The Enduring Myth of Blackbeard’s Raid on Middletown

The Enduring Myth of Blackbeard’s Raid on Middletown

By John R. Barrows

 

On December 16, 1927, the Matawan Journal ran a story about a new book that had been published about the history of Middletown, New Jersey.  Among many other highlights, the article noted that the book told of Middletown, “where the pitched battle between Blackbear [sic] and the country folk was staged.”  This is the first documented occasion we can point to where the story of the pirate Blackbeard in Middletown was given full credence, but it would certainly not be the last.

Certain mythical figures from history tend to dominate our popular culture, in particular, cowboys, cops, and criminals, but especially pirates.  And while there were more successful pirates, the one that remains the object of most pop culture fascination is Blackbeard.  For example, the Internet Movie Database has 260 entries for a character called “Blackbeard.”  No other pirate comes close. “Calico Jack” is good for 35 hits. Various permutations on Captain William Kidd return just under a hundred hits. “Hornigold” is a character in 51 films, and so on.  Blackbeard is simply the dominant pirate figure in western pop culture.

 

 

Over the years in our region, a number of publications have retold this story about Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, of the time he anchored off Middletown and sent his men into what is today Holmdel to forage for livestock to replenish his ship.  As the story goes, on the way back to shore, Blackbeard’s pirates faced off against irate local farmers, but were able to bring the plunder back to their ship.

 

 

While your humble author has not read every book on pirates in the English language, I could find no legitimate historical account of Blackbeard’s life that includes this story. Most of the books that do clearly label this as “legend,” or place the story within the context of “tradition” or “lore,” but there are authors who nevertheless present it as accepted fact even to this day.  A book published by The History Press in 2019 about the history of our region is a recent example.

If it could have been demonstrated that Blackbeard was ever in the vicinity of Monmouth County at any time, it would seem to have come to light long before now.  After all, Blackbeard’s entire carer as a pirate spanned just 18 months, and for much of that time, his whereabouts are well-established.  But prior to that, almost nothing is known of the world’s most famed and feared pirate.

 

Origins of a Bloodthirsty Swashbuckler

In May of 1724, a modest illustrated pamphlet was published in London titled A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates [sic] by “Captain Charles Johnson.”  It was hugely popular, and a revised version was published two years later with additional engravings and a shorter title.  By 1734, it had been expanded to include stories of highwaymen, murderers, and robbers as well as pirates, and it has been in print ever since.  This is how most Americans first learned about Blackbeard.

 

 

Virtually nothing is known about the author of this book, or the source of these stories, and yet, scholars over the years have determined that where primary source documents exist or emerge, they show that Captain Johnson’s stories were mostly accurate.  Some experts are convinced that Captain Johnson was the famed author Daniel Defoe, but others argue that this is impossible.  The bottom line is that much of what we do know about Blackbeard – and most of the pirates of the so-called “golden age,” including that phrase itself – comes from this single volume of stories and engravings.

 

 

It is from Captain Johnson, for example, that we first hear of the pirate flags known as the “Jolly Roger” and the “skull and crossbones.”  Scottish novelists Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island) and J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan, featuring Captain Hook) both identified Johnson’s General History among their major influences, and Stevenson even borrowed one character’s name (Israel Hands) from a list of Blackbeard’s crew that first appeared in Johnson’s book.

 

 

Johnson coined the phrase “Golden Age of Piracy,” which he set as starting in 1697, when the last of the buccaneers ended their attacks on Spanish settlements in the West Indies, and ending around 1726, when the last mass hanging of pirates took place.  Historian Angus Konstam argues that “the peak of piratical activity was concentrated in a far shorter period, from 1713, when the War of Spanish Succession ended, until 1722” when Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts and crew were hanged off the West Africa Coast. In colonial America, the worst phase lasted from 1716 to 1720, just four years.  The Bahamas were a pirate stronghold during American colonial times, and Blackbeard was one of the Bahamian pirates.

 

A Timeline of Blackbeard the Pirate in Monmouth County

1665  On April 8, the Monmouth Patent land grant was issued to the first colonial settlers of Monmouth County, who were mostly residents of Long Island.

