Edward Teach

Overview

Edward Teach, almost universally remembered as Blackbeard, was an English pirate whose two-year career in the Caribbean and along the North American Atlantic coast made him the era’s most theatrically self-presenting freebooter and, in popular memory, the archetype of the eighteenth-century pirate. His flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was a captured French slaver refitted to mount forty guns. He was killed by a Royal Navy boarding party in November 1718.

Origins

Teach’s early life is poorly documented. Charles Johnson’s 1724 General History of the Pyrates, the principal early source, gives Bristol as his birthplace and dates his transition to piracy to service under Benjamin Hornigold in 1716; both points are consistent with what little corroborating evidence exists from Bahamas-based sources, but neither can be independently confirmed. The conventional birth-date of c. 1680 is Johnson’s estimate.

Career

Teach received his first independent command from Hornigold in late 1716 and operated out of the pirate haven at Nassau in New Providence (Bahamas). In November 1717 he captured the French slaver La Concorde de Nantes off Martinique and refitted her as the Queen Anne’s Revenge, mounting forty guns and shipping a crew of around three hundred — among the largest pirate vessels of the period.

The most documented operation of his career was the May 1718 blockade of the entrance to Charleston harbour in the Province of South Carolina. Teach held a number of prominent passengers and merchants hostage, demanding (and receiving) a chest of medicines from the colonial government in exchange for their release. Within weeks the Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, and was lost; Teach moved his flag to a smaller sloop and accepted a pardon from North Carolina governor Charles Eden, then resumed piracy from Ocracoke.

Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy, operating under orders from Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood and not from the North Carolina civil authorities, located Teach at Ocracoke on the morning of 22 November 1718. In the boarding action Teach was killed; Maynard returned to Virginia with Teach’s severed head suspended from the bowsprit of his sloop.

Ships

• Queen Anne’s Revenge Frigate (refitted French slaver)

  The captured French slaver La Concorde de Nantes, refitted to mount forty guns. Lost at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, June 1718; the wreck site was archeologically confirmed in 2011.

• Adventure Sloop

  Teach’s vessel at Ocracoke; the boarding action of 22 November 1718 took place on her decks.

Notable raids & captures

Treasures

Documented

• The Charleston ransom

  A chest of medicines (specifics not enumerated) handed over by the South Carolina colonial government in exchange for the release of hostages from the May 1718 blockade. The transfer is recorded in the South Carolina council minutes for that month.

• <em>Queen Anne&rsquo;s Revenge</em> wreck assemblage

  Recovered material from the wreck site at Beaufort Inlet, including ordnance, surgical instruments, navigational equipment, and personal effects. The assemblage is curated by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and forms the largest archeological collection associated with any single pirate of the Golden Age.

Rumored or legendary

• Buried treasure (American Atlantic coast) unverified

  Local traditions on multiple stretches of the North Carolina and Virginia coast claim Blackbeard caches. Teach’s recorded statement — that he and the devil knew where his treasure lay, and the longest-living of them would take it all — is the best-known version of a remark that itself is preserved only through Johnson’s 1724 chronicle. No authenticated find has ever been tied to him.

Legacy

Charles Johnson’s 1724 account established the cinematic Blackbeard — matchcord burning under his hat in battle, multiple braces of pistols across his chest — that has held in popular culture ever since. The 1996 discovery of a wreck site in Beaufort Inlet, archeologically confirmed in 2011 as the Queen Anne’s Revenge, has made Teach the most archeologically substantiated pirate of the Golden Age. The site is excavated under the authority of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Associates & contemporaries

• Stede Bonnet — Sailed in consort with Teach for several months in 1717&ndash;1718; was hanged at Charleston in December 1718, weeks after Teach&rsquo;s death.
• Benjamin Hornigold — Teach&rsquo;s captain during his early career; later took the King&rsquo;s pardon and became a pirate-hunter in the Bahamas.