Flag of Blackbeard

During the Golden Age of Piracy, Blackbeard (c. 1680 – 1718) was one of the most infamous pirates on the seas. The only record there is of what flag he flew was in 1718 in a newspaper report which stated that Blackbeard's fleet, including his flagship Queen Anne's Revenge, during an attack on the Protestant Caesar flew black flags with death heads and "bloody flags".[3]

Following a revival in interest in piracy in the 20th century, the flag with the horned skeleton and bleeding heart first appeared in an article in The Mariner's Mirror magazine as a general pirate's flag in 1912, but the article made no assertion of it being Blackbeard's flag.[1] Later in the century approximately around the 1970s it started to be described as Blackbeard's flag and was often used as such in books and television programmes portraying him.[3] Some academic institutions such as the Smithsonian have also incorrectly described it as the flag of Blackbeard.[4]

According to sources, Blackbeard flew a black flag with a skull on it along with a blood red flag rather than the devil flag.

The design of the flag consisted of a horned skeleton raising an hourglass "toasting the Devil" in its right hand.[1] In the skeleton's left hand, it held a spear pointing towards a red heart which had three drops of red blood below it, supposedly to signal that no quarter would be given.[5] The historian E. T. Fox affirmed that this flag design would not have been of 18th-century pirate origin because, if the skeleton was meant to represent the Devil, then it would not have been a skeleton, and if it was supposed to represent Death, then it would not have been horned.[1] Most pirate flags at the time would have used simple imagery based on Christian symbols of mortality.[1] Flags of a similar design had been used by Edward Low, Francis Spriggs and Charles Harris.

• Jolly Roger

• Fox, E.T. (2015). Jolly Rogers, the True History of Pirate Flags. ISBN 978-1-326-44817-2