1680? According to Captain Johnson, Edward Teach was born in Bristol, England. In his first printing, Johnson refers to Blackbeard as “Edward Thatch,” but changes it to Teach in subsequent printings.  Researchers have been unable to find  records of any families in the Bristol area with the name Teach, or Thatch, or any of the many other possible variations. Johnson’s accounts have proven sufficiently accurate over time that Angus Konstam accepts “Teach” as correct, on that basis alone. According to Konstam, “From the descriptions of him provided by eyewitnesses, we can assume Blackbeard was a little under forty when he died, which means he would have been born around 1680.” This leads some to believe he was born in the Caribbean, but genealogists have run into the same dead end there as in Bristol.

1697  French privateers invaded and captured the Spanish port of Cartagena, Colombia, the last of the buccaneer attacks. This is possibly the year that Edward Teach first arrived in Port Royal, the port city in Jamaica that was a noted haven for pirates.

1714   September 7: The Holy Roman Empire joined the Treaty of Baden, effectively ending the War of Spanish Succession. This was a conflict that involved the Dutch Republic, Spain, Great Britain, France, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire. During the 13 years of this conflict these nations used privateers to extend their navies at one time or another. When the war ended, it left a glut of battle-tested seagoing warriors who suddenly lost their legitimate source of income.

1717   March: Edward Teach was a crew member abord a British privateer who turned to piracy. He started as a deputy to the pirate captain Benjamin Hornigold. Teach quickly distinguished himself and won the trust of Hornigold, who gave Teach his own ship and crew. Teach and Hornigold operated in tandem at times, but mostly independently. Hornigold eventually decided to take advantage of the British offer of amnesty for pirates but Teach continued his plundering ways.  Teach began to hone his Blackbeard persona, carefully crafted to be a lasting image, fostering an aura of menace from his visage alone, sufficient to make captains of target ships surrender without a shot fired.

June: At some time in the early summer, Teach headed north to avoid the treacherous five-month-long hurricane season in the Caribbean.

August: According to a biography of Blackbeard by Robert Earle Lee, Teach “…sailed up the Delaware River, 250 miles north, where he quietly went ashore at Philadelphia to sell some select treasure. “Apparently Teach and his crew spent some quiet time in the area enjoying the benefits of civilization.”  This account is not accepted by all historians.

September 29: Teach took wine from a ship off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia.

October: Teach operated “off the Delaware Bay” and Cape May, making numerous raids on shipping. There are no reports or evidence that he ever sent men ashore at or near Cape May.

November: The earliest surviving newspaper mention of Blackbeard the pirate appeared in the Boston News-Letter.  With hurricane season over, and the harsh northeast winter moving in, Teach headed back to the West Indies. On November 28, Teach captured a French ship, La Concorde, off Martinique, and made it his flagship, renaming it the Queen Anne’s Revenge.

December: Teach continued his piracy in the Caribbean off the Leeward Islands.

1718  March: Teach was reported to be in the Bay of Honduras.  His exact whereabouts for most of January, February, and early March are unknown.

April: Teach was spotted off the coast of Belize.

May 22: Teach blockaded the port of Charleston, South Carolina, seeking a chest of medicine.

June 2: Teach’s flotilla of four ships arrived off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Knowing he was now being hunted, Teach abandoned the conspicuous Revenge, too large for the shallow waterways of Pamlico Sound, by deliberately running her aground at Topsail Inlet. He allowed some crewmembers to take a ship and head wherever they wanted. Teach took another boat, with a small, handpicked crew of 18-20 men, loaded up all of the loot from the Revenge, and sailed away, marooning the other crewmembers on a barren island.  He had double-crossed 90 percent of his crew. Teach first set up on shore at Beaufort, and then later at Bath Town, where he became a trading partner and social acquaintance of the governor of North Carolina, from whom Teach hoped to receive a pardon or amnesty.  The governor was more than happy to comply.

