Mark Gagnon (13:03)
Okay. Anyway, so they basically are taking over these ships, and they have one. He's like, all right, Blackbeard, you take this little boat and see what you can do. Now, Hornigold had a rule. He said, never attack British ships. That was his one job. Don't attack any British ships. Because one. Hornigold still saw himself as, like, a loyal English Englishman. And on top of that, you attack the British Navy, you're probably going to get destroyed. You know, you take over one of their ships, all of a sudden you have the full force of the Brits on your ass. So the crew, on the other hand, did not really care about this. So after about a year of sailing under Captain Hornigold, he and Blackbeard would cross paths with one of the strangest characters in all of pirate history that we honestly probably should do our own episode on. And his name is Stede Bonnet. Now, Bonnet wasn't just any old sailor. He wasn't just. He wasn't a criminal in any, you know, sort of modern sense. He was a wealthy landowner in Barbados. And one day, out of nowhere, he decided that he was just sick of his marriage, sick of his wife, and he wanted adventure. A little bit of a midlife crisis. So instead of buying a Corvette, he bought a ship, hired a crew, and declared himself as a pirate, and he had basically zero nautical experience and even less crime experience. And even his own men admitted that he knew nothing about being a pirate, and they basically had to pretend that he did. Now, nobody knows exactly why he did this. Some authors during the era claim that Bonnet suffered from discomforts in a married state, basically saying that his wife was so crazy, he was like, you know what? Getting murdered by the British would be better than this. Now, if the rumors were true, he basically thought that, you know, this pirate life would be better than hanging out with his dumb wife. That's a nice little rhyme. Write that down. However, when Blackbeard met Bonnet, he immediately recognized this situation, right? This is a rich guy that is playing pirate, and everyone on his ship hated him. Now, Blackbeard quickly figured out that Bonnet was clueless, and with Bond's permission, he just took command over his ship. Now, at this point, Hornigold was still Blackbeard's mentor, but that was about to change, because Hornigold's crew had hit their breaking point. There was British ships full of the best loot, the most wealth, all the treasure, and it kept on passing by completely untouched because Hornigold refused to attack them. So the crew, getting pissed off by this, voted him out. He was literally, like, demoted and kind of, like, mutinied by his own people and, you know, sailed away with a small ship, leaving Blackbeard in command of the remaining fleet. But Hornigal didn't simply just leave, because around this time, the king's pardon had been issued. Now, this is basically a legal doctrine from the British Crown, basically saying, if you stop pirating right now, if you just leave it all behind, we won't kill you. Now, some captains saw this as a lifeline, and others saw it as a trap. However, Captain Hornigold saw this as, you know, his way out. So he sailed to New Providence, accepted the king's pardon, and then flipped sides. And then within months, he was now working for the British as a pirate hunter, literally tracking down the very men that he once mentored and sailed with. So by late 1717, this was a pretty good time for Blackbeard, right? He captured several merchant ships along the American coast. But now he was about to face the biggest battle yet. This was a French slave ship called La Concorde. Now, this wasn't just any ship. This was massive. It was heading to Martinique. It had 16 cannons, 75 crew members, and 500 enslaved people. The French captain, Pierre Dosset, said that they had about 20 pounds of gold dust, which would be worth, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in, you know, today's money. Now, the voyage for them had been brutal. The ship was ravaged by disease. Dozens on the crew were dead. I scurvy. It was. It was an awful situation. So the French really couldn't put up much of a fight. And after just two rounds of cannon fire, Captain Doe actually surrendered to Blackbeard. Now here's where Blackbeard made a decision that would make him famous. Instead of sinking the French ship, he just took it. He literally just took it and made it his own. And he renamed it Queen Anne's Revenge, literally, after the war that he had fought in. Now here's the crazy part. He actually turned this French ship into one of the most heavily armed pirate vessels of the era. He actually added more cannons to this already fortified vessel and added all the way up to 40 guns, making it strong enough to fight actual warships. Now, Blackbeard used this ship to terrorize the Caribbean and the American coast. Now, interesting fact, most ships would actually just surrender when they saw Blackbeard and his flag. That's how terrifying he was and how well fortified the ship had become. One of the most famous stories associated with Queen Anne comes out of Barbados when Blackbeard reportedly fought against HMS Scarborough. This was a British warship with 30 cannons. Captain Johnson, the guy we mentioned in the beginning, who allegedly wrote the book about Blackbeard, says that Blackbeard won this battle, though the Navy had, you know, to this day, never really confirmed the details. However, if it really happened, it meant that Blackbeard had literally beaten the Royal British Navy in open combat. Now, the first half of 1718 is when Blackbeard reached his peak power. He captured