The Search for Blackbeard’s Treasure
Author: Tim Taylor l Suitable for: Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3+, Planning
The Theme
Pirates
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Background
The Curriculum
Curriculum notes: I planned and taught this frame with Sam Bowell in her class of Year 1 & 2 children at St Michael’s Primary School in King’s Lynn. The school is in an area of severe social deprivation and the children are extremely challenging, with as many as 70-80% SEN. The main challenge was to support those children that had very little background knowledge and few social skills. They found it very difficult to organise themselves or to make choices. In our planning we decided to provide carefully structured activities that the children could self select and work on at their own pace. The activities were open-ended and non-differentiated. Our idea was to create multiple, varied, opportunities for the supporting adults to provide new information and to support those children who needed extra help, without drawing attention to them or separating them from the main group.
Understanding: To identify different ways of life in the past & to identify the different way the past is represented.
Knowledge: To learn about pirates: their activities, their ships, clothing, weapons etc and particularly about their obsession with secrecy and protecting their ill-gotten gains.
Skills: To ask & answer questions about the past. Make choices for particular purposes; plan ahead and evaluate; communicate with others to make decisions; to find out new information; to listen carefully, make deductions and ask pertinent questions; to organise their own time effectively; to keep a higher purpose in mind and make personal sacrifices to reach that higher purpose; to work closely with others – share resources, information and ideas; to work on problems – collect relevant information and resources.
Values: That keeping safe is paramount; that artefacts from the past best belong in museums and should be carefully protected and preserved for posterity; that more can be achieved working together than working alone; that working as part of a community sometimes means making personal sacrifices; that with freedom comes responsibilities to others.
Developing the Situation
Inquiry Questions
What moral responsibilities do people who research the past have to the people who lived in the past or to their decedents? Why should artefacts from the past (especially valuable artefacts from the past) be in museums rather than private collections? Do we have a responsibility to understand the past? Pirates are often depicted as glamorous and romantic, should the truth be more widely known?
Situation
A team of expert archaeologists (think Indiana Jones, not the Time Team) are flown to a deserted Caribbean island in search of the buried treasure of Blackbeard, the notorious 18th century pirate. The treasure is well hidden (possibly in a cave deep under the island’s extinct volcano). The team will have to search the entire island and look for clues of pirate activity, whilst being careful to protect themselves from the island’s many dangerous animals.
Designing the Expert Frame
Team of Experts
See above, the team have a long history of working successfully in very inhospitable climates and under intense conditions. They have access to all the latest technology and high quality equipment.
Client(s)
A museum concerned the treasure might end up in the hands of a private collector
Commission(s)
To find and retrieve Blackbeard’s treasure and return it safely to the museum for public display.
Possible Steps in
Notes: Before we started the first session Sam had already spent several weeks looking at pirates as a topic – Making pirate maps, drawing pirate ships etc. as a way of inducting the children into the subject.
Session 1 (establishing the island): (i) In this first session we started by drawing on small pieces of paper the kinds of objects that might have been left on an island after the pirates had left. The children had access to books and pictures of pirates and their ships. Very quickly we had huge amounts of material of the kind you could well imagine. As they worked I asked them to draw only one object for each piece of paper, then to turn it over and draw on the back what it might look like after 300 years. The children stuck them to the board with blu-tak as they worked.
(ii) We then ‘built’ the island using a large bed sheet and the children’s jumpers stuffed underneath to make hills etc. Around the edge they drew the coastline using chalk. Using more small pieces of paper they began to draw the geographical features of the island and to mark with particular care the places of possible danger.
Session 2 (establishing the mantle of the expert)
Step 1: I started by talking to the children about the story of Blackbeard. They had already done some work on him and were very interested in his ‘colourful’ eccentricities. I told them I had been interested in Blackbeard since I was a small boy, but that I had never known how he had died. We spoke a little about the most likely ways a pirate might have died. Then I read them the story of his death. The attached copy below is from Wikipedia, it is not the one we used but is close enough. If you intend to use it yourself you might want to edit it depending on the age of the children.
