Quote:
Originally Posted by Taltarzac725
The sad story of Captain David Harriot was one many preachers depicted in their purge of people's fascination with pirates. Captain Harriot had a sloop named Adventure out of Jamaica and when he pulled into the harbor of Turneffe Atoll off of Belize to fill his casks with fresh water he found he had floated into a flotilla of pirates. Rather than having his pants shot off by pirates, he quickly surrendered and he and his men were forced to become pirates or face being marooned on Turneffe. Harriot became a pirate and soon was captured by Cape Fear vigilantes and later killed after escaping from custody of law enforcement authorities. J O H N N Y D E P P Z O N E • View topic - On Stranger Tides Tidbit #14 ~ Blackbeard |
Blackbeard (born 1680) tried to offset any act he saw as a kindness--like his taking in of Captain David Harriot-- by staging actions which would enhance his reputation for cruelty and make merchant ship captains think twice before challenging him on the High Seas. He had read about the viciously cruel French pirate François l'Olonnais (1635-1668) as a child in Alexandre Exquemalin's
Buccaneers of America (1678) and tried to match some of these stories. He
buttoned himself and some crew members in the hold, lit fire to some barrels which had small amounts of brimstone, and waited for his crew members eyelids to get
droopy when they tried to stop the noxious smoke from getting into their eyes. He was the last to
leave this smelly inferno. It did
tweak his reputation a bit. More so however was his action of asking three ship members to a drinking bout in his cabin, turning off the lanterns, sitting back down, and then shooting two pistols from under the table without aiming. He hit one of his crew in the knee with a ball and crippled him for life. When friends of the victim of the shooting Israel Hands -- now Captain of
the Adventure-- asked him why he had done this Blackbeard said with a long line of curses "if he did not now and again kill one of them, they would forget who he was."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Exquemelin http://www.cindyvallar.com/lollonais.html