Blackbeard's Demise

April 27, 2014

Woke up to cloudy skies and cool temperatures. At 10:30 AM this morning a pod of maybe fifteen dolphin swam by headed up stream on an obvious foraging expedition. About an hour later they reappeared headed out. We noticed one with a torn dorsal fin, not an uncommon thing to see. Maybe an encounter with a shark or other predator – more likely an encounter with a boat in the ICW. These channels are narrow and, depending on where you are, crowded with boat traffic. Dolphins apparently didn’t get the memo about human activities that might be harmful to them.

This is a great anchorage – just off the ICW, shallow enough water, protected and private. A good place for next year on our return.

We proceeded north up the Mackay River through Buttermilk Sound, then up Little Mud River into Front River into the Sappelo River and finally into Sappelo Sound, past Blackbeard Creek and Blackbeard National Wildlife Refuge, both presumably named for Edward Teach (aka Blackbeard), an Englishman who turned to piracy as a career and plundered and pillaged his way along the Virginia and North Carolina coast and throughout the Caribbean in the early 1700 hundreds and who met his end at Ocracoke Island, NC on  Thursday, November 22, 1718 at the hand of Lieutenant Robert Maynard who engaged Blackbeard in hand to hand combat , finally wounding him with a pistol shot after which a Maynard crewman named Demelt stepped in and cut off Blackbeard’s head, which Maynard hung under the bowsprit of his sloop, Pearl, for all to see. Then Maynard traveled north to the Chesapeake Bay, all the while with Blackbeard, or a part of him so to say, hanging from the bowsprit, and finally up the James River to Williamsburg, VA to present his evidence of Blackbeard’s demise to the governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, who had issued a proclamation, that among other considerations, called for the capture of Blackbeard. Governor Spotswood apparently had little faith that Carolinians had enough balls to control piracy.

As most accounts go Blackbeard was a “moderate” when it came to torture and murder as tools of submission, relying more on his  formidable appearance to frighten his victims into submission, although David Cordingly, in his excellent book on piracy, Under the Black Flag, states that Blackbeard may have had as many as fourteen wives, one of which was a teenager, taken from her family by Blackbeard and who he ravaged often and when he was done invited members of his crew to do the same while he watched.

This is a guy we named a national wildlife refuge after.

So, we passed Blackbeard National Wildlife Refuge, crossed the sound into Johnson Creek and entered Walburg Creek at mile 622 ICW and after a beautiful passage and anchored in sixteen feet at mile 620 ICW after a forty-five mile day. Beautiful anchorage with forest to the east. Foraging wood storks, great and snowy egrets and great blues a hundred yards away on a wild beach on the lee side of St. Catherine’s Island. This anchorage lies just south of St. Catherine’s Sound and Inlet, a safe and very navigable outlet to the Atlantic. Speaking of wood storks, look up a picture of and read about this beautiful bird. For a long time ornithologists thought the wood stork was closely related to wading birds like the equally beautiful egrets and herons. Turns out that the wood stork is closer to vultures. 

Now that I have filled your heads with images of pirates and vultures, good night and sweet dreams.