Step 2: I then drew a side-view profile of the island we had made in the first session and asked them where they thought Blackbeard might have buried his treasure if it was still undiscovered. They decided inside a hidden cave, deep beneath the extinct volcano.
Step 3: I then drew a timeline above the island and marked it with two crosses. The first was 1718, the date just before Blackbeard’s death when he had hidden the treasure on the island. The second, much further along, was today, “the date when the exploration team landed, and began their search…” I then drew a dotted line from that date forward and told them “This is the future. In our story do you want the exploration team, who are searching for the treasure to bring back to the museum, to find the treasure or not?” There was some thinking and talking. Then we had a vote. About half the class said they did want it to be found in the future and about half said they didn’t. Sam and I weren’t worried either way, all we wanted was for it to happen in the future and not straight away, stealing all the tension!
Step 4: The next step was to gather together the team’s equipment. We were concerned that the children might not know what kind of equipment could be needed so we asked the other adults in the room to represent the different company store-rooms. They drew up signs – tools; machinery; sea/naval equipment; ropes/traps etc; communications; searching equipment; clothing; camping; transport. The children then drew on a piece of paper what they were going to use to carry their equipment in, either – a box, a case or a rucksack. And then they moved around the different store-rooms collecting the equipment they needed.
Afterwards, when we reflected on this session, we thought this convention had worked well because it allowed the children to be the experts and, at the same time, protected them from not knowing. It was entirely authentic for the adults to ask: “Do you need…?” or “Have you got…?”
Step 5: One of the children had drawn a compass and had learnt a mnemonic to remember the order of the points – “Naughty, Elephants, Squirt, Water”. When the session resumed after play, she taught the others this aid memoir and they each drew their own compass. While they worked each adult wrote a short extract from the pirate ship’s log-book. Each extract came from the pirate’s first few days on the island and contained information about the island and about the pirates’ life. We wanted to give the children some information about pirates without resorting to ‘telling’.
As they continued to work on their compasses we introduced the adults (their were 4) as people who were going to represent the pirates from our story who were reading from the ship’s log. In turn each ‘pirate’ read from the log (not with a silly pirate accent). The children could then ask questions both of the pirate and of the log. We suggested they might make notes on the back of their compass paper if they heard anything of importance that they wouldn’t want to forget.
This was the end of the session.
The Death of Blackbeard
When they came upon Blackbeard’s Adventure, they were hit with a devastating broadside attack. Midshipman Hyde, captain of the smaller HMS Jane, was killed along with six other men. Ten men were also wounded in the surprise attack. The sloop fell astern and was little help in the following action. Maynard continued his pursuit in HMS Ranger, managing to blast the Adventure’s rigging, forcing it ashore. Maynard ordered many of his crew into the holds and readied to be boarded. As his ship approached, Blackbeard saw the mostly empty decks, assumed it was safe to board, and did so with ten men.
Maynard’s men emerged, and the battle began. The most complete account of the following events comes from the Boston News-Letter:[6]
“Maynard and Teach themselves begun the fight with their swords, Maynard making a thrust, the point of his sword against Teach’s cartridge box, and bent it to the hilt. Teach broke the guard of it, and wounded Maynard’s fingers but did not disable him, whereupon he jumped back and threw away his sword and fired his pistol which wounded Teach. Demelt struck in between them with his sword and cut Teach’s face; in the interim both companies engaged in Maynard’s sloop. Later during the battle, while Teach was loading his pistol he finally died from blood loss. Maynard then cut off his head and hung it from his bow.”
Despite the best efforts of the pirates (including a desperate plan to blow up the Adventure), Teach was killed, and the battle ended. Teach was reportedly shot five times and stabbed more than twenty times before he died and was decapitated. Legends about his death immediately sprang up, including the oft-repeated claim that Teach’s headless body, after being thrown overboard, swam between 2 and 7 times around the Adventure before sinking. Teach’s head was placed as a trophy on the bowsprit of the ship.