Quest for Blackbeard: The True Story of Edward Thache and His World

By Baylus C. Brooks

Do you know who "Blackbeard the Pirate" was? Probably not! Born into a substantial family in Bristol, the eldest son of Capt. Edward and Elizabeth Thache sailed for Jamaica with his family sometime before 1695. Capt. Edward Thache of St. Jago de la Vega or "Spanish Town" died there at age 47 while his son, Edward "Blackbeard" Thache Jr. joined the Royal Navy and fought in Queen Anne's War aboard HMS Windsor. Thache resembled more a Robber Baron of the early 20th century than a poor downtrodden member of Benjamin Hornigold's "Flying Gang" in the Bahamas - or even his "pupil." Capt. Charles Johnson's "A General History of the Pyrates" is a flawed historical work and much of what we have previously known about Blackbeard is simply not true. This progressive book attempts to rediscover exactly who Blackbeard really was and how he related to his maritime American "Pirate Nation!" Quite a few surprises are in store! Website: http: //baylusbrooks.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365795923

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Quest for Blackbeard: The True Story of Edward Thache and His World

Quest for Blackbeard:

The True Story of Edward Thache and His World

By

Baylus C. Brooks

Electronic Edition

Copyright ©2017 Baylus C. Brooks

All rights reserved

http://baylusbrooks.com

Text design, cover art, and publishing by Baylus C. Brooks.

Basic information on Edward Blackbeard Thache’s early history and family previously published by Baylus C. Brooks in Blackbeard Reconsidered: Mist’s Piracy, Thache’s Genealogy through the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Electronic Edition

Copyright © 2017 Baylus C. Brooks

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations as detailed under fair use.

ISBN 978-1-365-79592-3

Baylus C. Brooks

MA in Maritime Studies from East Carolina University

Greenville, North Carolina

Place of Publication: Lake City, Florida

Printed by Lulu Press, Inc.

Website: http://baylusbrooks.com

Preface

To obtain the truth in life we must discard all the ideas we were taught and reconstruct the entire system of our knowledge

~ René Descartes

Obviously, legends are a nice diversion. Legends do not, however, a history tell. They hamper honest inquiry – suppress actual investigation with dishonesty. They should be fun, but they should never be treated as actual fact. This is never more apparent than in the case of the popular legends associated with pirates, especially Edward Thache, the alleged notorious, demonic, even evil, and wicked rogue known to readers of Capt. Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates as Blackbeard the Pirate. Popular impressions of this wicked pirate, made even more infamous by Robert Louis Stevenson’s version of pirates in Treasure Island, delight the storyteller and their audience. The gruesome pictures and caricatures provide shock and awe for bedtime stories or the Saturday afternoon family outing.

In great contrast, the book you are reading now is not about legends, but about distilling the honest search for history virtually buried by the tremendous literary weight of popular fiction. This is also a social history, which can be fun, too – literally searching for buried ancestral treasure! Ok, well… about pirates and treasure, though, I should warn you that I’ve heard one pirate scholar tell an audience that pirates never, ever, buried their treasure. Please, put down the shovel and stop digging up your neighbor’s yard, or something to that effect. In other words, the wild legends that you’ve heard are not often real, though occasionally and often loosely based in fact.

This sincere attempt at history is no easy task to accomplish because these legends have been popularized and modified over nearly 300 years of those Saturday afternoon outtings. Another monkey wrench in the historical works, many people also have tried to grasp a bit of the legend for themselves, altering whatever possible historical elements may actually have existed in the primary records. Yes, most of us are pirates! And, those few of us who are not – well, we want to be pirates anyway! Genealogies evolved that include famous and infamous people, including Cherokee Indian princesses, Abraham Lincoln, gangsters, and, of course, pirates. Everyone had to have one in the family, you understand. History was lost in the personalized popular haze of legend. It was beaten and scattered amongst the literary landscape – often by personal and political agenda.

By far, the worst effects have been achieved through politics – yes, the dreadful and willful destruction of honesty to gain power – pirate loot with a different shine. As this book will detail, the British began this effort against pirates, but we carried it further against our own kind. Our ancestor pirates of the West Indies settled the mainland – through the Barbadians of Carolina. At the end of the Civil War, their descendants, southerner redeemers have attempted to guard their version of history and they have perverted the historical narrative as a result. For North Carolina specifically, the great men of the Confederacy, usually ex-Confederate soldiers, became politicians and lawyers. They wrote volumes of amateur redeemer history that only represented their stubborn point of view. Pirates were used and abused in this effort – especially Edward Thache, being North Carolina’s own pirate. These great man pseudo-historians never received training in the historical sciences – and never wanted to understand it – only to use it to support the Lost Cause. Ex-Confederate Captain Samuel A’Court Ashe positioned himself as North Carolina’s embodiment of redeemer history – and, we adored his forthright support of our heritage. As a result, he was immortalized on a bronze plaque that still adorns a prominent street in Raleigh!

Essentially, due to the pervasive affects of many careless historians and redeemers like Ashe over the past three centuries, a unique approach has been taken for this book – the utter avoidance of older (especially of Southern U.S. origin) secondary material except as hostile examples. This is an extraordinarily difficult task and not always successful, but it is necessary to clean up the rubbish that bypassed the critical filters (historically not so critical with the popular subject of piracy) through the ages. Secondary materials often repeat great errors of the past without reserve, without proof, and without responsibility – often to sell books, like Johnson. When secondary materials are mentioned in this text, they are often used to contrast or support arguments already clearly made with primary sources, to show agreement or dissension among writers. Where they must be used to fill gaps, an attempt is made to clearly state their speculative qualities. Again, the records for Edward Thache’s family on Jamaica and others, like records from foreign archives, change the accepted narrative significantly. As a result, most pirate histories, if ever attempted in the first place, have to be reexamined. Although some information supposed by Charles Johnson has been proven somewhat accurate, other evidence usually refutes certain spectacular aspects of his creative narrative. I’ve written a novel myself and understand the difference between historical fiction and history. The misuse of fiction to drive an agenda is all too apparent in Johnson. His work is simply too problematic a source to use for history and the origins of our pirates have greatly suffered. If it were just Johnson alone, the problem would not be so pervasive, but every pirate enthusiast since his time has eagerly fed and built upon his wilder, unsupported and evocative adventures from nearly 300 years ago! Nearly every author since Blackbeard’s death in 1718 has to be literally scraped in favor of actual evidence – to avoid Johnson’s imaginative ravings. The search for the origins of pirates can then be fully engaged.

