Long Way Around

SHALLOW WATER, THICK SMOKE On the morning of Blackbeard’s last fight, the water was grey and deathly still. The battle was fevered, clawing, and the pirates fought dirty. Up on deck of the infamous Queen Anne’s Revenge, the air was thick with smoke from makeshift molotov cocktails the pirates had hurled at their pursuers, sailors from…

TEACH’S WORLD Most quotes have been updated with standard spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. November 4, 1718 About two weeks before Edward Teach lost his head near Ocracoke, an alarming report from Tobias Knight reached the governor’s council, meeting in the home of Thomas Pollock. A “great body of Indians now about Bath Town” had kidnapped…

ROOTS I.  After mining Beaufort County’s deed books, wills, and public records, plus countless various and sundry history books, Dee Lewis stated that he and colleague Juanita Paull “realized that [Blackbeard] lived in Bath. There’s no question that he lived there, that his father owned property there.”  Outside the four walls of the History Museum…

PRIZE VIGNETTES A note: For ease of reading, we have updated the punctuation and spelling in quotes, but left the original content intact. When Blackbeard roamed the seas, the world was split on which calendar system to use — we have converted all French Gregorian dates to fit into the British (Julian) calendar, so the…

DIGGING A couple of notes before we get going: As always, with older quotes we have updated spelling and punctuation for clarity. Also for clarity, the Department of Cultural Resources (DCR) eventually became the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources (DNCR) — to save us all the headache, we will be referring to the department…