Abdicating the high estate of admiral and breaking up his fleet,
leaving a part of it, as we have seen, to roll as wreckage on the tides
of Topsail Inlet, Blackbeard came back to Ocracoke and a lazy summer.
Perhaps it was during these thoughtful, meditative days that he
persuaded a young lady to become his fourteenth wife for there is
record of a merry marriage at which Governor Eden himself condescended
to appear as a well-wishing guest and give the occasion the suitable
air to promote the new Mrs. Blackbeard’s social fortunes. At the feast
a good deal of somebody else’s rum, somebody else’s victuals and
somebody else’s money were laid under contribution. Governor Eden,
however, had a peculiarly happy detachment to the minor questions of
somebody else’s property. That phase of his disposition doubly endeared
him to his pirate friend.
But the gold pieces that he sent spinning dwindled anon; little Toby
Knight began to bore him and even the Governor commenced to get on
his nerves. Respectable shore life was entirely too much for him, so
Blackbeard again yearned for the reeling decks and the roar of his
bully boys. With a laudable regard for the proprieties, he gave out
that he was putting to sea again on a “commercial venture,” and even
registered his ship at the local customs house.
“Salvage,” he murmured, looking intently into little Toby’s honest
face; pressing the secretary’s round, fat hand in farewell.
“Salvage,” grinned Toby, glad to get even the friendly grip of the sea
monster released, and instinctively rubbing his hand slyly on the tails
of his flaring coat.
Still delicate, Blackbeard waited until the land faded into the sea
line behind him ere, with the feeling that he had had a pleasant
vacation and was glad to get back to work again, he threw out his
sinister ensign,--the flag of skull and bones. Blackbeard was himself
again.
And now there happened that which many of the crew had often fearfully
predicted,--the Devil came aboard Blackbeard’s ship.
The weather had been threatening for some time, and now, on a late
afternoon, the great ocean heaved murmurously beneath the bows. In
the rigging the wind fretted and complained, shrilly and more shrilly
as though the white-green tumult of the waters was disturbing it; in
the cabin below the dark horror of delirium tremens was falling upon
the bearded master. On the decks, the mate--doubtless the effective
Mr. Richards--stripped his ship for the approaching combat and drove
his men aloft into the swaying yards. Now and then Blackbeard, still
the sailor, reeled on his cabin threshold and blurted insane orders
to the gale. Whereat Mr. Richards, well accustomed to the storms of
wind and waves and delirious masters, slammed the door in his face and
laughingly went about his work.
Palely the day expired in the west, and as though they had only been
waiting for the night, wind and water strengthened to the struggle and
now persuaded a third element, the rain, to join them in the conspiracy
of destruction. These three witches began to make the cauldron boil.
Mr. Richards still laughed; his sails were in and he was with the
helmsman, sweating to keep the vessel from a fatal lurch.
“What’s that sound?” gasped the steersman to his officer, leaning
full weight to his work. Forward they could see nothing but the black
void and a white wash of sea where their decks and bowsprit should
ordinarily be, nor could look in that direction long for the whips of
rain with which the screaming winds lashed them.
“The wind,” hollered Richards, bending close to be heard.
The steersman shook his head. “No--that!” he shouted.
The gale paused in one of those lulls by which it seems to recover for
a effort of fresh fury. And in the second of quietness there rose and
fell a long, horrible scream of inhuman defiance. Richards grinned
and pointed with his finger below. Blackbeard was wrestling with the
principalities and powers of darkness.
“Who’s that?” bellowed the steersman, his momentary reassurance flown.
His face was turned with a gaze of inexpressible fear at the gleaming,
plunging masts. “There--there--”
Richards peered in the rain-whipped night; peered and shrank back, his
mouth open wide and his eyes protruding. He rallied, pulled out a heavy
wooden pin from the ship’s side and started forward. Within ten paces
of the main-mast he stopped, and gathering his strength, hurled the pin
with all his force crashingly against the mast. The pin fell into an
invading sea and was whirled overboard. But the Thing stood, dark and
sinister.
Richards felt the ship getting beyond control of the cowering helmsman.
He rushed back in time to save them from ruin; the man had dropped to
the deck, a bundle of abject fright. While the mate was still calling
for help, the boatswain crawled up on hands and knees and turned an
ashen face to his superior.
