May 5, 2014 • 20 mins
Since the 2009 episode on Blackbeard, a lot of new information has come to light about the life of the infamous pirate. We'll catch you up on the latest, then listen to the original episode for review. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuffy missed in History Class from house works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frog and I'm Tracy Wilson. Hey, you know what, I
know what. Everybody loves Piro, but he does love Pirates.
We mentioned in our last episode that we're doing some
(00:23):
things a little bit different and doing several update episodes
in a row. It's my fault what trump Jacks is
a busy lady. I have a little time that I'm
taking off work, and so we are doing this that
we continue to have episodes. Well, I'm gone and listener
Andy pointed us to a story in Smithsonian Magazines February
fourteen issue which was called The Last Days of black Beard.
(00:45):
It's by Colin Woodward, who has written four books, including
The Republic of Pirates, being the true and surprising story
of the Caribbean Pirates and the man who brought them down.
Uh And that one's also the basis for the NBC
show Crossbones, which stars John Malkovich's black Beard, and that
premiere short really uh So. In this article, which we
(01:06):
will link to in Shore Notes, Woodward writes about some
of the newest discoveries about black Beard. And these have
been gleaned from lots of archaeological and archival research. So
intrepid people crawling through archives, reading all kinds of shipping
documents and manifests and basically police reports from the eighteenth
century have discovered new things about the life and death
(01:28):
of black Beard. One of these stories is actually unearthed
in two thousand eight and it involves the last two prizes.
Prizes is maybe a generous word, but the last two
ships that Blackbeard took before his final battle and death,
which took place on November seventeen eighteen, and these were
two French merchant ships, Latois d'Or and the rose Emilee,
(01:51):
and black Beard took them with a faint He and
his crew surprised and overwhelmed the crew of one. In
order to turn it against the other. He faked like
he was going at one of them and then speedily
made a turn and went to the other one instead,
took it over, and then used both ships to go
back after the first one. This all happened in August eighteen,
(02:13):
and that was about three months after the incident outside
Charleston that Katie and Sarah talk about in our original
episode on black Beard. At this point he had already
grounded the Queen Anne's Revenge and so he was doing
all of his rating in one of his sloops, and
so he did this, you know, two ships simultaneously. Heist
with a much smaller vessel than the ships that he
(02:35):
was taking over. And Woodwards article also supports the idea
that black Beard never actually killed anyone, which is a
much discussed element of this historical figures life, at least
not until that last bloody battle in which his throw
was cut. He also writes about how black Beard got
the Queen Anne's Revenge in the first place and what
(02:55):
happened to its original cargo of slaves, and he fills
in a three month gap in black beards known history,
which is just after King George the First declared a
pardon for all pirates who surrendered by September of seventeen eighteen.
The two prevailing theories were that he made a name
for himself in the Gulf of Mexico as the Great Devil,
(03:15):
and the heat just basically laid low for a while
to avoid capture. Woodward found handwritten papers in the British
archives confirming that it was the former uh probably he
was in pursuit of the Southeast Company's flagship, the Royal Prince.
And there's a lot more detail about black Beards last
Days in Woodward's article, and will link to that article
in the show notes. Yeah, we didn't want to just
(03:37):
basically summarize an article for your benefit in its entirety.
Uh As this update. We also got an email from
a listener named Carry following the first of our Unearthed episodes,
and in that episode, we talked about the announcement from
the Underwater Archaeology branch of the North Carolina Department of
Cultural Resources, and they announced that they were intending to
(04:00):
salvage every single scrap of the Queen Anne's Revenge by
the end of which is this year. Carry let us
know that they had already brought up more than a
quarter of a million artifacts and a lot of them
are now preserved and on display at the North Carolina
Maritime Museum in Beaufort. And we'll take a little and
break here before we go to the original episode. So
(04:26):
now we're going to turn you over to Katie and
Sarah with our original episode about black Beard, which originally
came out in two thousand and nine. Hello, and Welcome
to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downie.
