A Book Aboard Blackbeard’s Flagship

Here’s my favorite new archeological discovery, as reported by National Geographic and the Salisbury (N.C.) Post.

The flagship of the pirate Edward Thatch, best known as Blackbeard, ran aground off Beaufort, North Carolina, in 1718. Twelve years ago salvagers found that wreck, and state archeologists have been studying it ever since.

Among the artifacts from that ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was a breech-loading cannon or swivel gun. Inside it conservators found “a wet mass of textile scraps” that “may have served as a gasket for the wooden tampion, a plug that protected the cannon muzzle from the elements.”

Within that sludge were sixteen tiny pieces of paper. It’s rare for paper to survive on shipwrecks, for obvious reasons. The technicians carefully unfolded those papers. Some turned out to have legible words printed on them. So the next step was to identify, if possible, where those scraps had come from.

Back in 2014 I looked at a scrap of paper glued inside a picture frame and identified it as coming from a New York newspaper in 1810. So I have a sense of what such a search is like. But I had a much larger scrap of paper to work with. None of the scraps from the Blackbeard wreck was bigger than a quarter.

After “many months of research,” the researchers found a match. The legible fragments came from the 1712 first edition of Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711.

The leader of Cooke’s expedition was Woodes Rogers, who in 1718 became royal governor of the Bahamas with a mandate to crack down on piracy. Blackbeard and his ships were off North Carolina that summer because they wanted to keep away from the fleet Gov. Rogers was leading from Britain.

Some reports on this discovery describe it as giving insight into what pirates read. A copy of Cook’s Voyage to the South Sea was indeed aboard Blackbeard’s ship, but it’s really hard to read a book when someone’s ripped out several pages and used the scraps for wadding in a cannon.

Clearly some Caribbean mariner or traveler was reading about Woodes Rogers’s big voyage—that makes sense. And Thatch’s crew got a hold of a copy, perhaps for reading, perhaps as loot, perhaps just because they needed paper. But Thatch had that book ripped apart to prepare his guns to stave off Rogers’s patrols.

These surviving fragments and other artifacts from Queen Anne’s Revenge will probably go on display this year in an exhibit tied to the tricentennial of Blackbeard’s demise.

(I’ve been reading about Thatch, Rogers, and the other mariners who contended for superiority and wealth in the 1710s Caribbean in Colin Woodard’s Republic of Pirates. That’s why I’m calling Blackbeard “Thatch” instead of “Teach,” an early misspelling of his name.)

Arrrrr

In 2007, the British author Colin Woodard published The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man who Brought Them Down.

I therefore suspect that it was with mixed feelings that Woodard greeted the news in the very next year that researchers were uncovering important new sources on Caribbean piracy in the early 1700s. Trent University historian Arne Bialuschewski found several eyewitness reports from former captives in Jamaican archives. Mike Daniel of the Maritime Research Institute in Florida discovered an eyewitness report of how Blackbeard captured a French ship named the Rose Emelye in Nantes.

Now Woodard has drawn on those newly recognized documents and his own research to expand our knowledge of Blackbeard and his comrades in this article for Smithsonian magazine. He reports:

Blackbeard first appears in the historical record in early December 1716. . . . Of his life before then we still know very little. He went by Edward Thatch—not “Teach” as many historians have said, apparently repeating an error made by the Boston News-Letter [at that time the only newspaper in North America]. He may have been from the English port of Bristol (as the General History [of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates] says), where the name Thatch appears in early 18th-century census rolls. . . . The only eyewitness description—that of former captive Henry Bostock, originally preserved among the official papers of the British Leeward Islands colony—describes him as “a tall Spare Man with a very black beard which he wore very long.”

Despite his infamous reputation, Blackbeard was remarkably judicious in his use of force. In the dozens of eyewitness accounts of his victims, there is not a single instance in which he killed anyone prior to his final, fatal battle with the Royal Navy.

I haven’t read widely about pirates, so I learned a lot from Woodard’s article. For example, there was no documented “walking the plank” in that period of piracy. The earliest appearance of the practice or phrase was in the dying confession of George Geery, alias George Wood:

Such afterwards as shewed the least reluctance to their [i.e., the piratical mutineers’] wicked designs and cruel actions, or were any way suspected for a breach of faith with them, they either hung at the yard-arm, towed them along side, till quite dead, as a terrifying example to the rest, or obliged them to walk on a plank, extended from the ship’s side, over the Sea, into which they were turned, when at the extreme end.

Geery also claimed that he’d gotten the nickname “Justice” on that ship “from his abhorrence to the cruelties he saw exercised there by the pirating crew,” yet somehow he avoided these fates. Instead, he was executed on 22 Nov 1769 for robbing a ship off the English coast of “several hats.”