“And he was a thorough believer in keeping up his reputation and well knew the effect of appearances upon the public. Naturally a most repulsive-looking man,—a huge, long-armed, broad-shouldered, brutal creature,—he added to his ugliness by cultivating an enormous coal-black beard and allowing his hair to grow until it covered his shoulders like a mane. His beard he braided into innumerable little pigtails, twisting in bits of bright-hued ribbons, and when attacking a prize or boarding a ship he added to his wild and savage aspect by tucking burning slow matches into the mass of black hair and beard that framed his villainous, leering face. “But his actual deeds would have been sufficient to inspire horror and dread without the theatrical accessories of black whiskers and slow matches. He was a past master in the art of devilish cruelty; he gave no quarter; he took ships of any nation that happened to come his way, and when prizes were scarce he varied the monotony of life by robbing and murdering his own men and his fellow pirates. Had Teach drifted into other and more peaceful walks of life he might have become a great inventor, for he had an inordinate bump of curiosity and was forever carrying out experiments which, while most interesting to him, were most unpleasant to others. Once he marooned seventeen of his crew upon a tiny barren islet, to learn, so he declared, how long human beings could survive without food or water; but unfortunately for his curiosity, and most opportunely for the marooned subjects of his test, Major Stede Bonnet—of whom I have already told you—chanced to sail that way and rescued the unfortunate seventeen from their desert isle. “He possessed a weird and grewsome sense of humor too, and we may be very sure that life was never dull or monotonous aboard his ship. On one occasion, when for days no prize had been sighted and the pirate craft rolled with slatting sails upon an oily sea under the blazing tropic sun, Teach, hatless and shoeless, appeared on deck and announced with a roar and an oath that he had devised a scheme for killing time and amusing themselves. It was, indeed, a novel idea, and one quite in keeping with Blackbeard’s character, for it was nothing less than, to quote his words, ‘to make a little hell of our own and see who is best fitted for our hereafter.’ It was useless for the men to protest, for any artificial inferno that Teach could devise would, they knew, be mild in comparison to that which they would bring upon themselves should they refuse to follow out their captain’s wishes.