Edward Teach - Blackbeard Article

[corsair91]

Three Centuries After His Beheading, a Kinder, Gentler Blackbeard Emerges

Recent discoveries cast a different light on the most famous and most feared pirate of the early 18th century

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/three-centuries-after-his-beheading-kinder-gentler-blackbeard-emerges-180970782/

By Andrew Lawler
November 13, 2018


Since his head was separated from his body 300 years ago this month, Edward Teach (or Thache), also known as Blackbeard the pirate, has served as the archetype of the bloodthirsty rogues who once roamed Caribbean and Atlantic coastal waters.

Only in the past few years have genealogists, historians and archaeologists, thanks to a combination of hard work and good luck, unearthed surprising clues that reveal the man behind the legend, one that Blackbeard himself helped spawn. In his day, merchants whispered his name in fright. Reports circulated of a large man with fierce and wild eyes who kept a brace of three pistols on a holster across his chest and a tall fur cap on his head. Lighted matches made his luxurious beard smoke like a frightful meteor.

This pirate, according to a British account written a half-dozen years after his death, frightened America more than any comet that has appeared there [for] a long time. But Blackbeard vanished abruptly when a British naval expedition personally funded by Virginia Governor Alexander Spotswood ambushed him and most of his men in a bloody battle off Ocracoke Island on November 22, 1718. Blackbeard's head was stuck on a piling off Hampton, Virginia, as a warning to other lawbreakers.

The fearsome buccaneer never scared Hollywood producers, however. Blackbeard gained new notoriety in the mid-20th century, when the 1952 movie Blackbeard the Pirate proved popular. A half-dozen films centered on his exploits followed, and he emerged as the quintessential cinematic pirate. In 2006, he garnered his own miniseries detailing his search for Captain Kidd's treasure. He even had an encounter with Jack Sparrow in the 2011 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. These representations further embellished a legend that long ago overwhelmed historical truth. The real story of Blackbeard has gone untold for centuries, says Baylus Brooks, a Florida-based maritime historian and genealogist.

Even the most basic biographical details about Blackbeard have been hotly disputed. No one knows the year of his birth or even its location; some claim Bristol, in western England; others point to Jamaica. Still others insist he was from North Carolina or Philadelphia. His early life was a complete mystery. But few had attempted to trace Blackbeard’s family tree.

**********

On a lazy summer morning in 2014, Brooks wondered if there might be records of any Teaches or Thaches in Jamaica, one of the places the pirate was said to consider home. Then he remembered his subscription to Ancestry.com and began his research there. I expected nothing, but I got a hit, he says. It was the baptismal record of Cox Thache, a son of Edward and Lucretia Theach (Thache and Theach were common variants of Teach), in the Jamaican settlement of Spanish Town in 1700. This was all in about two hours over coffee in my favorite chair, Brooks recalls.

Brooks knew that an English visitor to Jamaica in 1739 made reference to meeting members of Blackbeard.s family residing in Spanish Town, and his mother was said at that time to be still living. My life had changed, said Brooks. Ever since, he has been on the paper trail of the pirate's family tree. With the help of Jamaican researcher Dianne Golding Frankson, he discovered that Edward Thache who Brooks believes was Blackbeard's father was a captain and a man of status who remarried twice; Lucretia was his last wife.

The real treasure that Brooks found, however, was a yellowed 1706 document on a shelf in the parish archives retrieved by Frankson. Written aboard the 60-gun Royal Navy ship Windsor while it was anchored in the harbor of Jamaica's Port Royal, the author was Edward Thache's son, who bore the same name. In this deed, Thache turns his late father's estate over to his stepmother, Lucretia, for the love and affection I have for and bear towards my brother and sister Thomas Theache and Rachel Theache his half siblings.

If Brooks is right, then Blackbeard joined the Royal Navy and magnanimously turned his father's estate, which as the oldest son he inherited by law, over to his Jamaican family. Checking the Windsor logbooks, he discovered an Edward Thache who had arrived in England aboard a Barbados merchant ship. On April 12, 1706, the young man joined the crew while the ship was anchored off England's Isle of Wight near Portsmouth.

In Brooks' telling, Blackbeard's family left Bristol while the pirate was still young to seek their fortune on the wealthy island of Jamaica, where sugar was known as white gold. They owned enslaved Africans and appear to have been of high social status. Why the young Edward, likely in his mid-20s, would leave home to join a merchant ship and then the Royal Navy is not clear, but it may have been a natural step to achieve advancement as well as nautical experience.

This historical Blackbeard is far different from the rampaging maniac or Robin Hood figure of myth. Brooks’ Thache is a well-educated man of social grace, literate and capable of using complex navigational equipment. This background would explain why, shortly before his death, he hit it off so well with North Carolina’s governor Charles Eden and other leading members of the colony. The pirate might have even been upset over the demise of the House of Stuart that put George I—a German speaker—on the English throne, perhaps the reason he renamed a stolen French ship the Queen Anne’s Revenge, after the last Stuart monarch.

***********

Other historians have recently noted that despite Blackbeard’s terrible reputation, no evidence exists that he ever killed anyone before his final battle at Ocracoke, near Cape Hatteras, when he was fighting for his life. “He likely cultivated that murderous image,” says Charles Ewen, an archaeologist at East Carolina University. “Scaring people was a better option than to damage what you are trying to steal.”


Brooks admits he cannot definitively prove his Thache is our Blackbeard, but other scholars find Brooks’ case compelling. “It makes sense and it seems credible,” says Ewen. Some are more cautious. “There is some validity,” adds historian Angus Konstam, “but it is not yet tied up.”

What drew Blackbeard to piracy a decade after joining the Royal Navy, however, is not a matter of dispute. In 1715, a fleet of Spanish ships left Havana, Cuba, for Spain filled with treasure, including vast quantities of silver. An early hurricane wrecked the ships on Florida’s Atlantic coast, drowning more than a thousand sailors. English pirates, privateers, and others—particularly Jamaicans—descended on the area to plunder the vessels, sparking what Trent University historian Arne Bialuschewski calls “a gold rush.”

Blackbeard first appears in the records as a pirate at this moment.

His career, like so many of his colleagues, was short-lived; within two years he was dead. “People have this romantic notion of piracy, but it was not a cushy lifestyle,” says Kimberly Kenyon, field director for excavation of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which went aground outside Beaufort, North Carolina, and was abandoned shortly before Blackbeard’s death.

Kenyon’s team has hauled more than 400,000 artifacts to the surface, from two-dozen massive cannons to a fragment of a page from a 1712 travel book—Blackbeard was known to plunder books as well as commodities. The pirate may have had a fondness for good food too, since records show that he kept the ship’s French cook. The archaeological team has also found remains of wild boar, deer, and turkey, a sign that the crew hunted fresh meat. And the team has only excavated half of the wreck—the world’s only pirate wreck to be scientifically studied.


