Quirky NC

Blackbeard & Queen Anne’s Revenge

Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR), Blackbeard’s flagship, ran aground in North Carolina’s Beaufort Inlet and was abandoned by the pirate in May 1718. Its location is one of America’s longest standing unsolved mysteries.

On November 21, 1996 – almost 280 years after the pirate’s death in a raging sea battle off North Carolina’s coast – Florida-based research, survey and recovery firm.

Since the 1996 discovery, a team from Intersal, the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources and other institutions has mounted multiple diving expeditions, gathering evidence like a prosecutor preparing for trial. The findings have added up to a conclusion by the team that the ship is in fact the QAR.

More than 300,000 artifacts have been recovered, and one of the first, a bronze bell retrieved during the initial dive, helped researchers date the wreck.

Chemical treatment of the heavily encrusted bell revealed 1-inch-high letters embossed around its waist that read “IHS (Iesu Hominorum Salvator) Maria” and “ano de 1705.” 

The crudeness of the bell’s casting and the lettering suggest that it was made in a Spanish or Portuguese New World colony. The bell is believed to be too small to have been the QAR’s. Theories for its presence in the wreckage hold that it was acquired while the frigate sailed as a French slave ship or after Blackbeard seized it in 1717.

The large number of cannons found near the site added more circumstantial evidence to the belief that the wreck was the QAR. In Blackbeard’s day, the QAR was reported to have had 40 cannons aboard, and to date, 25 have been discovered.

Pewter plates, syringes, a musketoon barrel and wine bottles — all from the appropriate time period — also have been found. Scientists tested wood from the ship’s hull and determined them to be white oak, used in ships constructed in northwest Europe.

An exhibition opening in June 2011 at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort makes the team’s case for the conclusion that the ship is the QAR, based on historical records and the evidence revealed from the artifacts.

Among the items in the display are hull fragments, sailcloth and a sailmaker’s needle; two cannons, cannonballs with apron, a sword quillon block and a serpentine side plate; and two medical syringes, cufflinks, buckles, galley items, an apparatus from the head, and other objects from everyday life.

You can see some of the recovered artifacts in a new exhibit at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, North Carolina.

Want to know more? Check out the ultimate source for Cultural Resources in North Carolina, NCDCR.

added: December 30, 2008

updated: February 6, 2012