Blackbeard

• 1. Introduction

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  Blackbeard, the English pirate whose real name may never be known, first appears on paper in a sworn statement from a merchant captain named Henry Bostock. In December 1717 Bostock spent about eight hours as a prisoner aboard a pirate ship, and then he reported the encounter to Governor Walter Hamilton on Saint Christopher Island. Hamilton asked him to sign an affidavit. In it, Bostock described a "tall spare man with a very black beard which he wore very long." That one line is the earliest recorded account of the man's appearance, and it is where the nickname comes from.

  The man behind the beard is harder to pin down. He is called Edward Teach or Edward Thatch, and he was probably born around 1680. Within a few years he rose from a crewman to the leader of a fleet. Yet there are no verified accounts of him murdering or harming a captive.

  So how did a pirate with such a record become the template for every pirate in fiction? Why would a man who held a whole port to ransom seek a royal pardon? And who ended his career, and with what authority?

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• 2. Road To New Providence

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  Thatch, Teach, Thach, Thache, Thack, Tack, Thatche, Theach: the surname of the man later called Blackbeard survives in many spellings. The form that stuck is Teach, because The Boston News-Letter, the only newspaper in North America at the time, printed it in its dispatches. People who actually met him wrote Thatch or something close. One source offers the surname Drummond, but nothing documents it. Pirates commonly took false surnames so they would not shame their families, so the real name is unlikely ever to surface.

  Bristol is the likeliest place he grew up. Colonial growth in the 17th century and the swelling Atlantic slave trade in the 18th had made it an international seaport, and it was then the second-largest city in England. Teach could almost certainly read and write. He corresponded with merchants and received a letter from Tobias Knight, who was Chief Justice and Secretary of the Province of Carolina. From this, the author Robert Lee speculated that Teach came from a respectable and wealthy family.

  The 18th-century author Charles Johnson claimed that Teach worked as a sailor out of Jamaica on privateering ships during the War of the Spanish Succession. According to Johnson, "he had often distinguished himself for his uncommon boldness and personal courage." Nobody knows when Teach joined that fighting. The same gap covers nearly everything about his life before piracy. He may also have reached the Caribbean in the last years of the 17th century aboard a merchant vessel, possibly a slave ship.

  Henry Jennings, a privateer turned pirate, chose the uninhabited island of New Providence as a base early in the 18th century. It sat within easy reach of the Florida Strait, whose shipping lanes were crowded with European vessels crossing the Atlantic. Its harbour could hold hundreds of ships but was too shallow for the larger vessels of the Royal Navy. The author George Woodbury called it "no city of homes," a place of "temporary sojourn and refreshment for a literally floating population."

  Probably soon after the Treaty of Utrecht, Teach moved there from Jamaica. Like most privateers who had fought in the war, he turned to piracy. Around 1716 he joined the crew of Captain Benjamin Hornigold, a renowned pirate who worked out of the island's safe waters. That same year Hornigold put him in charge of a sloop taken as a prize.

  In early 1717 the two men set out for the mainland, each commanding a sloop. They took a boat carrying 120 barrels of flour out of Havana, then 100 barrels of wine from a sloop out of Bermuda. A few days later they stopped a vessel sailing from Madeira to Charles Town, South Carolina. By then they had probably developed a taste for Madeira. On the 29th of September, near Cape Charles, they took nothing from the Betty of Virginia except her Madeira, and then scuttled her with the rest of the cargo.

  This cruise produced the earliest known report of Teach as a pirate in his own right. Captain Mathew Munthe, on an anti-piracy patrol for North Carolina, described "Thatch" with "a sloop 6 and about 70 men." In September, Teach and Hornigold met Stede Bonnet, a landowner and military officer from a wealthy family who had turned pirate earlier that year. Bonnet's crew of about 70 were unhappy with his command. With his permission, Teach took over his ship, Revenge.

  The flotilla now held three ships: Teach on Revenge, his old sloop, and Hornigold's Ranger. On the 22nd of October 1717 the sloops Robert of Philadelphia and Good Intent of Dublin were stopped and emptied. Hornigold, a former British privateer, attacked only his old enemies. His crew grew tired of watching valuable British cargoes sail past unharmed, and toward the end of 1717 he was demoted. He retired from piracy and took Ranger and one sloop with him. The two men never met again, and Hornigold accepted the King's pardon. Teach was left with Revenge and a single sloop, and on the 28th of November 1717 a French ship appeared off Saint Vincent.

