14. Blackbeard's skull

Is this Blackbeard's skull?  There are at least three contenders. Two are in America and one rumour has it being returned to Bristol.

3 Bristol slavers were taken by pirates and used as battleships to attack and rob other ships.  

Concord - 1717 Blackbeard, Peterborough - 1719 Edward England, Cadogan Snow - 1719 Howel Davis, Morning Star - 1721 Thomas Anstis

Blackbeard's ship Concord - 1717 was French

If you think you are a descendant of Edward Teach, or Thatch (or was it Teach or Drummond), why not submit to a D.N.A. test, and solve a 280 year old mystery!!

There is more than one skull that is claimed to be Blackbeard's skull.One is in the Peabody Essex Museum in, East India Square, Salem, Massachusetts. However, the skull doesn’t match the description given in Judge Whedbee’s book, nor is there any mention of the inscription "Deth to Spotswoode" on the cup skull. The cup mentioned in the book is only the very top part of the skull forming a bowl-like shape. Not a complete skull.

The Search for Blackbeard’s skull  

Bear baiting in Queen Square Henry Bright, a wealthy slave trader and merchant, lived at 29 Queens Square in the mid 1700s

The bodies of executed pirates were very often hanged in chains or metal cages near harbor entrances and left there for years as a deterrent to would-be pirates.  

Many believe that it was taken down perhaps by Blackbeard’s sympathizers and fashioned into a silver-mounted drinking cup. 

Antiquarian and publisher John F. Watson states that the "skull was made into the bottom part of a very large punch bowl, called the infant, which was long used as a drinking vessel at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. It was enlarged with silver, or silver plated; and I have seen those whose forefathers have spoken of their drinking punch from it, with a silver ladle appurtenant to that bowl."   

Historian and author John Esten Cooke, in his Virginia, states that the cup was still preserved in the state in 1903 having been a conversation piece in a tavern in Alexandria, Va. 

In 1989, Judge Charles H. Whedbee, a lawyer and state legislator in North Carolina, wrote about an event of the early 1930s when he visited a law school friend from the University of North Carolina at his home on the coast. Touring Ocracoke, they stopped at Blackbeard's Castle near Silver Lake. They drank from what was purported to be Blackbeard's silver-plated skull. According to the Judge the silver cup bore the curse "Deth to Spotswoode" engraved on the rim. Judge Whedbee became an author late in his life and had been trying to relocate the cup when he died in the mid 1990s. Some rumours placed the skull at the College of William & Mary, the University of Virginia, or perhaps a fraternity of one of those universities but extensive enquiries could not locate it. Another rumour suggested it had been returned to England.  

One such skull passed through the hands of several private collectors and in 1949 came into the possession of Edward Rowe Snow, a colourful writer of pirate lore and shipwrecks in New England. Snow died in the late 1980s and his widow gave the skull to the Peabody Essex Museum in, East India Square, Salem, Massachusetts, where it is today. They do not claim it is authentic. According to Caroline Sakowski, of John F. Blair, Publishers, in Winston-Salem, N. Carolina, the publisher of Charles Whedbee’s books, a picture of Mr. Snow with the skull, was shown to Judge Whedbee, who stated at the time that it was indeed the same skull he was familiar with.

This was taken from an article by John Walker in the May 1996 issue of “No Quarter Given”

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