Short History Of... - Blackbeard the Pirate

Episode Date: August 22, 2021

In the early 18th century, one man makes his name as the most notorious pirate of all time. The legend of Edward Thatch has spawned television shows, novels, and major motion pictures. Stories abound of his wild eyes striking fear into enemy hearts, of the six pistols strapped to his chest, and of his arrival in battle with his jet-black beard set ablaze. But how much is fact and how much fiction? This is a Short History of Blackbeard the Pirate. Written by Luke Kuhns. With thanks to Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates: Being the true and surprising story of the Caribbean pirates and the man who brought them down. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's November the 22nd, 1718. It's a sunny morning on Ocracoke Island, just off the outer banks of North Carolina. The calm waters sparkle. The sweet ocean breeze rustles the sea oats and the rolling dunes and the thick maritime forests. White waves crash on the sandy beaches of this beautiful and uninhabited strip of land that stretches for nine miles. On the inner side of the island, the pirate ship Adventure, captained by the notorious Edward Thatch, anchors. Inside the cabin, Thatch robs his aching brow, sitting at his desk which is cluttered with books, rolled charts and nautical instruments. A half-used wax candle flickers in front of him.

He's tired from a long night of drinking dark rum and wine with his crew. He swigs water from a pewter mug while the boat rocks beneath him. On the deck, a crewman spots two merchant sloops cutting across the water in their direction. A jolt of panic goes through him. Despite the distance, he can make out the red coats of the men on board. He sounds the alarm. Thatch bursts from the cabin and locks his dark, menacing eyes onto the approaching ships. They are the Jane and the Ranger, commanded by Lieutenant Robert Maynard.

It's an ambush. Blackbeard cuts the anchor with an axe. The deckhands make ready the sails and the long guns. The adventure is underway and turns. She fires her starboard guns at the sloops as she attempts to make a break for the open ocean on the other side of the island. With no cannons, Maynard's men fire muskets at the adventure, but then the adventure scores a direct hit on the Ranger which runs aground. A blast to the Jane injures or kills around twenty, but the Jane continues to move in. Thatch thinks his men outnumber those remaining on the enemy vessel.

He gives the order to take the ship. Grappling hooks lock the ships together. Blackbeard and his pirates swing over and board, falling right into Maynard's trap. Maynard's armed sailors, hidden below deck, charge the pirate boarding party and take them by surprise. A bloody fight breaks out. Side swords and cutlasses swing. Muskets and pistols pop. A thick cloud of smoke engulfs the deck

as the pirates and the king's men cut each other down. Edward Thatch and Robert Maynard make eye contact through the smoke. The two men, filled with bloodlust, rush at each other with swords drawn. In the early 18th century, across the Caribbean, the east coast of North America, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the West African coast, piracy runs rampant. The War of the Spanish Succession, otherwise known as Queen Anne's War, is over. Masses of suddenly unemployed privateers and British and American sailors have turned to crime, seeking their fortunes. This is the Golden age of piracy. From 1716 to 1718,

one man will become known as the most notorious and ruthless pirate of all time. You may well have heard the stories of his wild eyes that strike fear into the hearts of his enemies, the six pistols loaded and strapped to his chest. That before battles, he lights his jet-black beard on fire. That somewhere, hidden, is a massive treasure, its location known only to him. The legend of Edward Thatch has grown to mythic proportions. From books to television to major motion pictures,

fact and fiction are not always easy to separate. After all, at the center of most legends is the kernel of truth. So who was Edward Thatch? What did we really know of this man? Where did he come from? Was he really as violent as they say? And how did he become the most famous and fearsome pirate to sail the seas? I'm Paul McGann, and this is a short history of Blackbeard the Pirate.

Very little is known about the early life of the man who will become Blackbeard. He will only enter the historical record in 1716. Before that, what we do know is either inferred or taken from various reports, newspapers and depositions. From these records, we know Blackbeard's real name to be Edward Thatch, sometimes mispronounced or spelled as Teach. It's thought he was born in the 1680s. For hundreds of years, the primary source for information on Thatch's life is Charles Johnson's book, A General History of Pirates, published in 1724. It's Johnson who links Blackbeard to the English city of Bristol.

Johnson also places him at various points in the Royal Navy and in Jamaica. But even Johnson's work is as much fiction as it is fact. Colin Woodard is the author of The Republic of Pirates. The general history of the pirates, which was published while some of these pirates were still alive, published in London. And if you read it, it's sort of the source book for all of your pop culture accounts of these pirates. You know, what we think Blackbeard was like and what we think Black Sam Bellamy was and Mary Read and Anne Bonny and Steve Bonnet. They all come from this book.

was, and Mary Read, and Anne Bonny, and Steve Bonnet, they all come from this book. And the book is a funny combination of precisely accurate stuff drawn from official records that somehow the author of this book had access to, and things that are completely made up. So it's this frustrating amalgam of solid fact and total fantasy. There is another more obvious reason why Blackbeard's early life remains a mystery even to this day. Well, with all of the pirates of the Golden Age, we rarely know a great deal about their lives before they entered piracy. And part of the reason for that is class. Many of them were ordinary people who, in that time period, left very little documentary records behind after themselves. Somebody born in the late 1600s, there might be a record of their birth and of their marriage and of their death,

if you're fortunate and the records haven't been lost. And then in any legal disputes, they might have become involved in or legal engagements, wills, crimes, and so on. Other than that, often the records are quite mute. Because of this, early pirate chroniclers like Johnson tend to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. They also take the liberty of changing parts of the story from edition to edition. Angus Constam is author of Blackbeard, America's Most Notorious Pirate. He said Edward Thatch was born in Jamaica and was from a boy bred to the sea. So you get this idea that he knows what he's talking about.