Ironically, Edward Thache was not one of us or a typical pirate, as we now view pirates in the twenty-first century. Still, we have heard of extravagant, usually wealthy, people like him in our modern world. He did not work at minimum wage, or get fired before retirement. His business simply lost to a more aggressive competitor, with better assets and intel. When Blackbeard’s quartermaster William Howard was picked up in Virginia by Gov. Spotswood’s men, he had a substantial amount of gold and two slaves with him. Not a bad retirement for a desperate ne’er-do-well sea rover! Obviously, to find the true Blackbeard the Pirate, we must re-evaluate the very context in which we study piracy in America. Sit back and relax – this could take a while!

Note: This book uses terms which are enormously ambiguous. America in the eighteenth century was a more general term than we use today, covering nearly the entire hemisphere. The English and other European people referred to both American continents, North and South, the West Indies and Canada collectively as New World, America, the provinces, or even collectively as the West Indies. I have used America to represent any place on the western side of the Atlantic. This includes North American colonies as well as those in the West Indies – essentially the cradle of our unique cultural development. Certainly, Americans had transitioned from British society in the New World into a distinct sub-culture that would eventually split into a separate culture along these geographical lines. The early America later split artificially in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Prior to this date, there was no distinct geographical separation between today’s America, South America, Central America, and the West Indies. These are all fairly modern constructions.

Other terms like pirate or privateer, treason, patriot, freedom, even home government can change with time – especially when studied from 300 years later – and with changes in location, such as England to Jamaica, for instance. Many wealthy pirates, specifically our greatest heroes, called themselves privateers and gave a passive nod to the home government while ignoring many of that government’s wishes in favor of local West Indian needs. Then again, they might stand tall for queen and country! The government might see them as pirates from time to time, depending upon their necessity in war and other dire need. Understand that we lived beyond the lines of amity in a hellish wilderness of unbridled lust. We were very much not British for a very long time. These terms are all quite variable and flexible; they can all be very confusing!

Note also: two mistakes made in Blackbeard Revisited: Mist’s Piracy, Thache’s Genealogy have been corrected for this publication. One of those involved the authorship of Charles Leslie’s book, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica (1739), republished the next year as A New Account of Jamaica, and Lucretia Poquet’s second marriage to Nathaniel Ethel, Jr. which was first assumed to be an unknown Axtell. While there yet may be a relationship, no definitive corroborating documents prove it. See pages 151-153 for details. Genealogy, like history, involves the occasional assumption, even though we do not like them! Enjoy!

Acknowledgements

Many people and organizations were instrumental in my work and the research in particular for this book. First, I’d like to thank the North Carolina Archives in Raleigh and all the helpful people who work there. They have a small booklet on the Blackbeard Papers which include references to almost every document in their holdings collected through the years on this subject. These were mostly collected in the 1970s during Robert E. Lee’s research for his book on Blackbeard. Most of the British records cited in this book are from copies contained in their files, or available on microfilm in their reading room. British Online Archives provide a valuable resource for digitized archival material, although at a price, well worth the end results. Other British documents were obtained directly from the National Archives in London, again with a wonderful staff. Same goes for the Bodleian and British Libraries. Many thanks to the researchers with the QAR team at East Carolina University for the meticulously detailed reports made available by them. Special thanks to David D. Moore for his research and suggestions and to Jacques Ducoin for making available his transcriptions of French records pertaining to Edward Thache and his crew’s activities surrounding the capture of La Concorde in the French Windward Islands.

Thanks also go to the many published researchers and authors who have delved into Edward Thache’s background most recently, namely Colin Woodard, Arne Bialusechewski, Mark G. Hanna, Douglas R. Burgess, Peter Earle, Angus Konstam, David Cordingly, Kevin P. McDonald, and many others. Know that if I pick on you from time to time, it is with the utmost respect! Of course, I expect the same courteous launches into my own work. Still, know that yours have been instrumental in opening new paths of inspiration and exploration for me!

Thanks go to Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org for their fantastic databases of excellent primary source material. Familysearch.org in particular contains all of the Jamaican Anglican Church Records available from the mid-seventeenth century. The Blackbeard family discovery also would not have been possible without the services of the Register General’s Department in Spanish Town, Jamaica. Jamaican Council Minutes are also superbly kept by the National Library of Jamaica in Kingston.

Special thanks to my new friends at the Stonehouse History Group in Gloucestershire, England and to Dianne Golding-Frankson of GenealogyPlus, whose help with Jamaican documents helped make the Edward Thache family of St. Jago de la Vega known to the world! Dianne’s unique perspective also helped me understand certain idiosynchracies about Jamaican culture – highly valuable!

I’d like to offer thanks to my friends and family, in particular: my mother, Bernice Pierce Brooks Turner, for her incessant encouragement and archival research. The woman is talented! Also, I’d like to mention my good friends Eddie Riddle and Julie Smith Brooks and their respective families, without whom life would have been more difficult during this long process. To my Florida cowboy friend, Frank Dixon, for teaching me all there is to know about living the way our ancestors did, including how to avoid bears and gators when trompsing through Florida parks! To Sam Newell, for the knowledgeable sounding board, advice, and friendship and the great minds at North Carolina Historic Sites and the Maritime Museums. I’d also like to thank my partner in local history and expert in Port Bath, Gillian Hookway Jones.

Thanks also to all my instructors at East Carolina University for teaching me to think and question, not simply accept: Dr. Wade Dudley, the first one to enter my life (at 8:00 am) and expert on North Carolina and naval history – and for keeping me on my toes with the Elements of Historical Theory. Dr. Carl Swanson also instilled me with colonial history (four classes!) and the grammar (oh, Strunk & White!). Thanks to Dr. Christopher Oakley for introducing me to Jill Lepore – loads of great perspective there! Thanks to Dr. Kennetta Perry’s Jamaican work, Dr. Charles Ewen for the archaeology of pirates and his fascinating presentations, Dr. Lynn Harris for her encouragement, suggestions, and for nautical archaeology on pirate wrecks, and all other instructors who have influenced my education in the Maritime Studies Program at the aptly nicknamed Pirate Nation.