ship after ship with basically no resistance. And here's the crazy part, he rarely killed anyone during these captures. Blackbeard understood that looking terrifying was more effective than actually being a killer. I mean, physically, he was intimidating. He was this tall dude with broad shoulders. He had that famous long black beard. And he took this scary appearance to the next level. So he would wear these leather straps, cross his chest loaded with pistols. He had six of them just like strapped in John Wick style. And he would do this because reloading during a sea battle is basically impossible. And then he took things to a different level. So before combat, he would actually light slow burning hemp fuses and then weave them into his beard and tuck him under his hat. And this was done so that when he stepped onto the deck, smoke would like literally curl around his head like he had just walked out of hell. So to the sailors who were already, like, hearing myths and sea stories about this dude, they would look at him, and they didn't see a man. They saw, like, this horrifying creature from hell itself. Now, another weird detail is that he braided his beard into, like, these little, like. Like, pigtail ties, and he would put, like, colored ribbons at the end. And it was believed that he would do this to look, like, kind of unpredictable and unhinged, just like this wild man that's been out at sea with nothing to lose. And that was exactly the point. Now, another interesting thing to show how Blackbeard would control his crew. At one point, Blackbeard shot his own first mate, a guy by the name of Israel Hands. Now, he shot him in the knee during a card game just to basically remind everyone that he's the boss and he doesn't really give an f about anyone else. Now, when people asked him why he did this, he supposedly said, if I don't shoot one of you every now and then, you'll forget who I am. Now, out of all the Blackbeard stories, none are as famous as the Charleston blockade. Now, for nearly seven days, Blackbeard's fleet stopped every ship trying to enter or leave the harbor. I mean, literally everyone coming in and out. Merchant vessels, passenger ships, anything that was moving in the water, he wanted it. So by the end of the week, he had seized nine ships, including the Crowley, which was carrying several wealthy Charleston citizens on their way to London. Now, Blackbeard took the passengers hostage and actually sent a message to the governor. He says, literally, meet my demands, or I will send their heads back to you in a basket and burn every ship that I've captured. Now, here's where it gets weird. He doesn't ask for gold. He doesn't ask for weapons or even supplies. What he asks for is kind of interesting. He asks for medicine. Specifically a large chest filled with medical treatments that sailors commonly use to treat, you know, syphilis and scurvy and other infections. The most feared pirate in the world literally just wanted, like, antibiotics. So Blackbeard sent one of the hostages, a man named Mr. Marks, along with two pirates to deliver this demand on shore. And the governor. The governor at the time had two days to comply. Now, when those two days passed and nobody returned, the hostages on Blackbeard's ship assumed that they were about to be dead. But they didn't know Blackbeard well enough because Blackbeard didn't execute anyone. He actually waited. And this wasn't because you know he was soft or scared. It was because he wasn't the mindless killer that people thought he was. He understood how leverage worked. And eventually, Marks finally returned with the medicine chest and revealed why he was late. He claimed the pirates that he brought with him got so drunk in Charleston, they actually disappeared in the city. And that was literally what the excuse was, and Blackbeard accepted it. He then released all the hostages completely unarmed and sailed away with their valuables. It was the perfect example of his strategy. Terrify everyone, look unpredictable and sort of untamed. Tamed. Kill nobody and still get exactly what you want. Now, after Charleston, something really strange happened. At the Buford Inlet in North Carolina, Blackbeard lost his ship. Yeah, the Queen Anne's Revenge. And the weird thing, a lot of historians think that he actually did it on purpose. Now, the official story goes like this. The crew wanted to careen the ships, which is basically when they run a boat onshore during high tides so that they could, you know, clean and repair the bottom of the boat at low tide. And pirates would do this all the time. But during the maneuver, Blackbeard's ship went too far into the sand bar and got stuck. When another ship tried to pull it free, that ship got stuck, too. And just like that, Blackbeard's two largest vessels, the most fortified ships maybe in pirate history up until this time, were ruined beyond repair. Now, here's why this story doesn't really add up. Blackbeard was an extremely skilled navigator. I mean, this dude was a privateer for the British Navy, had fought in numerous wars, had been a pirate in this area for, at this point, almost two years. And this is a guy who could sail through these, you know, shallow Caribbean channels in the dark without ever hitting a reef. So accidentally wrecking one ship would have been embarrassing enough, but wrecking two just seems, like, difficult to even fathom that such a skilled navigator would do this. So some historians think that he didn't lose the ships. He just simply retired them. Now, behind the scenes, Blackbeard had a problem. The crew that he had assembled had gotten too