So Katie, I've always really liked pirates in high school
and my friends and I eased to have kind of
(04:47):
good pirate jokes. I don't go to conventions or anything. No, no, no,
I actually haven't even been a pirate for Halloween, but
I have. Really I do like them a lot, and
of course one of my favorites is Blackbeard. Well, I've
got you covered because the one Halloween I was a pirate,
and then this past Halloween, I was Abraham Lincoln and
(05:09):
wore a big black Beard, but mine did not have
candlewicks in it, unlike black Beard. Blackbeard was one of
the most feared pirates in history, and it's no wonder
with the smoking fuses and the sashes full of pistols
and cutlasses, pistols across the chests. He definitely mastered the
(05:30):
art of intimidation, and he did a lot to keep
that reputation up. He wanted people fearing him, although we
don't have any evidence that he ever killed anyone who
wasn't trying to kill him. But when you're fearsome pirate,
that's not exactly the kind of rumor you want to
spread around. The intimidation kind of saves you a lot
of work. You you just fire a few warning shots
and the ship gets handed over to you. You don't
(05:52):
have to go through the trouble of actually fighting and swashbuckling.
So every story that spreads around, like black Beer slicing
off a passenger's finger when he wouldn't give him his ring,
that all builds up to the great Blackbeard legend. But
of course Blackbeard wasn't always a pirate, and he obviously
had another name. He was born probably in Bristol, England,
(06:15):
although that's debated around sixteen ninety as Edward Teach or
possibly Edward Thatch. No one's quite sure, which will be
a theme in Blackbeard's life. Somebody who's so surrounded in legend,
there's going to be a lot of conflicting information about him.
So Teach enlisted as a privateer for the British in
the War of Spanish Succession, which went from seventeen o
(06:38):
one to seventeen thirteen. Privateers were right on the cusp
of legal The British government obviously wanted to have as
big of a navy as possible, but they could enhance
it a little bit with privateers, which were allowed to
sack French and Spanish ships and take a share of
(06:59):
the booty for themselves, which would help you develop your
pirrating fills. But of course the war comes to an
end eventually and privateers are no longer allowed to go
around sacking French and Spanish ships, and there are a
lot of people out of work, and some of them
end up turning to piracy. And the golden age of
(07:20):
piracy was the late seventeenth to the early eighteen centuries,
and as far as America goes, there have been a
bunch of laws passed by the British Parliament which had
made smuggling something that was a bit more desirable because
British imports were so expensive British taxes, right, you could
buy things so much cheaper from a pirate than you
could from them. So they would attack merchant ships carrying grain, molasses, rum, rope, tools, ammunition,
(07:47):
pretty much everything, and go ahead and sell it to
the colonists. And because North Carolina's outer banks have shallow
sounds and inlets, it was a pirate's favorite hideout place,
which is where black Beard established his home base. But
that wasn't until seventeen eighteen, and before that he had
to get in some more pirate training. He did, and
(08:08):
he did that with Captain Benjamin Hornegal in the Caribbean.
So in black Beard's sort of apprenticeship, almost with Hornegald,
they depart together and plunder a bunch of Spanish and
British ships of their coco and cordwood, sugar, rum, molasses,
all of these useful things. It's not so much the gold,
(08:31):
treasure and jewels, which of course is what you think
of when you think of black beard buried treasure, but
you might just be finding rum and sugar instead. Yeah,
and during this time, Teach gets his first captain c
of a small sloop and then the big guns come
out when Hornegal's fleet attacks a French slave ship called
(08:53):
the Concorde that was bound for Martinique, and Teach makes
this his flagship and renames it Queen NaN's Revenge. And
it only had fourteen guns to start with, so he
added a bunch to make it up to forty, because
you know you need your guns when you're a pirate.
It's more than eighty feet long their three masts, and
he also installs a cannon, and Teach probably took this
(09:14):
ship with his classic intimidation methods. Rather than a bloody fight,
It's likely he just fired some warning shots and hoisted
up the pirate flag and you know, the guy's surrender.
They don't want any trouble with Blackbeard. But the captain
of the Concorde also reported when he got back to
France that Teach gave him a sloop to finish transporting
(09:35):
his cargo of slaves, which I was surprised to hear that.
