$19.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-4874-6

Published: Spring 2000

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Copyright (c) 2000 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Excerpt from Chapter Four: Blackbeard

… Like most pirates, Blackbeard's career had begun legitimately enough. He was said to have distinguished himself in battle during the War of Spanish Succession, which ended in 1713. But he gravitated inevitably toward piracy. After settling in Nassau and acquiring his own vessel, he scored a number of impressive victories in the Caribbean before moving on, in January 1718, to terrorize the Carolina coast.

Blackbeard shifted his operations to Ocracoke in October of that year. … [W]ith its shallow inlet and protected anchorage, Ocracoke afforded Blackbeard an ideal vantage from which to launch surprise attacks on merchant vessels or passenger ships. Any captain who attempted to pursue Blackbeard through the inlet's narrow channels would almost certainly lose the chase.

Piracy along the coast was condoned and may even have been encouraged by high Carolina officials, including Governor Eden. Smugglers provided a ready source of corn, tobacco, and other goods that were not easily obtained through legal channels. They were an accepted part of the local economy.

But if Blackbeard was arguably good for Carolina, his propensity to shortstop cargos and terrorize men of commerce was bad for Virginia and, therefore, for its governor, Alexander Spotswood. Spotswood gained support from a group of upstanding North Carolina planters, who quietly urged him to put an end to Blackbeard's treachery. (Among those complaining was … cartographer-surveyor Edward Moseley, who also served as speaker of the lower house of the Assembly.) Operating in secrecy to avoid any detection of his plan, Spotswood dispatched an agent to North Carolina to determine Blackbeard's location. Instead of using two heavy Royal Navy men-of-war for the Ocracoke expedition, Spotswood wisely ordered two shallow-draft sloops to be outfitted with sixty men and placed Lieutenant [Robert] Maynard in charge.

If Blackbeard was not too worried as Maynard's sloops approached him that Thursday night in November, we must suppose Lieutenant Maynard could scarcely sleep a wink. His position was unenviable. He would have to anchor on the Middle Ground between South and North Breakers: between the shoal stretching out to sea and the edge of the breach itself. Even so, he was in rough water. He would need to depend on the wind to hold him off the shoals, which lay north, south, and west of him. His two boats had to be prevented from slamming in the night, or fouling their cables. And the autumn wind is notoriously shifty.

We know the tide turned and was rising by about seven o'clock the next morning: Maynard was to use it to advantage and record this fact. So on that wearying evening it must have been rising, too, well into the dark of the night. The rising tide would tend to carry the sloops into the wind and into the inlet-and onto the shoals. The fact that Maynard's sloops survived the night anchored off attests to a good, steady, prevailing southwesterly wind.

Still, many of Maynard's crew must have been up all night to keep safe in such a precarious spot, quite apart from fretting over whether Blackbeard would make an escape or-worse-an attack. No doubt Teach died wishing he had tried one or the other.

By midnight the tide began to fall, ebbing with mean current out the inlet. This shift eased Maynard's plight somewhat, but only as long as the wind held westerly. Beginning in September, periodic shifts in the wind to the north and northeast begin to override the prevailing southwesterlies. High pressure builds over Canada and the mid-continent north and west of the Banks. These systems produce an outflow of cool, dry air as they drift eastward and, eventually, out to sea. Storms, whether tropical hurricanes or frontal northeasters, will alter the autumn wind rose toward strong, seemingly prevailing northers, even though the lighter westerlies still blow most of the time. Fortunately, no such storm caught Lieutenant Maynard.

On slack tide of early morning Captain Teach slipped his anchor and let the current carry his sloop Adventure south toward the Point. His letter from his ally, the governor's secretary, Toby Knight, was veiled and vague. Ocracoke was as safe a place as he could hope to be, but if the governor of Virginia, Mr. Spotswood, would make trouble for him, Teach might have to fight. His crew was down to twenty-three (not counting himself) and some of those-cooks and boys-had not seen a pitched battle in their lives. So he would know who came in these two sloops riding off his inlet.

