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Video of the Wreck Site!
The Plank |
Editor's Note: In 1718, Blackbeard the pirate ruled the seas and called North Carolina home. Today is our second leg of a six-day voyage that reconstructs Blackbeard's adventures from the Caribbean to the Carolinas in 1718. By KELLY SIMMONS, Staff Writer MAY 1718, CHARLESTON HARBOR The pickings, Blackbeard mused, are almost too easy. His fleet anchored off Charleston's harbor was hour by hour, day by day, raiding merchant ships leaving the port city. His crews were efficient, stripping ships of cargo, stripping passengers of jewelry and money. Yet that which Blackbeard needed most eluded him. "We'll need a bargaining chip for this game," he told his crew. "Start assembling passengers. Lock them in the hold until further orders." By day's end, Blackbeard had dozens of influential South Carolinians in tow as hostages. Now he was ready to play his hand. He loaded a small boat with one hostage and two pirates and sent them into the city with his demands: "Lay the matter before the governor and tell him to give me what I ask. Give it -- or I will give him heads on a platter." I must have medicine, Blackbeard told himself. I must have that medicine now. * * * JULY 1997, CHARLESTON "There's an old saying, 'Sleep with Venus, wake up with mercury,'" says Katherine Saunders, a preservationist for the Historic Charleston Society. "Mercury was used as a cure -- if it didn't kill you." What Blackbeard needed most -- more than silver or gold -- was medicine to treat the diseases his men had caught following months of carousing with women in tropical ports. What Blackbeard was demanding from Charleston, Saunders says, was mercury. In his months of plundering the Spanish Main and the West Indies, historians believe, it would have been unlikely for Blackbeard to find appropriate medical provisions. How many pirates were diseased is unknown. Some historians speculate Blackbeard himself was weakened by disease. What is more of a mystery is why the pirate -- who held a wealthy port city hostage -- did not demand more, says David Moore, a marine archaeologist and Blackbeard authority at the N.C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort, N.C. "I can't come up with any reason why he didn't request a chest of medicine and 5,000 pounds sterling," Moore said. "That kind of wealth would have been available to him. Why he didn't take advantage of it is a mystery to me." * * * You have two days to return with the medicine, Blackbeard told his messengers. Two days passed, with no sign of the messengers -- or the medicine. The governor is behind this, Blackbeard told himself, working up a rage. Yes, that's it. He cares nothing for his own citizens. He has jailed my men. He has defied me! Prepare for death, Blackbeard told his remaining hostages. Spare us, they begged. Wait one more day. Our city would not abandon us over such small ransom. Blackbeard agreed. A third day passed. And still no sign of the medicine. Today you die, Blackbeard told his hostages. Spare us, they begged. Spare us and we'll help you sack the city. Truly an odd turn of events, Blackbeard mused. I can use Charles Town's own citizenry to burn her ships and beat her about the ears! * * * Many historians today marvel that there is no evidence that Blackbeard ever intentionally killed anyone. So skillfully did Blackbeard utilize terrorism that adversaries almost always surrendered without resistence, says Phil Masters, a researcher who has tracked Blackbeard's exploits through records in the U.S. and England. "He created a menacing image and he talked about how he was in a league with the devil," Masters says. "A North Carolina man robbed by Blackbeard on the Pamlico River in 1718 asked him where he came from. Blackbeard answered, 'from Hell.' "Everyone he encountered meekly surrendered to him when they saw him on the bridge of the Queen Anne's Revenge." Blackbeard's attention to detail is noteworthy: he was known, prior to an attack, to weave damp fuses or hemp in his hair and beard and light it. With smoke swirling about his menacing face and with his large stature, he seemed the devil himself. In port cities and island taverns, tales of Blackbeard's cruelty were embellished and exaggerated. Blackbeard's evil reputation grew with each tale -- as did his treasure. "A lot of that has been developed and built up over the years with the legends, myths and folklore associated with the man and his activities," says Moore, who has spent the past 15 years researching Blackbeard. "It would be interesting to know how Blackbeard is seen in another 100 years." * * * What Charleston citizens saw that spring day was something they had never seen before -- a fleet of heavily-armed ships sailing into the harbor, advancing on the city. They could see pirates scrambling about the decks. They could see hatches opening. They could see those mighty cannons rolling out, ready to fire. From the deck of the Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard raised his spyglass to scan the shore, the harbor, and the ships anchored there. From the deck of his flagship, Blackbeard took it in, all the delicious sights and sounds of a city in terror. * * * That day, Blackbeard's gaze could not have escaped the eastern tip of Charleston that juts into her harbor. That speck of land was then called White Pointe and is now called The Battery. Unknown to Blackbeard that day was that in seven short months, four dozen pirates -- some of them crewman who had served under him -- would swing from the gallows there. While Blackbeard enjoyed the upper hand this day in May, Charleston would, in December, exact sweet revenge for the wounds that pirates had inflicted upon the city.
Today, a 7-foot tall granite marker identifies the site of those mass executions. In a quiet park, it joins a dozen other markers and statues that speak to the turbulence felt here, most notably the Civil War and Hurricane Hugo.
Following the public hangings in 1718, the bodies of the pirates were tossed on a sandy shore at low tide. When the tide rose, the harbor currents swept those bodies out to sea. * * * Blackbeard saw too the tiny boat battling the harbor current, slowly making its way to his ship. In that boat he saw the hostage he had sent into the city. And with that hostage he could see a chest. "Sir, forgive the delay," the returning hostage told Blackbeard, as he hauled in the chest of medicine. "We searched about the city for your two men. We searched the ale houses. We searched the gaming rooms. We searched the parlors. We know they are well but we know not where." Blackbeard laughed. "Sir, I am sure they are enjoying the charms of your fair city." * * * Today -- nearly 300 years after Blackbeard's blockade of Charleston -- this fair city hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Among its chief attractions is its Low Country cuisine. And whether it's served a la carte at the bustling Hyman's Seafood Restaurant, or alongside shrimp and scallops at A.W. Shucks or next to a crab cake at the upscale 82 Queen restaurant, red rice rules here. Just as it is the foundation of many spicy dishes here -- like jambalaya -- rice is the foundation upon which Charleston grew. Indeed, rice is what would separate Charleston from her coastal cousin to the north in the early 18th century. By 1700, South Carolina had exported 3,000 tons of rice to England, 30 tons to the West Inides. In Charleston, rice plantations developed along the Cooper and Ashley rivers. With a valuable export like rice, Charleston's relationship with pirates changed quickly. No longer did she depend -- or even want -- pirates near her waters. "In the early days before (South Carolinians) really had a lot -- the days of the skin trades -- they kind of encouraged the black market," Saunders said. "Once the whole indigo and rice thing was going, you didn't want to be friendly with the pirates because they were preying on your ships." North Carolina -- with no cash crop -- remained a frontier in the early 1700s, it's primitive economy dependent upon what pirates bought and sold. Most coastal settlements -- what is now Wilmington and the Outer Banks -- welcomed pirates who offered deeply-discounted goods. And many of those good were stolen from places like South Carolina and Virginia. The bitterness engendered by that would, starting in 1718, prove the beginning of the end for the Golden Age of Piracy. * * * Time to fold our hand and cash in, Blackbeard told himself. He freed his hostages, wished a curse upon Charleston, ordered his ships hardabout and delivered this news to his crew: we will careen in Topsail, we will divide the booty, and we will make merry. To himself, Blackbeard said: it is this crew I must divide. It is this treasure I must have.
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Posted by The Depot and News & Record Online
© Copyright 1997
