Gallery · Blackbeard · Room 1 of 7
The Name and the Man
Curator's note
He left no writing of his own. Everything the record holds about his person in his lifetime was set down by other people, most of it sworn before officials who had no interest in making him famous. This room opens with the earliest of those documents that actually describes him.
"a tall spare man with a very black beard worn very long"
Bostock commanded a sloop that was stopped and held for about eight hours. His vessel was ransacked and then let go, and he and his men came away unharmed, which is why he was alive three days later to swear what he had seen. His words are the earliest sworn first-person description of Blackbeard that survives, and they were written down by a clerk taking evidence rather than by an author writing a life.
His forename was Edward. Men who wrote about him while he was alive spelled the surname Thach or Thatch. The form "Teach" that every modern reader knows is a standardisation that took hold in print. He is first named in a datable document on 17 December 1716, in the deposition of Captain Timberlake, where he appears as one of Benjamin Hornigold's men. The nickname itself is first attested on 23 October 1717, in a letter from Jonathan Dickinson of Philadelphia.
Where he was born is the room's open question. Charles Johnson's book of 1724 makes him a Bristol man. A Jamaican origin is the stronger modern reading: Charles Leslie put him in Jamaica in 1739, and the genealogist Baylus Brooks has since traced a Thache family there, though tying that family to the pirate is an argument rather than a record. A birth around 1680 is a back-calculation from his apparent age rather than a recorded date, and an outlying date of about 1660 also circulates.
The Timberlake deposition places him under Hornigold, which places him in the Bahamas. The haven he came out of has its own walk in The Republic of Pirates, and the port itself is held in the Nassau gallery. What matters for this Collection is the sequence: he is a named man in a sworn document a full year before he is a legend, and the first captive to leave a description of him was one he let go.