I
might have wept from the disabuse BLACKBEARD:
America's Most Notorious Pirate
heaped on me were it not that pirates didn't weep, and I usually find
myself unconsciously emulating characters in books I'm reading.
Although they did not weep, which is not counter intuitive, pirates
were not cutthroats, which is, as suggested by their fictional
counterparts. Nor did they say “Arrrr” or “Shiver me timbers,”
iconic piratical exhortations introduced by actor Robert Newton in
his title role of the 1952 Hollywood film Blackbeard
the Pirate.
Most
disheartening for me in this illusion-puncturing, meticulously
researched account by Scottish historian Angus Konstam was that real
pirates did not bury treasure! I selected the book to help with
research for a mystery novel I'm writing inspired by a local legend
that Blackbeard buried a chest of valuables on a small island in a
creek about ten minutes by foot from a house I once owned. Not
whining here, but clearly the debunking of my plot idea was,
if not a weep-worthy setback, one that might have merited reading no
further, chucking the book and administering a brutal tweak to the
raison
d'ĂŞtre
of my novel.
The
first and second steps I did not take. Konstam's Blackbeard
was much too interesting to abandon, and so, rapt, I read it through
to the thicket of end notes, bibliography and index entries. As to my
novel, its plot is still under construction, but be assured
Blackbeard will figure into it somehow. His is truly a fascinating
legend even a remote proximity of which would contribute a layer of
exotic intrigue to any story.
Edward
Teach--or Thatch or Thach or Thatche or Tatch, depending on which of
the early 18th
century spelling variations available in documents at the time one
prefers—likely was not the murderous monster of mayhem fictional
accounts have made him out to be. Konstam was unable to find any
evidence Blackbeard (the moniker suggested in a deposition of a
merchant marine captain the pirate captured early in his frightening
career) ever personally killed or ordered anyone slain. But he
certainly scared the hell out of people and indeed earned
unequivocally Konstam's description “America's most notorious
pirate.” Dec. 5, 1717, the moment of Edward
Teach/Thatch/Thach/Thatche/Tatch's metamorphosis from simple pirate
captain to one of the greatest villains the human imagination has
conjured:
|
Angus Konstam |
Henry
Bostock wasn’t having the best of mornings. His sloop the Margaret
wallowed in the swell, while a cable length (200 yards) away a large,
menacing pirate ship lay waiting for him, her gunports open. Wisps of
smoke told him the gunners were ready, lengths of burning slow match
held in their fists. Jeering cutthroats lined the rail of the larger
vessel, and the taunting continued as he clambered down into his
sloop’s tender and gave orders to be rowed toward his tormentors.
By way of diversion he would have cast his experienced eye over the
pirate ship as she loomed over him. She was clearly French-built,
with fast lines and a sleek appearance, a little like a naval
frigate. She had already been pierced for two dozen guns, but her
hull showed evidence of more recent alterations: extra gunports were
cut into her gunwale and beneath her forecastle and quarterdeck, both
of which had been cut down slightly, creating a flush deck fore and
aft.
Grinning
faces looked down on him as he clambered up the frigate’s side, and
rough hands hauled him up the last few feet onto the pirate deck. It
was then that he saw him. Standing before him was one of the most
frightening men he had ever clapped eyes on, a devilish-looking
figure with wild eyes surrounded by even wilder black hair. The
pirate’s beard was long and unkempt, plaited and hanging down over
his chest. The same unkempt hair seemed to surround his face, and
more plaits stuck out on either side of his face. Surprisingly, the
ends of these rat-tailed black plaits were tied with twists of
ribbon, which only seemed to make his appearance all the more
disconcerting. The man was dressed in a long sea captain’s coat,
crossed by two belts— a sword belt and a bandolier— while three
brace of pistols hung from improvised holsters over his chest, making
him look like a walking armory. Despite the winter sun of the
Caribbean, the man wore a small brown fur cap, of the kind commonly
worn by seamen in cold weather, and beneath it, as if to complete the
whole devilish image, two small lengths of slow match poked out and
hung down behind each ear, the tips of the impregnated rope glowing
red and smoldering, with wisps of smoke framing the pirate’s head.
