Queen Anne's Revenge

34.693055555556 - 76.669444444444Koordinaten: 34 ° 41 '35 " N, 76 ° 40' 10" W

The Queen Anne's Revenge, the ship of the pirate Blackbeard. It was a three-masted Fleute of 300 tons ( according to Builders Old Measurement Rule ), a length of about 30 meters and was armed with 40 guns as a pirate ship.

History

The ship belonged first to the French businessman Rene Montaudoin and was called La Concorde. He belonged to a heavily involved in the French slave trade family. Home port of the ship was Nantes, then a center of the slave trade. Usually ships were loaded in Nantes with goods acquired on the African coast slaves and transported them to the New World. The ships were loaded with local products and drove back to Europe. Only the crossing of the Atlantic took it two months. 1713, 1715 and 1717, and had Montaudin the La Concorde sent to such slave trading voyages. On March 24, 1717 the ship under Captain Pierre Dosset had set out on his last voyage under the French flag in Nantes. A 75 man strong crew was on board, the armament consisted of 16 guns. On July 8, the La Concorde Ouidah reached and took 516 slaves on here. In addition, the captain and other officers took 20 pounds of gold dust for their own use on board. In the eight-week crossing 16 sailors were lost and 61 Africans died.

Blackbeard initially served aboard a Jamaican ship under the command of the pirate Benjamin Hornigold. In 1717 he succeeded to hijack La Concorde 100 nautical miles from Martinique. Hornigold decreed this two sloops with eight or twelve guns and a total of 150 pirates. After the hijacking of La Concorde Blackbeard was appointed captain. Blackbeard steered as the newly appointed captain on the island of Bequia, where he let the French sailors and the slaves overboard. Only four Frenchmen, who had joined the pirates remained on the ship. The La Concorde was renamed Queen Anne's Revenge, and armed with 40 cannons. The ship was part of Blackbeard's pirate fleet, with which he struck the Caribbean and the North American coastal waters. In May 1718 pirates blocked the port of Charleston, and extorted a considerable ransom. After the blockade, the ship was at Beaufort Inlet in North Carolina on a sandbank and sank.

Wreck

1996 was the treasure hunter Phil Masters locate the wreck in the bay of Beaufort. Masters has based its search to records of the sailors Blackbeards. From the large number of guns found there was already before the final determination of the wreck that it must have been around a pirate ship. The wreck is still under investigation by underwater archaeologists and is a destination for diving trips. End of May 2011 was an anchor of the ship lifted and to be part of an exhibition to be presented at the conserved objects of the ship.

It is one of only five ships, which could be clearly identified as a pirate wrecks: On July 19, 1998 they discovered the body of the Whydah by Sam Bellamy. The ship Speaker of the pirate John Bowen was discovered by the historian Patrick Lizé 1980 off the coast of Mauritius and the ship William Kidd, the Adventure Galley, 2000 off Madagascar. The last matched, proven pirate wreck is the 1721 lower Fiery Dragon by William Condon, which was also discovered by Barry Clifford in 2000 in the harbor right outside Madagascar Ile Sainte -Marie.

Film

• David Johnson: Blackbeard's sunken pirate ship. Documentation of the excavations at the said wreck, United Kingdom, 2009, 47 min
• Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides, the fourth part of the Pirates of the Caribbean film series.