Day 165 -> Blackbeard's Skull became a Punch Bowl

A close approximation to the real "Infant" (Image found on Google)

      I knew great pirates had bad endings once they were caught, but man, that's a little too much! Nevertheless, it seems to be true. Our beloved Edward Teach, better known as the most fearsome pirate of all time, Blackbeard, spent years terrorizing the East Coast and the Caribbean. A bear of a man with lit fuses in his beard and a less than neighborly disposition, he eventually was sentenced to death. And to make  sure that the sturdy pirate had finally bit the sawdust, they cut his head off. That would be ok, if it was the only thing they did to his head. It wasn't.
     Initially, Blackbeard's head was stuck on a pole by the mouth of a river in Williamsburg, Virginia, as a brutal warning to anybody else harboring aspirations of piracy. Eventually, when the flesh had rotted away, somebody decided to do something else with it: to drink liquids out of it. Yew.
    The Raleigh Tavern appropriated Blackbeard's skull, plated it with silver, and converted it into the bottom of a huge novelty punch bowl, bizarrely known as "The Infant." For over a century, the Infant remained there, occasionally being lent out to dinner parties, believe it or not.
    By the 1920s, the skull had disappeared. It resurfaced sometime in the 1990s and is now on display at the Peabody Essex Museum.

~Ally