July: According to Angus Konstam, “Blackbeard’s sojourn in Bath Town lasted less than six months, and for much of that time he was away at sea.” He spent July and early August shuttling between his house in Bath Town and his sloop and crew, who were anchored in a harbor on the Pamlico Sound side of Ocracoke Island. According to Captain Johnson, during this time, Blackbeard and his men continued taking plunder both from ships out on the ocean as well as locals along Pamlico Sound. By some accounts, no traveler on the Sound was safe from the “reformed Pirates,” but only one ever filed a formal complaint to the North Carolina authorities. Some locals enjoyed the benefits of trading with pirates while others, who had seen their possessions simply stolen at the point of a cutlass, were outraged.

August 11: Pennsylvania Governor William Keith issued an arrest warrant for Teach.

September: Teach spent August and September at sea, continuing his piracy.

October: Teach and the pirate Charles Vane and their crews were on Ocracoke Island, enjoying the fruits of their illegal labors.

November 12: North Carolina locals finally had enough and appealed to the governor of Virginia to help.

November 22: A Royal Navy squadron led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard cornered Blackbeard in North Carolina, and the pirate was killed and beheaded.

 

 

1719   Blackbeard’s death was first reported on April 11, in the London Weekly Journal.

1878   The first/oldest reference to Blackbeard in a New Jersey newspaper is believed to have been published by the West-Jersey Pioneer of Bridgeton on July 4, 1878. “Tradition locates the island on with Atlantic City now stands as the spot where the freebooter Blackbeard buried his treasures.”

There are two problems here. Anytime the word “tradition” is used in these old newspaper stories, it is often an indication of fiction, or legend, and not fact.  And other than Captain Kidd, no pirate (or privateer for that matter) is believed by historians to have ever buried treasure anywhere, at any time. And there is no mention in this report of any Blackbeard raid on Monmouth County.

1882   The Camden Post reported that “The famous Money Island has disappeared, too…The noted pirate, Captain Teach, or Blackbeard, as he was popularly known, wintered there one season with his crew…” and, “…the few and scattered inhabitants of the neighborhood believed that Blackbeard had buried his treasure there. This is a reference to a tidal sandbar island in Delaware Bay that was destroyed by storms and natural erosion. There is no evidence anywhere that Teach spent an entire winter anywhere in the North.  And once again, no mention is made of a Blackbeard raid on Monmouth County.

1913   In February the Long Branch Daily Record published a poem called “The Pirates,” comparing politicians and businessmen of the day to Blackbeard et al.  There is no mention of a Middletown raid.

1926   The Long Branch Daily Record ran a front-page story about the discovery of a skull in Burlington County, reporting much excitement among the locals about buried Blackbeard treasure. No treasure found. No mention of a Monmouth County raid.

1927   The Christ Church of Middletown (Episcopal) celebrated its tercentenary by publishing The Story of Middletown: The Oldest Settlement in New Jersey, written by the rector, Ernest W. Mandeville, who held the original copyright.  This book contains the first telling of the Blackbeard attack on Monmouth County and is the basis for the Blackbeard myth in our region.

 

 

The Little Book that Started it All

Chapter three of The Story of Middletown is titled “The First White Settlers;” about eight of its ten pages are presented as “An account of early Middletown written years ago…”  There is no reference to an author or source. This text has yet to be found elsewhere. It’s a rambling essay that covers a myriad of subjects, ending with a brief observation about fruit trees.  But just before the fruit trees, Blackbeard. The passage starts with some broad claims about pirate activity in the Monmouth County region over the years, and then:

Another time Edward Teach (Black Beard [sic]) landed a crew and sent them up as far as Holmdel to seize cattle and hogs to provision his vessel.  After they had secured their booty and were marching back, the irate farmers gathered on their rear and harassed them so that their rear guard made a stand in Middletown and had quite a battle, but succeeded in getting away with their plunder.

 

 

That’s it.  That’s the entirety of the Blackbeard story in Monmouth County.  It comes to us from an unnamed source which has not yet emerged. If, in fact, this text was a written account of the history of Middletown, it’s reasonable to expect that the Blackbeard story would be more widely known, and included in the many other history books written about this region over the decades, e.g., Ellis (1885), and Salter (1890).

