Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. So Katie, I've always really liked pirates. In high school, my friends and I used to have kind of good pirate jokes. I don't go to conventions or anything like. No, no, no, I actually haven't even been a pirate for Halloween, but I have. Really I do like them a lot, And of course one of my favorites is Blackbeard. Well, I've got you covered because the one Halloween I was a pirate, and then this past Halloween, I was Abraham Lincoln and wore a big black Beard, but mine did not have candlewicks. And unlike black Beard. Blackbeard was one of the most feared pirates in history. And it's no wonder with the smoking fuses and the sashes full of pistols and pistols across the chest. He definitely mastered the art of intimidation, and he did a lot to keep that reputation up. He wanted people fearing him, although we don't have any evidence that he ever killed anyone who wasn't trying to kill him. But when you're fearsome pirate, that's not exactly the kind of rumor you want to spread around. The intimidation kind of saves you a lot of work. You just fire a few warning shots and the ship gets handed over to you. You don't have to go through the trouble of actually fighting and swashbuckling. So every story that spreads around, like black Beard slicing off a passenger's finger when he wouldn't give him his ring, that all builds up to the great black Beard legend. But of course Blackbeard wasn't always a pirate, and he obviously had another name. He was born probably in Bristol, England, although that's debated around six nine, as Edward Teach or possibly Edward Thatch, no one's quite sure, which will be a theme in black beards life. Somebody who's so surrounded in legend, there's going to be a lot of conflicting information about him. So Teach enlisted as a privateer for the British in the War of Spanish Succession, which went from seventeen o one to seventeen thirteen. Privateers were right on the cusp of legal The British government obviously wanted to have as big of a navy as possible, but they could enhance it a little bit with privateers, which were allowed to sack French and Spanish ships and take a share of the booty for themselves, which would help you develop your pirating skills. But of course the war comes to an end eventually and privateers are no longer allowed to go around sacking French and Spanish ships, and there are a lot of people out of work, and some of them end up turning to piracy. And the golden age of piracy was the late seventeenth to the early eighteen centuries, and as far as a mayor could goes, there have been a bunch of laws passed by the British Parliament which had made smuggling something that was a bit more desirable because British imports were so expensive British taxes, right, you could buy things so much cheaper from a pirate than you could from them. So they would attack merchant ships carrying grain, molasses, rum, rope, tools, ammunition, pretty much everything, and go ahead and sell it to the colonists. And because North Carolina's outer banks have shallow sounds and inlets, it was a pirate's favorite hideout place, which is where black Beard established his home base, but that wasn't until seventeen eighteen, and before that he had to get in some more pirate training. He did, and he did that with Captain Benjamin Hornigold in the Caribbean. So in Blackbeard's sort of apprenticeship, almost with Hornigold, they depart together and plunder a bunch of Spanish and British ships of their coco and cordwood, sugar, rum, molass, this, all of these useful things. It's not so much the gold, treasure and jewels, which of course is what you think of when you think of black beard buried treasure, but you might just be finding rum and sugar instead. Yeah, and during this time, Teach gets his first captaincy of a small sloop. And then the big guns come out when Hornicle's fleet attacks a French slave ship called the Concorde that was bound for Martinique, and Teach makes this his flagship and renames it Queen Anne's Revenge. And it only had fourteen guns to start with, so he added a bunch to make it up to forty, because you know, you need your guns when you're a pirate. It's more than eighty feet long. They're three masts, and he also installs a cannon. And Teach probably took this ship with his classic intimidation methods. Rather than a bloody fight, It's likely he just fired some warning shots and hoisted up the pirate flag, and you know, the guys through and they don't want any trouble with Blackbeard. But the captain of the Concorde also reported when he got back to France that Teach gave him a sloop to finish transporting his cargo of slaves, which I was surprised to hear that. I always imagined pirates making you walk the plank, and but that sounded very gentlemanly, we thought. And Hornagold couldn't be Blackbeard's teacher forever because after the war, the British government wanted to get rid of all their pirates, so they got an officer named Wood's Rogers and hired him as the governor of the Bahamas and told him he'd better get rid of the pirates. So he said he would grant pardons to pirates who agreed to walk the straight and narrow, and Hornagold is one of the ones who agreed, and he became a pirate hunter. But that's okay with black Beard by now, because he's really struck off on his own and starts patrolling the Virginia and Carolina coasts for his reign of terror from seventeen sixteen seventeen eighteen. So we've already mentioned that the Outer Banks as fantastic a place for pirates just because