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• 3. The Fearsome Image

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  Two broadsides crashed across the bulwarks of a French merchant vessel off Saint Vincent, killing several of her crew and forcing her captain to strike his colours. She was La Concorde, a large Guineaman registered in Saint-Malo and carrying enslaved people. She had begun as the English merchantman Concord, captured by a French squadron in 1711, and she had changed hands several times since.

  Teach sailed her south to Bequia and put her crew and captives ashore. The French crew were given the smaller of his two sloops, which they renamed Mauvaise Rencontre, meaning "Bad Meeting," and they sailed for Martinique. Teach may have recruited some of the captives. The rest were left on the island and were later recaptured by the returning crew of Mauvaise Rencontre.

  Teach renamed the prize Queen Anne's Revenge and equipped her with 40 guns. His lieutenant Richards took command of Bonnet's Revenge. Soon afterward, still near Saint Vincent, Teach attacked the merchant ship Great Allen. After a lengthy fight she surrendered. He had her moved closer to shore, put her crew off, emptied her holds, and then burned and sank her. The Boston News-Letter reported his force as a French ship of 32 guns, a briganteen of 10 guns and a sloop of 12 guns. He may by then have commanded at least 150 men across three vessels.

  Accounts after Bostock's add detail to the look that gave him his name. The beard was braided into pigtails, sometimes tied with small coloured ribbons. Teach was tall and broad-shouldered. He wore knee-length boots and dark clothing, topped with a wide hat and sometimes a long coat of brightly coloured silk or velvet. Johnson, writing in 1724, said he looked like "such a figure that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury from hell to look more frightful."

  In battle, Johnson added, Teach wore a sling over his shoulders holding three brace of pistols, and he "stuck lighted slow matches under his hat." Whether Johnson told the plain truth or embellished is unclear. It seems likely, though, that Teach understood the value of appearances. Frightening an enemy into surrender is cheaper than fighting for it. Despite the reputation, no verified account has him murdering or harming a captive.

  He also hid behind other names. On the 30th of November, the Monserrat Merchant met two ships and a sloop under a Captain Kentish and a Captain Edwards. Edwards was a known alias of Stede Bonnet.

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• 4. Charles Town Ransom

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  On the 6th of February, Captain Hume of HMS Scarborough reported a pirate ship of 36 guns and 250 men, with a sloop of 10 guns and 100 men, cruising among the Leeward Islands. Hume added musket-armed soldiers to his crew and joined HMS Seaford to hunt them, without success. They learned only that the two ships had sunk a French vessel off Saint Christopher Island and had last been seen going down the north side of Hispaniola. Nothing confirms that these were Teach and Bonnet. The author Angus Konstam thinks it very likely.

  In March 1718, at Turneffe Island east of Belize, the pirates were taking on water when they spotted the Jamaican logwood-cutting sloop Adventure heading for the harbour. They stopped her and invited her captain, Harriot, to join them. Harriot and his crew accepted. Teach sent a crew across to sail the sloop and made Israel Hands her captain.

  They sailed on to the Bay of Honduras and added another ship and four sloops to the flotilla. On the 9th of April the enlarged fleet looted and burned the Protestant Caesar. At Grand Cayman they took a small turtler. They then visited the wrecks of the 1715 Spanish fleet off the eastern coast of Florida, and went north toward Charles Town, South Carolina, attacking three vessels on the way.

  By May 1718 Teach had given himself the rank of Commodore. Late that month his flotilla closed the port of Charles Town. The town had no guard ship, so its pilot boat was the first prize. Over the next five or six days about nine vessels were stopped and ransacked as they tried to cross Charles Town Bar, where the fleet lay at anchor.

  One of them was the Crowley, bound for London with prominent citizens aboard, including Samuel Wragg, a member of the Council of the province of Carolina. The passengers were questioned about the ships still in port and then locked below decks for about half a day. Teach told them his fleet needed medical supplies from the colonial government. If none came, every prisoner would be executed, their heads sent to the Governor, and the captured ships burned.

  Wragg agreed. A Mr. Marks and two pirates were given two days to collect the drugs. Teach moved the fleet and its prizes to within five or six leagues of land. Three days later a messenger from Marks reached the fleet with word that his boat had capsized. Teach granted two more days, but the party still did not return. He then called a meeting of his men and moved eight ships into the harbour, which caused panic in the town.

