Myspace Layouts at Pimp-My-Profile.com / Pirates
Come about and prepare to be boarded!For eighteen months, one man terrorized America, bringing commerce and a superpower to its knees, raging onto the scene and disappearing as mysteriously as he appeared, and yet no one knew who he was except for the moniker ... Blackbeard. No one, that is, until now.Little is known of the man who became the trademark name for pirates. In fact, virtually every book to date has focused on only a year and a half of recorded history. This includes even the most recent non-fiction work that was a companion piece to a History Channel Special Presentation focusing on a recent underwater archeological discovery purported to be Blackbeard’s most famous ship off the North Carolina coast, the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Blackbeard’s life is shrouded in mystery, and over the last three hundred years few have been brave enough to try to create a plausible biography of the world’s most notorious terrorist of the high seas.Meet the brave.Thatcher: The Unauthorized Biography of Blackbeard the Pirate is the first of its kind in decades to attempt to tackle this daunting and mysterious character of mythic proportions. Employing a backdrop of true colonial history, the wrestling of empires jockeying for their place in the New World and the emergence of Russia from its isolation behind the ice curtain, Thatcher takes the known facts of Blackbeard’s life and weaves them into the historic machinations that led to the world we know today. Through his most colorful life, his infamous exploits and his dramatic demise, this novel tells how one man from a humble background rises to the prominence of those few terrorists known by one name: Ghengis, Vlad, Osama – and the most infamous of all, Blackbeard. But such a man could only come to life with a stellar cast of entertaining characters to surround him. The sex, drugs and rocking and rolling of ships in pursuit of treasure made men like Blackbeard the raucous pop stars of their day who larger than life exploit are even more interesting today. This novel adds plot twists that makes Blackbeard’s story more fascinating and better explains the motivations of the man behind the legend. Though his demise may be a foregone conclusion to anyone who knows the story of Blackbeard, Thatcher blazes a path that will shatter any preconceived notions of what led to that fateful day off Ocracoke Island.The story begins on a chance trip of an English teenager to Russia, who returns home bearing the seed of a dying Tsar. Her child will grow up in an environment of women in Bristol’s most notorious brothel and be tutored by a Westernized Russian cleric who knows that the boy is the only challenger for the throne to the emerging and youthful Tsar Peter. Thatcher’s inability to lay claim of his title, his failures in commerce owing to his common stature, and his disappointment at being rejected by the nation he fought for during Queen Anne’s War lead him to organize an armed resistance, forged on the revolutionary ideal of democracy. This most dangerous of ideas in a rigidly hierarchical world ruled by monarchs make Blackbeard a threat to more than mere commerce, for such radical theories threaten to topple empires and cannot be allowed to manifest in the New World.America’s first democracy did not begin in 1776 at the signing of a letter declaring independence. It began in 1714 with men who made their mark and pledged an oath to their fellow pirates that they would all hang together, for certainly if not they would all hang separately. These simple oaths of fraternity planted the seed of the belief that all men were indeed created equal.Thatcher cuts through the myth of the typical rum-swilling pirate preying on the hard work of honest merchants. Instead it reveals how piracy was not only tolerated, it was encouraged by the powers of Europe and the New World. Blackbeard was not merely the most notorious of these brigands but was, for all intents and purposes, America’s first revolutionary leader who was martyred to preserve the monarchial order. The incidences surrounding his death, the colonial hostilities it created and the iron fist employed by King George to control them began a sixty-year process that eventually led to the American Revolution, giving credence to the cliché that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.†To the common men and women who had been cast away by the empires for whom they had valiant fought and served, Blackbeard was the embodiment of the liberty they craved. Thatcher: The Unauthorized Biography of Blackbeard the Pirate, is the ultimate testament of the struggle against empire and its most unlikely of liberators, a pirate captain named Edward Thatch.