big. Now, after this Charleston blockade, he had hundreds of men, and a lot of people wanted to sail for him because, you know, he was the richest dude. He was getting the most money, and they wanted a piece. But the big cruise means big payrolls and, as we know, more mouths to feed, more people taking cuts to loot, and more potential for mutiny. Now, Blackbeard may have realized that, you know, it was time to scale down and slip away with the best Men and the best loot. And sure enough, right after grounding these ships, he handpicked a small group of his most loyal pirates, loaded the most valuable treasure onto two smaller ships and disappeared, literally, just like in the middle of the night, and left the rest of his crew stranded on the island. Now, some of those abandoned men were later captured and testified that Blackbeard had sabotaged those ships on purpose. Now, whatever the truth is, the effect was the same. Blackbeard went from commanding a four ship pirate fleet to being the captain of two small, you know, vessels with a tight, really elite crew. And it seems like he was just kind of downsizing and preparing for whatever comes next. Now, the coolest part of this whole thing is that in 1996, archaeologists discovered the wreck of Queen Anne's Revenge. It's one of the only pirate ships that were ever found and excavated. And they recovered cannons and anchors, gold dust, beads, medical tools, and thousands of artifacts related to this one specific pirate. Blackbeard may have grounded on purpose, but. But that one wreck literally kept his legend alive. So now with the Queen Anne completely surrendered, his small crew picked, and he loads up all his loot onto these small boats and dips away towards North Carolina. For most people, you know, they would see this as the end, but it wasn't for him. This was more of like a reset. Now, at this point, the Charleston blockade had made Blackbeard, you know, even more famous than he was. Everyone knew about him. And the British Navy was cracking down harder than ever. Pirate crews everywhere were shrinking, scattering. They were getting hung. I mean, these pirate hunters from, you know, the British Navy were actually finding pirates all over the region and taking them out. And Nassau, once a pirate's paradise, was being cleaned out by the new governor, Woods Rogers. Now, Blackbeard understood something that a lot of pirates didn't. This golden age of piracy was coming to an end. However, the king's pardon was still being allowed for any pirate who surrendered by September 5th. So Blackbeard quietly discussed it with Stede Bonnet and kind of used him as a test case to see whether the Governor of North Carolina, Charles Eden, could be trusted. Bonnet agreed and went to North Carolina in one of their sloops to surrender. And it worked. He got a pardon with no trouble. But while he was gone, Blackbeard betrayed him. He stripped Bonnet's ships of all of its valuables, marooned his crew members near Beaufort Inlet, and sailed away with the best men and all the loot. So when Bonnet showed up to retrieve his ships and get his crew which, again, this is part of the king's part, is that you're able to surrender and keep all your money. It's like, kind of the best deal ever. But if someone screws you over, then you kind of, you know, shit out of luck. So he goes back to get his stuff and realizes that he's been screwed over by Blackbeard. But here's the thing. Bonnet, despite having no piracy experience and was just kind of like this wealthy dude, you know, living in Barbados while he was working with Blackbeard, he actually learned some pirate skills. Now, those skills were, you know, how to operate, you know, a small vessel, and, more importantly, that you want revenge. So he actually managed to get his ship working again, this wealthy dude, Bonnet, was like, you know what? I'm gonna go get it back. And he actually went looking for Blackbeard. But he never was successful. Now, this single act drove Bonnet to continue pirating. Despite receiving a pardon literally hours earlier, he was eventually captured by the authorities. And despite begging for mercy and even trying to fake, like, a mental breakdown, he was hung for piracy. How crazy is that? This dude literally was like, I'm gonna turn myself in. I'm gonna keep my money. Realizing he got screwed over, he was like, actually, I gotta keep being a pirate so I can get Blackbeard and recoup all the money. And at this point, you know, the British were like, dude, we just gave you a pardon. And then you went immediately back to crime. You're done for. And they killed him. Now, Blackbeard, on the other hand, was heading straight for North Carolina, a small town called Bath. And this was the perfect place to just disappear in plain sight. Blackbeard arrived with, you know, his charming little pirate swag. He had some money, some political leverage, and he started throwing parties and handing out gifts and just kind of acted like a man ready to change his ways. Blackbeard saw an opportunity to take the king's pardon, clean his record, and keep operating in sort of this gray zone where he could, like, pirate while pretending not to. So he formally applied for the pardon. Governor Eden approved it instantly. And suddenly, Blackbeard went from being one of the most wanted men in the Atlantic, one of the most dangerous and terrifying pirates ever, to being legally free. But here's the twist. Blackbeard wasn't retiring. He was just reorganizing, right? Once a pirate, always a pirate. So within weeks, he was back at sea in smaller vessels, raiding ships under the guise of being a