The Day Blackbeard Fell at Ocracoke
On November 22, 1718, the notorious pirate Blackbeard was killed in a bloody dawn battle at Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina, ending the Golden Age of Piracy's most feared career.
It was just after dawn on November 22, 1718, and the most feared pirate of the age was about to fight his last battle. In the shallow waters of Ocracoke Inlet, off North Carolina's Outer Banks, the man history remembers as Blackbeard faced a Royal Navy force sent to kill him — and neither side would give quarter.
The man himself remains a mystery. Edward Teach — spelled Thatch, Thache, or Teach in early records — rose from obscurity to command the great ship Queen Anne's Revenge and a small fleet of raiders that terrorized the Caribbean and the American coast. In May 1718 he blockaded the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, holding the city hostage until officials handed over medical supplies. One account credits him with capturing more than thirty ships in a pirating career that lasted only a couple of years.
That June, Blackbeard accepted a royal pardon from North Carolina's governor, Charles Eden, and settled in the town of Bath — but the pirate life was not so easily abandoned. At the request of concerned colonists, Virginia's governor, Alexander Spotswood, dispatched a naval force under Lieutenant Robert Maynard to finish him. Maynard sailed for Ocracoke with two small sloops, the Jane and the Ranger, and about sixty men.
On the morning of November 22, Maynard's sloops cornered Blackbeard's sloop, the Adventure, inside the inlet. The pirates' guns raked the British decks — and then Maynard played his one card. He ordered most of his men below deck, making his sloop look all but abandoned. When the pirates swarmed aboard expecting easy pickings, Maynard's hidden sailors burst up with cutlasses drawn. What followed was among the bloodiest hand-to-hand fights in the history of piracy, with Blackbeard and Maynard dueling by sword while their crews hacked at each other around them.
Blackbeard fell only after an astonishing number of wounds. Legend holds that he absorbed five musket-ball shots and some twenty sword cuts before his body finally gave out. Maynard's men cut off his head and hung it from the bowsprit of the Jane as proof of victory; his headless body was tossed overboard — and according to legend, it swam three times around the sloop before sinking. The grisly trophy was later mounted at Hampton, Virginia, as a warning to every sailor who doubted that piracy had a price.
The Golden Age of Piracy was already fading, but Blackbeard's death made it feel final. Three centuries later, the bearded pirate with smoking fuses in his hair — the terrifying image he cultivated — remains the very picture of a pirate, haunting books, films, and the Outer Banks waters he once ruled.
Photo: George Edmund Varian (1904 illustration), public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