of how it's designed, but it was also a great place for black Beard himself because he met a lovely corrupt politician by the name of Charles Eden there who would allow him clemency in exchange for very generous bribes. So, in addition to the excellent geography of North Carolina and the corrupt governor um he's, black Beard actually ends up being kind of a folk hero. The people of North Carolina. They're not the wealthy rice growers or tobacco growers like South Carolina or Virginia, so they're more okay with this deal where they get essentially duty free goods from black Beard in exchange for sort of letting him, letting him hang in the Outer Banks and the folk here stuff also comes from Blackbeard's challenge to the oppress of authority. He's lauded for sticking a hot poker into the eye of British official, which sounds pretty awful. But I feel that that's a running theme and all the stuff that we've done about gangsters and outlaws in any way, part of it is public opinion of them being the hero who is the only one who's willing to go up against corrupt authority. But it also seems that that opinion always turned at some point the the outlaw does something which just pushes the reputation over the edge. And for black Beard, this is in May seventeen eighteen in Charleston, so with four vessels and as many as four hundred pirates, black Beard captures eight or nine ships coming into and out of Charleston over about a week, and he holds the cruise of the ship's hostage, along with their passengers and passengers, their kids on board, women on board, and um. Black Beard demands a chest of medicine in exchange for the lives of his passengers, but Charleston takes a while the pony up yes, and in the mean time, the pirates have decided they're not going to get it, and they've set all the citizens up to be hanged like preparations are underway. They're about to die, and Charleston eventually comes up with the ransom and gets their people back, but not before the pirates have taken all of their clothing and jewelry. Yeah, they returned to shore almost naked, as the outraged description is sent back to England. But all of this goes down pretty quickly, and within a week of the Charleston hostage situation, the Queen Ann's Revenge is grounded on a sandbar near the entrance to present day Beefort Inlet, and it's likely that Blackbeard beach this on purpose. He knew how to sail a ship and how to scurry around through the outer bank, so it's unlikely that he would accidentally ground his ship um and it's possible he was considering some kind of retirement or at least at least trying to dismand this group of four hundred pirates and break him up a little bit. Some people say he marooned a bunch of pirates on one of the sandbars when he left, and then took provisions from one of the other ships and got out of there. In addition to the blackade at Charleston. Black Beard by this point had captured something like fifty ships, and he was also charging tolls for other people's ships to make it through Pamlico Sound. So things were beginning to come to a head. And while North Carolina and Charles Eden were pretty okay with the pirrating money off the whole situation right, the rich Virginia planters and South Carolina planters were not, and they appealed to the Governor of Virginia, Alexander spots Would to do something about it, and he engages Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy to hunt down black Beard. And it's not as hard as it sounds to find black Beard. He's you know, you'd think it would be difficult to find a pirate, right, not if he's throwing the biggest pirate party known to man on Ocracoke Island, which I would kind of like to be invited to. I don't know, it might sound more fun than it really was. Drinking, womanizing, and pirates from all over the world were invited to come, and come they did and made a complete spectacle out of themselves. So during this drunken pirates shindig, Maynard shows up with his sloops intending to kill or capture Blackbeard, and the pirates are aware that Maynard is there, but they're trapped between this island and a sandbar, so they prepare themselves over the night, and well accounts a Blackbeard was very calm. His pirates were starting to get worried. Yeah, they were freaking out a little bit. He kept drinking. Everyone else went out and put sand on the decks in case there was blood, and so blankets and water in case there were fires, and began preparations battle. And Teach only has twenty men too, while Mannard has about sixty. But teach his man advantage here is mounted weapons on his sloop, which is called the adventure. So in the morning, everyone's kind of expecting Teach to try to make a getaway. Instead he waits and Maynard's men start to approach, and then at the last minute, Teach just shoots off to a little winding channel which no one else saw. Yes, it's right by a sandbar, and Mannerd's men all get stuck. But Mannard is pretty good captain, and he tells everybody to start throwing extra supplies overboard, and so they lighten the ships enough that they're able to sail free, and Maynard recounts that Teach drink damn nation to me and my men, whom he styled cowardly puppies an insult. Iron're going to be your new insult, killing someone a cow actually beware. And at this point Blackbeard's crew is bombarding Synard's ship with iron scraps and nails from the guns, basically everything they've got, and so Maynard and his men going hide below deck, all tricky like, and because the ship is so quiet after this bombardment, they're even