But by the time he does the next edition, a few months later in 1724, he says he was a Bristol man born, but sailed for some time out of Jamaica. out of Jamaica. Another scholar, Baylis Brooks, was able to locate various vital records in Jamaica and has made a pretty good case for Thatch having been indeed from a Bristol family, but having been born in Jamaica himself from either Gloucestershire or Bristol family members. In my efforts in writing The Republic of Pirates to trace his past, I went as far as to go to Bristol, to the Bristol Public Records Office, and search through those tax rolls and census rolls and property records that were available for the right period, seeing if I could find any such people. And there's no one by his name showing up in the records we had, but there was a potential family member, a Thomas Thatch, who had moved there from Gloucester

in 1712. So it was possible that in the general region of Bristol, the family from which he might have come may have been from there. Bristol or Jamaica then, these seem the two most likely origins for Edward Thatch. Two very different locations, but two places linked by the transatlantic slave trade. As far back as the Middle Ages, Bristol is an English city steeped in trade and piracy. By Edward Thatcher's time, it has a population of 20,000. It's a bustling maritime town of wealthy ship owners and sailors. Its narrow cobbled streets are a scene of marine commerce fish cotton and sugar are some of their biggest imports bristol has established itself as a gateway to the north atlantic

and is an integral part of the triangular slave trade that links up europe west africa and the caribbean maritime trade is so deeply embedded in the psyche and spirituality of the city that giant bones and skeletons of whales are hung from the churches and cathedrals. Bristol was the most important port in that era, especially in the 17th century for the exploration of what became New England and of Newfoundland. It was the major English gateway to the Americas. Four and a half thousand miles away, the island of Jamaica is, at this time,

the jewel in the crown of the British Empire in the Caribbean. As a colony, its imperial inhabitants thrive off the production of white gold, otherwise known as sugar. Jamaica has a substantial Royal Navy presence and is the regional centre of economic activity, both in terms of the slave trade and the shipment of goods. It's 1714. The Spanish War of Succession is over,

as the signing of the Peace of Utrecht brings an end to hostilities between Britain and Spain. Since 1701 Europe has been engulfed in conflict, as rival claimants to the vacant Spanish throne, each backed by their allies, have battled it out for the crown. Throughout this war the British Royal Navy has swelled in size. It's expanded in order to provide the number of sailors required. But at the same time, significant portions of British military activity have been undertaken by privateers.

Privateers are essentially pirates with a facade of respectability. Pirates paid and regulated by the government. Francis Drake, the famed Elizabethan courtier, was perhaps the most renowned privateer ever to live. Privateering is a great option, for the individuals who do it, and for those who employ them. For the privateers themselves, they can rob and pillage the enemy without making an enemy of their own authorities.

They have the chance to lie in their pockets and claim booty. And for their employers, it's a way of giving yourself a cutting edge on the high seas, without having to officially incorporate these nerder wells into your armed forces. But now as peace arrives in Europe, naval sailors are made redundant, and privateering contracts are torn up. Thousands of men are out of work. A once thriving industry is gone overnight. It seems that among those now out of a job is one Edward Thatch. Across the British colonies, tension grows between the ex-privateers and their former bosses. Many, including the infamous Captain

Benjamin Hornigold and his rival Captain Henry Jennings, are unwilling to return to poorly paid merchant work. When the war finally ended and peace was negotiated in 1714, the Royal Navy contracted by like two-thirds and dumped all of these sailors on the docks of empire. People who suddenly had no means to sustain themselves, but all of these skills gained well in the Navy in terms of attacking and capturing ships and hand-to-hand combat and all the rest. And at the same time, there were tons and tons of people who had been given permission by their sovereign or by governors during the war to attack enemy shipping, the raiders who were privateers. And when peace came, all of the privateering commissions were withdrawn as well.

So you had hundreds and maybe thousands of former privateers who were out of work with a certain set of job skills and no way to support themselves. And merchant shipping, knowing that this was all the case and that the supply of sailors and desperate sailors was enormous, started rapidly slashing wages because they knew they could get away with it. So all of these things built enormous pressures that resulted in this outbreak of piracy after the war. Led by Captains Horniggold and Jennings,

a band of renegade privateers decide to go it alone. They establish a base at Nassau in the Bahamas, on the island of New Providence. With an abandoned fort and few inhabitants, seizing this land is easy work for this crew. If they can no longer work legally for the Crown, they declare, then they'll set up their own republic and govern it with their own pirate code. Nassau becomes a prosperous community built by and for pirates.

