Did you know that the well-known English nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence a pocket full of rye, four-and-twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie” could have been a coded message used to recruit crew members for the notorious 18th-century pirate Blackbeard.  His real name Teach was a shrewd and calculating leader who spurned the use of force, relying instead on his fearsome image to elicit the response that he desired from those whom he robbed…