Further reading for Blackbeard

Blackbeard: America’s Most Notorious Pirate by Angus Konstam

The Sea Rover’s Practice: Pirate Tactics and Techniques, 1630-1730 by Benerson Little

Edward Teach, more commonly known as the pirate Blackbeard is the template by which modern people understand pirates of The Golden Age of Piracy, a period of time stretching from 1650 to 1730 along the trade routes around the North Atlantic around to the Indian Ocean. Not much is known of his beginnings or his youth, but the two short years of 1716 to 1718 is jam-packed with tales of piracy and terror as he disrupted trade routes in his ship, The Queen Anne’s Revenge, off the shores of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

His ship was an unstoppable war machine, bristling with cannons, and Blackbeard, himself, navigated the murky waters of pirate politics in order to form an alliance of ships strong enough to blockade entire ports. It took an extraordinary effort from colonial governors and ships from the British fleet to hunt him down and stop him. In that time, Blackbeard built up a reputation as vicious murderer. Among the many stories told of him, Blackbeard is most commonly known for walking around with weapons stored all over his person. He carried the usual cutlass found on most pirates of the time but also kept six flintlock pistols loaded in a brace on his chest and was known to keep slow-burning matches and fuses tied in his beard to quickly ignite explosives. The guy was a walking timebomb and if it wasn’t for his dedication to being a bit much, he likely would have slipped beneath the waves as so many of the age’s pirates did, nameless at the bottom of Davy Jones’s Locker.

Hollywood would go on to borrow liberally from his story for just about every pirate movie that has ever been made.

Episodes: 491-493

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