A review of nonfiction books focusing on Blackbeard, the Golden Age of Pirates, or piracy during the era when Blackbeard was active, reveals not one single example where the Middletown/Holmdel story is included. A thorough literature review shows that the Mandeville story pops up typically in books and magazines aimed at children or tourists, or in collections of folklore such as Weird New Jersey. And yet, it endures. The Long Branch Daily Record repeated it almost verbatim in 1955, in a long excerpt from Mandeville’s book, with Mandeville given byline credit as author, despite the fact that he had long since left not only Middletown, but the clergy altogether. And thus, the Blackbeard – Monmouth County myth endures.

The Blackbeard passage in the book isn’t even the main pirate story in Mandeville’s book.  Chapter Six, titled “Pirate Days in Middletown,” is six pages long and relates the myths surrounding Captain Kidd.  Mandeville makes unsubstantiated claims about Raritan Bay being a haven for pirates over the years, and then deals at some length with Kidd myths, presented as fact.

Most of these claims simply do not fit known facts. For example, Mandeville states that “pirates made their shore headquarters” on Ideal Beach on Raritan Bay in Middletown, in 1699. This might possibly refer to Dutch ships that preyed on British merchant vessels during the years when control of New Amsterdam was still in question, but this was long over by 1699. Or, this might refer to privateers in service to the British, targeting French or Spanish shipping, but for the fact that Britain was not at war from 1697 to 1702.   Likewise, most of the other general claims about piracy in our area made by Mandeville have never been substantiated.

Mandeville’s book includes a curious foreword by the author:

THE WRITER of this Story of Middletown does not claim originality; He acknowledges indebtedness to the histories of Franklin Ellis, John W. Barber, Edwin Salter, Frank R. Stockton, George C. Beekman, Thomas Henry Leonard, as well as to the many documents loaned him by his friends. He does not claim over diligent research (our emphasis), but he covered as much ground as was possible in the press of time for publication and the limits of expense imposed upon him.

Mandeville seems to be complaining that he was asked to do a rush job, on the cheap, concluding with “He looks forward to the time when ancient Middletown can have a more worthy historian.”

Ellis, Barber, Salter, Beekman, and Leonard all wrote histories of Monmouth County, none of which includes any mention of Blackbeard. Frank R. Stockton mostly wrote children’s books and fairy tales.

The book went through several reprintings over the years. It was well-covered by local newspapers when it first came out, for the pirate stories more than anything else. Daniel Boone and Abraham Lincoln are in this book, but get short shrift in local media coverage.

Mandeville had been a magazine publisher, among other things, prior to taking to the pulpit, and he was a muckraking journalist even while a preacher. He was news editor of the official national weekly publication of the Episcopal Church. As a man of letters, a professional journalist, his remarkable foreword should have served as a warning sign to readers, that the contents were not to be treated as, well, gospel. But they were then and often are still today.

This book has been out of print for decades. While reprints can be found in numerous libraries in our region, and for sale online in various used editions, Mandeville’s book can also be accessed for free via the Internet Archive.  The first printing of The Story of Middletown that is on the Internet Archive, however, is missing Mandeville’s foreword. After Monmouth Timeline brought this to the attention of the Internet Archive, they added a second version that does include the foreword. But the point of all this is that for years, people saw a version of Mandeville’s book that omitted his apologies, and therefore would have had no reason to question its veracity.

 

But Could this Possibly be True?

Despite the fact that virtually every historian has chosen to exclude this story from their own work, our job is to examine if it’s at least plausible.  Looking at what is known, there are three possible ways that the story Mandeville published might have had a basis in fact:

The Privateer Hypothesis: Teach led this raid before he was Blackbeard, while he was a sailor aboard a privateer vessel. Many people conflate privateers with pirates, or see those as synonymous, and so the man who later became known as Blackbeard the pirate could have once been a privateer who tried to steal livestock in Monmouth County.

The biggest problem with this is that Teach was said to have sailed aboard British privateer, and Monmouth County was very much a British colony during the War of Spanish Succession. It would have been an act of piracy and treason for a British-documented privateer to have engaged in crimes on land in British colonies.  And if such a thing happened, it’s likely that it would have been recorded by someone, somewhere.  As such, it is possible, but highly unlikely. And it would not have been Teach who chose to embark on the raid, as he was just one of the crew, and not yet captain of his own ship.

