Black Flags, Blue Waters by Eric Jay Dolin

Author:Eric Jay Dolin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

CHAPTER 8

The Gentleman Pirate

and Blackbeard

Blackbeard as portrayed in the 1726 edition of Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates.

BETWEEN THE CRASH OF THE WHYDAH AT THE END OF April 1717, and the executions of Bellamy’s men the following November, pirates continued to plague the American colonies. In addition to Williams’s depredations, La Buse struck a few nasty blows, including one in which his men slashed and brutally beat the captain of a New Hampshire merchant ship captured off the coast of North Carolina and then threatened to skin and burn him alive before letting him go. The litany of attacks prompted one of Philadelphia’s most successful merchants and future mayor of the city, James Logan, to write to a friend near the end of the year, complaining, “We have been extremely pestered w[i]th pirates who now swarm in America and increase their numbers by almost every vessel they take.” Of all those pirates, there were two who would go down in history as among the most notorious and fascinating, less so for their attacks in 1717 than for their bold captures the following year, and the dramatic manner in which their pirating careers intertwined and came to a violent end. They were Stede Bonnet, the “gentleman pirate,” and Edward Thatch, better known as Blackbeard.

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