Introduction

North Carolina’s infamous pirate Blackbeard has stirred many an imagination for almost three centuries. Yes, I said North Carolina’s infamous pirate. The state’s historian who laid claim to the pirate, Dr. Hugh Rankin, wrote The Pirates of Colonial North Carolina back in 1969. Dr. Rankin began his tale of Blackbeard, the Fiercest Pirate of Them All with, Blackbeard, more than any other, can be called North Carolina’s own pirate.[1] Fickle as many of these love-hate relationships can be, the venom was only a line away. Blackbeard might have taken offense – the North Carolina historian harshly added this piece of trash, however, could not be considered a credit to any community.[2] With this phrase, Rankin simply repeated a common impression engendered by the semi-biographical A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates by Capt. Charles Johnson and other popular works authored by many just as thrilled by Capt. Johnson’s flamboyant tales. North Carolina’s unremitting claim to Blackbeard, actually a resident of Jamaica, continued for three centuries.

Still, in a very real sense, North Carolina does own a tangible mammoth-sized artifact of Blackbeard’s legend. The 300th anniversary of Blackbeard’s demise in North Carolina’s Outer Banks approaches in 2018 and more than fifteen years ago, his flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) was found beneath the sands of Beaufort Inlet. It has been revealing its secrets, as well as confirming and disproving former assumptions since that time. New discoveries are made daily.  Thousands of visitors flock to Beaufort’s North Carolina Maritime Museum to see the latest artifacts conserved by East Carolina University’s QAR conservation team. Medical instruments likely taken from Charleston during the infamous pirate’s daring blockade of that port: cannon, the ship’s bell, and gold dust are highlights of the display. 

Still, many former assumptions about Blackbeard have been mired in a deep morass of unknown factors, namely his origins. Thus, it was easy to accuse him of many things: hardhearted thief, evil and wicked murderer, a traitor to king, country, and even his own men. The years since his death have continued this demonizing process because, as pirate authors usually discovered, as with Johnson, it sells books. A General History and Treasure Island sold many copies, certainly, and became undoubted classics. Still, let us not call these histories. Furthermore, all those centuries of pulling the focus from Jamaica to North Carolina may have obscured his true origins.

Traditionally, the first told of Edward Thache by Johnson, he pirated enemy vessels in Queen Anne’s War as a privateer. Still, this was barely a whisper, relying on the word of Johnson’s popular, unknown, and unverifiable source. Afterward, one might guess, he may have become a merchant seaman for a short while until the prospects of certain and easy profit came in the form of wrecked Spanish treasure ships on the coast of Florida. One deposition that Johnson probably heard about before his second edition tells that he sailed consort to fish these wrecks with Benjamin Hornigold late in 1716. He may have lived in the port of Kingston as did Henry Jennings. These records tell of his life as a pirate, but what about before?

Recently-discovered records reveal that he was a member of a good family on Jamaica, likely born elsewhere, who served in the Royal Navy, perhaps as an officer, on HMS Windsor during Queen Anne’s War in 1706. This startling revelation, regarding his father’s plantation, inherited by his son Edward, raises new hints as to his motivation and creditable class. These Jamaican Thache records have been likely confirmed by contemporary author Charles Leslie, who may have met his family in St. Jago de la Vega, or Spanish Town, Jamaica. Records of that Thache family offer even more as to their wealth and social position in Jamaica’s capital. After the peace treaty ending that war, he may have continued taking prizes as though still at war, perhaps with an official commission from the governor of Jamaica, like many others, fighting for Jamaica – not England. Finally, he became the rebel type known by British authorities as a ne’er-do-well – a pirate, an enemy of all mankind.

Capt. Charles Johnson, famous pirate biographer and contemporary of many, asserted in 1724 that Privateers in Time of War are a Nursery for Pyrates against a Peace and this was supposed to explain these men and their alleged crimes.[3] Still, that was not the entire story for many, especially when other non-traditional records revealed real and substantial human beings, not just gentlemen, such as with Edward Thache, Henry Jennings, Stede Bonnet, Thomas Barrow, and others. The tale of these early pirates’ gentlemanly demeanor, formerly wealthy privateers, has been confined, narrowed, and almost eradicated. The people we call pirates today most resemble those found in the Bahamas, driven out by 1718. This remote and neglected colony set the narrative for 300 years of pirate lore.

The Bahamas had been ignored and neglected by its wealthy private owners and populated by exiled Puritans of its early days, mixed with outcasts from all across the Atlantic community. These became the common pirates so well described by pirate authors over the past three centuries. They were disdained by the wealthier Anglican privateer communities of Jamaica, Barbados, and Bermuda. The class and religious difference was not readily discernable from observers in the present, but it appears when viewed in its proper historical context.

Wreckers in the Bahamas, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and other struggling maritime locales were not the wealthy privateers of the elite Anglo-American world. These were the pirates of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the ne’er-do-wells, outcasts of the English Civil War, entrenched Puritans derided by ruling Anglicans following the Restoration in 1660 and especially after the Vestry Acts restored full Anglican domination. These were people who feared the return of Catholicism with the Stuart Restoration, after which Whig propagandist Henry Care warned Protestant gentlemen will be…

… forced to fly destitute of bread and harbour, your wives prostituted to the lust of every savage bog-trotter, your daughters ravished by goatish monks, your smaller children tossed upon pikes, or torn limb from limb, whilst you have your own bowels ripped up … or else murdered with some other exquisite tortures and holy candles made of your grease (which was done within our memory in Ireland), your dearest friends flaming in Smithfield, foreigners rendering your poor babes that can escape everlasting slaves, never more to see a Bible, nor hear again the joyful sounds of Liberty and Property. This gentlemen is Popery.[4]

Liberty and Property should sound familiar to early American political scholars and adherents to John Locke. Bahamians were generally destitute religiously-spurned men who continued to espouse liberty from monarchy, inspiring tales of democracy from some authors, tales of a Republic of Pirates from others. These outcasts of British society often signed on as lowly pirate crews – the pirates who modeled the characters we grew to fear as the notorious ones – like Long John Silver. These were people who did not, with rare exception, ever make it into the history books – a few though, only as notorious criminals, did. These low-bred brigands of the maritime homeless community looted and commited larceny to maintain their meager flow of necessaries in their economically-deprived society. Truly criminals, they easily turned pirate in the surprisingly tolerant American waters, especially with elite heroic examples to follow – Drake, Hawkins, Morgan, and Bartholemew. If any of us have a pirate ancestor, it would most likely be one of these desperate roguish men, not the likes of their heroes or the navy veteran and staunch Anglican conservative Edward Thache of St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica!

