Blackbeard and his contemporaries in the early 18th-century Caribbean had nobody’s permission to do what they were doing they were outlaws. William Kidd and Sir Henry Morgan-weren’t really pirates at all, but privateers, mercenaries given permission by their sovereign to attack enemy shipping in time of war. Out of all the pirates who’ve trolled the seas over the past 3,000 years, Blackbeard is the most famous. He could not have known that these would be the last prizes of his career and that in just three months he and most of his crew would be dead. He turned Rose Emelye into the wind, drifted to a halt and surrendered his command.īlackbeard, the notorious pirate, had captured two vessels more than twice the size of his own-a feat described here for the first time. Soon the bearded man was alongside again and his men discharged their cannons. Now he found himself facing not one attacker but two. Pirates swarmed over the gunwales and onto the ship’s decks, seizing the crew, perhaps as human shields. Minutes later the vessels’ wooden hulls came together with a moan. The sloop-the pirate sloop-swept down to the unarmed Toison d’Or.
His helmsman threw the tiller hard to lee, men released ropes, and, sails briefly flapping, the strange vessel suddenly swung hard about, shooting by in the opposite direction. On the tiny sloop, a tall, slim man with a long black beard barked out an order. Mathew Waehner / North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources Remove yourselves, Goupil’s mate cried out to the men on the sloop, or we will fire!Īn iron shackle with cord binding recently recovered from Queen Anne's Revenge. He ordered his crew of 17 to prepare for action, getting Rose Emelye’s four cannons to the ready. Jan Goupil would have seen three cannon muzzles rolled out of gun ports on the tiny sloop’s sides and dozens of armed men crowded on its decks. What was it doing out here in the open ocean, and why was it on an intercept course with the Frenchmen’s much larger oceangoing merchant ships? As the mysterious sloop overtook them and pulled alongside, they knew they would have answers soon enough. To the Frenchmen’s relief, it was a tiny vessel: a sloop with Spanish lines better suited to shuttling cargo between Caribbean islands than to crossing an ocean. Over the next three hours the sky grew dark and the vessel drew ever closer. Then, as the sun sank low in the sky, someone spotted sails bearing down on their stern. The next day would raise Bermuda above the horizon, the final waypoint before making landfall in Europe. The American mainland had disappeared behind the horizon days before. Now they were following the Gulf Stream home in the company of another French merchant ship, La Toison d’Or, sailing just a stone’s throw behind and to leeward.
They’d spent the spring following the winds and currents across the Atlantic to tropical Martinique, and much of the summer unloading French cargo and taking on bags of cocoa and barrels of freshly refined sugar.
For the 18 men aboard the French merchant ship Rose Emelye, the evening of August 23, 1718, was shaping up to be as routine as the 167 that had preceded it since they’d left Nantes.
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