives.
Traditional narratives tell thatBlackbeard was born in the city
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of Bristol in southwest England around 1680.
There is generally agreement on his birth being around this time
due to descriptions of him beingin his mid 30s in the mid 1710s.
Supporters of the idea that he was born in Bristol point
towards primary source documentation of the time, which
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refers to the notorious pirate captain as, quote, a Bristol man
born. Furthermore, in the 17th
century, cities like Manchester,Birmingham and Newcastle had yet
to emerge as industrial centres and were little more than
provincial towns, while Liverpool had yet to begin its
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bewildering ascent as the epicenter of the triangular
Atlantic slave trade in England.In the 17th century, power
resided in Bristol, which aroundthe time of Blackbeard's birth
was the home of much of England's Atlantic trade.
Bristol was the second largest city and port in England, with
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many of its residents becoming employed as Mariners, including
perhaps the notorious Edward Teach.
Other places have also been nominated as the original home
of Blackbeard, including Jamaica.
The theory behind this location is based on evidence from a
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separate contemporary document which refers to Blackbeard as
quote born in Jamaica of very creditable parents. 1/3 theory,
which has been promoted in a recent book, contends that Teach
was actually a man by the name of Edward Beard who came from
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Bath County in North Carolina. As one reviewer of this book
noted, in the absence of any concrete evidence with which to
determine the actual facts of the notorious pirate captain's
early life, the theory of his origins in North Carolina are as
plausible as any other. While little is known of
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Blackbeard's early life, it is far easier to reconstruct the
political and social world in which he lived.
Whether he was born in Bristol, Jamaica, or North Carolina, he
was born and raised in England'sexpanding colonial empire.
England was a late arrival to successfully implementing
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colonization schemes in the New World, only beginning its ascent
in the early 17th century when it established colonies in
Virginia and in Massachusetts. Though other empires such as
Spain and Portugal had begun conquering the Americas earlier,
the English tenaciously continued to establish colonies
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in an attempt to expand their influence.
By the 1630s, English colonies have been established on some of
the small islands of the Caribbean and West Indies, such
as Nevis, Saint Kitts, Bermuda and Barbados.
In the mid 1650s, Jamaica was wrested from Spain on a military
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expedition which Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of
the English Commonwealth, termedThe Western Design War with the
Dutch Republic in the mid 1660s saw the Dutch colony of New
Holland fall and was renamed NewYork by the English.
Through treaty and warfare, English colonies also conquered
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Native American tribes lands up and down the North American
seaboard. Trade flourished between these
new colonies and the home country fuelled cash crops such
as sugar and tobacco. This was the world of the
English Atlantic, in which Blackbeard and many other
pirates came to prominence in the early 18th century.
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It is worth briefly backtrackingat this juncture to examine the
nature of piracy in the early modern world.
The word piracy is something of an historical misnomer.
This word was not used initiallyin early modern times to refer
to naval bandits. Instead, there were two types of
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what we would call pirates. The first of these, and the one
from which the more modern word pirate is derived, were
privateers. These were captains of ships who
are employed in an unofficial capacity by the governments of
European states to attack the shipping of rival nations.
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They were given letters of mark or permission from rulers.
However, if anyone asked too many questions, they were acting
in a private capacity, hence thename privateers.
The benefits of this arrangementallowed monarchs like Queen
Elizabeth, the first of England,to employ privateers like Sir
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Francis Drake to attack Spanish shipping in the Caribbean in the
1570s and 1580s, while England was at peace with Spain without
her government being directly complicit in attacking the
shipping of another country. For the privateers, the
occupation ensured government protection and even national
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fame, whereas later pirates wereforever on the run from the
governments of every nation. These latter kinds of pirates,
who operated solely on their owninitiative and who hid out in
pirate havens, should rightly betermed Buccaneers.
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These Buccaneers operated primarily in the northern and
eastern Atlantic in the first half of the 16th century,
sailing out of remote ports in southern Ireland, the English
West Country, and even parts of North Africa along the coast of
Morocco. But by the second-half of the
17th century, as European colonial settlements grew in
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number in the Americas, they hadrelocated westwards and were
increasingly based out of piratehavens in the Caribbean, where
they could strike directly at the growing number of ships
travelling between the English, Spanish and French colonies.
The increase in Caribbean naval traffic led to a huge explosion
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in piracy in the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds by the time
Teach was born. However, one final element was
needed to drive the expansion ofpiracy in the early 18th
century. In November 1700, King Charles
the Second of Spain died withouta clear air.
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His will directed that Philippe Avonjou, a grandson of the King
of France, Louis the 14th, should succeed him.
But the Austrian House of Habsburg also had a strong claim
to the Spanish throne, and the English and the Dutch were
anxious to avoid the French securing control over the vast
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Spanish Empire. Consequently, a pan European war
erupted, the War of the Spanish Succession.
It lasted for 13 years. Much of it played out in the
Atlantic World, with numerous naval clashes along the eastern
seaboard of North America and the Caribbean.
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As this occurred, the governmentof Queen Anne in England began
fitting out extra ships to send to fight the Spanish and the
French across the Atlantic, while letters of mark allowing
privateer captains to attack Spanish and French shipping were
also distributed. This latter arrangement was a
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cheap approach, as the government issued such letters
to individuals who owned their own ships.
A great many of those who becamesome of the most notorious
pirates in the decades to come entered English government
service in this way during the War of the Spanish Succession.
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Edward Teach was seemingly one of these naval figures.
While we know virtually nothing about his upbringing and early
adult years, there are snippets of evidence which suggests that
he was active in the Caribbean by the 1700s and sailing aboard
ships which were attacking Spanish shipping in the
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Caribbean during the war. Whatever the details of his
background were, a few things are discernible by this time.
For instance, we know that he could read and possibly write as
well. It did not always follow that
people could do both. In pre modern times, some people
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could read but were only able tomake a mark on a document when
it came to signing it, indicating that they could not
write. Given this, he may have come
from a family, a fairly affluentbackground and had access to
some schooling in his youth. By the late 1700s or early 1710s
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he was actively sailing with theprivateers who were in the semi
employment of the English Crown in the Caribbean.
Teach or Tach was based out of Jamaica and one near
contemporary account offers a brief reference to his time
engaged in this activity, claiming he distinguished
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himself for his uncommon boldness and personal courage.
However, he was never given command of a privateer ship and
sailed under the direction of others.
This is not wholly unexpected given his relatively young age.
It is possible that he had become one of the more senior
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officers on board one of these privateering ships by the early
1710s, given his rapid subsequent rise.
In 1713, disaster befell the small army of English privateers
plying the waters between Newfoundland and the Caribbean.
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After years of stalemate, the decision makers at the courts of
London, Paris, Madrid and Viennanegotiated a peace settlement
and agreed that if Spain and France never united under 1
member of the House of Bourbon, a member of the French royal
family could sit on the Spanish throne.
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Britain and Austria were compensated for agreeing to this
through the transfer of Spanish lands and colonies in Italy, the
Mediterranean, the Caribbean andelsewhere to them.
With that, the War of the Spanish Succession came to an
end, leaving thousands of privateers out of work.
They now had a choice, return toland, try and find positions as
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legitimate Mariners working on board merchant ships or strike
out as lawless Buccaneers. Many chose the latter option and
Teach was amongst them. An account of his doings
published in 1724 in London states that he headed to
Barbados, and there he found employ on a ship of Buccaneers
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commanded by Steed Bonnet, a figure who has become known as
the Gentleman Pirate. Under Bonnet, Teach served as a
foremast man, a middling officer, as they began raiding,
shipping, sailing off the coast of the English colonies of North
America. The exact chronology of events
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concerning Blackbeard in this first year or so of his piracy
career is not entirely clear. He worked with Bonnet for a
time, although Steed's genteel behaviour seems to have rubbed
some of his men the wrong way, and they eventually ejected him
from his command and appointed Teach as their new captain.
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Other evidence points towards Blackbeard and Bonnet ultimately
remaining on good terms. In any event, Bonnet was back up
and running with a separate crewbefore long, and through much of
1717, Blackbeard, Bonnet and another pirate captain by the
name of Benjamin Hornigold were attacking shipping in the
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western Atlantic and Caribbean. They were particularly active in
the waters off the Carolinas andwhat would later become Georgia
eastwards towards the Bahamas, where points like New Providence
were effectively pirate havens at this time.
This stretch of water from the Outer Banks eastwards was
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completely lawless in the immediate aftermath of the war,
and it was here that Blackbeard and Bonnet made their names and
their riches, attacking any Spanish, English or French
merchant ships attempting to pass from Florida N towards the
ports of Philadelphia, NY and Boston.
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By the autumn of 1717, Blackbeard was by and large
sailing in alliance with Hornigold.
They had three ships, an old Sloop which Teach had acquired
around the time he was still a junior partner to Steed Bonnet,
and the ship which he acquired after Bonnet's crew removed him
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from his leadership position. This was called the Revenge, a
not uncommon name for pirate ships.
One wonders why the name abounded.
Perhaps these former privateers felt they had been treated
poorly in the peace settlements arranged in 1713 and 1714, and
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believed that their turn towardspiracy was an act of revenge
against the government that had not provided adequate
compensation for their wartime service.
To these two ships was added Hornigold's ship, the Ranger.
