In June 1718, Captain Edward Tache (pronounced Teach) ran his three-masted flagship aground off North Carolina’s Beaufort Inlet. Tache and his crew abandoned ship with all the valuables they could carry, and the ship sank into the sands of the inlet. Tache was better known as the feared pirate Blackbeard who was terrorizing shipping and the coastal towns of the American colonies. The lost ship was the Queen Anne’s Revenge, a French slave ship and privateer captured by Blackbeard in 1817 and refitted with as many as forty cannons. The Queen Anne’s Revenge, along with three smaller ships, gave Blackbeard a fleet that was a match for any naval force in the region.
For 300 years the last resting place of the Queen Anne’s Revenge remained a mystery, while rumors of lost pirate treasure, fueled by Hollywood and popular fiction, grew along the Mid-Atlantic coast. But in the fall of 1996, Intersal, LLC, a treasure-salvage company searching for a lost Spanish treasure ship, found the missing pirate vessel, when its many iron cannons and anchors set off the search vessel’s magnetometers. Since the wreck was in state waters, the task of investigating it fell to the well-equipped Underwater Archaeology Branch (UAB) of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Affairs. When the governor announced the discovery, it set off a national sensation, and the legislature promptly set aside funds for the excavation and curation of the Queen Anne’s Revenge and its contents.
Underwater excavations by UAB began in 1997 and continue to this day. A conservation lab was established at Easter Carolina University. To date, some 200,000 artifacts have been recovered along with thirty-one iron cannons. This volume tells the story of perhaps the most extensive underwater archaeology project in American history. Author Mark Wilde-Ramming is the former deputy state archaeologist and past director of the Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck project. Co-author Linda Carnes-McNaughton is the current program archaeologist. Blackbeard’s Sunken Prize is written for the general public and lavishly illustrated with 227 color photos, forty-two halftones, fourteen maps, three graphs, and four tables. Not only does it tell the exciting story of the discovery and excavation of the pirate flagship, it is a primer for underwater archaeology.
Thus far little gold and silver treasure has been found on the Queen Anne’s Revenge, leading archaeologists to conclude that Blackbeard and his crew were successful is salvaging whatever riches it carried. But this volume makes the case that the real treasure of the pirate ship is the vast stores of information it is providing about pirates and naval history in Colonial America.
