The HBO Max comedy “Our Flag Means Death” built its premise on a genuinely strange historical footnote: a wealthy Barbadian landowner who walked away from his plantation to become a pirate, and his real alliance with Blackbeard. The show leans into both men’s softer, more sympathetic sides. The historical record agrees with that portrait more often than you’d expect — and diverges from it in ways that matter.
The real Stede Bonnet
Stede Bonnet was born around 1688 in Bridgetown, Barbados, to a wealthy English family, and inherited the family estate after his father’s death in 1694. By his thirties he was one of the richest men on the island, married with four children. In 1717, with no sailing experience, he bought and outfitted his own sloop, the Revenge, hired a crew, and sailed off to become a pirate. Contemporary accounts — principally Captain Charles Johnson’s 1724 “A General History of the Pyrates” — attribute the decision to “disorder of the mind” and an unhappy marriage, though historians treat that explanation cautiously, since Johnson’s book mixed solid reporting with embellishment throughout.
Bonnet and Blackbeard’s actual alliance
Bonnet met Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, off the coast of Honduras in 1717, and the two sailed in loose company for several months. Bonnet, by most accounts, was a poor captain, and at some point — while Bonnet was recovering from a wound, by one version of events — Blackbeard’s men effectively took over command of the Revenge. Blackbeard kept Bonnet aboard his own ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, in a position closer to guest-prisoner than partner, before the two eventually parted ways. The show depicts their relationship as a close, ambiguous partnership; the surviving record confirms the alliance but offers no evidence of the romantic dimension the series explores, though historians note that long-term partnerships between sailors, sometimes called matelotage, were a documented feature of pirate and maritime communities more broadly.
A fiercer reputation than the facts support
Blackbeard’s legend as a bloodthirsty killer is harder to support from contemporary sources than his legend as a showman. He blockaded Charleston harbor in 1718 with a small flotilla and extracted a chest of medicine from the colony without firing a shot. Scholars working from surviving court records and contemporaries’ accounts have found no solid evidence he killed anyone before the battle that killed him off Ocracoke Island on November 22, 1718. His fearsome image — the lit slow-matches reportedly woven into his beard, the multiple pistols and knives — was built for psychological effect more than put into practice. On this point, the show’s gentler, more self-aware Blackbeard tracks closer to recent scholarship than the cartoonish villain of older pirate fiction.
What the show leaves out
Where “Our Flag Means Death” diverges most clearly from the record is in what happened after Bonnet and Blackbeard separated. Bonnet resumed raiding and, by several contemporary accounts, grew considerably more violent toward prisoners and his own crew than he had been at the outset. He was captured at the Battle of Cape Fear River on September 27, 1718, by Colonel William Rhett’s naval expedition, and brought to Charles Town. Tried on November 10, 1718, before Judge Nicholas Trott on charges connected to two captured ships, he was sentenced to death and hanged at White Point on December 10, 1718 — roughly three weeks after Blackbeard’s own death. His body was buried in the marshland below the low-water mark alongside his crew. A multi-season comedy built around a quick, sympathetic exit for either man would struggle to accommodate that ending, and the show, as of its cancellation after two seasons, never had to.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia’s entry on Stede Bonnet; SlashFilm’s and The Mary Sue’s reporting on the historical basis of “Our Flag Means Death.”
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