A fourth ship of an unknown namewas added soon afterwards so
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that Teach, Hornigold and otherssuch as David Heriot and Israel
Hands, who were junior commanders to Blackbeard, were
sailing a small flotilla of pirate ships along the eastern
seaboard of North America. Records indicate they captured
numerous ships and robbed them of their goods here in October
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1717. These included the Robert and
the Good Intent 2 ships based out of Philadelphia in
Pennsylvania and Dublin in Ireland.
The score must have been substantial as Hornigold decided
to retire after these attacks. He left with one of the smaller
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sloops and the Ranger. In an interesting twist,
Hornigold soon offered his services as a pirate hunter.
He and Teach would never see each other again.
While Blackbeard and his crew were now down to the smaller
Sloop and the Revenge, they soonacquired the ship which
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Blackbeard is most famous for owning.
On the 28th of November 1717, heand his men came across a French
ship not far from the island of Saint Vincent in the Caribbean.
This was a Guinea Man, the colloquial name for a slave ship
due to how these vessels generally plied their trade
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along the Guinea coast of Western Africa before
transporting their human cargo to the Americas.
The ship was named La Concorde, though it had earlier been an
English ship before being captured by the French during
the previous war. Teach and his crew fired off
several broadside shots of cannon and the French quickly
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surrendered, running to over 31 meters in length.
With a complement of 40 cannons and able to hold a crew of 200
or more pirates, La Concorde wasa bigger ship than any Teach had
captained before. He thus made it his flagship and
renamed it the Queen Anne's Revenge.
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Again naming the boat after Queen Anne, who had died in
1714, right around the time the war ended and former privateers
like Teach decided to become Buccaneers, suggests A pining
for the days when they believed they have been well treated by
the English government. Exactly what was done with the
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slaves is unclear. Some may have been marooned with
the French crew of LA Concorde, though it is also plausible that
Teach recruited some of them as pirates who joined his crew with
his new flagship and his other two vessels.
Blackbeard continued to raid in the Caribbean and along the
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shores of the English colonies through the winter of 1717 and
into the spring of 1718. One of his most infamous prizes
was the Great Allen, a large merchant ship which was seized
near Saint Vincent within days of the capture of the Queen
Anne's Revenge. The sacking of this ship,
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stranding of its crew on shore, and then burning of it was
reported as far afield as New England, where the Boston
Newsletter noted that Teach had three ships under his command
and at least 150 pirates, thoughother accounts suggest that the
numbers in his pirate crew had swelled to well over 300 by that
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time. It was the first of half a dozen
valuable prizes which Blackbeardand his crew captured that
winter around the Caribbean. The captain of one of these,
Henry Bostock, provided one of the most extensive and reliable
accounts of Blackbeard when he was deposed by the governor of
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the island colony of Saint Christopher shortly after his
return. He noted Teach as being very
tall and thin, and possessed of an immense Blackbeard.
At that juncture, Bostock believed that they intended to
winter on the island of Hispaniola with a view to trying
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to intersect one of the Spanish treasure ships which still
sailed from the Americas to Europe every year, with the now
admittedly thin supply of silverand gold from the mines of
Mexico and Bolivia. In all of this, Blackbeard and
his followers were operating within what was broadly termed
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the Alliance of Pirates. This had been in existence since
the late 16th century, when it first emerged in the Atlantic
world as Buccaneers sought to profit at the expense of Spanish
shipping. Crossing from its enormous
empire in the Americas to Europe, the alliance involved
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loosely allied pirate crews who worked together to establish
safe havens in ports in disparate locations.
In the early 18th century, some of these were found in places
like Bermuda and Jamaica, but others were much further afield
in parts of western Africa. While for a time Madagascar, off
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the coast of southeast Africa, had become a major pirate haven
where shipping from India and the East Indies to Europe could
be intercepted. All of these pirate crews were
seeking to steal anything they could.
It was rare that chests full of gold or jewels would show up,
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contrary to Hollywood depictionsof piracy.
Instead, staple forms of loot were actually large consignments
of products like sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, dyes,
and spices of various kinds, allof which were valuable and could
fetch good profits if sold in the right location.
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One thing was also clear. These pirates almost certainly
never buried their loot. They sold it for money, and then
they spent the money. If a pirate was wandering around
the Caribbean of the early 18th century with a map with an X on
it, he was very much an oddity. Blackbeard's reputation within
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this alliance of pirates was established quickly.
While much of the legend surrounding him was burnished by
tall tales in later times, thereis little doubt that he managed
to impress his contemporaries through his audacity and also
his physically imposing presence.
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His beard was, one will not be surprised to learn, black and
was grown in such a fashion thatit covered much of his face.
It was memorably described as a large quantity of hair, which,
like a frightful meteor, coveredhis whole face, and frightened
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America more than any comet thathas appeared there for a long
time. So long was it that he would
twist some of it into ribbons and turn them round his ears in
pigtails. In combat, he was said to walk
the deck of his ship with a bandolier of three pistols slung
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over his shoulder and wearing a fur cap.
Legend has it that some form of lit matches or dynamite was
placed by him coming out of the sides of his cap or beard.
So that quote imagination cannotform an idea of a fury from hell
to look more frightful. His private life had an element
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of pure fiction and legend around it.
For instance, the important account of Teacher's life, which
was published in 1724, claimed he was a polygamist who had been
married at least 14 times, with a dozen of his wives still alive
at the time of writing. In the mid 1720s it was common
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practice, the same author noted,for the pirate captain and his
wives to engage in orgies. How much of this can actually be
taken seriously, or whether or not it was entirely fabricated
to shock a gullible reading audience in early Georgian
England, is open to considerabledebate.
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Though it is notable that many historians of the Golden Age of
Piracy do think that the author of this account, a writer who
went by the pen name Charles Johnson, was himself a pirate
who may have been active in the Caribbean in the late 1710s.
Teach, or Tach, was also known for his heavy drinking.
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On one occasion, after a night of heavy imbibing, he allegedly
had his men set fire to the entire lower deck of a ship and
then wandered around roaring about how he had created a
version of Hell. A journal of his which has not
survived, but which was allegedly found in his ship
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after his death, contained entries like Such A Day, Rum All
Out and elsewhere. Such a Day took one with a great
deal of liquor on board to kept the company hot, Damned hot, and
all things went well again. It isn't difficult to see from
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descriptions like this how Blackbeard and pirates like him
gained A reputation for loose living and debauchery.
These salacious and often fantastical details about his
appearance and private life aside, Blackbeard's reputation
and legacy was based, above all other things, on his actions in
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the winter of 1717 and into the spring and early summer of 1718.
After wintering in the Caribbean, he and his men
evidently abandoned the idea of striking at the Spanish treasure
fleet and instead sailed for theCarolinas in North America.
It was at this time that Teach decided that they would blockade
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the port of Charleston in what is now South Carolina.
Charleston was one of the most important port towns in the
entirety of the British coloniesacross North America.
By the early 18th century, it was the epicenter of the tobacco
trade in the southern colonies, and huge consignments of tobacco
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were shipped from there to the European market every year.
Few people would have ever considered attacking a port this
substantial for the very simple reason that it would have
generated too much attention, and it was assumed that the
defenses of the port would be substantial enough to ward off a
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pirate attack. But Teach was about to prove
them wrong. That May, his ships showed up on
the outskirts of Charleston. The blockade of Charleston
continued for a period of 9 or 10 days.
The port of Charleston lies inside the Charlestown Bar, a
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bar or stretch of Shoals which form a shallow barrier at the
mouth of the Ashley River. Ships have to navigate the
Charlestown Bar carefully to avoid running aground on the
Shoals. Aware of this, Blackbeard and
his crews anchored their ships along the bar and waited here
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for their prey to try and enter or leave Charleston.
They captured several ships in the process, one being the
Crowley, an English ship which was disembarking to head across
the Atlantic to London. On board were several prominent
officials and figures who Blackbeard took captive, sending
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word to the Governor of South Carolina, Robert Johnson, that
he had them prisoner and demanding ransom, principally in
the form of medicines. An act which suggests an
outbreak of disease of some kindamongst teachers crew, or
perhaps a growing poncho for smoking opium amongst the pirate
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crew. Whichever was the case, an
arrangement was eventually worked out and Blackbeard
released his captives after depriving them of their
valuables and receiving a ransom.
He then decided it was best to make himself scarce before a
flotilla of Royal Navy ships could be gathered to strike
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against him. The blockade of Charleston was
one of the most striking events in the whole of the Golden Age
of Piracy, a period of upwards of two weeks in which a pirate
crew managed to effectively block all passage in and out of
one of the foremost port towns of North America.
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While the blockade of Charlestonmight have seemed like a
striking statement about the power of the Alliance of
Pirates, in the years following the War of the Spanish
Succession, events were conspiring to bring about a
major crackdown on the actions of Blackbeard and his many
allies. As early as 1715, the government
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of the new British monarch, KingGeorge the First, who had
arrived from Germany just weeks earlier to commence the rule of
the House of Hanover following Queen Anne's death, entered into
a programme of piracy suppression.
The new King and his ministers were deeply disturbed to learn
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that a great many of the Mariners and privateers who had
so recently been allies of the Crown against the French and
Spanish were now attacking any shipping they came across
indiscriminately. On the one hand, it struck at
English economic interests in the region, while the fact that
those who were attacking the ships in the Caribbean and North
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Atlantic had so recently been allied with the Crown risked
creating a diplomatic crisis forEngland if they continue to
strike at French or Spanish ships.
Consequently, there was a determination to end the
piratical activity from 1715 onwards.
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This made little headway in the first year or two.