grenades involved. Teach thinks that they're dead, and the pirates board the ship, black Beard included, and all of a sudden, Maynards men rush out their lives prize the gotcha moment and teaching Maynard go to a face to face battle that actually gets written about in the London papers, and it's really it looks like it should be in an action movie Maynards story, if it hasn't already. Maynards sort has spent. He shoots black Beard. Um black Beard survives after being shot, and obviously guns are they put a big hole in you. At this point, and one of Maynard's men jumps in that the last minute of this brutal fight between these two men and slashes Blackbeard's neck, and um, I don't know how he did this with a with a bloody slash neck, but black Beard apparently says, well done, lad are maybe apocryphal, but it's still a good detail. But when he died, he'd been shot multiple times and stabbed multiple times and kept fighting until the very very end. And Maynard's man actually cuts off black Beard's head, which is strung up on the ship as a warning to other pirates. And Maynards searched and searched for black Beard's treasure, as people have been doing for years, but all he found were supplies and letters. And during the fight, eight of the other pirates were killed. Some cried for mercy and some were arrested and they were brought to trial, and all but two were hanged. So the pirates didn't get off so easily either. And this was pretty much the end of piracy, or at least the golden age of piracy. That was November twenty, seventeen eighteen, when black Beard was killed. So in addition to the legend about the treasure, there's another pretty amazing one about Black Beards skull. So his head is hung up on the ship. But what happens to the skull? Maybe it went to the University of Virginia. There's a legend that says the skull was dipped in silver and kept by the university, where fraternity members were once required to drink from it upon their initiation of a great grandfather who went to the University of Virginia. Now I'm starting to wonder was he in a fraternity as a former member of the Greek system. I salute to uv A for a great rumor. You can actually go visit black Beard Island. It was acquired by the Navy Department and then in nineteen twenty four was made a preserve and breeding ground for wildlife and birds. You can only go there by boat, which I feel is fitting quaint now is it? Do so? If you'd like to learn more about piracy from Black Beards Time to today, check out How Pirates Work at how stuff works dot com, and if you have any suggestions you'd love to send us, email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com, and be sure to check out the stuff you missed in History Glass Blog on the how stuff works dot com home page

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. So Katie, I've always really liked pirates. In high school, my friends and I used to have kind of good pirate jokes. I don't go to conventions or anything like. No, no, no, I actually haven't even been a pirate for Halloween, but I have. Really I do like them a lot, And of course one of my favorites is Blackbeard. Well, I've got you covered because the one Halloween I was a pirate, and then this past Halloween, I was Abraham Lincoln and wore a big black Beard, but mine did not have candlewicks. And unlike black Beard. Blackbeard was one of the most feared pirates in history. And it's no wonder with the smoking fuses and the sashes full of pistols and pistols across the chest. He definitely mastered the art of intimidation, and he did a lot to keep that reputation up. He wanted people fearing him, although we don't have any evidence that he ever killed anyone who wasn't trying to kill him. But when you're fearsome pirate, that's not exactly the kind of rumor you want to spread around. The intimidation kind of saves you a lot of work. You just fire a few warning shots and the ship gets handed over to you. You don't have to go through the trouble of actually fighting and swashbuckling. So every story that spreads around, like black Beard slicing off a passenger's finger when he wouldn't give him his ring, that all builds up to the great black Beard legend. But of course Blackbeard wasn't always a pirate, and he obviously had another name. He was born probably in Bristol, England, although that's debated around six nine, as Edward Teach or possibly Edward Thatch, no one's quite sure, which will be a theme in black beards life. Somebody who's so surrounded in legend, there's going to be a lot of conflicting information about him. So Teach enlisted as a privateer for the British in the War of Spanish Succession, which went from seventeen o one to seventeen thirteen. Privateers were right on the cusp of legal The British government obviously wanted to have as big of a navy as possible, but they could enhance it a little bit with privateers, which were allowed to sack French and Spanish ships and take a share of the booty for themselves, which would help you develop your pirating skills. But of course the war comes to an end eventually and privateers are no longer allowed to go around sacking French and Spanish ships, and there are a lot of people out of work, and some of them end up turning to piracy. And the golden age of piracy was the late seventeenth to the early eighteen centuries, and as far as a mayor could goes, there have been a bunch of laws passed by the British Parliament which had made smuggling something that was a bit more desirable because British imports were so expensive British