The Missing Days Hypothesis: From mid-January to March, 1718, Blackbeard’s whereabouts are unknown. At the start of this period, Teach was somewhere in the Caribbean. For this hypothesis to hold water, Teach would have had to sail more than a thousand miles north to Monmouth County, and conduct his voyage and raid in the dead of winter, and then sail back to the West Indies, all while fully escaping notice from anyone on shore or at sea.

A sailing ship of that era could cover that distance in a matter of weeks, with fair winds and calm seas. But in wintertime, sailing along the Atlantic coast of colonial America, fair winds and calm seas were – and are – something of a rarity. Teach would have known that he was heading into the worst weather of the entire year, in frigid temperatures, all the while foregoing livestock that could have been stolen from the southern colonies.

Further, Sandy Hook was where the natural deep-water channel ran providing access for ships to and from the ocean to New York Harbor. Anchoring off Middletown, especially if he rounded Sandy Hook, would have placed Teach in the middle of one of the busiest waterways in colonial America, which would surely have attracted attention. Ships coming and going from New York were the subject of keen interest, observers noted every vessel’s movements. It’s difficult to discern which is less likely, that a wanted pirate and experienced ship’s master like Teach would have sailed 2,000 miles for livestock in winter, or that such a voyage could possibly evade detection.  And Teach would also have been disregarding a 30-gun Royal Navy frigate that was operating in and around New York Harbor during this time.

The Delaware Bay Hypothesis: In 1717, Blackbeard operated off Delaware Bay, where he looked to capture prizes coming in or out of Philadelphia. It is during this time that numerous stories have emerged about Blackbeard burying treasure in southern New Jersey. From there, he is thought to have sailed out and around Cape May, and again buried treasure, according to local legend. Having established the numerous challenges inherent in attempting to round Sandy Hook, it is at least possible that, while in Delaware Bay, Teach might have sent his men inland from the west, over land, across the state to what is now Holmdel, rather than hope his ship might evade detection sailing north of Cape May.

This hypothesis once again requires Blackbeard’s men to have exhibited stealth so as to avoid notice while traveling along what few roads existed in those years. According to Google Maps, for Teach’s men to walk from say, Camden, New Jersey, to Holmdel, they would have had to travel about 75 miles, which they could have covered in a week’s time given ideal conditions.  Depending on which Indian trail they followed, Teach’s crew might have walked directly through what is today Freehold, or possibly Shrewsbury. And then, back again, with cows and pigs and sheep in tow. Without attracting attention.

But this conflicts with Mandeville’s version which clearly implies that the pirate was anchored (“landed”) offshore somewhere along the Middletown coastline when the raid occurred. And once again, why send men on a long march across New Jersey when livestock surely was more easily available in Pennsylvania? Where Teach was said to have taken another bride during this time?

 

Serious Flaws in These Hypotheses

There are a number of problems with concluding that this story can be true, on any level. The first is that the oldest recorded account that places Blackbeard in Middletown came out in 1927, more than 300 years after the pirate’s death.  That story has no named source and is related as simply a story that someone once wrote. But that story was published by a member of the clergy, a man of the cloth, who was an established legitimate journalist, and so it has been given credibility from the beginning and is still quoted as an authoritative history to this day.

Another problem is that, unlike the buccaneers of an earlier era, pirates of the so-called golden age rarely committed crimes on land.  Different laws and courts regulated criminal activity on land and on the sea in that era, and pirates like Blackbeard knew how to use this to their advantage.  For example, a story that is accepted by Blackbeard biographers holds that Teach once apprehended two French sloops off the coast of South Carolina.  He moved all of the cargo and valuables to one boat, and moved all of the people to the other, relieved them of their sails, oars, etc., and then set them adrift. Teach brought the other boat into port and claimed that it had been discovered abandoned, and according to Admiralty Law, they were entitled to a share of what they found.

Teach knew it would be difficult for anyone to dispute what had happened out on the ocean. Committing crimes on land, however, is a very different thing.  There are more likely to be witnesses and evidence left behind, and the colonial authorities could call upon militia and naval forces to help enforce the laws of the land. In fact, Angus Konstam states this succinctly: “There is no evidence that Blackbeard ever committed a crime on land.”