It wasn't until the HMS Scarborough, a ship of the Royal
Navy, managed to capture a pirate ship off the island of
Saint Croix in the Caribbean early in 1717 that the first
victory was achieved. But there was a clear awareness
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that dozens of pirate ships wereoperating across the North
Atlantic. Many proposed a strategy of
conciliation through which the pirate captains and their
followers would be offered pardons and would be allowed to
keep much of their I'll gotten gains if they agreed to cease
their buccaneering activity. Realizing that it would be
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cheaper and swifter to take thisapproach, in September 1717, the
government of George the First issued the Proclamation for the
Suppression of Pirates, or the Act of Grace, as it was more
widely known. It stipulated that any pirate
who surrendered himself to a senior English magistrate or
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governor in one of the North American colonies or in the
Caribbean before the 5th of September 1718 would be pardoned
of any crimes he or she had committed prior to the 5th of
January 1718. The deadline was subsequently
extended forward to the 1st of July 1719.
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The catch was that anyone who did not surrender by that time
would have a large bounty placedon their head and would be
haunted by the Royal Navy. Blackbeard and many others like
him now had to make a decision, accept the riches they had
accumulated and retire, or keep going and risk everything.
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Teachers movements in the monthsthat followed, and indeed the
course of the remainder of his life, were substantially
influenced by two figures of very differing temperaments and
attitudes towards piracy. One of these was Charles Eden, a
British colonial officer who hadbeen appointed as the Governor
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of North Carolina in 1714 and who held that post through the
early 1720s. Eden was notoriously corrupt and
was clearly in cahoots with Teach and others like Steed
Bonnet and Benjamin Hornigold. One important source for the
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Life of Blackbeard, published in1724, even suggests that Eden
oversaw the nuptials for one of teachers. 14 marriages.
Official complaints concerning his conduct in the late 1710s
suggested he had benefited financially and materially from
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facilitating piratical activity off the coast of the Carolinas.
This was the figure to whom manyformer pirates turned to obtain
pardons in 1718 and 1790. The counterpoint to Eden was
Alexander Sportswood. He was a military commander who
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had been appointed as the governor of the Virginia Colony
to the immediate north of the Carolinas in 1710, in the midst
of the war with France and Spain.
He is generally credited with expanding the Virginia Colony in
the years that followed and beginning the process whereby
the colony expanded westwards into the Blue Ridge Mountains
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and into what would become the state of West Virginia.
Spotswood was a by the book government official who did not
engage in the kind of corrupt dealings his colleague in North
Carolina did. When the orders began arriving
from 1715 onwards to crack down on the growing piracy threat, he
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was determined to implement those same orders.
He took an uncompromising approach to Blackbeard and his
allies in 1718, determining thathe would prosecute them with all
military and naval power he could muster if they refused to
accept the generous pardon offerwhich had been extended to them
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by King George's government. Eden and Spotswood loomed over
the pirates in the late 1710s, one offering a way out, the
other promising their destruction if they did not
surrender. For Blackbeard, the decision to
seek a pardon was made easier for him by the events which
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occurred in the fortnight following the blockade of
Charleston. In the immediate aftermath of
the quasi naval siege of this major port town.
Teach and his crews sailed N with the intention of careening
their ships on Beaufort Inlet inwhat is now North Carolina,
scraping out the hulls and preparing them for a possible
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voyage to the Caribbean. But for whatever reason, maybe
the prodigious amounts of alcohol the crew was said to be
fond of, both the Queen Anne's Revenge and one of the smaller
sloops were accidentally run aground on the sands of the
inlet. The primary mast of Teacher's
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flagship, as well as extensive parts of the hull, was damaged
in the process, and the crews did not have sufficient supplies
to fix the ship. There is a theory that this
might not have been as accidental as it first seemed,
and that Blackbeard had possiblydecided to scuttle the ship in
an effort to reduce the size of his crew drastically, hoping
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they would disperse on land on the Carolinas and potentially
leave him and his closest followers with a larger part of
the booty they had acquired in blockading Charleston and the
raid through the Caribbean the previous winter.
Whether accidental or intentional, June 1718 saw the
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Queen Anne's Revenge left in thewaters off North Carolina and
was eventually claimed by the sea.
Whether Blackbeard intentionallyscuttled the Queen Anne's
Revenge or not is doubly significant because the sinking
of his flagship and the other Sloop now led him to join a
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growing number of Buccaneers whowere seeking to obtain a pardon.
He had first learned of the offer of amnesty when he was in
the Caribbean in the winter of 1717.
It is possible that after learning of the amnesty offer
that Blackbeard decided to seizeone last large score by
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blockading Charleston, safe in the knowledge that he could
avail of the pardon offer thereafter.
He then blockaded Charleston, scored a big final loot and ran
the Queen Anne's Revenge aground2 weeks later in order to drive
off most of his crew and so be able to seize a greater
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proportion of the loot himself. This would certainly match with
the fact that in the Midsummer of 1718, just a week or two
after the flagship was destroyed, he presented himself
before Governor Eden and obtained A pardon from the Crown
government for all his previous wrongdoings.
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This was a brilliant way of extricating himself from the
pirate life, having acquired some hefty riches in the process
of a few years of buccaneering. Even more fortuitous for
Blackbeard and other pirates were the growing tensions
between England and Spain following Spain's reoccupation
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of the island of Sardinia in theMediterranean, one of the
territories it had ceded to Austria a few years earlier at
the end of the War of the Spanish Succession.
If war broke out yet again between England and Spain.
Teach, Bonnet and others were doubtlessly calculating that
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they might find themselves beingoffered letters of mark to
operate as privateers on behalf of the English government once
more. If Blackbeard was imagining that
he could have his cake and eat it in this fashion, then he was
soon disabused of the notion. Having obtained his pardon from
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Eden in late June 1718, he and many other pirates began
settling in coastal communities along the shores of the
Carolinas. But he hadn't banked on the more
scrupulous governor of Virginia,Alexander Spotswood.
No sooner had Eden handed out pardons to Blackbeard and many
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other pirates. Who then began settling along
the Outer Banks and other parts of the Carolinas.
Then Spotswood began preparing to prosecute these same
individuals. He was able to do so because
there was a flaw in Blackbeard'splan.
The proclamation for the Suppression of Pirates or the
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Act of Grace that had held out the promise of pardons to
Buccaneers like Teach had contained a very specific
provision that anyone availing of the amnesty offer could do so
until September 1718, a deadlinewhich was later extended into
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1719. But it also contained A proviso
that they would only receive pardons for crimes and misdeeds
perpetrated prior to the 5th of January 1718.
This stipulation had been included for a very specific
reason, to prevent individuals doing exactly what Blackbeard
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had done, learning of the pardonoffer and then deciding to
engage in one last bout of piratical activity, knowing that
a pardon could be acquired afterwards.
Teach had done precisely this when he blockaded Charleston, an
action which had been carried out four months after the 5th of
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January 1718 deadline. Armed with this knowledge,
Spotswood once determined to prosecute Blackbeard and his
followers, regardless of the pardon which Eden had issued to
them. In the summer of 1718, as
Spotswood began plotting to undermine Blackbeard, Teach
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himself was settling down near Bath Creek on Plum Point in
North Carolina. He still had one small ship left
after the wreckages in June, andhe had put in a petition to
become a privateer. As England descended into war
again with the Spanish, many of his more loyal crewmen settled
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in the region with him. Eden probably was anxious that
he would obtain a letter of Markand leave North Carolina, aware
that there was a growing suspicion of his own behavior
and role in issuing pardons to those involved in the blockade
of Charleston the previous May. There were also issues quickly
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emerging around lawlessness, drunkenness, and public disorder
in the coastal communities that the former pirates had settled
in. It was in this environment that
claims arose in August that Teach have been involved in a
piracy attack on a French ship sailing along the coast, though
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the Admiralty court in Pennsylvania quickly convened
and decided the ship had been wrecked.
Naturally, all of this was enough for Spotswood to decide
in Virginia that he stood on firm enough ground to override
Eden and begin efforts to prosecute the former pirates in
the Carolinas as though their pardons were not valid, an
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approach which was legally soundgiven that the blockade of
Charleston had occurred well after the January 1718 deadline.
Throughout August and September of 1718, Spotswood and his
officials gathered sufficient information from individuals
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such as William Howard, the former quartermaster of the
Queen Anne's Revenge, to have a good idea where Teach and his
closest allies were residing in North Carolina.
Armed with this information, he began plotting a military
campaign to the Outer Banks. He appointed Lieutenant Robert
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Maynard, a veteran of the War ofthe Spanish Succession, to
oversee the mission and granted him the use of two ships, the
Ranger and the Jane, the latter being the HMS Pearl, renamed.
Just over 50 men would accompanyMaynard on board the two ships
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with an offer held out of a substantial financial reward for
killing or capturing Blackbeard.One offered by the local
government of the Virginia colony, who were worried that
Teach and his associates would become a major problem for their
trade and would soon begin attacking ships if left to his
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own devices in North Carolina. Thus, armed with dozens of
cannons and incentives, Maynard and his men set out from
Virginia on their two ships on the 17th of November 1718.
An extensive contemporary account of the events which
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followed was published in Londonin 1724 and provides an unusual
level of detail concerning what would ultimately prove to be the
final events of teacher's life. After four days of tiptoeing
down the coast, Maynard and his men on the Ranger and the Jane
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arrived at Ocracoke Inlet on theOuter Banks near what is now
called Cape Lookout. They had proceeded cautiously
with the aim of not alerting Blackbeard or any of his
followers to their arrival in North Carolina.