I always imagined pirates making you walk the plank, and
but that sounded very gentleman ling, we thought. And Horna
Gold couldn't be Blackbeard's teacher forever because after the war,
the British government wanted to get rid of all their pirates,
so they got an officer named Wood's Rogers and hired
(09:56):
him as the governor of the Bahamas and told him
he'd better get rid of the pirates. So he said
he would grant pardons to pirates who agreed to walk
the straight and narrow, and Hornigold is one of the
ones who agreed, and he became a pirate hunter. But
that's okay with black Beard. By now because he's really
struck off on his own and starts patrolling the Virginia
(10:18):
and Carolina coast for his reign of terror from seventeen
sixteen seventeen eighteen. So we've already mentioned that the Outer
Banks is a fantastic place for pirates just because of
how it's designed, but it was also a great place
for black Beard himself because he met a lovely corrupt
politician by the name of Charles Eden there who would
allow him clemency in exchange for very generous bribes. So,
(10:42):
in addition to the excellent geography of North Carolina and
the corrupt governor um he's, black Beard actually ends up
being kind of a folk hero. The people of North Carolina.
They're not the wealthy rice growers or tobacco grow ors
like South Carolina or Virginia, so they're more okay with
(11:05):
this deal where they get essentially duty free goods from
black Beard in exchange for sort of letting him letting
him hang in the Outer Banks. And the folk hero
stuff also comes from black Beard's challenge to the oppressive authority.
He's lauded for sticking a hot poker into the eye
(11:26):
of a British official, which sounds pretty awful, but I
feel that that's a running theme and all the stuff
that we've done about gangsters and outlaws in any way,
part of it is public opinion of them being the
hero who's the only one who's willing to go up
against corrupt authority. But it also assumes that that opinion
always turns at some point the the outlaw does something
(11:49):
which just pushes the reputation over the edge. And for
black Beard, this is in May seventeen eighteen in Charleston.
So with four vessels and as many as four hundred
pyre its, black Beard captures eight or nine ships coming
into and out of Charleston over about a week, and
he holds the cruise of the ship's hostage along with
(12:09):
their passengers and passengers, their kids on board, women on board.
And Blackbeard demands a chest of medicine in exchange for
the lives of his passengers, but Charleston takes a while
the pony up yes, and in the meantime, the pirates
have decided they're not going to get it, and they've
set all the citizens up to be hanged. Like preparations
(12:33):
are underway. They're about to die and Charleston eventually comes
up with the ransom and gets their people back, but
not before the pirates have taken all of their clothing
and jewelry. Yeah, they returned to shore almost naked as
the outraged description is sent back to England. But all
office goes down pretty quickly, and within a week of
(12:53):
the Charleston hostage situation, the Queen Ann's Revenge is grounded.
Honestly and bar near the entrance to present day Beaufort Inlet,
and it's likely that Blackbeard beached this on purpose. He
knew how to sail a ship and how to scurry
around through the outer bank, so it's unlikely that he
(13:14):
would accidentally ground his ship. Um, it's possible he was
considering some kind of retirement, or at least at least
trying to dismand this group of four pirates and break
him up a little bit. Some people say he ma
ruined a bunch of pirates on one of the sand
bars when he left, and then took provisions from one
(13:35):
of the other ships and got out of there. In
addition to the black hate at Charleston, black Beard by
this point had captured something like fifty ships and he
was also charging tolls for other people ships to make
it through Pamlico Sound. So things were beginning to come
to a head. And while North Carolina and Charles Eden
were pretty okay with the pirateing money off the whole
(13:58):
situation right to the rich, Virginia planters and South Carolina
planters were not, and they appealed to the Governor of Virginia,
Alexander spots Would to do something about it, and he
engages Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy to hunt
down black Beard. And it's not as hard as it
(14:19):
sounds to find black Beard. You know, you'd think it
would be difficult to find a pirate, right, not if
he's throwing the biggest pirate party known to man on
Ocracoke Island, which I would kind of like to be
invited to. I don't know, it might sound worth fun
than it really was. Drinking, womanizing, and pirates from all
(14:40):
over the world were invited to come, and come they
did and made a complete spectacle out of themselves. So
during this drunken pirate shindig, Maynard shows up with his
loops intending to kill or capture Blackbeard, and the pirates
are aware that Maynard is there, but they're trapped between
(15:01):
this island and a sandbar. So they prepare themselves over
the night, and well accounts they Blackbeard was very calm.
