The man known to history as the pirate captain Blackbeard is a historical enigma. There is a considerable debate as to where he was born and grew up. Accounts from the early eighteenth century suggest his name was Edward Teach, Edward Tatch, or some variant of that kind, yet even this information is not reliable, 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 that Blackbeard was born in the city of Bristol in south-western England around 1680. There is generally agreement on his birth being around this time due to descriptions of him being in his mid-thirties in the mid-1710s. Supporters of the idea that he was born in Bristol point towards primary source documentation of the time which refers to the notorious pirate captain as, quote, “A Bristol Man Born.
” Furthermore, in the seventeenth 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 bewildering ascent as the epicentre of the triangular Atlantic slave trade in England. In the seventeenth century power resided in Bristol, which around the 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 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 separate contemporary document which refers to Blackbeard as, quote, “Born in Jamaica, of Very Creditable Parents. ” A third 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 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 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’s expanding colonial Empire.
England was a late arrival to successfully implementing colonization schemes in the New World, only beginning its ascent in the early seventeenth century when it established colonies in Virginia and in Massachusetts. Though other empires such as Spain and Portugal, had begun conquering the America’s earlier, the English tenaciously continued to establish colonies in an attempt to expand their influence. By the 1630s English colonies had been established on some of the small islands of the Caribbean and West Indies such as Nevis, St Kitts, Bermuda and Barbados.
In the mid-1650s Jamaica was wrested from Spain in a military expedition which Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth, termed the Western Design. War with the Dutch Republic in the mid-1660s saw the Dutch colony of New Holland fall and was renamed New York by the English. Through treaty and warfare English colonies also conquered 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 eighteenth century. It is worth briefly backtracking at this juncture to examine the nature of piracy in the early modern world.
The word ‘piracy’ is something of a historical misnomer. This word was not used initially in early modern times to refer to naval bandits. Instead there were two types of 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 were employed in an unofficial capacity by the governments of European states to attack the shipping of rival nations. They were given letters of marque, or permission, from rulers, however if anyone asked too many questions they were acting in a ‘private’ capacity.
Hence the name ‘privateers’. The benefits of this arrangement allowed monarchs like Queen Elizabeth I of England to employ privateers like Sir Francis Drke 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 fame, whereas later pirates were forever on the run from the governments of every nation.
These latter kinds of pirates, who operated solely on their own initiative and who hid out in pirate havens, should rightly be termed buccaneers. These buccaneers operated primarily in the northern and eastern Atlantic in the first half of the sixteenth 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 seventeenth century, as European colonial settlements grew in number in the Americas, they had relocated westwards and were increasingly based out of pirate havens 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 in piracy in the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds by the time Teach was born. However, one final element was needed to drive the expansion of piracy in the early eighteenth century. In November 1700 King Charles II of Spain died without a clear heir.
His will directed that Philip of Anjou, a grandson of the King of France, Louis XIV, 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 Spanish Empire. Consequently, a pan-European war erupted, the War of the Spanish Succession. It lasted for thirteen years.
Much of it played out in the Atlantic world with numerous naval clashes along the eastern seaboard of North America and the Caribbean. As this occurred, the government of Queen Anne in England began fitting out extra ships to send to fight the Spanish and the French across the Atlantic, while letters of marque allowing privateer captains to attack Spanish and French shipping were also distributed. This latter arrangement was a cheap approach as the government issued such letters to individuals who owned their own ships.
A great many of those who became some of the most notorious pirates in the decades to come, entered English government service in this way during the War of the Spanish Succession. 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 suggest that he was active in the Caribbean by the 1700s and sailing aboard ships which were attacking Spanish shipping in the 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 could read, but were only able to make 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 of fairly affluent background and had access to some schooling in his youth. By the late 1700s or early 1710s he was actively sailing with the privateers who were in the semi-employment of the English crown in the Caribbean.
