Blackbeard's Last Fight

The case

The price Blackbeard demanded for releasing a shipload of Charles Town's leading citizens in May 1718 was not gold. It was a chest of medicines. For about a week his flotilla sat across the bar at the harbour mouth, stopping every vessel that tried to come or go, while a hostage delegation went ashore with the demand and the threat that the prisoners would die if it were refused. The medicines came. The prisoners were sent back, minus their valuables and some of their clothes. Nobody was killed.

That episode sums up the man better than the legend does. Edward Teach, or Thatch as people who actually met him tended to write it, was probably born around 1680, possibly in Bristol, and probably served on privateers during Queen Anne's War. Almost nothing about his early life is documented. He surfaces in the record around 1716 on New Providence in the Bahamas, then a lawless anchorage, sailing under the veteran pirate Benjamin Hornigold, who gave him a captured sloop to command.

In late 1717, after Hornigold was voted out and quit the trade, Teach took a large French slaver, La Concorde, off Saint Vincent. He renamed her Queen Anne's Revenge and mounted some forty guns on her. A merchant captain named Henry Bostock, held aboard for several hours that December, gave a sworn description of a tall, spare man with a very long black beard. That deposition is the earliest account of his appearance and the source of the name. Later writers added the braids, the ribbons and the slow-burning matches tucked under his hat; those details come from Charles Johnson's 1724 General History of the Pyrates and cannot be checked.

What the documents do show is a pirate who worked by intimidation. No reliable account has him killing a prisoner. Through the spring of 1718 his squadron grew, absorbing the gentleman pirate Stede Bonnet's sloop Revenge, a Jamaican logwood sloop called Adventure and several prizes, until he styled himself commodore. The Charles Town blockade was the high point.

Then he shrank his own operation. In June 1718 Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground in Topsail Inlet, now Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, and so did Adventure. A crew member later testified that Teach caused the grounding deliberately, and several historians think he did it to cut the number of men sharing the plunder. He stripped the remaining sloop, marooned a group of the crew on a sandbar, and went up the Pamlico to Bath, where Governor Charles Eden granted him the king's pardon.

The retirement lasted weeks. By late summer Teach was raiding again, and he returned with a French ship that a vice-admiralty court in North Carolina obligingly declared a derelict found at sea; part of its sugar ended up with Eden and with Tobias Knight, the colony's secretary. In Virginia, Governor Alexander Spotswood had no faith in North Carolina's willingness to act. Without clear legal authority to do so, he paid for an expedition himself: soldiers overland to Bath, and two hired sloops under Lieutenant Robert Maynard of HMS Pearl to go in by water.

Maynard found Teach's sloop anchored on the inside of Ocracoke Island on the evening of 21 November 1718 and attacked at first light. A broadside from Adventure killed or wounded a large part of Maynard's force and put one sloop out of the fight. Maynard kept his surviving men below decks, and when Teach's crew boarded what looked like an empty ship they came up fighting. Teach was shot and cut many times and died on the deck of Maynard's sloop. Around ten pirates and a similar number of the attackers were killed, by the differing official counts.

Maynard took Teach's head back to Virginia to claim the bounty. Surviving crew members and associates rounded up at Bath were tried at Williamsburg in March 1719.