Edward Thatch

Recorded sideThatch's squadron (Edward Thatch, alias Teach)

Recorded resultvictory

Thatch's squadron victory; the province defeated. No shots exchanged - none are recorded. A port was reduced and a ransom extracted without an exchange of fire.

Reputation did the work of the broadside. The flag was accepted as evidence that resistance was fatal and surrender was not, so the cost per prize collapsed to nothing - no powder, no casualties, no damage to the hulls. The pattern has a stated expiry: it prices in a belief, and it decays the moment someone resists and survives, or surrenders and hangs anyway. That is precisely what the post-1718 vice-admiralty trials manufactured. The suppression campaign attacked the reputation, not the ships.

What followed

Admitted deliberately as a zero-fire engagement. If the atlas only admits engagements where guns fired, it systematically undercounts the era's most effective operation type - and the omission is not random, it deletes exactly the cases where reputation substituted for force. Read with the Ouidah striking of January 1722 (eleven ships struck to Roberts without a fight) as the two named instances of reputation-as-force-substitute; the prereg registration `reputation_substitution` requires at least five cases each side of the 1718 boundary before any comparison, and is recorded as 'open, below threshold'.

Recorded sideThatch's crew (Edward Thatch, alias Teach - killed)

Recorded resultdefeat

Royal Navy detachment victory; Thatch's crew annihilated and the commander killed. The taken cargo was cocoa, indigo and cotton - not specie.

The state had to shed its own advantage to reach the target, and it very nearly lost the action doing so. Spotswood could not send the warships he had: Pearl and Lyme were fourth-rates and could not enter the inlet. He hired shallow-draft sloops, borrowed their crews, took local pilots - and Maynard still put both sloops aground going in. Thatch's counter was to fight the boarding rather than the ship, which is the correct counter when the enemy has spent his gun advantage to get to you.

What followed

The clearest case of the draft gate operating against the hunter rather than for him, and the row that carries the prize-composition finding: Maynard's take was cocoa, indigo and cotton, not specie. Success in this era ran on liquidity - the ability to convert bulk colonial cargo into money - so the fence was infrastructure and closing the market turned a capture into worthless weight. The prize-composition test (cargo class across the trial records, which itemise) is recorded as pending.