But if Blackbeard was loath to use violent means, he certainly was ready to do so. The ship was heavily armed with 250,000 bits of lead shot, 400 cannonballs, dozens of grenades, and many muskets, as well as a total of 40 English and Swedish cannon. Disease likely posed a greater threat than the Royal Navy, however, as evidenced by the urethral syringe found by archaeologists still bearing traces of mercury, a popular treatment at the time for syphilis.

The recent archaeological finds coupled with Brooks’ research may make Blackbeard “even more enigmatic,” says Kenyon. He is no longer the cardboard villain of the past, but his personality and motives are still unclear. “He continues to be so elusive. There are so many facets to this person. That’s what makes him fascinating.

Editor's note, November 20, 2018: This story has been corrected to indicate that Blackbeard joined his crew near Portsmouth, not Plymouth.

[corsair91]

wikipedia links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbeard


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maynard

Expecting to be rewarded for his actions, Maynard was never fully compensated or paid for the expedition. He was eventually promoted to commander in 1739.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Anne%27s_Revenge

https://www.artpublikamag.com/single-post/2018/07/04/Resurrecting-the-notorious-Queen-Annes-Revenge-David-Moore-talks-maritime-archeology-and-how-he-discovered-Blackbeards-pirate-flagship

[corsair91]

The Most Iconic Episode From the Life of Blackbeard Is How It Ended.
Here's How the Pirate Really Died

https://time.com/5457008/blackbeard-death/

By Eric Jay Dolin
November 21, 2018



When Blackbeard Scourged the Seas

Governor Spotswood warred against him. His skull became a drinking cup.

https://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/blackbea.cfm

by George Humphrey Yetter

[corsair91]

Blackbeard the Pirate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eyKPDsOyR8&list=PLUOc2qodFHp8mvnBE_Ya6Bj0HYnRo4XiY&index=40

Epic History TV

The complete story of the dreaded pirate Edward Thatch, AKA Blackbeard, told in 6 minutes with detailed maps of his voyages and notorious deeds.


Possibly born in Bristol in England around 1680, Edward Thatch (or Teach) may have served as a sailor or privateer during the War of Spanish Succession (known in America as Queen Anne's War) before turning to high seas larceny in the last 'Golden Age' of piracy.

Blackbeard's pirate career probably began in 1717 while serving as second-in-command to Captain Ben Hornigold, based in the pirate haven of Nassau in the Bahamas. Together they attacked and plundered merchant ships off the eastern seaboard of colonial America. Blackbeard later met 'gentleman pirate' Stede Bonnet, and took over command of his sloop, 'Revenge'. Blackbeard continued to terrorise the Thirteen Colonies, attacking ships bound for eastern seaports including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, the Chesapeake and Charleston.

Blackbeard then sailed to the Windward Islands, and near St.Vincent captured a French frigate, 'La Concorde', which had been converted into a slave ship. Some of the slaves joined Blackbeard's crew, the rest he put ashore. Blackbeard renamed the ship 'Queen Anne's Revenge' and fitted her with 40 guns, making her one of the most powerful ships in the area.

With 'Queen Anne's Revenge' at the head of his small pirate flotilla, Blackbeard attacked ships and settlements from Guadeloupe to the Gulf of Mexico. Spanish sailors nicknamed him 'the Great Devil', and he became the most notorious and feared pirate in the West Indies.

In 1718 Blackbeard sailed to the coast of Florida, where a Spanish treasure fleet had been wrecked three years before. Some pirates had made their fortune searching the wrecks for silver and gold, and Blackbeard's men spent several weeks diving the wrecks. But they had little success.

Next, in the most audacious move of his pirate career, Blackbeard, with four ships, blockaded the port of Charleston, capital of the British colony of South Carolina. For six days he stopped all ships entering or leaving the harbour, plundered them, and took their passengers and crew hostage to be ransomed back to the town.

Moving up the east coast of America looking for a hideaway, Blackbeard's flagship 'Queen Anne's Revenge' ran aground entering a shallow inlet, and sank. By now Blackbeard's crew was over-large and unruly, and some speculate that Blackbeard sank his ship on purpose, to disband his crew and increase his own share of the plunder they were carrying. Now he marooned the most discontent of his men (they were later rescued by Stede Bonnet) and sailed in a spare sloop to Bath with 60 of his best crew. At Bath, then capital of North Carolina, they accepted a royal pardon from the governor, as part of a general pirate amnesty that had been offered by the British government.

Blackbeard was not content with civilian life, and from his new base at Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks, he soon returned to piracy, robbing two French ships out at sea. Alexander Spotswood, Lieutenant Governor of the neighbouring colony, Virginia, was outraged at the prospect of having the infamous, recidivist pirate Blackbeard operating on his doorstep. Although North Carolina was out of his jurisdiction, Spotswood organised a naval expedition to kill or capture Blackbeard. Led by Lieutenant Maynard, Royal Navy, the expedition caught Blackbeard by surprise at Ocracoke Island. In the viscous battle that followed, Blackbeard was finally overpowered and killed.

N.B. There are no precise records of most of Blackbeard's voyages or attacks. Those depicted in this video are carefully researched but intended to give an accurate impression of his exploits, rather than a precise record of exact routes or attacks. Similarly, there are no accurate contemporary images of Queen Anne's Revenge, so artistic license has been taken with a ship of similar size and type.


"Damnation seize my soul if I give you quarters, or take any from you."
- Blackbeard


Read more about Blackbeard in this article from Smithsonian.com:


The Last Days of Blackbeard
An exclusive account of the final raid and political maneuvers of history’s most notorious pirate

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/last-days-blackbeard-180949440/?no-ist=&amp=&page=1

EDIT: see below

[corsair91]

The Last Days of Blackbeard
An exclusive account of the final raid and political maneuvers of history’s most notorious pirate

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/last-days-blackbeard-180949440/?no-ist=&amp=&page=1


https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/GBoyZmEN8jkf6WP0vVXOrp2E_qA=/800x600/filters:no_upscale():focal(530x301:531x302)/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/af/df/afdf8162-c200-48fd-ace5-848f521a4148/01-blackbeard-drawing.jpg

By Colin Woodard
Smithsonian Magazine
February 2014


For the 18 men aboard the French merchant ship Rose Emelye, the evening of August 23, 1718, was shaping up to be as routine as the 167 that had preceded it since they’d left Nantes. They’d spent the spring following the winds and currents across the Atlantic to tropical Martinique, and much of the summer unloading French cargo and taking on bags of cocoa and barrels of freshly refined sugar. Now they were following the Gulf Stream home in the company of another French merchant ship, La Toison d’Or, sailing just a stone’s throw behind and to leeward. The American mainland had disappeared behind the horizon days before. The next day would raise Bermuda above the horizon, the final waypoint before making landfall in Europe.