His pirates were starting to get worried. Yeah, they were
freaking out a little bit. He kept drinking everyone else
went out and put sand on the decks in case
there was blood, and so blankets and water in case
(15:23):
there were fires, and began preparations for battle. And Teach
only has twenty men too, while Mannard has about sixty.
But Teach his man advantage here is mounted weapons on
his sloop, which is called the Adventure. So in the morning,
everyone's kind of expecting Teach to try to make a getaway.
Instead he waits and maynards men start to approach, and
(15:47):
then at the last minute, Teach just shoots off to
a little winding channel that which no one else saw. Yes,
it's right by a sandbar, and manners men all get stuck.
But Mannard pretty good captain, and he tells everybody to
start throwing extra supplies overboard, and so they lighten the
ships enough that they're able to sail free. And Mannard
(16:10):
recounts that Teach drank damnation to me and my men,
whom he styled cowardly puppies an insult. I am just
going to be your new insults beware. And at this point,
Blackbeard's crew is bombarding a Maynard's ship with iron scraps
and nails from the guns, basically everything they've got, and
(16:31):
so Maynard and his men go and hide below deck,
all tricky like, and because the ship is so quiet
after this bombardment they're even grenades involved, Teach things that
they're dead, and the pirates board the ship, black Beard included,
and all of a sudden, Maynard's men rush out their
lives pride the gotcha moment, and Teach and Maynard go
(16:57):
to a face to face battle that actually gets written
about in the London papers, and it's really it looks
like it should be in an action movie. Maynards still
be if it hasn't already managed sort of is spent.
He shoots black Beard. Um. Black Beard survived after being shot,
(17:19):
and obviously guns are they put a big hole in
you at this point, and Um, one of Maynard's men
jumps in at the last minute of this brutal fight
between these two men and slashes black Beard's neck, and um,
I don't know how he did this with a with
a bloody slash neck, but black Beard apparently says, well done,
(17:44):
lad are maybe apocryphal, but it's still a good detail.
But when he died, he'd been shot multiple times and
stabbed multiple times and kept fighting until the very very end.
And Maynard's man actually cuts off black Beard's head, which
is strung up on the ship as a warning to
other pirates. And Maynards searched and searched for black beards treasure,
(18:07):
as people have been doing for years, but all he
found were supplies and letters. And during the fight eight
of the other pirates were killed, some cred for mercy
and some were arrested and they were brought to trial,
and all but two were hanged. So the pirates didn't
get off so easily either. And this was pretty much
the end of piracy, or at least the golden age
(18:29):
of piracy. That was November twenty, seventeen eighteen, when black
Beard was killed. So in addition to the legend about
the treasure, there's another pretty amazing one about Blackbeard's skull.
So his head is hung up on the ship, But
what happens to the skull. Maybe it went to the
University of Virginia. There's a legend that says the skull
(18:53):
was dipped in silver and kept by the university, where
fraternity members were once required to drink upon their initiation.
As a great grandfather who went to the University of Virginia,
and now I'm starting to wonder was he in a
fraternity as a former member of the Greek system. I
salute you U v A for a great rumor. You
(19:13):
can actually go visit black Beard Island. It was acquired
by the Navy Department and then in nineteen twenty four
was made a preserve and breeding ground for wildlife and birds.
You can only go there by boat, which I feel
is sitting quaint now, is it is? If you would
(19:33):
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can visit us
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dot com, and on pinterest dot com slash mist in
History or we Love to Pin. You can also visit
us at our website, which is missed in History dot com.
