Introduction
“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
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 local claim to that
phrase, 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 usually become, the venom, of course, 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 derogatory phrase, Rankin simply repeated a common impression made popular
by the “counterfactual” A General History of the Robberies and Murders of
the most Notorious Pyrates, written by Nathaniel Mist as “Capt. Charles Johnson” and other popular works authored
by many just as enthralled with Johnson-Mist’s flamboyant tales. Owing to this
early literary bias and many other popular polemics that followed, North
Carolina’s unremitting claim to Blackbeard – actually a resident of Jamaica and
not North Carolina - continued for three centuries.
Still, in a very real
sense, North Carolina does happen to own a tangible
mammoth-sized artifact of Blackbeard’s legend – because Blackbeard unceremoniously parked it in Beaufort
Inlet. Whether he meant to or not is still the subject of some discussion,
although the evidence strongly leans away from a purposeful grounding. Blackbeard’s
demise in North Carolina’s Outer Banks adds to North Carolina’s claim which
has some merit. The 300th anniversary of that demise in 2018 has
recently passed. And, more than twenty years ago, his flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) was found where he left it – beneath
the shifting sandy shoals of Beaufort Inlet. So, many have claimed that the Jamaican gentleman Edward Thache may be
North Carolina’s “own” pirate, hero, or whatever.
The ever-changing currents
and purposeful work of nautical archaeologists from East Carolina University have
been revealing QAR’s 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 ECU’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. Newer technology has made the museum even more
user-friendly of late.
Still, many former
assumptions about Blackbeard have mired themselves in
tradition – an even deeper morass of unknown factors. One of the most evasive
factors has been Edward Thache’s more substantial origins. Thus, it was easy to
accuse him of many horrible 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 did Johnson – it sells books. There’s nothing more American
than pure plain profit! And, as it seems, selling out our former heroes!
Traditionally, the first lines
of narrative written by Johnson about Edward Thache say that he pirated enemy vessels in Queen Anne’s War as a privateer from Jamaica. Jamaica
would have made sense but still, this was barely a whisper, relying on the word
of Johnson’s popular, unknown, and unverifiable source – if indeed, one existed.
Afterward, as one might surmise, he became 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 writing 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 fellow pirate 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
(good chance it was Gloucestershire, the home county of Bristol), sailed on a
slave ship, who served in the Royal Navy, perhaps as a petty officer, on HMS Windsor during Queen Anne’s War in 1706. This startling
revelation, regarding his father’s plantation, inherited by his son Edward –
the man who became Blackbeard – raises brand new clues as to his motivation and
“creditable” class. These Jamaican Edward Thache (note that “Thache” is not a common name; “Edward” even less so
than “Thomas” within the Thache family itself) records indeed were probably
confirmed by contemporary author Charles Leslie, who visited this family in St.
Jago de la Vega, or Spanish Town, Jamaica in late 1736. Leslie met
Blackbeard’s step-mother Lucretia and his half-brother Cox. Records of that Jamaican
Thache family reveal their wealth and social position in Jamaica’s capital. After the peace treaty ending that war in which Edward Jr.
fought, he may have continued taking prizes as though still at war, perhaps with a so-called
“official” commission from the governor of Jamaica, like many others, fighting for Jamaica – and not England. Finally, he was labeled by others as the rebel sought
by British authorities as a “ne’er-do-well” – a pirate, an “enemy of all
mankind.” For 300 years, many opportunistic authors have taken advantage of
this sordid reputation and accompanying anti-pirate British rhetoric to abuse
Edward Thache. Johnson-Mist established himself as a pioneer in this type of
“counterfactual” rhetoric, but many more added fuel to the notorious legend!
A General History and Treasure Island sold many copies,
certainly, and became undoubted classics – still, they should never have been
called – or treated as – “histories.” Furthermore, all those centuries of American
historians “pirating” the focus away from Jamaica to Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North
Carolina may have kept us from discovering
his true origins until now. Yes, American and even some British bias probably
prevented a valuable discovery for nearly 300 years! But then, we were
enthralled by Johnson-Mist’s “true crime” stories and the ubiquitous
elaborations upon that savage theme. Only the recent digitization craze begun
by Ancestry.com made it possible to take another look at Jamaica again. And
there – for all to view – was his “creditable” patrician family. It even
surprised todays’ Jamaicans to find that Blackbeard was actually a son of theirs!