And if in fact he did commit a crime on land, the question remains: Why Middletown? There is simply no logical answer for this.  Only Ernest Mandeville can answer that, and he’s dead.

 

The Many Lives of Ernest W. Mandeville

 

 

Ernest Wyckoff Mandeville was born March 20, 1896, and raised in Elmira, N.Y. He attended Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and was manager of the yearbook and school paper. During his college years, he was active in drama and wrote and produced plays.  In 1917, with the U.S. set to enter the war raging in Europe, Mandeville graduated with honors and joined the Navy, where he served on a patrol boat headed for France, peeling potatoes.

At least, that’s what they published in his local newspaper.  But from our earliest impression, we see Mandeville as comfortable with playing a variety of roles at any one time, and writing and performing fiction.  For the rest of his life, he would juggle one occupation with others, always defying categorization.  And he was always more than what he seemed at any one time.

For example, Mandeville served seven months at sea in the Navy and then quietly transferred to the nascent U.S. Secret Service, which was ramping up recruiting, looking for men with experience in areas like legal matters or journalism. Now stateside, Mandeville was responsible for ferreting out saboteurs and spies.  He was credited with finding a suspected German saboteur named Hanz Lentz who, when caught, was found with plans for the New York City water supply as well as a schedule of tankers and ships. Another suspected spy Mandeville caught was found to be the son of the head of Germany’s secret service. In a story in the Elmira newspaper that came out after the war, “…in all the young Elmiran has 20 internments to his credit,” meaning, arrests; meanwhile, this whole time, friends and family had thought Ernest was still in the Navy, peeling potatoes.

After the armistice, Mandeville became a business partner in Mandeville & Goodenough, “a general office service” that included printing.  In 1919, Mandeville and Claude E. Goodenough, “of White Plains” were named deputy sheriffs for Westchester County. In July of 1920, Mandeville was found to have employed a 14-year-old boy at his printing plant and was arrested for violating state child labor laws.  Newspapers reported the allegations against Westchester Printing Service, run by the “son of a White Plains millionaire.”  Mandeville was found guilty and received a suspended sentence, the judge saying, “this is the first violation of the child labor law in a White Plains factory,” and “a second offense will be dealt with heavily.”

Oddly enough, Mandeville later worked as a Westchester County investigator, and then as editor of The Chesterfieldian, a weekly magazine portraying life in Westchester, N.Y., and Fairfield, Conn., counties, before entering the General Theological Seminary in New York City.  In August of 1923, the Matawan Journal announced that Mandeville would preach at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Asbury Park. A month later, Mandeville’s hometown newspaper, the Elmira Star-Gazette, cited the official Episcopal Church weekly, called The Churchman, which reported that the young cleric had been asked to stay on after the end of summer as a preacher at the Christ Church of Middletown.  One month after that, Mandeville was appointed to the post of news editor at The Churchman, which was based in New York City.  This was a pattern that would continue, with Mandeville serving as preacher while at the same time pursuing journalist endeavors. He was ordained as a deacon in 1924.

In the years to come, Mandeville wrote for The Outlook and The Christian Century, periodicals focusing on religious and spiritual matters. Mandeville seems to have had two primary interests as a journalist: Immorality in the emerging medium of motion pictures, and hypocrisy in the enforcement of Prohibition. Mandeville wrote an opinion piece for The Outlook on the depravity creeping into the films of the day, and was interviewed on that subject by a New York City radio station.

In June of 1925, Mandeville went to England for a month, “to make a study of drink conditions there for the Outlook magazine. On account of his intensive studies of Prohibition conditions in America, the British newspapers eagerly sought his opinions and findings for their audiences.  While he was there, he met with the Archbishop of Canterbury among other elites.

In December of 1925, our man Mandeville was “added to the staff of a lecture bureau which supplied speakers on various topics in the large cities.” Teddy Roosevelt was among other speakers represented by the bureau. Mandeville continued his clerical duties, while embarking on a tour to talk about Prohibition conditions in the U.S. and Europe.

