“Oh! my name is Captain Kid,
As I sailed,
As I sailed,
Oh! my name is Captain Kid,
As I sailed,
Oh! my name is Captain Kid,
And God’s laws I did forbid,
And right wickedly I did
As I sailed.”
So far as the knowledge of the editor of this work extends no such ballad has been written concerning the doings of that other famous knight of the black flag whose name is no less renowned in the history of his kind—Captain Edward Teach, better known as Black-beard. But, though so far as ballad fame is concerned he is at a disadvantage with the other, Captain Teach stands par excellent in an unique personality of his own. Perhaps there are few figures so picturesque as that suggested in the description of his get-up upon the occasions of public appearances—the plaited beard, the face smeared black with gunpowder, the lighted matches thrust under his hat brim, the burning sparks thereof hanging down about his face. The fiendish grimness of that figure has made fully as much impression upon the clay of the past as even that of Captain Kid, in spite of the celebrated song that emphasizes his fame. But the two together stand head and shoulders above all others of their kidney as the best-known pirates of the early eighteenth century. Even to this day it is safe to say that nowhere along the Atlantic coast of the whole United States, from Maine to Florida, are their names unknown, and that in all that stretch of sea-board there is hardly a lonesome sandy beach but is reputed to have held treasure hidden by the one or the other of them. Each is the hero of half a hundred legends and fantastically exaggerated tales, and it was Captain Kid who buried the treasure that Poe discovered in the delightful romance of “The Gold Bug.”