taxes, right, you could buy things so much cheaper from a pirate than you could from them. So they would attack merchant ships carrying grain, molasses, rum, rope, tools, ammunition, pretty much everything, and go ahead and sell it to the colonists. And because North Carolina's outer banks have shallow sounds and inlets, it was a pirate's favorite hideout place, which is where black Beard established his home base, but that wasn't until seventeen eighteen, and before that he had to get in some more pirate training. He did, and he did that with Captain Benjamin Hornigold in the Caribbean. So in Blackbeard's sort of apprenticeship, almost with Hornigold, they depart together and plunder a bunch of Spanish and British ships of their coco and cordwood, sugar, rum, molass, this, all of these useful things. It's not so much the gold, treasure and jewels, which of course is what you think of when you think of black beard buried treasure, but you might just be finding rum and sugar instead. Yeah, and during this time, Teach gets his first captaincy of a small sloop. And then the big guns come out when Hornicle's fleet attacks a French slave ship called the Concorde that was bound for Martinique, and Teach makes this his flagship and renames it Queen Anne's Revenge. And it only had fourteen guns to start with, so he added a bunch to make it up to forty, because you know, you need your guns when you're a pirate. It's more than eighty feet long. They're three masts, and he also installs a cannon. And Teach probably took this ship with his classic intimidation methods. Rather than a bloody fight, It's likely he just fired some warning shots and hoisted up the pirate flag, and you know, the guys through and they don't want any trouble with Blackbeard. But the captain of the Concorde also reported when he got back to France that Teach gave him a sloop to finish transporting his cargo of slaves, which I was surprised to hear that. I always imagined pirates making you walk the plank, and but that sounded very gentlemanly, we thought. And Hornagold couldn't be Blackbeard's teacher forever because after the war, the British government wanted to get rid of all their pirates, so they got an officer named Wood's Rogers and hired him as the governor of the Bahamas and told him he'd better get rid of the pirates. So he said he would grant pardons to pirates who agreed to walk the straight and narrow, and Hornagold is one of the ones who agreed, and he became a pirate hunter. But that's okay with black Beard by now, because he's really struck off on his own and starts patrolling the Virginia and Carolina coasts for his reign of terror from seventeen sixteen seventeen eighteen. So we've already mentioned that the Outer Banks as fantastic a place for pirates just because of how it's designed, but it was also a great place for black Beard himself because he met a lovely corrupt politician by the name of Charles Eden there who would allow him clemency in exchange for very generous bribes. So, in addition to the excellent geography of North Carolina and the corrupt governor um he's, black Beard actually ends up being kind of a folk hero. The people of North Carolina. They're not the wealthy rice growers or tobacco growers like South Carolina or Virginia, so they're more okay with this deal where they get essentially duty free goods from black Beard in exchange for sort of letting him, letting him hang in the Outer Banks and the folk here stuff also comes from Blackbeard's challenge to the oppress of authority. He's lauded for sticking a hot poker into the eye of British official, which sounds pretty awful. But I feel that that's a running theme and all the stuff that we've done about gangsters and outlaws in any way, part of it is public opinion of them being the hero who is the only one who's willing to go up against corrupt authority. But it also seems that that opinion always turned at some point the the outlaw does something which just pushes the reputation over the edge. And for black Beard, this is in May seventeen eighteen in Charleston, so with four vessels and as many as four hundred pirates, black Beard captures eight or nine ships coming into and out of Charleston over about a week, and he holds the cruise of the ship's hostage, along with their passengers and passengers, their kids on board, women on board, and um. Black Beard demands a chest of medicine in exchange for the lives of his passengers, but Charleston takes a while the pony up yes, and in the mean time, the pirates have decided they're not going to get it, and they've set all the citizens up to be hanged like preparations are underway. They're about to die, and Charleston eventually comes up with the ransom and gets their people back, but not before the pirates have taken all of their clothing and jewelry. Yeah, they returned to shore almost naked, as the outraged description is sent back to England. But all of this goes down pretty quickly, and within a week of the Charleston hostage situation, the Queen Ann's Revenge is grounded on a sandbar near the entrance to present day Beefort Inlet, and it's likely that Blackbeard beach this on purpose. He knew how to sail a ship and how to scurry around through the outer bank, so it's unlikely that he would accidentally ground his ship um and it's possible he was considering some kind of retirement or at least at least trying to dismand this group of four hundred pirates and break him up a little bit. Some people say he marooned a bunch of pirates on one of the sandbars when he left, and then took