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.