Indeed, writers for most of these 300 years generally suspected this was true –
only recently have we moved toward bringing him to the United State’s shores!
Capt. Charles Johnson - pseudonym of Nathaniel Mist – infamous
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] This
was arguably true. Still, “piracy” or “crime” of Mist’s contemporary wealthy
merchant-mariner class was not the precise reality for many, especially when
other types of records revealed the 97% of our ancestors – not just the 3% of gentlemen,
such as with Edward Thache, Henry Jennings, Stede Bonnet, Thomas Barrow, and others. Some of these poorer sorts went aboard pirate ships and
sloops as crew, certainly, but they usually were not as well educated as those
who navigated them. The tale of these early pirates’ gentlemanly demeanor,
formerly wealthy privateers, has been confined, narrowed, and almost eradicated
by literary rhetoric. The people we call “pirates” today most resemble those
found in the Bahamas after 1715, driven out by 1718, scattered refugees of a barren island and rude
maritime subsistence – the 97% were blamed for the crimes of the 3%! This
remote and neglected colony established the narrative for 300 years of gruesome
pirate lore – again, blamed on the 97%. The Bahamas became the quintessential
“pirate nest,” but we must ask why the Royal Navy posted the bulk of their
anti-pirate forces at Jamaica in 1717? Indeed, why the early focus just outside
of the Caribbean when most pirates were found actually in the Caribbean? This is a clue to the re-direction of
pirate history.
Destitute pirates thrived
at the Bahamas. This locale 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 –
when we, today, think of pirates, we almost always neglect Jamaica in favor of
the Bahamas. Bahamians, however, were unfairly disdained by the wealthier
Anglican privateer communities of Jamaica, Barbados, and Bermuda – communities
that had also turned to piracy – even started the worst of it in 1715 – but
were generally ignored by anti-pirate polemicists. We are used to this
disparagement of the common sort – the people – aren’t we? This political trend
survives to the present oligarchic trend. Because of class distinctions and
deference of the common people to the wealthy, the cultural difference has not
been readily discernable by observers in the present, but it appears when
viewed in its proper historical context – by those trained in the historical
sciences. This subtle distinction becomes quite clear in a close reading of the
following chapters.
Wreckers in the Bahamas - as well as on the Outer Banks of North Carolina - and other struggling maritime
locales were also the lowly pirates of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. They were the
ne’er-do-wells, outcasts of the English Civil War, dissenting Puritans, and
other destitute people who had settled in the Bahamas because they were not
welcome elsewhere. Yes, this disparagement was religious, political, pecuniary,
and cultural – a complex affair of prejudice involving derision of ruling
Anglicans following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The following Vestry
Acts restored full Anglican politico-religious domination over British
dominions in America.
Bahamians were not the
wealthy privateers of the elite Anglo-American world – like Jamaica, Antigua,
Bermuda, etc. They were the lowly commoners of a dissenting protestant faith –
not exactly ideologically akin to wealthy Anglicans in the better colonies.
These dissenters most 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]
Certainly, these horrid anti-popery fears found
fertile ground in America! “Liberty and Property” should also 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 famous characters of literature –
the ones we grew to fear as the “notorious” ones – like Long John Silver,
Charles Vane, and Blackbeard. They may have taken on Jacobite sentiments from their Anglican
captains – much like the average Confederate in the South during the Civil War
supported a war for slavery even though they had never owned slaves, but,
rather saw themselves as temporarily embarrassed slave owners. These were
people who did not, with rare exception, ever make it into the history books.
They were, however, considered in a distant derogatory anonymous sense as
“notorious” criminals. These low-bred brigands of the maritime homeless
community looted and committed 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, inspired by
elite heroic icons of buccaneer days – Drake, Hawkins, Morgan, and Bartholemew.
The Caribbean was indeed the “South” of the Atlantic World.
