Badass Page 14
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AVVAKUM
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Avvakum was a seventeenth-century archpriest in the Russian Orthodox Church and a rigid, inflexible orthodox traditionalist/crazy person. When the Church started moving toward a more Western approach he took it on himself to launch a one-man crusade against modernization. He basically just went around calling everyone heretics, harlots, devil worshipers, whores, dogs, heathens, sinners, etc. (you know how religious types can be)—placing curses and hexes on princes, assaulting street performers, accosting folks on the side of the road, trying to exorcise demons from random bystanders, breaking into churches and yelling at priests and congregations in the middle of Sunday services, telling everybody that the bubonic plague was the murderous embodiment of God’s terrible wrath, and referring to the Patriarch and the tsar as unholy Satan worshipers who had sex with their relatives and made the baby Jesus cry.
Well, it turns out that Russians don’t really appreciate that sort of thing. For his trouble, Avvakum was continually beaten up by the people he was harassing. He was knocked down, shot at, whipped, dragged behind horses, hit with axes, and thrown into a river. His house was burned down, and he was imprisoned for disorderly conduct and charged with treason. One time he angered a soldier so bad that the dude bit him. Another time a group of pissed-off women beat him with oven forks and shovels and threw him out a window. On yet another occasion he busted into a Patriarchal Council and called everyone godless Antichrists, so a group of high-ranking priests and Church officials beat him down with wooden rods and tossed him out into the snow.
Nothing could stop this crazy bastard, though. He was defrocked and banished to Siberia twice, but he just sat in his freezing cold studio apartment writing long, hate-filled letters to the Church and the tsar about how they were all going to rot in the fires of eternal hell for their sins. Eventually everyone got sick of his bull, and Avvakum was dragged back to Moscow, where he was burned at the stake for heresy and treason.
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23
BLACKBEARD
(1680–1718)
In time of action, he wore a sling over his shoulders with three brace of pistols hanging in holsters like bandoliers, and stuck lighted matches under his hat, which appearing on each side of his face, his eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a figure that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury from Hell to look more frightful.
—DANIEL DEFOE, A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE PYRATES
THE ACRID STENCH OF SULFUR AND THE SCREAMS OF DYING MEN FILLED THE AIR AS A BRUTAL BATTLE RAGED ACROSS THE WATERLOGGED WOODEN DECK. Through the thick black smoke and salty sea spray appeared the very vision of evil: a vile, bloodthirsty demon sent forth from the deepest recesses of hell itself to inflict pain and suffering on all those unlucky enough to gaze into his imposing and terrifying visage. This massive, six-foot-tall pirate captain, his physique resembling a hellish mix between a linebacker, an oak tree, and a grizzly bear, bellowed a blood-curdling laugh, and stormed through the fray, swinging his oversized, bloodstained cutlass like a wild man, hewing down all that stood before him like an angry lumberjack clear-cutting a rain forest. His appearance struck terror into the hearts of all he encountered. Cords of slow-burning hemp rope protruded from beneath his hat and were woven into his out-of-control, bristling black beard. These fuses were alight at the ends, leaving a trail of fire and smoke surrounding his face, unnaturally illuminating his wild eyes like white-hot orbs of searing flame. He drew one of the six fully loaded flintlock pistols he wore on bandoliers across his chest, violently jammed the muzzle flush into the chest of the French captain, and ended the brief but bloody engagement with a sickening muffled thud.
Edward Teach, better known by the incredibly sinister nickname Blackbeard, terrorized the seas during the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean and lives on as one of the most notorious and terrifying scalawags to ever hoist the black flag. Born in Bristol, England, Teach left home as a young man to seek awesome adventures on the high seas and club his enemies into submission with his raging kill-boner. When Queen Anne’s War broke out in the waters of North America, Teach fell in with a British privateer outfit under the command of Captain Benjamin Hornigold, and together they raided and plundered French and Spanish galleons throughout the West Indies and the Spanish Main—breaking necks, cashing checks, and viciously thrusting their cutlasses into the faces of anybody who didn’t own at least one clean pair of Union Jack boxer briefs.
