Gallery · Blackbeard · Room 3 of 7
The Terror as Theatre
Curator's note
The sworn evidence of how Blackbeard ran a capture comes from a courtroom he never stood in. Stede Bonnet and his men were tried at Charles Town in 1718 and the trial was printed the year after, and it is there, in the depositions of David Herriot and Ignatius Pell, that the method is described by men who had watched it.
Herriot and Pell described the flagship going aground at Topsail Inlet, the smaller vessels lost or left, and about fifteen men set ashore on a low sandy island where fresh water was scarce. Herriot swore the grounding was done on purpose. Captain Brand, reporting to London afterwards, described it in terms that imply an accident.
In late May 1718 he blockaded Charles Town harbour for about a week. Ships were stopped, leading inhabitants of the town were held, and a chest of medicine was demanded and delivered. The Governor of South Carolina reported it to the Council of Trade on 18 June 1718, and that report survives in the colonial correspondence at Kew, CO 5/1265 No.106, alongside the trial print. The hostages were released.
The flagship went aground at Topsail Inlet, now Beaufort Inlet, around 10 June 1718. Whether she was put there deliberately, to break up a company that had grown too large to feed and to leave with the best of the goods, is disputed inside the period record itself. Herriot alleges design; Brand implies mishap. This Archive carries the deliberate reading at probable and prints the disagreement instead of resolving it.
The reputation was the instrument. The beard, the lighted matches, the flags and the noise are all reported by men who surrendered to him, and what they surrendered was time and cargo. This is where the Collection's central finding has to be stated plainly, because this is the room where it is tested: No surviving document has Blackbeard killing or seriously harming a captive before the fight that killed him. That finding is very likely, which is as high as a statement about an absence can honestly go.
The worked instance is the Protestant Caesar. In April 1718 her crew were put ashore and the ship was burned, by his own account in reprisal for an earlier attempt on him. The ship was burned and her crew were put ashore alive. A reputation for slaughter costs less than slaughter, and it works only if nobody tests it.