Death comes for every man, but that doesn't mean you have to make it easy for the bastard. These are the men who, despite whatever terrible things they may have done in life, earned a place in our hearts with their amazingly badass deaths.

7 Edward Teach a.k.a. Blackbeard

Why He Had to Go

Blackbeard or Edward Teach was a famous English pirate and a massive asshole by all accounts. He had between fourteen and sixteen wives, most of them about a biscuit older than Dakota Fanning. One wife in particular would be routinely forced to run a train with the crew while Blackbeard watched and "buffed his peg leg" so to speak. He burnt hemp beneath his ... um, black beard, to make it look like he was breathing fire, which worked to intimidate his enemies but likely alienated his crew since such a stunt would make an 18th century pirate smell like a snowman made of dogshit.

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He'd also occasionally murder his first mate, just to keep everyone on their toes.



"I can't even remember why I was mad at you."

How He Went Down

Blackbeard eventually retired to North Carolina to spend his senior years rolling around in gold coins. But the Governor of Virginia put out a hit on Blackbeard, sending two ships after him, commanded by Robert Maynard.

Rather than running from the two enormous ships sent to kill him, Blackbeard boarded Maynard's ship. Well, first he bombed the deck with an assload of primitive grenades like Jim Brown in The Dirty Dozen. That's when things got all sorts of stabby. Blackbeard nearly severed the fingers on one of Maynard's hands with his sword, and Maynard broke his fucking sword stabbing Blackbeard back.

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At the end of the fight, Blackbeard had been stabbed twenty times and suffered at least five gunshot wounds, before bleeding to death while trying to reload his pistol to keep the party going. Maynard then cut Blackbeard's head off and hung it from the bow of his sloop, partly for effect but mostly because he needed the head to collect his reward. He was paid 100 pounds for his trouble, the modern equivalent of about $18,000 or a 2006 Buick Rainier.