On November 22, 1718, Lieutenant Robert Maynard’s men killed Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, in a close-quarters fight off Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina. What happened next is not in dispute: Maynard’s own account states that his crew cut off Blackbeard’s head and hung it from the bowsprit of their sloop, the Ranger, before sailing to Virginia to collect the bounty and prove the kill. The head reportedly hung afterward from a pole at the point where the Hampton and James rivers meet — a spot still known today as Blackbeard’s Point. What became of it after it was eventually taken down is where the documented history stops and the legend begins.
The Williamsburg punch bowl
The earliest traceable version of the skull legend comes from the antiquarian John F. Watson, who recorded in his 1830 reminiscences that Blackbeard’s skull had been fashioned into the silver-mounted base of a large punch bowl, nicknamed “the Infant,” said to have been used at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. Watson claimed to have spoken with people whose ancestors said they had drunk from it. Decades later, the Virginia historian John Esten Cooke wrote that the cup was still preserved as of 1903, though he supplied no further detail about where or by whom. Neither account offers anything that would count as verification — both are secondhand claims, resting on family tradition rather than any examined object.
A secret society and an inscribed skull
A second strand of the legend surfaces in a 1989 memoir by North Carolina judge Charles Harry Whedbee, who described visiting a gathering at a place called “Blackbeard’s Castle” on Ocracoke in the early 1930s, where members of a private society were said to drink from a silver-plated skull inscribed “Deth to Spotswoode” — a jab at Alexander Spotswood, the Virginia governor who had ordered the raid that killed Blackbeard. Like Watson’s account a century earlier, this one rests entirely on personal recollection, decades after the fact, of a private ritual no outside party could confirm.
What the museums actually found
In 1998, the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, put a skull purported to be Blackbeard’s on exhibit. The museum’s own director acknowledged at the time that it could not be authenticated. Pirate historian Angus Konstam, who viewed the piece, noted that drinking from a defeated enemy’s skull has real precedent in the ancient world — the practice is described by Livy, Plutarch and Herodotus in entirely unrelated contexts — which makes the general shape of the Blackbeard story plausible as a type of legend without making this particular skull genuine. No object connected to the story, in Williamsburg, Ocracoke or Newport News, has ever had its provenance independently established.
Why the legend survives anyway
Every link in the chain, from the Raleigh Tavern bowl to the inscribed Ocracoke skull, is secondhand testimony about an object nobody today can produce and examine. That has not stopped the story from being repeated in each generation, because it fits something real: Blackbeard’s head genuinely was taken as a trophy and genuinely was put on public display for a time, so a legend claiming the skull kept circulating afterward is a plausible, if unverifiable, extension of events that actually happened. The honest version is unsatisfying in the way most real history is — the display of the head is documented fact; everything after that point is a story people have wanted to believe for three hundred years.
Sources consulted: the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s research journal and its Trend & Tradition magazine (Winter 2025) on the Blackbeard skull legend, cross-checked against standard biographical accounts of Blackbeard’s death and the Mariners’ Museum exhibit history.
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