by Craig Cabell
The next report from the Boston News Letter tells us that Blackbeard was moving south towards warmer climes. On 18 October 1717 he captured a sloop on the border between North Carolina and Virginia at latitude 36 under the command of Captain Pritchard. Pritchard had left St Lucia and was sailing northwards: ‘Pritchard from St Lucia, who on 18th October in Lat 36 and 45 was taken by Captain Teach, in Company with Captain Hornigold.’
As we have seen in earlier chapters there are discrepancies around the issue of Hornigold sailing with Blackbeard in October 1717. However, the report in the November edition of the Boston News Letter suggests that Hornigold was still sailing in company with Blackbeard. Nevertheless, as we have seen, by this time Hornigold may have been in command in name only of his own vessel due to his penchant for not attacking British ships. What we do know is that by the middle of October 1717 Blackbeard was no longer the protégé of Hornigold but an experienced pirate captain commanding a small fleet in his own right. Remember, this is prior to the encounter with La Concorde. The pirates took from Pritchard’s vessel about eight casks of sugar and most of the clothes.
According to the report two more vessels were taken by the pirates; the sloop Robert and a ship called the Good Intent, both on 22 October 1717.112 The article ends by saying that a ship from London sailing for Virginia had been ‘taken off the Capes of Virginia by Teach and Hornigold’. After being plundered the ship limped into a Maryland port where the report about their experiences was filed, but this ship got off lightly as all the pirates took was a suit of sails and rigging that had been brought across the ocean for a ship being built for Colonel Lloyd in Maryland.113
For most of these accounts we have been turning to the Boston News Letter for information. This is largely because the information in Johnson’s account is so sketchy. We will turn to the same publication again for the account of the taking of the Great Allen. The report of this action was filed on 24 February 1718 and claims that the ship was taken in November 1717. It appeared in the March edition of the Boston News Letter. This ship, under the command of Captain Christopher Taylor, was cruising near St Lucia and St Vincent in Caribbean waters. Both islands are part of the Lesser Antilles and also part of the British Windward Islands. The Great Allen was registered in Boston and was on its way to Jamaica, having come out of Barbados.
What we know is that Blackbeard had two sloops and with those he took La Concorde to which he transferred his command and converted her to a pirate ship and launched her as the Queen Anne’ s Revenge. We also know that he gave the French crew he had stranded on the island one of his own sloops, which was unarmed because he’d taken the guns from it and put them onto the flagship. That left Blackbeard with the Queen Anne’ s Revenge and the Revenge – a large flagship and a sloop.
The account of Taylor’s capture by Blackbeard in the Boston News Letter stated that ‘a great ship from Boston was taken at or near St Lucia or St Vincent by Captain Teach the Pirate in a French Ship of 32 Guns, a Brigantine of 10 guns and Sloop of 12 guns.’ So Taylor mentions Teach by name and he also mentions a brigantine. Being a ship’s captain himself he is hardly likely to mistake a sloop for a brigantine. This means we have to assume that Blackbeard took this brigantine before capturing the Great Allen and after he had captured and refitted La Concorde and relaunched her as the Queen Anne’s Revenge. 114 Captain Taylor reported sighting a large French vessel armed with thirty-two guns. The assumption is that Blackbeard’s new flagship had around forty guns but as most sources have discrepancies in dates, numbers of ships and numbers of guns it is hard to pinpoint an exact total so, again, we make some assumptions and one of those is that this 32-gun ship was the Queen Anne’ s Revenge.
Ordering his men to put on more sail, Blackbeard brought the Queen Anne’ s Revenge closer to the Great Allen and soon he was alongside her. Shouting and yelling, waving their cutlasses and pistols, Blackbeard’s crew poured onto the deck of the captured ship, rampaging through their new prize stealing anything they could get their hands on. From a deposition filed by Governor Hamilton of the Leeward Islands in January 1718 we know that the ship was carrying a great deal of plate ‘and one fine cup they told the despondent they had taken out of Captain Taylor’, but there is no record of anything else it was carrying. Blackbeard and especially his crew were convinced that the ship was carrying more and that it had been hidden.