As if all this wasn’t alarming enough, there were the eyes— the
manic, staring eyes that glared at him from behind the hair. Henry
Bostock had just met Blackbeard.
The
pirates held Bostock and his crew prisoner for eight hours,
eventually setting them free. This took place off Crab Island near
Anguilla. Bostock's subsequent statement to the governor of Barbados
provided the first known description of the pirate captain, and gave
him the name that would sail with its Jolly Roger myths into the
ages: “The Captain by the [name] of Capt. Tach … was a tall Spare
Man with a very black beard which he wore very long.”
Blackbeard's
career as a pirate lasted about eighteen months, probably less time
than it took his beard to grow so distinctively long. Despite its
widespread, enduring notoriety, his career as a buccaneer was hardly
the most successful of those who preyed on merchant ships throughout
the century's first two decades, known as the Golden Age of Piracy.
Most pirates, including Blackbeard, had segued into the black-flag
vocation from doing the same thing legally as privateers, seizing
enemy vessels during times of war under authority of their country.
Their seagoing lives without this authority was preferable to that on
the merchant ships they seized, and they often recruited new pirates
from crews of those same ships.
Records
exist indicating that pirates governed themselves democratically,
electing their officers and deciding common issues by vote. They won
their plunder largely by intimidating bluff. Most of their plunder
was the marketable cargo carried by the ships they seized and,
occasionally, the ships themselves. They sold, traded or drank (if
rum or wine) the stolen cargo, and rarely found any of the jewels and
doubloons fiction has them burying in “a dead man's chest,” with
pet parrots on villainous shoulders squawking “pieces of eight!”
Their chief danger lay in getting caught, and many who did were
summarily hung after token trials. Their chief threat was economic,
but Colonial authorities, with little protection from the British
Navy, regarded piracy more as an irritant than dire—until
Blackbeard upped the stakes by blockading for a week the major port
of what is now Charleston, S.C., choking off all trade.
His
actions paralyzed the port, bringing maritime trade to a halt. While
this caused a crisis in the colony of South Carolina, Blackbeard’s
blockade had an equally dramatic impact further up the coast. At the
time Blackbeard commanded several ships and several hundred men. With
a force like that at his disposal he could repeat his success off
Charleston anywhere else along North America’s Atlantic seaboard.
For a brief period he became America’s bogeyman, and nobody knew
where he would strike next.
Enter
Alexander Spotswood, Virginia's colonial governor, who took this
danger to task, and, despite the legal risk of “invading” the
colony of North Carolina, where he knew Blackbeard was living
apparently with a royal pardon from the governor there, sent a task
force to put the pirate out of business for good. The task force did
just that, and returned to Virginia with Blackbeard's nightmarish
head dangling from the bowsprit of one of the two commercial sloops
rented for the mission. Sixteen men captured from Blackbeard's sloop
were brought back, as well, alive. They were imprisoned for three
months in Williamsburg before all but one, who had been Blackbeard's
prisoner, were tried, convicted and sentenced “to hang by the neck
until dead, dead, dead.”
Spotswood
granted clemency to another of the prisoners before the execution,
which took place three days after the trial. Konstam suggests the
lucky pirate, Israel Hands, might have escaped the others' fate by
acting as a credible informant to the Virginia governor with legal
problems that grew out of his North Carolina “invasion.” The
fourteen others, including four African slaves who'd joined the
pirates, were hung from trees or makeshift gibbets every half mile
along a stretch of road from Williamsburg to the James River. Legend
has Blackbeard's head rotting on a pole for several years at the
James River port where the returning task force docked, with the
skull eventually used as a drinking cup before ending up in a museum.
The author says he viewed what was purported to be Blackbeard's skull
as part of a traveling exhibit displayed at The Mariner's Museum in
Newport News, Va.
Konstam
suggests Blackbeard's grisly fate was more a result of his carefully
crafted image than for anything he actually did. In reality, he was
believed to be a literate man socially at ease in polite company and
capable of persuasive charm when it suited him. In modern fictional
portrayals, Konstam says, the character Jack Sparrow, played by
Johnny Depp in the Pirates
of the Caribbean
movies, “was closer to the real Blackbeard than most fictional
attempts to capture the...man behind the myth.”
Arrrr,
I say to that, and shiver me timbers, and what the hell.