Nevertheless, it appears that Teach was informed of their
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coming, and he may have been tipped off by the Buccaneers
perennial friend Governor Eden. As a result.
Before Maynard and his crews ever arrived in North Carolina,
Teach had ordered his former crew members to begin making up
his remaining ship, the small Sloop The Adventure, for them to
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either engage Maynard or else totry to slip away if he did
arrive. They did not make a pre emptive
move to flee from the Outer Banks as this was not the first
warning they had received about a possible effort by Spotswood
and the Virginians to capture him.
Had he not had these previous false alarms, he might have been
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more alert to the potential threat.
Instead, Teach and several of his crew were said to have spent
the night before Maynard and hisships arrived to Ocracoke Inlet
drinking in a local Tavern. Maynard and his men laid anchor
at the mouth of the inlet on theevening of the 21st of November
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1718. They spent the night there and
only moved in the morning after hoisting the King's colours to
let anyone they came across knowthat they were on Crown
business. By then Teach and approximately
two dozen of his men were on board the adventure.
Blackbeard cut the cables to loosen the ship and ordered his
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men to begin firing at Maynard'sships.
His undoing was that the adventure ran aground as he went
to escape. Baynard was thus able to weigh
anchor and pull up close, ordering his superior number of
men who had far more cannons to begin firing on the adventure.
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An exchange followed between Blackbeard and Maynard shouting
across the water at each other, with Teach allegedly finishing
it by raising a glass of spiritsto his assailant and drinking it
with a shout that he would offerMaynard and his men no quarter
before once again ordering his men to open fire.
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A dozen or so men were lost on both sides in the exchange of
fire, which then followed Blackbeard nearly one the day as
Maynard's men tried to engage them through the shallow waters.
Teach made it to Maynard at thisjuncture and was engaging him
when Maynard's sword broke. The Lieutenant would probably
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have died had one of his men notsuddenly intervened and sliced
Teach badly along his neck and throat.
He was shot moments later, at which point his few remaining
followers began fleeing from thescene as Blackbeard fell dead to
the ground. It had been a fitting last
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stand, as one account put it. Here was an end of that
courageous brute who might have passed in the world for a hero
had he been employed in a good cause.
Maynard ordered that his head becut off and taken on board his
ship. He then sailed onwards to Bath
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Town to acquire medical aid for his wounded men.
Correspondence between Teach, Eden and others was allegedly
discovered on the wreck of the Adventure and in Blackbeard's
house, which indicated the Governor's complicity with the
pirates and even individuals in New York.
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A diary of teachers was also apparently discovered, though if
this is true, it sadly has not survived.
After recovering somewhat at Bath Town, Maynard and his men,
with several of the pirates taken as prisoners, returned to
Virginia to collect their bounty.
Many of the prisoners were placed on trial and later
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executed. Blackbeard's head was set up on
a spike at the entrance to the Chesapeake and the James River
in Virginia as a warning to any other pirates tempted to ply
their trade off the coast of this particular colony.
News soon spread of the notorious pirate captain's
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demise, with the newspapers in New York and Boston reporting on
the famed buccaneer's death on the 22nd of November.
By early December, Blackbeard was just the first of the great
pirate captains who died as partof the brutal government
crackdown in the late 1710s. Two weeks before Teach was
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killed, his old accomplice, Steed Bonnet, had been captured
and taken alive. He was given a perfunctory trial
and sentenced to death. He was hanged in Charleston, the
scene of Blackbeard's greatest triumph, on the 10th of December
1718. A few months later, Benjamin
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Hornigold, who had returned to the sea as a pirate hunter of
sorts, was wrecked at sea duringa hurricane and never seen
again. In November 1720, another
infamous Buccaneer, Calico Jack Rackham, was captured on
Jamaica. He was executed at Port Royal
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and his body was put hanging on a gibbet as a warning to all
would be pirates in the region. Two well known female
Buccaneers, Mary Reed and Anne Bonnie, were captured with
Calico Jack. Both of them were seemingly
spared as they were pregnant. Bonnie disappeared from the
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historical record altogether after that, but Reed died in
prison. Finally, Buffalo MU Roberts, a
pirate who is often credited with inventing something akin to
the skull and Crossbones pirate flag, was killed in February
1722 in a clash with a Royal Navy ship off the coast of Gabon
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in western Africa. Hence, within a few years of
Blackbeard's death, the vast majority of the more prominent
pirate captains had joined him in Davy Jones's locker.
Others relocated entirely to theIndian Ocean, where they were
less likely to end up dead. Figures like Henry Every, a
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hugely successful pirate of the 1680s and 1690s who retired in
1696 and probably lived a happy later life in obscurity into the
1710s, were the exception ratherthan the rule when it came to
piracy in its supposed golden age.
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By the time Bartholomew Jack waskilled in the spring of 1722,
the legend of the Buccaneers wasalready beginning to emerge.
Their exploits had caught the imagination of the English
public, and in London in 1724 a book appeared which began to
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establish Blackbeard as a paragon of the infamous pirate
captain. This was entitled A General
History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious
Pirates and was allegedly authored by a figure called
Captain Charles Johnson. No record exists of any captain
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sailing out of an English port under this name, and it is
assumed that he was using a pen name or pseudonym, a fact which
has led to much speculation as to who the author of the General
history might have been. The most interesting theory
holds that the author was DanielDefoe, who had published his
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canonical work Robinson Crusoe five years earlier in 1719.
Whoever the author of the general history was, it cannot
be understated how influential it was in establishing modern
ideas concerning the Golden Age of Piracy and the reputations of
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figures like Blackbeard and Steed Bonnet.
In it, Teach and over two dozen other famous pirate captains
were profiled. While elements of the pirate
life, such as the raising of theJolly Roger flag were noted,
Blackbeard's reputation and legend was further enhanced as
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the years went by. The 19th century saw a
renaissance in pirate law. For instance, he was the basis
of the central character in Matilda Douglas's fictional work
Blackbeard, a page from the colonial history of
Philadelphia, though it had little to do with his actual
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actions off the coast of North Carolina.
More significant was the publication, in serial form in
the early 1880s of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a
work which more than any other established a wide array of
tropes concerning the Buccaneersof the Golden Age of Piracy.
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Blackbeard is both mentioned directly by Stevenson, and 1
character is named Israel, Handsin reference to the deputy
commander of the Queen Anne's Revenge.
A slew of popular works in the 20th century have all been based
to some extent on Blackbeard, notably JM Barry's rendering of
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Captain Hook in Peter Pan, a pirate captain whose hook hand
is the equivalent of Teach running around the deck of his
ship with dynamite in his beard.A great many television shows
and films have centred on characters either called
Blackbeard or based on the popular cultural image of
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Blackbeard, the most recent version being found in Disney's
Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
Blackbeard's status as the most infamous of all the Buccaneer
captains of the Golden Age of Piracy has ensured that academic
interest in him remains high, and universities have been able
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to obtain funding for projects related to him, no matter how
loose the connection might be. In the late 1990s, a project
discovered the wreckage of the Queen Anne's Revenge off the
coast of North Carolina. Naval archaeological expeditions
at the site have since retrieved30 cannons and 10s of thousands
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of different artifacts which canbe associated with the wreckage.
Live underwater footage of the wreck was even broadcast in the
early 2000s. In 2011, the National Geographic
Society confirmed that the wreckage was Blackbeard's
infamous ship, as sufficient evidence had accumulated by that
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time to confirm it as such. Notably a wine glass decorated
to commemorate the accession of King George the First as the new
monarch of Britain in 1714, and a sword similarly marking the
accession of Louis the 15th as King of France in 1715.
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Fragments of a book entitled A Voyage to the South Sea,
published in 1712, have even been identified from the
wreckage or objects which suggest a wreck from the
second-half of the 1710s, which,when combined with the location
of the wreck and the nature of the ship, make it very likely
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that it is the Queen Anne's Revenge.
The story of the pirate Captain Blackbeard is very unusual.
He has acquired a status as the quintessential pirate, a
swashbuckling Buccaneer who terrorized shipping across the
Caribbean and along the seaboardof what would become the United
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States. The circumstances of his birth
are unclear, including where he was born and when.
Well, the vast majority of his life is an enigma.
The historical record becomes more concrete from the mid 1710s
onwards when he suddenly bursts into the Atlantic world in his
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mid 30s. His career as a Buccaneer only
lasted about two years before hewas killed.
Blackbeard's short stint as a pirate was similar to most of
the famed Pirates of the Golden Age, many of them in the years
immediately following the end ofthe War of the Spanish
Succession. The majority of these pirates
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invariably were killed or captured in the late 1710s.
In this sense, Blackbeard's story is entirely representative
of the Pirates of the era. What do you think of Blackbeard?
Is his reputation actually overrated, given that he was
only a pirate captain for a brief period of time, or does
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the terror he inspired make him a true legend?
Please let us know the comments section and in the meantime,
thank you very much for watching.
The man known to history as the pirate Captain Blackbeard is an
historical enigma. There is a considerable debate
as to where he was born and grewup.
Accounts from the early 18th century suggest his name was
Edward Teach, Edward Tach, or some variant of that kind.
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Yet even this information is notreliable, as those who engaged
in piracy in early modern times often adopted pseudonyms for
legal reasons and to ensure no social stigma was attached to
their more law abiding relatives.
