In March of 1719 the men who had sailed with Edward Teach were brought to Williamsburg and tried for piracy. Most of them hanged.
Israel Hands was not among them, and the reason is almost absurd. He had been ashore at Bath for weeks, recovering from a wound, and that wound is why he was not on the deck of the Adventure when Lieutenant Maynard came into Ocracoke Inlet. The injury that ended his sailing career is the only reason he outlived it.
It did not save him from the court. He was swept up in the arrests, carried to Virginia, tried, and condemned.
Here is the part that stopped me.
The Minutes of the Governor’s Council of Virginia survive. You can read them. The records of the trial itself do not.
So the one man alive who had stood next to Blackbeard in the ordinary hours, who had seen him on a Tuesday morning with nothing to prove, was put under oath in a room full of people whose job was to write things down, and the paper is gone.
What we have instead is one book. A General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724 by a man calling himself Captain Charles Johnson, six years after the fact, about people nobody had been following. Almost everything the world is sure it knows about Blackbeard comes through that single volume. The beard. The matches. The fourteen wives.
Johnson has one more line about Israel Hands. He says that some time afterward the man was alive in London, begging his bread.
That is the last thing history says about him. He was somewhere in his thirties.
Which leaves about thirty years with nothing in them at all.
I spent a long time with that gap. A documented man, a documented trial, a documented pardon, and then three decades of a life that nobody wrote down. The record does not say he died. It says it stopped looking.
From the Wreck One Legend, One Fact
The Legend
They say pirates made prisoners walk the plank. A blindfold, a cutlass at the back, a board run out over the water, and a long step into nothing. It is in every pirate story ever filmed and every child’s drawing of one.
The Fact
It is essentially absent from the golden age record. Not rare. Absent.
Pirates of that era killed people, and the accounts are frank about how. They marooned men on sandbars. They flogged them. They threw them over the side without ceremony, and in some cases they tortured them first. Nobody was doing carpentry for it.
The plank arrives later, through nineteenth century fiction and the illustrations that came with it, and works its way backward into what everyone knows.
Which raises a question I have not been able to put down. If the single most famous thing about pirates was invented a hundred years after the last of them hanged, what else on that list is furniture?
Three Things This Deposition Gets Wrong
Below is a short account of what happened after Ocracoke, written in the manner of the period. Three of its claims are wrong.
Not opinions. Facts, of the kind a man correcting his own ship’s books would catch in the margin. Everything you need is in the dispatch above.
Find all three and you are entered.
Three signed hardcovers of The Death of Blackbeard
Hit reply with the code. Three correct answers drawn at random when entries close on Friday November 6, and I will write to the winners for a mailing address, so you know that email is coming and it is me.
I will say how many of you got it right in the next dispatch on November 12.
Two of the three are contradicted by something you read a minute ago. The third is a question of whose court it was.
You have it. The trial was at Williamsburg, in Virginia. The trial records are gone. Maynard was sent by Spotswood of Virginia, not the governor of North Carolina.
Send me this and you are entered:
Three signed hardcovers of The Death of Blackbeard, drawn at random on Friday November 6. I will say how many of you got it right in the next dispatch on November 12.
The deposition passage above is written for the puzzle. The facts behind each claim, including the three errors, are documented.
PS
Lost Voices: The Death of Blackbeard came out on the thirteenth. A hundred pages, narrated by Israel Hands, and the part the record kept is not the part the book is about.
Free to read on Kindle Unlimited.
If you have already finished it, a review is the single most useful thing you can do for a new book, and it takes two minutes.
Start the series
Three in the Echoes of Fortune series. Cozumel is the quickest way in, and it is free.
Shadows Over Cozumel. A standalone novella and the shortest way in. A Thanksgiving dive off Mexico and a Confederate ghost ship that vanished in 1865. Download free.
The Search for Braddock’s Lost Gold. Book one, where the whole thing starts. General Braddock marched toward certain ambush in 1755 and vanished with a fortune the record never recovered. Amazon.
Knights of the Golden Circle. Book three. A cipher carried home from the Civil War turns into something a great deal larger than a treasure hunt. Amazon.
One Question
Which invented pirate detail did you believe longest?
Mine was the plank, well into adulthood, and I did not go looking for it until I started writing about these people.
Send me your answer.
Send this to someone
If you know somebody who would enjoy a hole in the record Blackbeard’s only shipmate left behind, or the fact that nobody ever actually walked the plank, this page is public and needs no signup.
Someone forward this to you?
Shadows Over Cozumel is free. A Confederate blockade runner that vanished in 1865 and appears in the official record exactly once, and the dive team that finds her.
The dispatches come with it, every few weeks.
From Other Authors
One book from another author this month. The description is mine and it is factual rather than a recommendation, so you can decide for yourself whether it is your kind of thing.
What She Requires by P. R. Lynn
Contemporary psychological suspense, and the furthest thing on this page from my own ground. A nurse and her partner start up a Blue Ridge trail in October. She reads the weather in the sky, he reads it in an app, and the storm that comes in strands them somewhere they have to accept shelter. In the publisher’s words, “She sends the storm. She decides who leaves.”
First person, present tense, and it never leaves the narrator’s head. If you read dark contemporary suspense alongside your history, this is squarely that.
Until next time, keep hunting.
David R Leng
Echoes of Fortune. The Past Refuses to Stay Buried… It Echoes into the Present.