(19:54):
And if you would like to learn a little bit
more about pirates, You can go to House of works
dot com and type in the word pirates in the
search bar, and you will get an article called how
Pirates work, which is quite a fun read, uh And
you can learn about that as well as almost anything
else you can think of at how works dot com
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(20:17):
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Welcome to Stuffy missed in History Class from house works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frog and I'm Tracy Wilson. Hey, you know what, I
know what. Everybody loves Piro, but he does love Pirates.
We mentioned in our last episode that we're doing some
(00:23):
things a little bit different and doing several update episodes
in a row. It's my fault what trump Jacks is
a busy lady. I have a little time that I'm
taking off work, and so we are doing this that
we continue to have episodes. Well, I'm gone and listener
Andy pointed us to a story in Smithsonian Magazines February
fourteen issue which was called The Last Days of black Beard.
(00:45):
It's by Colin Woodward, who has written four books, including
The Republic of Pirates, being the true and surprising story
of the Caribbean Pirates and the man who brought them down.
Uh And that one's also the basis for the NBC
show Crossbones, which stars John Malkovich's black Beard, and that
premiere short really uh So. In this article, which we
(01:06):
will link to in Shore Notes, Woodward writes about some
of the newest discoveries about black Beard. And these have
been gleaned from lots of archaeological and archival research. So
intrepid people crawling through archives, reading all kinds of shipping
documents and manifests and basically police reports from the eighteenth
century have discovered new things about the life and death
(01:28):
of black Beard. One of these stories is actually unearthed
in two thousand eight and it involves the last two prizes.
Prizes is maybe a generous word, but the last two
ships that Blackbeard took before his final battle and death,
which took place on November seventeen eighteen, and these were
two French merchant ships, Latois d'Or and the rose Emilee,
(01:51):
and black Beard took them with a faint He and
his crew surprised and overwhelmed the crew of one. In
order to turn it against the other. He faked like
he was going at one of them and then speedily
made a turn and went to the other one instead,
took it over, and then used both ships to go
back after the first one. This all happened in August eighteen,
(02:13):
and that was about three months after the incident outside
Charleston that Katie and Sarah talk about in our original
episode on black Beard. At this point he had already
grounded the Queen Anne's Revenge and so he was doing
all of his rating in one of his sloops, and
so he did this, you know, two ships simultaneously. Heist
with a much smaller vessel than the ships that he
(02:35):
was taking over. And Woodwards article also supports the idea
that black Beard never actually killed anyone, which is a
much discussed element of this historical figures life, at least
not until that last bloody battle in which his throw
was cut. He also writes about how black Beard got
the Queen Anne's Revenge in the first place and what
(02:55):
happened to its original cargo of slaves, and he fills
in a three month gap in black beards known history,
which is just after King George the First declared a
pardon for all pirates who surrendered by September of seventeen eighteen.
The two prevailing theories were that he made a name
for himself in the Gulf of Mexico as the Great Devil,
(03:15):
and the heat just basically laid low for a while
to avoid capture. Woodward found handwritten papers in the British
archives confirming that it was the former uh probably he
was in pursuit of the Southeast Company's flagship, the Royal Prince.
And there's a lot more detail about black Beards last
Days in Woodward's article, and will link to that article
in the show notes. Yeah, we didn't want to just
(03:37):
basically summarize an article for your benefit in its entirety.
Uh As this update. We also got an email from
a listener named Carry following the first of our Unearthed episodes,
and in that episode, we talked about the announcement from
the Underwater Archaeology branch of the North Carolina Department of
Cultural Resources, and they announced that they were intending to
(04:00):
salvage every single scrap of the Queen Anne's Revenge by
the end of which is this year. Carry let us
know that they had already brought up more than a
quarter of a million artifacts and a lot of them
are now preserved and on display at the North Carolina
Maritime Museum in Beaufort. And we'll take a little and
break here before we go to the original episode. So
(04:26):
now we're going to turn you over to Katie and
Sarah with our original episode about black Beard, which originally
came out in two thousand and nine. Hello, and Welcome
to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downie.
