The Ocracoke Fight

No contemporary image of the action at Ocracoke survives; the fight is exhibited here through the paper record alone.

The fight at Ocracoke was a Virginia operation carried out in North Carolina's water, and that is part of why it happened the way it did. Governor Alexander Spotswood had no authority over Blackbeard, who had been pardoned in the neighbouring colony and was living, more or less openly, near Bath. Spotswood moved on him anyway. He hired two shallow-draught sloops, the Jane and the Ranger, put them under Lieutenant Robert Maynard of HMS Pearl with about sixty men, and sent them south.

Maynard's sloops slipped out of the Chesapeake on 17 November 1718 and reached the Outer Banks on the 21st. The action came the next morning, Saturday 22 November 1718 old style, which is 3 December by the modern calendar.

It was close and it was quick. Maynard had kept most of his men below deck; when Thache's crew boarded a sloop that looked all but empty, the hidden men came up into a hand-to-hand fight on the open deck. Thache and Maynard fired at each other, and Thache went down in the press. His body was found afterwards to bear five shot and about twenty cuts. He was beheaded in the action, and Maynard hung the head from his bowsprit for the sail back to Virginia, the proof a reward would need.

The three men who reported the day counted the dead differently. Maynard gave eight of his own killed and twelve of the pirates; Brand gave ten pirates and eleven of Maynard's men; Spotswood gave ten and ten. The Archives records the toll as a range across the three reports rather than a single figure. Blackbeard fell with about nine of his men.

The reward arrived after the fact. Virginia's Act to Encourage the Apprehending and Destroying of Pyrates, which put a hundred pounds on Blackbeard's head, passed on 24 November 1718, two days after he was already dead. The news had not yet reached Williamsburg. His captured crew were carried back to Virginia and tried at Williamsburg on 12 March 1719. Israel Hands, his sailing master, was pardoned; Samuel Odell was released as no true member of the company; fourteen men were condemned and hanged. That trial is the securest thing we have on the fate of the company, and no primary court record of it survives, which leaves the best-documented reckoning in the whole case resting on correspondence and later report.

The core of the day is documentary: the date, the place, Maynard, the death, the beheading, the head on the bowsprit, all carried by Spotswood's dispatch of 22 December 1718 (The National Archives, CO 5/1318, No. 61) and by a Boston News-Letter account that reached New England in February 1719. What is not documentary is most of the theatre later hung on it, the defiant exchange of words before the boarding and the run of pistol shots Thache is supposed to have shrugged off before falling. Those are Johnson's, from the General History, Vol. 1 (1724), written six years after the event.