The Flying Gang

Edward Teach — better known as Blackbeard — was a privateer turned pirate whose two-year career terrorized the West Indies and the American eastern seaboard. He was born in Bristol around 1680 and likely served aboard British privateers during the War of the Spanish Succession. When that war ended in 1713, thousands of seamen like him found themselves unemployed; many turned to piracy.

The flagship

In late 1717, Teach captured the French slave ship La Concorde near Saint Vincent and refitted her as his flagship, mounting forty guns and renaming her Queen Anne's Revenge. With a fleet of as many as four vessels and three hundred men, he was for a moment the most powerful pirate afloat.

The blockade of Charleston

In May 1718 Teach's fleet stood off the bar of Charleston harbor and stopped every ship that tried to enter or leave. He demanded not gold but a chest of medicine — needed, by various accounts, to treat sailors with venereal disease. The town capitulated. Within days he had loosed his hostages and sailed north.

Theatre of fear

Teach cultivated a fearsome image with calculated showmanship. Before battle he tied slow-burning hemp fuses into his beard, lit them, and surrounded his face in smoke. Captives reported he looked "like a fury from hell." It was almost entirely performance: there is no contemporary account of Blackbeard murdering a prisoner who surrendered.

End at Ocracoke

After a royal pardon in June 1718 he took up residence in Bath, North Carolina, where the colonial governor Charles Eden tolerated him in exchange for a share of the spoils. Virginia's governor Alexander Spotswood had no patience for it. He commissioned Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy to hunt Teach down. On 22 November 1718, in the shallows of Ocracoke Inlet, Maynard's sloops engaged Blackbeard's Adventure. Teach died on the deck of Maynard's ship after taking, by Maynard's count, five musket balls and twenty cuts. His head was hung from the bowsprit and carried back to Virginia.