Author:
Susan
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Date Posted: 22:02:47 06/17/06 Sat
OMG, I just started watching this new Hallmark movie (15 minutes in), and I've already lost count of the *glaring* historical inaccuracies (beyond the aforementioned ones gleaned just from the website blurb)! I'm sorry to be such a stickler, but I'm exasperated and just have to vent ...
- Before the movie even starts, they display a map of Great Britain on which Cornwall has been boldly labelled "Wales"! (Meanwhile, Cardiff is still up north of the Severn.) BTW, why even bother to show the map, since the whole Blackbeard story took place in the Western Hemisphere? It's not he even got sent back to England for trial.
- Crew members are shown comfortably swabbing the deck with long-handled mops instead of crouching down on their knees with "holy stones"?
- The French colors flown by Blackbeard's first prize are the modern flag adopted *after* the French Revolution of 1789! (Blackbeard died in 1718.)
- Blackbeard's ship meanwhile flies the jolly roger of "Calico Jack" Rackham, who sailed several years later with Anne Bonny and Mary Read. (Blackbeard's real jolly roger is well documented and was even used in the recent National Geographic movie.)
- Forget the long-standing debate about whether Blackbeard came from Bristol or Jamaica--he was clearly a Scot, according to Hallmark! (Or perhaps they're mixing him up with Captain Kidd?)
- Captain Benjamin Hornigold and Blackbeard argue aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge about whether to take a French slave ship, then Blackbeard tortures the defeated Hornigold? In reality, Hornigold (sailing in the Ranger) was Blackbeard's mentor and put him in charge of one of his sloops. When they captured that French slaver, Hornigold and Blackbeard split the spoils and parted amicably, with Blackbeard taking the prize and renaming *that* ship the Queen Anne's Revenge.
- Hornigold went to "pay his respects" to Captain Kidd's wife after Kidd was captured for piracy?! Puh-lease! Kidd's mission was to hunt down pirates in the Indian Ocean and modern historians maintain he wasn't a pirate himself but a scapegoat; it's highly unlikely he'd have known Hornigold. (Kidd's primary nemesis was the Cornish pirate Robert Culliford.) Besides which, his well-to-do widow Sarah was busy fighting to keep possession of her New York property while mourning the death of her beloved husband. In 1703, two years after his death, she married a New Jersey merchant, making it hard to believe she would hand over a document (if she'd had one) telling the location of her late husband's treasure (if it had actually still been there) to a pirate!
- John Gardiner--marooned by Kidd???? The island was already owned by Gardiner before he allowed Kidd to hide his treasure there! And it was located off the coast of Long Island--so why does the movie make it look like a tropical rain forest?
- Maynard has a love affair with a governor's daughter and goes undercover as one of Teach's crew???? (Hmm, where have we heard that one before? Well, at least he doesn't accidentally call himself "Edward" in the opening narration.)
Ugh! Two more hours of this? No way, I can't watch any more. It's making "Blackbeard the Pirate" look like a masterpiece! Why does nobody bother to do research for these things? None of this information is the least bit obscure, especially with the explosion of pirate literature published in the last ten years or so? (BTW, I saw a brand-new book about Blackbeard by Angus Konstam at the book store last night. He's written several other authoritative books on pirates, and this one looks pretty good--but, alas, out of my budget at the moment.)
Anyway, I don't know who Hallmark's intended audience for this is (though the ending of the King Tut movie that was on right before seemed even worse; now I realize why I never watch this channel), but it sure isn't for serious pirate fans. Is this the kind of assembly-line drivel we can expect to continue now that pirate movies are suddenly hot again? If it is, I think (or at least hope) it'll be a short-lived revival. (At least with Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney has the creativity to invent *fictional* pirates, making the historical errors a lot easier to ignore.)
I will say Macfadyen gives his Blackbeard more personality than James Purefoy but has nothing in the charm department; he's wily, but he's a despicable creep. Robert Newton could easily mop the deck with both of them.
So was anybody else as, er, disappointed as I was in this movie, or am I being too critical again?
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