Devil of the high seas
QUESTION Why did the pirate Blackbeard fly a flag depicting a skeleton with a spear piercing a bleeding heart?
Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach (1680-1718) was the best known of the pirates who terrorised merchantmen in the west Indies and the eastern seaboard of Britain’s North american colonies.
The flag with the horned devil, spear and bleeding heart is a modern invention. The first time this design appeared is in a Mariner’s Mirror article from 1912. It was much later that it became associated with Blackbeard. In the 18th century, the horned devil was rarely depicted as a skeleton, and the skeletal death figure was never shown with horns.
Pirates were known to use iconography to project fear. The Grim reaper, death’s head, crossed bones, hourglass, dart and black background suggest finite mortality. They were a sign that a meeting with a pirate vessel would probably prove fatal.
There is only one contemporary record of the flag used by Blackbeard. This came from a report in the Boston News Letter on June 16, 1718, about the capture of Captain william wyer’s merchant vessel Protestant Caesar by Blackbeard’s Queen anne’s revenge, a ship of ‘40 guns and 300 men’. It describes wyer’s initial engagement with Blackbeard’s crew off the island of roatan, near Honduras, when he was assailed by a small pirate sloop with ten guns and 50 pirates.
wyer escaped, but Blackbeard tracked him down to Belize. The report says wyer saw a ‘large ship and sloop with black flags and death’s heads on them and three more sloops with bloody flags all bore down upon the said ship Protestant Caesar . . .’ wyer chose to abandon ship to save his own life and that of his men.
David Cummings, Halifax, W. Yorks.
QUESTION What was the first description of a practical joke?
ROMAN emperor Elagabalus, who reigned from 218 to 222, was known for his eccentric behaviour and has been called the first great practical joker.
The Historia augusta, a medieval ‘Lives of The roman Emperors’, outlines some of his high jinks: ‘when his friends became drunk he would often shut them up, and suddenly during the night let in his lions and leopards and bears — all of them harmless — so that his friends on awakening at dawn, or worse, during the night, would find lions and leopards and bears in the room with themselves.
‘Some of his humbler friends he would sit on air pillows instead of on cushions and let out the air while they were dining, so that often the diners were suddenly found under the table.’ The emperor’s behaviour became more extreme, particularly his sexual exploits, and he was assassinated by his own Praetorian Guard.
Iain Morley, Havant, Hants. ONE of the earliest practical jokes involved a 4th- century cup found in Vinkovci, Croatia, in 2012. at first it was thought to be a dish used by the occupying romans, but dr richard Hobbs, the weston curator of roman Britain at the British Museum, determined it to be an elaborate practical joke. anyone who drank from this cup would see wine spill onto their clothes instead of reaching their lips.
on the cup is a carving of the Greek mythological figure Tantalus, who was doomed to stay in sight of fruit he couldn’t eat and water he couldn’t drink. This Tantalus cup’s design is based on the physics of a siphon described by Greek mathematician Pythagoras.
Joan Brotherton, Lyme Regis, Dorset.