“There’s a strange man,” he shouted as loudly as a quavering voice
would permit, indicating with a backward jerk of his thumb. “Aloft--”
The Thing was moving about the yards; there was a sort of solid
blackness to It that somehow made It visible even against its somber
background.
Turning the helm over to the boatswain, the mate rushed below for his
pistol, but when he came back to the deck the Thing was gone.
Richards laughed thinly. “The Devil’s signed on with us, boys!”
“Then that’s the end o’ us,” groaned the boatswain.
But the fact that a New Hand was on the ship if not on her articles was
not immediately disastrous. For very shortly after that vivid night,
Blackbeard, recovered now of his bout, met and took a very fine French
ship, which was in so excellent a condition that to call it “salvage”
was indeed the very subtlest of piratical jokes.
And the joke was made good, too, when, taking her at once into
Ocracoke, His Excellency, with little hesitation, gave her captor a
certificate of salvage, accepting as his fee for the certificate some
sixty hogsheads of sugar. What the Governor did not use, Toby Knight
obligingly allowed to be stored in the Knight barn.
This was the final straw that caused the proverbial fatal accident to
the camel. North Carolina, at the end of patience, now flared up, and,
ignoring her own corrupt authorities, appealed to the capable Alexander
Spotswood, Governor of Virginia, for the extermination of the pest of
Ocracoke Inlet.
Virginia heard and responded and despatched Captain Brand and
Lieutenant Maynard, each in command of a small ship of war, to the
Carolina coast in quest of Blackbeard.
Brand and Maynard appreciated the size of their job, so they gathered
into their crews picked men who were volunteering for the duty, and
who would be likely to keep the same zestful lookout for the oncoming
terror as does a whaler in fat and profitable fishing grounds for the
dark bulk which shall fill all his barrels with oil.
They reached Pamlico Sound, of which Ocracoke Inlet is a part, toward
the evening of November 21, and with jumping pulses spotted the masts
of the black beast as he lay in wait for prey. Blackbeard was surprised
just as Bonnet had been, and like Bonnet spent the night in getting
ready for battle.
The Virginians had to lie outside the inlet all night and wait for
the morning to light them through the risky channels. When next day
they sailed in, Blackbeard, knowing the soundings, was able to make
the running-fight pirate tactics prescribed for such emergencies, and
blasted Brand and Maynard with his broadsides; and though steeped to
the eyebrows in rum, he was at all times the adept and finished sailor.
But the enemy were getting at him, too, and his decks were cluttered
with the slain. He was undermanned, having only some twenty men at the
time, so that his losses from the attackers’ fire left him but a sparse
crew to work his ship and man eight guns, as well as keep going an
effective musketry volleying. There was left but one resource, and that
was hand-to-hand conflict.
He got within grappling distance of Maynard’s ship, and with his usual
ferocity of appearance and manner threw himself and his surviving men
into the Virginian’s rigging, and plunged, demoniacally fighting, to
the decks. For a second the pirates shook their enemy with the shock
of the impact, but not long; with that roaring vigor which gave the
English-speaking sailors their dominion of the oceans of the world,
Maynard’s men rallied and an indescribable butchering ensued.
Blackbeard made for the commander, and Maynard met him with equal
courage and the added strength which the moral side of the matter
always lends a warrior’s arm. The arch-pirate’s body was open at more
than twenty places; but on those heaving, blood-wet decks he fought the
lieutenant with the verve of an athlete fresh for the field. A sudden
chance and he thrust a cocked pistol straight into his opponent’s
chest, but before the finger could pull the trigger back, Maynard laid
the cutlass squarely across the pirate’s throat. He sank to the deck
like a slaughtered bull.
It was all over. Those pirates who could, leaped over the bulwarks and
swam to the shore, leaving a red trail in the water behind them.
[Illustration: He fought the lieutenant with the verve of an athlete
fresh for the field.]
Twilight came down on the sea. Beneath the shallow waters the
bodies of the slain quivered with the motion of the waves as if they
were still alive and still struggling, and among them was the headless
corpse of Blackbeard.
For that terrible head was hung at the bowsprit of Maynard’s ship. All
the way back to Virginia the gruesome figurehead swung and dipped and
ducked with the movements of the vessel; the ocean pounded and played
with it and twisted that strange beard into more fantastic shapes
than Blackbeard had ever dreamed of, weaving into it the weeds and
slime-flora of the sea, and for a last touch washed from their sockets
the baleful eyes which glared in the fixed glassiness of death.