The Pirates by Jones Sam

Author:Jones, Sam [Sam Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Maritime History & Piracy
ISBN: 9781612309521
Publisher: New Word City
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

​The Murderous Blackbeard

One of the most fearsome pirates on the Spanish Main during the early eighteenth century was Edward Teach, commonly known as Blackbeard. He may have been born in Port Royal, Jamaica, though other legends claim he was a native of Bristol, England. Teach apparently ran away to sea as a teenager, and by 1706, had joined the crew of a privateering expedition aboard the HMS Windsor.

As a privateer, Teach served England’s Queen Anne near the end of her five-year reign, at which time England was fighting France for control of the colonies in North America. Teach was one of many flying England’s flag along the North Atlantic coast of the Americas as privateers harassed French and Spanish supply and troop ships.

From privateering, it was an easy step into piracy. According to Defoe’s General History of Pyrates, Teach “sailed some time out of Jamaica in Privateers, in the late French War; yet tho’ he had often distinguished himself for his uncommon Boldness and personal Courage, he was never raised to any Command, till he went a-pyrating, which I think was at the latter End of the Year 1716, when Captain Benjamin Hornigold put him into a Sloop that he had made a Prize of . . . .”

In the spring of 1717, with Teach as second-in-command of Hornigold’s flagship, the thirty-gun sloop Ranger, the pirates captured three merchant ships – one carrying flour en route to Havana, another carrying wine from Madeira, and a Bermudan sloop carrying liquor to ports unknown.

Hornigold, an Englishman, was careful not to attack ships flying England’s flag. But his crew was less discriminatory; in November 1717, Hornigold’s men voted that any ship was fair game, and in mutiny, stripped Hornigold of his captaincy. Teach, in command of Hornigold’s second ship, did not learn the fate of the Revenge or its captain until two met again later in the year. Hornigold sailed to Jamaica, where in January 1718 he received a pardon from the governor. Later, he would become a pirate hunter for the new governor of the Bahamas, Woodes Rogers; his prey would include his former lieutenant.

Teach’s nickname derived from his impressive black beard that “like a frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face, and frightened America more than any Comet that has appeared there a long time,” wrote Defoe. When dressed in his finer clothes, he twisted and tied his beard with colored ribbons, sometimes looping the strands over his ears. A giant of a man - more than six feet four inches and weighing upwards of 250 pounds - Teach had a deep bass voice, and when he shouted it was like a cannon’s roar.

Unaware of what had transpired with Hornigold, in 1717, Blackbeard sailed back to the Caribbean. There, he captured a large French slave ship, the Concorde, which he armed with forty guns, and renamed Queen Anne’s Revenge – more as an indictment against England’s unpopular King George I than a tribute to the late monarch, under whom Teach had only nominally served.

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