  When Marks finally came back, he explained. The Governor had gathered the drugs quickly. The two pirates sent to escort Marks, however, were hard to find. They had been drinking with friends and were discovered drunk.

  Teach kept his side of the bargain. He released the ships and the prisoners, though not before relieving them of their valuables, including the fine clothing some of them wore. While at Charles Town he had also heard that Woodes Rogers had left England with several men-of-war, under orders to clear the West Indies of pirates.

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• 5. Pardon And Pursuit

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  On the 10th of June 1718 the flotilla reached Beaufort Inlet, then called Topsail Inlet, off North Carolina. The plan was to careen the ships and scrape their hulls. Instead Queen Anne's Revenge ran onto a sandbar, cracking her main-mast and badly damaging her timbers. Teach had sloops throw ropes across the flagship to pull her free. Israel Hands's Adventure also grounded. Both vessels looked beyond repair, which left only Revenge and the captured Spanish sloop.

  A royal pardon was on offer to pirates who surrendered on or before the 5th of September 1718. It carried a catch: immunity covered only crimes committed before the 5th of January. In theory that left Bonnet and Teach exposed over Charles Town Bar, though most authorities could waive such conditions. Teach thought Governor Charles Eden of North Carolina was a man he could trust. To be sure, he waited to see how another captain fared.

  Bonnet went first. He sailed a small boat to Bath Town, surrendered to Eden and received his pardon. He then returned to Beaufort Inlet to collect Revenge and the rest of his crew, intending to sail to Saint Thomas Island for a commission. Teach had stripped the ship of valuables and provisions and marooned her crew. Bonnet set out for revenge but could not find him. He and his men went back to piracy and were captured on the 27th of September 1718 at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. All but four were tried and hanged in Charles Town.

  Was the wreck an accident? Robert Lee thought Teach and Hands ran the ships aground on purpose, to shrink the fleet's crew and enlarge each remaining share. At Bonnet's crew's trial, Revenge's boatswain Ignatius Pell testified that "the ship was run ashore and lost, which Thatch Teach caused to be done." Konstam adds that Queen Anne's Revenge had become a liability. A pirate fleet at anchor sent word to nearby towns, and any ships around would delay sailing.

  Before heading north on his remaining sloop to Ocracoke Inlet, Teach left about 25 men on a small sandy island roughly 5 km from the mainland. Perhaps he wanted to silence any protest from men who guessed his plans. Bonnet rescued them two days later. In June 1718, only days after Bonnet left with his pardon, Teach and his much-reduced crew received theirs from Eden in Bath.

  Teach settled on the eastern side of Bath Creek at Plum Point, near Eden's home. Through July and August he moved between the town and his sloop off Ocracoke. Johnson says he married the daughter of a local plantation owner, though no evidence supports it. Eden let him sail to St Thomas to seek a privateer's commission, a handy way to remove bored and troublesome pirates from a small settlement. Teach was also given title to his remaining sloop, which he renamed Adventure.

  By the end of August he was back at sea. The governor of Pennsylvania issued a warrant for his arrest, but Teach was probably already in Delaware Bay. He took two French ships leaving the Caribbean, moved one crew onto the other, and sailed the remaining ship back to Ocracoke. In September he told Eden he had found it deserted at sea. A Vice Admiralty Court was quickly convened under Tobias Knight and the Collector of Customs. It ruled the ship a derelict. Knight received twenty hogsheads of sugar from the cargo and Eden sixty. Teach and his crew kept what was left in the hold.

  Ocracoke Inlet was Teach's favourite anchorage, a perfect lookout over ships moving between the settlements of northeast Carolina. From there he first saw the approaching ship of Charles Vane, another English pirate. Vane had refused the pardon brought by Woodes Rogers and had slipped past the men-of-war Rogers brought to Nassau. Teach's old commander Hornigold, now a pirate hunter, had also chased him. Teach and Vane spent several nights together on the southern tip of Ocracoke Island, with notorious company such as Israel Hands and Robert Deal.

  News of the gathering spread through the neighbouring colonies and alarmed the governor of Pennsylvania, who sent out two sloops. They failed. Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia was also uneasy about the supposedly retired freebooter living next door. Some of Teach's former crew had already moved into Virginian seaports. On the 10th of July he issued a proclamation ordering former pirates to report to the authorities, surrender their arms, and travel in groups of no more than three. As head of a Crown colony, Spotswood viewed proprietary North Carolina with contempt. He expected the pirates to turn to their old ways once their money ran out.

