Blackbeard: the real Edward Thatch

Who was Blackbeard?

Blackbeard was a pirate captain of the Golden Age of Piracy. The officials who dealt with him wrote his name as Edward Thatch; “Teach”, the spelling most people know, became popular through newspapers and a 1724 book about pirates. Spellings varied a lot in the 1700s, and pirates sometimes used false names, so we cannot be sure.

We know little about his early life. The 1724 book says he came from Bristol, England. In 2014 a historian, Baylus Brooks, found records of an Edward Thache whose family lived in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and who served on a Royal Navy warship in 1706, but nobody has proved this was the pirate. He was probably a sailor on privateers, private warships licensed to attack the enemy, during the war that ended in 1713. The only eyewitness description we have says he was a tall, thin man with a very long black beard.

How did Blackbeard become a pirate?

After the war, Thatch joined the pirates of Nassau in the Bahamas and learned the trade under Captain Benjamin Hornigold. By late 1716 he commanded his own sloop with about 90 men. By 1717 he appears in written reports: a ship’s captain listed “Thatch” among the pirate captains working from Nassau.

In late 1717 he cruised off the American coast with Hornigold and with Stede Bonnet, a wealthy planter turned pirate. Thatch soon took command of Bonnet’s ship, too.

What was the Queen Anne’s Revenge?

In November 1717, near the island of Martinique, Blackbeard’s two sloops captured La Concorde, a French slave ship from Nantes. She had taken on 516 Africans at Ouidah in West Africa, and 455 were still alive when the pirates seized her. Many of the French crew were sick, and the captain surrendered.

The pirates kept the big ship, renamed her the Queen Anne’s Revenge and gave her about 40 guns. They left most of the captives with the French crew, who took them on to Martinique; some Africans stayed with the pirates. For a few months Blackbeard commanded a small fleet of three or four ships and as many as 300 to 400 men.

Why did Blackbeard blockade Charleston?

In May 1718 Blackbeard parked his fleet outside the harbour of Charles Town, today’s Charleston, in South Carolina, for about a week. His ships stopped every vessel going in or out, and he took prisoners, among them a member of the colony’s council, Samuel Wragg. His demand was surprising: not gold, but a chest of medicines. He threatened to kill the hostages and burn the ships if it was not sent. The governor gave in, the medicine was delivered, and the hostages were let go, robbed of their valuables and clothes but alive. Nobody knows exactly what medicines were in the chest.

What happened to the Queen Anne’s Revenge?

About two weeks later, around 10 June 1718, the Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground on a sandbar at Topsail Inlet, now Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina. A smaller sloop that tried to help went aground too. Some of the pirates later said Blackbeard wrecked her on purpose to break up his large crew and keep more of the loot for himself; others think it was an accident. Either way, he left in a small sloop with a hand-picked crew, abandoning some of his men on a sandbank.

He then accepted the King’s pardon from North Carolina’s governor, Charles Eden, and settled near the town of Bath. But by August he was taking ships again, and he made his camp at Ocracoke Inlet on the Outer Banks.

How did Blackbeard die?

Virginia’s governor, Alexander Spotswood, decided to end Blackbeard himself, without telling North Carolina. He hired two small sloops, the Jane and the Ranger, which could sail in shallow water, and filled them with sailors from two Royal Navy warships. Lieutenant Robert Maynard of HMS Pearl was in command.

At dawn on 22 November 1718 they attacked Blackbeard’s sloop Adventure at Ocracoke Inlet. Blackbeard had only about 19 men, six of them Black. His first broadside badly hurt Maynard’s sloops. Maynard hid most of his men below deck, and when Blackbeard boarded, they rushed up and a fierce close fight began. Maynard shot Blackbeard, and Maynard’s sailors finished the fight. Maynard reported that the pirate had been shot five times and cut about twenty times.

Maynard hung Blackbeard’s head from the bowsprit of his sloop. Later it was set on a pole at the mouth of the Hampton River in Virginia, a spot still called Blackbeard’s Point. The surviving crew were tried at Williamsburg in March 1719, and most were hanged. Virginia’s law offering £100 for Blackbeard was passed on 24 November 1718, two days after he died, before the news reached Williamsburg.

Who were Blackbeard’s crew?

Blackbeard’s crews were mixed. Some men joined willingly, some were forced, and a large share were Black. Some of them were free sailors and some had been taken from slave ships. After the Queen Anne’s Revenge was lost, about 60 Black men left with him; the historian Kevin Duffus argues that many of them were later sold into slavery in North Carolina. Five of the fourteen prisoners Maynard brought back from Ocracoke were Black, and they were tried alongside the white prisoners. During the last fight a Black crewman was ordered to blow up the ship but was stopped. He may have been a man named Caesar; historians disagree about whether Caesar was hanged or survived.

Where is Blackbeard’s ship now?

In November 1996 divers from a company called Intersal found an old shipwreck near Beaufort Inlet. After years of study, North Carolina confirmed in 2011 that it is the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Archaeologists have found about 30 cannon and hundreds of thousands of objects, including the ship’s bell, anchors, lead shot and medical tools. Many are on display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort.