Blackbeard

Born Edward Teach sometime around 1680, little is known about Blackbeard’s early life or where he was born—some claim Bristol in western England, while other maritime historians point to Jamaica. Still others claim that his early sailing experience had been on privateer ships during Queen Anne’s War, before settling for a time on the Bahamian island of New Providence, where privateer Captain Benjamin Hornigold gave Blackbeard command of a captured sloop.

Queen Anne’s Revenge

After Hornigold’s retirement from piracy, Blackbeard captured a French slave ship known as La Concorde, renaming her the Queen Anne’s Revenge, before equipping the ship with 40 guns and over 300 buccaneers. Soon earning a reputation as a shrewd and calculating leader, Blackbeard shunned the use of violence in lieu of his fearsome appearance, which struck instant terror into the hearts of his victims.

Fearsome Appearance

Lighting cannon fuses draped from his thick black hair and beard, Blackbeard soon became the archetype for the sort of bloodthirsty rogues who once roamed Caribbean and Atlantic coastal waters. After forming an alliance of pirates off South Carolina’s coast, Blackbeard blockaded the port of Charles Town, ransoming the city’s wealthy merchants before accidentally grounding the Queen Anne’s Revenge on a sandbar near Beaufort North Carolina.

Brief Retirement

Avowing his retirement from piracy from his new home at Bath North Carolina, Blackbeard was given a royal pardon, only to relapse into piracy a short time later. In response, Virginia Governor Alexander Spotswood mustered a joint force of soldiers and sailors in pursuit of the wayward outlaw, leading to Blackbeard’s death in a ferocious battle on November 22nd, 1718. Blackbeard’s head was driven onto a piling off Hampton Virginia—a warning, of sorts, for other would-be buccaneers approaching the coastal waters of the British colonies.

A Hollywood Favorite

Hundreds of years after his death, Hollywood enshrined Blackbeard as the penultimate cinematic pirate, beginning with 1952’s Blackbeard the Pirate followed by a half-dozen more, including a TV miniseries and an encounter with Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, making Blackbeard one of the most enduring bad boy legends of high seas piracy.