When the war ended in 1713 and the queen declared that it was no longer “totally awesome” to go about indiscriminately killing Frenchmen and ganking loot from the cargo holds of half-destroyed Spanish vessels, Hornigold and Teach decided to put in a little off-the-books overtime. Together they became outlaw pirates: roving the seas, preying on shipping lanes, plundering more gold than they could carry, and drinking rum by the caskful.
One day the crew came across a massive French merchant ship called Le Concorde. Being the murderous pirates that they were, Hornigold’s crew stormed the vessel and, after a brief battle, wrestled control of it. Hornigold was stoked about taking command of this huge ship but eventually decided that it was probably in his best interest to take advantage of the pirate amnesty that most European countries were offering at the time. Hornigold didn’t feel like getting hanged by the neck like a chump, so he just up and retired from piracy like some kind of quitter. He left Le Concorde under the command of Blackbeard, who was, of course, the biggest badass in his crew, and the “Terrible Teach” immediately got busy crushing people’s skulls into bone dust with the hilt of his cutlass.
Blackbeard decided that the three-hundred-ton ship wasn’t as ultimate giga-mega-Xtreme as it could be, so he outfitted it with forty cannons, recruited a crew of three hundred toothless, foul-mouthed, hook-handed, peglegged, parrot-lovin’, face-punchin’, monkeycidal pirates to run it, and renamed the vessel Queen Anne’s Revenge (this is a way more awesome name than Le Concorde, which quite honestly sounds like a luxury yacht full of beret-wearing, sweater-vested winos). Commanding this formidable pirate warship, Blackbeard impressed his buddies by winning naval duels against the British warships HMS Scarborough and HMS Great Allen, shouting “Yarr!” every time he got the chance, and generally just exerting his dominance over the Caribbean. Over the next couple of months, Blackbeard also captured several fast-moving sloops, added them to his fleet, terrorized the shipping lanes of the Atlantic, and plundered with impunity.
Now, despite what you may have heard, it should be noted that Blackbeard wasn’t a totally heartless bastard. If he hoisted his Jolly Roger (no, that’s not a euphemism for something dirty) and the other ship had the good sense to surrender without a fight, he would just sack the cargo hold, steal the passengers’ jewelry, and let everybody go on about their business. If they were dumb enough to fire a broadside at him, Blackbeard would assault the ship, loot it, burn it, sink it, and kill every person on board. Of course, the latter didn’t really happen all that often—Blackbeard was such a terrifying figure that most sailors regarded him as the devil incarnate and surrendered without a fight. This was usually a wise move.
Blackbeard was also seriously crazy, like out-of-his-mind psycho. One time, he went a couple of days without kicking any puppies or setting any Spanish sailors on fire, so one of his men foolishly doubted his meanness. Blackbeard simply shot his own first mate in the kneecap just to prove how nuts he was. Another time, he took his entire crew below deck and lit a huge sulfurous brimstone fire to see who was man enough to take the smoke the longest. Blackbeard won. Everyone else either ran off crying or asphyxiated.
Interestingly, this mentally unstable cutthroat buccaneer with a gigantic bristling beard was quite the ladies’ man as well. Over the course of his tenure as pirate captain he married at least fourteen different women throughout the Caribbean, and allegedly fathered something like forty children. Despite his rampant polygamy, he was fiercely loyal to his wives and didn’t particularly t
ake well to being dissed. One story claims that one of Blackbeard’s wives divorced him and gave her ring to some punk-ass sailor bitch, so Blackbeard hunted the guy’s vessel down, sacked it, cut off the dude’s hand (with ring still attached), and mailed it to his ex-wife in a box.
For much of his notorious career, Blackbeard did whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted at all times. He had a sweet arrangement where he sent the governor of North Carolina a portion of his treasure in exchange for a safe port (where he didn’t have to worry about being imprisoned and violently executed for murder and piracy), and at one point his crew actually had the audacity to blockade the bustling colonial port city of Charleston, South Carolina, plunder the town, and pimp-slap the governor right in his stupid face. Blackbeard eventually became such a giant dick that the governor of Virginia put a massive bounty on his head and contracted a British navy lieutenant named Robert Maynard to take him out.
