In the third week of May 1718, Blackbeard’s four-ship squadron anchored across the entrance to Charleston harbor and stopped every vessel trying to enter or leave. Within about a week his men had taken several merchant ships — contemporary accounts differ on whether it was five or as many as eight or nine — along with a number of their passengers, including a sitting member of the colony’s governing council, Samuel Wragg. Blackbeard’s demand was not gold. It was a chest of medicine, and it shows, in miniature, how pirate crews actually treated the people they captured: less through cinematic cruelty than through calculated leverage.
A hostage crisis, not a massacre
Blackbeard held his hostages for about a week while a small boat carried his ransom demand into Charleston. Governor Robert Johnson, who had no fleet capable of challenging the blockade, agreed to supply the medicine chest under the explicit threat that the hostages would be killed if he refused. The ransom was paid, the chest delivered, and the prisoners released. Contemporaries in the Carolinas described the episode as having struck “a great Terror to the whole Province,” which was, from Blackbeard’s point of view, close to the entire purpose: a ransom demand backed by nothing more than reputation.
The crew nobody wanted to let go
Most captured sailors were never held for ransom at all. They were questioned, usually on deck, about where valuables were hidden and about how their former captain had treated them — a captain known for cruelty risked violent retaliation from his own former crew once they ended up in pirate hands. Pirate quartermasters also looked for certain trades among their prisoners: carpenters, surgeons, and navigators were disproportionately forced to join, because a pirate ship could not function without them and volunteers in those trades were scarce. Some of these men signed the ship’s articles under open threat of death; others who went along willingly still claimed afterward to have been forced, because a sailor who could prove he never signed had a far better chance of acquittal if his pirate ship was later captured by a naval patrol. Vice-admiralty judges took the distinction seriously, and pirate crews knew it — which is reportedly why some willing recruits asked their new shipmates to stage a show of forcing them, purely for the paper trail.
Quarter, and the real meaning of the Jolly Roger
Pirates generally preferred not to fight. A contested boarding action could cripple both vessels and kill or maim men a pirate crew could not easily replace, so most captains tried to make surrender look like the safer option. This is the real function of the Jolly Roger: hoisting a black flag was effectively a promise that a crew who struck their colors promptly would be spared. A red, or “bloody,” flag sent the opposite signal — that no quarter would be given at all. The threat worked often enough that most captures involved no violence once the black flag went up.
When it did turn violent
Resistance, or the suspicion that valuables were being hidden, could turn captivity brutal. Interrogation methods recorded in trial testimony and crew accounts included “woolding” — tightening a cord around a prisoner’s head — and repeated dunking from the yardarm. Specific, well-documented atrocities exist: in 1722, Edward Low’s crew hanged a group of Portuguese passengers and separately tortured a Portuguese captain, cutting off his lips and burning them in front of him; in October 1720, Bartholomew Roberts’ crew cut the ears off a group of Dutch captives. These cases were notorious precisely because they were exceptions worth writing down, not the baseline. For the much larger number of merchant crews who struck their colors and cooperated, captivity usually meant a few uncomfortable days before being set adrift in a boat, left aboard their own ship once it had been stripped of anything valuable, or put ashore on a convenient coastline — unpleasant, but survivable, and a long way from the walk-the-plank theatrics of later fiction.
Sources consulted: Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724); the South Carolina Encyclopedia’s entry on Blackbeard; Wikipedia’s “1718 in piracy” and “No quarter”; and World History Encyclopedia’s “Pirate Punishments in the Golden Age of Piracy.”
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