Blackbeard

by Craig Cabell

  He could not execute the hostages, even if he was that way inclined. Once he had exhausted his supply of people to kill and with no further shipping bringing replacement hostages into his grasp, he would have nothing left to bargain with. If he did start killing the hostages, every warship, militia and army in the Colonies would be after him.

  Days passed and there was no news from the men in the boat. From Blackbeard’s perspective his anxiety would have been mounting and thoughts turning to the fact that the town was not going to comply with their demands and every day that brought nearer the problem he had of having to carry out his threats. As the time dragged on some of the hostages might have been wondering why their lives were being considered to be so unimportant as to be worth less than a chest full of medical supplies. Blackbeard must have been both surprised and disappointed that his very simple demand was apparently not being met.

  While some sources speculate that the little boat carrying the three men capsized with the men managing to get to a small uninhabited island before they were rescued and landed at the town, the evidence to support this is sketchy.144 This could account for the long delay in getting the medicines, but not all the sources on Blackbeard claim that this is what happened to the boat so this incident is in some doubt.

  However, a BBC docudrama simply entitled Blackbeard suggests that much of the delay was caused by the two pirates, having set foot on dry land, descending on the nearest tavern and pouring as much alcohol as they could down their throats and it goes on to claim that the crewmen sent ashore used the capsizing incident merely as an excuse to conceal the fact that they had spent the entire time drinking and sleeping off the effects.

  The BBC drama shows that the Queen Anne’s Revenge moved further into the harbour putting it some way along the river. Now this move would have bottled up Blackbeard completely if warships arrived at the mouth of the harbour behind him. The three sloops would have remained in a line across the harbour mouth to continue to capture and plunder ships but even the combined firepower of the sloops would have been no match for a heavily-armed warship. We know that the Queen Anne’s Revenge did not go any closer than where she remained for the entire duration of the blockade. It would have taken considerable time for the three men to get to the Governor to give him the demands and then time for him to collect the medicines demanded on the list, but that does not make for such interesting television.

  This was the early eighteenth century when everything happened, by our modern standards, at a much reduced pace. Collecting a chest full of medicines would not have been as easy as a visit to the chemist with a prescription. If some of the medicines were not immediately available, it could have taken several days to find them. Also, the Governor would have had no idea when the pirates would be coming to present Blackbeard’s demands or even know if he had any demands until a messenger arrived or the pirates showed up themselves. Everything was by word of mouth, messengers on foot or horseback or, in this case, pirate ambassadors in a small boat. It would all have taken considerable time.

  There is some evidence that suggests the two pirates might have gone into the local taverns as the BBC drama asserts, because Captain Johnson says that:

  Whilst Mr Marks was making application to the council, Richards and the rest of the pirates walked the streets publicly in the sight of all people, who were fired with the utmost indignation, looking upon them as robbers and murderers and particularly the authors of their wrongs and oppressions, but durst not so much as think of executing their revenge, for fear of bringing more calamities upon themselves, and so they were forced to let the villains pass with impunity.

  From Johnson’s account above and from Governor Robert Johnson’s letters we know the pirates walked the streets with impunity in a ‘bold and upright’ manner. While Marks was with the Governor the pirates walked the streets. We speculate here that it is highly likely that the pirates entered the tavern while they waited for Marks. After all, they had the upper hand. Marks would not be able to run away because of the hostages; the pirates wouldn’t be molested because of the fear of reprisal and again, the fate of the hostages. So it is likely they did go drinking which would account for the delay.

  The situation with the townspeople would have been one of wanting to do something but being utterly paralysed by fear of retaliation on a grand scale. The best they could do was either look away in fear or give the pirates a few hard stares. Since there was no evidence of pillaging or plundering by the pirates, or indeed anything more devastating, we can only assume that the pirates were either better behaved than our general view of pirates, or our general view of pirates is distorted; or perhaps, they felt vastly outnumbered, vulnerable and just as ill at ease among the hostile population of Charles Town.

  Captain Johnson states that while the pirates walked the streets at liberty, the Governor and the Council:

  …were not long in deliberating upon the message though ’twas the greatest affront that could have been put upon them, yet for the saving of so many men’s lives (among them Mr. Samuel Wragg, one of the council) they complied with the necessity and sent aboard a chest valued at between 300 and 400 pounds.

  Blackbeard did get his medicine and ‘the pirates went back safe to their ships’. The hostages were released, but not before they were relieved of not only all their possessions but most of their clothing. In terms of the value of items taken from ships and hostages, Johnson states that Blackbeard and his fellow pirates took ‘out of them in gold and silver, about 1,500 pounds sterling, besides provisions and other matters’.145

  After a week of blockading the town and stopping everything that moved in or out, the flotilla of pirate vessels sailed away, and it seems that not even a single shot had been fired by either side. With the city defences in such a poor condition, raiding the town might have been worthwhile. There were around 300 pirates, all ready for a fight, and around 5,000 civilian inhabitants, all trembling behind closed doors, or so it would have seemed. Why then, did Blackbeard not press home his advantage?

