A claim circulates widely online, often dressed up as a piece of genuine pirate trivia: that Blackbeard’s logbook ordered his crew to steer clear of certain waters because he believed they were enchanted by mermaids. It shows up in listicles, trivia sites, and casual conversation as an established fact. It is not one.
Tracing the claim back
The closest thing to a primary source for a Blackbeard logbook is a single reference in Captain Charles Johnson’s 1724 A General History of the Pyrates — the same book responsible for most of what the public thinks it knows about Golden Age pirates, and a book many historians already treat with caution because parts of it appear to be invented. That solitary reference says nothing about mermaids.
A detailed investigation by the pirate history researcher behind the Pirate Surgeon’s Journal traced the mermaid claim to an unsupported edit on Wikipedia, which cited a BBC television program as its source. Checking that program directly turned up no mention of mermaids or a logbook at all. No earlier citation, period document, or scholarly source has been found to support it. Comprehensive modern biographical treatments of Blackbeard, including the World History Encyclopedia’s detailed account of his career and capture, make no mention of mermaids, enchanted waters, or any related superstition. The claim appears to be a straightforward internet-era fabrication that picked up the appearance of authority by attaching itself to pirate history’s most recognizable name.
What sailors actually believed
The interesting story is not the fake Blackbeard quote — it’s the real history of mermaid sightings that predates and surrounds it, and that any literate sailor of the period would have had some exposure to. Christopher Columbus recorded seeing three “mermaids” off Hispaniola in January 1493, noting dryly that they were “not so beautiful as they are painted,” a description that lines up well with a manatee breaching the surface. The English buccaneer and naturalist William Dampier described manatees off Mindanao in his 1697 account A New Voyage Round the World, treating them as an unremarkable, edible curiosity rather than anything supernatural. Naval surgeon John Atkins gave a similarly matter-of-fact description of West Indian manatees. A Dominican friar, Domingo Navarrete, recorded an encounter with a “Woman-Fish” in the Philippines in the late 1600s that modern readers would recognize as a dugong.
What set the era apart was not that sailors were gullible, but that natural history itself had not yet drawn a hard line between the zoological and the fantastical. Serious scholarly works catalogued “sea monks,” “sea bishops,” and other merfolk alongside real marine species. The German Jesuit scholar Gaspar Schott’s 1662 compendium Physica Curiosa — a work of natural philosophy, not folklore — includes an engraved plate illustrating exactly this: a “Monstrum Marinum” in the shape of a monk, a “Vir Marinus” dressed as a bishop, a triton, and a sea satyr, presented as subjects worth serious cataloguing. A pirate crew of the following half-century, drawn from the same seafaring culture that produced and consumed these accounts, would have grown up with genuine stories like these — reports of strange shapes in the water, later explained as manatees, dugongs, giant squid, or seals, filtered through travelers’ tales and credulous natural history.
That real, well-documented belief is a far better story than the invented one. It explains why “mermaid” folklore had genuine traction among sailors without needing to borrow a fake quote from history’s most famous pirate to make the point.
Sources consulted: The Pirate Surgeon’s Journal (piratesurgeon.com); World History Encyclopedia, “Blackbeard”; Gaspar Schott, Physica Curiosa (1662), via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
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