Shiver me timbers! New signs pirates liked booty – and books
RALEIGH, N.C. — Dead men tell no tales, but there’s new evidence that somebody aboard the pirate Blackbeard’s flagship harboured books among the booty.
In an unusual find, researchers have discovered shreds of paper bearing legible printing that somehow survived three centuries underwater on the sunken vessel. And after more than a year of research that ranged as far as Scotland, they managed to identify them as fragments of a book about nautical voyages published in the early 1700s.
Conservators for Blackbeard’s ship the Queen Anne’s Revenge found the 16 fragments of paper wedged inside the chamber for a breech-loading cannon, with the largest piece being the size of a quarter.
The Queen Anne’s Revenge had been a French slave ship when Blackbeard captured it in 1717 and renamed it. The vessel ran aground in Beaufort, in what was then the colony of North Carolina, in June 1718. Volunteers with the Royal Navy killed Blackbeard in Ocracoke Inlet that same year.