Blackbeard Mini Series (2006)

We are getting started early again this week.  This theme is for a our cat Alexina--we've had it planned for months to celebrate her 9th birthday last week, but over the weekend she's fallen gravely ill, so we want to get as many pirates in for her as possible!

This made for television mini, stars Angus Macfayden as the infamous Blackbeard.  It purports to tell the real biographical story of the infamous pirate, whose real name is thought to have been Edward Teech.  He was the full on definition of pirate!  His activities as a criminal sailor, have given the world most of it's stereotypes of what a pirate is, and how a pirate acts.  I'm not at all sure if he ever uttered "Arggh" or not, but a lot of his other actions certainly gave the world it's definition of "pirate."

An engraving of Edward Teech

Some of Blackbeard's infamous "deeds"included almost surgical strikes known as "sea robberies."  When taking a ship for robbing, he would fly the British flag to lure in the unsuspecting vessel that he'd targeted, then at the last minute, when the ship was too close to flee, he would, in high pirate fashion, hoist his own pirate flag.  He acquired his infamous ship by attacking a larger French sloop, stranding her crew on a Caribbean island and sailing off their vessels, renaming it the Queen Anne's Revenge.  For the stranded French, he was at least nice enough to leave them his old ship, which they boarded, renamed it Mauvaise Rencontre, or "Bad Meeting," and hobbled off to the island of Martinique.

This is actually what Blackbeard's pirate flag looked like!  Nuts.

The most famous or infamous thing that he ever did was blockade the Charleston harbor in South Carolina.  At first, he "merely" anchored his ship and just took advantage of ships trying to sail past the Charleston bar.  This he did, eventually keeping all of the ships captured and forming a huge flotilla.   This grew more serious when he and his crew took over a London bound ship called the Crowley, full of prominent Carolinians, including children.  His demand??  Medicine!!  It is now thought that these were needed by Teech's crew because of a serious out-break of venereal disease amongst them.  Now, I grew up here in the south, so I heard about all this stuff when I was a kid.  I didn't give it much thought at the time, but now it seems pretty damn strange that all this was just bandied about as local history, when really it was quite famous!!

The mini-series also stars Stacey Keach (who sounds a lot like he's yelling his own last name when he yells at Teech), Richard Chamberlin, Jessica Chastine, Mark Umbers and Rachel Ward.  It was actually one of two made for television movies about Blackbeard in 2006.  I guess there was some Blackbeard fever that no one noticed--or something!  I was around this time that the wreck of Blackbeard's ship off the coast of the Carolinas was confirmed, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I guess this is what piracy leads to.