A heavily racist element and
brutality pervaded these American waters. Spanish writers testify as to the
blatant anti-Catholic prejudice and outright terrorism carried out by such “piratas
Ingles,” calling their foreign foes “Papist liars,” defiling their sacred
sites, torturing and killing without care, and stealing from their churches. Later
Americans of a racist upper class, or “gentlemen,” like generals Stonewall
Jackson or Robert E. Lee fell into the same abysmal categories of history. And,
like our Civil War ancestors, most of us today – assuming we have a pirate
ancestor – that pirate was probably one of those desperate roguish poor men of
the “pirate nests.” They were not, however, the wealthy heroes upon their
altars – for example, Sir Henry Morgan, the ruthless sacker of Panama, or the
navy veteran and staunch Anglican conservative who followed in his footsteps,
Edward Thache of St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica! Thache and his ilk were the West-Indian
gentlemen who became the great plantation owners and ruling feudalists of the
American South.[5]
This is not a common
distinction. Peter Earle in Pirate Wars, understood well early piracy, but he still grouped the
disparate classes together. “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.[6] Still,
he did not make class distinctions between them and Bahamians and their like –
he did not see Bahamians as different to privateers in this respect. New
revelations about Edward Thache suggest he was an elite pirate or privateer of
great wealth – not comparable to the lower-class destitute wreckers from which
most of us descended. Still, like most, the capable historian Earle was yet influenced
by Johnson-Mist’s propaganda against Thache and his brethren in 1724 – and by Treasure Island. These books saw pirates collectively as
Marcus Rediker’s proto-democratic dregs of the maritime community. Earle - even Rediker – conflated the
pirates of the Bahamas with Jamaican privateers – they created a homogenized
class of pirates that hid the crimes of the wealthy. They both made errors
based on bias they obtained from previous popular literature. Rediker claimed
that these privateers were egalitarian like all pirates and, by no means, was
this true. Privateers, by great contrast to Bahamian pirates, were much rarer
than those common pirates and, contrastingly, wealthier men of estates. They
were educated Anglicans – lords over others – slavers, and capitalists of the
West Indies and the later United States, if the wealthy Jamaican plantation
owner Edward Thache is any indication.
Yes, this is difficult to
understand… to tease from historical records. This bias persisted for centuries
and formed zealous prejudices. Most of us can hardly be blamed for this, having
read these popular tales – portrayed as history – as did their parents before
them. Yes, like us, our ancestors had also been weaned on these tales of iconic
pirate/buccaneer heroes, Sir Francis Drake and Sir Henry Morgan. Morgan even died in St. Jago de
la Vega in 1688,
about the time the Thaches might have arrived from Gloucestershire – when
Edward Jr. was but an influential boy. Morgan was simply one of the well-born, iconic boyhood heroes of the
privateers of Jamaica and other affluent Anglican
societies. They may have expressed equality between each other – the 3% of the
colonial world – but certainly not with their crews, who compared better with
the pirates described by Marcus Rediker after 1718 – like those lowly commoners
of the government-less Bahamas – like most adherents to anti-government MAGA.
Why did we read these popular pirate books as histories – apart from the word “history”
appearing in Johnson-Mist’s title? Was that seriously all it took? Politics, of
course – with the usual accompanying ignorance of history – happened.
Furthermore, early American historical perceptions in general have been influenced
by early British derision of Americans – against both Puritan and Anglican
American alike since 1688. When the political wars of the Golden Age were over
and forgotten, the anti-pirate narrative yet remained even if we had not
changed at all. We liked the popular history of pirates because it was fun –
not terribly interested in facts. We treated the subjects of these tales as
distant anomalies – almost caricatures or cartoons - yet they were actually our very own ancestors! Their ideology is
ours. Marcus Rediker got this correct, by the way – though the elite characters
involved were truly not democratic.
Piracy was once an accepted
economic method of West Indian life; it had been essential since the English
invaded Spanish colonial territories around 1588. It was chiefly essential first
in Jamaica for more than half a century – since the English took it from the
Spanish in 1655. Still, as seen from an increasingly Whig England at home, that
pattern had begun to change by the 1680s. Utilizing America’s own print media,
Britain vilified not only the Puritan outcasts of the recent Civil War, but
also the martial and feudal Anglican West Indian former heroes to the empire.
Americans still revered the Stuart conservatism that gave life to their revered
icons. Facing a changing social, political, and economic paradigm – quite
different from the mother country – wealthy privateers and common pirates both
were tempted to join together against Britain and revolt – again, as the elites
and commoners in the later Confederacy allied against the United States.