Then, as the sun sank low in the sky, someone spotted sails bearing down on their stern.

Over the next three hours the sky grew dark and the vessel drew ever closer. To the Frenchmen’s relief, it was a tiny vessel: a sloop with Spanish lines better suited to shuttling cargo between Caribbean islands than to crossing an ocean. Still, something wasn’t right. What was it doing out here in the open ocean, and why was it on an intercept course with the Frenchmen’s much larger oceangoing merchant ships? As the mysterious sloop overtook them and pulled alongside, they knew they would have answers soon enough.

In the last moments, Capt. Jan Goupil would have seen three cannon muzzles rolled out of gun ports on the tiny sloop’s sides and dozens of armed men crowded on its decks. He ordered his crew of 17 to prepare for action, getting Rose Emelye’s four cannons to the ready. Remove yourselves, Goupil’s mate cried out to the men on the sloop, or we will fire!

On the tiny sloop, a tall, slim man with a long black beard barked out an order. His helmsman threw the tiller hard to lee, men released ropes, and, sails briefly flapping, the strange vessel suddenly swung hard about, shooting by in the opposite direction.

Goupil’s skin may have turned cold. The sloop—the pirate sloop—swept down to the unarmed Toison d’Or. Minutes later the vessels’ wooden hulls came together with a moan. Pirates swarmed over the gunwales and onto the ship’s decks, seizing the crew, perhaps as human shields. The bearded man had fooled him. Now he found himself facing not one attacker but two.

Soon the bearded man was alongside again and his men discharged their cannons. Musket balls flew over Goupil’s head. There was nothing to be done. He turned Rose Emelye into the wind, drifted to a halt and surrendered his command.

Blackbeard, the notorious pirate, had captured two vessels more than twice the size of his own—a feat described here for the first time. He could not have known that these would be the last prizes of his career and that in just three months he and most of his crew would be dead.

***


Out of all the pirates who’ve trolled the seas over the past 3,000 years, Blackbeard is the most famous. His nearest rivals—Capt. William Kidd and Sir Henry Morgan—weren’t really pirates at all, but privateers, mercenaries given permission by their sovereign to attack enemy shipping in time of war. Blackbeard and his contemporaries in the early 18th-century Caribbean had nobody’s permission to do what they were doing; they were outlaws. But unlike the aristocrats who controlled the British, French and Spanish colonial empires, many ordinary people in Britain and British America saw Blackbeard and his fellow pirates as heroes, Robin Hood figures fighting a rear-guard action against a corrupt, unaccountable and increasingly tyrannical ruling class. So great were these pirates’ reputations—daring antiheroes, noble brigands—that they’ve been sustained ever since, inspiring 18th-century plays, 19th-century novels, and 20th- and 21st-century motion pictures, television shows and pop culture iconography. In his lifetime, Blackbeard—who terrorized the New World and died in a shipboard sword fight with sailors of the Royal Navy—captivated the public imagination like no other. He has never let it go.

And yet Blackbeard’s life and career have long been obscured in a fog of legend, myth and propaganda, much of it contained in a mysterious volume that emerged shortly after his death: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. Nobody knows for sure who wrote the book—which was published pseudonymously in 1724—but the General History almost single-handedly informed all the accounts that have come since. Parts of it are uncannily accurate, drawn word-for-word from official government documents. Others have been shown to be complete fabrications. For researchers, it has served as a treasure map, but one that leads to dead ends as often as it does to verifiable evidence, which scholars covet like gold.

In recent years, however, researchers have dug up new evidence, buried in the archives of England, France and the Americas, or beneath the sands of the American coast, allowing them to piece together a fuller and extremely compelling picture of Blackbeard and his cohorts, one that shows him to have been a canny strategist, a master of improvisation, a showman, a natural leader and an extraordinary risk taker. “Researchers are often drifting around without a rudder not sure what pirate stories are real,” says underwater explorer Mike Daniel, president of the Maritime Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida, who found the never-before-published account of the Rose Emelye’s capture buried in the Archives Départementales de Loire-Atlantique in Nantes in 2008. “Then all of a sudden you find documents like these and it’s like finding an island. There are solid facts beneath your feet.”

Many of the discoveries shed light on the final months of Blackbeard’s life, when he executed a series of daring schemes that, for a time, kept him one step ahead of his enemies as the golden age of piracy was collapsing all around him. They go a long way in explaining why a pirate active for, at most, five years has managed to grip the public’s attention for nearly three centuries.

***

Of late, pirates are everywhere. Disney is planning the fifth installment of its Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, while the fourth installment of the multi-billion-dollar Assassin’s Creed video game series is entitled “Black Flag.” (I worked on the game as a script consultant.) And there are two new television series: “Black Sails,” which premiered in January on Starz, and, launching this winter on NBC, “Crossbones,” which features John Malkovich as Blackbeard and is based on my 2007 nonfiction book, The Republic of Pirates.

Virtually all of these pirate materials—as well as the works of Robert Louis Stevenson—are inspired by Blackbeard’s circle of pirates, who shared a common base in the Bahamas, and were active for a very brief period: 1713 to 1720 or so. Despite the brevity of their careers, many of these pirates’ names have lived on through the ages: Sam Bellamy of Whydah fame, the female pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the gentleman pirate Stede Bonnet, the flamboyantly dressed Calico Jack Rackham, the bombastic Charles Vane and, of course, Blackbeard himself.

Part of the reason for their fame is the success they enjoyed. At their zenith, in late 1717, Blackbeard and his Bahamian associates had disrupted the trans-Atlantic commerce of three empires and even had the warships of the Royal Navy on the run. They were threatening colonies, occupying smaller ones at will and burning and blockading the larger ones. The governor of Bermuda expected an invasion at any time. The governor of Pennsylvania feared they would come burn Philadelphia. The lieutenant governor of the British Leeward Islands colony effectively found himself under house arrest for several days when Sam Bellamy’s men took over the island of Virgin Gorda for a few days of recreation and debauchery. The captain of the frigate HMS Seaford abandoned his patrol of the same colony on the rumor that pirates were near because he feared his ship would be captured. It was a genuine concern: Bellamy, Blackbeard and other pirates not only piloted ships every bit as large and well-armed as the 22-gun Seaford, but the pirates also had far greater manpower, which was a critical advantage in boarding actions.

Their success was largely because of the pirates’ sanctuary, a fortified base at Nassau, once and future capital of the Bahamas. Britain had lost control of this colony during the War of Spanish Succession, which ended for Britain in 1713, and during which the French and Spanish sacked Nassau twice. After the war, the pirates took over this failed state before Britain got around to it, shoring up Fort Nassau and brokering a black market trading network with unscrupulous English merchants at Harbour Island and Eleuthera, two Bahamian islands 50 miles northeast. From this well-defended and supplied position, the pirates could spring out into the Florida Straits—a major seaway that, due to the prevailing winds, most Europe-bound ships were compelled to use—capture prizes and quickly carry them back to the safety of their base.

