The Pirate World by Angus Konstam

Author:Angus Konstam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472830968
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

This early 18th-century plan of Charles Town shows a bustling and well-defended port, but when Blackbeard arrived there in 1718 the city lacked adequate defences.

It was now late November 1717. His first prize was a small sloop, which he added to his fleet. Then off St Lucia he captured the Boston merchantman Great Allen, en route to Jamaica. The pirates kept her for a day, plundering her of anything they wanted, and then set fire to her. He went on to take three other smaller vessels before he encountered the sloop Margaret off Anguilla. The importance here was that her captain gave a detailed description of the pirate to the authorities. He described ‘Capt. Tach’ as ‘a tall spare man with a very black beard which he wore very long’. This is the description that Captain Johnson used as the basis for his more exuberant version. It also gave rise to the pirate’s nickname. From that point on he would be widely known as ‘Blackbeard’.

Johnson describes a fight between the Queen Anne’s Revenge and the frigate HMS Scarborough that never actually happened, although both ships were cruising in the same waters at the time. News of the warship was probably what prompted Teach to leave the West Indies. He spent Christmas in Semana Bay, on the eastern side of Hispaniola, and then led the Queen Anne’s Revenge and the sloop Revenge to the Gulf of Honduras. Blackbeard spent a month attacking the logwood ships that frequented the Gulf. By late April he was heading north again, passing the western tip of Cuba, then sailing up through the Florida Straits. He captured a small Spanish sloop off Havana, then spent a few days lying off the wreck sites of the 1715 treasure flota. Off Florida he captured another brig, which he decided to keep.

That meant he now had four ships, including his 40-gun flagship, and 250 men. With all that power, he would have felt that the whole of the Atlantic seaboard lay at his mercy. He would take full advantage of it. On 22 May 1718, Blackbeard appeared off Charles Town (now Charleston), in the province of South Carolina. A string of sandbars separated Charles Town harbour from the ocean, and so, by guarding the only navigatable gap in the bar, Blackbeard managed to blockade the port. His first victim was the pilot boat escorting out the Crowley, a large merchantman bound for London, and Blackbeard captured both vessels. The pirates captured a few more prizes over the next few days. Then, when the prizes dried up, Blackbeard decided to be even more audacious.

Captain Johnson describes his next move:

Teach detained all the ships and prisoners, and, being in want of medicines, resolved to demand a chest from the government of the province ... threatening that if they did not send immediately the chest of medicines and let the pirate ambassadors return without offering any violence to their persons, they would murder all their prisoners, send up their heads to the governor, and set the ships they had taken on fire.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.