Opposition to piracy in America brought Britain’s colonies against her more
than half a century before the American Revolution. Still, at this early stage of insufficient colonial infrastructure
(roads and inland cities with significant populations not on the waterfront and
vulnerable to British attack), wealthy privateers needed more reason to revolt
against all authority. They needed a motive more enticing to risk their
families, fortunes, and good names.
What could entice these
martial conservative gentlemen to risk Britain’s wrath? As if told by Johnson-Mist,
or author Robert Louis Stevenson, or perhaps as echoed by our capitalists today, that lure was certainly
the classic American tales of greed, avarice, money – hundreds of thousands of
pieces of eight glittering in the shallow, easily-fished waters. “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, gave these wealthy American gentlemen incentive to risk it all.[7] The
wrecks offered a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity for ex-privateers,
pirates, and wreckers alike – already used to stealing everything from the
Spanish – including even the title of the Gulf of Mexico! It created a
treasure-lust that evaporated all vestiges of patriotism, all residual
adherences to mother England’s liberal desires and created, in my opinion, the
Golden Age of Piracy. America simply had not been ready for a revolution in
1715. Still, give us another half-century….
This diverse collection of
wealthy profiteer mariners lost control; all sense of national allegiance
disappeared in the shiny gleam of gold and silver. They followed Jacobites in
England who also rebelled that same year against a German Whig thrust upon their
near-century-long held Stuart conservative Tory throne. This foreigner disrespectfully
spoke no English and barely held little more than a cousin’s connection to the British
royal line. West-Indians – already loyal Stuart Jacobites – greatly resisted bowing
to him – to George I! Combined with liberal hatred, this sparkling treasure
ignited a huge powder keg of long making. American criminality flourished with
abandon! 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-labeled “enemies of all
mankind” took any and every ship – even those of the radical Whig
Parliamentarian king of England!
Americans still harbor
similar prejudices against Catholicism and foreign influence. 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 dollar then held eight whole pieces –
like the Spanish dollar or Piece-of-Eight! We still think in West Indian
economic terms – of piracy, brutality for profit, or modern American capitalism.
American gentlemen mariners
– like oligarchs today – had released a dragon. Once the lucrative theft had
been committed, stopping may not really have been an option, even for
substantial ex-privateer captains, and especially when their leadership was
threatened by the whims of an increasingly treasure-hungry and
less-financially-secure pirate crew. Driven from their affluent home colonies, a
few remaining privateers and common pirates banded together and reluctantly
created a society of rebel thieves on the Bahamas, the pirate “Republic,” as author 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 – or at least until sixty years later in 1776.[8]
The strongest and most
gentlemanly example – a significant threat to the new liberalizing empire – a
powerful enemy who simply would not
submit - was Edward Thache. He was no ordinary enemy to the British. His true actions
speak to us from many primary sources: vital, editorial, tabloid, and
adversarial – even through the rhetorical haze of British anti-pirate
propaganda. He and his crew sold their valuable and desirable loot to the hungry
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 well-educated
and less violent than many of his contemporaries, like Charles Vane and Edward Low – but still the most memorable
pirate of the Golden Age. That and his military training made him and other wealthy
pirates like him official targets to a new liberalized English political
viewpoint hell bent on destroying piracy. America had to learn the lesson that
England wanted them to adopt – that it no longer needed or wanted its former West-Indian
heroes and champions – especially from such a savage remote America. America
must be brought to heal!
America resisted, it
continued to revere their heroes and desire their rough, rowdy, and profitable
warlike Stuart version of trade. For poorer Americans of this time, as in
America’s later South, trading with men like Edward Thache seemed no more unusual than trade
with any London or Bristol merchant – or trade with a Georgia slave plantation
owner and wealthy food producer of the following century. His arrival in
various ports was not feared, but indeed welcomed. He brought even more rare
and exotic goods and staples to which backwoods locals – us, our ancestors – had
little access. The 97% adored Thache as conservative Americans adore Elon Musk
today!