The Bahamian pirates were unlike most other pirates before or since in that they engaged in more than simple banditry. Most of them—Blackbeard included—were former merchant and naval sailors who thought themselves engaged in a social revolt against shipowners and captains who’d made their prior lives miserable. Bellamy’s crew members referred to themselves as Robin Hood’s men. “They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference,” Bellamy once told a captive. “They rob the poor under the cover of law...and we plunder the rich under the cover of our own courage.”

There was also a democratic spirit aboard the pirates’ ships, an unusual development six decades before Lexington and Yorktown, more than seven ahead of the storming of the Bastille. Upon seizing a vessel, the pirates turned its government upside down. Instead of using whips and beatings to enforce a rigid, top-down hierarchy, they elected and deposed their captains by popular vote. They shared their treasure almost equally and on most ships didn’t allow the captain his own cabin. “They were very shrewd in the way they reorganized their ships to limit the captain’s power,” says maritime historian Marcus Rediker of the University of Pittsburgh. “There was a real social consciousness at work there.”

***

Blackbeard was likely one of the first pirates to come to Nassau after the end of the War of Spanish Succession. He was probably one of the 75 men who followed the Jamaican privateer Benjamin Hornigold to the ruined town in the summer of 1713, and whose early exploits were documented by the governor of Bermuda and even received attention in the American colonies’ only newspaper, the Boston News-Letter. The war was over, but Hornigold’s gang continued attacking small Spanish trading vessels in the Florida Straits and isolated sugar plantations in eastern Cuba. Operating from three large open sailing canoes called periaguas, in just eight months the gang pulled in plunder worth £13,175, a staggering fortune at a time when a naval sailor made only about £12 a year. Nine months later their haul had grown to £60,000, several times the annual income of Britain’s wealthiest noblemen. They soon drove the last authority figures out of the Bahamas and traded their periaguas for large, nimble sloops-of-war, which extended their range as far north as New England and south to the Spanish Main.

In the fall of 1715, Nassau’s pirate population grew from dozens to hundreds after an early hurricane wrecked the annual Spanish treasure fleet on the nearby beaches of Florida, scattering bodies and gold coins across what has since been called the Treasure Coast. At year’s end, Henry Jennings, another former Jamaican privateer, arrived in Nassau with £87,000 in recovered Spanish treasure. Prostitutes, smugglers, escaped slaves and adventure-seekers flowed into Nassau, which expanded into a city of huts and tents, an open-air Las Vegas and tropical Deadwood rolled into one.

Blackbeard first appears in the historical record in early December 1716, when he was Hornigold’s lieutenant and in charge of his own eight-gun, 90-man pirate sloop. (The pirates were apparently preparing a feast: They relieved a Jamaica-bound brigantine of its beef, peas, oysters and other foodstuffs before releasing it and the captain to tell the tale to authorities in Kingston.) Of his life before then we still know very little. He went by Edward Thatch—not “Teach” as many historians have said, apparently repeating an error made by the Boston News-Letter. He may have been from the English port of Bristol (as the General History says), where the name Thatch appears in early 18th-century census rolls that I scrutinized in that city while researching Republic of Pirates. During the war, he probably sailed aboard Hornigold’s privateering vessel, and he was known to merchants as far away as Philadelphia, where he had sailed as “a mate from Jamaica,” the commercial hub of the British Caribbean. The only eyewitness description—that of former captive Henry Bostock, originally preserved among the official papers of the British Leeward Islands colony—describes him as “a tall Spare Man with a very black beard which he wore very long.”

Despite his infamous reputation, Blackbeard was remarkably judicious in his use of force. In the dozens of eyewitness accounts of his victims, there is not a single instance in which he killed anyone prior to his final, fatal battle with the Royal Navy. “I haven’t seen one single piece of evidence that Blackbeard ever used violence against anyone,” says Trent University historian Arne Bialuschewski, who unearthed several forgotten accounts by captives and others in the archives of Jamaica in 2008. Imperial authorities and allied newspapers, Bialuschewski says, “created this image of Blackbeard as a monster.”

Thatch’s first fully independent command came under unusual circumstances. In late August 1717, an unfamiliar vessel came into Nassau Harbor, its rigging, hull and crew bearing the scars of battle. When the captain showed himself, Nassau’s pirates must have gasped. He was clad in a fine dressing gown, patched with bandages, and spoke and carried himself like a gentleman and a landlubber, both of which he turned out to be. This was Stede Bonnet, the 29-year-old scion of a wealthy Barbados family of sugar planters who built his own armed sloop, hired a crew of 126 and ran away with them to start a life of piracy—an account that I recently confirmed in the letters, now in Britain’s National Archives, of an 18th-century Royal Navy captain. Why Bonnet did so is unclear—he had no maritime experience and three small children at home—but the author of the General History claimed he suffered from “a disorder of his Mind” caused “by some discomforts he found in a married state.” On arrival on the American seaboard, he’d foolishly engaged a Spanish warship, losing a third of his crew, suffering serious injury himself and barely escaping capture.

Bonnet sought sanctuary among Nassau’s pirates; they complied, but turned command of Bonnet’s sloop, Revenge, to Edward Thatch. When Thatch set sail a couple of weeks later, Bonnet remained lodged in his book-lined captain’s cabin, barely able to leave his bed on account of his injuries. He would remain there as Thatch led one the most dramatic and attention-grabbing piracy operations the American colonists had ever seen.

In battle, he cultivated a terrifying image. According to the (often unreliable) General History, he wore a silk sling over his shoulders on which were “three braces of pistols, hanging in holsters like bandoliers.” Under his hat he tied lit fuses, dangling some of them down the sides of his face so as to surround it with a halo of smoke and fire, making him “look more frightful” than “a fury from Hell.”

Merchant crews would take one look at this apparition and the army of wild men around him bearing cutlasses, muskets and primitive hand grenades and invariably surrender without firing a shot. It was during this cruise that Thatch’s victims began referring to him as Blackbeard, as documented in merchants’ letters now housed in the collections of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Over the first three weeks of October 1717, Blackbeard terrorized the approaches to the Chesapeake Bay, Philadelphia and New York Harbor, never staying more than 48 hours in one place. He captured at least 15 vessels, becoming the most feared pirate in the Americas practically overnight. Traumatized captains poured into Philadelphia and New York with tales of woe: cargoes thrown into the sea; pirates leaving vessels and their crews to run aground after hacking down their masts and cutting loose their anchors; an entire cargo of indentured servants whisked away, perhaps because they wanted to join the pirates’ ranks as so many other members of captured ships did. “Pirates...now Swarm in America and increase their numbers by almost every Vessel they take,” Philadelphia merchant James Logan wrote a friend in London after Blackbeard’s raids. “If speedy care be not taken they will become formidable...and [they] know our govern[men]t can make no defence.”

