Blackbeard and the Pirates of the Caribbean

As a boy, Blackbeard would have grown up hearing cautionary tales of pirates who were captured and swinging from the gallows and whose bodies were left in wire cages.

But these aren't the only pirate stories he would have been familiar with.

There were also very exciting, swashbuckling tales of real pirates like Henry Avery, who was actually an Irish sailor turned pirate.

And he did that when he and his shipmates were left high and dry by a treacherous investor and were looking at a life of either forced labor or imprisonment.

So rather than accept the unfair hand that had been dealt them, Henry Avery led his fellow shipmates in seizing another ship and making their way out of the harbor, thus embarking on a life of piracy.

They were now outlaws.

They were their own bosses.

And apparently, after capturing many other ships, including one of them that had an Indian princess on board, they became fabulously rich.

and later managed to retire and slip back into society anonymously to live off their wealth.

Now the truth of what happened to Henry Avery and his men was a little bit less glorious and a lot more gritty, but the legend of Henry Avery, the adventure and the escape from an unfair lot that was dealt to him and his crew members as sailors, inspired many young boys who would later go to sea.

And we can only assume that Blackbeard as a boy would have heard all these same stories.

Piracy was a high-risk, high-reward kind of occupation.

And those men who were captured as pirates were soon brought before a panel of officials.

There was no jury of your peers involved in a pirate trial.

And the assumption was that these men were guilty.

So the burden of proving their innocence lay on the individual men themselves.

And of course, they didn't have defense lawyers.

Many of them were common sailors, and most of them were illiterate.

So that meant that very few men managed to escape a sentence of guilty.

There were exceptions.

Occasionally, a man was able to successfully argue that he'd been forced into a pirate gang and that he hadn't participated in a particular piratical action, and therefore he might be pardoned.

But the overwhelming majority of men brought on piracy charges ended up hanging at the end of a noose.

He was born around 1680, and we don't even know his real name.

Historians think that he was called Edward Teach or Edward Thatch, but census records from Bristol in that period don't turn up families with either of those names.

So the going theory now is that Blackbeard actually used a false name, that Edward Teach or Edward Thatch was a name he gave to deliberately disguise his actual origins and people who might still be related to him back in his port town.