Lieutenant's logbook for HMS PEARL, Part 1-10, 1715-19. July 1715 under the command of Captain Charles Poole, served with Admiral George Byng's fleet in the English Channel, and then on the coast of Scotland during the Jacobite rising of 1715. In 1716 under Captain George Gordon, HMS PEARL served first in the Baltic and North Sea, before sailing to Virginia in 1717 with Robert Maynard as first lieutenant. That year, Governor Alexander Spotswood issued an order for the capture of the pirate Blackbeard.

Administrative / biographical background
HMS Pearl was a 42-gun fourth-rate of the Royal Navy. Her crew was involved in the hunt and death of the pirate Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, in 1718. Blackbeard, who had supposedly retired, was living in the neighbouring Province of North Carolina, and Spotswood felt that he was an immediate threat to Virginia commerce should he resume his pirating career. Using information gathered from a captured member of Blackbeard's crew, Spotswood dispatched 33 crewmen from the Pearl and 24 crewmen from HMS Lyme and commandeered two merchant sloops, which they used to sail down the coast to North Carolina. With Maynard in command, the group finally located Blackbeard's ship, the Adventure, and attacked, resulting in his subsequent death and post-mortem decapitation by Maynard.