Traditional narratives tell thatBlackbeard was born in the city
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of Bristol in southwest England around 1680.
There is generally agreement on his birth being around this time
due to descriptions of him beingin his mid 30s in the mid 1710s.
Supporters of the idea that he was born in Bristol point
towards primary source documentation of the time, which
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refers to the notorious pirate captain as, quote, a Bristol man
born. Furthermore, in the 17th
century, cities like Manchester,Birmingham and Newcastle had yet
to emerge as industrial centres and were little more than
provincial towns, while Liverpool had yet to begin its
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bewildering ascent as the epicenter of the triangular
Atlantic slave trade in England.In the 17th century, power
resided in Bristol, which aroundthe time of Blackbeard's birth
was the home of much of England's Atlantic trade.
Bristol was the second largest city and port in England, with
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many of its residents becoming employed as Mariners, including
perhaps the notorious Edward Teach.
Other places have also been nominated as the original home
of Blackbeard, including Jamaica.
The theory behind this location is based on evidence from a
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separate contemporary document which refers to Blackbeard as
quote born in Jamaica of very creditable parents. 1/3 theory,
which has been promoted in a recent book, contends that Teach
was actually a man by the name of Edward Beard who came from
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Bath County in North Carolina. As one reviewer of this book
noted, in the absence of any concrete evidence with which to
determine the actual facts of the notorious pirate captain's
early life, the theory of his origins in North Carolina are as
plausible as any other. While little is known of
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Blackbeard's early life, it is far easier to reconstruct the
political and social world in which he lived.
Whether he was born in Bristol, Jamaica, or North Carolina, he
was born and raised in England'sexpanding colonial empire.
England was a late arrival to successfully implementing
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colonization schemes in the New World, only beginning its ascent
in the early 17th century when it established colonies in
Virginia and in Massachusetts. Though other empires such as
Spain and Portugal had begun conquering the Americas earlier,
the English tenaciously continued to establish colonies
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in an attempt to expand their influence.
By the 1630s, English colonies have been established on some of
the small islands of the Caribbean and West Indies, such
as Nevis, Saint Kitts, Bermuda and Barbados.
In the mid 1650s, Jamaica was wrested from Spain on a military
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expedition which Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of
the English Commonwealth, termedThe Western Design War with the
Dutch Republic in the mid 1660s saw the Dutch colony of New
Holland fall and was renamed NewYork by the English.
Through treaty and warfare, English colonies also conquered
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Native American tribes lands up and down the North American
seaboard. Trade flourished between these
new colonies and the home country fuelled cash crops such
as sugar and tobacco. This was the world of the
English Atlantic, in which Blackbeard and many other
pirates came to prominence in the early 18th century.
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It is worth briefly backtrackingat this juncture to examine the
nature of piracy in the early modern world.
The word piracy is something of an historical misnomer.
This word was not used initiallyin early modern times to refer
to naval bandits. Instead, there were two types of
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what we would call pirates. The first of these, and the one
from which the more modern word pirate is derived, were
privateers. These were captains of ships who
are employed in an unofficial capacity by the governments of
European states to attack the shipping of rival nations.
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They were given letters of mark or permission from rulers.
However, if anyone asked too many questions, they were acting
in a private capacity, hence thename privateers.
The benefits of this arrangementallowed monarchs like Queen
Elizabeth, the first of England,to employ privateers like Sir
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Francis Drake to attack Spanish shipping in the Caribbean in the
1570s and 1580s, while England was at peace with Spain without
her government being directly complicit in attacking the
shipping of another country. For the privateers, the
occupation ensured government protection and even national
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fame, whereas later pirates wereforever on the run from the
governments of every nation. These latter kinds of pirates,
who operated solely on their owninitiative and who hid out in
pirate havens, should rightly betermed Buccaneers.
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These Buccaneers operated primarily in the northern and
eastern Atlantic in the first half of the 16th century,
sailing out of remote ports in southern Ireland, the English
West Country, and even parts of North Africa along the coast of
Morocco. But by the second-half of the
17th century, as European colonial settlements grew in
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number in the Americas, they hadrelocated westwards and were
increasingly based out of piratehavens in the Caribbean, where
they could strike directly at the growing number of ships
travelling between the English, Spanish and French colonies.
The increase in Caribbean naval traffic led to a huge explosion
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in piracy in the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds by the time
Teach was born. However, one final element was
needed to drive the expansion ofpiracy in the early 18th
century. In November 1700, King Charles
the Second of Spain died withouta clear air.
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His will directed that Philippe Avonjou, a grandson of the King
of France, Louis the 14th, should succeed him.
But the Austrian House of Habsburg also had a strong claim
to the Spanish throne, and the English and the Dutch were
anxious to avoid the French securing control over the vast
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Spanish Empire. Consequently, a pan European war
erupted, the War of the Spanish Succession.
It lasted for 13 years. Much of it played out in the
Atlantic World, with numerous naval clashes along the eastern
seaboard of North America and the Caribbean.
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As this occurred, the governmentof Queen Anne in England began
fitting out extra ships to send to fight the Spanish and the
French across the Atlantic, while letters of mark allowing
privateer captains to attack Spanish and French shipping were
also distributed. This latter arrangement was a
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cheap approach, as the government issued such letters
to individuals who owned their own ships.
A great many of those who becamesome of the most notorious
pirates in the decades to come entered English government
service in this way during the War of the Spanish Succession.
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Edward Teach was seemingly one of these naval figures.
While we know virtually nothing about his upbringing and early
adult years, there are snippets of evidence which suggests that
he was active in the Caribbean by the 1700s and sailing aboard
ships which were attacking Spanish shipping in the
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Caribbean during the war. Whatever the details of his
background were, a few things are discernible by this time.
For instance, we know that he could read and possibly write as
well. It did not always follow that
people could do both. In pre modern times, some people
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could read but were only able tomake a mark on a document when
it came to signing it, indicating that they could not
write. Given this, he may have come
from a family, a fairly affluentbackground and had access to
some schooling in his youth. By the late 1700s or early 1710s
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he was actively sailing with theprivateers who were in the semi
employment of the English Crown in the Caribbean.
Teach or Tach was based out of Jamaica and one near
contemporary account offers a brief reference to his time
engaged in this activity, claiming he distinguished
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himself for his uncommon boldness and personal courage.
However, he was never given command of a privateer ship and
sailed under the direction of others.
This is not wholly unexpected given his relatively young age.
It is possible that he had become one of the more senior
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officers on board one of these privateering ships by the early
1710s, given his rapid subsequent rise.
In 1713, disaster befell the small army of English privateers
plying the waters between Newfoundland and the Caribbean.
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After years of stalemate, the decision makers at the courts of
London, Paris, Madrid and Viennanegotiated a peace settlement
and agreed that if Spain and France never united under 1
member of the House of Bourbon, a member of the French royal
family could sit on the Spanish throne.
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Britain and Austria were compensated for agreeing to this
through the transfer of Spanish lands and colonies in Italy, the
Mediterranean, the Caribbean andelsewhere to them.
With that, the War of the Spanish Succession came to an
end, leaving thousands of privateers out of work.
They now had a choice, return toland, try and find positions as
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legitimate Mariners working on board merchant ships or strike
out as lawless Buccaneers. Many chose the latter option and
Teach was amongst them. An account of his doings
published in 1724 in London states that he headed to
Barbados, and there he found employ on a ship of Buccaneers
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commanded by Steed Bonnet, a figure who has become known as
the Gentleman Pirate. Under Bonnet, Teach served as a
foremast man, a middling officer, as they began raiding,
shipping, sailing off the coast of the English colonies of North
America. The exact chronology of events
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concerning Blackbeard in this first year or so of his piracy
career is not entirely clear. He worked with Bonnet for a
time, although Steed's genteel behaviour seems to have rubbed
some of his men the wrong way, and they eventually ejected him
from his command and appointed Teach as their new captain.
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Other evidence points towards Blackbeard and Bonnet ultimately
remaining on good terms. In any event, Bonnet was back up
and running with a separate crewbefore long, and through much of
1717, Blackbeard, Bonnet and another pirate captain by the
name of Benjamin Hornigold were attacking shipping in the
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western Atlantic and Caribbean. They were particularly active in
the waters off the Carolinas andwhat would later become Georgia
eastwards towards the Bahamas, where points like New Providence
were effectively pirate havens at this time.
This stretch of water from the Outer Banks eastwards was
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completely lawless in the immediate aftermath of the war,
and it was here that Blackbeard and Bonnet made their names and
their riches, attacking any Spanish, English or French
merchant ships attempting to pass from Florida N towards the
ports of Philadelphia, NY and Boston.
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By the autumn of 1717, Blackbeard was by and large
sailing in alliance with Hornigold.
They had three ships, an old Sloop which Teach had acquired
around the time he was still a junior partner to Steed Bonnet,
and the ship which he acquired after Bonnet's crew removed him
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from his leadership position. This was called the Revenge, a
not uncommon name for pirate ships.
One wonders why the name abounded.
Perhaps these former privateers felt they had been treated
poorly in the peace settlements arranged in 1713 and 1714, and
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believed that their turn towardspiracy was an act of revenge
against the government that had not provided adequate
compensation for their wartime service.
To these two ships was added Hornigold's ship, the Ranger.
