ECU's Program in Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology plays a crucial role in the recovery, off the North Carolina coast, of an 18th century shipwreck thought to be the pirate Blackbeard's flagship

It's an easy boat ride from Beaufort, N.C.'s scenic harbor to a spot-just a couple of miles offshore-that is, with little doubt, the resting place of the Queen Anne's Revenge, one of the most famous pirate ships of all time.

The shipwreck, discovered only a year ago, has captured world-wide attention; and, it's no wonder. The Queen Anne's Revenge was the flagship of Edward Teach - the notorious and legendary Blackbeard.

Early last fall, nautical archaeologists from East Carolina University's Maritime History and Nautical Division of Archives and History spent a month producing maps and uncovering artifacts at the site. Two cannons were raised and a dozen more guns were counted.

The work was done last fall by divers and maritime historians to help assess the wreck and to confirm the identity of the vessel. State archaeologists have reported they are about 95 percent certain that the shipwreck was indeed the flagship in Blackbeard's fleet.

The number of cannons at the site serves as a clue to the shipwreck's identity. Blackbeard's vessel, according to historical reports, carried 40 of these weapons. Divers have spotted 14 cannons, so far, in the top of the pile of materials from the ship and have raised two of them.

Anchors are also clues. The three anchors found at the site are of the size used to hold a 100-foot vessel like the Queen Anne's Revenge.

A dinner plate and platter were also retrieved. Dr. Lawrence Babits, an ECU professor and expert in identifying artifacts from shipwrecks, said the plates are pewter with English markings. Glass, stoneware and pieces of storage containers have also been found which will be dated by comparing them with artifacts from the wreck of the Whydah, a pirate vessel that sank off New England in 1717.

Another find was a clump of lead shot that had been held in a small bag. The archaeologists said it was a common practice for pirates to fire bags of lead shot, and sometimes nails and other objects, from their cannons. Such weapons, said Babits, become effective anti-personnel devices.

"These artifacts help tell a story," said Dr. Timothy Runyan, director of ECU's Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology program.

"It's a bit like detective work. Careful analysis is something that we must do to prove definitively that it is the Queen Anne's Revenge, " he said.

The Queen Anne's Revenge was built in England in 1710 and named the Concorde. At the time of its capture by Capt. Benjamin Hornigold, Blackbeard and his pirate crew, in the winter of 1717, it was a French slave ship. Hornigold rewarded Blackbeard by giving him the Concorde. Blackbeard renamed it Queen Anne's Revenge.

The vessel ran aground off Beaufort in 1718. On the same day Blackbeard lost his flagship, another one of his vessels, the Adventure, also ran aground. The Adventure was lost too and has not been found, although a search for the ship has begun.

The shipwreck believed to be the Queen Anne's Revenge was discovered in the fall of 1996 by Intersal Inc., a Florida salvage company. The company received a state permit to search for shipwrecks in North Carolina waters and focused its search on the two famous pirate ships and on a Spanish vessel that sank during a storm in 1715. The Spanish ship, the El Salvador, carried a cargo of gold and silver. If treasure was aboard the pirate vessel it was most likely removed after the ship ran aground.

The excavation of the shipwreck thought to be the Queen Anne's Revenge, according to Runyan, could take four to five years. He said a large portion of the time will go into the conservation of recovered artifacts.

For example, cast-iron cannons that protrude from the pile on the sandy bottom offer major challenges. Two of these guns were removed in October. Each one is about eight feet long and weighs more than a ton. As soon as they were retrieved, they were submerged in tanks in Beaufort. They will undergo electrolysis for several years to remove rust and salt from the iron.

Dr. Bradley Rodgers, an archaeologist and director of ECU's Underwater Archaeology Laboratory, said the treatment for wooden artifacts includes soaking the pieces in chemicals that help the wood to hold its shape and strengh. Simply allowing the wood to dry out would cause it to shrink and collapse.

The same kind of deterioration would occur in ceramic artifacts. These materials must also be cleaned and treated.

UP FROM THE BRINY DEEP Among artifacts found so far: A Spanish cast-bronze bell inscribed with the year 1709 (at left). A brass barrel from a blunderbuss, a popular 18th-century muzzle-loaded weapon.] A lead apron used to cover a cannon's touch hole. Cannon balls. Three anchors. Large iron hoops that litter the site. A lead sounding weight used to measure water depth. Fourteen cannons, two of which have been raised from teh water. Both weighed about 2,500 pounds. Fragments of glass, from gin bottles and a rum bottle, shards from large lead glazed storage containers adn salt-glazed stoneware.

In other recovery activities involving ECU, Dr. Gordan Watts, a nautical archaeologist, conducted a magnetometer and sonar survey of the site. Archaeologist Frank Cantelas, aided by graduate student Ryan Harris of Canada, used the university's Sonic High Accuracy Ranging and Positioning System (SHARPS) to precisely map and locate the shipwreck. The data will be used in computers to create images of the site.

Nathan Henry, an ECU graduate student from Holly Ridge, N.C., has been hired to work at the site by the Archives and History's Underwater Archaeology Unit. He will work on the project as a site conservator.

About 25 feet of water covers the shipwreck. Wave action and tidal currents limit the underwater visibility to only a foot or two. One of the puzzles for the archaeologists, according to Runyan, is the way the materials from the ship settled into the ocean bottom. He said the ECU team observed that the shipwreck looked as if it was "dumped from a gigantic wheelbarrow in one huge mass."

Could the ship have been ripped open when it struck the sandy floor? Or perhaps waves stood the ship on end and cause the objects to be dropped into a single mound.

"It will be difficult to figure out what happened," Runyan said.

The Division of Archives and History asked the ECU program to assist in the project this fall. A number of other agencies and universities are contributing through the loan of boats, equipment and research expertise.

