Of immense size and coarse and brutal aspect, Teach nurtured a huge black beard which covered his ugly face to his eyes, and which, falling to his waist, was braided into innumerable small pigtails, the ends being tied together over his ears. His hair, also of inky hue, fell to his shoulders and almost met his beetling, bushy black eyebrows over his forehead. As though not ferocious-looking enough naturally, he was accustomed, when making an attack, to stick burning slow-matches in hair and beard, which surrounded his fierce face and gleaming eyes with a ring of fire and smoke and, according to a contemporaneous description, “glowed most horribly.” Unlike many of his notorious predecessors and compeers, Blackbeard was no dandy. His favorite costume was a long-skirted, deep-cuffed coat, much the worse for wear and dribbled liquor; a rough shirt open to the waist and exposing a chest as hairy as a gorilla’s; short, wide breeches, and low seaman’s shoes. Stockings he usually dispensed with, and a battered felt hat of the type made familiar by stage robbers crowned his ebon mane, while, to complete his get-up, a pair of cutlasses and a knife or two hung at his belt and half a dozen pistols were stuck through his sash. And, in truth, Blackbeard’s character was as ferocious as his looks, and his soul as black as his whiskers. There was not a single redeeming feature about him, unless it was his sheer courage, and altogether he was a despicable scoundrel. On more than one occasion he robbed and murdered his own men, and he cared not a whit whether prizes he took were flying the flag of his mother country or of another. To him, torture and butchery were mere pastimes, and one day, just as a joke, he placed seventeen of his own crew on a tiny desert island, promising to return at intervals to see how long they could survive without food or water. Fortunately for the castaways, Teach was unable to carry out this, to him, interesting experiment in human endurance, for another corsair,—and a rank amateur, at that,—Major Stede Bonnet, rescued the marooned pirates. No doubt time hung heavy on the pirates’ hands at times as they sailed aimlessly about waiting for a prize, but those upon Blackbeard’s ship could always be sure that tedium would not be their lot. As an entertainer Teach was a marvel, albeit his ideas of amusement were not always appreciated by others and he must have devoted a considerable portion of his spare time to inventing new schemes to relieve the monotony between fights.