Throughout his career, Blackbeard stayed one step ahead of his adversaries, and by the time military authorities had been alerted, he, the Revenge and his two prize sloops were well offshore and halfway to the far eastern Caribbean. There he would capture the ship that made him a threat not just to merchant vessels, but also to naval frigates and colonial capitals.

On November 17, 1717, Blackbeard’s flotilla intercepted the French slaver La Concorde in the open ocean approaches to the Windward Islands. The ship was formidable: At nearly 250 tons it was as big as most of the Royal Navy frigates stationed in the Americas and had enough gun ports to accommodate 40 cannons. But the ship was in no condition to resist the pirates. Sixteen crewmen had died in the eight-month journey from France and Africa, and most of the survivors were stricken with “scurvy and the bloody flux,” according to accounts by their officers unearthed in Nantes in 1998 by Mike Daniel. Most of La Concorde’s cannons had been left in France to make room for an oversize cargo of 516 slaves chained below decks. Unable to outrun Blackbeard’s swift sloops, Capt. Pierre Dosset surrendered without a fight.

For Blackbeard, it was the perfect pirate ship. “Slavers had all the right elements: They were large, extremely fast and could carry a lot of armament,” says Daniel. “They could be easily converted to a large, totally open, flush deck that could house many people and allow them to easily move around during a boarding action.” Blackbeard brought the ship to a remote anchorage where his crew refitted her as a pirate frigate, renaming her Queen Anne’s Revenge. They kept food and valuables, of course, but what of her human cargo?

Pirate vessels were among the few places in European America where slaves could free themselves. A remarkable number of pirates were of African origin, according to accounts of captives and pirates brought to trial. There were more than 30 Africans in Bellamy’s crew, and in the months after capturing the Concorde, witnesses would report as many as 70 serving with Blackbeard. “Most of these black sailors on pirate ships were not slaves,” Rediker, who has studied both the pirates and life aboard slave ships, told me recently. “We have an account of a group of rebellious slaves on one of the islands rowing offshore to join a pirate ship. And the pirates knew they could count on them to be totally committed and to fight to the end, because their only other option was a life of plantation slavery.”


But not everyone was seen as a potential recruit. Of the 455 slaves who were still alive when Blackbeard intercepted Concorde, all but 61 were given back to Captain Dosset, along with a small sloop, which he used to ferry them back to Martinique to be sold at auction. How it was decided which people were crew and which were cargo remains a mystery, beyond the lucky minority being able-bodied males. What is known is that a substantial number of black people would remain within Blackbeard’s inner circle until the day he died.

***

With the Queen Anne’s Revenge at the center of his flotilla, Blackbeard raced up the Lesser Antilles, the island chain ringing the outer arc of the Caribbean like a string of pearls, leaving fear and destruction in his wake, events described in the testimonies of some of those he held captive and the letters of the colonial officials whose islands he terrorized. He set fire to part of Guadeloupe Town, burned a fleet of merchant vessels in the shadow of the British fort on St. Kitts and caused the governor of the Leeward Islands to abandon a tour of his colony aboard HMS Seaford for fear the frigate would be captured. Blackbeard and his crew repaired to St. Croix, burning an English sloop for amusement, and sailed for Puerto Rico, where, in early December, they learned shocking news from the captain of a merchant sloop they’d seized.

King George I had decreed that any pirate who surrendered to a British governor by September 1718 would be pardoned for all piracies committed before January 5, and could even keep his plunder. The day before, Blackbeard and the 400 other men in his fleet had thought they had already taken an irrevocable step into criminality and rebellion. Now they could consider the possibility of a second chance. What Blackbeard did next reveals a great deal about his character.

Until recently, nobody knew exactly what that was. The great pirate vanished from British records for the next three months, last seen continuing westward toward Cuba. Spanish merchants spoke of a pirate known only as “the Great Devil” stalking the Gulf of Mexico in a ship filled with “much treasure.” A London newspaper reported Blackbeard and Bonnet had that winter been seen around the Mexican gulf port of Veracruz, hunting for “a galley called the Royal Prince” and the 40-gun HMS Adventure, which at the time was the most powerful Royal Navy warship in the Western Hemisphere. Was there any truth to these sensational-sounding stories, or had Blackbeard actually gone somewhere to lie low until he figured out the safest way to receive the king’s pardon?

It turns out these rumors were accurate. Working in the British archives after my book was published, I found the papers of Capt. Thomas Jacob of the HMS Diamond, whose task that winter was to escort the Royal Prince, flagship of the South Seas Company, to Veracruz. The papers—handwritten and stitched into a leather-bound folio by 19th-century archivists—include depositions from merchant captains describing how Blackbeard had cleverly captured their vessels in the Bay Islands off Honduras by anchoring innocently nearby and seizing officers after they naively rowed over to say hello. One witness, who spent 11 weeks aboard the Queen Anne’s Revenge, reported that 70 of the 250 crewmen were black and that they all sought to seize the Adventure. Another reported that they “often threatened to take his majesty’s ship the Diamond, as they heard she was weakly manned.” Blackbeard’s intelligence was excellent. Jacob’s letters indicate his warship’s crew had been critically weakened by tropical diseases en route to Veracruz. Blackbeard hadn’t been lying low; he’d doubled-down on piracy, risking everything in an effort to make a massive final score.

It was not to be. Blackbeard never found the frigates or the Royal Prince, probably because he abandoned the search too early. He spent much of February, March and April in the islands off Honduras and Belize, seizing ships filled with wood and molasses, rather than Spanish gold and silver. Indeed, despite capturing a huge number of vessels, his enormous crew had fairly little wealth to show for it. Morale was apparently poor, especially when they ran out of rum for a time. “A damned confusion amongst us!” Blackbeard reportedly wrote in his journal, which was found and remarked on by naval officers after his death and quoted by the author of the General History but has since been lost. “Rogues a plotting [and] great talk of separation.” While he was able to replenish the liquor supply and head off mutiny, he must have been desperate for real treasure.

In the spring, Blackbeard pointed Queen Anne’s Revenge north. His four-vessel fleet dropped into Nassau —perhaps to sell goods—then tried their luck diving among the Spanish treasure fleet wrecks on the nearby Florida coast. In May he made another bold move, blockading the entrance to Charleston’s harbor for six days and capturing every vessel that came or went. I found Charleston’s customs records for these weeks in the British archives. The cargoes he intercepted were useless, mostly barrels of pitch, tar and rice. Improvising, Blackbeard seized passengers instead, sending word to the town that he wished to ransom them. In the end, his crew of 400 left the area with plunder worth less than £2,000. They needed a hideaway, and the creeks and inlets of poor, sparsely populated North Carolina had hideaways in abundance.