Maynard had to see the maneuver. One can imagine how he and his crew might have responded:

Ahoy, Mr. Hyde, don't be deceived by bare poles, yonder ship is moving.

Aye, Sir, coming down to meet us she is.

I'm putting a boat and two men over to sound the channel, Mr. Hyde. Up your jib and bring Ranger behind me. The tide slacks and the breeze holds light. We'll tack in past the Point.

But, Sir, why not put the men to the sweeps now? Tacking's a slow business.

No, Mr. Hyde. Every man at battle station, ready to fight. Those are no fisherman's poles across those sands. Once clear of the Point we can haul main sheets and run down on him.

But clearing Ocracoke Point that morning was no simple feat tacking under light sail. Maynard's sloop and Hyde's little Ranger grounded several times in the passage. Blackbeard held fast and waited.

Howard Pyle's vibrant reconstruction of the Battle of Ocracoke (Book of Pirates, 1921) is admittedly a blend of fiction and fancy. Much of it is unacceptable, but some of his points strike home. First, he has the small boat Maynard sent ahead sounding, under sail, like a dinghy. He correctly gives the distance as four to five miles from anchorage outside the inlet to Teach's Hole. Of course, Teach closed that distance by coming down the channel. When Maynard finally rounded the point and could run before the wind, the gap was still more than a mile.

Pyle's tale of the dinghy making two trips, the first to a "village" with "settlers," and a "wharf"-in search of an inlet pilot is not credible. No village existed at Ocracoke before about 1735; there were probably no settlers or other long-term residents, and anything more than a crude dock and little ballast stone groin for a landing would be unwarranted. Blackbeard's hideout certainly featured a tent, and may have consisted of little else.

Still, Pyle's view of the timing of events is probably right. Bumping and grinding all the way, Maynard and Ranger (under Hyde) took hours to round the Point. Full high tide must have been about midday, and it ultimately saved the day for Maynard. The tide must have gone slack and begun to fall by about one o'clock. Though he did not yet know it, Blackbeard was doomed.

Still, he came very close to routing Maynard. Had he lured Maynard's sloops onto the shoal on a falling tide, history would have been different indeed. He let the dinghy come within a quarter mile: 1,500 feet. At that distance, across water, with only a light breeze, he could shout and be heard. Perhaps he should have let the dinghy sail closer. He should have played for more time. But Blackbeard's crew was nervous and trigger-happy, and they fired their muskets at the dinghy. It was too far away. Their fire merely established hostile intent and sent the dinghy tacking back toward Maynard's sloop.

That impatience may have been Blackbeard's undoing. Running before the wind, the dinghy was well out in the channel. If it got too close before it came about, its first starboard reach would run it into the shoal. It was critical to Blackbeard's plan that Maynard not find the position of the shoal. So Blackbeard dared not hold fire for long.

No matter: the next sequence of events proved critical. With the dinghy back in tow, Maynard and Ranger set full sails and ran straight down on Adventure. That is when Blackbeard began his best work of the day.

Haul sheets, you maggots! Give me full sail now!

The pirate took the helm and ran before the wind, too, straight toward the beach. His quartermaster, Thomas Miller, accosted Blackbeard in a panic, but was shoved away. Then Miller saw the plan, the trap. Maynard knew nothing of the shoal that lay to his north, port side. Blackbeard was determined that he run aground on it.

Before piling on the beach, Blackbeard nimbly swung to the port reach. He did not need to come about. Noting his change of course, Maynard must have reckoned Blackbeard was now headed straight out into the sound, fleeing as the craven coward Maynard suspected all pirates truly were. But Blackbeard was not running. As Maynard swung port to cut him off, Blackbeard too came farther port, cleaving close to the wind, almost on collision course with the point of the shoal-and Lieutenant Maynard as well.

