Blackbeard had taken a royal pardon earlier that year and settled at Bath, North Carolina, but he was soon raiding again. Virginia's governor, Alexander Spotswood, sent Maynard with two hired sloops to find him. At dawn on November 22, Maynard's crews entered Ocracoke Inlet and ran into a devastating broadside from Teach's sloop, Adventure. When the pirates boarded Maynard's apparently empty deck, sailors hidden below burst out. Teach died fighting, shot five times and cut about twenty.
Teach had built his fearsome reputation in barely two years. He captured a French slave ship, renamed her Queen Anne's Revenge and armed her with 40 guns, and in 1718 his squadron blockaded Charles Town, South Carolina, holding its citizens to ransom. He was said to tuck lit slow matches under his hat in battle to wreathe his face in smoke.
At Ocracoke, the broadside from Adventure cut down as much as a third of Maynard's men. Maynard kept the survivors hidden below, and when Teach led his crew aboard the seemingly deserted sloop, the navy men poured up from the hold. Teach and Maynard fired at each other; Teach broke Maynard's cutlass at the hilt and was about to strike again when one of Maynard's men slashed him across the neck. He was then overwhelmed.
Maynard reported eight of his men and twelve pirates killed. He had Teach's head hung from his sloop's bowsprit as proof for the reward, and back in Virginia it was placed on a pole at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay as a warning to other pirates.
Key people: Blackbeard, Robert Maynard, Alexander Spotswood