Quest for Blackbeard Pyrates coffee mug

Quest for Blackbeard: early pirate leaders were most often not the struggling property-less proletarians that some writers would have us believe. Many, like Edward Thache of Spanish Town, Jamaica were wealthy planters and mariners on an island where piracy was simply a way of life for the aristocracy. Blackbeard’s probable daughter married a local physician in Spanish Town. They were well-born, educated, wrote, could likely read, and had more in common with governors and other officials than pirate historians of the past have been willing to admit. They were the upper class of the population, with resources at their command. It has always been more comfortable for Americans today to see them as low-born criminals rather than independent capitalists taking advantage of wholly neglected privatized colonies with virtually no regulation. Most pirates surrendered when the king offered pardon. They returned to, or retired from, their law-abiding merchants’ lives as then wealthier men… after they had gathered their profits. A handful continued and were immortalized as “common enemies of mankind” by Capt. Charles Johnson in 1724… definitively as “pirates.” One of these was Blackbeard. Thanks to documents recently uncovered by the author showing Edward Thache’s family in St. Catherine’s Parish, Jamaica, we can now enter the Quest for Blackbeard’s origins, all the way back to Gloucestershire, England, just up the Severn River from Bristol. We can now study his life as a wealthy sugar planter and grandson of an Anglican minister who studied at Oxford. Piracy, politics, profit, and proprietaries went hand-in-hand in the beginnings of our America. In many ways, the pirates never left…