SHALLOW WATER, THICK SMOKE

Illustration by Kelsey Martin of Kettle Pot Paper — *Illustration by Kelsey Martin of* *Kettle Pot Paper*

Content Warning: This series covers pirates, and pirates sometimes did and said unsavory things. We will cover those things carefully, with as much detail as necessary for understanding but without dwelling. Please consider this series to be PG-13.

Also, if you’re more pirate-savvy than the average person…make sure you stick around till the end.

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 the British navy spearheaded by the young and true-hearted Lieutenant Maynard. In the belly of the pirate vessel, a Black man “bred up” by Blackbeard sat, listening intently to the scuffling and echoes of screams above his head. Breaking the first rule of mariners and their wooden world, he sat next to an open flame. The man was under orders to touch the candle to a powder keg if things did not go the pirate's way. Inside the magazine, there was a strange sense of shelter, and he felt ready to blow them all to kingdom come rather than face a capture and a trial. Unaware of the danger lurking belowdecks of the pirate ship, the navy forces aboard the Ranger pulled their vessel alongside the Queen Anne's Revenge.

The pirates delivered a devastating round of cannonballs into the side of the Ranger, shattering wood and bone in an instant. Confident of his success in beating back his enemy, Blackbeard leaped down to the Ranger, bringing his crew with him. He landed crouched like a panther and then drew himself to his full height, which was closer to seven feet than six. Fire and brimstone seemed to be the natural habitat of this man; he was broad, with a great black beard, eyes ablaze, and a roaring voice. He charged Maynard, cutlass swinging.

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Blackbeard wasn't born aboard a ship, but in a harbor. Sometime around 1690 in Bristol, England, Blackbeard was born to the name Edward Teach. Being an illegitimate son of well-to-do parentage afforded him something of an education, but no official acknowledgement by his father, and no status to speak of. Wits and a smudgy family history were the only advantages for this boy, who grew up in a nondescript rowhouse in a port town where comings and goings were as unremarkable as the rhythm of the tide. As a young man he left on the sea to seek his fortune - first as a privateer based in Jamaica in 1712, then eventually as a full-fledged pirate. Privateering was effectively state-sanctioned piracy, robbing the trade of opposing countries in times of war. In 1724 a man writing under the name Captain Charles Johnson said, "Privateers in time of war are a nursery for pirates against a peace," and he wasn't far off. For Edward Teach, the transition from privateering to piracy was as natural as leaving a home that offered him nothing.

Edward Teach sailed the Caribbean under the training of Benjamin Hornigold. An adept pirate in his own right, Hornigold fathered so many pirate crews, that his alumni had a nickname, The Flying Gang. Teach had built a reputation for boldness in his privateering days, but on Hornigold's vessel he still had to work his way up the ranks. After about six months of experience and taking on the memorable stage name Blackbeard, Teach was given command of a French vessel, which he renamed the Queen Anne's Revenge (renaming a vessel has been considered to be bad luck by mariners for centuries, like saying Macbeth in a theatre; pirates renamed ships with abandon). Teach and Hornigold worked in tandem for a while, until Teach once again struck out to make his own way, leveraging his daring image to inspire fierceness in his crew and fear in the hearts of his prey. In the spring of 1717, Teach formed a small flotilla with Stede Bonnet, gentleman pirate from the fragrant hill country of Barbados. Bonnet had recently suffered a few embarrassing losses, with even a large, lumbering merchant ship giving him the slip. Shortly after joining forces with Blackbeard, Bonnet suffered another loss. Blackbeard replaced him as captain with the first mate from the Queen Anne's Revenge. Bonnet did not seem to feel the loss too keenly in the moment, spending his days in his dressing gown, reading.

The flotilla grew as the combined forces dominated the waters they sailed, robbing merchants of their wares, and sometimes their ships. On April 9, 1717, they captured five vessels in one day - and burnt one, simply because she was sailing out of Boston. On November 28, 1717, the pirates captured La Concorde, a French slaver full of human cargo. They set the sailors and most of the enslaved on shore, and refitted La Concorde into the Queen Anne's Revenge 2.0.

On this new, looming Queen Anne's Revenge, there was room for more men and more weapons. The vessel was armed to the teeth, boasting 40 cannons, far beyond the day's standards, even for pirates. With her, Blackbeard expanded his territory, plaguing the east coast of America and acquiring a wife in almost every port (grand total: seventeen). In waters from Philadelphia back to the Caribbean, the man with the great black beard became a spectre to be feared, synonymous with violence and bad fortune and fury. Leaning further into this reputation, Blackbeard readied himself for battle by styling his hat with slow-burning matches, smearing his face with gun powder. During the off-hours, he was known to challenge his crew to a trial by hellfire in the hold, shutting out the outside world and lighting brimstone, daring his men to try and outlast him as oxygen was replaced by smoke (they never did).

