Blackbeard. Calico Jack. Black Bart. The names feel as authentic as the cutlasses, and most readers assume they came straight out of a ship’s muster roll in the 1710s. The documentary record tells a different story. Two of the three most famous pirate nicknames in English history cannot be traced to anyone who actually sailed with the men they describe — they were coined years, or in one case two centuries, after the pirates in question were already dead.
Blackbeard: a real nickname, an uncertain surname
Edward Teach is the one case where the nickname is solidly contemporary. Henry Bostock, a sea captain who encountered him in 1717, described in a sworn deposition “a tall spare man with a very black beard which he wore very long,” and witnesses at the time already called him Blackbeard. The description held up: by the time Captain Charles Johnson published A General History of the Pyrates in 1724, he had Blackbeard twisting ribbons into his beard and tucking lit match-cord under his hat brim to frame his face in smoke before a fight — a detail no other source confirms and that may be Johnson’s own embellishment.
What is genuinely uncertain is his real surname. Contemporary documents spell it Thatch, Thache, Thach, Tack and Thatche almost as often as Teach, and the people who actually met him favored the Thatch variants. “Teach” became the standard spelling mainly because it is what The Boston News-Letter, the only newspaper in the American colonies at the time, printed. A pirate’s working name turns out to be more reliably documented than his birth name.
Calico Jack: a nickname from the wrong decade
John Rackham fares worse. The transcript of his 1721 trial in Jamaica calls him only “John Rackham” throughout — no alias, no nickname — even though the trial record for Blackbeard’s crew, taken a few years earlier, uses “Blackbeard” freely. No contemporary newspaper gave Rackham a colorful name either. “Calico Jack” appears in print for the first time in 1728, in the second volume of Johnson’s General History — a volume historians regard as considerably less reliable than the first, padded with pirates whose biographies look embellished or invented outright. Calico cloth was also strongly associated with women’s clothing at the time, which makes it an odd nickname for a swaggering captain to have actually gone by. A different, unrelated pirate from the 1690s had also been called “Calico Jack,” which may be where Johnson picked up the name.
Black Bart: a 1920s poem wearing an 18th-century costume
Bartholomew Roberts has the strangest case of all. He was born John Roberts in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in 1682, and nothing in the record explains why he started sailing under “Bartholomew” rather than his birth name — historians can only guess it might echo the earlier buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp. “Black Bart” is not a period nickname at all. It originates with “Barti Ddu,” the title of a ballad by the 20th-century Welsh poet Isaac Daniel Hooson, who was almost certainly riffing on Johnson’s 1724 physical description of Roberts as “a tall black Man” — meaning dark-complexioned, not a nickname. The Welsh epithet shows up nowhere in Roberts’s lifetime; its earliest appearances are a 1973 novel, Hooson’s poem, and a 2017 song. Two and a half centuries after his death, Roberts acquired a nickname he never heard.
Why the confusion runs so deep
Part of the problem is Johnson’s book itself. A General History of the Pyrates is the foundational source for almost everything known about Golden Age piracy, and it is also a working mixture of trial records, eyewitness report, and outright narrative invention, with no indication in the text of which is which. Later writers, filmmakers and balladeers then built on Johnson’s embellishments rather than the sparser court and shipping records underneath them, and each retelling added polish that got mistaken for history. The irony is that the real contemporary record — depositions, trial transcripts, naval correspondence — is often less colorful than the legend, but considerably more trustworthy about what pirates were actually called while they were alive.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia entries on Blackbeard, John Rackham and Bartholomew Roberts, cross-checked against Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724/1728) and standard biographical summaries from Royal Museums Greenwich and the National Maritime Museum.
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