Long Way Around

Long Way Around is a series of longform nonfiction articles I wrote and published exploring the story of North Carolina’s most infamous figure, the pirate Blackbeard. I wanted to dig into the man himself, but I also felt it was important to sift through many of the lives he impacted — both during his own time, and in the present day — and how a story goes from unusual fact to wild fiction. The idea was to create a pleasure read that has eaten its vegetables, with some piracy, curiosity, and surprise along the way. Right now this series lives on a different website, but I thought I would provide links to each issue for you to peruse at will. Long Way Around represents two years and many, many late nights of work combing through footnotes and searching for just one more piece of information on the internet, in papers and books, in old faded letters and microfilm reels. I hope you enjoy it!

This illustration and all others for Long Way Around created by my friend and collaborator, Kelsey Martin. Y’all go hire her to illustrate all your stuff!

Issue 1: Shallow Water, Thick Smoke

An introduction to Blackbeard’s story as many know it, with a little bit of trickery involved.

Issue 2: Teach’s World

One thing that I realized after a year of research is that any person — even a researcher — needs a whole lot of context to really understand individual historical events. So, this issue sets the scene, defines the terms, and gives readers everything they need to step into this story and 18th-century world. All in the context of a high-stakes colonial North Carolina court case involving a faked kidnapping and a beating, of course.

Issue 3: Roots

Where exactly Blackbeard came from is hotly-contested amongst a small group of people. I talked to several of the key players about their research, their conclusions, and the never-ending, always-intriguing hunt of genealogists.

Issue 4: Prize Vignettes

We only have about a year’s worth of documents that tell us about Blackbeard’s pirating – in this issue, we look at several of his most famous exploits, including how he claimed his flagship Queen Anne’s Revenge and how he managed to blockade the entire port of Charleston.

Issue 5: Digging

When salvage company Intersal discovered the wreck of Blackbeard’s ship in Beaufort Inlet, they started decades of work to recover the ship and what remains of her cargo. This issue features interviews from several people who worked directly on the wreck/artifacts, fighting through silt and strong currents to piece together a physical history of Blackbeard and crew. Ever wondered how an artifact you see behind glass in a museum got there? This is the issue for you.

Issue 6: Legal Trouble

This issue covers two sets of legal entanglements that both track back to Blackbeard — one during the early 1700s that involved a Christmastime break-in and colonial power struggles, and the other from just last year, a case of former collaborators on the QAR wreck so contentious it led to the Supreme Court.

Issue 7: Postcards

Now we’ve learned about all the documented facts we can find about Blackbeard, it’s time for a fun side-bar: All the stories that permeate North Carolina that seem to have absolutely no basis in fact, evidence, or document — but flourish anyways and remain quite stubbornly a part of our landscape. This one starts with the Cloutier family, who own the house in Beaufort, NC, known as “Blackbeard’s House”; Betty Cloutier tells us about all the visitors Blackbeard draws to the house, tourists, supernatural, and otherwise.

Issue 8: Dust to Dust

For the final installment, I thought it was appropriate to spend some time on the aftershocks of Blackbeard’s life. There’s political chaos in both Virginia and North Carolina, the looming end of the Golden Age of piracy, and (for many of his captured crew members) a fate of death by hanging. We also explore the lives of Blackbeard’s captors, one leaving behind a far less noble legacy than one might expect.