Blackbeard had eight deck guns, small cannons. Maynard and Hyde were equipped with none, but they had twice the number of men at arms. Maynard cannot have known of Blackbeard's cannons, but he certainly should have. This was his great failure of intelligence. In those early years of the eighteenth century, a pirate ship would outfit herself with four- to six-pounders, mounted on wheeled carriages. To hole a hull and sink a ship, balls were fired at very close range: forty or fifty feet. The trick was to depress the trajectory of the balls: literally fire down from your own deck to the opponent's water line. To accomplish this one used a wooden wedge, called a quoin, which was driven between the breech (back end) of the cannon and the toe or butt (wheelless posterior extension) of the carriage. To elevate the barrel, one pulled back on the quoin.

A pirate, of course, would not want to sink ships. He probably did not even stock cannon balls. He wanted to board ships safely afloat, plunder them, and then—if it struck his fancy—burn them. A pirate stocked langrage. That gives much greater range, up to 200 feet. One fires it high up. It falls down.

We know and use the expression, "everything but the kitchen sink." But for first-quality langrage, no such exclusion is required. The kitchen sink will make lovely langrage, once smashed into chunks and jagged fragments. So will horseshoes, nails, bolts, hunks of glass, even rocks, and especially chains. One can chain or tie good langrage together and sack it up in old sailcloth. Thus pirates were among the first to recycle their rubbish, especially the sharp, hard stuff that cuts, clobbers, and kills. Blackbeard, a prince among recyclers, was about to complete the cycle of his finest junk.

Maynard and Hyde were reaching smartly, closing rapidly on Adventure, and though they did not know it, heading directly toward the shoal.

Shoal, Sir! Shoal dead ahead! Lord God, shoal to port, too, Sir! Coming up too fast, Sir. That's ground you could plow!

Starboard! Starboard! Haul the boom inboard. Fast, men, fast! Get her inboard and drop the sails!

Then the sudden, lurching stop: hard aground. Dead in the water.

What now? There might be minutes left to full flood tide, then a little slack, but soon-all too soon-begins the ebb.

To the sweeps, men! You've got to pull us off!

And they did. With the last of the rising water, with the westerly wind freshening just a little and helping push them east, toward the channel, half of them would get off alive and fairly well. Half, including Mr. Hyde of Ranger and both his top officers, would die or be badly wounded on that shoal.

Blackbeard was closing fast. The freshening breeze game him speed, too. Speed to bring him in range before Maynard got off the shoal, but speed to precipitate the battle a fraction too soon to catch the falling tide.

At 400 feet: Damn you for villains, who are you? And whence come you?

Maynard's reply: You may see by our colors we are no pirates!

Blackbeard: Send your boat on board so that I might see who you are.

One can imagine Maynard's dinghy, now with men at its oars, trying to pull Maynard off the bar.

At 250 feet: I cannot spare my boat, but I will come aboard you as soon as I can with my sloop! A brazen declaration of war: the intention to board by force.

Maynard was close enough now to look down the barrels of Blackbeard's cannons. Suddenly Blackbeard dropped sails and came about. To anyone on shore, or the men on Maynard's sloop and Ranger, it must have looked as though Blackbeard ran aground, too. The pirate came about sharply and, held into the wind, Adventure stopped.

Blackbeard: Pull the quoins! Touch fire to my guns!

The range was perfect, the targets dead in the water. Blackbeard's deadly langrage fell with a vengeance. "This single broadside of eight cannons was devastating," wrote Robert Lee. The carnage inflicted by langrage at 150 feet is terrible. "With a single broadside … Blackbeard had reduced the attacking force to half its original size."