Maynard caught up with Blackbeard in the small cove known as Teach’s Hole on November 22, 1718. The infamous pirate was on board the sloop Adventure when two British sloops-of-war sailed in toward him, but instead of getting nervous and blasting a load of grapeshot into his trousers, Blackbeard just cracked his knuckles, drew his pistols, and swore so heartily that it killed a dolphin. He waited until the enemy ships were almost on top of him and then fired a broadside right into their faces, crippling one of the British ships. Blackbeard immediately leapt onto the deck of the HMS Ranger, cutlass drawn, his full weight crashing into a large group of limey soldiers. The massive pirate captain was being attacked from all sides, but Blackbeard didn’t pay any heed to their puny attempts to stop him—he just plowed ahead, knocking men to the deck and storming over to Maynard, his eyes varnished over with his trademark psychotic glaze. During the epic duel that followed, some chump Brit slashed Blackbeard in the neck when he wasn’t looking, but it didn’t even faze the towering monster. He just kept fighting, spilling sailors’ guts all over the deck, until finally, completely surrounded and being attacked from all directions, the notorious pirate passed out from loss of blood, falling to his knees while pulling the hammer back on one of his pistols. Later examinations of his body revealed that he had five bullets lodged in him and had been stabbed more than twenty times before he was finally brought down.
Maynard decapitated Blackbeard’s lifeless corpse, threw the body overboard, and hung the captain’s severed head from the bow of his ship, which is pretty cool, I guess. Legend has it that Blackbeard’s body became possessed by Satan (and/or Michael Phelps) and swam three laps around Maynard’s ship, but that seems a little hard to believe.
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Port Royal, Jamaica, known affectionately as “the Sodom of the New World,” was a pirate haven back in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This lawless British port was notoriously lax in its dealings with buccaneers and was a great place for the most dangerous men in the world to squander all of their hard-earned plunder on cheap booze and cheaper syphilitic prostitutes.
Scurvy was a nasty disease that proliferated during the age of sail and killed more seamen than cannons, cutlasses, white whales, and malaria combined. The Brits eventually figured out that this terrible affliction was brought on by a citrus deficiency, so they began issuing lemons and limes to their sailors to ward off the illness. From that point on, British sailors were known as limeys.
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24
ANNE BONNY
(c. 1720)
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
—AYN RAND
ANNE BONNY WAS A CRAZY-ASS PIRATE CHICK WHO SAILED ACROSS THE CARIBBEAN DESTROYING ANYBODY WHO LOOKED AT HER FUNNY AND GENERALLY BEING A VICIOUS, MAN–KILLING SCOURGE OF THE SEAS, MAKING A NAME FOR HERSELF BY HACKING THE ARMS OFF MERCHANT SAILORS, STEPPING ON THEIR NECKS, AND THEN SHOOTING THEM OUT OF A CANNON FACE-FIRST INTO A BRICK WALL. She was originally born in Ireland around the turn of the eighteenth century, but being that she was the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy lawyer named William Cormac and his maid, young Anne wasn’t really all that well received when she came into the world. Mrs. Cormac took out an ad on the Cook County Times front page proclaiming William’s adultery, and since that sort of thing was really frowned upon in Irish society back in those days, the Cormac family decided to relocate to Charleston, South Carolina, for a quiet life growing tobacco and watching a lot of college basketball.
At the age of fourteen Anne took over as the primary housekeeper for the estate and promptly got into a heated fight with a maid that resulted in Anne stabbing her in the gut with a steak knife. A year later some horndog asshat tried to rape her, so she beat the holy living hell out of him and bashed his unconscious body half a dozen times with a belaying pin. The dude was so badly messed up that he had to be hospitalized for months.
