Edward Teach aka Blackbeard

 Edward Teach was born in about 1680, probably in Bristol, England.  He apparently arrived in the Caribbean in about 1700, gaining employment as a privateer, a common practice for English sailors attacking Spanish ships with a veneer of legitimacy provided by the Crown.  When Queen Anne’s War (also known as the War of the Spanish Succession) ended in 1713, the English privateers were officially out of business.  Many of them, Teach included, turned to piracy.  He joined forces in 1716 with Benjamin Hornigold, who operated out of the pirate stronghold of New Providence in the Bahamas Islands.  In 1717, Hornigold accepted a royal pardon and retired from piracy.  This left Edward Teach in charge of a small flotilla of pirate vessels.  In November 1717, he and his band captured a large French guineaman off the coast of Saint Vincent.  They commandeered the French vessel and renamed it “Queen Anne’s Revenge”.  About this time, Edward Teach began referring to himself as Blackbeard.  He was a tall man with a long black beard.  He often tied his beard into small pigtails, to which he sometimes attached bright ribbons.  Like Lady Gaga, he recognized the value of making a distinctive first impression.  When attacking another ship, he tended to wear black clothing, bandoliers with three braces of pistols, and lighted matches stuck in his hair.  For the next six months, Blackbeard became the scourge of the Caribbean, attacking ships at will.  In May, 1718, he brought his flotilla to Charles Town, South Carolina (later renamed Charleston).  The flotilla anchored off the port.  They stopped and looted every ship attempting to enter or depart the port.  After about a week, the Governor of South Carolina paid a ransom of valuable medical supplies and other goods.  Blackbeard departed, taking with him the ransom and the valuables seized from the ships that he had detained.  From Charles Town, the flotilla moved north to Topsail Inlet (now called Beaufort Inlet) on the North Carolina coast.  The plan was to careen the hulls in the relative obscurity of those waters prior to returning to the Caribbean.  Unfortunately, the “Queen Anne’s Revenge” and another vessel ran aground and were damaged beyond repair.  Edward Teach and some of his cohorts took a sloop and sailed to Bath, then the capital of the Colony of North Carolina.  In June 1718, they received pardons from Governor Eden.  By August, apparently bored with life ashore, Edward Teach resumed his career as Blackbeard the Pirate, operating out of Ocracoke Inlet, not far from the wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge.  Governor Spotswood of Virginia, exasperated by the cozy relationship between Blackbeard and Governor Eden of North Carolina, commissioned a Royal Navy contingent to hunt down Blackbeard.  On November 22, 1718, the two Royal Navy sloops discovered Blackbeard and his ship, the “Adventure”, anchored on the inner side of Ocracoke Island.  Unfortunately for Blackbeard, a large number of his crew was ashore at the time.  One of the sloops was severely damaged in the battle.  Blackbeard and his men stormed aboard.  They were outnumbered though and slowly driven back.  Blackbeard, in the thick of the fight, was shot and stabbed numerous times.  When he died, the remaining pirates surrendered.  Blackbeard’s head was suspended from the sloop’s bowsprit and his body was thrown into the sea.  The remaining pirates were delivered to Governor Spotswood in Williamsburg, Virginia.  After a quick trial, most were found guilty.  They were hung and left to rot in gibbets along what became known as Gallows Road.  In a postscript, the remains of the Queen Anne’s Revenge were rediscovered in 1996 lying in about 25 feet of water just west of the Beaufort Inlet Channel.  Numerous artifacts have been recovered and conserved.  Most are on display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort.  On May 27, 2011, one of the ship’s anchors, weighing about 3,000 pounds, was brought to the surface.