Robert Maynard
So I recently saw that new Netflix Pirate Kingdom documentary where they got a bunch of historians to repeatedly call Anne Bonny a slut and argue that piracy in the Caribbean was altruistic and heroic because these murderous lunatics occasionally plundered, marauded, and destroyed ships associated with the slave trade and because they could sometimes vote for their captains. It’s got some fun reenactment stuff, like how in the middle of some dude talking about the Queen Anne’s Revenge they randomly cut to an out-of-nowhere extreme close up of Blackbeard's flaccid penis being penetrated by a hypodermic syringe without warning. They reuse that same shot again later, just in case the image of syphillitic pirate dong hadn’t been sufficiently seared into your brain the first time.
I thought it was pretty good.
Anyway, on a slightly related subject, I had a kid recently. He was born on November 22nd, so, being a history nerd, I of course went looking for cool shit that happened on that date so that I could get to work planning on how to begin indoctrinating this kid into our little history cult here. I guess he shares a birthday with Charles De Gaulle, the actors for Black Widow and the Incredible Hulk, and Queen Ranavalona the Cruel, and, while a few other noteworthy things might have also happened on the twenty-second of November, the main Badass of the Week connection was that it’s also also the date that the terrifying and insanely-badass dick-needle pirate Blackbeard was killed by elements of the Royal Navy in a fierce naval battle off the coast of North Carolina.
All of this together got me thinking about that famous painting of the Death of Blackbeard, and particularly about the weirdly-unheralded Virginia Lieutenant who was dispatched to face off against the most dangerous man on earth, emerged victorious with the fearsome raider's head mounted on the bowspirit of his ship, and then disappeared into history forever — Robert Maynard. The story is pretty amazing, and, weirdly, is even more swashbuckling and exciting than it was presented in that documentary.
I've got an entire chapter on Blackbeard in my first book, but the TLDR is that this guy was a bad motherfucker. He raided and terrorized the coasts of North America and the Caribbean islands without mercy, charging into enemy ships with his hair and beard literally on fire and with six flintlock pistols and two cutlasses hanging off of him in various places. He commanded a massive 40-gun warship known as Queen Anne's Revenge, sunk and destroyed dozens of merchant ships, and once even blockaded the city of Charleston and laid siege to the entire town single-handedly.
Here's a picture of this dude.
He’s pretty intense.
If it wasn’t bad enough that this guy was sinking and destroying every ship he could get his hands on, towards the end of his career Blackbeard also started kicking money back to the Governor of North Carolina, who in turn granted the pirate safe harbor in the shoals and inlets of the Tar Heel coastlines, granting him a little base of operations to fuck up the rest of the ACC states. This, of course, didn't really work for the Governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, who put out a decent bounty to whoever could bring him Blackbeard's nuts in a vice.
The guy who answered the call was a hardened naval officer named Robert Maynard. Not much is known about him, which is kind of weird because this is the dude who killed the most famous pirate ever. We know he was British, born in England, and that he lived in Virginia back when Virginians were also technically Brits. By 1707 he was a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy, meaning that he would have had at least 11 years of experience in the King's fleet by 1718 – and probably significantly more, since you typically don’t just get made Lieutenant the same day you sign up for the Navy. He was serving in Virginia by 1718 aboard the 42-gun Frigate HMS Pearl, one of only two warships assigned to defend the colony’s coastline from pirates, shark attacks, and the French.
Governor Spotswood hired Maynard to find Blackbeard, though, weirdly, we aren't sure if this was an Official Order or if Maynard was working more as a bounty hunter on this one (I'd argue either capacity to be equally badass). Maynard asked around and in some seedy-ass pirate bars and got a tip that Blackbeard's crew were moored of Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, and that they were in a smaller sloop called the Adventure instead of the terrifying pirate frigate Queen Anne's Revenge. Attacking into this cove would be tough, but it might be better to hit this dude when he's not commanding from the deck of a ship that was literally once a warship in the French Navy. Maynard left Pearl in port, picked up two smaller sloops that were better suited for shallow-draft adventures, hand-selected some of his best and toughest sailors, and departed Williamsburg, Virginia on November 17, 1718 to rid the world of its most notorious pirate.
Maynard had two sloops – the Ranger, with 22 men, and the Jane, with 31 guys, including Maynard himself. As they approached Ocracoke Island on the morning of November 22nd, 1718, they found Blackbeard and his guys aboard the pirate sloop Adventure. The Pirates had around thirty guys, most of whom were pretty hungover from partying and drinking all night, but these were some badass motherfuckers with plenty of experience gutting their enemies on the high seas, and you really don't want to try to engage a pirate in hand-to-hand combat unless you were really just super curious what it felt like to have your nose bitten off by a dude with rabies.
But Maynard didn't give a fuck. Realizing that he might have the drop on the pirates, he ordered Jane and Ranger forward at full speed, hoping to board and capture the enemy without a fight.
It didn't work out though, because Ranger bonked on a sand bar and got stuck, forcing the crew to scramble to un-fuck her, a job they only completed mere moments before nine cannons started hurling explosive shells at them.
Maynard looked ahead at Blackbeard, who was chugging wine on the deck of the Adventure, lighting his face on fire, and screaming about how the Royal Navy were "sniveling puppies" and about how he "swore damnation to himself if he either took or gave quarter". Maynard didn't love the idea of this, but he had a job to do – he ordered his ships to close for battle.
