Bath, N.C.
Three hundred years ago this week. a band of Royal Navy sailors killed Blackbeard, the most infamous pirate in history, putting a symbolic end to the golden age of piracy, a maritime rebellion that strangled trans-Atlantic commerce, terrified naval captains and colonial governors, and briefly gave hope to downtrodden sailors, plantation slaves and even the House of Stuart, recently deposed from the British throne.
Blackbeard didn't go quietly. Surprised at his Quter Banks pirate’s nest on the morning of Nov. 22, 1718 － his crew hung over from a night? of revelry － he blasted his opponents’ vessels with broadsides and died in hand-to-hand combat, with five musket wounds “and 20 dismal cuts on several parts of his body.”
He didn't live quietly, either. In a piracy career lasting no more than four years, Blackbeard helped his fellow pirates occupy war-torn Nassau in the Bahamas, where they stored the fort and strangled commerce making the obligatory passage out of the Caribbean via the nearby Florida Straits. He terrorized the approaches to New York, Philadelphia, the Chesapeake and Charleston, S.C., and cultivated so terrible a visage that merchant captains simply surrendered to him without a fight.
In the process, his deeds captivated the popular consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic and never let it go. “A General History of the Pyrates,” a surprisingly sympathetic and often embellished account of their depredations, became a best seller in Britain and its colonies. The book written by a pseudonymous author, informed the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, the films of Walt Disney and most every fictional pirate from Captain Hook to Captain Jack Sparrow.
But why? The Bahamian pirates were unlike most other pirates who’ve come before or since in that they claimed to be engaged in more than simple banditry. Most, including Blackbeard, were former merchant and naval sailors who thought themselves engaged in a social revolt against shipowners and captains who’d made their lives miserable. The pirate Sam Bellamy’s crew referred to themselves as Robin Hood’s men. “They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference,” Bellamy 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 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. The contracts some crews drew up and signed included disability benefits: payments for lost eyes and limbs taken from the shared plunder before it was divvied up.
All this － and far better food, drink and hours － made piracy extremely attractive to merchant and naval sailors alike, who in this time period faced malnourishment, wage cheating, and brutal and sometimes sadistic officers. Typically when the pirates captured a ship, a portion of its crew would enthusiastically join their ranks, allowing the outbreak to expand from a handful of pirates in sloops to thousands in multi-ship squadrons in just three years. Even the Royal Navy was vulnerable; when the ship H.M.S. Phoenix confronted the pirates at their Nassau lair 300 years ago this spring, a number of the frigate’s sailors sneaked off in the night to serve under the black flag.
Runaway slaves also joined the pirates as word spread that they allowed people of African descent to participate as equal members of their crews and sometimes as captains. At the height of the outbreak, it was not unusual for escaped or liberated slaves to account for a quarter or more of the pirates’ crews. In the months after Blackbeard captured his flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, witnesses would report as many as 70 serving aboard, several remained in his closest circle to the day he died. Although pirates also treated many of the slaves they found on captured slave ships as cargo to be sold, not colleagues to recruit, their integrated ships still represented a threat to the slave colonies surrounding the Bahamas. Gov. Benjamin Bennett of Bermuda warned that slaves had “grown so impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their rising” against us and “fear their joining with the pirates.”
Not all pirates were downtrodden. Bellamy’s sidekick Paulsgrave Williams was the son of Rhode Island’s attorney general, and the “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet was the scion of an influential Barbados family. There’s considerable evidence that these pirates had a secret motivation of their own: to deposed George I － who had ascended to the throne in 1714 － and restored the Stuarts. Some of the pirates sent a letter to the court of the would-be Stuart king in exile in France offering their services, while several others were closely associated with a suspected organizer of a failed, pro-Stuart uprising in 1715.
Their motives may have been mixed, but popular opinion was on the pirates’ side. Authorities regularly complained to their superiors in London that many of their subjects regarded the pirates as heroes. Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood of Virginia fumed that his citizens had “an unaccountable inclination to favor pirates.”
The gang included the female pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the flamboyant Calico Jack Vane, but Blackbeard became the most famous of them all. This was partly because of the terrifying image he cultivated, tying lighted fuses in his beard as his ship closed on its prey so as to appear bathed in demonic fire and smoke. Opposing crews were so fearful they usually surrendered without firing a shot, which was exactly the intent; he wanted his prize, its cargo and crew of potential recruits to be undamaged. Indeed, in the dozens of eyewitness accounts of his victims, there is not a single instance in which he killed anyone before his final, fatal battle with the Royal Navy.
It was that battle that sealed his place in history. North America’s only newspaper, The Boston News-Letter, covered it exhaustively, and the controversy over the legality of the operation carried on for years. Lt. Gov. Spotswood had sent the naval sailors － including a detachment traveling overland － into what amount to an unsanctioned invasion of North Carolina. Authorities there had protested it － several of them had colluded with Blackbeard, who had bought a house, married a local woman and fenced pirated goods in the diminutive capital, Bath. The scandal helped bring down Spotswood, who resigned his post in 1722, and the hero of the battle, Lt. Robert Maynard, was repeatedly passed over for promotions.
As for Blackbeard, his body was thrown into Pamlico Sound, his head presented to Spotswood, who displayed it on a tall pole at Hampton Roads at a place now known as Blackbeard’s Point. But while the lieutenant governor has been all but forgotten, the pirate has lived on, more famous in death than he ever was in life.