In 1927, The Story of Middletown was published, to great local acclaim. Local newspapers gushed about the Kidd revelations, with one printing the Kidd passages to the exclusion of everything else Mandeville wrote.

Mandeville was always active in his community, running for and winning election to the Middletown school board. For a number of years, he was a thorn in the side to the establishment, at one point accusing the superintendent of misusing school funds for personal purchases.  This was a big drama in Middletown during those years.

In 1931, newspapers reported that Ernest W. Mandeville had won the contract to perform publicity services in the U.S. on behalf of the island nation of Bermuda. It’s hard to see how Mandeville could perform these duties on top of his writing and his preaching, but all evidence suggests that this is the same Ernest Mandeville (there was another man with that name in Monmouth County during this time).  In that newspaper story he was described as “owner of a publicity business.” This business was the Mandeville Press Bureau.

Mandeville resigned as pastor of Christ Church of Middletown on September 8, 1935, saying he just did not have enough time. “I came to this parish in Middletown to stay one summer. I have stayed 13 summers and 12 winters,” he said. He also maintained that his work, “from which I derive income to support my family,” required that he live in New York City.

 

A Fresh Start

On December 30, 1935, about four months after he left the clergy, The Camden Courier-Post noted that “Truly Valiant, a play by Irving Stone, author of the novel “Lust for Life,” will come into the Forty-Ninth Street Theater under the direction of Gustav Blum, in association with Ernest W. Mandeville.”  The former Union College thespian and playwright was back in the greasepaint and spotlight business.

Mandeville operated his publicity business until 1943, when his father died.  Hubert C. Mandeville was a self-made man and a pillar of the Elmira community, of whom it was said, “His career was marked with success in practically all undertakings.”  In addition to being a founder and partner in a large law firm, H.C. Mandeville was at one time president of the Worcester Salt Co. (which he sold for $2 million); president of the Elmira Foundry Co.; chairman of the Thatcher Manufacturing Co.; and a trustee of Elmira Savings Bank.  His obituary goes on and on with various senior posts at prominent businesses he held over his lifetime.

It took several years for Hubert Mandeville’s vast estate to be probated, but from that point forward, his son Ernest’s life seemed to bespeak a newfound source of financial wherewithal.  For example, in 1947, he was announced as producer of the Finger Lakes Drama Festival. In theatrical terms, a producer is the person who fronts the money required to stage the event.

Eventually, he moved back to Monmouth County. He lived in Allenhurst in the mid-1950s and wrote copious letters to newspaper editors. Mandeville edited a local newspaper, The Middletown Courier, from 1956 to 1961. At some point, he moved to southern California, where he had a son and a daughter living in La Jolla. He became editor of The Valley News in El Cajon, Calif., and wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for a number of years.

He also became a leading philanthropist in the area, in one instance pledging $50,000 per year to the local public television station.  There are several facilities at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), named for him. For example, the Ernest W. Mandeville Center for the Arts houses visual arts classrooms, the campus wood and metal shop, the University Art Gallery, and the Mandeville Auditorium, one of the two major musical theater-oriented auditoriums on the UCSD campus.  The UCSD Library offers the Ernest W. Mandeville Department of Special Collections.  He also donated three electron microscopes to the school of medicine, supported the Crisis Center, the Mandeville Children’s Library in Israel, and Mercy Hospital.  At his alma mater, Union College, students benefit from the Mandeville Gallery.

 

 

By 1967, Ernest Wyckoff Mandeville was in poor health; he died November 9, 1970, in a rest home in San Diego, age 74. In his obituary, he was described as a “millionaire philanthropist.” There is no evidence that he ever discussed Blackbeard or pirates ever again after what may have been his one and only foray into that topic.

 

A Possible Source for this Myth?

Almost all of the northern American colonies had a place called Middletown in the years when Blackbeard was operating. Settlements by that name could be found in Massachusetts (Middleton), Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina.