privateer. Now, Eden, the governor, and the corrupt customs officer stamped whatever Paperwork was needed, and eventually everyone got a cut. It was quite literally a sort of colonial version of organized crime. He was working with the governor and sort of the political system at the time to continue stealing from nearby ships. Now, Blackbeard spent the summer of 1718 living like a absolute rock star. I mean, he's drinking, he's sailing, he's throwing these parties, and he's literally smuggling with this government protection. I mean, the locals loved him, the merchants sort of tolerated him because he wasn't screwing them over as much. And as long as Governor Eden got paid, nobody was asking questions. But Virginia's Governor, Alexander Spotswood, saw the scam for what it was. Blackbeard wasn't reformed. He was now just freelancing for the government with protection of the governor. And his presence was still destabilizing the entire coastline. It was the worst of all worlds. So Spotswood made a decision that was technically illegal, but politically necessary. He was going to end Blackbeard himself, despite not having any jurisdiction in North Carolina waters. So Spotswood secretly hired two armed sloops and put Lieutenant Robert Maynard in command, ordering him to find Blackbeard and take him out. On November 22, 1718, Maynard actually tracked Blackbeard to Aquracoat island, where Blackbeard's ship, the Adventure, was anchored in a shallow inlet. Now, what happened next was one of the most brutal close quarters fights in pirate history. Blackbeard opened the battle with a blast of a cannon and musket fire that tore through Maynard's ships, killing and wounding dozens. The deck of Maynard's vessel was now littered with dead bodies. And from a distance, it looked like the fight was done. So thinking that he won, Blackbeard boarded Maynard's ships to finish off all the survivors. But it was a trap. Before the battle, Maynard had ordered his remaining men to hide below deck, leaving only a few sailors actually standing in sight. So when Blackbeard and his pirates climbed aboard, expecting, you know, an easy kill and everyone else to surrender like they always had, the hidden soldiers actually came out of the hatches and surrounded them. Now, according to Maynard's official report, the final clash only lasted six minutes, literally six minutes of knives, pistols, smoke, hand to hand combat in these close quarters. And it's said that Blackbeard fought with an insane amount of strength, even snapping Maynard's sword with his bare hands. But even legends have their limits. So by the end of the fight, Blackbeard had been shot five times, cut at least 20 times before he eventually fell into the deck and died. But Even in his death, his legend continued to grow. Now, the legend claims that Maynard cut off Blackbeard's head and hung it from the ship's bow as proof of the kill. And then he tossed the headless body into the water. Now, according to local folklore, it's almost obviously a myth, but it's just too good to not bring up. Maynard's corpse swam around the ship three full times before sinking. So even in death, people believe that Blackbeard was supernatural or just, you know, greater than any human had been. Now, over the next three centuries, towns, sailors, storytellers added their own little pieces to the myth of Blackbeard until it became impossible to separate fact from folklore. According to old coastal traditions, Blackbeard was married several times. Some of the stories claim as many as 14 wives throughout his life. Not all at once, but still, 14 different women supposedly, you know, agreed to marry the most feared man on the American coast, which is not that hard to believe, right? I mean, criminals and, you know, gangsters, mob guys, they all have a bunch of wives and mistresses. But local stories say that his final wife was just, you know, a young woman, probably around 16 at the time when he married just months before he died. And there aren't surviving records to prove much of this, but many historians think that he married her as a part of his plan to look sort of respectable and, you know, retire from piracy under the king's pardon. But then there's the legend that refuses to die, the buried treasure conspiracy. Now, again, I just want to point out there's no strong, you know, perfect historical evidence that Blackbeard actually buried treasure. You know, pirates usually spent their loot pretty quickly, but Blackbeard loved creating mystery. And rumor says that before his final battle, he told his men only he and the devil know where the treasure was, adding that the longest liver should take all literally. The person that lived the longest should be allowed to have it. And since he didn't survive the day, the secret allegedly died with him. So for over 300 years, treasure hunters have searched the Carolinas, hoping to uncover Blackbeard's lost fortune. And to this day, no one ever has, which only keeps the myth even more alive. Another popular legend claims that Blackbeard's severed head was eventually turned into a silver lined drinking cup and was passed around kind of like a war trophy. Again, there's no proof of this, but like all great pirate stories, people continue to tell it because it's just too good to let go. Now, one of the most famous legends is actually a Mystery that people still argue about today. What was Blackbeard's flag? There's one design that shows a skeleton with horns holding like an hourglass and a spear piercing a heart, which looks pretty sick, to be honest. But the famous devil horn skeleton flag is almost certainly not authentic. It was