One true pirate story every Sunday morning, read straight from the pages of a penny dreadful. Then the paper goes down and you hear what really happened.
Issue No. 1 premieres Sunday, November 29
One true pirate story every Sunday morning, read straight from the pages of a penny dreadful. Then the paper goes down and you hear what really happened.
No. 1 · Price One Penny · Yours Free
In May 1718 the most feared pirate on the Atlantic parked his ships across the mouth of Charleston harbor and held the whole city hostage. What he asked for in ransom will make you laugh. Or wince. Probably both.
Three chapters of the lurid legend, plus The Record on the back page: what's true, and what's BS.
Print it out. Read it to somebody in your best spooky voice. We won't tell.
How It Works
Back in the 1830s, Britain sold cheap story papers for a penny a part. Every week we read you one: the big, juicy, overcooked legend.
Then the paper goes down. What really happened, where the legend came from, and how much of it holds up.
In between, straight talk on business, money and life from someone who's been running a small business long enough to have opinions. A lot of opinions.
Your Host
Former talk radio host, now running a cigar lounge in Pinellas Park, Florida. She used to do the news. She quit because politics is exhausting, unless she's making fun of somebody.
No politics here. No guests. No sales pitch. Just one pirate story a week, told right, and a little straight talk on the side.
The Record
Cheap weekly story papers sold in Britain starting in the 1830s, one penny a part. They were packed with murderers, highwaymen, vampires and pirates, and they never let the truth slow down a good story. Neither did a lot of pirate history.
A chest of medicine. In May 1718 he blockaded Charleston for about a week, took eight or nine ships, and held prisoners, including councilman Samuel Wragg, until the colony sent a medicine chest valued at £300 to £400. His crew was likely sick with syphilis. Nobody was killed.
No. Even the 1724 book that made him famous puts lit slow matches under his hat, not in a burning beard. The scary look was the weapon. It made ships give up without a fight.
Historian Colin Woodard found no eyewitness account of Blackbeard killing anyone before his final battle at Ocracoke Inlet on November 22, 1718, the fight in which he died.
Probably Edward Thache, not Teach. Historian Baylus Brooks traced a respected Thache family in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and a 1706 record of an Edward Thache serving in the Royal Navy. He says he can't prove it's the same man, but other scholars find the case convincing.
Every Sunday morning, starting Sunday, November 29, 2026, with a new issue to download each week.
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