Benjamin Hornigold seize other vessels with impunity. Hornigold's second-in-command during this period was Edward Teach, who would later be better known as the pirate Blackbeard. When Hornigold took command of the "Ranger", he delegated the captaincy of his earlier sloop to Teach. In the spring of 1717 the two pirate captains seized three merchant ships in quick succession, one carrying 120 barrels of flour bound for Havana, another a Bermudian sloop with a cargo of spirits and the third a Portuguese ship travelling from Madeira with a cargo of white wine. In March 1717, Hornigold attacked an armed merchant vessel sent to
Edward Coates (pirate) Robert Culliford, operating for several years before his eventual capture and execution several years later. Edward Coates (pirate) Edward Coates was a colonial American privateer in English service during the King William's War and later a pirate operating in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean during the mid-1690s. In 1689, Coates originally signed aboard the "Jacob" as a sailor in a privateer expedition, then under the command of Captain William Mason, and commissioned by the colonial officials in New York to raid French shipping off the coast of Quebec ""to war as in his wisdom should seem fit"". However, unable