Blackbeard maneuvered Adventure for a broadside and unleased a withering hail of canister fire on the Ranger, fragging the deck with shrapnel that blew apart the commander and shredded five of his top officers. From the railings, pirates unleashed volleys of musket fire, some of the guns loaded with nails and screws and other horrifying shit, and chaos broke out aboard the suddenly-leaderless Ranger pretty much immediately. The ship listed and faltered, and soon began turning away from the gunfire that was still raining down on them.
But Lieutenant Robert Maynard wasn't about to give in that easily. He commanded Jane forward, personally standing at the bow of his ship as it hurtled towards the heavily-armed pirates. He ordered his guys to the gunwales with muskets and unleashed as much fire as he could get on the pirates — trying not only to damage or kill them, but also to drive them away from the crippled Ranger. Blackbeard responded to this new threat with another broadside of cannon fire, which smashed Jane and wounded several of Maynard's men. Lucky, however, amid the heavy fighting a single lucky shot from Maynard's troops managed to split the jib on Adventure, crippling Blackbeard's speed and making it significanly more difficult for the pirate ship to escape.
Of course, things were also looking bad for Maynard – Ranger was running for it, Jane was on fire, his guys were wounded and dying, pirates were shooting nails at him, and the broadsides of pirate cannon fire were relentlessly turning his ship into sawdust.
So he came up with a plan.
Maynard ordered his guys below deck, then ordered his ship to make a false retreat – turn tail and act like you're bailing on the battle, but flee in such a way that it blocks Blackbeard's only avenue of escape from this cove. Blackbeard, with his jib damaged, would never have been able to outrun Jane in open water, did the only thing he could do – he took the bait. Adventure closed with Jane, pummeled it with another volley of cannon, then grappled the ship with grappling hooks and boarded her with a horde of bloodthirsty, screaming, cutlass wielding pirates.
Lieutenant Robert Maynard then immediately charged out from the hold with his best guys, all of whom were armed with makeshift fucking hand grenades they’d put together with gunpowder and steel.
The fight was on.
Bombs, gunfire, and cutlasses clashed and burned as a ferocious battle raged across the decks of the Jane and the Adventure. The sides were evenly matched – 31 Royal Navy guys against 30 pirates – and after the first volley of bombs and explosions ripped through the pirates, the Royal Navy guys were getting pretty cut up in hand-to-hand combat. Yet they continued fighting heroically, emptying pistol fire at point-blank range and slashing fiercely with knives, boarding axes and swords.
Maynard himself charged at the pirate leader – the infamous Blackbeard, who was drunk, on fire, and screaming like a fucking lunatic. Maynard put a bullet in the hulking demon, which didn't even slow the guy down, and the two engaged in a fierce swordfight, each slashing the other with relentless swings of their heavy steel blades. Blackbeard took more gunfire, was hit a couple more times with musket balls, yet still stood strong, raging and grunting like a wild animal from hell as he lashed out at everyone and everything around him. Maynard refused to give a fuck, however, even when his sword broke in the fight, but he continued on, disarming Blackbeard with a broken-ass sword and sending him to the deck. Blackbeard went down, and was then immediately decapitated by Maynard's second-in-command, a big-ass Scottish Highlander who ran up from behind and cut Blackbeard's head off with a big swing of his broadsword.
Their commander dead and their allies getting fragged with grenades and goddamn Highlander swords, the pirates lost their spirit. Some jumped in the water, where the Royal Navy sniped them from the ship as they tried to swim away. Blackbeard's second-in-command, a former African slave named Black Caesar, tried to blow up the Adventure's gunpowder hold, but he was stopped and captured before he could suicide bomb both ships into flotsam.
By the time the smoke and fighting cleared, and the blood had been swabbed from the deck, twenty-one pirates lay dead, including Blackbeard himself. The Royal Navy lost ten guys on Ranger, and although all 20 men aboard Jane reported as Wounded in Action, somehow not a single man from that ship died of his injuries.
Robert Maynard arrived back home a month later with nine pirate prisoners in his brig, a hold full of recovered gold and treasure, and a handful of damning documents proving that the Governor of North Carolina was openly supporting piracy against the Crown. As he entered Williamsburg, people saw that he also had the severed head of the most notorious pirate in history hanging from the bowspirit of his ship. Governor Spotswood would later stake Blackbeard’s skull at the mouth of the Hampton River as a warning against future pirate attacks.
Considering that he’s a hero of the Colonies who defeated the most vicious pirate in the Caribbean in hand-to-hand combat, Robert Maynard basically just takes his money and goes back to work without too much more celebration, and kind of just disappears from history. He attains the rank of Captain by 1740, and eventually dies in January of 1751 at the age of 66, at his home in Kent, England, after a naval career spanning at least 30 years. He's buried in a small church in that town. Nowadays the site of the battle is known as Teach's Hole (Blackbeard's real name was Edward Teach), and they do reenactments of the battle there every once in a while. Every November, the crew of the Royal Navy's HMS Ranger (the current iteration is as an Archer-class patrol vessel based out of Portsmouth) has a “Blackbeard Night” to commemorate the accomplishments of Maynard and the crew of their namesake vessel.
"But 12 stout Men I left there, fought like Heroes, Sword in Hand, and they kill’d every one of them that enter’d, without the loss of one Man on their Side, but they were miserably cut and mangled."