Also in the museum may be seen the chart-book of Blackbeard, the pirate, who, one of the curators of the museum informed me, was the same person as Edward Teach.  Blackbeard, who is commemorated in the name of Blackbeard’s Island, off the coast of South Georgia, met his fate when he encountered a cruiser fitted out by Governor Spotswood of Virginia and commanded by Lieutenant Maynard.  Maynard found Blackbeard’s ship at Okracoke Inlet, on the North Carolina coast.  Before he and his men could board the pirate vessel the pirates came and boarded them.  Severe fighting ensued, but the pirates were defeated, Maynard himself killing Blackbeard in single combat with swords.  The legend around Okracoke is that Blackbeard’s bad fortune on this occasion came to him because of the unlucky number of his matrimonial adventures, the story being that he had thirteen wives.  It is said also that his vanquishers cut off his head and hung it at the yard-arm of their ship, throwing his body into the sea, and that as soon as the body struck the water the head began to call, “Come on, Edward!” whereupon the headless body swam three times around the ship.  Personally I think there may be some slight doubt about the authenticity of this part of the story.  For, while from one point of view we might say that to swim about in such aimless fashion would be the very thing a man without a head might do, yet from another point of view the question arises:  Would a man whose head had just been severed from his body feel like taking such a long swim?

And what a rich lot of other historic treasures!

Did you know, for instance, that Flora Macdonald, the Scottish heroine, who helped Prince Charles Edward to escape, dressed as a maidservant, after the Battle of Culloden, in 1746, came to America with her husband and many relatives just before the Revolutionary War and settled at Cross Creek (now Fayetteville), North Carolina?  When General Donald Macdonald raised the Royal standard at the time of the Revolution, her husband and many of her kinsmen joined him, and these were later captured at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge, in 1776, and taken as prisoners to Philadelphia.  Yes; and Flora Macdonald’s garter-buckles are now in the museum at Raleigh.

A portrait of Captain James J. Waddell, C.S.N., who was a member of a famous North Carolina family, recalls the story of his post-bellum cruise, in command of the Shenandoah, when, not knowing that the War was over, he preyed for months on Federal commerce in the South Seas.

The museum of course contains many uniforms worn by distinguished soldiers of the Confederacy and many old flags, among them one said to be the original flag of the Confederacy.  This flag was designed by Orren R. Smith of Louisburg, North Carolina, and was made in that town.  The journals of the Confederate Congress show that countless designs for a flag were submitted, that the Committee on a Flag reported that all designs had been rejected and returned, the committee having adopted one of its own; nevertheless Mr. Smith’s claim to have designed the flag finally adopted is so well supported that the Confederate Veterans, at their General Reunion held in Richmond in 1915, passed a resolution endorsing it.