  There are a number of reasons, and some have already been discussed. Any student of military strategy knows that making a move to attack that also closes off your escape route is unsound. Also, Blackbeard could only guess at the condition of the defences. He was never close enough to make a full survey. Even though he’d captured several ships and from them would have had a rough idea of the town’s defences, sailing into an enclosed harbour would have put him in range of the cannon they did have but, more importantly, small-arms fire. Especially, if his navigation wasn’t accurate and the massive flagship went aground on one of the many shoals or sand bars, he could be shot at from the shore with impunity. Once stuck, he would then be at the mercy of the town’s defences and the arrival of the Royal Navy.

  Of course, an attack on the town may have pleased many of his men and given them the opportunity to get more wealth from plundering the people and the town but what of the cost of such an attack? If his overriding need was to get a chest of medicine, then how many of his men were even fit enough to mount such an attack?

  In addition, the BBC drama gives us another reason. It claims that, despite the wishes of many of his crew, Blackbeard ordered the flotilla to sail away without attacking Charles Town because to do so would have been, in their view, too easy. Yet, to leave without attacking the town after being in a position where he could have if he had wanted, displayed far greater power and control than if he simply ravaged the place. The actions of blockading the town and then sailing away, leaving it intact would have earned him some more notoriety. In addition, he had received what he had set out to receive – the medicines – and that was sufficient. As a bonus, his crew had a share of the takings from the ships they had plundered during the blockade. In achieving what it had intended, the whole incident was a resounding success, resounding because its impact and the news of it would reverberate throughout the colonies for some time to come.

  Governor Robert Johnson’s letter to the
Council of Trade and Plantations sent after the event illustrates the effect of the blockade. He starts by describing it as an

  unspeakable calamity this poor province suffers from pyrates obliges me to inform your lordships of it in order that his Majestie may know it and be induced to afford us the assistance of a frigate or two to cruse hereabouts upon them for we are continually alarmed and our ships taken to the utter ruin of our trade.146

  Also in this letter, the Governor raises a fascinating point. He states that this was the second time in nine months since he entered office that Charles Town had been besieged by pirates. Blackbeard’s blockade started fourteen days before Governor Johnson wrote his letter and it continued for about a week to ten days.

  Governor Johnson’s letter to the Council of Trade and Plantations arrived in London in August 1718. He tells their lordships at the Council that ‘twice since my coming here in 9 months time they [pirates] lain off of our barr taking and plundering all ships that come into this port’.

  The problem we have with this nine months issue is that this then takes us back to around September 1717. Who was in the area at the time? It could have been any number of pirates, but a letter written around the same time as the governor penned his states that the second blockade in May 1718 was by the same pirates who were responsible for the earlier blockade in September 1717. It states that a merchant ship was taken by a sloop with twelve guns and a much larger French ship of forty guns accompanied by two sloops

  for their tenders, having in all about 300 men all English – the ship is commanded by one Teach and the sloop by one Richards, who have been upon this account in those and other vessels about two years, and is, the same sloops and company that was off our barr the last summer and took two vessels inward bound.147

  So Blackbeard had already been here and had plundered two vessels. This means that Blackbeard would have been off Charles Town when he was commanding the Revenge and before he seized La Concorde. While being off Charles Town Bar the previous summer he could have then hatched a plan to return to Charles Town and blockade the harbour with a much larger force, so he would need a larger ship with far greater firepower. Hence he seized La Concorde for that very purpose. We can’t know for sure that this was what lay behind the taking of the French slaver but it does make some sense.

  Perhaps he intended to plunder all the ships going in and out and the town itself and get greater riches on his return to the area?

  Yet, when he did arrive again and blockade the town he only asked for medicine. If he and his crew were sick then asking for the medicines made sense. He’d had to change his plans of plundering the town so instead he could just take any booty from incoming and outgoing vessels while waiting for his medicine. Then he could move to better hunting grounds, lie low and start plundering all over again.

  Governor Johnson predicted that the King’s Pardon would do very little to change these pirates. In terms of Blackbeard, it was a prediction that was destined to come true. The Governor also becomes one of the first people to write in his account ‘commanded by one Teach alias Blackbeard’.

  Resplendent on the deck of his grand flagship, Blackbeard sailed north. With him were the three sloops. He had achieved everything he had set out to achieve, but there was still more to come. The next part of his plan was to come as a shock to almost all of those around him.

  Chapter 10

  Death of the Queen

  Teach began now to think of breaking up the company,

  and securing the money and the best of the effects for

  himself and some others of his companions he had

  most friendship for, and to cheat the rest. 148

  Captain Charles Johnson

  When Captain Kidd arrived in the Caribbean aboard the Quedagh Merchant, which he had renamed as Adventure Prize, he found himself in a dilemma. His massive ship was perfect as a prize to take back to England but it was also a massive target and just about every navy, privateer and even pirates were hunting him.