Treasure enters and exits the island. Taverns flow with booze and sex work thrives. Nassau now lives outside of the law. It's not somewhere the British Navy can breach with ease. Sometime in either 1715 or 1716, Edward Thatch walks into a tavern in Nassau for the first time. The air is likely sticky and humid, as it often is in this part of the world.

His black beard damp with sweat. He is looking for a crew to join. At the tavern's tables, drunken pirates bash their mugs onto wooden tabletops, sloshing their ale. There are women as well as men. Not all pirates are male. Thatch, though, has his eye on one pirate in particular. The grey-bearded captain captain Benjamin Hornigold. So the innovation that allowed the Golden Age pirates to become formidable was the fact that they ended up having a shared base.

And that base was in the failed colony of the Bahamas during the War of Spanish Secession. This English possession had been sacked and destroyed twice, you know, by the French and Spanish. The surviving residents of Nassau, the biggest settlement there, were, you know, basically kind of in tents and improvised shelters in the woods.

And the fort was destroyed and everything else. And some of these early pirates who'd either seized control of small vessels or had even built dugout ocean-going canoes themselves and had started kind of continuing to raid Spanish ships in violation of the law, or even English ships, started streaming there. They showed up there first and started shoring up the fort there and making it difficult to remove them. But the great event that accelerated this process and made the pirate space into an entire sort of republic, if you were, a community that was strong enough to threaten the empires

was a storm, terrible hurricane that struck. It's 2 a.m. on July the 31st, 1715. A hurricane rages off the coast of Florida. Twelve Spanish ships departed Havana, Cuba, two days ago, with cargoes of silver and gold coins, about 14 million pesos worth. Now they're caught in the storm. The navigators try to steer the ships through the winds, but waves continually slam into them, pushing them further and further off course.

A particularly huge wave rises and wipes out one of the ships entirely. The others continue to be tossed around like toys. By morning, the entire fleet has sunk, swallowed by the sea. 1,500 sailors are dead, and just a few survive in lifeboats. Days later, silver and gold from the sunken vessels begins to wash up on the Florida coast. An incredible quantity of treasure

sunken, scattered in shallow water all along the beaches. And when word got out of this, of the destruction of the treasure fleet in 1715, it was like an all-points bulletin to any prospector, beachcomber, ne'er-do-well, would-be pirates to go down and try to, as they say,

fish the wrecks, to dive down and try to salvage the treasure that was there. The Spanish Navy dispatches fresh ships to salvage the wreckage. They largely succeed in recovering the bullion. But one of the Nassau pirates, Captain Henry Jennings, has been watching on with his crew. He chooses this moment to strike.

One of the founding pirates in Nassau was bold and audacious enough to simply come ashore on the beach and attack the Spanish military garrison and steal all their treasure and bring it back to Nassau, which made suddenly it seemed like a true bonanza that anything might be possible for these pirates if they stuck together. Inspired by Jennings' daring raid, copycat pirates flocked to the region. Soon the population of nearby Nassau has rocketed into the hundreds. Before long, pirates will outnumber the Nassau locals.

By the summer of 1716, Edward Thatch has become a member of Captain Hornigold's crew. Well, when Blackbeard entered piracy, he was entering as part of a very new thing in piracy, what we now call the Golden Age of Piracy. And we call it that because many of the most famous pirates in our pop culture were all part of this Golden Age of Piracy. A Golden Age that really lasted from 1713 to 1720, 21 or so in the long view, but the real core of it was just 1716 to 1718 or so. Under Hornigold's tutelage, Thatch can discover just what it takes to be a pirate captain. As they raid and capture sloops across the Americas, he learns that to keep men loyal, a pirate captain must provide a consistent

flow of prizes, a boundless supply of food and drink, and plenty of promises of booty. These are all things which, over time, Hornigold fails to guarantee. From 1716 to 1717, Thatch rises through the ranks. He's learning on the job, but his achievements do suggest a modicum of formal education. He had to get into that position through proving himself to be a good mariner, a good leader, and lucky, and good at hunting down the enemy. To become a captain of a pirate ship, you need skills like navigation. You've got to be fairly literate and fairly numerate. By 1717, the British authorities have homed in on the Bahamas as the centre of pirate activity.

They want to rid the waters of cutthroats to secure the safety of the Americas. Nassau's days as the Republic of Pirates are numbered. As for Edward Thatch, his wings are just beginning to spread. An eight-gun sloop cuts through the open Caribbean waters, heading towards a brigantine en route to Kingston, Jamaica. Stood at the helm of the sloop, Edward Thatch is now a lieutenant in Hornigold's fleet. He's commander of this vessel. Thatch signals to the gunner. Two more shots fire over the bow of the brigantine.

The intimidation works. Its captain orders a full stop. Ninety pirates raid the brigantine. Wielding pistols and cutlasses, the pirates take watches, rings, jackets, hats, and earrings. In the crowded mess hall of the sloop, the pirates sit at the tables. Bottles of rum and wine are passed between them. They beam with joy and drunken excitement. They dine on the brigantine's supply of beef, peas, and oysters well into the night. Thatch raises a bottle and commends the fine work of his hearties. They cheer his name, Blackbeard.

