The problem with biographies on people about whom not much is known,really, is they tend to be full of assumptions and background detail (most bios of Shakespeare are like this - "Shakespeare may or may not have been born in X and he may or may not have been called Shakespeare and he may or may not have gone to school..." Konstam, the author of this bio on the world's best known pirate, does what he can - combs the newspapers and court records (not very thorough), makes educated guesses e.g. describing a typical pirate's career of the time, a typical pirate's ship. A believable picture emerges (though still one mostly drawn from Johnson's account): Blackbeard was a Bristol seamen who turned privateer (legal pirates) - then when the piece of paper making piracy legal was taken away he elected to stay with his chosen profession (something Bush and company should keep in mind if they genuinely think all those Iraqi insurgents they helped create are going to settle down to needlework after the Iraq War ends). It gets better as it goes on - not only do the adventures get more thrilling, the information gets more detailed - we have the adventures of Gov Spotswood, accounts of the trial and so on - though Konstam occasionally falls into the trap of being a true pirate nerd: going into detours about the spelling of the name and the composition of guns on his ship,etc (which is important stuff but may have been better say as a separate section in a book instead of part of the one continuous narrative).
Even shorn of hype, Blackbeard had an action packed life complete with a rich gallery of supporting characters - encounters with the wimpy Stede Bonnet (whose life is fascinating himself - turning pirate to escape his wife, buying his own ship, losing respect of his men, and getting caught after a battle where the ships were stuck on sandbars), dealings with the probably corrupt Gov Eden, parties on the beach with sadistic Charles Vane, abandoning his crew on the beach, and most of all his spectacular final battle, duel (with Lt Maynard, about whom surprisingly little is still known) and death. It makes you shake your head as to why they didn't film it in the Robert Newton Blackbeard or some other old school pirate movie - and also wish they had made a film of William Goldman's The Sea Kings (about Blackbeard and Bonnet - and the casting of Sean Connery and Roger Moore would have been magic).
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