Peter Earle in Pirate Wars, understood well the structural nature of early piracy. The first crews, he says, were drawn mainly from the men of the West Indian privateering community and that they were the ones who accepted the pardons of 1718.[5] But, like most, he was influenced by Johnson’s propaganda against Thache and his brethren in 1724 – and by Treasure Island or Marcus Rediker in more recent years. Earle conflated the pirates of the Bahamas with Jamaican privateers and claimed that these privateers were egalitarian and, by no means, was this true. Privateers, by great contrast, were fewer and wealthy men of estates – educated Anglican lords over others, slavers, and capitalists of the West Indies – if Edward Thache is any indication. They had been weened on tales of their iconic pirate heroes, Sir Francis Drake and Sir Henry Morgan, who died in St. Jago de la Vega in 1688, about the time the Thaches might have arrived from Gloucestershire. These were the well-born, iconic heroes of the privateers of Jamaica and other affluent Anglican societies. They may have expressed equality between each other, the one percent of the colonial world, but not with their crews, comparable to the pirates described by Marcus Rediker after 1718 – like those commoners of the government-less Bahamas.

What happened to alter the narrative? Politics, of course – specifically early British derision of Americans in general – against both Puritan and Anglican American alike. Piracy once was an accepted economic method of West Indian life; it was chiefly essential in Jamaica for more than half a century. Still, as seen from an increasingly Whig England at home, that pattern had begun to change by the 1680s, although it met resistance. Utilizing America’s own print media, Britain vilified not only the Puritan outcasts of the recent Civil War, but also the former martial and feudal Anglican West Indian heroes to the empire. Facing a changing social, political, and economic paradigm, quite different from the mother country, wealthy privateers and common pirates both were tempted to revolt. Opposition to piracy brought Britain’s colonies against her more than half a century before the American Revolution. Still, at this early stage, wealthy privateers needed more reason to go against all authority. They needed a motive more inticing to risk their families and good names.

What could entice these martial conservative gentlemen to risk Britain’s wrath? As if told by author Robert Louis Stevenson, or perhaps as echoed in our capitalists today, that lure was greed, avarice, money – hundreds of thousands of pieces of eight provided that motive. Merchandise, 14,000,000 pesos in silver, and significant quantities of gold from the wreck of a massive flotilla of Spanish treasure galleons strewn across the coast of Florida, may have been enough inducement.[6] The wrecks were a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity for ex-privateers, pirates, and wreckers alike. It created a treasure-lust that evaporated all patriotism, all resistance to mother England’s liberal desires and created, in my opinion, the Golden Age of Piracy – especially for a diverging America.

This diverse collection of wealthy profiteer mariners lost control; all sense of national allegiance disappeared in the shiny gleam of gold and silver. That allegiance had already been weakened when a German was thrust upon the formerly Stuart throne – a German who spoke no English and barely had a marital connection to Britain. Fishing castaway Spanish treasure on the coast of Florida quickly gave way to pilfering it directly from Spanish salvers – plundering it from others who had already fished it. Eventually, these newly-labled enemies of all mankind took any ship that they desired. That the Spanish Piece-of-Eight or Spanish dollar was the all important goal of the English in the West Indies is still evident in modern America. Until the first half of the twentieth century, the American quarter (or quarter dollar) was often called two bits or two parts of the whole. The American dollar was thus divided into four quarters or two bits, making on the whole eight pieces – like the Spanish Piece-of-Eight! We still think in West Indian economic terms.

Once the theft had been committed, stopping may not really have been an option, even for substantial ex-privateer captains, especially when their leadership was threatened by the whims of an increasingly treasure-hungry and less-financially-secure pirate crew. Afterwards, privateers and common pirates banded together and reluctantly created a society of rebel thieves on the Bahamas, the pirate Republic, as journalist Colin Woodard saw it. The mold was forever cast – the future had taken root. Britain’s Board of Trade then used the rhetorical weapons of the new colonial print media to destroy the reputations of gentlemen privateers-turned-outlaw of yesterday – pirates, rebels, and revolutionaries like Edward Thache. America lost its first revolution, branded as a rebellion, its heroes damned forever.[7]

The strongest and most gentlemanly example – indeed a threat to the new liberal empire who simply would not submit – was indeed, Thache. He was no ordinary pirate. His actions, even through the rhetorical haze and misinformation, speak from many primary sources: vital, editorial, tabloid, and adversarial. He and his crew sold their loot to the residents of Jamaica, the West Indies, the Bahamas, North and South Carolina, Boston, and many other frontier maritime locales. He used theatrics to induce immediate surrender and prevent unnecessary violence. He used a cultivated education, cunning intelligence, and military training to fool his enemies and sometime partners. Edward Thache was by no means evil, apparently less violent than a few of his contemporaries, like Charles Vane and Edward Low. He was still the most successful pirate of the Golden Age. That and his military training made him and others like him official targets to a new liberalized English political viewpoint. America had to learn the lesson that England wanted them to adopt – that it no longer needed or wanted its heroes.

America resisted, it continued to revere their heroes and desire their rough, rowdy, and profitable warlike Stuart version of trade. For Americans of this time, trading with men like Edward Thache seemed no more unusual than trade with any London or Bristol merchant. His arrival in various ports was not feared, but welcomed. He brought even more rare and exotic goods than backwoods locals – us, our people – usually received.

Edward Thache and his pirate crew eventually came to privately-run North Carolina, somewhat late in his career. Like its sister colony of the Bahamas, this private colony had a reputation for administrative malfeasance, salutary neglect, and maritime mischief. Thache probably believed the Carolina coast as useful as the shoal waters of the Bahamas before Gov. Woodes Rogers’ arrival, dispersing the pirate crews. North Carolina’s early instability and past acts of mutinous administrators John Gibbs, Seth Sothel, John Culpeper, and Thomas Cary suggested an open invitation to those pirates who accepted the offer.  Pirates called such locations pirate holes, or a place to relax, hide, and prepare. Scholars and other writers often call them pirate nests. In America, there existed a simpler society, more traditional and conservative – unlike liberalizing England – an ideology more familiar to Edward Thache, where pirates were not only welcomed, but regarded as necessities, great heroes like the iconic Sir Francis Drake.