And that's where Thatch first starts appearing in the records, is once Hornigold has some of these additional prize vessels, he chooses Thatch to be one of his sort of, you know, lieutenants. Or if he's a commodore with a little fleet, he's chosen Thatch to be one of his, you know, lieutenants, or if he's a commodore with a little fleet, he's chosen Thatch to be one of the captains, or maybe the crews chose him too, to sail along in consort with him. Together, Thatch and Hornigold's highlights include the plunder of 120 barrels of flour from one ship, seizing several gallons of wine from a sloop from Bermuda, and robbing the clothes and valuables from another vessel traveling from Madeira to South Carolina.

But all partnerships come to an end. Feeling he's achieved all he can under Hornigold, whose own influence is waning, Blackbeard decides it's time to step out on his own. It's summer 1717. An unfamiliar vessel is docked in Nassau. It's a purpose-built sloop of war.

But the ship is badly damaged and the crew bears scars from battle. The name Revenge is splashed on the side of the vessel. It's a formidable sight. A refit is underway.

Two more guns are being added to the ten it already possesses. Blackbeard makes inquiries as to what happened to this ship and who the captain is. It would have been when he would have made inquiries as to what's going on, the story would have come out that there was this new figure in town, a guy named Steed Bonnet. Blackbeard wants to speak with this captain. The next day, the two meet on board the Revenge. 29-year-old Steed Bonnet is a rosy-cheeked blonde man. Bonnet carries himself like a landlubber gentleman.

Assessing the power of the Revenge and the morale of the crew, Blackbeard makes Bonnet an offer to join forces bonnet it transpires is no pirate at all wasn't a really a sailor or a pirate at all he wanted to enter piracy but he was the scion of a major slave plantation-owning family on Barbados. And for some reason had suddenly decided to abandon all that. He had built his own, in quotes, privateering vessel, like financed its construction and hired a crew and gone off privateering and immediately entered piracy instead and had gotten in some kind of entanglement

with some kind of Spanish warship and had barely gotten away and had been injured. So he's arrived. He doesn't know anything about sailing or being a pirate, but actually owns the vessel. And the pirates are trying to figure out essentially what to do with this guy who wants to join them, but is a fish out of water. Whoever makes the decisions, what comes out of it is that Blackbeard is placed in control of this purpose built sloop with Steed Bonnet on board as well, but more or less kind of confined to his cabin where he has a large library of books and is reported to be sort of wandering around while they're under sail in his dressing gown. Freshly in charge of the revenge, the crew looks to their experienced new captain, Edward Thatch.

His eyes are now set on America. And it's in this vessel with Steed Bonner on board that Blackbeard starts making a separate name for himself. Particularly infamous because his first big campaign to raid shipping takes place on the eastern seaboard of what's now the United States, essentially blockading and attacking shipping, trying to sail in and out of Philadelphia and New York and the Capes of Delaware to Virginia. In other words, the centers of communication, locations where letters get spread around and eventually make it the one newspaper in British North America at the time in Boston, the Boston newsletter, which starts broadcasting these lurid, you know, like a cable news show, right? There's this lurid and dramatic story with a pirate attacking vessels and seizing them up and down the seaboard. And it's the Boston

newsletter that started reporting these sort of breathless accounts of this Edward Thatch character. And people would read those things and comment on them. And if it reached a city that actually had a newspaper, like London for sure, but also later Jamaica, people would reprint it. They would read the story, they would lay out in their own printing press and print it themselves, sometimes with comments,

you know, about what they thought. They retweeted it with comments and they would rebroadcast these stories. So that's how Blackbeard's reputation started building very early on because he successfully was raiding all sorts of vessels near the centers of communication. It's November 1717. For two months, Blackbeard has been attacking ships in the Leeward Islands and up and down the east coast of America, going as far north as New Jersey.

Merchantship after merchantship succumb to Blackbeard's intimidating tactics. Bonnet, under Blackbeard, is given command of another seized sloop. By this point, Blackbeard's control over the growing fleet is unquestioned. And over time, Steed Bonnet must have picked up some skills because at the point where Blackbeard has prize vessels of his own, Bonnet is given control. So like Bonnet is sailing in consort with Blackbeard for a time.

The captain to Blackbeard is a Commodore. The pirates revel in their Commodore's notoriety and the rewards they reap under his command. But governors in the British colonies have been writing to their bosses in London, telling of this threatening pirate. They describe him as a slim man with a face dominated by a mass of black facial hair. In Charles Johnson's general history of pirates, he is described as a frightful meteor that frightened America more than any comet that has appeared. He wore a sling with three brace of pistols,

stuck lighted matches under his hat, his eyes naturally looking fierce and wild. It's unknown to what extent Johnson's physical description of Blackbeard is accurate. This is a topic of much debate. Does Blackbeard really ignite fuses in his beard? Or is that Johnson deploying

artistic license? He must have looked colorful, but probably not necessarily as colorful as Johnson makes out. But that helped made him a bestseller. That's all part of the whole persona because as a pirate, what you want is the enemy to give up

without a fight because that's easy pickings. He and his crewmen had, you know, bandoliers of grenades and weapons and were dressing intentionally in the various finery and clothing of the wealthy passengers they captured like war trophies.