So Katie, I've always really liked pirates in high school
and my friends and I eased to have kind of
(04:47):
good pirate jokes. I don't go to conventions or anything. No, no, no,
I actually haven't even been a pirate for Halloween, but
I have. Really I do like them a lot, and
of course one of my favorites is Blackbeard. Well, I've
got you covered because the one Halloween I was a pirate,
and then this past Halloween, I was Abraham Lincoln and
(05:09):
wore a big black Beard, but mine did not have
candlewicks in it, unlike black Beard. Blackbeard was one of
the most feared pirates in history, and it's no wonder
with the smoking fuses and the sashes full of pistols
and cutlasses, pistols across the chests. He definitely mastered the
(05:30):
art of intimidation, and he did a lot to keep
that reputation up. He wanted people fearing him, although we
don't have any evidence that he ever killed anyone who
wasn't trying to kill him. But when you're fearsome pirate,
that's not exactly the kind of rumor you want to
spread around. The intimidation kind of saves you a lot
of work. You you just fire a few warning shots
and the ship gets handed over to you. You don't
(05:52):
have to go through the trouble of actually fighting and swashbuckling.
So every story that spreads around, like black Beer slicing
off a passenger's finger when he wouldn't give him his ring,
that all builds up to the great Blackbeard legend. But
of course Blackbeard wasn't always a pirate, and he obviously
had another name. He was born probably in Bristol, England,
(06:15):
although that's debated around sixteen ninety as Edward Teach or
possibly Edward Thatch. No one's quite sure, which will be
a theme in Blackbeard's life. Somebody who's so surrounded in legend,
there's going to be a lot of conflicting information about him.
So Teach enlisted as a privateer for the British in
the War of Spanish Succession, which went from seventeen o
(06:38):
one to seventeen thirteen. Privateers were right on the cusp
of legal The British government obviously wanted to have as
big of a navy as possible, but they could enhance
it a little bit with privateers, which were allowed to
sack French and Spanish ships and take a share of
(06:59):
the booty for themselves, which would help you develop your
pirrating fills. But of course the war comes to an
end eventually and privateers are no longer allowed to go
around sacking French and Spanish ships, and there are a
lot of people out of work, and some of them
end up turning to piracy. And the golden age of
(07:20):
piracy was the late seventeenth to the early eighteen centuries,
and as far as America goes, there have been a
bunch of laws passed by the British Parliament which had
made smuggling something that was a bit more desirable because
British imports were so expensive British taxes, right, you could
buy things so much cheaper from a pirate than you
could from them. So they would attack merchant ships carrying grain, molasses, rum, rope, tools, ammunition,
(07:47):
pretty much everything, and go ahead and sell it to
the colonists. And because North Carolina's outer banks have shallow
sounds and inlets, it was a pirate's favorite hideout place,
which is where black Beard established his home base. But
that wasn't until seventeen eighteen, and before that he had
to get in some more pirate training. He did, and
(08:08):
he did that with Captain Benjamin Hornegal in the Caribbean.
So in black Beard's sort of apprenticeship, almost with Hornegald,
they depart together and plunder a bunch of Spanish and
British ships of their coco and cordwood, sugar, rum, molasses,
all of these useful things. It's not so much the gold,
(08:31):
treasure and jewels, which of course is what you think
of when you think of black beard buried treasure, but
you might just be finding rum and sugar instead. Yeah,
and during this time, Teach gets his first captain c
of a small sloop and then the big guns come
out when Hornegal's fleet attacks a French slave ship called
(08:53):
the Concorde that was bound for Martinique, and Teach makes
this his flagship and renames it Queen NaN's Revenge. And
it only had fourteen guns to start with, so he
added a bunch to make it up to forty, because
you know you need your guns when you're a pirate.
It's more than eighty feet long their three masts, and
he also installs a cannon, and Teach probably took this
(09:14):
ship with his classic intimidation methods. Rather than a bloody fight,
It's likely he just fired some warning shots and hoisted
up the pirate flag and you know, the guy's surrender.
They don't want any trouble with Blackbeard. But the captain
of the Concorde also reported when he got back to
France that Teach gave him a sloop to finish transporting
(09:35):
his cargo of slaves, which I was surprised to hear that.