Teach or Tatch was based out of Jamaica and one near contemporary account offers a brief reference to his time engaged in this activity, claiming he “distinguished 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 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. After years of stalemate the decision-makers at the courts of London, Paris, Madrid and Vienna negotiated a peace settlement and agreed that if Spain and France never united under one member of the House of Bourbon, a member of the French royal family could sit on the Spanish throne. Britain and Austria were compensated for agreeing to this through the transfer of Spanish lands and colonies in Italy, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and elsewhere 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 to land, try and find positions as 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 commanded by Stede 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 concerning Blackbeard in this first year or so of his piracy career is not entirely clear. He worked with Bonnet for a time, although Stede’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. Other evidence points towards Blackbeard and Bonnet ultimately remaining on good terms.
In any event, Bonnet was back up and running with a separate crew before long and through much of 1717 Blackbeard, Bonnet and another pirate captain by the name of Benjamin Hornigold were attacking shipping in the western Atlantic and Caribbean. They were particularly active in the waters off of the Carolinas and what 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 completely lawless in the immediate after of the war and it was here that Blackbeard and Bonnet made their names and their riches attacking any Spanish, English of French merchant ships attempting to pass from Florida north towards the ports of Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
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 Stede Bonnet and the ship which he acquired after Bonnet’s crew removed him 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 that they had been treated poorly in the peace settlements arranged in 1713 and 1714 and believed that their turn towards piracy 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 name was added soon afterwards, so that Teach, Hornigold and others such as David Herriot 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 1717. These included the Robert and the Good Intent, two 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 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 soon acquired the ship which Blackbeard is most famous for owning. On the 28th of November 1717 he and his men came across a French ship not far from the island of St Vincent in the Caribbean.
This was a Guineaman, the colloquial name for a slave ship due to how these vessels generally plied their trade 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 surrendered.
Running to over 31 metres in length, with a complement of 40 cannons and able to hold a crew of 200 or more pirates, La Concorde was a bigger ship than any Teach had captained before. He thus made it his flagship and renamed it the Queen Anne’s Revenge. 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 had been well-treated by the English government.
Exactly what was done with the 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 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 St Vincent within days of the capture of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. The sacking of this ship, 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, though other accounts suggest that the numbers in his pirate crew had swelled to well over 300 by that time. It was the first of half a dozen valuable prizes which Blackbeard and 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 the island colony of St Christopher shortly after his return. He noted that Teach as being very tall and thin and possessed of an immense black beard. At that juncture Bostock believed that they intended to winter on the island of Hispaniola with a view to trying to intercept one of the Spanish treasure ships which still sailed from the Americas to Europe every year with the now admittedly thin supply of silver and gold from the mines of Mexico and Bolivia.
In all of this Blackbeard and his followers were operating within what was broadly termed the Alliance of Pirates. This had been in existence since the late sixteenth 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 loosely allied pirate crews who worked together to establish safe havens in ports in disparate locations.
In the early eighteenth century some of these were found in places like Bermuda and Jamaica, but other were much further afield in parts of western Africa, while for a time Madagascar off the coast of south-east 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, Hollywood depictions of piracy to the contrary.
Instead staple forms of loot were actually large consignments of products like sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, dyes and spices of various kinds, all of which were valuable and could fetch good profits if sold in the right location. 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 in the early eighteenth century with a map with an X on it, he was very much an oddity. Blackbeard’s reputation within this Alliance of Pirates was established quickly.
While much of the legend surrounding him was burnished by tall tales in later times, there is little doubt that he managed to impress his contemporaries through his audacity and also his physically imposing presence. His beard was, one will not be surprised to learn, black, and was grown in such a fashion that it covered much of his face. It was memorably described as a “large quantity of hair, which like a frightful meteor, covered his whole face and frightened America more than any comet that has appeared there a long time.
” So long was it that he would twist some of it into ribbons and turn them around his ears in pigtails. In combat he was said to walk the deck of his ship with a bandolier of three pistols slung 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 cannot form an idea of a fury from hell to look more frightful.
” His private life had an element of pure fiction and legend around it. For instance, the important account of Teach’s life which was published in 1724 claimed he was a polygamist who had been married at least fourteen times, with a dozen of his wives still alive at the time of writing in the mid-1720s. It was common 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 considerable debate, 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 Tatch was also known for his heavy drinking. 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 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, so kept the company hot, damned hot, then all things went well again. ” It isn’t difficult to see from 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 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 the Carolinas in North America. It was at this time that Teach decided that they would blockade 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 colonies across North America. By the early eighteenth century it was the epicentre of the tobacco trade in the Southern Colonies and huge consignments of tobacco 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 defences of the port would be substantial enough to ward off a 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 nine or ten days.