You know, it looked like something like one of these Mad Max movies when these guys are coming. You know, there are people wearing women's hats and gentlemen's wigs and cutlasses and, you know, grenades and fancy silks, you know, all in this hodgepodge, you know, the apocalypse has come and now we're coming for you sort of fashion. As Blackbeard's raids continue, his popularity spreads. And with that, the number of pirates he commands increases to a staggering 250 men. Blackbeard decides it's time for aggressive expansion. The Revenge leads the flotilla south after a series of successful raids on the eastern seaboard. En route to the Caribbean,

Blackbeard's eyes appealed for another prize capture. East of Martinique, Blackbeard's lookout, perched in the crow's nest, spots a French slave ship, armed with fourteen guns. This is it. The black flag unfurls,

the sloops pointed straight at the French vessel, warning shots fire. Blackbeard is about to acquire the queen of pirate flagships. Blackbeard's sloops quickly gain on La Concorde. This vessel is slow, weighted down by its human cargo. There are 450 slaves chained in the hold. The French seamen watch in terror as Blackbeard's fleet approaches. These pirate ships are far quicker and more maneuverable.

Blackbeard's guns are at the ready. He expects the French to fire upon him. They don't. La Concorde's cannons are not deployed. An outbreak of scurvy and dysentery has weakened its crew. Only 23 men are in a fit shape to fight, and they are no match for Blackbeard's army. Escape is impossible at this point for La Concorde. The white flag waves.

Captain Pierre d'Orsay surrenders and prays for their lives. In no time, the ship is under Blackbeard's command. Because they were capturing this vessel as it was arriving from Africa, it meant that there were hundreds of slaves as the cargo below. And this raises an interesting facet of the Golden Age pirates that's very intriguing and frustrating for researchers is their stance towards people of African descent and slavery itself. There's a group of people who see themselves as fighting against an exploitative system who are operating in the middle of these horrific slave plantation islands, the sugar plantations. That's what Barbados is all about. And Jamaica and the Leeward Islands colony and Martinique and all of these places

around them are using slave gangs. It's an absolutely horrific and staggeringly profitable economy occurring all around them based on enormous inequality and servitude. And in some ways, the pirates were, we know, Blackbeard and many of the other pirates accepted people of African descent as fellow crewmen, as fellow pirates, and often even as leaders and captains of vessels. The possibility of being accepted and treated as a full human within pirate circles was very much there. And as a result of that, this was one of the most destabilizing things that this pirate outbreak represented to the colonies around them, because word got out among escaped slave communities, people who had escaped from slavery and formerly enslaved people were hiding out in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and had their

own hidden societies and communities, trying to avoid recapture. But suddenly there was hope. If you could get to the Bahamas or join the pirates, there would be a possibility of a wider zone of freedom and perhaps even a chance at sort of revenge against the other systems. The word had gotten out, we know from the governor of Bermuda and some of the other leaders of the colonies. Among the enslaved people, they were cheering and hoping the

pirates would come and attack their colonies and therefore be a source of liberation. So all of that was going on. And Blackbeard, later in his career, the people in his pirate crew who he kept closest to him were people of African descent. A large proportion of his pirate crew, as much as a third of it or even half at different times, was of African descent. A large proportion of his pirate crew, you know, as much as a third of it, or even half at different times, was of African descent. This is not to say, however, that Blackbeard is a moral figure who liberates slaves wherever he encounters them. He is motivated by self-interest as much as anything else.

But at the same time, what happens when he captures Lac-en-Cours? What happens to the 455 or so enslaved people in the hold, newly arriving from the slave forts of Africa? And the answer is that the vast majority of them were basically given back to the French captain to keep and to be ferried by smaller vessels later by this captain to be sold back into slavery. What is going on with that? Some of the enslaved people joined Blackbeard and may have been part of his crew, but many didn't. And as we're trying to parse that contradiction, trying to understand the pirate stance, we don't know the answer. But one theory that fits the circumstances as we see it is it may have been that the pirates saw people of African descent who lived in, had been born in the Americas, who used the technology and the language of the day, could be treated as fellow humans equal to anyone else. But people newly arriving from Africa were othered and treated as property. The line

may have been in the pirate's head, not so much racial, but foreignness, if you know what I mean, as opposed to that. La Concorde is taken to the small remote island of Becquia in the Grenadines, where no French or British naval military presence is to be seen. It is here Blackbeard oversees La Concorde's refit. He hands the slaves back to the sailors, and even gives the Frenchman one of his smaller sloops, albeit stripped of its guns. Captain Dosset, the man now in charge of this sloop,

renames it the Mauvaise Rencontre, which translates as Bad Meeting. By December the 10th, Dosset has landed in Martinique, where he reports his encounter with Blackbeard to the authorities. Two weeks after the capture of La Concorde, the refurbished ship is renamed Queen Anne's Revenge. It's a satirical dig at the British monarch, George I, the first king from the German House of Hanover.