  He learned that William Howard, Queen Anne's Revenge's former quartermaster, was in the area. Believing Howard might know where Teach was, he had him and his two slaves arrested. Spotswood had no legal authority to try pirates, so Howard's attorney, John Holloway, brought charges against Captain Brand of HMS Lyme, where Howard was held. Holloway also sued for £500 in damages for wrongful arrest. Spotswood's council argued that a statute of William III let a governor try pirates without a jury in a crisis, and that Teach's presence was one.

  The charges against Howard cited acts of piracy supposedly committed after the pardon's cut-off date, in a Spanish-owned sloop. They ignored that these happened outside Spotswood's jurisdiction. Brand and Captain Gordon of HMS Pearl refused to serve with Holloway present, so he stood down. John Clayton, the Attorney General of Virginia, replaced him; Spotswood described him as "an honester man." Howard was found guilty and sentenced to hang. A commission from London saved him by directing Spotswood to pardon surrendering pirates for acts committed before the 18th of August 1718.

  By then Spotswood had what he needed from Howard: information on where Teach lay. He gathered support from Edward Moseley and Colonel Maurice Moore, two men keen to discredit North Carolina's governor. He wrote to the Lords of Trade suggesting that the Crown could profit from the capture. He paid for the operation himself, possibly believing Teach had fabulous treasure hidden. The Assembly of Virginia added a reward of its own. Gordon and Brand were to march overland to Bath. Lieutenant Robert Maynard of HMS Pearl would take two commandeered sloops there by sea.

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• 6. Last Battle

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  Fifty-seven men sailed down the James River from Kecoughtan on the 17th of November, 33 from HMS Pearl and 24 from HMS Lyme, with some civilian sailors still aboard. Maynard commanded the larger sloop, which his Pearl detachment named Jane. The other, Ranger, went to one of Maynard's officers, a Mister Hyde. The sloops moved slowly, giving Brand time to reach Bath. He arrived within three miles of the town on the 23rd of November, along with several North Carolinians, including Colonel Moore and Captain Jeremiah Vail. Moore went in to look for Teach and reported he was not there but was expected "every minute."

  By then Maynard had already found him. On the evening of the 21st of November he saw the pirates anchored on the inner side of Ocracoke Island, having learned their position from ships he stopped on the way. He did not know the local channels and shoals, so he waited for morning. He turned back all traffic into the inlet so no one could warn Teach, and he put a lookout on each sloop.

  On the other side of the island Teach was entertaining guests and had set no lookout. Israel Hands was ashore in Bath with about 24 of Adventure's sailors, so the crew was thin. Johnson reported "no more than twenty-five men on board," while Teach told passing vessels he had forty. Brand later reported to the Admiralty "Thirteen white and six Negroes."

  At daybreak a small boat took soundings ahead of Maynard's two sloops as they entered the channel. Adventure spotted it and fired as soon as it came in range. The boat fled to Jane. Teach cut his anchor cable, and his crew hoisted sail and swung the starboard guns toward Maynard. Hyde brought Ranger alongside Jane's port side, and the Union flag went up on each ship. Adventure then turned toward the beach, heading for a narrow channel.

  What happened next is uncertain. Johnson claimed that after an exchange of small arms fire, Adventure ran aground on a sandbar, and Maynard anchored and lightened his ship to pass the obstacle. Another version says Jane and Ranger ran aground, though Maynard's log does not mention it. Either way, Adventure then fired her guns into the two sloops. In an instant Maynard lost as much as a third of his force. About 20 men on Jane were wounded or killed, and 9 on Ranger. Hyde was dead, his second and third officers dead or badly hurt, and his sloop played no further part.

  Accounts after that are confused. Small-arms fire from Jane may have cut Adventure's jib sheet, sending her onto the sandbar. Jane and Ranger may have been grounded as well, turning the fight into a race to see who could float first.

  Maynard had kept many of his men below deck, telling them to prepare for close fighting. As the gap closed, Teach ordered his men ready. Adventure's grappling hooks caught, and several grenades, made of bottles filled with powder and shot and lit with fuses, burst across Jane's deck. When the smoke cleared, Teach led his men aboard. Jane looked empty apart from the small group around Maynard at the stern, and the pirates fired at them.