The port of Charleston lies inside the Charles Town Bar, a bar or stretch of shoals which form a shallow barrier at the mouth of the Ashley River. Ships have to navigate the Charles Town 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 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 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 kind amongst Teach’s crew, or perhaps a growing penchant for smoking opium amongst the pirate 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 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. While the blockade of Charleston might 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 of the new British monarch, King George I, 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 program of piracy suppression. The new king and his ministers were deeply disturbed to learn 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 ships in the Caribbean and North Atlantic had so recently been allied with the crown risked creating a diplomatic crisis for England if they continued to strike at French or Spanish ships.
Consequently, there was a determination to end the piratical activity from 1715 onwards. 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 of the island of St Croix in the Caribbean early in 1717 that the first victory was achieved, but there was a clear awareness that dozens of pirate ships were operating 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 ill-gotten gains if they agreed to cease their buccaneering activity. Realising that it would be cheaper and swifter to take this approach, in September 1717 the government of George I 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 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. The catch was that anyone who did not surrender by that time would have a large bounty placed on their head and would be hunted 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.
Teach’s movements in the months that 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 had been appointed as the Governor 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 Stede Bonnet and Benjamin Hornigold .
One important source for the life of Blackbeard published in 1724 even suggests that Eden oversaw the nuptials for one of Teach’s fourteen marriages. Official complaints concerning his conduct in the late 1710s suggested he had benefited financially and materially from facilitating piratical activity off the coast of the Carolinas. This was the figure to whom many former pirates turned to obtain pardons in 1718 and 1719.
The counterpoint to Eden was Alexander Spotswood. He was a military commander who 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 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 crackdown on the growing piracy threat he was determined to implement those same orders. He took an uncompromising approach to Blackbeard and his allies in 1718, determining that he would prosecute them with all military and naval power he could muster if they refused to accept the generous pardon offer which had been extended to them 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 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 north with the intention of careening their ships on Beaufort Inlet in what is now North Carolina, scraping out the hulls and preparing them for a possible voyage to the Caribbean.
But for whatever reason, maybe the prodigious amounts of alcohol the crew were 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 Teach’s 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 possibly decided to scuttle the ship in an effort to reduce the size of his crew drastically, hoping 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 Queen Anne’s Revenge left in the waters off of North Carolina and was eventually claimed by the sea. Whether Blackbeard intentionally scuttled 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 growing number of buccaneers who were 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 seize one last large score by 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 aground two weeks later in order to drive off most of his crew and so be able to seize a greater 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.
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 of the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean, 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 they might find themselves being offered letters of marque 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 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 other pirates who then began settling along the Outer Banks and other parts of the Carolinas than Spotswood began preparing to prosecute these same individuals. He was able to do so because there was a flaw in Blackbeard’s plan. The Proclamation for the Suppression of Pirates or the 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 deadline which was later extended into 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 had done: learning of the pardon offer 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 January 1718 deadline.
Armed with this knowledge, Spotswood was 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 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 and he 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 in the region with him. Eden probably was anxious that he would obtain a letter of marque and leave North Carolina, aware that there was growing suspicion of his own behaviour and role in issuing pardons to those involved in the blockade of Charleston the previous May. There were also issues quickly 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 had been involved in a piracy attack on a French ship sailing along the coast, though 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 approach which was legally sound given 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 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 Maynard, a veteran of the War of the 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 fifty men would accompany Maynard on board the two ships, 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 own devices in North Carolina.
Thus, armed with dozens of canons 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 followed was published in London in 1724 and provides an unusual level of detail concerning what would ultimately prove to be the final events of Teach’s life. After four days of tiptoeing down the coast, Maynard and his men on the Ranger and the Jane arrived at Ocracoke Inlet on the Outer 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 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 either engage Maynard or else to try 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 more alert to the potential threat. Instead, Teach and several of his crew were said to have spent the night before Maynard and his ships arrived to Ocracoke Inlet drinking in a local tavern.
