>>283453252
It's my guess that Oda when researching pirates for One Piece learned about how cool the real life Blackbeard was and resolved to make an important character in his pirate manga based on him. At least that's what I would do if I were Oda, Blackbeard is my favorite real life pirate too. He seems to have given some of Blackbeard's more honorable traits to Whitebeard, like his death with the wounds being listed is straight out of BB's death irl, with the "coward's wound" detail being added by Oda, it's also why WB has the name Edward taken from the real life BB while BB took Teach, even though Oda switched them as surnames and given names.