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April 8 - April 10, 2021
The first phase of this effort would involve a stealth mission to the island, where he would make contact with the pirates, assess their strength and numbers, and try to negotiate their peaceful surrender.
Whether severed during or after the battle, Blackbeard’s head was strung up in the Adventure‘s bowsprit: a grotesque trophy that would fetch the sailors £100 bounty when they got back to Virginia.
Maynard had Blackbeard’s headless body thrown into Pamlico Sound, where, according to legend, it swam around the Adventure three times before sinking into the brackish water.
It’s better to swim in the sea below Than to swing in the air and feed the crow, Says jolly Ned Teach of Bristol
On Wednesday, March 29, 1721, Charles Vane was hanged at Gallows Point in Port Royal.
Over the months and years that followed, they watched his apparition disappear, bit by bit, ravaged by birds, insects, and the elements, until all that was left of Vane—and the Golden Age of Piracy—were the stories told by the tavern fire, or in hammocks between the decks of a thousand creaking, miserable ships.
During this time, he made the acquaintance of one of New Providence’s most infamous harlots, Anne Bonny, wife of James Bonny, a rank-and-file pirate who had become one of Rogers’s informants. Rackham took a fancy to the fiery young woman, who swore like a pirate and had cuckolded her husband on a great many occasions.
He spent the last of his money courting her, then shipped out on one of Burgess’s final privateering missions, and spent his share of the proceeds on his new flame.
The two fell in love and, sometime in the spring or early summer of 1720, approached James Bonny to seek ...
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Anne Bonny was allowed to see him one last time. “I’m sorry to see you here,” she is said to have told him, “but if you had fought like a man, you need not have hanged like a dog.”
With the execution of Rackham and Vane, the Golden Age of Piracy was all but over.