Eventually, Gov. Woodes Rogers and other colonial administrators commissioned bounty hunters to seek out these victims of change. They evaded the hunters in a colonial atmosphere that whole-heartedly resented England’s interference – until the rhetoric had its intended effect – the stories of their misdeeds were printed and diffused into the colonial world. Colonial merchants read of their depredations every week in the newspapers and began to fear that the worst was true. Pirates became less heroic and more villainous in the eyes of the colonial merchant. They soon became enemies of all mankind in the average American’s eyes as well, not just in Britain’s. In the case of ex-pirate Benjamin Hornigold, the hunted turned hunter, became a traitor to America, and captured the truly villainous and exceptional Charles Vane and others of his pirate brethren. Pirates, ever since this time, became the poor, wretched, hungry, and desperate ne’er-do-wells, villains of all nations, as one pirate scholar termed them.

Edward Thache probably had not wanted to surrender once the pardon had been offered. There is, however, some indication of this wish after wrecking his flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) upon arrival to the shoals of North Carolina. In the end, he resigned himself to Britain’s wishes, his fate, and attempted to live out his tedious life as an ex-Royal Navy landed Stuart-Tory gentleman privateer under an increasingly hostile and liberal royal Whig government.

Perhaps another reason for North Carolina to claim the pirate – their colony was his place of execution or murder. Two Royal Navy crews and a single royal governor with a personal vendetta eventually hunted Edward Thache among the shoals of the Pamlico Sound. There, these assasins captured his crew and killed the officially-styled notorious pirate near Ocracoke Inlet in November 1718. They placed his bloody severed head on the bowsprit of Ranger for their triumphant return to Virginia – demonstrating to all their dominance and control.

Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood, channeling the Board’s desires, was pleased to murder Thache, but he failed to ask the king, who routinely issued pardons for such men, his royal subjects and those that would soon be needed again in the next war, only a month away from Thache’s death.[8] Moreover, no one asked the local residents who would sorely miss the occasional inexpensive shipments of sugar and cocoa. It looked suspiciously as though Spotswood and his North Carolinian allies simply eliminated his less predictable and harder to remove competition in syndicate style, perhaps the only style he believed might be effective against the pirates of America.

This picture contrasts sharply with many current views – often popularly desired views as well. Lindley S. Butler, renowned North Carolina historian, and maritime historian Marcus Rediker both see pirates as drawn from the lowest social classes. They believed pirates struggled to be recognized as significant. The evidence today leans away from this assumption, at least in regards to the more affluent, wealthy pirates in the beginning. Edward Thache desired to simply make a profit off the Spanish wrecks, like smuggler John Hancock a half-century later. Both men were gentlemen, landed planters or merchants from great cities like St. Jago de la Vega on Jamaica, with families, parents, sons and daughters, as with Thache or Boston, as with Hancock.

Britain’s media campaign in the Boston News-Letter, courts, and perhaps with literary influence by Capt. Charles Johnson, may have been successful. There developed an anti-historical retelling of the beginnings of British America – but, one more suited to Britain’s immediate fiscal need. Winners tell history. With the offer of pardons from the king, many of these ex-privateers retired to Jamaica, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Virginia, New England, or the backwaters of the Albemarle and Bath in North Carolina as did their families. Some became official privateers for the Royal Navy once again. They sought to preserve their captured fortunes and pride as any other exhausted conservative who understood the reality of their lost cause.

Uncertain methods and abuses of profiteering, salutary neglect of proprietary colonies, gold and silver, sugar and slaves all created America – and likewise, it distorted our modern image of many aspects of America’s history, our own natures, and abusive economics, and especially our old heroes like Edward Thache. Ironically, Thache was very much an American, when America had included the West Indies. As a wealthy West Indian merchant, Edward Thache epitomized American disrespect for British authority. Perhaps he might have been an early George Washington, in another time – under different circumstances.

Disrespect for British authority should certainly sound familiar to us. Anti-government, deregulated freedom might have been Thache’s own rallying cry to his crew. His wealth, flamboyance, audacity, and intelligence made him visible by comparison, but he was not all that different from others in the revolutionary gentleman’s club. He certainly shared similarities with Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty - both anti-British terrorists. Thache may even have shared a common class and ideology with Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin – those that would one day fight a successful revolution against mother England and become independent. In many ways, disgruntled ex-privateers and pirates alike finally founded their Republic of Pirates in America in 1776, a revolt that owes much to the conservative American ideology that had precipitated from the Golden Age of Piracy.

As an Anglo-American planter, merchant, Royal Navy man, privateer, or pirate, Edward Thache merely followed the practices, precepts, and morals established by his West Indian forebears. He learned the tactics of other naval heroes of his day. He and his family owned and used slaves on their St. Catherine’s Parish plantation. They observed a feudal structure like that of America’s Deep South. Georgia, Alabama, Tennesssee and others grew from Carolina and later became part of the American Confederacy. These colonies and states also followed the same feudal West Indian social structure with great plantations of thousands of acres and African slaves working the fields like on the sugar plantations of Jamaican estates – perhaps even the Thache’s. Journalist and researcher Colin Woodard best explores these ideas and asserts that the Deep South received their ideology directly from Barbados slave lords, who lived in a wild West-Indian style slave society, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many.[9] He painted Deep South slave society as a system so cruel and despotic [that it] shocked even its seventeenth-century contemporaries.[10]  He further clarified that it has remained a bastion of white supremacy, gentlemanly privilege, and modeled upon the classical Republicanism of the slave states of the ancient world.[11] In describing the Deep South, Woodard, also a pirate scholar, described the West Indies in which Edward Thache had once flourished.

Edward Thache’s daring and flamboyance became politically untenable when the political and economic paradigm changed and he did not. Johnson’s rhetoric helped Thache get noticed in a bad way, even by former pirates, turned pirate-hunters. The blockade of Charles Town disrupted trade and upset the local elite who once liked their pirates. Still, those days were quickly fading. If not for the British opposition, he may have become another John C. Calhoun with characteristic assertion of states’ rights, limited government, and anti-regulation, defending slavery and encouraging nullification and secession.