However, Captain Taylor was adamant that there was no currency on board. Frustrated, Blackbeard ordered him to be bound in irons for a full twenty-four hours. During this time, Blackbeard’s crew subjected him to a whipping to extract the information from him about any hidden money.115
Having taken everything they could from the ship, the pirates stranded the crew on the nearby island of St Vincent. However, once the crew were on the island, instead of handing them another ship to help them get back to civilisation Blackbeard took a different action. Standing on the beach, stranded, the crew and officers of the Great Allen watched in desperation as the pirates set fire to their ship, ending any chance they had of getting off the island quickly. As the flames spread, their hearts sank as the ship slowly burnt to nothing.116
Why didn’t Blackbeard just let them go as he had done with the crew of La Concorde? Some months before, captured pirates had been executed in Boston and this ship was from Boston so it just could have been an act of revenge or retribution on Blackbeard’s part. He also would have known that as soon as Taylor got to civilisation he would file a report with the local authorities which would eventually appear in something like the Boston News Letter. By being lenient with one crew and harsh with another it showed Blackbeard to be unpredictable and violent.
On 29 November Captain Benjamin Hobhouse, commanding officer of the Montserrat Merchant, came face to face with the pirates:
Seeing two ships and a sloop, and thinking one did belong to Bristol, and the other two to Guinea, he went in the long-boat to enquire for letters. They desired us to come on board, but seeing Death Head in the stern we refused it. They compelled us to go on board and asked about the guns and ships at Kingslale and Plymouth. They report the Captain of the pirates name is Kentish and Captain Edwards belonging to the sloop, and they report the ship has 150 men on board and 22 guns mounted, the sloop about 50 white men, and eight guns, and that they burnt part of Guadalupe, when they cut out the French ship.117
In the past, Bonnet had used the alias of Captain Edwards and it is likely that he was still aboard the Queen Anne’ s Revenge at the time but we don’t know who Captain Kentish is, or do we?118 Konstam suggests that Kentish was another alias that Blackbeard used, providing us with a clear indication that Blackbeard was not above using several aliases himself. This account was made through Governor Hamilton by Thomas Knight, one of the crew of the Montserrat Merchant.
The next morning Captain Richard Joy commanding the New Division ran into the pirates. He was lucky. The pirates didn’t plunder his ship or attack the crew. They just wanted information on shipping in the area. Perhaps his vessel was so meagre and the cargo of no importance to the pirates that he was spared. We’ll never know nor will we ever know what he told them but we do know that, while his ship may not have been plundered, his crew was shrunk by one. Whether that person went voluntarily or by force is also not clear.119
The next entry comes from Henry Bostock, the captain of the sloop Margaret. According to his deposition published in a letter from Governor Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Bostock encountered Blackbeard on 5 December off Crab Island where he met a large ship and a sloop:
He was ordered on board and Capt. Tach took his cargo of cattle and hogs, his arms books and instruments. The ship, Dutch built, was a French Guinea man, 36 guns mounted and 300 men. They did not abuse him or his men, but forced 2 to stay and one Robert Bibby voluntarily took on with them. They had a great deal of plate on board, and one very fine cup they told the deponent they had taken out of Capt. Taylor, bound from Barbados to Jamaica, whom they very much a
bused and burnt his ship. They said they had burnt several vessels, among them two or three belonging to these Islands, particularly the day before a sloop belonging to Antego, one (Robert) McGill owner.120
In the same letter Governor Hamilton recounted more of Blackbeard’s activities. We learn that the pirate continued to plunder vessels through the early part of December 1717; in one instance capturing a ship loaded with white sugar which he sunk. Hamilton then goes on to give different accounts of the description of the number of guns on the larger vessel from twenty-two up to as many as forty. This letter is one of the first to mention that Blackbeard was married: ‘He is believed to have a wife and children in London.’121
Some people joined Blackbeard voluntarily, others were forced to join. Captain Bostock’s account states that Robert Bibby had jumped ship and joined Blackbeard voluntarily but two other crew members were pressed into the pirate’s service. Though Bostock didn’t identify them we can assume that they had skills needed by Blackbeard.