One of Blackbeard's grandest accomplishments (or worst, depending on your view of piracy) was blockading Charleston. In a feat of nerve and piratical dexterity, the posse held the trade of an entire port — one of the biggest and most important in the colonies — hostage for the puzzling ransom of a medicine chest. A few pirates went ashore to collect their ransom, swaggering through the streets of Charleston at high noon, leering at its citizens, and daring them to so much as frown their disapproval. Perhaps sensing that they'd pushed their luck too far, the pirates hastily repaired to North Carolina to seek a pardon the king had offered. The terms of the pardon were generous; it was free to any pirate who applied, on the condition they promised to bring their piracy to a halt. Stede Bonnet (back in charge of his vessel at last) was sent ahead to Bath Town, while the other four in the flotilla took a side-junket to the fishing village of Beaufort to make some repairs before surrendering their pirating ways, and with them a ship they would have to sell.

The pirates aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge held their collective breath, trying to skate through the shallow waters of Topsail Inlet. It's tough sailing, even now, even for skillful sailors. Then came the sound they were waiting for, but hoping not to hear: The scraping of wood against sand. They were stuck, solidly wedged into a sandbar. After waving their comrades back to help them, soon two ships were lodged in Topsail Inlet, creaking and groaning as water filled their bows. Here's the thing about being grounded in a large ship: There are not sails, oars, or manpower enough to remove them before the sea claims them. The crew — and the loot — were quickly unloaded.

Look out at Beaufort Inlet from Fort Macon, North Carolina. If you bump into the right people, they might even be able to point to where the buoy marking the shipwreck used to be. — Look out at Beaufort Inlet from *Fort Macon, North Carolina. If you bump into the right people, they might even be able to point to where the buoy marking the shipwreck used to be.*

The majority of the men were set on a sliver of island nearby while to their dismay the loot went with Blackbeard and his new hand-picked crew. The marooned men howled after the sails disappearing into the blue yonder, partly out of indignation, partly from rising panic. Teach and his crew took their winnings and hightailed it to Bath Town, where they applied to governor Charles Eden for a pardon and received it in short order.

Edward Teach blustered into town with a big reputation and no-questions-asked wealth, and it bought him friends - in society and government. For a while, it seemed as though Blackbeard was trying to settle down. After years away from Bristol, he'd found another home in another, smaller port town, bought a plantation, built a mansion, and found a wife to keep in it. The process of settling down had been far from traditional; during one of his courtships, the unlucky girl (Governor Eden's own daughter) received the gift of her other suitor's right hand in a jeweled case. Teach's friendships were swept with an unpleasant undercurrent, which is perhaps why he started making regular trips upstream to visit a sister who mysteriously appeared in the backwaters of North Carolina.

Even after Blackbeard married his final wife, rumors continued to swirl about untowards goings-on at his mansion off Bath Creek. Unsavory characters were known to go and come, slinking in on the creek. Local planters saw it with their own eyes when they were invited to raucous nights of feasting, hazy nights full of booze, sweet curls of tobacco smoke, and general debauchery. They wondered what happened when they left, speculating as they stumbled home that Blackbeard's wife suffered brutal mistreatment at the hands of his crew, while Blackbeard looked on and laughed. Bath was small enough, Blackbeard could have kept a low profile if he wanted to. But it was also small enough that the whole town knew if anything was slightly amiss, and old habits die hard. It was not long before Edward Teach was back on the water.

Friendship with the powers that be comes in handy when you're up to no good; it takes little effort to let friendship rot on the vine and turn to corruption. After almost a year of wining and dining and dancing on the governor's lawn, Blackbeard gathered a small collective and resumed his piracy career, using the island of Ocracoke as his base while retaining Bath as his home. The goods of local merchants started to go missing, pilfered from their sloops in the outer inlets, and word started to spread that trade with the southeastern coast was unsafe. When Teach kept his crimes out of sight (a quick trip to Maryland here, a venture to southern waters there), at least there was plausible deniability surrounding his lengthy absences, and the mysterious nighttime deliveries smuggled in through the tunnel that ran from the river straight to the governor's cellar. But one September day he brought a handsome prize to his home port. With a flourish, he presented the French vessel Rose Emelye, innocently explaining that he and his crew had found her floating unmanned (but packed with expensive cocoa, sugar, spices, and cloth), with no identifying papers. The local authorities took him at his word, and local merchants took this as the final straw. If they could not bend the ear of their own governor, with the pirate living in their own midst and making it hard for local ships to get out to sea, they would bring their case to Virginia's government. With a colony particularly dependent on sea-based trade, Governor Alexander Spotswood was alarmed into immediate action (well, as immediate as government action has ever been). He commissioned navy men to end Blackbeard's reign of terror, sending out two ships led by Lieutenant Maynard. Their orders were sweetened by the promise of a hefty reward: Bring back pirates, dead or alive.