Approaching upon Edward
Thache’s fate in North Carolina’s shoal waters, Gov. Woodes Rogers and other colonial administrators
commissioned bounty hunters to seek out these victims of unwanted change. They even
turned former pirates against their brethren. 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, and South Carolina, this private colony had a reputation for
administrative malfeasance, salutary neglect, and maritime mischief – another
America “prate nest.” A military-trained Thache saw the Carolina coast as
useful as the shoal waters of the Bahamas before Gov. Woodes Rogers’ arrival there absorbed and dispersed 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 reprovision. Scholars and other writers
often call the larger ones “pirate nests.” They were a simpler society, more
traditional – holding onto an older more traditional ideology unlike
liberalizing England – an ideology familiar to wealthy Jamaican Edward Thache,
where pirates were not only desired, but regarded as necessities, great heroes
like the iconic Sir Francis Drake – where profit could be made and radicals
resisted.
On the run, pirates evaded
the hunters in another 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 could then read of their pirates’ alledged misdeeds every
week in newspapers. They began to fear the worst. They began to watch the
harbors with increasing suspicion. The papers turned neighbor against neighbor.
Pirates became less heroic and more “villainous” in the eyes and words of the highly-regarded
wealthy colonial merchants. They soon became “enemies of all mankind” in the
average American’s eyes as well, not just in the merchants’ eyes or in Britain’s.
In the case of ex-pirate Benjamin Hornigold, the hunted turned hunter, became a traitor to revolting America. He
betrayed and sought the truly villainous and exceptional Charles Vane and others of his former pirate
brethren. “Pirates” ever since this time became the poor, wretched, hungry, and
desperate ne’er-do-wells of legend, “villains of all nations.”
Edward Thache probably had not wanted to
surrender once the pardon had been offered. There is, however, some indication that
he did in fact entertain 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 a more tedious – and safer – life as an ex-Royal Navy landed Stuart-Tory gentleman
privateer under an increasingly hostile and liberal Whig royal government. Thache
might sip bumboo on the banks of his Rio Cobre estate like a former-slave-owning
American plantationist might have ended his days sipping on the traditionally
Southern mint julep, brought to him of course by his former house slave – now tenant!
That agreeable ending was
not to be his fate. As mentioned earlier, another reason North Carolina claimed
the pirate was that 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 assassins captured his crew and killed the rhetorically-derided
“notorious pirate” near Ocracoke Inlet in November 1718. They placed his
bloody severed head on the bowsprit of the sloop Ranger for their
triumphant return to Virginia – demonstrating to all their
dominance and control. The same papers carried the news of his destruction for
all to read – even his horrified family in St.
Jago de la Vega, Jamaica!
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.[9]
Moreover, no one asked the local American residents who would sorely miss the
occasional inexpensive shipments of sugar and cocoa – or Teslas and Starlink
today. It looked suspiciously as though the well-born Spotswood and his North Carolinian wealthy allies
simply eliminated their competition in an illegal syndicate style. This was perhaps
the only method Spotswood believed might be effective against his opposition: the
traitorous pirates of Britain’s backwards provincial colonial America.
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.”
This revised narrative contrasts sharply with many current and long
stubbornly-held views of our history. Ironically, conservatives of modern
America have adopted many of the liberal views originally held by British Whigs
before the Golden Age of Pirates – and before the Civil War of 1861-1865 and Civil
Rights in 1964 threw gasoline on the burning flames of racist division. We
called these amendments to the Constitution the Bill of Rights and they have
often shackled the hands of the slaveowners while at the same time just as
equally giving them some needed tools to further abuse the people. It seems
that everything was a compromise. For instance, it did not stop Samuel A’Courte
Ashe from demonizing our earliest founding fathers, at least in regards to the
more affluent, wealthy pirates in the beginning. Like Ashe or any of his
associates, Edward Thache desired to simply make a profit
off the Spanish wrecks, also like smuggler John Hancock a half-century after Thache’s
death. All three were gentlemen, landed planters or merchants from great cities
like St. Jago de la Vega on Jamaica
or Wilmington, North Carolina, with families, parents, sons and daughters, as with Thache – or Boston, as with John Hancock.
Also becoming more
recognized by scholars today is Britain’s media campaign in the Boston News-Letter, courts,
and perhaps with literary influence by “Capt. Charles Johnson.” There developed an anti-historical retelling of the beginnings of
British America – but, one more suited to Britain’s immediate fiscal need.
Winners usually tell their version of history.
Piracy was the birth of America.