  Then Maynard's men burst out of the hold, shouting and firing. The pirates were caught off guard. Teach rallied them, and the two sides fought across a deck already slick with blood from his broadside. Maynard and Teach fired flintlocks at each other. Maynard hit; Teach missed. Both threw the pistols aside and drew cutlasses. Teach snapped Maynard's blade at the hilt.

  The pirates were driven back toward the bow by better training and a slight edge in numbers, and Jane's crew closed around Teach, who was now isolated. He pressed on and was about to land a killing blow when one of Maynard's men slashed him across the neck. That deflected the cutlass onto Maynard's knuckles instead. Badly wounded, Teach was then attacked by several more of Maynard's crew and killed. The rest of the pirates quickly surrendered. The crew of Ranger took those left on Adventure, including one man who meant to fire the powder room and blow up the ship.

  Reports of the casualties differ. Maynard counted 8 of his men and 12 pirates dead. Brand counted 10 pirates and 11 of Maynard's men. Spotswood claimed ten on each side.

  Maynard examined the body and noted that Teach had been shot five times and cut about twenty. Among his papers was a letter from Tobias Knight. The corpse was thrown into the inlet. The head was hung from the bowsprit of Maynard's sloop so the reward could be collected. Back in Virginia it was set on a pole at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, a warning to pirates and a greeting to arriving ships, and it stood there for several years.

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• 7. Reckoning

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  Maynard stayed at Ocracoke for several more days, making repairs and burying the dead. The loot, sugar, cocoa, indigo and cotton found "in pirate sloops and ashore in a tent where the sloops lay," was auctioned with sugar and cotton from Knight's barn. The sale raised £2,238, and Spotswood used part of it to cover the entire operation.

  The prize money for Teach was meant to be about £400, but it was split between the crews of HMS Lyme and HMS Pearl. Brand and his troops had not been the ones fighting for their lives, and Maynard thought the split deeply unfair. He lost much of his potential support when it came out that he and his crew had helped themselves to about £90 of Teach's booty. The two companies waited four years for their prize money. Despite his bravery Maynard was never promoted, and he faded into obscurity.

  Brand found the rest of Teach's crew and associates in Bath and shipped them to Williamsburg, Virginia, where they were jailed on piracy charges. Several were black. Spotswood asked his council what could be done about "the Circumstances of these Negroes to exempt them from undergoing the same Tryal as other pirates." They were tried regardless, with their comrades, under admiralty law in Williamsburg's Capitol building on the 12th of March 1719. No record of the proceedings survives. Fourteen of the 16 accused were found guilty.

  Of the other two, one proved he had fought only out of necessity; he had been on Teach's ship simply as a guest at a drinking party the night before. The other was Israel Hands, who was not at the fight at all. He claimed Teach had shot him in the knee during a drinking session, and that the royal pardon still covered him. The remaining men were hanged and left to rot in gibbets along Williamsburg's Capitol Landing Road, which was known for some time afterward as "Gallows Road."

  Governor Eden was embarrassed by Spotswood's invasion of his colony, and Spotswood disavowed any part in the seizure of goods. Writing to Lord Carteret, a shareholder in the province of Carolina, he defended himself. He pointed out that Carteret might profit from the sale and reminded him how many Virginians had died protecting his interests. He argued that Eden "could contribute nothing to the Success of the Design," and told Eden his authority came from the king. Lee concluded that Spotswood had no legal authority to invade North Carolina, capture the pirates and auction their goods.

  Spotswood had also accused Tobias Knight of siding with Teach, and on the 4th of April 1719 Eden had Knight brought in for questioning. Israel Hands had testified weeks earlier that Knight was aboard Adventure in August 1718, soon after Teach brought in a French prize. Four pirates said they had visited Knight's home with Teach to give him presents. With the letter Maynard found, this looked compelling. Knight, though very sick and close to death, defended himself competently. He questioned Spotswood's witnesses, said Hands spoke under duress, and noted that under North Carolinian law the other witness, an African, could not testify. He said the sugar was legally stored at his house and that Teach had come only on official business. The board found him innocent of all charges, and he died later that year.

  Eden was angry that the charges against Knight arose in a trial where he had no role. Because the goods Brand seized were officially North Carolinian property, he considered Brand a thief. The quarrel between the colonies lasted until Eden died on the 17th of March 1722. His will named Spotswood's opponent John Holloway as a beneficiary. That same year Spotswood, after years of fighting enemies in the House of Burgesses and the council, was replaced by Hugh Drysdale.

