Edward Thache (Blackbeard)

Blackbeard is remembered as the cruellest pirate of the golden age. The period record does not name one person he killed before the fight that killed him.

The name on the paper is not Teach. In the documents drawn up while he was alive the surname is Thach or Thatch, and the earliest of them, Henry Timberlake's deposition of 17 December 1716, writes "Edward Thach". Teach is a printer's spelling. The Boston News-Letter used it in 1718 and Johnson's General History fixed it in 1724, and the print won. The forename Edward is the one part of his name every early record agrees on.

Where he came from is not settled, and both candidate origins reach us through weak evidence. Bristol rests on a single sentence in Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724): "Edward Teach was a Bristol man born, but had sailed some time out of Jamaica, in privateers, in the late French war." Jamaica rests on Charles Leslie's New Account of Jamaica (1739), which calls him Jamaica-born of creditable parents, and on Baylus Brooks's reconstruction of an Edward Thache family in Spanish Town. The Jamaica case is the stronger of the two and is the leading modern reading. The link between Brooks's documented Thache and the pirate is inference, though, and the historians who reviewed it said as much. No birth record for the man himself has ever been produced, so the usual date of about 1680 is a back-calculation from his apparent age at death and nothing firmer.

He learned the trade under Benjamin Hornigold. The Timberlake deposition that first gives us his name places him with Hornigold's company off Hispaniola in December 1716, and Captain Matthew Musson's report of July 1717 lists "Thatch" among the captains working out of New Providence. Hornigold was the senior man and Thache his consort. Within a year Thache had his own command and Hornigold had taken the king's pardon and turned pirate-hunter. The consortship is documented; the sources will carry the relationship as far as consort and second, no further.

In late 1717 he took the ship that made his name. La Concorde was a French Nantes slaver, captured near St Vincent on 28 November 1717 with 455 enslaved Africans still aboard. Thache kept her, armed her and renamed her Queen Anne's Revenge.

By the spring of 1718 he commanded a small squadron and blockaded Charleston, then Charles Town. His men stopped eight or nine vessels and took hostages, among them the councillor Samuel Wragg and his young son. The ransom he set was not money but a chest of medicine, and once it was delivered the captives were freed, stripped of their valuables and put ashore. Governor Robert Johnson reported the whole affair to the Board of Trade on 18 June 1718 and named "Teach alias Blackbeard" as its author.

Queen Anne's Revenge did not last the year. About 10 June 1718 she grounded on the bar at Beaufort Inlet, then called Topsail, and was lost. Two of his own men, David Herriot and Ignatius Pell, later swore he had run her ashore on purpose to break up the company and keep the plunder for a chosen few, then sailed off with those few and left the rest marooned on a sandbank. Captain Brand of HMS Lyme read the same grounding as an accident of pilotage. The record keeps both. Weeks later, in late June 1718, Thache surrendered to Governor Charles Eden at Bath and took the Act of Grace, the royal pardon of 1717. It did not hold. Through that summer and autumn he was back at an anchorage inside Ocracoke Inlet, and further captures are recorded against him. Pirate informants later accused Tobias Knight, the governor's secretary, of dealing with him, and pointed to sugar stored in Knight's barn; Knight was tried and acquitted, and the corruption stays on this record as an allegation, not a finding.

He was killed at Ocracoke Inlet on 22 November 1718 (3 December new style), resisting a boarding party led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard and sent from Virginia by Governor Spotswood into water that was not Virginia's to police. His body was found to carry five shot and about twenty cuts; he was beheaded in the fight, and his head hung from Maynard's bowsprit for the passage back. He was never tried. No court ever ruled on his guilt for anything, which is why this record does not call him convicted, and the Ocracoke fight has its own page.

The myth audit

Most of what people know about Blackbeard is Johnson's, and Johnson wrote in 1724, six years after the man was dead. The fourteen wives are his, with no marriage record behind a single one; even the one North Carolina marriage, later attached to a "Mary Ormond", has no contemporary document. The surname Drummond is folklore. The week-long carousal with Charles Vane at Ocracoke in October 1718 is Johnson's too, and the trial testimony that does survive puts Vane in Bahamian and Cuban waters at the time, so the Archives holds the carousal at Possible.

The largest reveal is the quietest. Read against the documents, the sadist does not appear. Every captive we can name from the period record walked away alive: Bostock off Puerto Rico, Wyer of the Protestant Caesar, the Wraggs at Charleston, the French officers of La Concorde. The harshest act anyone swore to was the marooning of his own crew, and a marooning is not a killing. Angus Konstam put it plainly: until his last fight, Blackbeard "had not so much as killed a single man". The terror was real and it was worked at, the long black beard that gave him his name, the show of force, the reputation carried ahead of him, but it was a device for making men surrender without a fight, and on the evidence it worked. The violence came at the end, and it was his own.