The Hanoverians have supplanted the House of Stuart, whose line came to an end with Queen Anne of Great Britain. So now at the end of 1717, Blackbeard now has in his possession this frigate-sized flagship, the Concorde, renamed the Queen Anne's Revenge. He's able to arm it with upwards of 40 guns. It's 250 tons. It's at least as large as most of the 5th and 6th rate frigates that the Royal Navy had posted to defend the empire. And ditto for the French and the Dutch and the Danes and everyone else who had transatlantic empires here. The pirates had a vessel as big as the warships that they had to confront, and they had three times as many crewmen, which in a time when boarding actions were common was a critical advantage.

Blackbeard sails Queen Anne's Revenge through the Caribbean islands, the Bahamas, Florida, sequestering and looting as he goes. He intimidates his victims with tremendous results. He sheds little blood. He doesn't need to. His reputation precedes him. He actually wasn't hurting or killing anybody. He was incredibly judicious in his use of force. He'd scare people, but in all of the accounts we have of Blackbeard's grades and career, all these accounts come from his victims, right? They're not sympathetic accounts. What we know about him is almost entirely from depositions victims gave when they got back to see the authorities or trial records. Despite that, in all these cases,

he would carefully parse them. He didn't hurt or bother or kill anybody prior to his final epic battle to the death with the Royal Navy, but he terrorized people and it worked to great effect. But a significant development now presents itself. Indeed, it threatens the pirate way of life. Back on September the 5th, 1717, in Britain, Back on September 5th, 1717, in Britain, the king had signed the Proclamation for Suppressing Pirates. News of this is only now reaching the Caribbean in December. Blackbeard knows this has the potential to bring down his crew and devastate his empire. The proclamation decrees, Pirates shall on or before September the 5th, in the year of our Lord 1718, surrender.

Such pirates shall have our gracious pardon. But an added clause says, Immunity will only be applied to crimes before January the 5th, 1718. Blackbeard's time as a freewheeling buccaneer seems up. Shortly after he captured Queen Anne's Revenge and was sailing counterclockwise up the rim of the Caribbean islands back towards the Bahamas and Florida, he would have gotten word from some of the vessels he'd captured that the Pirate Republic's days were limited.

There was a new program afoot at the imperial level to break the Pirate Republic. And it was a divide and conquer strategy that the king had just issued a royal proclamation of pardon that any pirates who came and surrendered and sought pardon for their crimes would be given pardon and would be able to keep all of their loot, but had to retire from piracy and stand down. And Blackbeard realized that many of his compatriots, suddenly given the chance, a get out of jail free card and keep your treasure too, would probably take it. So knowing this at this time, suddenly you can see Blackbeard changes his tactics. He is desperately seeking a very large final score. It's May 22nd, 1718. Blackbeard begins his most daring and brazen series of attacks. He starts at Charlestown, or Charleston,

South Carolina. Here, the Queen Anne's Revenge and its flotilla set up a blockade. Blackbeard raids the incoming and outgoing merchant ships for nearly two weeks. But the loots aren't substantial, and merchant ships soon catch on as to what Blackbeard is doing. They opt to give Charlestown a wide berth. Now that's the thing that really starts kicking things into a new gear because you're capturing ships, you're holding a port to ransom and it's one of the major ports on the American colonial American seaboard.

You're going to annoy a lot of people, a lot of merchants, a lot of colonial governors. They are reliant on maritime trade. Blackbeard knows his time is running out. He'll need to exit Charlestown before the British Navy arrives. But before he leaves, a passenger ship named the Crowley comes into sight. Blackbeard decides to up the ante. Many of his men are ill with scurvy and syphilis. They need attention. Blackbeard captures the crowley and holds the crew for ransom on board are some of charlestown's most influential residents including samuel ragg

a wealthy merchant and member of the ruling council blackbeard sends his demands to governor johnson of south carolina he requests a chest of medical supplies If the governor does not comply Blackbeard will behead the captives And send the governor their heads Governor Johnson has no choice He agrees Medicine is loaded into a chest And given to two of Blackbeard's crewmen

In return Blackbeard sends the prisoners ashore According to Governor Johnson They are nearly, the pirates having taken their clothes. Now Blackbeard makes a break for it. He heads north. It's June 1718, and Blackbeard is worried. He knows the crimes he's committed are enough to see him hanged. Blackbeard is worried. He knows the crimes he's committed are enough to see him hanged.

Eyes on his sloops, he runs a hand through his beard. He realizes his piratical empire has become a liability. He'll struggle to make port anywhere now. The Queen Anne's revenge attracts far too much attention. It's time for drastic action. The following day in the top sail inlet in Beaufort, North Carolina, Blackbeard stuns his crew when he orders the Queen Anne's Revenge to be run aground. Why did he do it? Based on what we know, what people said and testified as to what Blackbeard was doing, who were on the vessel, you know, some of his captives were there and gave depositions.