A fourth ship of an unknown namewas added soon afterwards so
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that Teach, Hornigold and otherssuch as David Heriot and Israel
Hands, who were junior commanders to Blackbeard, were
sailing a small flotilla of pirate ships along the eastern
seaboard of North America. Records indicate they captured
numerous ships and robbed them of their goods here in October
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1717. These included the Robert and
the Good Intent 2 ships based out of Philadelphia in
Pennsylvania and Dublin in Ireland.
The score must have been substantial as Hornigold decided
to retire after these attacks. He left with one of the smaller
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sloops and the Ranger. In an interesting twist,
Hornigold soon offered his services as a pirate hunter.
He and Teach would never see each other again.
While Blackbeard and his crew were now down to the smaller
Sloop and the Revenge, they soonacquired the ship which
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Blackbeard is most famous for owning.
On the 28th of November 1717, heand his men came across a French
ship not far from the island of Saint Vincent in the Caribbean.
This was a Guinea Man, the colloquial name for a slave ship
due to how these vessels generally plied their trade
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along the Guinea coast of Western Africa before
transporting their human cargo to the Americas.
The ship was named La Concorde, though it had earlier been an
English ship before being captured by the French during
the previous war. Teach and his crew fired off
several broadside shots of cannon and the French quickly
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surrendered, running to over 31 meters in length.
With a complement of 40 cannons and able to hold a crew of 200
or more pirates, La Concorde wasa bigger ship than any Teach had
captained before. He thus made it his flagship and
renamed it the Queen Anne's Revenge.
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Again naming the boat after Queen Anne, who had died in
1714, right around the time the war ended and former privateers
like Teach decided to become Buccaneers, suggests A pining
for the days when they believed they have been well treated by
the English government. Exactly what was done with the
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slaves is unclear. Some may have been marooned with
the French crew of LA Concorde, though it is also plausible that
Teach recruited some of them as pirates who joined his crew with
his new flagship and his other two vessels.
Blackbeard continued to raid in the Caribbean and along the
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shores of the English colonies through the winter of 1717 and
into the spring of 1718. One of his most infamous prizes
was the Great Allen, a large merchant ship which was seized
near Saint Vincent within days of the capture of the Queen
Anne's Revenge. The sacking of this ship,
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stranding of its crew on shore, and then burning of it was
reported as far afield as New England, where the Boston
Newsletter noted that Teach had three ships under his command
and at least 150 pirates, thoughother accounts suggest that the
numbers in his pirate crew had swelled to well over 300 by that
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time. It was the first of half a dozen
valuable prizes which Blackbeardand his crew captured that
winter around the Caribbean. The captain of one of these,
Henry Bostock, provided one of the most extensive and reliable
accounts of Blackbeard when he was deposed by the governor of
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the island colony of Saint Christopher shortly after his
return. He noted Teach as being very
tall and thin, and possessed of an immense Blackbeard.
At that juncture, Bostock believed that they intended to
winter on the island of Hispaniola with a view to trying
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to intersect one of the Spanish treasure ships which still
sailed from the Americas to Europe every year, with the now
admittedly thin supply of silverand gold from the mines of
Mexico and Bolivia. In all of this, Blackbeard and
his followers were operating within what was broadly termed
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the Alliance of Pirates. This had been in existence since
the late 16th century, when it first emerged in the Atlantic
world as Buccaneers sought to profit at the expense of Spanish
shipping. Crossing from its enormous
empire in the Americas to Europe, the alliance involved
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loosely allied pirate crews who worked together to establish
safe havens in ports in disparate locations.
In the early 18th century, some of these were found in places
like Bermuda and Jamaica, but others were much further afield
in parts of western Africa. While for a time Madagascar, off
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the coast of southeast Africa, had become a major pirate haven
where shipping from India and the East Indies to Europe could
be intercepted. All of these pirate crews were
seeking to steal anything they could.
It was rare that chests full of gold or jewels would show up,
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contrary to Hollywood depictionsof piracy.
Instead, staple forms of loot were actually large consignments
of products like sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, dyes,
and spices of various kinds, allof which were valuable and could
fetch good profits if sold in the right location.
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One thing was also clear. These pirates almost certainly
never buried their loot. They sold it for money, and then
they spent the money. If a pirate was wandering around
the Caribbean of the early 18th century with a map with an X on
it, he was very much an oddity. Blackbeard's reputation within
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this alliance of pirates was established quickly.
While much of the legend surrounding him was burnished by
tall tales in later times, thereis little doubt that he managed
to impress his contemporaries through his audacity and also
his physically imposing presence.
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His beard was, one will not be surprised to learn, black and
was grown in such a fashion thatit covered much of his face.
It was memorably described as a large quantity of hair, which,
like a frightful meteor, coveredhis whole face, and frightened
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America more than any comet thathas appeared there for a long
time. So long was it that he would
twist some of it into ribbons and turn them round his ears in
pigtails. In combat, he was said to walk
the deck of his ship with a bandolier of three pistols slung
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over his shoulder and wearing a fur cap.
Legend has it that some form of lit matches or dynamite was
placed by him coming out of the sides of his cap or beard.
So that quote imagination cannotform an idea of a fury from hell
to look more frightful. His private life had an element
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of pure fiction and legend around it.
For instance, the important account of Teacher's life, which
was published in 1724, claimed he was a polygamist who had been
married at least 14 times, with a dozen of his wives still alive
at the time of writing. In the mid 1720s it was common
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practice, the same author noted,for the pirate captain and his
wives to engage in orgies. How much of this can actually be
taken seriously, or whether or not it was entirely fabricated
to shock a gullible reading audience in early Georgian
England, is open to considerabledebate.
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Though it is notable that many historians of the Golden Age of
Piracy do think that the author of this account, a writer who
went by the pen name Charles Johnson, was himself a pirate
who may have been active in the Caribbean in the late 1710s.
Teach, or Tach, was also known for his heavy drinking.
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On one occasion, after a night of heavy imbibing, he allegedly
had his men set fire to the entire lower deck of a ship and
then wandered around roaring about how he had created a
version of Hell. A journal of his which has not
survived, but which was allegedly found in his ship
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after his death, contained entries like Such A Day, Rum All
Out and elsewhere. Such a Day took one with a great
deal of liquor on board to kept the company hot, Damned hot, and
all things went well again. It isn't difficult to see from
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descriptions like this how Blackbeard and pirates like him
gained A reputation for loose living and debauchery.
These salacious and often fantastical details about his
appearance and private life aside, Blackbeard's reputation
and legacy was based, above all other things, on his actions in
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the winter of 1717 and into the spring and early summer of 1718.
After wintering in the Caribbean, he and his men
evidently abandoned the idea of striking at the Spanish treasure
fleet and instead sailed for theCarolinas in North America.
It was at this time that Teach decided that they would blockade
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the port of Charleston in what is now South Carolina.
Charleston was one of the most important port towns in the
entirety of the British coloniesacross North America.
By the early 18th century, it was the epicenter of the tobacco
trade in the southern colonies, and huge consignments of tobacco
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were shipped from there to the European market every year.
Few people would have ever considered attacking a port this
substantial for the very simple reason that it would have
generated too much attention, and it was assumed that the
defenses of the port would be substantial enough to ward off a
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pirate attack. But Teach was about to prove
them wrong. That May, his ships showed up on
the outskirts of Charleston. The blockade of Charleston
continued for a period of 9 or 10 days.
The port of Charleston lies inside the Charlestown Bar, a
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bar or stretch of Shoals which form a shallow barrier at the
mouth of the Ashley River. Ships have to navigate the
Charlestown Bar carefully to avoid running aground on the
Shoals. Aware of this, Blackbeard and
his crews anchored their ships along the bar and waited here
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for their prey to try and enter or leave Charleston.
They captured several ships in the process, one being the
Crowley, an English ship which was disembarking to head across
the Atlantic to London. On board were several prominent
officials and figures who Blackbeard took captive, sending
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word to the Governor of South Carolina, Robert Johnson, that
he had them prisoner and demanding ransom, principally in
the form of medicines. An act which suggests an
outbreak of disease of some kindamongst teachers crew, or
perhaps a growing poncho for smoking opium amongst the pirate
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crew. Whichever was the case, an
arrangement was eventually worked out and Blackbeard
released his captives after depriving them of their
valuables and receiving a ransom.
He then decided it was best to make himself scarce before a
flotilla of Royal Navy ships could be gathered to strike
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against him. The blockade of Charleston was
one of the most striking events in the whole of the Golden Age
of Piracy, a period of upwards of two weeks in which a pirate
crew managed to effectively block all passage in and out of
one of the foremost port towns of North America.
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While the blockade of Charlestonmight have seemed like a
striking statement about the power of the Alliance of
Pirates, in the years following the War of the Spanish
Succession, events were conspiring to bring about a
major crackdown on the actions of Blackbeard and his many
allies. As early as 1715, the government
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of the new British monarch, KingGeorge the First, who had
arrived from Germany just weeks earlier to commence the rule of
the House of Hanover following Queen Anne's death, entered into
a programme of piracy suppression.
The new King and his ministers were deeply disturbed to learn
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that a great many of the Mariners and privateers who had
so recently been allies of the Crown against the French and
Spanish were now attacking any shipping they came across
indiscriminately. On the one hand, it struck at
English economic interests in the region, while the fact that
those who were attacking the ships in the Caribbean and North
(30:31):
Atlantic had so recently been allied with the Crown risked
creating a diplomatic crisis forEngland if they continue to
strike at French or Spanish ships.
Consequently, there was a determination to end the
piratical activity from 1715 onwards.
