History of Bald Head Island

The Village's history is peppered with colorful people and connections. Through the years, the island has been a breeding ground for wild boar, a prime hangout for bootleggers, a supplier of materials for cedar pencils, a Civil War fort, a nesting ground for loggerhead turtles, and a produce farm and fruit orchard. Pirates, lighthouse keepers, Indians, river pilots, ruffians, soldiers, farmers, and entrepreneurs of all types have come and gone, and yet, the Village's essence is unchanged. This can only be because the island itself is a living thing, with its own integrity and spirit, its wild beauty more or less disregarding man's inclination to tinker.

In the 17 th and 18 th centuries, when pirates ruled the waters off the coast of North Carolina with greed and terror, the Village was a favorite refuge and base for the notorious buccaneers. In all, the waters surrounding Cape Fear were a hideaway for hundreds of pirates, the most famous of which were Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, and Stede Bonnet, the gentlemen pirate.

Bonnet, the so-called "Gentlemen Pirate" from Barbados, was an educated retired military officer who turned to piracy in 1717 as a second career in order to escape what one historian tactfully referred to as "the discomforts he found in a married state." During his short stint as a pirate, Bonnet terrorized the Carolina and Virginia coasts aboard his sailing sloop Revenge with 10 guns and 70 men. For a brief time, Bonnet even linked up with Blackbeard, a pirate who never carried the title "gentlemen." In 1718 Blackbeard was cornered and killed aboard his sloop, Adventure, by two warships sent by the governor of Virginia. Just three weeks later, Bonnet was captured at Bonnet's Creek in Southport by Colonel William Rhett of South Carolina and hanged near Charlestown. Their deaths marked a dramatic end to the Golden Age of Piracy in North Carolina.