And just subsequently what he did and didn't do, it seems pretty clear to me that he intentionally grounded his flagship in order to break up the ship's company and to leave with the people he trusted to go into his new chapter of his life. Hold up in the captain's cabin on Bonnet's sloop, Blackbeard and his protégé discuss their options. They know they'll likely need the king's pardon to avoid the hangman's noose. To gain that, they'll need the cooperation of an acquiescent local governor.

Blackbeard doesn't want to set foot on land himself until he's sure he'll be pardoned. He manages to convince Bonnet to go ashore first, to fetch a pardon for himself from Governor Eden in nearby Bathtown. Bonnet is given his old sloop back as a sweetener. Bonnet heads landward. Now Blackbeard rallies his own men. They gather up the Bonnet loyalists among the crews and maroon them on a small nearby island. Blackbeard has betrayed Bonnet.

The marooned crew watches powerlessly while Blackbeard and his devotees raid Bonnet's sloop, taking weapons, provisions and money before sailing away. There was a small sort of fishing settlement, so they were going to be okay. But what they couldn't do was stop Blackbeard clearing off with the loot. So he went away, kicked around at sea for a week or two, and then went to Bath himself, probably going through Ocracoke Inlet to get there, thereby avoiding Bonnet, who returned, found that Blackbeard had absconded with the money and he was left with his own ship and a bunch of really annoyed pirates. Downsized, Blackbeard continues his raids, but in the back of his mind, he still wants that king's pardon.

His next destination will be the residence of Governor Charles Eden. Somehow he knew that if he went there and he traveled in a small vessel, that he would be able to cook up a deal with the governor there. All the governors of all the colonies were allowed to issue the king's pardon. He sailed up the creek to Bath, North Carolina and accepted Charles Eden's pardon. And sailed up the creek to Bath, North Carolina and accepted Charles Eden's pardon. And somehow, we don't have the records of it, but from subsequent events,

it's clear that they worked out some sort of deal. It's September 1718. Blackbeard has a fresh pardon in his pocket, covering both he and his men. He has reassured Governor Eden that he is no longer any kind of threat. Now new horizons are on Blackbeard's mind. Blackbeard and his close 40, 50 companions would, in quotes,

settle down and become respectable citizens of this little village capital, along with all of their weapons and fighting skills to defend the place if another conflict were to break out or if there were an intercolonial war and suddenly North Carolina was threatened, they would be helpful in that respect. But also, they would disappear and head out to sea and then come back mysteriously with all sorts of treasures, which they would then sell to the governor and the governor's customs house. In other words, bringing wealth into the colony.

And his position was kind of like mafia figure, right? I'm just a respectable garbage business operator. But in reality, everyone knows, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, that he's continuing to do piracy and operating an organized crime syndicate. At one point, Blackbeard tows a French merchant ship with a cargo of cocoa and sugar to Ocracoke Island. Stripping the vessel of its precious goods, Blackbeard brings his supposed discovery to Charles Eden.

When asked where he found it, he claims he simply stumbled upon the ship, abandoned. Charles Eden accepts his story, even if many across the Americas certainly do not. Those prizes were legally condemned in Bath by the court set up by Governor Eden, by Charles Eden. And clearly they weren't. There were reports appearing in the Philadelphia press and words getting down to Virginia that these were pirate attacks when the French crew land, they give their, you know, their depositions saying, we were attacked, we were captured,

and this is the guy that did it. So Governor Eden is covering for them. He's legally saying they were found abandoned. These two ships, miraculously, just abandoned by the crew, but this nice guy, Teach, came up and rescued them from the high seas and took them back, still with their cargo on, but just no people.

So who do you believe? Blackbeard is pleased with his new arrangement. Operating out of Ocracoke Island, he continues to raid vessels, selling the plunder on to Eden's government, no questions asked. But for Blackbeard, this is in fact the beginning of the end. News of his ongoing piratical antics reaches Virginia Governor Alexander Spotswood, who decides to take matters into his own hands. Spotswood makes plans to capture Blackbeard.

Word of what was going on had gotten to him, and he was aristocratic, staggeringly corrupt himself, you know, built himself a sumptuous palace, used various schemes to consolidate a land empire in his own hands, which is now named Spotsylvania County after himself. He was definitely imperious and used to getting his way. And he may have been concerned also that if Blackbeard had set up this pirate base just to his south, that Blackbeard might be threatening the security of the shipping going into the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. And so he, completely beyond his authority, conspired with the captains of the two Royal Navy vessels posted to defend Virginia and the Chesapeake in Hampton Roads, and convinced them to embark on a two-pronged invasion of North Carolina to get Blackbeard.

What Blackbeard didn't count on when he set himself up in North Carolina was that the authorities in adjacent colonies would actually violate the law to get him. He felt he was in sanctuary. Each of the colonies on the North American seaboard was separately governed. And the acting governor, the lieutenant governors, they said of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, had no right to be projecting force into a colony that didn't belong to his investors or to a royal colony. A separate set of noblemen owned Virginia from owning North Carolina. One of the two military groups commissioned by Spotswood crosses illegally into North Carolina.