What happened next is a matter of scholarly debate. We know that on June 3, 1718, Blackbeard guided his fleet into Topsail Inlet, home to the tiny hamlet of Fish Town, now Beaufort. Bonnet’s Revenge and the fleet’s two other sloops went first, negotiating the narrow, comma-shaped channel to the village. Queen Anne’s Revenge ran hard aground, apparently while under full sail. The pirates tried to get their flagship off the shoal, but only managed to sink one of their sloops in the effort. We know that Blackbeard sent Bonnet away with the Revenge before marooning dozens of his remaining crew on a large sand bank. He then set off in the remaining sloop with his closest crewmen—“forty white men and sixty Negroes”—and all the company’s plunder. One of his captives, David Herriot, later told authorities it was “generally believed the said Thatch ran his vessel a-ground on purpose” to get rid of the riff-raff. Others—including the man who would find the wreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge nearly 300 years later—think that Blackbeard simply made the best of the situation.

Not all the evidence of Blackbeard lies hidden in archives; it also lies at the bottom of the sea, with the wrecks of his vessels, each an artifact-packed time capsule. Daniel, then working for the salvage firm Intersal, found the remains of Queen Anne’s Revenge one November day in 1996, and with it a treasure trove of physical evidence. There’s the ship itself, which is just as witnesses described it and was equipped with a variety of cannons of mixed English, French and Swedish origin, some of which were loaded when it sank. During his blockade of Charleston, Blackbeard’s most urgent ransom demand had been a chest of medicine; on the wreck, divers found a pewter urethral syringe containing traces of mercury, which in the pirates’ day was used to treat syphilis. Daniel thinks that the wreck’s location shows the grounding was an accident. “He didn’t run right into a bank, he hit the sandbar at the shallowest part as you enter,” he says. “She was just too big to get in there.”


“The Queen Anne’s Revenge was his claim to fame—he was an admiral when he had that,” Daniel continues. “After that he was just a small operator working out of a 35-ton vessel. Why would he have done that to himself?”

***

Crammed aboard their small Spanish-built sloop, Blackbeard and his followers headed for their final sanctuary. The tiny hamlet of Bath, located up a narrow creek from Pamlico Sound a day’s sail from Beaufort, was a frontier settlement. Just over ten years old and comprising fewer than two dozen homes, it had only a hundred residents. But it was also, in effect, the capital of North Carolina, and counted Gov. Charles Eden among its residents.

No eyewitness accounts of the initial meeting between Blackbeard and Eden have survived, but it must have gone well. Eden was a wealthy English nobleman who governed an impoverished colony spread out over what was literally a backwater: vast tracts of pestilent, low-lying cypress forests pierced by sluggish, tea-colored creeks, inlets and swamps. Most of its approximately 20,000 colonists were penniless and outnumbered by aggrieved Indians who, just six years before, had nearly wiped Bath and the rest of the colony from the map. Blackbeard’s men wanted a pardon—one to include even their blockade of Charleston—and they offered the colony something in return. First, with their arrival, the population of Bath nearly doubled, and the newcomers were armed combat veterans, men who could help defend the settlement if war resumed with the Indians or anyone else. Second, they had money and the means and inclination to bring in more, so long as Governor Eden refrained from asking too many questions about where it came from. In the end, Eden granted all of them a pardon and, later, legal title to the sloop they’d arrived in.

Blackbeard and several of his men settled in Bath, building homes and leading what might appear at a distance to be honest lives. Blackbeard even married a local girl, a fact that reached the ears of Royal Navy officers in nearby Virginia, who noted the development in their dispatches to London. But in reality the pirates were intent on slipping down the creek and into the open sea to prey on vessels passing up and down the Eastern Seaboard or to and from Chesapeake Bay. As later court testimony reveals, they set up a camp on Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks, where they could sort their plunder, repacking it for transshipment and sale back in Bath. It was the perfect arrangement: a new Nassau, only better in that it had a sovereign government and therefore, the pirates might well have assumed, not subject to British invasion.

Blackbeard started small at first, “insulting and abusing the masters of all trading sloops and taking from them what goods or liquors he pleased,” according to one witness. But in August he and his gang took the Spanish sloop far out to sea in search of foreign vessels whose crews would be unlikely to be able to identify them. On the morning of the 24th, they captured the Rose Emelye and the Toison d’Or, or “Golden Fleece.”

True to form, Blackbeard’s men terrorized the Frenchmen, but did them no harm. According to mate Pierre Boyer’s account—recently found by Daniel in the city of Nantes—they tied up the five crewmen and kept them aboard the pirate sloop, while armed men strip-searched the rest for valuables. Pleased with the Rose Emelye’s cargo—180 barrels of sugar and hundreds of bags of cocoa—they transferred the crew to the Toison d’Or and “ordered them to make without delay” for France or Blackbeard would burn their ship. In parting, the pirates told the crew that if the extra vessel had not been available “they would have thrown them into the sea”—the nearest reference to “walking the plank” ever found in connection to the golden age pirates.

Blackbeard brought Rose Emelye back to Ocracoke. While his crew began unloading its cargo and storing it in tents on the beach, he set off in a small boat bearing presents for Bath authorities: sweetmeats, loaf sugar, chocolate and some mysterious boxes. Arriving at midnight at the home of Tobias Knight, North Carolina’s chief justice and His Majesty’s customs collector, he was welcomed inside and stayed, eyewitnesses later testified, “till about an hour before the break of day.” When he emerged —without the gifts—he headed back to Ocracoke. A day later, Governor Eden granted him full salvage rights to the French ship, which Blackbeard alleged to have found abandoned at sea. Meanwhile a large parcel of sugar found itself into Knight’s barn, hiding itself under a pile of hay.

Blackbeard may have had Eden in his pocket, but the lieutenant governor of Virginia was another matter. Alexander Spotswood had been keeping tabs on Blackbeard for months, even sending spies into North Carolina “to make particular inquiry after the pirates.” Merchants had bombarded him with complaints about Thatch, but when he learned of the Rose Emelye incident, Spotswood later wrote, “I thought it necessary to put a stop to the further progress of the robberies.” He didn’t have the authority to send an expedition into another colony, but Spotswood was not one to be constrained by legal and ethical niceties. Legislators were already working to have him thrown out of office for various power grabs and for squandering tax revenue on Williamsburg’s fantastically opulent new Governor’s Palace. Through blind trusts he would ultimately give himself 85,000 acres of public land, an area that came to be known as Spotsylvania County. He contacted the captains of the two naval frigates at anchor in Hampton Roads and hatched an audacious and illegal plan to wipe out the fearsome pirate.

Not knowing if Blackbeard would be in Bath or on Ocracoke, the naval captains launched a two-pronged invasion of their southern neighbor. One led a contingent of armed men overland on horseback, arriving at Eden’s house in Bath six days later. The other dispatched 60 men under Lt. Robert Maynard in two small, unarmed sloops Spotswood had provided. They arrived at Ocracoke five days later. Blackbeard’s sloop was anchored there.

