December 5th, 1717

The name "Blackbeard" is born after Henry Bostock and his men have an encounter with Edward Teach off the coast of Anguilla.

Somehow Henry Bostock lived to tell the tale. Then encounter took place on December 5, 1717, when for eight long hours he and his men remained Blackbeard's prisoners, never knowing from one minute to the next whether they would live or die. The attack took place off Crab Island near Anguilla, and for the rest of the day the Queen Anne's Revenge, accompanied by the sloop Revenge, cruised the waters of the Leeward Islands in search of more victims. During that time Bostock had plenty of time to watch Blackbeard in action, and when he wrote his statement for the governor of Barbados two weeks later he was able to describe his nemesis in some detail. In fact, the master of the sloop Margaret was the first to provide a description of the pirate who captured him, and it was he who first came up with the cognomen "Blackbeard."

from the book Blackbeard by Angus Konstam page 154