This book has three goals. The first is to demonstrate that private colonies were corrupt and needed central government control for any progress to commence once Spain’s possessions in the West Indies had been largely secured – once Britain dominated in America. Second, the opinion of this author is that the Golden Age of early eighteenth-century piracy had an epicenter. It began from one catastrophic event that followed almost immediately the end of Queen Anne’s War - the wreck of General Juan Esteban de Ubilla’s and General Don Antonio de Echeverz’s flotilla of eleven treasure galleons. An early season hurricane spilled 14,000,000 pesos worth of gold and silver on the shallow coast of Florida on July 30, 1715. Thirdly, the general modern view of dirty, poor, and destitute pirates, at least their leaders, needs to be revised. Especially, the popular image of Edward Thache as the demonic, evil, and notorious pirate Blackbeard is simply not accurate. Edward Thache, himself, created this false image most likely as a trick to prevent unnecessary violence – it was not intended as history. Johnson, an unknown controversial author and early pirate writer likely using a pseudonym, expanded upon Thache’s theatrical brainchild. He took Thache’s evil character, stretched the image beyond historicity, and used it to popularize his criminal biography and get rich. It set the stage for America’s perceptions of pirates and became a literal guidebook to American piracy. Mariners like North Carolina mariner John Vidal since this time probably read A General History and gained inspiration for their own criminal acts. Still, some also gained a healthy respect for the consequences of piracy. America had been brought to heel – it changed, but only for a few decades, as it grew, built roads, established lucrative trade patterns, and developed the infrastructure to make another successful, more confident, attempt at revolution.[12]

As to Edward Blackbeard Thache belonging to North Carolina, well, he died in North Carolina’s waters. The recent discovery and recovery of the QAR, wrecked by Thache beneath the shallow shoal waters near that same inlet in North Carolina has invigorated a renewed interest in the man, if you’ll notice, mostly in Johnson’s image of the notorious pirate. Still, some speculate upon his life, possible offspring, and those of his crew, many of whom are undoubtedly ancestors to some North Carolinians. Blackbeard’s legend, again, has infected nearly everyone in the state and country. Movies, documentaries, television series, and new theories abound.

Recent accessibility of genealogical records from Jamaica tell of Edward Thache and his family, the likely family of Blackbeard the Pirate. The surprising detail of these records invigorated genealogical study of many pirates and those associated with them. Thache had indeed left some trace beyond Carolina’s shoals and other wealthy gentleman pirates, quite few in the population and prolific in Jamaica and other locales, can indeed be traced genealogically. The St. Jago de la Vega or Spanish Town archives and church in St. Catherine’s Parish indeed reveal a great deal about Thache’s Anglican family. Other primary records enhance and help to establish the trail all the way back to Gloucestershire and perhaps Bristol, just miles away down the River Severn. This book makes a greater effort to use this genealogical method more thoroughly than ever before.

This rediscovery of Edward Thache opens new chapters of the legendary brigand of the Golden Age of Piracy.  Too much has been happily – maybe conveniently from a political standpoint – left to the imagination without these new records. What of his life before he came to North Carolina? Who were his family? How different or similar were West Indian privateers to our wealthy capitalist great men and their families? What role did religion play in the cultural changes? We can truly add to our knowledge, now. But, what are the new implications of this knowledge? Also, what was it like to be a pirate of the Golden Age? This book and the records explored in it will finally answer some of these questions in detail. That detail, of course, is rather exciting!

---

[1] Hugh F. Rankin, The Pirates of Colonial North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1960), p. 43.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, from their first rise and settlement in the island of Providence, to the present time. With the remarkable actions and adventures of the two female pyrates Mary Read and Anne Bonny; contain’d in the following chapters, ... Chap. I. Of Capt. Avery. II. Of Capt. Martel. III. Of Capt. Teach. ... By Captain Charles Johnson, 2nd edition (London: printed for, and sold by T. Warner, 1724), 1.

[4] Henry Care, quoted in M. L. Donnelly, Interest, Honour, and Horatian Raillery in the Service of Liberty: An Account of the Growth of Popery, Marvell and Liberty (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 313.

[5] Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), 166.

[6] Lowell W. Newton, Juan Esteban de Ubilla and the Flota of 1715, The Americas, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Oct., 1976), 279.

[7] Colin Woodard, Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought them Down (Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Inc., 2008), cover.

[8] Lindley S. Butler, Pirates, Privateers, & Rebel Raiders of the Carolina Coast (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 24-25.

[9] Colin Woodard, Up in Arms, Tufts Magazine (Fall 2013) [online magazine] (Medford, MA: Tufts University, 2013), http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/features/up-in-arms.html (accessed 8 Nov 2013).

[10] Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Penguin Books, 201), 9.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Sam Newell, A Man of ‘Desperate Fortune’ – The Career and Trial of John Vidal: North Carolina’s Last Pirate, Tributaries (Oct 2004): 7-17.

Chapter 1

Profit, Treason, and Freedom in the West Indies

Braver than merchants, more financially astute than gentlemen…

~Claire Jowitt

Treason is a relative term. Most often, treason is defined as the offense of acting to overthrow one’s government or to harm or kill its sovereign.[13] For most, it implies leading a rebellion, or somehow causing a disruption in the workings of government – assuming that the traitor belongs to the government affected, of course.  Otherwise, the definition becomes not simply vague; it makes little sense. Certainly, of course, in cases where a Member of Parliament votes to behead his own monarch, as with Col. Daniel Axtell (1622-1660) in 1649, that qualifies as treason – well, maybe and maybe not.

The regicide Axtell, shown in figure 1, certainly a political upstart, tried his best to swing the vote in favor of King Charles I’s execution. Lady Ann Fairfax interrupted the king’s trial proceedings, and Axtell threatened to shoot her.  He also bullied and beat the relatively quiet and probably fearful soldiers in attendance to make them cry for justice and execution of their own divinely-anointed king. The trial transcript from October 12, 1660 at Hickes-Hall read:

Mr. Axtell, Prisoner at the Bar, commanded his Souldiers to cry out, Justice, which the Souldiers not readily obeying of him, I saw him beat four or five of them with his Cane , until they cried out, (with himself) Justice, Justice, Execution, Execution, which made me turn to a Noble Lord, by whom I then stood, and said, Pray my Lord take notice, there is not above 4 or 5 that cry out Justice, Justice : I heard also of their spitting in the Kings Face; and I think no bodies sufferings have been so like those of our Saviour Christ Jesus, as his Majesties were.[14]

Parliament had done the unthinkable and killed their king. After the vote mentioned by the trial transcript, Colonel Daniel Axtell, then, in 1649, captain of the Parliamentary Guard, led the convicted king to a scaffold erected at Whitehall, London.  Presumably, the people, or to whomever that phrase then referred, wanted their monarch dead. In one swing of the axe, the Interregnum or Parliamentary rule began. It would last for eleven years. To Tory supporters of the king, Axtell was a traitor; to the new Commonwealth, Axtell was a hero. Where be the treason here?