The following morning, Lieutenant Maynard’s men attacked. Blackbeard’s crew of 20 had spent the night drinking and might have been surprised at anchor, had one of Maynard’s sloops not run aground coming into the anchorage. By the time the naval sailors got their small vessel free, Blackbeard had gotten his sloop underway and greeted them with a broadside that killed or injured many. But as the pirates sailed for open water, a musketball severed a halyard on their sloop, causing a sail to drop and a critical loss in speed. The second sloop—Lieutenant Maynard’s—caught up to them, only to receive another broadside of deadly grapeshot and a salvo of hand grenades. In seconds, 21 members of Maynard’s crew were killed or wounded. Staring down at the smoke-veiled carnage, Blackbeard concluded the battle had been won. He ordered his sloop to come alongside Maynard’s sloop, so his men could take control of it. Blackbeard was the first to step aboard, a rope in his hands to lash the vessels together.

Suddenly: chaos. Maynard and a dozen uninjured sailors rushed up from the hold where they had been hiding and engaged the pirates in hand-to-hand combat. In a scene that would inspire many Hollywood movies, the dashing naval lieutenant and the arch-pirate faced each other with swords. In the end, Blackbeard’s men were overwhelmed, and the pirate fell to the deck “with five shot in him, and 20 dismal cuts in several parts of his body,” according to Maynard. The second sloop arrived to overwhelm the rest. Maynard returned to Virginia with 14 prisoners (nine white and five black). Blackbeard’s head was strung up from his bowsprit.

The controversy over the invasion helped bring down Spotswood, who was deposed in 1722. Although Eden was cleared of wrongdoing, his reputation never recovered from his dealings with Blackbeard. He died from yellow fever on March 17, 1722. “He brought the country into a flourishing condition,” his tombstone reads, “and died much lamented.”

Blackbeard had no grave at all. His body was thrown into Pamlico Sound, his head given as a trophy to Spotswood, who had it displayed on a tall pole in Hampton Roads, at a site now known as Blackbeard’s Point. But while the governors have both been all but forgotten, the pirate has lived on, more famous in death than ever he was in life.

The Nassau pirates were self-interested, to be sure, but their idealistic way of organizing themselves, sharing their plunder and settling scores with social betters made them heroes to many common people throughout Britain’s empire. The example they set—choosing to live a dangerous but free life over one of stability and servitude—has proven a captivating one, and the new archival and archaeological discoveries accentuate the incredible (and often unnecessary) risks many of them took, even after being offered a second chance. Many intriguing questions remain unanswered—from the status of former slaves to the origins of principal figures like Blackbeard—but scholars hope the answers are out there, in long-forgotten documents at French, Spanish and Caribbean archives, or beneath shifting sands at the bottom of the sea.

[corsair91]

Blackbeard: Scourge of the Seven Seas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnZbR3rOlxo

Biographics
22 Jan 2020



300 Years After The Death Of Blackbeard, Divers Off Carolina’s Coast Made An Astonishing Discovery
https://www.youtube.com/watLET ME KNOWch?v=E6VlqaDRRgY

LET ME KNOW
Jan 22, 2019


300 Years After The Death Of Blackbeard, Divers Off Carolina’s Coast Made An Astonishing Discovery

The year 2018 marks the 300th anniversary of notorious pirate Blackbeard’s death. Divers made an incredible discovery off North Carolina which illuminates the story of this infamous corsair. It was November 21, 1996, when a team of divers working for a private salvage outfit found a shipwreck in 28 feet of water off the coast…




Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag - Edward "Blackbeard" Thatch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGpF8iD1yUo

All the cut scenes and narrative gameplay for individual characters from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag in full-screen HD. If the character has a speaking part, it should be in here.



Assassin's Creed: The Real History - "Blackbeard"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPdcht6EcDU

OnlineKnights
27 Nov 2013

the story behind the man known as Blackbeard.



Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag - Blackbeard's Intimidation Speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsAqMyxl8cI

Generic Gaming
31 Oct 2013

Blackbeard's intimidation speech from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. Blackbeard was so feared that he almost never actually had to use violence. He specialized in intimidation, so this speech is awesome.



Assassin's Creed® IV Black Flag - Blackbeard Epic Scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxMmu1oZu_Y

CallMeBigMoz
13 May 2015

[corsair91]

What Everyone Should Know About Blackbeard the Pirate
https://www.amherst.edu/users/U/dullian08/node/20554

Submitted by David M. Ullian

[corsair91]

Blackbeard's Last Stand I PIRATES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRbCQsrNE90


IT'S HISTORY
29 Apr 2015


Few pirates are became as legendary as Blackbeard aka.Edward Teach. He was one of the most notorious pirates during the golden age of piracy and the legends surrounding him didn't stop after his final and legend-worthy battle. Indy tells you everything about the end of Blackbeard in our new episode of Battlefields on IT'S HISTORY.

[corsair91]

Blackbeard's Face Was His Greatest Weapon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU7k920I5pc

Smithsonian Channel
14 Nov 2014

Blackbeard and his pirates rarely fought the merchant vessels they commandeered. Their secret? Pure intimidation.




Blackbeard: The Most Notorious Pirate (Pirate History Explained)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdeygre2K9k

The Legends of History
5 Apr 2018

A look at Blackbeard, arguably the most notorious pirate who ever lived.




Blackbeard: The Pirate (1952) | Adventure, Romance Movie | Robert Newton, Linda Darnell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F87qbvRr4UA

Cinecurry Hollywood
29 Aug 2019
runtime 1:38:08

1952 Adventure, Romantic movie.
Starring Robert Newton, Linda Darnell, Keith Andes, Irene Ryan and Alan Mowbray.
Directed by Raoul Walsh
Produced by Edmund Grainger,
Music by Victor Young.

[corsair91]

Blackbeard's Treasure! You Will Never Find It! (History Explained)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWsuLEdQjGo

Curiosity
27 Jun 2021

Arguably the most fearsome pirate of them all, Edward Teach terrorized the Caribbean and the American East Coast in the early 18th centry under the infamous name of Blackbeard. Following his death, conflicting stories began to circulate about the fate of his treasure. If he did conceal it (and not, as some believe, simply spend it all) then someone may yet find themselves very rich



Where is Blackbeard's Treasure? (Pirates and Gold of the Caribbean)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12s70UqvaaI

Fact Feast
31 May 2020

Where is Blackbeard’s treasure hidden? This documentary looks at the legend of the infamous 18th Century pirate Edward Teach (Thatch). Better known to us as Blackbeard, in the 300 years that have passed since his death, we are still no closer to discovering his treasure. It’s told that Blackbeard buried extraordinary amounts of ill gotten gold and silver on islands throughout the Caribbean. But is this a tale based more in myth than reality? We seek to separate fact from fiction to identify what treasure he may have had and where it could be hidden today.