A second group is led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard downriver. Maynard has armed sailors hidden in the holds of two commandeered merchant ships, the Ranger and the Jane. He approaches Ocracoke Island. On the morning of November 22, the sun rises and sparkles on the calm waters. Robert Maynard stands on the bow of the Jane and scans the banks of Ocracoke through his scope. Blackbeard's anchored sloop, the adventure can be seen.

But Maynard can't make out any movement on board. And as it turned out, at the time, Blackbeard and his men were at Ocracoke at the beach, having been involved in dismantling vessels. They had been throwing some raucous party into the night and were hung over and didn't even wake up when the small Royal Naval vessels circled the outside of Ocracoke Island from the sea and started approaching them. They were very slow to get their vessel off. Maynard gives the signal to the Ranger.

The Navy ships begin their attack. One of Blackbeard's crew sees the approaching ships and sounds the alarm. Bursting from the captain's cabin, a rather worse for wear, Blackbeard storms onto the deck. As Blackbeard's guns fire, the ranger is hit and runs aground. Blackbeard seems to have the upper hand. He decides now is the time to board and plunder the Jane. But that's exactly what Maynard has hoped for. Maynard's men, hidden below deck, charge the invaders. Amidst the carnage, Blackbeard and Maynard lock eyes across the smoky deck. Neither has a loaded pistol, so the two men rush each other with swords drawn. Blackbeard swings his cutlass, nearly slicing Maynard's belly open.

Maynard jabs at Blackbeard but misses. But this does not remain a duel for long. A naval sailor spots an opportunity to end this. He raises his pistol and fires at the pirate captain. A naval sailor spots an opportunity to end this. He raises his pistol and fires at the pirate captain. Blackbeard pushes through the pain and continues to swing and hack at Maynard. Finally, riddled with bullets, Blackbeard goes down. Maynard stands over the pirate's body, covered in blood, dirt, and sweat. Blackbeard is dead.

The remaining pirates surrender. And as a final act of victory, Maynard severs Blackbeard's head and hangs it on the bowsprit. He was beheaded so they could take Blackbeard's head as a trophy and proof of his death back to their captains at Hampton Roads in Virginia, and his body was thrown overboard where, according to legend, it, you know, swam around the ship three times or something. The two contingents started piecing together what Blackbeard had been doing and then discovered a lot of the goods that Blackbeard had stolen from the French sugar ships hidden under, you know, like a pile of hay in the official North Carolina collector of customs, you know, barn. And so aspersions were being cast upon the governor and the authorities in North Carolina that they had been somehow conspiring with the

pirates, which of course they vigorously denied. This caused all kinds of trouble later, headaches for Spotswood, lawsuits against Lieutenant Maynard and others that got locked into battles long thereafter because the raids had been illegal, but they did succeed in their aims, which was wiping out Blackbeard, probably much to his surprise. The authorities were better at breaking the law, perhaps, than he was. He'd underestimated just how far they would go. authorities were better at breaking the law, perhaps, than he was. He'd underestimated just how far they would go. In the wake of Blackbeard's death, many of his crewmen are arrested and tried by Alexander Spotswood. Blackbeard's former associate, Steed Bonnet, has also been rounded up.

So Steed Bonnet's career didn't end any better. He was, you know, fairly hapless, and he ended up being surprised and captured by a posse sent out to find him of proper South Carolinian residents. He was brought back to Charleston to stand trial. This all happened in, you know, like October, like a month before Blackbeard was killed. There's an attempt to escape again. They break out of jail and try to escape and there's a trial and Bonnet escapes and many of his men don't and his men are found guilty and then Bonnet is being hapless as he is

is discovered and captured again and brought back to jail in late November and then ultimately he's held for trial really just like a week before Blackbeard is killed in Charleston and found guilty of piracy. And in December of 1718, he's hung at White Point at the end of the town of Charleston, which is on a peninsula, ending his career as well and wiping out one of the last of the pirates of the Golden Age outbreak.

Charles Johnson's book, The General History of Pirates, is released just six years after Blackbeard's death. The book is a bestseller, which immortalizes Edward Thatch as one of the most notorious pirates ever to sail the seas. It's largely thanks to Johnson that the pirates become the stuff of myth and legend, as fact and fiction blur. The theme of the book is surprisingly sympathetic to the pirates as lovable rogues in the same sense that we today in the 21st century in pop culture often look upon them. So they were folk heroes at the time and it's never let go. Here we are 300 years later, and there's this same sort of sympathetic stance of pop culture towards pirates that is in fact rooted in the history and in the perceptions back when they were still alive of the public. Today, the figure of Blackbeard

continues to fascinate us. Historians search for priceless new information as they strive to piece together a complete picture of who Edward Thatch really was. But 300 years after the pirate's death, that task is only getting harder. The historical figure of Blackbeard is receding ever farther into the distance, while the myths and legends become ever stronger. In the next episode of Short History Of,

we'll bring you a short history of the California gold rush. Skilled people at the time made a dollar and a quarter. Miners in the gold fields in California made $20 a day. Gold is something you can't keep quiet. That's next time on Short History Of.