Some tidbits that interested me:
- Blackbeard was born Edward Thache, son of a moneyed Englishman who brought his family to the Caribbean when Edward was 4 or 5 years old, to become a plantation owner. They owned slaves.
- Edward’s mother Elizabeth died in 1699, and sometime around then, Edward had a daughter he named Elizabeth.
- By 1699, Edward Thache was working on merchant ships, and in April 1706, he joined the British navy.
- In late 1706, his father passed away. Edward signed over his inherited estates to his stepmother, choosing life at sea over life as a planter
- Thache almost certainly fought in Queen Anne’s War (1701 - 1714) and probably enjoyed the fighting, because when the war was over, he turned pirate