likely invented in 1912, almost 200 years after Blackbeard died. The only real description we have from Blackbeard's time appeared in a newspaper describing an attack by his fleet. It said that there were five pirate ships total. Two had black flags with skulls and three had solid red flags. Red flags would typically mean no quarter. This basically means that, you know, surrender now or everybody dies. So Blackbeard probably used the classic skull and crossbones, but we will never know for sure. Now, why is Blackbeard more famous than these other pirates that are more successful or more prominent? And it really comes down to perfect timing and brilliant self promotion. Once again, he is a master of psychological warfare. He understood that the reputation of a pirate is actually more powerful than the cannons. His wild appearance and theatrical behavior made people surrender without fighting, which actually saved a lot of lives on both sides and made his job as a pirate much easier. He was probably one of the first people to understand this power of personal branding when it came to executing a military operation. Secondly, he died at exactly the right moment. His death came right at the end of the golden age of piracy, making him sort of this symbol, or almost like an anti hero of the era. You know, dying in battle instead of being hung like a lot of pirates made him seem more heroic and kind of romanticized his story. And finally, his story had everything that people love in a legend, right? There's mystery about this treasure. There's violence, there's looting, there's, you know, crime. There's this dramatic ending in this close quarter shootout. Writers have been retelling and adding to the story for 300 years, making the legend bigger and bigger than the man ever was. I think it's also worth adding that the fact that this was happening in the Atlantic, off the coast of the United States, with sort of the colonial government, I think, also really adds to the lore that this is imbued with American history. And like most of the history that gets exported around the world, the American story gets aggrandized. I mean, even today, Blackbeard is built into the landscape of North Carolina. You can actually walk through the town where he lived after taking the king's pardon. You can visit a place known as the, the Bonner House, which sits on the land where Blackbeard is believed to have stayed. And just down the road from the house is St. Thomas Episcopal Church, the oldest church in the state. Now, the current building wasn't finished until 1734, 16 years after Blackbeard had died. But the parish its existed while he was living in Bath in North Carolina. And local tradition says that he actually attended early services while he was, you know, sort of pretending that his life had changed. And if you head out to the coast, you can stand on Aquacote island right by what is known as Teaches Hole, which is the exact waters where he is thought to have fought his final battle. So 300 years after his death, Blackbeard is still drawing crowds, still generating money for North Carolina, and still growing as a legend. And honestly, I mean, that just might be the most fitting end for a pirate ever. And ladies and gentlemen, that is the abridged legend of Blackbeard the pirate. I mean, pretty wild. I mean, it's kind of a sick life, right? Like, there's so many comparisons I feel you could draw with other historical figures. The first one that sticks out my mind. Rasputin, right? No, the wandering holy man of, like, you know, early 1900s of Russian history, right before the revolution. I mean, if you look at Rasputin's legend, he was literally this traveling, you know, holy dude that was going through Siberia and Russia. And he had this sort of, like, crazy sort of mangled kind of appearance that he intentionally sort of leaned into to give himself this more mystical aura. And he's able to get in with sort of the government at the time. He gets close with, you know, Tsar Peter and Tsarina, and I think it's Catherine. Tsarina. Catherine, Catherine. And he gets close with them and, you know, cures their kid with the hemophilia thing. All that says that, you know, he becomes sort of like this mystical, wandering holy man that everyone is going to for information. And then when they try to kill him, they apparently have to kill him three times. They stab him. Once they shoot him, they try to poison him. None of it works. They throw his body into the river. And then even then, people are like, you know, he refused to die. So, like, there's the same sort of like, mystique around his character. The way he looked. And then, you know, this infamous death story. The man who refused to be killed and Blackbeard kind of has those same sort of legendary elements, right? He, like, leaned into this look. He put this hemp in his beard that burned and smoked while he was fighting and really created an aura that, you know, he was not of this Earth. And granted, he used a lot of his, you know, abilities and skills for piracy and looting, whereas Rasputin was using it for, you know, getting close to, you know, the Tsarina and stuff like that. But to me, I think there's some obvious parallels. I'm trying to think. I'm like, there's. I feel like there's been other people like this in history who's. The lore around them and sort of the aura kind of precede their whole. Their whole vibe. Jack the Ripper is another one right. Where he's tricky, though, because, like, they try to solve it in the time, you know, like, they try to, like, figure out who he was. Which apparently people think that they did figure it out.
