Blackbeard's Blockade of Charles Town (1718)

For roughly a week in late May 1718 the sea road into Charles Town was held by a pirate squadron under Edward Thache, commonly called Blackbeard. South Carolina was then a proprietary colony, with no Royal Navy guardship on its coast and a trade to Britain and the islands that funnelled across a shallow bar. The flotilla is usually put at about four vessels, and that was enough.¹

The force that came off the bar

The flagship was the Queen Anne's Revenge, the French slaving vessel La Concorde, taken off the Windward Islands in November 1717 and refitted, her armament usually given as something near forty guns. With her sailed the sloop Revenge, which had been Major Stede Bonnet's command. By that spring Bonnet had been eased out of her and travelled as a guest aboard Blackbeard's ship while one of Blackbeard's officers worked the sloop. With her consorts it was the largest pirate force then operating off the North American seaboard.

The colony was weak in more than ships. Its government was at odds with the Lords Proprietors, the Spanish sat at Saint Augustine, and the frontier was still unsettled in the wake of the Yamasee War. The usual explanation for what the pirates wanted is practical: several hundred men at sea, many of them likely carrying venereal and other disease, needed mercury and the rest of the shipboard pharmacy, then in short supply at sea. No document states Blackbeard's reason.

Five or six days of stopping ships

The squadron appeared off the Charles Town Bar in late May and began stopping everything that moved. Over about five or six days it took a run of inbound and outbound merchantmen, rifled them, and held their people. Eight or nine vessels is the figure most often repeated.²

Tradition puts a small son of Samuel Wragg among the captives, taken with his father, and sometimes calls the boy William and gives him as about four years old. Both the name and the age are later fixtures.³

The demand

Blackbeard made no attempt on the town. He sent a party ashore under a flag with a demand for a chest of medicines and a threat attached: refuse, and the prisoners would be killed, the captured ships burned, and the heads of the hostages sent to the Governor. A captive named Mr Marks was sent in to treat with the government. By the story that came down, the boat was slow returning, the pirates detailed to escort Marks ashore were found to have gone drinking with acquaintances in the town, Blackbeard concluded he was being played with, and the captives were threatened again before the chest came out.⁴

What the chest was worth

Reports diverge, and not by a few pounds. One line of accounts gives a demand of at least 300 pounds sterling, or a value somewhere between 300 and 400 pounds. Another gives 400 pounds weight of medicine gathered and sent out. A sum of money and a quantity of drugs are different things, and popular retellings slide between them without noticing.⁵

The Governor's compliance

Governor Robert Johnson and his Council had no means of resisting. The medicines were gathered and sent out to the bar. Blackbeard then kept the bargain. The hostages were released, though many of them are reported to have been stripped of money, valuables and their clothes, the plundered ships were let go, and the flotilla stood away from the coast. The General History has it that the affair "struck a great Terror to the whole Province of Carolina". By the accounts that survive, the port's trade had been halted and leading citizens ransomed.⁶

North to the inlet

Within a few weeks the squadron was off North Carolina, where, on the pretence of running in to clean, the Queen Anne's Revenge grounded and was lost at Topsail Inlet, now Beaufort Inlet, Israel Hands's sloop running ashore near her when it was ordered to her assistance. The Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, reporting at second hand, dates the loss to June 1718 but puts it at the mouth of Ocracoke Inlet and has two of the four sloops lost with the ship, so neither the place nor the number of vessels is agreed. Blackbeard then cut his company down, going into the tender sloop with forty hands and marooning seventeen men on a sandy island, and went up to Governor Charles Eden of North Carolina with about twenty of his men to surrender under the King's proclamation, the Act of Grace, and take certificates of it, settling afterwards for a time near Ocracoke.⁷

Charles Town's answer came that autumn. Johnson fitted out expeditions which took Stede Bonnet and other pirates, tried them in the town and hanged dozens; Bonnet went to the gallows there in December 1718. In November a Virginia-sponsored party under Lieutenant Robert Maynard killed Blackbeard at Ocracoke, six months after the blockade. For the colony, the blockade helped feed the discontent that produced the overthrow of proprietary rule in 1719.

What the tradition added

The episode has been polished by repetition. The General History gave the retellings their furniture, Marks and the drunken escort and the terrified town, and repetition hardened it into fact. Popular histories fix what the record leaves open: the flotilla swelled to eight ships, the Wragg child named and aged, the medicine figure settled by picking whichever version reads better. Medical instruments recovered from the Queen Anne's Revenge wreck in 2015, a urethral syringe among them, are regularly cited as physical proof of the crew's need for medicines; they evidence shipboard medicine in general and do not document the Charles Town demand. Charleston's heritage trade now carries the documented core and the embellishment in the same breath.

What the sources cannot yet give is the paper that would settle the particulars. The Colonial Office correspondence of Governor Johnson and the colony's agents, in the CO 5 series at The National Archives, Kew, and the Boston News-Letter for June and July 1718, have not been read; they are the likeliest route to the exact days, which are not fixed, to the number of ships stopped, and to whether the ransom was a sum of money or a weight of drugs. The South Carolina Council journals and the Wragg family papers would settle the hostage list and the child. Until then the outline is firm and the detail is borrowed, most of it from a book of 1724 that is known to embellish: the compliance, the release and the flotilla's departure come down through later accounts, no contemporary paper of them having been read, and the near-forty guns of the Queen Anne's Revenge is a received figure with no period count behind it. The move north to Topsail Inlet, the June date given for the loss of the ship and the pardon taken from Eden rest on the 1724 narrative and on the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia's second-hand report, and want the North Carolina papers read against them.