at the
time. To them the Governor of Virginia applies, and plucky Lieutenant
Maynard, of the Pearl, was sent to Ocracoke Inlet to fight this pirate
who ruled it down there so like the cock of a walk. There he found
Blackbeard waiting for him, and as ready for a fight as ever the
lieutenant himself could be. Fight they did, and while it lasted it
was as pretty a piece of business of its kind as one could wish to
see. Blackbeard drained a glass of grog, wishing the lieutenant luck
in getting aboard of him, fired a broadside, blew some twenty of the
lieutenant's men out of existence, and totally crippled one of his
little sloops for the balance of the fight. After that, and under cover
of the smoke, the pirate and his men boarded the other sloop, and then
followed a fine old-fashioned hand-to-hand conflict betwixt him and the
lieutenant. First they fired their pistols, and then they took to it
with cutlasses--right, left, up and down, cut and slash--until the
lieutenant's cutlass broke short off at the hilt. Then Blackbeard would
have finished him off handsomely, only up steps one of the lieutenant's
men and fetches him a great slash over the neck, so that the lieutenant
came off with no more hurt than a cut across the knuckles.

At the very first discharge of their pistols Blackbeard had been shot
through the body, but he was not for giving up for that--not he. As said
before, he was of the true roaring, raging breed of pirates, and stood
up to it until he received twenty more cutlass cuts and five additional
shots, and then fell dead while trying to fire off an empty pistol.
After that the lieutenant cut off the pirate's head, and sailed away in
triumph, with the bloody trophy nailed to the bow of his battered sloop.

Those of Blackbeard's men who were not killed were carried off to
Virginia, and all of them tried and hanged but one or two, their names,
no doubt, still standing in a row in the provincial records.

But did Blackbeard really bury treasures, as tradition says, along the
sandy shores he haunted?

Master Clement Downing, midshipman aboard the Salisbury, wrote a book
after his return from the cruise to Madagascar, whither the Salisbury
had been ordered, to put an end to the piracy with which those waters
were infested. He says:

"At Guzarat I met with a Portuguese named Anthony de Sylvestre; he came
with two other Portuguese and two Dutchmen to take on in the Moor's
service, as many Europeans do. This Ant