Now we come to an event which can only be described as fiction. According to Johnson’s account of Blackbeard he stated that the Queen Anne’s Revenge encountered the Royal Navy warship HMS Scarborough ‘who engaged him for some hours; but she finding the pirate well manned and having tried her strength gave over the engagement and returned to Barbados, the place of her station, and Teach sailed towards Spanish America.’
If this story was true it would certainly have gone a long way to increasing Blackbeard’s notoriety – a pirate ship coming away from an encounter with a Royal Navy warship unscathed? The story would spread like wildfire throughout the ports. There is no official documentation to support this story, so was it true or a complete fabrication?
On the one hand the Royal Navy, having engaged the Queen Anne’ s Revenge and failed to stop the pirate captain known by then to be on board, may not want anyone to know of the failure. If the perceived might of the Royal Navy was insufficient to stop him, what chance did anyone else have? This would, by association, increase his reputation and the fear surrounding him. Conversely, the Royal Navy, having by then heard of the exploits of Blackbeard, would have needed to be seen to be doing something to stop him before he became too powerful and too dangerous.
HMS Scarborough was certainly capable of standing up to the Queen Anne’ s Revenge. It could certainly face Blackbeard’s vessel on a cannon-for-cannon basis. Also, since pirates on the whole rely on fear in their victims and so have very little opportunity to fight, they would not be as skilled and battle-hardened as the crew of the warship. It is far more probable, if this story were true, that the warship would have had more accurate fire and have been able to keep up a higher rate of fire than the pirate ship. There are many other documented cases where Royal Navy ships have encountered pirate ships and virtually blasted them out of the water. For proof we can look at the rather one-sided fight Bartholomew Roberts found himself in against HMS Swallow. He lost the fight and his life.
Johnson claims that the ships engaged each other for several hours. This could mean that it was a running fight with both ships firing off shots from their bow guns or stern guns and never getting into a position to fire full broadsides. However, if it was a full-scale battle and the ships engaged each other for hours, then both would suffer significant damage to their hulls and masts. Yet, no-one giving subsequent reports of seeing the Queen Anne’ s Revenge makes any claim that they saw damage to either the structure or any of the masts. In addition, there was no damage reported on HMS Scarborough from any of the ports she subsequently entered, nor was there any mention of it requisitioning replenishments of cannonballs and gunpowder. Interestingly, the logbook from HMS Scarborough is still held on file, along with Captain Hume’s personal letters and reports and nowhere within them is there a mention of such a battle.122
Surely this would be an urgent requirement for a warship that had just emerged from a prolonged battle? While it may have been useful for the Royal Navy to be doing something to stop Blackbeard, it is inconceivable that these vessels, locked in combat for several hours, would both emerge without a single scratch.123
Historian Robert E. Lee has a different version of events. He states that Blackbeard waited for the Scarborough to get closer to his ship and then when she was in range opened fire with a broadside ‘that tore great holes in her sails’. He suggests that the Scarborough broke off the engagement and limped back to Barbados. This version goes against Johnson’s who doesn’t mention the damage done to the Scarborough. It also goes against what Angus Konstam says in his book, that ‘the closest HMS Scarborough and the Queen Anne’ s Revenge ever got to trading blows with each other was when the pirate ship sailed past Nevis on her way north.’124
It is likely then that Lee is using sources that propagate the myth of this encounter, for if there is no record of the event taking place in the ships’ logs and there is no reference to the encounter in Governor Hamilton’s letter, perhaps we can assume that the encounter between these two vessels either didn’t take place or was built upon another encounter between two lesser vessels and either used by Governor Hamilton to deliberately show how bad the piracy problem was, or the event was simply confused.
