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Blackbeard

Why was the most famous pirate who ever lived never brought to trial, and what does the surviving record actually prove he did?

Letterpress title page reading: A General History of the Pyrates, from their first Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, to the present Time. With the remarkable Actions and Adventures of the two Female Pyrates Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Below sits a two-column list of sixteen chapters, from Captain Avery to Captain Spriggs, and a note of a short abstract of the statute and civil law in relation to piracy. A line between rules reads: The second Edition, with considerable Additions, By Captain Charles Johnson. The imprint reads: London, printed for, and sold by T. Warner, at the Black-Boy in Pater-Noster-Row, 1724.
Title page, A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, London 1724 Printed for and sold by T. Warner, six years after Blackbeard was killed. This is the book that made him the most famous pirate who ever lived, and it is also the source of almost everything about him that cannot be found in a document. Digitised open-access copy. Public domain.

Blackbeard is the most famous pirate who ever lived, and he was never brought to trial.

Even the name is a later hand. In his own lifetime he was Thache or Thatch, and "Teach" reached us through the Boston News-Letter and through Charles Johnson's General History of 1724, the book that also fixed the legend. Where he came from is contested. Bristol rests on one sentence of Johnson. A Jamaican origin, from Charles Leslie in 1739 and from Baylus Brooks's genealogy of an Edward Thache of Spanish Town, is the stronger modern reading, though identifying that Thache with the pirate is an inference rather than a proof.

The terror is real, and it worked as method. He blockaded Charles Town for about a week in the summer of 1718, held leading inhabitants including a councillor and his young son, and forced the town to hand over a chest of medicine to ransom them. The captives went home alive, as captives did in every documented capture before his last day. No surviving document has Blackbeard killing or seriously harming a captive before the fight that killed him. The sadistic murderer is a later gloss, much of it Johnson's and the retellings that followed him.

The ending is stranger than the legend laid over it. Thache took the King's pardon from Governor Charles Eden at Bath in late June 1718, then drifted back to the trade and was taking prizes again through the autumn. He was never tried for that. On 22 November 1718 (Old Style) an armed party under Lieutenant Robert Maynard, sent by Alexander Spotswood, the Governor of Virginia, into North Carolina waters at Ocracoke Inlet, killed him in a close hand-to-hand fight. He was decapitated in the action, and his head was hung from the bowsprit of Maynard's sloop and carried back to Virginia. The Virginia act that set a hundred pounds on his head was not passed until 24 November 1718, two days after he was already dead. The state that could not, or would not, try him, killed him instead, and its own reward for doing so was not yet law when the deed was done.

The death, the place, the date, the beheading and the head on the bowsprit come from contemporary naval reports and the press. The restraint is very likely, an argument from the whole surviving record rather than from one decisive line. The pardon at Bath is probable and its exact day is nowhere recorded. The head's later display on a pole at Blackbeard's Point is probable, tradition more than period document. The one court that might have judged him, the Williamsburg trial of his captured crew in March 1719, has left no surviving record at all, and that silence is the largest hole in the case.

Engraved plate. A full-length figure of a man stands on a shore, sword raised in his right hand, wearing a tall fur cap, a long coat, and a bandolier of pistols slung across his chest, with a heavy black beard spreading over his chest and twists of cord hanging at his ears. Behind him armed sailing ships engage, with smoke of battle rising on the right.
Blackbeard, engraved plate from Johnson's General History, 1724 An artefact of the legend, not a likeness. The plate was cut for a book published six years after the man died, and no authenticated portrait of him exists. The lit fuses under the hat, the bandolier, the beard in cords: this image is where the costume comes from. Digitised open-access copy. Public domain.

The rooms

  1. The Name and the Man
    The earliest sworn sight of him, and the name he never used.
  2. The Flagship
    A Nantes slave ship taken at sea, and what she was carrying.
  3. The Terror as Theatre
    Charleston, the grounding, and terror working as method.
  4. The Pardon and the Relapse
    The Crown's mercy in its own printed words, and what he did next.
  5. The Killing at Ocracoke
    The death as news: the fight, the head, the bowsprit.
  6. The Wreck
    A 1705 bell, a site number, and a determination made in 2011.
  7. Fourteen Wives and No Trial
    The legend set beside what the archive can produce.

What it adds up to

The record of Blackbeard is loud where it is public and silent where it should have been judicial. Sworn depositions, a printed royal proclamation, the reports of the men who killed him and a newspaper notice carry the captures, the pardon, the fight and the head. The court that might have settled what he actually did, the Williamsburg trial of his captured crew in March 1719, has left nothing behind it. The last room sets the legend beside what the archive can produce, and leaves that silence standing.

Two theme galleries carry parts of this story across the site. The King's Pardon holds the Act of Grace in the Crown's own printed words, and the relapse problem that Thache's own case put to the Crown in the sharpest form available. The end of the Golden Age holds the suppression he died inside. Each room links out to its theme rather than repeating it.

Go deeper

Enter the first room