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Three-hundred years ago, the fearsome pirate Blackbeard plied his bloody trade off the North Carolina coasts. His reign ended after running his flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, aground near the Beaufort Inlet. Thanks to the Office of State Archaeology in the NC Department of Cultural Resources, the Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project is bringing what is presumed to be the famous Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) back to the surface. This time around the ship won’t be terrifying anyone; it will be delighting and inspiring thousands at museum exhibits in Beaufort and around the country.
At the end of their third year of excavating, researchers didn’t have to deal with any pirates above the waves, but were harassed by some fiercely inclement weather. The QAR Shipwreck Project had planned to bring up the 12th cannon from the wreck, but high winds and storms had delayed them. However, divers slipped in at the very end of the excavation schedule and were able to recover the 2,000-pound cannon from the wreck. The cannon will join many other artifacts collected this season at the QAR Conservation Lab at East Carolina University to be properly conserved and studied before returning to Beaufort at the NC Maritime Museum.
Several of these items were displayed for the press at the Fort Macon Coast Guard Station in Atlantic Beach, and then the next day at the Maritime Museum. Wendy Welsh, the conservation field supervisor for the project, announced this season’s haul included 1,500 ballast stones and 450 concretions. Concretions are concrete-like coatings of sand and debris that form on objects under the water. “(The concretions) could contain hundreds of other artifacts we just won’t be able to see until we run them back in the lab” Welsh explained.
In addition, divers came up with eight loose pieces of ceramic, eight fragments of pewter plate, grinding stone fragments researchers say they hope will match up to two previously recovered pieces, a lead sounding weight, a cannon ball, a cannon apron used on the touch hole of a gun to keep the barrel clean, deadeye strops for rigging, a hand dagger guard, and what researchers think is a silver coin.
Excavators Take a Seat: The Perfect Place for Pirate Booty
The “big reveal” of the press conference was when researchers unveiled the cylindrical working part of the “seat of ease,” as it was known, before handing it over later that day to the NC Maritime Museum in Beaufort to be part of the collection on display.
The artifact looks like a squashed lead cylinder (it was flattened in the wreck) with rivets at a flanged end to attach to a seat. It functioned similarly to a pit toilet. A sailor (or pirate, in this case) would sit on a wooden seat, with the flanged part of the lead tube found attached to the wood. The non-flanged other part of the cylinder would let waste exist the ship from either the bow or stern area. The stern area would have had a galley area on the outside of the ship, and would have been the seat the captain would use. Since this particular seat of ease was found in the stern, researchers suspect Blackbeard at one time would have used it to “ease himself.” Project Director Mark Wilde-Ramsing went so far as to call the artifact “Blackbeard’s throne” at the press conference.
The seat of ease was a large concretion when found in 2005 and originally thought to be an object closer to a urinal than a toilet. Shanna Daniel, a conservator working with the project, had to painstakingly remove as much of this material as possible without damaging the artifact. She worked for nine months cleaning it out, although she said if she had not been dividing her time between the seat of ease and other projects, it would have only taken her one. Working on an ancient pirate toilet for nine months was tricky work, and also cause for some rather bad puns among her coworkers. “I was running water through the tube to get the sediment out and (my coworkers) were like, ‘hey Shana, you’re flushing the toilet,’ ” she said.
Panning For Gold (And More) at the Bottom of the Sea
Large artifacts like cannon and rigging elements aren’t the only things researchers are brining out of the water. Researchers are breaking out the magnifying glasses and sieves. Conservator Franklin Price carefully examines each pan full of sediment that is dredged up through a hose, and sifted through a sluice. “We’re going over the entire site to the quarter inch,” he said. “If you spend less than 20 minutes on a pan full, you’re going too fast.”
The idea for all this meticulous work is to find heavy but small objects. These include yellow beads, possibly indicative of slave jewelry. Other interesting results have been a concreted coin and several buckles, many examples of shot, and gold dust. Price said that while the gold was an exciting find, it didn’t reveal much about history. “Sometimes it was found in West Africa, and sometimes they would actually import gold from Brazil, so it’s hard to say exactly where that comes from,” Price said.
While it may seem tedious to examine a wreck site one pan full of sand at a time, Price said he was amazed by the findings panning had produced. After finding a mysterious piece of material marked with an “X”, price joked, “I know it’s a pirate ship now, because ‘X’ marks the spot.”
