Bloodthirsty? Blackbeard was a jolly nice fellow!
HE is history’s most infamous pirate, with a bloodthirsty reputation for savagery on the high seas.
But Blackbeard was victim of a smear campaign and likely to have been a decent man, a leading piracy historian has claimed.
American author Colin Woodard said the feared villain – who preyed on ships in the West Indies and off the coast of the US eastern seaboard – was instead a ‘thinking man’s pirate’ and great strategist.
He says there is no evidence he hurt any captives, while his reputation as a violent cut-throat was made up by authorities to legitimise the hunt for him.
But his ship the Queen Anne’s Revenge carried a terrifying flag depicting a skeleton spearing a heart. The Pulitzer Prize finalist said: ‘Blackbeard’s life and career has long been obscured in a fog of legend, myth and propaganda.’ He added: ‘In dozens of eyewitness accounts of his victims, there is not a single instance in which he killed anyone prior to his final, fatal battle with the Royal Navy.’
The US historian has made the claims in his new book Republic of Pirates, which he researched using archives in the UK and travelling to Blackbeard’s hometown of Bristol.
He also confirmed that for three centuries Blackbeard had also been given the wrong name after a newspaper report incorrectly named him Edward Teach, not Thatch.
Mr Woodard said: ‘He created this image so he would never really have to fight anyone.’ The historian said much of Blackbeard’s story had been told in the book A General History of the Robberies and Mur- ders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, which emerged six years after his death in battle 1718 aged 38.
While much of it was accurate, a lot has been disproved.