At this juncture we must part company with those chroniclers who contend that Blackbeard's ship went aground before his cannons fired. Even if Adventure had grounded prior to firing (which we doubt), the recoil would serve only to push her off, back into the narrow channel. Here Blackbeard committed his fatal mistake. He could see the death and destruction he had wrought; he evidently believed the battle all but won. He did not hoist sail and run up the channel—the prudent course of action while reloading his cannons. He may not have bothered to reload at all, for there were no living men visible on the royal decks.

As the tide slacked, the outflow current took over, easing Adventure southward, down channel. The freshened wind pushed her hull east, toward the Ocracoke sands. Blackbeard was so intent on studying (or toasting?) his apparent victory that he failed to watch his stern. It was across the narrow channel that he went aground, a thousand feet southeast of Maynard's struggle on the shoals.

But Maynard's sails had been down when the langrage struck. They were cut up, of course, and the rigging much damaged. But not hopelessly so, as they probably would have been had his sloop been under sail. The men in the dinghy survived, as did some at the onboard sweeps, low to the deck and partially covered by the rail and cabin.

Maynard again: Get below men. Leave me two-you, helmsman, and you, Butler: we'll get up the jib. She's afloat now. Stave barrels, lads; pitch over ballast and all we can live wi'out, for it's living a bit longer that we must try to do!

Blackbeard was out of cannon range now, so Maynard could scurry about, give aid and consolation to the wounded, and make sure his able-bodied were armed but hidden-below decks, out of the way of lethal langrage.

Meanwhile, Adventure's stern grounded on the steep bank and her keel cut deep in the mud. Blackbeard was aground by the stern; falling tide, wind, and current conspired to keep him there. But he was not worried. His men were hard at work loading more bits of finer rubbish in bottles and fitting these with powder and oil-soaked fuses. This pirate used grenades—which it is said he invented-to fine effect.

With only his jib pulling, Maynard closed the thousand feet across the channel. The second sloop, Ranger, captain and crew mangled, lay still aground. Maynard's courage certainly can never be questioned. He may at first have tackled Blackbeard believing all pirates doltish villains and cowards; but he had been grossly outwitted and out-gunned that day, while his adversary was inconvenienced but as yet unharmed.

As Maynard approached, Blackbeard and his hale crew could fairly swagger, readying grappling hooks and line and preparing to touch fire to their grenade fuses. As Maynard's sloop drew close, Blackbeard made his second bad judgment of the day: he assumed all but three or four of Maynard's crew were dead or mortally wounded.

Grapples flew and caught: grenades caught and flew. The smoke obscured the deck of Maynard's sloop as the pirates swarmed aboard. But Maynard's men swarmed too: up out of the holds that had hidden them, as well as saved them from the impact of the grenades.

The grisly gore and gruesome details of that battle have been well—described. It is said that Blackbeard absorbed not fewer than five pistol balls at close range, and took twenty cutlass chops—one nearly severing his neck—before he finally dropped. A dozen of the royal crew were killed and roughly twice that number wounded. Numbers vary, but counting Blackbeard himself, at least ten pirates were killed and nine wounded. After the subsequent executions of the captured pirates, the toll of the dead would reach twenty-three.

Maynard finished chopping off Blackbeard's head and hung the souvenir from his bowsprit. As for his carcass's legendary swim three times around the sloop, we must dispute the story. With the falling tide, there was insufficient water by the stern for swimming of any kind. As for the tale that the pirate's skull was plated with silver and has been used as a drinking cup by undergraduates at the University of Virginia, we have not been able to verify it. What can be asserted is that the ebb tide at Ocracoke that day ended a high-water mark of the Golden Age of Piracy, which by 1725 would be over.

Did Charles Johnson, later to become a captain, witness or participate in this battle? Was he a boy left at Blackbeard's camp, on shore? Or one of Maynard's crew? Not likely the latter, or we would know more of him. Captain Johnson wrote six years later, in 1724, very much as a narrator of sights seen at first hand. We give him the last word: "Here was an end of that couragious Brute, who might have passed in the World for a Heroe, had he been employed in a good Cause… ."