Capture of the Pirate Blackbeard
12:00 AM
Ye Pirate Bold
Dead Men Tell No Tales
Curated by Sonia Larbi
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| Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, Capture of the Pirate Blackbeard 1718, 1920 |
"The night before the day of
the action in which he was killed he sat up drinking with some congenial
company until broad daylight. One of them asked him if his poor young wife knew
where his treasure was hidden. 'No,' says Blackbeard; 'nobody
but the devil and I knows where it is, and the longest liver shall have
all,'" writes Howard Pyle in The Book of Pirates.
Six pistol shots and twenty stabs with a cutlass is what it took to bring down the most notorious pirate to ever roam the seas. Amid broken bottles and strewn bodies, Blackbeard and Lieutenant Robert Maynard fight to the death. In the background, pirates fall to the pistols and cutlasses of the British troops. The Jolly Roger waves haphazardly, buffeted by the rising smoke of the pistol shots and cannon fire. The mainmast and shroud - rope ladder the scallywags would use to climb to the crow's nest - frame the main action.
"First they fired their pistols, and then they took to it with cutlasses--right, left, up and down, cut and slash--until the lieutenant's cutlass broke short off at the hilt," writes Pyle. "Then Blackbeard would have finished him off handsomely, only up steps one of the lieutenant's men and fetches him a great slash over the neck, so that the lieutenant came off with no more hurt than a cut across the knuckles." Maynard then took Blackbeard's head and skewered it on his bow, so the whole world could see who brought down the terror who, as Pyle says, "made more than one captain walk the plank, and who committed more private murders than he could number on the fingers of both hands; one who fills, and will continue to fill, the place to which he has been assigned for generations, and who may be depended upon to hold his place in the confidence of others for generations to come."
Six pistol shots and twenty stabs with a cutlass is what it took to bring down the most notorious pirate to ever roam the seas. Amid broken bottles and strewn bodies, Blackbeard and Lieutenant Robert Maynard fight to the death. In the background, pirates fall to the pistols and cutlasses of the British troops. The Jolly Roger waves haphazardly, buffeted by the rising smoke of the pistol shots and cannon fire. The mainmast and shroud - rope ladder the scallywags would use to climb to the crow's nest - frame the main action.
"First they fired their pistols, and then they took to it with cutlasses--right, left, up and down, cut and slash--until the lieutenant's cutlass broke short off at the hilt," writes Pyle. "Then Blackbeard would have finished him off handsomely, only up steps one of the lieutenant's men and fetches him a great slash over the neck, so that the lieutenant came off with no more hurt than a cut across the knuckles." Maynard then took Blackbeard's head and skewered it on his bow, so the whole world could see who brought down the terror who, as Pyle says, "made more than one captain walk the plank, and who committed more private murders than he could number on the fingers of both hands; one who fills, and will continue to fill, the place to which he has been assigned for generations, and who may be depended upon to hold his place in the confidence of others for generations to come."
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