The notorious Blackbeard's secrets revealed

Blackbeard the pirate has long been regarded as terrible and infamous, and even romantic in light of the modern Hollywood love affair with Disney pirates, but recent evidence taken from the wreck of Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard's ship, is also suggesting that resourceful can be added to the list of adjectives used to describe him.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - For those who know of Blackbeard both then and now, he was hardly a romantic figure. Plying the seas off North Carolina, Blackbeard and his crew of pirates sought to terrorize their victims into surrendering their ships and valuable cargoes.

Preferably, if the ships could be taken without a fight, or at least with minimal bloodshed, Blackbeard could be sure to maximize his profits. Dead men may have told no tales, but sunken ships yielded no profit and piracy thrived on the latter. 

To accomplish the difficult but relatively bloodless feat of capturing a ship intact, Blackbeard and his crew improvised several weapons, all now being revealed by undersea excavation of the wreck. Among them were cannonballs that were linked together, not so much to kill men more effectively, as to snap rigging and rip sails to slow fleeing ships. Instead of expensive grapeshot, which functioned as a giant shotgun blast to clear the deck of resistant crew, the pirates used glass, nails, or other bits of scrap metal to accomplish the same task.

At short range, it mattered little what kind of shot was used. While these weapons were certainly fearsome, it was the fearsome nature of the weapons that prevented his having to use them, and thus spared lives, and more importantly for Blackbeard, cargo.

Such resourcefulness reveals that Blackbeard was probably more resourceful than bloodthirsty and they show that piracy was about stealing wealth from passing ships rather than about fighting battles. Still, Blackbeard's resourcefulness could not save him and in 1718, he was finally killed in a battle against a group of sailors sent to bring him to justice. His corpse was decapitated and his head hung as a trophy.  

Although Blackbeard's career lasted only a matter of months, his legacy has lasted for centuries. Recent discoveries have proved that the legacy is far less bloodthirsty and far more resourceful than previously believed-but certainly not romantic.

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