15 things you probably didn’t know about Blackbeard

Fresh from their highly-acclaimed Blood and Butchery in Bedminster walking tour, promenade theatre specialists Show of Strength return from July 20 with Blood, Booze and Buccaneers. This tour around Bristol’s docks with a few hostelries along the way promises new revelations about Blackbeard that will change your view of pirates forever.

Here are some fascinating facts about Bristol’s most famous and fearsome pirate:

1. 2018 marks the 300th anniversary of Blackbeard’s death. He was born Edward Teach in Bristol around 1680 and served as a privateer until turning to piracy at the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713.

An engraving of Blackbeard shows the lit tapers that he attached to his wild beard and hair

2. In 1717, after fellow pirate Benjamin Hornigold rewarded him with a hijacked French slave ship, Le Concorde, Blackbeard set out on his own.

3. Queen Anne’s Revenge, as he renamed the ship, carried a crew of some 300 men and 40 cannons.

4. The flag flying over the Queen Anne’s Revenge depicted a heart dripping blood and a skeleton holding an hourglass and spear.

An engraving of the Queen Anne’s Revenge flying a flag featuring a skull and crossbones

5. Blackbeard and his men sailed the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of North America, torturing merchant ship crewmen and passengers and stealing cargo.

6. The pirate captain cultivated his own image to strike fear into the hearts of other sailors, wrapping slow-burning lighted coils in his black hair and beard.

7. Blackbeard formed a short-lived alliance and later double-crossed Stede Bonnet, the 29-year-old owner of a Barbados sugar plantation who was known as ‘the Gentleman Pirate’.

8. Charleston in North Carolina once found itself at the mercy of Blackbeard, who sealed off the city’s harbour, plundering ships that tried to enter or leave and demanding a chest of medical supplies in exchange for two prominent hostages.

A colour engraving of the pirate in the USA, where he regularly sailed

9. After the Queen Anne’s Revenge sank, Blackbeard received an official pardon and settled in the coastal town of Bath, North Carolina. He reportedly married a local woman but soon returned to piracy.

10. His demise came after being ambushed on the orders of Virginia’s colonial governor, suffering 25 stab wounds and five gunshots before succumbing to his injuries on November 22, 1718.

11. He was decapitated, his head hung on a ship’s bowsprit and his body tossed overboard.

Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was the inspiration for one of the ships in the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise

12. Blackbeard’s severed head was later mounted on a tall pole in Virginia where it stayed for a few years as a morbid warning to other pirates.

13. Generally considered as Blackbeard’s second in command, Israel Hands was given a role by Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island as the wily first mate of Long John Silver.

14. The wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge was discovered in about 25ft of water off the coast of North Carolina by divers in 1996.

15. Hundreds of artefacts have since been recovered from the site including improvised ‘double-headed’ cannonballs that were effective at bringing down rigging.

The anchor from the Queen Anne’s Revenge has been recovered from the wreck