Axtell then served the Commonwealth as the leader of the Irish invasion and became notorious for cruelty. A year after his appointment as commander of the Irish invasion army, Oliver Cromwell suspended Axtell for killing prisoners who had surrendered after the promise of quarter. On his return to England, a Royalist privateer captured him and held him prisoner in the Isle of Scilly. Upon release, he surprisingly returned again as the governor of Ireland – still a hero.[15]

Of course, we have only the trial documents to reveal this story; they can be most untrustworthy – too many emotional and political desires morphing actual fact! Politics, not necessarily involving the people, can be extremely fickle, swinging the pendulum drastically from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Eleven years later, the executed king’s son, Charles II returned from exile in France and restored the monarchy. Tories, loyalist supporters, again in power, looked upon regicides like Axtell with the utmost horror and disgust. What the people or 99% actually thought, no one really knows. Of course, after the Restoration in 1660, some of those capable of recording documents then accused Axtell of having behaved discourteously towards the King.[16] Again, presumably the people, unrepresented of course, agreed with this. Col. Axtell, now a traitor and no longer a hero, was summarily executed, drawn and quartered, the four parts of his body distributed to the gates of London.

Figure 1:  Col. Daniel Axtell (1622-1660) – Source: http://www.axtellfamily.org/axfamous/regicide/index.htm Image used by permission of Axtell Family Organization.

Tory anger, insatiable as it was, did not stop there.  At first, they hunted the duke of Albemarle, George Monk, who tried to establish an emergency Puritan government under Sir Henry Vane. Not long after, a warrant was granted for searching the house and warehouse of Mr. [Daniel] Axtell, son of Col. Axtell… for the said pamphlet and other seditious papers.[17]  The Tories or king’s men then hunted Axtell’s family.

They fled. The younger Daniel Axtell (1640-1686), son of the regicide, escaped to the new colony of Carolina and became a prominent landgrave there, probably with Albemarle’s help. A more accepting and wilder frontier America received the traitor’s family as grandees, like the father to the Parliamentarians. Quaker Proprietor John Archdale granted Daniel three thousand acres of land in Carolina. Col. Axtell’s nephew, Dr. William Axtell (1644-1724) left for Jamaica, married and settled first in St. Catherine’s and then in St. Andrew’s Parish, becoming an Assemblyman there, as did his son Daniel. William died in Port Royal in 1724. The regicide’s brother Thomas (1619-1646) founded the honored Axtell family of New England. Treason worked rather well for the family of the regicide/traitor/hero Col. Axtell - beyond the lines of amity in America.[18]

What about the people during all of these events? Well, the average sheep herder or malt grower in England of the time probably did not vote and could have cared less whether they had a Parliament, king, president, or whatever. A survey conducted in 1780 revealed that the electorate in England and Wales consisted of just 214,000 people – less than three percent of the total population of approximately 8 million.[19] The electorate in the colonies probably reflected this same percentage right up until the American Revolution and afterward. So, treason could not really have concerned the people as a complete body, only those who ruled – the three percent at the top. They also wrote and kept most of the records.

Those three percent used the term treason rather loosely in those records. It appears frequently in English/British records of the sixteenth through eighteenth century. Usually, in the daily administrative parley, tempers flared and treason in the records carried a tone of righteous indignation, or betrayal. Still, those who used the word would likely not make good examples of patriots, either. Treason was a highly relative term. It truly depended upon your politics or point of view.

Treason could be easily accomplished by simply speaking against the king or just ignoring local authority. Take, for example, the petition of Henry Darnell to the Privy Council concerning John Coode for alleged treasonable words against the Prince of Orange.[20] Whereas Axtell chopped off his king’s head, Coode merely spoke words and was accused of similar treason. Moreover, Samuel Long of Port Royal was accused of treason with intention to grasp the legislative power into his own hands by ignoring Jamaica’s Deputy-Governor Col. Edward Morgan’s commands.[21] Long merely voiced the intent, but he did not carry it through. The House of Lords even hoped to pass An Act to make it High Treason to hold Correspondence with the Sons of the Pretender [i.e. the denounced James III or Jacobi] to His Majesty’s Crown in 1744. This arose almost a full three decades after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. These national wounds took much time to heal.[22]

For the Carolina Lords Proprietors, they might even commit treason against themselves. Some of them wrote to Carolina governor Phillip Ludwell about the unwarrantable acts of one of their own, rebel proprietor Seth Sothel living then in the Albemarle [Northeastern North Carolina], on the estate later owned by Thomas Pollock. They wrote that The power of the proprietors is not vested in any one of them but in the majority of them, and for him to oppose that majority is high treason.[23]  Can anyone commit treason against a small body of private owners rather than the head of a sovereign nation? Again, it depends. The meaning of the word is highly ambiguous, almost impossible to define, in fact.

The same is true of the related terms privateer and pirate. Comparing the acts of a privateer, or a vessel and crew working for one sovereign government to prey upon the property of another, with that of a pirate, acting against all nations, as seen from the victim’s perspective, seems apropos. The government who authorized the piracy, as seen from the point of view of another nation, though, might knight their privateer and give him estates like Queen Elizabeth with Sir Francis Drake, or "El Draque [Dragon]," as the Spanish called him. So, the terms are somewhat interchangeable, from two opposing sides, that is.

Legal scholar Jill Harrelson in Blackbeard Meets Blackwater: An Analysis of International Conventions that Address Piracy and the Use of Private Security Companies to Protect the Shipping Industry tells that the United Nations has adopted a modern legal definition for piracy. Article 101 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea states that piracy is an illegal act of violence or detention that is committed for private ends and stipulates that these acts must occur on the high seas for this rule to apply. Violators of this law are subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning that any nation can be brought to justice for any such act. Interestingly, among those few nations that have not signed this agreement is the United States. In all probability, certain acts of private companies, conducting business on the high seas may occasionally stray across this legal definition and commit such an act. Somalia has claimed that the United States is guilty of dumping waste in their waters and is, therefore, guilty of piracy. This illegal act of violence may, however, also cover the legal realm of terrorism.[24]

Arguably, the term pirates could imply terrorists, having no obvious sovereign loyalties and preying upon everyone, anywhere. In this view, could a pirate truly be guilty of treason? What if he had permission from at least one sovereign government and promised not to raid any of their vessels? Then, he acted as privateer. No treason there, either. So, a pirate who worked within the confines of one’s own laws was a privateer to his government. If the pirate defied all governments, then universal jurisdiction would apply. He would then be a dreaded enemy of mankind, yet he could technically be no traitor, for he belonged to no sovereign nation.. Suppose this pirate created his own sovereign nation as was later attempted on Madagascar and in the Bahamas – what about Somalia?