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• 8. Legend And Wreck

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  Francis Drake was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1581 after returning from a round-the-world voyage with plunder worth an estimated £1,500,000. That is a reminder of how differently officials and storytellers saw pirates. The English government generally treated privateers who turned pirate as a reserve naval force, sometimes even encouraging them. Pardons were issued regularly, usually when England neared war, and the public often looked favourably on pirates, some even seeing them as patrons. The economist Peter Leeson argues that pirates were generally shrewd businessmen, far from the barbarians of the modern imagination.

  Woodes Rogers landed at New Providence in 1718 and ended the pirate republic there. Piracy in the West Indies then declined terminally. Pirates had no easy outlet for stolen goods and were reduced to subsistence living. After almost a century of naval war among the British, French and Spanish, sailors had found easy employment, and lone privateers were now outnumbered by powerful ships guarding British merchant fleets. The popularity of the slave trade also helped end the frontier conditions of the West Indies.

  Much of what we know of Teach comes from Charles Johnson's A General Historie of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, published in Britain in 1724. It was required reading for years for those interested in pirates, including its entries on Anne Bonny and Mary Read. A second edition quickly followed. Konstam suspects that the Blackbeard entry was "coloured a little to make a more sensational story," though the book is generally considered reliable. Johnson's accounts have been corroborated in personal and official dispatches, so Lee believes that whoever he was, he had access to official correspondence. Konstam suggests Johnson might have been the playwright Charles Johnson, the publisher Charles Rivington or Daniel Defoe. Woodbury called the name "obviously a pseudonym" and wrote, "one cannot help suspecting that he may have been a pirate himself."

  Despite his fame, Teach was not the most successful pirate. Henry Every retired rich, and Bartholomew Roberts took an estimated five times what Teach stole. Treasure hunters have long searched for his rumoured hoard of gold and silver, but nothing found along the US east coast has been linked to him. Buried pirate treasure is often considered a modern myth. Pirates served for a share of the profit, so a wealthy owner with a hoard did not fit the command structure of a pirate ship. Treasure Island is one of the fictional accounts that spread the idea. The only pirate known to have buried treasure was William Kidd.

  The treasure that has been recovered comes from the wreck presumed to be Queen Anne's Revenge. Intersal Inc., a private research firm, found it in 1996. By 2013 around 280,000 artefacts had been recovered, and a selection is on display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum.

  Ghost stories followed too. Unexplained lights at sea are often called "Teach's light," and some tellings have him roaming the afterlife looking for his head, afraid his friends and the Devil will not recognise him. A North Carolinian tale says his skull became the basis of a silver drinking chalice, and a local judge claimed to have drunk from it one night in the 1930s.

  Matilda Douglas made him the main subject of a fictional work in 1835, titled Blackbeard: A page from the colonial history of Philadelphia. Later came the films Blackbeard the Pirate (1952), Blackbeard's Ghost (1968), Blackbeard: Terror at Sea (2005) and the 2006 Hallmark Channel miniseries Blackbeard. Robert Newton, a West Country native, starred in the 1952 film, and his exaggerated West Country accent is credited with popularising the stereotypical pirate voice. Parallels have been drawn between Johnson's Blackbeard and Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. On television he has been played by John Malkovich in Crossbones, Ray Stevenson in Black Sails and Taika Waititi in Our Flag Means Death.

  The wreck itself led to a court fight. In 2013 and 2015 the North Carolina state government posted videos of the wreck by Nautilus Productions on its website without permission. Nautilus, which had been documenting the recovery since 1998, sued in federal court over copyright violations and over "Blackbeard's Law," passed by the General Assembly. It declared such photographs and videos in state custody public records. On the 5th of November 2019 the U.S. Supreme Court heard Allen v. Cooper and ruled for the state, striking down the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act that Congress passed in 1989.

  Nautilus sought reconsideration. On the 18th of August 2021 Judge Terrence Boyle granted it, and North Carolina appealed. The Fourth Circuit denied the state's request on the 14th of October 2022. Nautilus filed its second amended complaint on the 8th of February 2023, adding constitutional claims and arguing that Blackbeard's Law was a Bill of Attainder. On the 30th of June 2023, eight years after its passage, Governor Roy Cooper signed a bill repealing the law.

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