While there are many followers of Jack Sparrow and his ship Black Pearl, of Pirates of the Caribbean fame, history lovers can follow the evolution of the flesh and blood pirate Blackbeard, and his flagship Queen Anne’s Revenge.
Just subscribe to Blogging Blackbeard, which recounts how a French privateer known as La Concorde became a slave ship and eventually one of the most dreaded vessels on the seas.
The blog is part of the tricentennial commemoration of the sinking of Queen Anne’s Revenge June 10, 1718. Capt. Ellis Brand, of the HMS Lyme, sent this report on the event back to the British Naval headquarters:
“On the 10 June or thereabouts a large pyrate Ship of forty Guns with three Sloops in her company came upon the coast of North Carolina ware they endeavour'd To goe in to a harbour, call'd Topsail Inlett, the Ship Stuck upon the bar att the entrance of the harbour and is lost; as is one of the sloops….”
So while Black Pearl gets caught up in the Devil’s Triangle, the latest post in Blogging Blackbeard recounts a pit stop by La Concorde en route to Africa. Find out more and other adventures of a real pirate ship in observance of the tricentennial of when Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground. The wreck rests off North Carolina’s coast near Atlantic Beach.
The N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources has been investigating the Queen Anne’s Revenge shipwreck since 1997. More information is available at www.qaronline.org.
For additional information, please call (919) 807-7389 or email fay.mitchell@ncdcr.gov. The Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project is administered by the Underwater Archaeology Branch, Office of Archives and History, of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.