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This made little headway in the first year or two.
It wasn't until the HMS Scarborough, a ship of the Royal
Navy, managed to capture a pirate ship off the island of
Saint Croix in the Caribbean early in 1717 that the first
victory was achieved. But there was a clear awareness
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that dozens of pirate ships wereoperating across the North
Atlantic. Many proposed a strategy of
conciliation through which the pirate captains and their
followers would be offered pardons and would be allowed to
keep much of their I'll gotten gains if they agreed to cease
their buccaneering activity. Realizing that it would be
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cheaper and swifter to take thisapproach, in September 1717, the
government of George the First issued the Proclamation for the
Suppression of Pirates, or the Act of Grace, as it was more
widely known. It stipulated that any pirate
who surrendered himself to a senior English magistrate or
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governor in one of the North American colonies or in the
Caribbean before the 5th of September 1718 would be pardoned
of any crimes he or she had committed prior to the 5th of
January 1718. The deadline was subsequently
extended forward to the 1st of July 1719.
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The catch was that anyone who did not surrender by that time
would have a large bounty placedon their head and would be
haunted by the Royal Navy. Blackbeard and many others like
him now had to make a decision, accept the riches they had
accumulated and retire, or keep going and risk everything.
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Teachers movements in the monthsthat followed, and indeed the
course of the remainder of his life, were substantially
influenced by two figures of very differing temperaments and
attitudes towards piracy. One of these was Charles Eden, a
British colonial officer who hadbeen appointed as the Governor
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of North Carolina in 1714 and who held that post through the
early 1720s. Eden was notoriously corrupt and
was clearly in cahoots with Teach and others like Steed
Bonnet and Benjamin Hornigold. One important source for the
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Life of Blackbeard, published in1724, even suggests that Eden
oversaw the nuptials for one of teachers. 14 marriages.
Official complaints concerning his conduct in the late 1710s
suggested he had benefited financially and materially from
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facilitating piratical activity off the coast of the Carolinas.
This was the figure to whom manyformer pirates turned to obtain
pardons in 1718 and 1790. The counterpoint to Eden was
Alexander Sportswood. He was a military commander who
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had been appointed as the governor of the Virginia Colony
to the immediate north of the Carolinas in 1710, in the midst
of the war with France and Spain.
He is generally credited with expanding the Virginia Colony in
the years that followed and beginning the process whereby
the colony expanded westwards into the Blue Ridge Mountains
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and into what would become the state of West Virginia.
Spotswood was a by the book government official who did not
engage in the kind of corrupt dealings his colleague in North
Carolina did. When the orders began arriving
from 1715 onwards to crack down on the growing piracy threat, he
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was determined to implement those same orders.
He took an uncompromising approach to Blackbeard and his
allies in 1718, determining thathe would prosecute them with all
military and naval power he could muster if they refused to
accept the generous pardon offerwhich had been extended to them
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by King George's government. Eden and Spotswood loomed over
the pirates in the late 1710s, one offering a way out, the
other promising their destruction if they did not
surrender. For Blackbeard, the decision to
seek a pardon was made easier for him by the events which
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occurred in the fortnight following the blockade of
Charleston. In the immediate aftermath of
the quasi naval siege of this major port town.
Teach and his crews sailed N with the intention of careening
their ships on Beaufort Inlet inwhat is now North Carolina,
scraping out the hulls and preparing them for a possible
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voyage to the Caribbean. But for whatever reason, maybe
the prodigious amounts of alcohol the crew was said to be
fond of, both the Queen Anne's Revenge and one of the smaller
sloops were accidentally run aground on the sands of the
inlet. The primary mast of Teacher's
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flagship, as well as extensive parts of the hull, was damaged
in the process, and the crews did not have sufficient supplies
to fix the ship. There is a theory that this
might not have been as accidental as it first seemed,
and that Blackbeard had possiblydecided to scuttle the ship in
an effort to reduce the size of his crew drastically, hoping
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they would disperse on land on the Carolinas and potentially
leave him and his closest followers with a larger part of
the booty they had acquired in blockading Charleston and the
raid through the Caribbean the previous winter.
Whether accidental or intentional, June 1718 saw the
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Queen Anne's Revenge left in thewaters off North Carolina and
was eventually claimed by the sea.
Whether Blackbeard intentionallyscuttled the Queen Anne's
Revenge or not is doubly significant because the sinking
of his flagship and the other Sloop now led him to join a
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growing number of Buccaneers whowere seeking to obtain a pardon.
He had first learned of the offer of amnesty when he was in
the Caribbean in the winter of 1717.
It is possible that after learning of the amnesty offer
that Blackbeard decided to seizeone last large score by
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blockading Charleston, safe in the knowledge that he could
avail of the pardon offer thereafter.
He then blockaded Charleston, scored a big final loot and ran
the Queen Anne's Revenge aground2 weeks later in order to drive
off most of his crew and so be able to seize a greater
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proportion of the loot himself. This would certainly match with
the fact that in the Midsummer of 1718, just a week or two
after the flagship was destroyed, he presented himself
before Governor Eden and obtained A pardon from the Crown
government for all his previous wrongdoings.
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This was a brilliant way of extricating himself from the
pirate life, having acquired some hefty riches in the process
of a few years of buccaneering. Even more fortuitous for
Blackbeard and other pirates were the growing tensions
between England and Spain following Spain's reoccupation
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of the island of Sardinia in theMediterranean, one of the
territories it had ceded to Austria a few years earlier at
the end of the War of the Spanish Succession.
If war broke out yet again between England and Spain.
Teach, Bonnet and others were doubtlessly calculating that
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they might find themselves beingoffered letters of mark to
operate as privateers on behalf of the English government once
more. If Blackbeard was imagining that
he could have his cake and eat it in this fashion, then he was
soon disabused of the notion. Having obtained his pardon from
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Eden in late June 1718, he and many other pirates began
settling in coastal communities along the shores of the
Carolinas. But he hadn't banked on the more
scrupulous governor of Virginia,Alexander Spotswood.
No sooner had Eden handed out pardons to Blackbeard and many
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other pirates. Who then began settling along
the Outer Banks and other parts of the Carolinas.
Then Spotswood began preparing to prosecute these same
individuals. He was able to do so because
there was a flaw in Blackbeard'splan.
The proclamation for the Suppression of Pirates or the
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Act of Grace that had held out the promise of pardons to
Buccaneers like Teach had contained a very specific
provision that anyone availing of the amnesty offer could do so
until September 1718, a deadlinewhich was later extended into
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1719. But it also contained A proviso
that they would only receive pardons for crimes and misdeeds
perpetrated prior to the 5th of January 1718.
This stipulation had been included for a very specific
reason, to prevent individuals doing exactly what Blackbeard
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had done, learning of the pardonoffer and then deciding to
engage in one last bout of piratical activity, knowing that
a pardon could be acquired afterwards.
Teach had done precisely this when he blockaded Charleston, an
action which had been carried out four months after the 5th of
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January 1718 deadline. Armed with this knowledge,
Spotswood once determined to prosecute Blackbeard and his
followers, regardless of the pardon which Eden had issued to
them. In the summer of 1718, as
Spotswood began plotting to undermine Blackbeard, Teach
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himself was settling down near Bath Creek on Plum Point in
North Carolina. He still had one small ship left
after the wreckages in June, andhe had put in a petition to
become a privateer. As England descended into war
again with the Spanish, many of his more loyal crewmen settled
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in the region with him. Eden probably was anxious that
he would obtain a letter of Markand leave North Carolina, aware
that there was a growing suspicion of his own behavior
and role in issuing pardons to those involved in the blockade
of Charleston the previous May. There were also issues quickly
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emerging around lawlessness, drunkenness, and public disorder
in the coastal communities that the former pirates had settled
in. It was in this environment that
claims arose in August that Teach have been involved in a
piracy attack on a French ship sailing along the coast, though
(42:55):
the Admiralty court in Pennsylvania quickly convened
and decided the ship had been wrecked.
Naturally, all of this was enough for Spotswood to decide
in Virginia that he stood on firm enough ground to override
Eden and begin efforts to prosecute the former pirates in
the Carolinas as though their pardons were not valid, an
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approach which was legally soundgiven that the blockade of
Charleston had occurred well after the January 1718 deadline.
Throughout August and September of 1718, Spotswood and his
officials gathered sufficient information from individuals
(43:40):
such as William Howard, the former quartermaster of the
Queen Anne's Revenge, to have a good idea where Teach and his
closest allies were residing in North Carolina.
Armed with this information, he began plotting a military
campaign to the Outer Banks. He appointed Lieutenant Robert
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Maynard, a veteran of the War ofthe Spanish Succession, to
oversee the mission and granted him the use of two ships, the
Ranger and the Jane, the latter being the HMS Pearl, renamed.
Just over 50 men would accompanyMaynard on board the two ships
(44:22):
with an offer held out of a substantial financial reward for
killing or capturing Blackbeard.One offered by the local
government of the Virginia colony, who were worried that
Teach and his associates would become a major problem for their
trade and would soon begin attacking ships if left to his
(44:43):
own devices in North Carolina. Thus, armed with dozens of
cannons and incentives, Maynard and his men set out from
Virginia on their two ships on the 17th of November 1718.