Rhode Island was known as a haven for pirates during the Golden Age, Newport in particular was a known gathering place for pirates.  The immediately adjacent to Newport is Middletown. It is at last possible that a pirate might have gone foraging in the area around Newport for livestock, giving rise to the myth that became attached to Middletown, New Jersey. If so, it is almost certainly not a story involving Edward Teach; there are no reports or even rumors that he was ever in that area.  But it’s unlikely that pirates would raid for livestock so close to a place they valued as a haven.  The Middletowns of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia are all well inland and not close to waterways used by pirates.  Therefore, none of these seems likely to be a source for this myth.  But North Carolina offers a much more plausible possibility.

According to Captain Johnson, when Teach decided to leave Delaware Bay and return to the West Indies in 1718, he first teamed up with fellow pirate Charles Vane, and the two captains and their crews went ashore at Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, where they spent a week in drunken revelry, enjoying the Madeira wine they had taken from a recent capture.

During the late 1600s and well in to the 1700s and beyond, Ocracoke and neighboring Portsmouth Island were two of North Carolina’s biggest ports.  With deep inlets and access to river channels to mainland North Carolina, many of the area’s goods arrived and departed from those harbors. It was also a region where numerous pirates operated or made port over the years.

And directly north of Ocracoke Island, about 25 miles across Pamlico Sound, is a rural part of North Carolina that was settled in 1705 and is now Hyde County.  One part of the coast of Hyde County on the Sound is known as Middletown. And the waters just off Middletown are known as the Middletown Anchorage.

 

Here we have all of the elements of our myth: Blackbeard the pirate, anchored offshore. He’s enjoying a weeklong party, which requires food, and food of any kind might well have been scarce on the Outer Banks in 1718.  It would have been simple to send some men in a boat across the sound to round up some cows and chickens from the locals.  It seems to hold water.

The language used by historians relating to Blackbeard during the period is remarkably similar to that used by Mandeville in his claims about piracy in Monmouth County.  For example:

From captured Spanish ships the pirates were said to have brought quantities of silks, Spanish laces and other luxuries to their friends in Middletown village.  The Middletown merchants in turn marketed them through the colonies, at a handsome profit, and waxed rich and powerful.

Here’s how one historian described Blackbeard’s interactions with North Carolina residents:

While Blackbeard horrified the people of the surrounding colonies, North Carolinians enjoyed buying goods at discounted prices from him, which he had stolen from ships.

Kellie Shipler, North Carolina History Project

There is as yet no known rumor or legend which directly connects Blackbeard with Middletown, North Carolina. There is almost no written history of this specific part of Hyde County, which today is mostly abandoned buildings. There are numerous references to Blackbeard and/or his men sailing up and down Pamlico Sound, but no published reports have been found that specifically mention Middletown.

But it cannot be overlooked that the claims regarding Blackbeard anchoring off the coastal areas of Pamlico Sound and sending men ashore to forage for provisions are regarded as a matter of a fact in North Carolina history, and a matter of myth in New Jersey history. There is likely to be no way to ever demonstrate conclusively that the Blackbeard story in North Carolina is the source of the Blackbeard myth in New Jersey, but it seems compelling, if not persuasive.

After all, Mandeville was not from Monmouth County, he was a journalist tho traveled, he would have picked up stories everywhere he went.  He wrote a story about Asheville, N.C., during Prohibition.  And while he was a journalist, he was at other times a publicist and a dramatist, so it does not seem to be a stretch that while trying to finish a rush job on the cheap about the history of Middletown, New Jersey, he might have included a story he’d heard about another Middletown that appealed to his sense of the dramatic.

 

Sources:

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Image Credits:

Blackbeard’s Raid on Middletown, original illustration ©2024 Emma D’Orazio, Perilize Art, commissioned by Monmouth Timeline Inc.

First Cover of The Outlook magazine, July 1, 1893. (1893).  Public Domain image. Available:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outlook_(New_York_City)

Image: Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Photographic Laboratory; University of California, San Diego; McGill, William J. (William James), 1922-1997; Mandeville, Ernest W. (Ernest Wyckoff), 1896-

1919 headshot of Ernest W. Mandeville: Ernest Mandeville Does Great Work Detecting German Enemies for U.S. (1918). Star-Gazette, Elmira, N.Y., December 12, 1918, P. 14.