Somali pirates are generally not wealthy men like Jamaican privateers or early pirates of the late seventeenth century. In this respect, they best reflect the common wreckers and pirates of the Bahamas in the Golden Age. Somali pirates, still, like some Caribbean pirates, have the support of the local population and government, as with Gov. Hamilton of Jamaica and Gov. Eden of North Carolina, to name only two colonial examples. Somalis also control the politics on their part of the African horn. They say that many nations, including the United States, behaving like pirates, have been dumping toxic waste in their waters, killing and poisoning their fishing industry. They claim that the use of counter-piracy is simply a means of survival. Independent Somalia news site WardheerNews found that seventy percent of Somalis strongly support the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.[25] Would their pirates then be terrorists, or privateers, or traitors, or national heroes?

Assistant Professor at Ambedkar University, New Delhi, Dr. Rohit Negi justifies Somali piracy as not merely about acts we consider evil. For him, it also represents a response to the glaring unevenness of the emergent global order.[26] This view holds Marxist elements similar to other proposed arguments for similar reasons – most notably arguments used by progressives to describe the alleged corrupt political establishment of the United States in the present day.

We should also examine the ambiguous term sovereign, usually defined as possessing supreme or ultimate power. Now, what exactly does this mean? Is this not simply another relative term? One definition defines this term as implying possession of supreme political power, whether it be held by a committee, ruler, or the people. When does a polity attain sovereign status? Must this polity have defined boundaries or can its borders be fluid, as in a maritime organization? Must it be a nation with borders, in other words? When does it gain ultimate power? Who makes that determination? And, over whom does it wield this power? Then again, if another country, also possessing the same powers, as they see it, refuses to recognize another’s sovereign status, their privateers would suddenly become terrorists or pirates – to the sovereign power, that is. Again, privateers, or those commissioned by one government to prey on the ships of others, cannot be pirates to the government that commissioned them. Again, this is specifically relative to the government. There is no guarantee of agreement between all governments.

Harrelson also encountered a rarer form of defense against pirates involving privateers not sanctioned by any government, but by private companies. They are generally hired mercenaries that have been hired by a sovereign country – again, most notably by the United States. Certainly, the services provided by Blackwater Worldwide, now known as Xi, could very well be termed piracy by the provisions of UN Artcle 101. As Harrelson noted, Blackwater is no stranger to controversy and has been criticized for some of its questionable actions in Iraq.[27] While this is not a new idea in maritime law, Article 101 does provide some precarious legal wrinkles for American companies like Blackwater/Xi and its employers, like the United States.

These terms are all highly ambiguous and undefinable to the satisfaction of all. Treason, like sovereign or pirate is simply an ambiguous term, especially when viewed from a personal or political point-of-view. These terms can be found in almost any official record, from royal courts to commons and they mean but little.  Furthermore, speakers of these words seldom intended a strict interpretation be applied in the first place, except in the rarest of cases.  Even if, like Col. Daniel Axtell, you chop off a king’s head, the concept of treason can still be quite vague.  Ask his family – early and wealthy founders of America!

Hiding Behind… Blackbeard?

When did Anglo-American piracy begin in the West Indies?  Who or what exactly was Blackbeard, the quintessential pirate of the Golden Age? The answer to the first question is easy – basically when the English came to the West Indies to steal from the French and Spanish. France and Spain had already been stealing from each other in the West Indies, by the way; still, Catholic nations tended to work together more often than not. Also, this answer is quite simplistic since England viewed these men as privateers. Again, describing the quintessential pirate is just as ambiguous as treason. The second question is certainly harder, since Anglo-American piracy was probably best called a transition from privateering to privateering – or a change in the viewpoint of sovereign identity. West Indians and other Americans began to see themselves as a sovereign entity, apart from English rule. This manifestation, however, had been encouraged by mother England herself.

Discovering who Blackeard was is so much harder to accomplish because our understanding of Golden Age Piracy is so completely misunderstood. British historian Patrick Pringle saw that pirates had been modified from swashbuckling adventurers to common criminals.[28] America, though, loved its pirates and Britain’s ire against them was born, of course, by politics. By the turn of the eighteenth century, Britain waged a media war against pirates and, for a long while, they waned in the background of British America. Still, America restored them somewhat modified after the American Revolution when America became independent, yet modeled itself in Britain’s image. After all, these supposed ruthless and immoral pirates were once our greatest heroes! They would rise again in the new independent America – with dual personalities as both capitalist entrepreneurs and the crude stuff of legend. Pirates became the best and worst of American businessmen.

The full realization of this Pirate Thesis took some time. In the late nineteenth century, comparing technological advancement in the United States to our abilities before the onset of this technology – older, cruder methods – tells of an explosive period of progress – the realization of our piratical Manifest Destiny. Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis was coincident, of course, with the popularity of the late nineteenth-century book Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson’s popular creation was based upon Johnson’s older narrative that had slowly been falling into the background amidst a uniquely and coalescing American frame of mind. Pirates of the Caribbean had been repossessed from Britain by America. Psychology is not my area, but… why bring historical catastrophes of the past to the forefront so brightly – almost making fun of it? Such progress in technology shines a light on capitalism; and, perhaps it may have been too bright for our comfort. Focusing on our piratical desires and methods elevated our blustering egos. Still, treating piracy seriously as a valid historical subject might expose our own chosen economic methods as unquestionably immoral to the rest of the world. Reducing the subject to the level of entertainment makes it more palatable – easier to swallow and for us to sleep at night – while we relished in the stories and continued our immoral practices to pirate land from Native Americans.

Was Blackbeard that different than our capitalists today? Consider that if piracy is theft, and capitalism is not, then if a person knows that someone is coming to take his