An extensive contemporary account of the events which
(45:03):
followed was published in Londonin 1724 and provides an unusual
level of detail concerning what would ultimately prove to be the
final events of teacher's life. After four days of tiptoeing
down the coast, Maynard and his men on the Ranger and the Jane
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arrived at Ocracoke Inlet on theOuter Banks near what is now
called Cape Lookout. They had proceeded cautiously
with the aim of not alerting Blackbeard or any of his
followers to their arrival in North Carolina.
Nevertheless, it appears that Teach was informed of their
(45:45):
coming, and he may have been tipped off by the Buccaneers
perennial friend Governor Eden. As a result.
Before Maynard and his crews ever arrived in North Carolina,
Teach had ordered his former crew members to begin making up
his remaining ship, the small Sloop The Adventure, for them to
(46:08):
either engage Maynard or else totry to slip away if he did
arrive. They did not make a pre emptive
move to flee from the Outer Banks as this was not the first
warning they had received about a possible effort by Spotswood
and the Virginians to capture him.
Had he not had these previous false alarms, he might have been
(46:32):
more alert to the potential threat.
Instead, Teach and several of his crew were said to have spent
the night before Maynard and hisships arrived to Ocracoke Inlet
drinking in a local Tavern. Maynard and his men laid anchor
at the mouth of the inlet on theevening of the 21st of November
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1718. They spent the night there and
only moved in the morning after hoisting the King's colours to
let anyone they came across knowthat they were on Crown
business. By then Teach and approximately
two dozen of his men were on board the adventure.
Blackbeard cut the cables to loosen the ship and ordered his
(47:18):
men to begin firing at Maynard'sships.
His undoing was that the adventure ran aground as he went
to escape. Baynard was thus able to weigh
anchor and pull up close, ordering his superior number of
men who had far more cannons to begin firing on the adventure.
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An exchange followed between Blackbeard and Maynard shouting
across the water at each other, with Teach allegedly finishing
it by raising a glass of spiritsto his assailant and drinking it
with a shout that he would offerMaynard and his men no quarter
before once again ordering his men to open fire.
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A dozen or so men were lost on both sides in the exchange of
fire, which then followed Blackbeard nearly one the day as
Maynard's men tried to engage them through the shallow waters.
Teach made it to Maynard at thisjuncture and was engaging him
when Maynard's sword broke. The Lieutenant would probably
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have died had one of his men notsuddenly intervened and sliced
Teach badly along his neck and throat.
He was shot moments later, at which point his few remaining
followers began fleeing from thescene as Blackbeard fell dead to
the ground. It had been a fitting last
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stand, as one account put it. Here was an end of that
courageous brute who might have passed in the world for a hero
had he been employed in a good cause.
Maynard ordered that his head becut off and taken on board his
ship. He then sailed onwards to Bath
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Town to acquire medical aid for his wounded men.
Correspondence between Teach, Eden and others was allegedly
discovered on the wreck of the Adventure and in Blackbeard's
house, which indicated the Governor's complicity with the
pirates and even individuals in New York.
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A diary of teachers was also apparently discovered, though if
this is true, it sadly has not survived.
After recovering somewhat at Bath Town, Maynard and his men,
with several of the pirates taken as prisoners, returned to
Virginia to collect their bounty.
Many of the prisoners were placed on trial and later
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executed. Blackbeard's head was set up on
a spike at the entrance to the Chesapeake and the James River
in Virginia as a warning to any other pirates tempted to ply
their trade off the coast of this particular colony.
News soon spread of the notorious pirate captain's
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demise, with the newspapers in New York and Boston reporting on
the famed buccaneer's death on the 22nd of November.
By early December, Blackbeard was just the first of the great
pirate captains who died as partof the brutal government
crackdown in the late 1710s. Two weeks before Teach was
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killed, his old accomplice, Steed Bonnet, had been captured
and taken alive. He was given a perfunctory trial
and sentenced to death. He was hanged in Charleston, the
scene of Blackbeard's greatest triumph, on the 10th of December
1718. A few months later, Benjamin
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Hornigold, who had returned to the sea as a pirate hunter of
sorts, was wrecked at sea duringa hurricane and never seen
again. In November 1720, another
infamous Buccaneer, Calico Jack Rackham, was captured on
Jamaica. He was executed at Port Royal
(51:19):
and his body was put hanging on a gibbet as a warning to all
would be pirates in the region. Two well known female
Buccaneers, Mary Reed and Anne Bonnie, were captured with
Calico Jack. Both of them were seemingly
spared as they were pregnant. Bonnie disappeared from the
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historical record altogether after that, but Reed died in
prison. Finally, Buffalo MU Roberts, a
pirate who is often credited with inventing something akin to
the skull and Crossbones pirate flag, was killed in February
1722 in a clash with a Royal Navy ship off the coast of Gabon
(52:03):
in western Africa. Hence, within a few years of
Blackbeard's death, the vast majority of the more prominent
pirate captains had joined him in Davy Jones's locker.
Others relocated entirely to theIndian Ocean, where they were
less likely to end up dead. Figures like Henry Every, a
(52:25):
hugely successful pirate of the 1680s and 1690s who retired in
1696 and probably lived a happy later life in obscurity into the
1710s, were the exception ratherthan the rule when it came to
piracy in its supposed golden age.
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By the time Bartholomew Jack waskilled in the spring of 1722,
the legend of the Buccaneers wasalready beginning to emerge.
Their exploits had caught the imagination of the English
public, and in London in 1724 a book appeared which began to
(53:08):
establish Blackbeard as a paragon of the infamous pirate
captain. This was entitled A General
History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious
Pirates and was allegedly authored by a figure called
Captain Charles Johnson. No record exists of any captain
(53:31):
sailing out of an English port under this name, and it is
assumed that he was using a pen name or pseudonym, a fact which
has led to much speculation as to who the author of the General
history might have been. The most interesting theory
holds that the author was DanielDefoe, who had published his
(53:54):
canonical work Robinson Crusoe five years earlier in 1719.
Whoever the author of the general history was, it cannot
be understated how influential it was in establishing modern
ideas concerning the Golden Age of Piracy and the reputations of
(54:16):
figures like Blackbeard and Steed Bonnet.
In it, Teach and over two dozen other famous pirate captains
were profiled. While elements of the pirate
life, such as the raising of theJolly Roger flag were noted,
Blackbeard's reputation and legend was further enhanced as
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the years went by. The 19th century saw a
renaissance in pirate law. For instance, he was the basis
of the central character in Matilda Douglas's fictional work
Blackbeard, a page from the colonial history of
Philadelphia, though it had little to do with his actual
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actions off the coast of North Carolina.
More significant was the publication, in serial form in
the early 1880s of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a
work which more than any other established a wide array of
tropes concerning the Buccaneersof the Golden Age of Piracy.
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Blackbeard is both mentioned directly by Stevenson, and 1
character is named Israel, Handsin reference to the deputy
commander of the Queen Anne's Revenge.
A slew of popular works in the 20th century have all been based
to some extent on Blackbeard, notably JM Barry's rendering of
(55:44):
Captain Hook in Peter Pan, a pirate captain whose hook hand
is the equivalent of Teach running around the deck of his
ship with dynamite in his beard.A great many television shows
and films have centred on characters either called
Blackbeard or based on the popular cultural image of
(56:05):
Blackbeard, the most recent version being found in Disney's
Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
Blackbeard's status as the most infamous of all the Buccaneer
captains of the Golden Age of Piracy has ensured that academic
interest in him remains high, and universities have been able
(56:27):
to obtain funding for projects related to him, no matter how
loose the connection might be. In the late 1990s, a project
discovered the wreckage of the Queen Anne's Revenge off the
coast of North Carolina. Naval archaeological expeditions
at the site have since retrieved30 cannons and 10s of thousands
(56:51):
of different artifacts which canbe associated with the wreckage.
Live underwater footage of the wreck was even broadcast in the
early 2000s. In 2011, the National Geographic
Society confirmed that the wreckage was Blackbeard's
infamous ship, as sufficient evidence had accumulated by that
(57:14):
time to confirm it as such. Notably a wine glass decorated
to commemorate the accession of King George the First as the new
monarch of Britain in 1714, and a sword similarly marking the
accession of Louis the 15th as King of France in 1715.
(57:34):
Fragments of a book entitled A Voyage to the South Sea,
published in 1712, have even been identified from the
wreckage or objects which suggest a wreck from the
second-half of the 1710s, which,when combined with the location
of the wreck and the nature of the ship, make it very likely
(57:57):
that it is the Queen Anne's Revenge.
The story of the pirate Captain Blackbeard is very unusual.
He has acquired a status as the quintessential pirate, a
swashbuckling Buccaneer who terrorized shipping across the
Caribbean and along the seaboardof what would become the United
(58:20):
States. The circumstances of his birth
are unclear, including where he was born and when.
Well, the vast majority of his life is an enigma.
The historical record becomes more concrete from the mid 1710s
onwards when he suddenly bursts into the Atlantic world in his
(58:41):
mid 30s. His career as a Buccaneer only
lasted about two years before hewas killed.
Blackbeard's short stint as a pirate was similar to most of
the famed Pirates of the Golden Age, many of them in the years
immediately following the end ofthe War of the Spanish
Succession. The majority of these pirates
(59:05):
invariably were killed or captured in the late 1710s.
In this sense, Blackbeard's story is entirely representative
of the Pirates of the era. What do you think of Blackbeard?
Is his reputation actually overrated, given that he was
only a pirate captain for a brief period of time, or does
(59:29):
the terror he inspired make him a true legend?
Please let us know the comments section and in the meantime,
thank you very much for watching.
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