I always imagined pirates making you walk the plank, and
but that sounded very gentleman ling, we thought. And Horna
Gold couldn't be Blackbeard's teacher forever because after the war,
the British government wanted to get rid of all their pirates,
so they got an officer named Wood's Rogers and hired
(09:56):
him as the governor of the Bahamas and told him
he'd better get rid of the pirates. So he said
he would grant pardons to pirates who agreed to walk
the straight and narrow, and Hornigold is one of the
ones who agreed, and he became a pirate hunter. But
that's okay with black Beard. By now because he's really
struck off on his own and starts patrolling the Virginia
(10:18):
and Carolina coast for his reign of terror from seventeen
sixteen seventeen eighteen. So we've already mentioned that the Outer
Banks is a fantastic place for pirates just because of
how it's designed, but it was also a great place
for black Beard himself because he met a lovely corrupt
politician by the name of Charles Eden there who would
allow him clemency in exchange for very generous bribes. So,
(10:42):
in addition to the excellent geography of North Carolina and
the corrupt governor um he's, black Beard actually ends up
being kind of a folk hero. The people of North Carolina.
They're not the wealthy rice growers or tobacco grow ors
like South Carolina or Virginia, so they're more okay with
(11:05):
this deal where they get essentially duty free goods from
black Beard in exchange for sort of letting him letting
him hang in the Outer Banks. And the folk hero
stuff also comes from black Beard's challenge to the oppressive authority.
He's lauded for sticking a hot poker into the eye
(11:26):
of a British official, which sounds pretty awful, but I
feel that that's a running theme and all the stuff
that we've done about gangsters and outlaws in any way,
part of it is public opinion of them being the
hero who's the only one who's willing to go up
against corrupt authority. But it also assumes that that opinion
always turns at some point the the outlaw does something
(11:49):
which just pushes the reputation over the edge. And for
black Beard, this is in May seventeen eighteen in Charleston.
So with four vessels and as many as four hundred
pyre its, black Beard captures eight or nine ships coming
into and out of Charleston over about a week, and
he holds the cruise of the ship's hostage along with
(12:09):
their passengers and passengers, their kids on board, women on board.
And Blackbeard demands a chest of medicine in exchange for
the lives of his passengers, but Charleston takes a while
the pony up yes, and in the meantime, the pirates
have decided they're not going to get it, and they've
set all the citizens up to be hanged. Like preparations
(12:33):
are underway. They're about to die and Charleston eventually comes
up with the ransom and gets their people back, but
not before the pirates have taken all of their clothing
and jewelry. Yeah, they returned to shore almost naked as
the outraged description is sent back to England. But all
office goes down pretty quickly, and within a week of
(12:53):
the Charleston hostage situation, the Queen Ann's Revenge is grounded.
Honestly and bar near the entrance to present day Beaufort Inlet,
and it's likely that Blackbeard beached this on purpose. He
knew how to sail a ship and how to scurry
around through the outer bank, so it's unlikely that he
(13:14):
would accidentally ground his ship. Um, it's possible he was
considering some kind of retirement, or at least at least
trying to dismand this group of four pirates and break
him up a little bit. Some people say he ma
ruined a bunch of pirates on one of the sand
bars when he left, and then took provisions from one
(13:35):
of the other ships and got out of there. In
addition to the black hate at Charleston, black Beard by
this point had captured something like fifty ships and he
was also charging tolls for other people ships to make
it through Pamlico Sound. So things were beginning to come
to a head. And while North Carolina and Charles Eden
were pretty okay with the pirateing money off the whole
(13:58):
situation right to the rich, Virginia planters and South Carolina
planters were not, and they appealed to the Governor of Virginia,
Alexander spots Would to do something about it, and he
engages Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy to hunt
down black Beard. And it's not as hard as it
(14:19):
sounds to find black Beard. You know, you'd think it
would be difficult to find a pirate, right, not if
he's throwing the biggest pirate party known to man on
Ocracoke Island, which I would kind of like to be
invited to. I don't know, it might sound worth fun
than it really was. Drinking, womanizing, and pirates from all
(14:40):
over the world were invited to come, and come they
did and made a complete spectacle out of themselves. So
during this drunken pirate shindig, Maynard shows up with his
loops intending to kill or capture Blackbeard, and the pirates
are aware that Maynard is there, but they're trapped between
(15:01):
this island and a sandbar. So they prepare themselves over
the night, and well accounts they Blackbeard was very calm.