  Two decades later, Blackbeard was in the same dilemma. The blockade of Charles Town had cemented his reputation as the most feared, powerful and audacious pirate sailing in American waters. His fame was spreading, but the blockade had also set him up as public enemy number one. His ship, the Queen Anne’ s Revenge, had become one of the most famous and most recognisable in the world. While Kidd feared attack from both pirates and any of the navies he had managed to upset along the way, Blackbeard had no reason to fear a pirate attack but attacks from the navies, especially the Royal Navy, were a completely different story. His ship was one of the largest pirate vessels afloat and would act as a massive target for anyone hunting him, and they were hunting him. Everyone knew what his ship looked like. However, Blackbeard had a plan.

  When Europeans first began to arrive in North Carolina, they were mainly English settlers coming down from the north in search of more farmland. What they found when they arrived was a diverse selection of North American indigenous tribes that included Cherokee, Tuscarora, Cheraw, Pamlico, Meherrin, Coree, Machapungo, Cape Fear, Waxhaw, Saponi, Tutelo, Waccamaw, Coharie and Catawba, all vying for land that would eventually make up North Carolina.

  Sir Walter Raleigh was given land in the colony of Virginia in 1584 by Elizabeth I. Raleigh was the man who famously brought tobacco to Europe. As the decades went by, more and more colonists arrived and in 1663 the colony was firmly established by a charter issued by King Charles II that named the entire territory Carolina. In 1710, the area was split into North and South Carolina and the rough line of the modern border was established. Some of the coastline was known as the Outer Banks. This was where Blackbeard was heading.

  It was an ideal hiding-place for pirates. Filled with small inlets and shoals, it provided any small pirate vessel with a perfect place to ambush merchant ships traversing the Outer Banks. The multitude of sandbanks made navigation difficult for large ships. Any vessel forced onto these sandbanks by smaller pirate vessels would find they had little choice but to submit to being plundered or face being run aground. One of the many inlets, and the one that Blackbeard was heading for, was Topsail Inlet right in front of Beaufort, North Carolina. During Blackbeard’s time Beaufort was a tiny fishing settlement that had been set up as a whaling station. Konstam describes it as having ‘a ragged collection of unpainted shacks surrounded by bleached bones and the stench of rotten fish’.149

  The place Blackbeard was heading for was Topsail Island within Topsail Inlet, so named because any merchant ship passing by would only be able to see the tops of sails above the rolling sand dunes that formed the beaches of the island. Beyond the island was Beaufort and beyond that, Native American territory.

  Indeed, the dominant tribe of the area was the Coree, whose territory stretched from the Outer Banks to Cape Lookout and Cape Fear River. The Coree were engaged in a war with the Machapungos and the Tuscarora tribes that nearly wiped them all out, so they had little fight left in them when the white settlers arrived. In 1718, when Blackbeard arrived, the settlement of Beaufort was five years old though it wouldn’t officially be recognised as a town until five years later. With such navigational hazards and so few people known to be in the area, it was isolated enough for the next stage of his plan.

  He needed to get rid of his flagship. A ship that size was simply too big to operate out of this area, plus it was too well-known, so it had to go. It would certainly not have been the only large ship to have been wrecked in this area. There is only one really safe way through the Outer Banks into Topsail Harbour, even for smaller vessels. If you miss that, you end up beached on one of the many sand bars. No matter which route he took, Blackbeard would have found navigating his way through the sandbanks and shoals difficult with a ship the size of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. However, it appears that he didn’t care. He sailed straight into the sandy beach on Topsail Island.

  Captain Ellis Brand, the commanding officer of HMS Lyme wrote to the Admiralty on 12 July 1718 providing a roug
h date of around 10 June 1718 regarding the grounding of the Queen Anne’ s Revenge. We know that Blackbeard lifted the blockade around the end of May 1718 and six days later he beached his flagship so it would be early June. Brand’s date will suffice for our purposes.

  He describes the flotilla in detail, telling us that the sloops followed the Queen Anne’ s Revenge over the sand bar in the same way that a flock of ducklings would follow their mother wherever she goes. How could Blackbeard be leading them into danger? In Brand’s account he believes that Blackbeard was attempting to enter the harbour at Topsail Inlet but instead crashed into the sand bar.150

  However, other sources tell a different story. Blackbeard knew that his flagship was now a liability. After the blockade of Charles Town he was a hunted man and everyone would be looking for a giant pirate warship of forty guns. Blackbeard was working to a plan. Captain Johnson tells us in his account about the beaching of the Queen Anne’ s Revenge:

  Teach began now to think of breaking up the company, and securing the money and the best of the effects for himself and some others of his companions he had most friendship for, and to cheat the rest. Accordingly, on pretence of running into Topsail Inlet to clean, he grounded his ship, and then as if it had been done undesignedly and by accident, he ordered Hands’ sloop to come to his assistance and get him off again, which he endeavouring to do, ran the sloop on shore near the other, and so were both lost.

  As we believe that Hands was one of Captain Johnson’s key sources it is very likely that this part of the narrative came directly from him. If we take Johnson’s account as relatively accurate then it’s clear that few of the 300 or so pirates knew what their commander was up to. Blackbeard would only have confided in those he could most trust to keep the plan a secret, and those he had decided were worthy of keeping on as a part of the reduced crew, but whether even they knew in advance the full details is debatable.