Lieutenant Maynard found Blackbeard anchored quietly in a spot now known as Teach's Hole, sheltered by the island of Ocracoke. He did not catch the pirates entirely by surprise; they had been tipped off by Tobias Knight, a high-ranking government official in Bath with ties to Governor Eden. On the morning of November 22, Maynard and his crew began approaching slowly, cautiously, through the shallow waters. Spotting the approaching forces, Blackbeard leaned over the edge of his ship, bellowing,

"Damn you for villains, who are you? And from whence came you?" Continuing his approach, Maynard called back that Teach could see very well from the Union Jack they were flying that they weren't pirates. The exchange ended with Blackbeard throwing back liquor after a sarcastic toast to Maynard: "Damnation seize my soul if I give you quarters, or take any from you!" Both masters prepared their ships for battle.

By the time Maynard and Blackbeard met on the decks of the Ranger, the vessel was in rough shape, the decks strewn with broken glass and wounded. The two men fought first with pistols (Maynard's bullet found its mark in Blackbeard's flesh), then hacked and brawled with swords. It was a rabid duel. Out of the worst luck in the world, Maynard's cutlass snapped at the hilt. He stepped back, fumbling with his pistol. Blackbeard raised his sword to deliver a devastating blow, but one of Maynard's crew struck him from the back, and Maynard escaped with only a scrape across his fingers.

*Springer’s Point, very near the place still called Teach’s Hole.*

The fight continued, navy men and pirates swinging at one another in a blind fever of swords, axes, and makeshift weaponry, until the water around the ships was tinged red. Maynard continued to strike and fire at Blackbeard, but in a perverse miracle, with each injury the veteran pirate only became more fearsome. Finally, as Maynard was cocking his pistol for the sixth time, Blackbeard dropped to the deck with a thud. He was dead, his body covered with 25 wounds, five of them inflicted by bullets. Seeing their leader lifeless, his crew jumped overboard, refusing to be lured back until they were promised mercy. Blackbeard's head was immediately claimed as a prize, and his body was pitched over the side of the ship.

"Here was an End of that courageous Brute, who might have pass'd in the World for a Heroe, had he been employ'd in a good cause," Charles Johnson wrote years after the fact.

And the man in the magazine? He had been so close to lighting up the barrels of powder, and bringing explosive destruction on everyone - but two prisoners talked him out of it, begging for their lives.

After the smoke cleared and the debris (human or otherwise) was cleaned up, the navy got down to business. They made their triumphant return to Williamsburg, the trophy of Blackbeard's head swinging from the bowsprit. In Williamsburg, all of his men except one were quickly condemned to do the "hempen jig". They hanged in a row along the waterway, and their bodies were left behind for a year as a warning to other potential ne'er-do-wells. This was not the last anyone heard of Blackbeard, however.

The name Blackbeard echoed in conspiracy charges against Tobias Knight and Governor Eden; it was shouted in courtrooms and muttered in taverns for decades after his death. And his mystery outlived them all — legend has it that his spirit still stalks the harbors and inlets of North Carolina, looking on with approval at ceremonies where his skull is filled with moonshine and passed around, or appearing as flickering lights out on the water and leading innocent sailors to disaster (some variations say that Teach's Lights lead to his treasure, with the devil perched atop). He had claimed that no one knew the location of his treasure, with the exception of Satan himself, and that "the longest liver should take all." And so we have all been left to wonder.

Wrong, almost entirely wrong. Most of the story you've just read is exactly that - a story. There was likely no buried treasure, no lawyer father, no palace in Bath-Town. Even his real name is in question. Blackbeard's final battle was no epic struggle; in reality, it probably lasted about six minutes. We can't really be blamed for believing the story so many North Carolinians grow up knowing; it fits together so well, does it not? It flows, there's a certain amount of poetry. But history is prose — it has tangles and knots and often doesn't assemble itself into a cohesive plotline. The version we have echoed since Charles Johnson told it back in 1724 came with an authoritative voice and has grown thick with layers added over the space of three centuries. Certain parts are blatantly false, bits are speculation, parts are exaggerated or editorialized, and — perhaps most surprisingly — some pieces are as true as the North Star.

It was important that you know the outline of the old story, so you can understand all the context for all the installments over the next seven months. There's so much more to this story than smoke, guns, swords, and rum (although there's still plenty of all that to be had). This series is crafted to bring the human Blackbeard into focus - a flesh-and-bones man, who led a band of other real men to sea (and ultimately misfortune) in a world strained by war, plague, coronations, and local power grabs. In the forthcoming issues, you will hear from archaeologists and treasure hunters, archivists, lawyers, historians, shopkeepers and reenactors, and from many worthy historians who have worked tirelessly to recover the story of Blackbeard from the rubble of legend. Through their eyes you will explore the reserves back behind library walls, old taverns, new labs, see the remnants of ancient rituals and hear the sound a shipwreck makes when it is pulled from the ocean floor. The long way around means extra mileage, but brings with it the prospect of remarkable views. Welcome aboard.