Before I was the Prince, I was just Sam. A teenager in the Royal Navy, which, let me tell you, is a fantastic place if you enjoy eating biscuits made 40% of weevils and I fought in some battles, saw the world, and realised one very important thing, that the legal life is a total scam.
You work for the King, he gets the gold and you get scurvy which is an awful business model.
So, I decided to go into independent and started with treasure hunting. My friend Paulsgrave Williams and I headed for the Florida coast to find the wrecked Spanish Plate Fleet. It was going to be easy,just pick some gold off the seafloor and retire but we found nothing. Not a single doubloon and that’s when we met Pirate Captain Benjamin Hornigold and his first mate was a guy named Edward Teach who you might know as Blackbeard.
Now, Ed was a lot. Fuses in the beard? Check. Multiple pistols strapped to his chest? Check. A general aura of I might bite your legs off? Absolutely.
I learned a lot from them, mostly that I was much better looking than they were and that I had a better philosophy. Hornigold refused to attack English ships because he still loved the King and although the ships crew told him the King doesn't even know you exist unless he’s signing your death warrant he refused so eventually, the crew voted him out and I was made captain. I was in my late twenties, I had a ship and while everyone else was wearing those ridiculous itchy wigs, I just tied my long black hair back with a velvet ribbon. Simple. Elegant. Aerodynamic and Black Sam was born.
I didn’t see myself as a thief. I saw myself as a wealth redistribution specialist and my crew called themselves Robin Hood’s Men. I was merciful and generous, i lived by a rule that if you didn't fight back, I didn't kill you and I might even give you your ship back after I took all the good stuff.
In just over a year, I captured 53 ships and then came the Whydah. She was a beautiful state-of-the-art galley built for the slave trade and we spent months raiding the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast and I was the wealthiest pirate in history. I was winning at life.
I even had my own flag. Most pirates go for the basic skull and crossbones which is a bit cliché, if you ask me. Mine was a skeleton holding an hourglass in one hand and a speaking trumpet in the other and everything was going perfectly. I was heading back to New England with a ship full of gold and a crew of 145 men who thought I was a god, then came Mother Nature.
She didn’t care how many ships I captured. A storm hit us off Cape Cod and the weight of all that gold made us into giant golden brick and the ship capsized and out of 146 men, only two made it to shore. I wasn't one of them. I went down with the ship, the gold, and my very nice velvet hair ribbon.