Uncertain methods and abuses of profiteering, salutary neglect of proprietary
colonies in the brutal wilderness, gold and silver, sugar and slaves all
created our modern culture. Likewise, the continuing media campaign of the
wealthy distorted our modern image of many aspects of America’s history, our
own natures, and abusive economics, and especially our old heroes like the
conservative war-veteran and pirate hero Edward Thache. As a wealthy American merchant – indeed, like any of our founding
fathers – 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” once described our attitudes. Anti-government attitudes – toward
British as opposed to Jamaican - deregulated “freedom” – these words might have
been in Thache’s own rallying cries 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 anti-British terrorists like Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty. Thache even 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 for total freedom that owes much to the
conservative American ideology that had precipitated from the Stuart Dynasty of
England. Again, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and their Bill of Rights –
also modeled largely on the British Bill of Rights - essentially saved us from the
abuses of their freedom!
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 social structure like that of America’s Deep South. Georgia, Alabama,
Tennesssee and others grew from Carolina’s West-Indian seed and later became part of the
American Confederacy. These colonies and states also followed the same feudal West Indian ideals
with great plantations of thousands of acres with African slaves to work the
fields – like 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.”[10] He painted Deep South slave
society as “a system so cruel and despotic [that it] shocked even its
seventeenth-century contemporaries.”[11] 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.”[12] In
describing the Deep South, Woodard, also a pirate scholar merely described the West Indies in which Edward
Thache had once flourished.
This book has three goals –
the first of which may sound familiar – as they relate to problems with modern
American political conservatism. This first goal is to demonstrate that private
colonies were corrupt and needed central government – or federal – control for
any progress to commence once Spain’s possessions in the West Indies had been largely secured – once British
colonies dominated in America. This argument goes against the opinion of modern
Republicans – adherents to the “Lost Cause” – who declare the federal
government should be “drowned in a bathtub.”
The first four chapters
cover background history of the English entry into, and domination over Spanish
America with a focus upon Edward Thache’s home of Jamaica. A social study of
Jamaica found in chapter four helps to better understand the world within which
he developed from childhood. The rest of the book tells the actual quest for
the real Edward “Blackbeard” Thache.
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, as opposed to their leaders – i.e.,
the various class levels – should be introduced and explained. Obviously, the
popular image of Edward Thache as the demonic, evil, and
notorious pirate “Blackbeard” is simply popular trash and has damaged a proper understanding of our
history. Edward Thache, himself, created this false image most likely as a
morally-derived deception to prevent unnecessary violence – it was not representative
of his true ideology.
Charles Johnson, an unknown
controversial author and early pirate writer, covertly 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 and unfortunate guidebook to American piracy. Mariners
like North Carolina’s 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 independent trade
patterns, and developed the infrastructure to make another successful, more
confident, attempt at rebellion – hopefully, revolution.[13]
This rediscovery of Edward
Thache opens new chapters of the legendary brigand of
the “Golden Age of Piracy.” Too much has
been happily – perhaps 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 – indeed, in the racism that filled
the new independent America? No longer can authors claim “not much is known
about his early life!” We now know a great deal and the implications have
proven extraordinary!
We can truly “discard all the ideas we were taught and reconstruct
the entire system of our knowledge.” So, for readers of pirate, American, or
political history, please read this book closely and let me explain the new
implications of this knowledge. Also, what was it truly like to be a pirate of
the “Golden Age?” Most importantly, what can this knowledge tell us about our
current political struggles? This book and the records explored in it will
finally answer some of these questions in detail. That detail, of course, is the
greatest treasure of powerful knowledge worth fishing from our waters!
[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] Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona, El orígen de Belice (México : Impr. de F. Díaz de León, 1879),
3-8.
[6] Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), 166.
[7] Lowell W. Newton, “Juan Esteban de Ubilla and the Flota of
1715,” The Americas, Vol. 33, No. 2
(Oct., 1976), 279.
[8] 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.
[9] Lindley S. Butler, Pirates,
Privateers, & Rebel Raiders of the Carolina Coast (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 24-25.
[10] 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).
[11] Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven
Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Penguin Books, 201), 9.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Sam Newell, “A Man of ‘Desperate
Fortune’ – The Career and Trial of John Vidal: North Carolina’s Last Pirate,” Tributaries
(Oct 2004): 7-17.
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