Maynard and his men laid anchor at the mouth of the Inlet on the evening of the 21st of November 1718. There they spent the night there and only moved in the morning after hoisting the king’s colours to let anyone they came across know that 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 men to begin firing at Maynard’s ships. His undoing was that the Adventure ran aground as he went to escape. Maynard was thus able to pull up close and weigh anchor, ordering his superior number of men, who had far more canons, to begin firing on the Adventure.
An exchange followed between Blackbeard and Maynard shouting across the water at each other, with Teach allegedly finishing it by raising a glass of spirits to his assailant and drinking it with a shout that he would offer Maynard and his men no quarter before once again ordering his men to open fire. A dozen or so men were lost on both sides in the exchange of fire which then followed. Blackbeard nearly won the day as Maynard’s men tried to engage them through the shallow waters.
Teach made it to Maynard at this juncture and was engaging him when Maynard’s sword broke. The Lieutenant would probably have died had one of his men not suddenly 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 the scene as Blackbeard fell dead to the ground.
It had been a fitting last 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 be cut off and taken on board his ship.
He then sailed onwards to Bath 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 that individuals in New York. A diary of Teach’s 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 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 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 part of the brutal government crackdown in the late 1710s. Two weeks before Teach was killed, his old accomplice Stede 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 Hornigold, who had returned to the sea as a pirate hunter of sorts, was wrecked at sea during a hurricane and never seen again.
In November 1720 another infamous buccaneer, Calico Jack Rackham, was captured on Jamaica. He was executed at Port Royal 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 Read and Anne Bonny, were captured with Calico Jack.
Both of them were seemingly spared as they were pregnant. Bonny disappeared from the historical record altogether after that but Read died in prison. Finally, Bartholomew Roberts, a pirate who is often credited with inventing something akin to the skull and cross-bones pirate flag, was killed in February 1722 in a clash with a Royal Navy ship off the coast of Gabon 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 the Indian Ocean where they were less like to end up dead. Figures like Henry Every, a 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 rather than the rule when it came to piracy in its supposed golden age.
By the time Bartholomew Jack was killed in the spring of 1722 the legend of the buccaneers was already beginning to emerge. Their exploits had caught the imagination of the English public and in London in 1724 a book appeared which began to establish Blackbeard as a paragon of the infamous pirate captain. This was entitled A General Historie of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates and was allegedly authored by a figure called Captain Charles Johnson.
No record exists of any captain 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 Historie might have been. The most interesting theory holds that the author was Daniel Defoe, who had published his canonical work, Robinson Crusoe, five years earlier in 1719. Whoever the author of the General Historie was, it cannot be understated how influential it was in establishing modern ideas concerning the Golden Age of Piracy and the reputations of figures like Blackbeard and Stede 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 the Jolly Roger flag were noted. Blackbeard’s reputation and legend was further enhanced as the years went by. The nineteenth century saw a renaissance in pirate lore.
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 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 buccaneers of the Golden Age of Piracy. Blackbeard is both mentioned directly by Stevenson and one character is named Israel Hands in reference to the deputy commander of the Queen Anne’s Revenge.
A slew of popular works in the twentieth century have all been based to some extent on Blackbeard, notably J. M. Barrie’s rendering of 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 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 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 retrieved thirty cannons and tens of thousands of different artefacts which can be 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 time to confirm it as such, notably a wine glass decorated to commemorate the accession of King George I as the new monarch of Britain in 1714, and a sword similarly marking the accession of Louis XV as King of France in 1715.
Fragments of a book entitled A Voyage to the South Sea published in 1712 have even been identified from the wreckage, all 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 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 terrorised shipping across the Caribbean and along the seaboard of what would become the United States.
The circumstances of his birth are unclear, including where he was born and when, while 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 mid-thirties. His career as a buccaneer only lasted about two years before he was killed.
Blackbeard’s short stint as a pirate was similar to most of the famed pirates of the Golden Age of, many of them in the years immediately following the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. The majority of these pirates 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 the terror he inspire make him a true legend? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
