“Blackbeard”
I
If you want to know a real pirate--a true terror of the seas--meet
Mr. Blackbeard; called, in what could scarcely have been an innocent
childhood, Edward Thatch, or Teach. Little Edward must have been
suckled on brass filings and have cut his teeth on iron nails, for he
grew up to be consistently and completely evil. Perhaps he fell when an
infant and injured his head, or more probably was born with a twist to
the bad; for no sane, normal man could have been so wild and wicked.
He, not Kidd, is the fellow you have in mind when you think of a
pirate. He was the genuine, plank-walking, marooning, swashbuckling boy
of the seven seas; Bill Kidd and Jack Quelch, so far from being in his
class, would barely have been tolerated by him as ordinary seamen under
the “black flagg with a humane skelleton” which terrified the old-time
mariners. To win his yellow-fanged grin of approval one would have to
be absolutely, unreservedly inhuman.
Blackbeard! Folks got along with him best who addressed him with that
pretty name. He had no use at all for “Mister Thatch.” Plain Blackbeard
to high and low, fore and aft; for his pride, his pleasure, his life
were in his beard; an enormous bush, unusually, weirdly, wonderfully
black; a huge mat of hair, really beginning at his ears, arching across
his nose, and ending with his knees,--a regular jungle from behind
which his veined and boozy eyes peeped like those of a beast spotting
its prey, the while the long, leathery lips slavered with the thirst
for blood. Nice-looking chap--very.
He might not take time to wash his nose--the only island of skin in
that sea of hair--but no hour was too long or too tedious which was
spent in curling, preening, pulling and twisting that beard into the
most fantastic shapes and effects. One day he would swagger out on
deck with his chin the axle for a half-dozen spokes of tightly rolled
whiskers; another, it might be one great spike, thrust outward and
upward in a unicorn symbol. Practically he had a fashion for every
mood, especially for the belligerent.
People had to keep out of his cabin when the skipper was trimming
up his beard for a fight. Really he was the first patentee of
frightfulness. That was his specialty. When action threatened, those
whiskers were wrought into an appearance of ferocity beyond depicting.
Nor was that all; he had other artistic touches in the nightmare line.
For instance, there were those long, thin, slow-burning matches which
he stuck all around his head, beneath his hat--alight they looked as if
the inferno had vomited forth a demon; there were the three braces of
pistols over his shoulders; the two dirks in his brilliant Caribbean
sash, and the cutlass that never stammered. A gulp of raw Jamaica rum
and he was ready to eat ’em alive.
How amiable an apparition to behold oozing up over your bulwarks some
fine morning! No wonder the Atlantic, where it slaps the West Indian
beaches on the one side and the shores of the Carolinas on the other,
whispered his name with fear.
It was going to be a big job for the forces of law and order to snare
this bird.