The Pirate Who Built a Brand
Edward Teach was likely born in Bristol around the 1680s, though almost nothing is known of his early life. He served as a privateer during Queen Anne's War, the North American theatre of the War of the Spanish Succession, gaining experience in combat and seamanship under legitimate commission. When the war ended and the privateering commissions dried up, Teach, like hundreds of other former privateers, turned to piracy. His first documented appearance in the historical record comes in late 1716, when he was serving under the English pirate captain Benjamin Hornigold in the waters around the Bahamas.
Teach quickly distinguished himself. In November 1717, he captured La Concorde, a large French slave ship, off the coast of Saint Vincent. He armed it with 40 cannons, renamed it the Queen Anne's Revenge, and began a twelve-month campaign of piracy that would make him the most feared marauder on the Atlantic seaboard. He attacked more than thirty English, French, and Spanish merchant vessels. He blockaded the port of Charleston, South Carolina, for several days, holding an entire city's shipping hostage in exchange for a chest of medicine. He cultivated terror as a weapon: a tall, broad man with a thick black beard tied into pigtails, who lit slow-burning fuses under his hat during battle to shroud himself in smoke. The image was deliberate. Teach understood that a ship that surrendered without a fight was more profitable than one that had to be taken by force.
The Quote
Blackbeard's connection to Oak Island comes down to six words. According to "A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates," published in 1724 under the name Captain Charles Johnson, one of Teach's crew asked him the night before his final battle whether his wife knew where his treasure was buried. Teach reportedly replied that nobody knew where it was "but himself and the Devil," and that the one who lived longest should take all.
The General History, likely written by Daniel Defoe or a contemporary, appeared six years after Teach's death and is the single source for this exchange. The book is a mixture of genuine research, second-hand accounts, and outright fabrication, and historians have long debated which portions can be trusted. The quote may record an actual conversation relayed by surviving crew members who were captured and interrogated. It may also be a literary invention designed to sell books to a public hungry for pirate lore. There is no independent corroboration.
Regardless of its authenticity, the quote attached itself to the Oak Island story early and has never let go. A buried treasure that only the Devil could find, on an island where six men have died searching: the narrative appeal is obvious, even if the evidentiary basis is thin.
The Missing Fortune
If Blackbeard accumulated a significant treasure during his career, it has never been found. In June 1718, the Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground near Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina. What is believed to be the wreck was discovered by divers in November 1996. Hundreds of thousands of artefacts have been recovered from the site in the decades since, including cannons, sword hilts, gold fragments, navigational instruments, and coins from the reign of Queen Anne. No large store of gold or silver was found aboard.
After losing his flagship, Teach retreated to Ocracoke Island aboard the smaller Adventure. He accepted a royal pardon from Governor Charles Eden of North Carolina and briefly played at respectability, but was soon back to raiding. On 22 November 1718, Lieutenant Robert Maynard engaged Teach in close combat under orders from the Governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood. Teach boarded Maynard's sloop and was killed in the fighting, reportedly sustaining five gunshot wounds and twenty sword cuts before falling. Maynard cut off his head and hung it from the bowsprit.
In the two weeks that followed, Maynard's men searched Ocracoke Island for the rumoured treasure. They were disappointed. The total haul amounted to casks of sugar, cocoa, indigo dye, a few bales of cotton, and a small quantity of gold dust. If Teach had a fortune hidden somewhere, it was not at Ocracoke, and it was not aboard his ships.
The Oak Island Connection
The most detailed case for Blackbeard's involvement with Oak Island was put forward by Jesse E. Boyd in a 1990 article published in the magazine Treasure Search/Found. Boyd proposed that Teach and his sometime partner Stede Bonnet, the so-called "Gentleman Pirate," used Oak Island as a haven where they could careen their ships and clean their barnacle-encrusted hulls with little fear of discovery. According to Boyd, Teach recovered a portion of a Spanish treasure fleet that was wrecked by a hurricane off the coast of Florida, and stored it on the island.
Boyd's evidence was circumstantial at best. His most compelling point was a local legend that two Nova Scotian fishermen disappeared while investigating mysterious lights on Oak Island sometime around 1720, roughly coinciding with the final years of Teach's career. Beyond this, the case rested on geographical possibility rather than documented fact. Nova Scotia's coastline, with its hundreds of sheltered coves and uninhabited islands, certainly lay within the broader operating range of Golden Age pirates. Ned Low terrorised fishing fleets at Shelburne in 1720, and the governor of Fortress Louisbourg requested additional French naval protection against the pirate threat in the mid-1720s. Pirates were active in these waters. Whether Teach specifically was among them is another question entirely.
The Problem
Blackbeard's pirate career lasted roughly two years, from late 1716 to November 1718. That is an extraordinarily short window in which to accumulate a fortune large enough to justify the engineering effort the Money Pit represents, transport it to Nova Scotia, and construct an elaborate underground vault to protect it. His known movements during this period place him almost exclusively in the Caribbean and along the coast between the Carolinas and Virginia. No documented voyage takes him north of the Chesapeake.
There is also a question of means. Despite his fearsome reputation, Teach may not have been as wealthy as the legend suggests. The inventory recovered after his death was modest. Pirate crews divided their plunder according to strict articles of agreement, with the captain typically receiving only two shares to a common sailor's one. Whatever Teach accumulated was split among dozens of men. The image of a pirate sitting atop a mountain of gold is largely a creation of 18th century publishing and 19th century illustration, particularly Howard Pyle's influential paintings for Harper's Magazine in the 1880s.
No artefact recovered from Oak Island has been attributed to Blackbeard. No archival document, ship's log, or crew testimony places him in Mahone Bay. The connection rests entirely on a quote of uncertain provenance, a geographical possibility, and the enduring appeal of the most famous pirate who ever lived. In the hierarchy of Oak Island theories, Blackbeard is more myth than evidence, a name that attaches itself to buried treasure the way barnacles attach to a hull: persistently, but without much to hold onto.
