“Blackbeard" Tank Top
Regular price $35.00
The most famous flag he probably never flew.
Edward Teach — known to history as Blackbeard — terrorized the Atlantic for about two years before a Royal Navy lieutenant named Maynard cornered him at Ocracoke Inlet on the morning of November 22, 1718. Teach took five musket balls and roughly twenty cutlass wounds before he finally went down. The flag the modern world remembers him by — a horned skeleton driving a spear into a bleeding heart — was actually first attributed to him in a 1959 German book and didn't reach mass culture until a 1978 Time-Life volume put it on the cover. The actual record from Teach's lifetime describes only "black flags with deaths' heads" on his ships. But the modern flag has become his anyway, the way a face becomes a legend: not because it's accurate, but because three centuries of people decided it should be.
- Lightweight cotton-poly blend, soft drape
- Unisex tank cut, scoop neck, side-seamed
- Screen-printed graphic, washes that hold
- Machine wash cold, hang dry
- Sizes XS–2XL · runs true to size