His pirates were starting to get worried. Yeah, they were
freaking out a little bit. He kept drinking everyone else
went out and put sand on the decks in case
there was blood, and so blankets and water in case
(15:23):
there were fires, and began preparations for battle. And Teach
only has twenty men too, while Mannard has about sixty.
But Teach his man advantage here is mounted weapons on
his sloop, which is called the Adventure. So in the morning,
everyone's kind of expecting Teach to try to make a getaway.
Instead he waits and maynards men start to approach, and
(15:47):
then at the last minute, Teach just shoots off to
a little winding channel that which no one else saw. Yes,
it's right by a sandbar, and manners men all get stuck.
But Mannard pretty good captain, and he tells everybody to
start throwing extra supplies overboard, and so they lighten the
ships enough that they're able to sail free. And Mannard
(16:10):
recounts that Teach drank damnation to me and my men,
whom he styled cowardly puppies an insult. I am just
going to be your new insults beware. And at this point,
Blackbeard's crew is bombarding a Maynard's ship with iron scraps
and nails from the guns, basically everything they've got, and
(16:31):
so Maynard and his men go and hide below deck,
all tricky like, and because the ship is so quiet
after this bombardment they're even grenades involved, Teach things that
they're dead, and the pirates board the ship, black Beard included,
and all of a sudden, Maynard's men rush out their
lives pride the gotcha moment, and Teach and Maynard go
(16:57):
to a face to face battle that actually gets written
about in the London papers, and it's really it looks
like it should be in an action movie. Maynards still
be if it hasn't already managed sort of is spent.
He shoots black Beard. Um. Black Beard survived after being shot,
(17:19):
and obviously guns are they put a big hole in
you at this point, and Um, one of Maynard's men
jumps in at the last minute of this brutal fight
between these two men and slashes black Beard's neck, and um,
I don't know how he did this with a with
a bloody slash neck, but black Beard apparently says, well done,
(17:44):
lad are maybe apocryphal, but it's still a good detail.
But when he died, he'd been shot multiple times and
stabbed multiple times and kept fighting until the very very end.
And Maynard's man actually cuts off black Beard's head, which
is strung up on the ship as a warning to
other pirates. And Maynards searched and searched for black beards treasure,
(18:07):
as people have been doing for years, but all he
found were supplies and letters. And during the fight eight
of the other pirates were killed, some cred for mercy
and some were arrested and they were brought to trial,
and all but two were hanged. So the pirates didn't
get off so easily either. And this was pretty much
the end of piracy, or at least the golden age
(18:29):
of piracy. That was November twenty, seventeen eighteen, when black
Beard was killed. So in addition to the legend about
the treasure, there's another pretty amazing one about Blackbeard's skull.
So his head is hung up on the ship, But
what happens to the skull. Maybe it went to the
University of Virginia. There's a legend that says the skull
(18:53):
was dipped in silver and kept by the university, where
fraternity members were once required to drink upon their initiation.
As a great grandfather who went to the University of Virginia,
and now I'm starting to wonder was he in a
fraternity as a former member of the Greek system. I
salute you U v A for a great rumor. You
(19:13):
can actually go visit black Beard Island. It was acquired
by the Navy Department and then in nineteen twenty four
was made a preserve and breeding ground for wildlife and birds.
You can only go there by boat, which I feel
is sitting quaint now, is it is? If you would
(19:33):
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can visit us
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(19:54):
And if you would like to learn a little bit
more about pirates, You can go to House of works
dot com and type in the word pirates in the
search bar, and you will get an article called how
Pirates work, which is quite a fun read, uh And
you can learn about that as well as almost anything
else you can think of at how works dot com
and we hopefully you do for more onness and thousands
(20:17):
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