Even if it did happen, the account mentions only the Queen Anne’ s Revenge and HMS Scarborough. Where were the sloops that were escorting Blackbeard’s flagship? We know from earlier and later reports of sightings that at least one sloop was a constant companion of the Queen Anne’ s Revenge, which was most likely the Revenge. Yet, had it conveniently vanished just before the ‘battle’ and would then reappear as escort to its totally undamaged flagship immediately after the last cannon blast had been fired?
If this event took place then it really would have cemented Blackbeard’s reputation as the most feared pirate on the high seas, but suppose it was a fabrication, not by Johnson but by Blackbeard and his crew? Thomas Knight’s deposition as reported by Governor Hamilton said that they had spotted a man-of-war when they made Nevis: ‘Spying some vessels in Nevis, and among the rest took one for the man of war, they said they would cut her out, but the Captain being ill prevented it.’
Thomas Knight was taken prisoner by Blackbeard when they encountered the Montserrat Merchant. Once he was free from the pirates Knight reported to Hamilton and gave his deposition. Henry Bostock in his deposition to Governor Hamilton said ‘They owned they had met the man of war on this station, but said they had no business with her, but if she had chased them they would have kept their way.’
So Lee thinks the encounter is true, Johnson thinks it’s true and many historians base their facts on Johnson’s account. However, as we have the depositions from people who were there that they didn’t engage with the Scarborough, where does the tale come from? If, when Blackbeard and his crew entered port they bragged about engaging a warship and winning the battle against it then we have the makings of a great story, a great myth that Johnson could have picked up on when he was putting his history of Blackbeard together, especially if he was using Israel Hands as one of his primary sources. Even if Blackbeard and his crew didn’t boast about it but the story was around as rumour, then Blackbeard could have picked up on it to enhance his reputation.
Of course we have no evidence either way, but this is certainly food for thought.
Both Johnson and Captain Bostock state that the Queen Anne’ s Revenge sailed towards the coast of Spanish America for cleaning. The implication for cleaning a vessel is to do minor repairs to beams and scrape off the hull to ensure the ship remains as fast as possible; it did not imply that the vessel was limping into port to make massive repairs to its overall structure. In order for Blackbeard to clean the vessel, he put into Samana Bay on the island of Hispaniola to keep away from prying eyes while his ship and men were vulnerable.125
For the next few months there were no sightings of the pirate. Some pirates were nicknamed ‘snowbirds’ because they plagued the northern ports such as Boston and New York during the summer and drifted southward
s to the warmer Caribbean when winter arrived. We hear very little from Blackbeard until March 1718 except for a sighting that took place in February in the vicinity of the Leeward Islands.
This sighting comes from a report filed by Captain Hume of HMS Scarborough. He states that he had information of a pirate ship of thirty-six guns and 250 men in company with a sloop of ten guns and 100 men operating in the Leeward Islands’ vicinity. He sailed on 18 February for Antigua to join with HMS Seaford and it was while they were at Antigua that they had information that the pirate ship had moved to the Leeward Islands: ‘The 23 December we proceeded for Nevis, and St. Christopher’s, from which islands I had an Officer and 20 Soldiers put on board me for the Cruize.’126
While this account does not accurately identify the vessel as being the Queen Anne’ s Revenge, we can be fairly sure that there weren’t too many pirate vessels of that size operating in those waters and even fewer that were in consort with a 10-gun sloop. Governor Hamilton ordered HMS Seaford supported by HMS Scarborough to hunt for the pirate ship. They were unsuccessful.
On 28 March 1718 another victim fell into Blackbeard’s clutches and this was the Protestant Caesar, on the final few days of its long voyage from Boston. It was within a couple of days of Honduras.
Captain William Wyer commanding the Protestant Caesar stood on the deck of his ship, watching a small sloop heading directly for him. As his own ship rolled up and down with the motion of the sea he estimated that the sloop had about ten guns and possibly fifty or so men. Were they pirates? Just in case, he ordered more sail, but his ship couldn’t go any faster and Wyer watched the much smaller vessel getting closer and closer. Much of the action that followed was later reported in the Boston News Letter.