Dear Reader:
You are viewing
a story from GN Version 4.0.
Time may not have been kind to formatting, integrity of links, images, information, etc.
Historian gives background on what real-life figures we might see in Assassin's Creed IV
A portion of a Game Informer interview with historian, Colin Woodard...
GI: Ubisoft Montreal has talked about several intriguing characters from the period they plan to include in the new Black Flag story, and I'd love your perspective on who these people actually were. Starting with somebody you already mentioned, who was Blackbeard?
CW: He was definitely a thinking man’s pirate. I got the impression as I went through the documents and reconstructed what he was doing, you could see what a chess player he was. As I mentioned before, he was cultivating this image of terror to get people to surrender without fighting, and that was carefully thought out. And people were terrified of his reputation. When you realized it was Blackbeard coming with all of his men going “arggh” and you know this fire and smoke coming off his beard, people surrendered. But the fact is in all of the documentation, much of it from surviving people who had been captured and later reported it to the authorities, they’re not necessarily sympathetic witnesses – there’s not a single instance of any killing of anybody in his entire career until his last battle to the death with the Royal Navy.
It was a cultivated vision of terror, but he himself rarely actually tried to kill anybody, and that’s really unusual in this time. It was a very brutal age where justice itself was quite arbitrary if a child is caught, an eight year old in London stealing a loaf of bread, you hang him. It was a very violent age, so it almost sticks out. But he was also thinking about what he was doing. He sees what’s happening before anyone else seems to and has an endgame worked out. He tries to set himself up as a sort of Tony Soprano-like figure in North Carolina. He went there and managed to get the protection of the governor and work out a deal where he was just “an ordinary citizen”, you know, hanging around in North Carolina, but also quietly and unofficially, running a gigantic piracy operation and dragging the ships in and looting them and shipping in small boats up the creeks. All of the stolen goods were being stored under bales of hay where they were later discovered. So he had set himself up and bought off the authorities and set up a deal and was trying to become a sort of underworld figure with plausible deniability and protection of a sovereign government. Pretty smart – throughout his career he was thinking many moves ahead. Unfortunately, he underestimated the ruthlessness of the government of Virginia. Alexander Spotswood was willing to violate all sorts of laws without permission to invade north Carolina and capture Blackbeard and conquer his men, but that was Blackbeard underestimating the ruthlessness of his host. So, Blackbeard was an extremely intriguing character and the one I found most interesting of the group.
Full interview here
GI: Ubisoft Montreal has talked about several intriguing characters from the period they plan to include in the new Black Flag story, and I'd love your perspective on who these people actually were. Starting with somebody you already mentioned, who was Blackbeard?
CW: He was definitely a thinking man’s pirate. I got the impression as I went through the documents and reconstructed what he was doing, you could see what a chess player he was. As I mentioned before, he was cultivating this image of terror to get people to surrender without fighting, and that was carefully thought out. And people were terrified of his reputation. When you realized it was Blackbeard coming with all of his men going “arggh” and you know this fire and smoke coming off his beard, people surrendered. But the fact is in all of the documentation, much of it from surviving people who had been captured and later reported it to the authorities, they’re not necessarily sympathetic witnesses – there’s not a single instance of any killing of anybody in his entire career until his last battle to the death with the Royal Navy.
It was a cultivated vision of terror, but he himself rarely actually tried to kill anybody, and that’s really unusual in this time. It was a very brutal age where justice itself was quite arbitrary if a child is caught, an eight year old in London stealing a loaf of bread, you hang him. It was a very violent age, so it almost sticks out. But he was also thinking about what he was doing. He sees what’s happening before anyone else seems to and has an endgame worked out. He tries to set himself up as a sort of Tony Soprano-like figure in North Carolina. He went there and managed to get the protection of the governor and work out a deal where he was just “an ordinary citizen”, you know, hanging around in North Carolina, but also quietly and unofficially, running a gigantic piracy operation and dragging the ships in and looting them and shipping in small boats up the creeks. All of the stolen goods were being stored under bales of hay where they were later discovered. So he had set himself up and bought off the authorities and set up a deal and was trying to become a sort of underworld figure with plausible deniability and protection of a sovereign government. Pretty smart – throughout his career he was thinking many moves ahead. Unfortunately, he underestimated the ruthlessness of the government of Virginia. Alexander Spotswood was willing to violate all sorts of laws without permission to invade north Carolina and capture Blackbeard and conquer his men, but that was Blackbeard underestimating the ruthlessness of his host. So, Blackbeard was an extremely intriguing character and the one I found most interesting of the group.