At sixteen she ran off, married a small-potatoes pirate named James Bonny, and moved to Nassau Island—a den of piracy that at the time was one of the seediest locales this side of Mos Eisley Spaceport. Things went okay for a while, but as you can probably guess, Anne wasn’t the sort of badass babe who was going to be happy sitting around at home being a bored desperate housewife when she could have been out doing something epic. She also didn’t really fit in with the locals very well: One legend has her going to a fancy-pants high society ball where she was introduced to the sister-in-law of the governor of Jamaica. That bitch made some catty remark about how Anne’s shoes didn’t match her purse or something, so Anne hauled off and slugged her right in her stupid face. The snooty debutante went down like the Titanic and lost two teeth for her trouble. Needless to say, this didn’t get Anne invited to too many more parties. To further complicate Anne’s misery, around this time James Bonny decided he was going to start selling out all of his pirate buddies to the governor of Nassau in exchange for cold hard cash. Since Anne really didn’t want to be married to some slimy stool pigeon rat bastard, she started exploring other options.
It didn’t take long before one presented itself. A relatively obscure pirate known as “Calico Jack” Rackham arrived on the island and immediately took a liking to Anne. At this point in time, Calico Jack was more renowned for his flamboyant wardrobe and inherent personal charm than he was for his tireless sword arm and ability to turn British merchantmen into giant flaming infernos, but Anne seized the opportunity to set sail for awesomeness. Jack and Anne hooked up at a keg party one night and the two fled the island on Jack’s ship, the Revenge, and off they went on a perpetual honeymoon of nautical terrorism.
Since pirates weren’t really the sort of folks who took too kindly to fighting alongside women, Anne initially disguised herself as a man in order to fit in with the crew. She quickly made a name for herself as a total hardass who didn’t even bat an eye while hacking up sailors with her trusty cutlass or blasting dickbags in the mouth with one of the many pistols she carried on her belt at any given time. She didn’t shy away from killing, she worked ship with the best of them, and she spewed forth enough profanity to make a marble statue of the Virgin Mary start crying tears of blood. She led boarding parties onto enemy vessels, made prisoners walk the plank, and was essentially considered the toughest pirate onboard.
After several months kicking ass at sea, finally one of her fellow crewmen caught on to the fact that she had boobs. At first this caused a clamor, but when everybody realized that she was probably one of the most dangerous and hardcore pirates onboard, they decided it was all good in the hood. Anne eventually took to wearing men’s clothing when she went on raids and women’s clothing when she was just hanging out around the ship, and everybody was cool with it. Later on in her high seas adventures, the Revenge would actually take on another female, a fellow face-breaking hellion named Mary Read, and with these two women onboard the crew enjoyed a period of unparalleled success, earning tons of gold and plunder from ports and merchant ships.
Unfortunately, we all know how most of these pirate stories turn out for our intrepid
outlaws. In October 1720 the Revenge captured a Spanish galleon laden with gold and treasure, and everybody decided to get wasted to celebrate their victory. Well, right around the time the crew was on their second rendition of “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor,” a ship full of British marines pulled up, and all of a sudden the pirates found themselves about to get seriously wasted by the limeys. Anne and Mary were apparently the only crew members who could hold their liquor, so the two of them put up a valiant last stand against the onslaught of enemy soldiers. After holding off the Brits single-handedly for some time, the women were finally overwhelmed and the crew of the Revenge was captured. Anne was so pissed at the cowardice and uselessness of her fellow pirates that as she was being hauled off by the Brits she started firing her pistols at her own men. She was an angry drunk.
The crew of the Revenge were all thrown in prison and sentenced to death by hanging. Once it was revealed that Anne was pregnant with Calico Jack’s baby, her sentence was commuted and she was released (a common practice for the times). Before she left jail, she stopped in to pay Jack a visit. She calmly walked up to the bars of his cell, looked him dead in the eye, and said, “I’m sorry, Jack, but if you had fought like a man, you would not now be about to die like a dog.” Then she turned on her heel, strode out the front door, and completely vanished from history.
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