Circumstantial Piracy
While the QAR Shipwreck Project crew is bringing up major finds in the form of pirate toilets and cannons, there are still skeptics as to whether the wreck is even the Queen Anne’s Revenge, as no artifact has been found with the name of the ship, or her previous name, La Concorde. The team says they are convinced their hypothesis is correct. They haven’t found a “smoking gun,” or evidence that expressly names the wreck as Blackbeard’s fearsome flagship, but have found substantial evidence to support the theory.
Chris Southerly, QAR Archaeological Field Supervisor, said that this year’s excavations at the midships area, east and west of the main ballast pile, seem to support some theories of the wrecking process. “The wrecking process would support it, the east side has extended ballast, indicating material from the lower holds, with rigging elements on the west side. It’s always possible we might find something (that proves this isn’t the right ship) but the date ranges for artifacts fit very closely,” he said.
Nothing found so far post-dates the 1718 sinking of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. If researchers find a bunch of things that didn’t start being produced until after the sinking, Southerly said they would be forced to reexamine their hypothesis.
There’s also the matter that so far, historian research has supported findings. “Historians say this site checks out with historical documentation. History says it is, and 10 years of archaeology failed to prove it isn’t,” he added.
Project Director Mark Wilde-Ramsing said he thought “everything is pretty well confirmed.” The findings point to the ship being a pirate ship, and the QAR was the only ship reported to be in the area during that time period. Beads were found, which might mean an African connection (the QAR was transporting slaves before it was a pirate ship). A big clue to the wreck’s piratical nature lies of course, in the cannon. “The cannons were loaded and one of the smaller ones had spikes in it,” Wilde-Ramsing explained. “There was no doubt. You could make a theoretical argument that it could have come from outer space and it might be true, but anyway.”
Richard Lawrence, head of the Underwater Archaeology Branch put it another way: “Looking at it this way, there isn’t a murder weapon, so you can’t get capitol punishment, but the preponderance of circumstantial evidence is enough to put them away for life.”
Whydah You Know?
What researchers are finding under the waves can tell us more than just which name was probably painted on the bow of the vessel. Researchers say they are getting down what life aboard was like, and what the final moments of the ship would have been. Wilde-Ramsing said the evidence shows the crew of the QAR probably left the ship in a hurry.
Researchers hypothesize this by comparing the QAR wreck with a very similar wreck, which sank near Cape Cod the year before the QAR did. The Whydah was an English pirate slave ship. “They were English pirates, it was a flagship, the same size, everything about the same, but that ship went down in a storm, all but two people were killed,” explained Wilde-Ramsing.
The Whydah had been very well excavated and because of the storm nothing was removed. The difference is that in the QAR wreck, the ship ran aground, so pirates had time to evacuate. Looking at what they removed can help determine how long they had and what was important to them.
The pirates didn’t take any gold weighing scales—several sets of cups and little dishes used to weigh gold have been found. “’Ok, we’re taking all the gold, but we don’t need to waste our time taking the weights,’ because Blackbeard is probably not sharing like he’s supposed to so they have no reason to weight it out” Wilde-Ramsing said.
Bigger artifacts such as grinding wheels and mechanical jacks were left at the site as well, probably because even though they would have been of use and of value, they were probably too heavy to carry off.
While researchers have found some weapons, like the knife hilt and various gun parts Wilde-Ramsing said the findings didn’t match the store from the Whydah where the weapons were all intact. “The things that are worn are not being taken,” he explained.
Artifacts found can also tell researchers where the pirates were headed after jumping ship. Fishnets and throw nets have been found at the wreck. If they weren’t taking them, it means they were headed to land in a place they could get food instead of staying on the ocean. Researchers also found a lot of iron hoops for barrels. Researchers are not positive the barrels were full of provisions, but Wilde-Ramsing said it could mean pirates were not dumping food off the sinking ship because they knew they were coming into a semi-inhabited place. “If they have money to buy food they are better off because that’s less to carry.”
Keeping A Weather Eye On The Future
Pirates have fought their way with musket ball and cutlass into our collective hearts. Because of the expense of underwater archaeology, rarely does their world come out of the water as vividly as in the QAR Shipwreck Project. The project still has three to four years to go excavating and then countless years in the lab. With the momentum generated, no one is talking of anything but following things through to completion.
“This is something that archeologists, geologists, historians will treasure for years and years to come,” Southerly said to reporters. “It’s a public treasure for everyone to relate to. It’s unbelievable to me the interest in pirates. I think we all know that. It really brings history to life and here we have tangible evidence of pirates and early 18th century life.”
By Bill Bedard »» Full Article |
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