provisions from one of the other ships and got out of there. In addition to the blackade at Charleston. Black Beard by this point had captured something like fifty ships, and he was also charging tolls for other people's ships to make it through Pamlico Sound. So things were beginning to come to a head. And while North Carolina and Charles Eden were pretty okay with the pirrating money off the whole situation right, the rich Virginia planters and South Carolina planters were not, and they appealed to the Governor of Virginia, Alexander spots Would to do something about it, and he engages Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy to hunt down black Beard. And it's not as hard as it sounds to find black Beard. He's you know, you'd think it would be difficult to find a pirate, right, not if he's throwing the biggest pirate party known to man on Ocracoke Island, which I would kind of like to be invited to. I don't know, it might sound more fun than it really was. Drinking, womanizing, and pirates from all over the world were invited to come, and come they did and made a complete spectacle out of themselves. So during this drunken pirates shindig, Maynard shows up with his sloops intending to kill or capture Blackbeard, and the pirates are aware that Maynard is there, but they're trapped between this island and a sandbar, so they prepare themselves over the night, and well accounts a Blackbeard was very calm. His pirates were starting to get worried. Yeah, they were freaking out a little bit. He kept drinking. Everyone else went out and put sand on the decks in case there was blood, and so blankets and water in case there were fires, and began preparations battle. And Teach only has twenty men too, while Mannard has about sixty. But teach his man advantage here is mounted weapons on his sloop, which is called the adventure. So in the morning, everyone's kind of expecting Teach to try to make a getaway. Instead he waits and Maynard's men start to approach, and then at the last minute, Teach just shoots off to a little winding channel which no one else saw. Yes, it's right by a sandbar, and Mannerd's men all get stuck. But Mannard is pretty good captain, and he tells everybody to start throwing extra supplies overboard, and so they lighten the ships enough that they're able to sail free, and Maynard recounts that Teach drink damn nation to me and my men, whom he styled cowardly puppies an insult. Iron're going to be your new insult, killing someone a cow actually beware. And at this point Blackbeard's crew is bombarding Synard's ship with iron scraps and nails from the guns, basically everything they've got, and so Maynard and his men going hide below deck, all tricky like, and because the ship is so quiet after this bombardment, they're even grenades involved. Teach thinks that they're dead, and the pirates board the ship, black Beard included, and all of a sudden, Maynards men rush out their lives prize the gotcha moment and teaching Maynard go to a face to face battle that actually gets written about in the London papers, and it's really it looks like it should be in an action movie Maynards story, if it hasn't already. Maynards sort has spent. He shoots black Beard. Um black Beard survives after being shot, and obviously guns are they put a big hole in you. At this point, and one of Maynard's men jumps in that the last minute of this brutal fight between these two men and slashes Blackbeard's neck, and um, I don't know how he did this with a with a bloody slash neck, but black Beard apparently says, well done, lad are maybe apocryphal, but it's still a good detail. But when he died, he'd been shot multiple times and stabbed multiple times and kept fighting until the very very end. And Maynard's man actually cuts off black Beard's head, which is strung up on the ship as a warning to other pirates. And Maynards searched and searched for black Beard's treasure, as people have been doing for years, but all he found were supplies and letters. And during the fight, eight of the other pirates were killed. Some cried for mercy and some were arrested and they were brought to trial, and all but two were hanged. So the pirates didn't get off so easily either. And this was pretty much the end of piracy, or at least the golden age of piracy. That was November twenty, seventeen eighteen, when black Beard was killed. So in addition to the legend about the treasure, there's another pretty amazing one about Black Beards skull. So his head is hung up on the ship. But what happens to the skull? Maybe it went to the University of Virginia. There's a legend that says the skull was dipped in silver and kept by the university, where fraternity members were once required to drink from it upon their initiation of a great grandfather who went to the University of Virginia. Now I'm starting to wonder was he in a fraternity as a former member of the Greek system. I salute to uv A for a great rumor. You can actually go visit black Beard Island. It was acquired by the Navy Department and then in nineteen twenty four was made a preserve and breeding ground for wildlife and birds. You can only go there by boat, which I feel is fitting quaint now is it? Do so? If you'd like to learn more about piracy from Black Beards Time to today, check out How Pirates Work at how stuff works dot com, and if you have any suggestions you'd love to send us, email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com, and be sure to check out the stuff you missed in History Glass Blog on the how stuff works dot com home page