The Wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge

· Blackbeard’s flag ship The Queen Anne’s Revenge was found just a mile or so from Beaufort Inlet in 1996.

· Blackbeard captured a French slave ship called the Concorde off the island of St. Vincent on November 28, 1717. The ship became Blackbeard's price for being a fierce and able pirate. French historical documents indicate that the Concorde was a 200 ton vessel with an original armament of 14 cannon. Thatch strengthened the armament of the ship to around 40 cannon, renamed her the Queen Anne's Revenge, and for the next six months used the ship in consort with smaller sloops to harass shipping throughout the Caribbean and up the eastern seaboard of North America.

· According to various letters and depositions, Blackbeard ran both the Queen Anne's Revenge and a smaller consort sloop, Adventure, aground off Topsail Inlet (present day Beaufort Inlet) in early June 1718. According to reports left by some of the pirates who were present, Blackbeard did this in order to break up his company of 300 to 400 men. This effectively allowed the pirates to divide the plunder accumulated to that point among far fewer men; forty or less by some accounts.

· Found in 1996, exactly 278 years to the day since Blackbeard was killed at Ocracoke Inlet, the QAR, Blackbeard’s former flagship, was found in Beaufort Inlet. The project to locate the QAR began in 1982 with a research project of David Moore, a NC native and graduate student at ECU. His work to locate the QAR resulted in the interest of a Floridian treasure hunter named Phil Masters. Masters obtained a permit to search for the QAR in 1996, and on the last scheduled day of scheduled surveying, divers found anomalies on the ocean floor that could be the QAR. Further dives and the discovery of several cannons, a large bronze bell, a gun barrel, a 21 pound deep sea sounding weight, cannon balls and more.