Journey with us across the Caribbean, North Carolina and the east coast of America, to discover if old pirate tales of adventure on the high seas, black flags, treasure maps and chests of gold have any basis in reality.



The Most Feared Pirate in the World - Blackbeard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A419iCilWeU

The Infographics Show
16 Jun 2020


Blackbeard is one of the most famous pirates in history, and today we're going to show you who the mad pillager really was. Blackbeard had a notoriously ruthless reputation, but he was educated and advanced in the tactics of war.

the pirate with the flaming beard, Blackbeard!

[corsair91]

Blackbeard Clip - Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szUEkiRPQwQ

disneypirates
16 May 2011

Queen Anne's Revenge, the ship of the formidable pirate Blackbeard (Ian McShane)



Coastal Pirates of North Carolina - "Blackbeard" - A WRAL Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXhbCd_1olo

WRAL Documentaries
28 Nov 2016

Researchers discover what they believe to be Blackbeard's flagship just off the North Carolina coast. This WRAL Documentary examines the recovery of items from the ship as well as the pirate's notorious history.



How Blackbeard Tricked Out His Ship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fcVoEd8_y4

Smithsonian Channel
14 Nov 2014

When Blackbeard seized the Queen Anne's Revenge, it was almost the perfect pirate ship. It just needed a few explosive upgrades.

[corsair91]

Blackbeard: The True Story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eyKPDsOyR8

Epic History TV
8 Jul 2016

The complete story of the dreaded pirate Edward Thatch, AKA Blackbeard, told in 6 minutes with detailed maps of his voyages and notorious deeds.

Possibly born in Bristol in England around 1680, Edward Thatch (or Teach) may have served as a sailor or privateer during the War of Spanish Succession (known in America as Queen Anne's War) before turning to high seas larceny in the last 'Golden Age' of piracy.

Blackbeard's pirate career probably began in 1717 while serving as second-in-command to Captain Ben Hornigold, based in the pirate haven of Nassau in the Bahamas. Together they attacked and plundered merchant ships off the eastern seaboard of colonial America. Blackbeard later met 'gentleman pirate' Stede Bonnet, and took over command of his sloop, 'Revenge'. Blackbeard continued to terrorise the Thirteen Colonies, attacking ships bound for eastern seaports including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, the Chesapeake and Charleston.

Blackbeard then sailed to the Windward Islands, and near St.Vincent captured a French frigate, 'La Concorde', which had been converted into a slave ship. Some of the slaves joined Blackbeard's crew, the rest he put ashore. Blackbeard renamed the ship 'Queen Anne's Revenge' and fitted her with 40 guns, making her one of the most powerful ships in the area.

With 'Queen Anne's Revenge' at the head of his small pirate flotilla, Blackbeard attacked ships and settlements from Guadeloupe to the Gulf of Mexico. Spanish sailors nicknamed him 'the Great Devil', and he became the most notorious and feared pirate in the West Indies.

In 1718 Blackbeard sailed to the coast of Florida, where a Spanish treasure fleet had been wrecked three years before. Some pirates had made their fortune searching the wrecks for silver and gold, and Blackbeard's men spent several weeks diving the wrecks. But they had little success.

Next, in the most audacious move of his pirate career, Blackbeard, with four ships, blockaded the port of Charleston, capital of the British colony of South Carolina. For six days he stopped all ships entering or leaving the harbour, plundered them, and took their passengers and crew hostage to be ransomed back to the town.

Moving up the east coast of America looking for a hideaway, Blackbeard's flagship 'Queen Anne's Revenge' ran aground entering a shallow inlet, and sank. By now Blackbeard's crew was over-large and unruly, and some speculate that Blackbeard sank his ship on purpose, to disband his crew and increase his own share of the plunder they were carrying. Now he marooned the most discontent of his men (they were later rescued by Stede Bonnet) and sailed in a spare sloop to Bath with 60 of his best crew. At Bath, then capital of North Carolina, they accepted a royal pardon from the governor, as part of a general pirate amnesty that had been offered by the British government.

Blackbeard was not content with civilian life, and from his new base at Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks, he soon returned to piracy, robbing two French ships out at sea. Alexander Spotswood, Lieutenant Governor of the neighbouring colony, Virginia, was outraged at the prospect of having the infamous, recidivist pirate Blackbeard operating on his doorstep. Although North Carolina was out of his jurisdiction, Spotswood organised a naval expedition to kill or capture Blackbeard. Led by Lieutenant Maynard, Royal Navy, the expedition caught Blackbeard by surprise at Ocracoke Island. In the viscous battle that followed, Blackbeard was finally overpowered and killed.

N.B. There are no precise records of most of Blackbeard's voyages or attacks. Those depicted in this video are carefully researched but intended to give an accurate impression of his exploits, rather than a precise record of exact routes or attacks. Similarly, there are no accurate contemporary images of Queen Anne's Revenge, so artistic license has been taken with a ship of similar size and type.

[corsair91]

Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project Video Nautilus Productions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJfU_bplRJU

Blackbeard the pirate's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, was discovered in 1996 by Intersal, Inc.

Join Nautilus Productions & underwater archaeologists from the Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project as they explore the 300 year old wreck site near Beaufort Inlet, NC



Queen Anne's Revenge Exhibit - Beaufort, NC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_xGZngKGFs

AroundCarolina
27 Jun 2011

Right now the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, NC is displaying relics excavated from the final resting place of Blackbeard's ship, Queen Anne's Revenge. This feature will give you a taste of what can be seen in the exhibit, with commentary from the museum's maritime curator, Paul Fontenoy.

[corsair91]

Edward Thache Jr: The Man Behind the Beard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SGz5x4ZN20

Gold and Gunpowder
6 May 2021

Who was Blackbeard really? Was he a commoner born in Bristol? A merchant's son? A mulatto? Recent evidence shows that he was born Edward Thache Jr: a plantationer, brother, father and widower. From the cradle to the grave, this great biography of Blackbeard hopes to shed some light on a man that was far from the monster we know.


Timecoded on youtube Page

0:00 Introduction
0:39 Just Who Was He?
2:10 Edward Thache Jr.
4:11 After the War
5:24 Blackbeard Rises
7:59 Stede Bonnet
9:32 The Queen Anne's Revenge
11:24 Yo-ho, Mexico!
12:56 Heading North
15:09 End of Queen Anne
17:14 The Mafia Boss
19:10 Blackbeard's End
20:35 Conclusion

[corsair91]

Blackbeard Wasn't Only Looking for Gold
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3cv0cu7whk


Smithsonian Channel
8 May 2015

La Concordia was an integral vessel in the transatlantic slave trade route. When Blackbeard sieged it, he took on some unexpected crew members.



Absolute Mad Lads - Blackbeard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-jy_1-65q4

Count Dankula
25 Nov 2020