There are still issues to be settled before serious excavation begins at the shipwreck site. One factor that could determine ECU's future involvement, according to Runyan, will be the written agreement that is made between the salvage company and the state.

"We are concerned over rights to publish academic research that we might compile from our work," he said. "And we believe there should be a firm agreement about the ownership of recovered artifacts and about the participation by the salvage company in the recovery, preservation and display of historical artifacts."

He said he is also concerned about eh public's understanding of underwater archaeology. University and other professional archaeologists take great care to treat shipwrecks as historical sites while he says treasure hunters or salvers frequently destroy a shipwreck in their haste to find objects of value.

"The price of this is the loss of history and our understanding of events surrounding the shipwreck," Runyan said.

Phil Masters, Intersal's president, said that his company has turned over the rights to the artifacts to the state which already claims ownership because the historical wreck sank within three miles of the North Carolina coast. He said he hopes to recoup the $300,000 spent on the project, by selling movie and book rights to the discovery.

In the meantime, the excitement of the find has produced a rush of interest in Blackbeard, his ships and his fellow pirates. Newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States and abroad have jumped on the story in recent months.

Warner Bros. Inc., has announced plans for a movie on Blackbeard that could star Sean Connery as Edward Teach and Kevin Costner in the role of Lt. Robert Maynard, the British naval officer who caught and killed the notorious pirate at Ocracoke.

Debate has broken out among at least five towns or museums in North Carolina and Virginia over who gets a share of the artifacts. About 200 artifacts have already been recovered but about half of these are ballast stones carried below deck to keep the ship balanced when sailing with a light cargo.

In other developments, the N.C. Legislature appropriated $200,000 to the Division of Archives and History to fund work at the shipwreck site. An Intersal, the company that found the wreck, has announced that it is going back to sea to look for Blackbeard's other ship, the Adventure. Their search for the second pirate ship began in November.

"It's exciting to explore a shipwreck like the Queen Anne's Revenge in our own backyard," said Runyan.

"It's a very high-profile project; and, like our colleagues in the state department of Archives and History, we want this to be a model project that is done correctly. But, our primary role will be to bring our academic skills to bear on the work at the shipwreck site," he said.

ECU's program in Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology is one of the only two graduate programs in nautical archaeology in the country. The other program is in Texas A&M University.

Established in 1981, the program has conducted studies of shipwrecks throughout the continental United States and Hawaii and in Europe, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. In 1995, the National Park Service awarded special recognition to the program for its work in the preservation of historic shipwrecks.

David Moore believes he has a long-standing date with Blackbeard.

Since his days as a graduate student at East Carolina University in the 1980's, it has been Moore's plan to look for the Queen Anne's Revenge, and another of Blackbeard's ships, the Adventure, off the coast of Beaufort.

"It's been a long time coming," said Moore, who was back on the East Carolina campus recently. "The seed was really planted here," he said, as he looked around the stacks in Joyner Library.

Moore was one of the first students in ECU's Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology graduate program. In 1982, a year after the program was established, he wrote a research paper, "Submerged Cultural Resources Associated with Blackbeard the Pirate." That paper has proven to be prophetic.

Moore, who received his master's degree in 1989, is now a nautical archaeologist with Maritime Museum in Beaufort, N.C., and has been working on the efforts to locate and preserve the ship now thought to be the Queen Anne's Revenge.

"In 1982, my research was limited in scope, and documents thtat were not available then have since been uncovered, but the most significant document I found regarding the wreckage of the Queen Anne's Revenge I found right here in this library," he said while visiting ECU's new North Carolina Collection area.

Moore's find was a microfilm copy of a 1719 published account of the trial of pirate Stede Bonnet taken from a London newspaper.

Bonnet was a known associate of Blackbeard's who was captured and tried. It was Davie Herriot, who had been the original captain of the Adventure when captured by Blackbeard, who provided the best description in his published testimony of the events at Beaufort Inlet leading up to the sinking of Blackbeard's ships:

"…after they had all got safe into Topsail-Inlet, except Thatch, the said Thatch's ship Queen Anne's Revenge run a-ground off of the Bar of Topsail-Inlet, and the said Thatch sent his Quarter-Master to command this Deponent's Sloop to come to his Assistance; but she run a -ground likewise about Gun-shot from the said Thatch, before his said Sloop could come to their Assistance, and both the said Thatch's Ship and this Deponent's Ship were wreck'd..."

Topsail Inlet was later called Old Topsail, and is now Beaufort Inlet. Blackbeard's real name is usually given as Edward Teach, but other spellings are Thatch and Thache.

After losing two of his ships and marooning part of his crew at the Beaufort Inlet, it is thought that Blackbeard traveled north to Ocracoke where he set up his base of operations for the next few months and was eventually killed in November 1718 by an expedition sent down by the Governor of Virginia.

In his research paper, Moore also quoted Ellis Brand, the captain of the guardship Lyme stationed in Virginia:

"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 barr att the entrance of the harbour and is lost; as is one of the sloops…"

Moore surmised the phrase "Stuck upon the bar at the entrance of the harbour and is lost," suggested a general location at Beaurfort Inlet.

He consulted the Edward Moseley navigation chart published in 1733, which provides one of the earliest detailed views of the inlet. Moore said the chart suggested the "entrance of the harbour" was on the westward side of the inlet. However, Moore found that the James Wimble chart of 1738 had the most accurate contemporary configuration of the inlet, a channel over the sand bar, and subsequent entrance into the harbor.

Also, Moore found the Wimble chart revealed "a visual range in the form of a line or bearing drawn from a white house near Beaufort out through the inlet with a note instructing mariners that 'This line leads over the Bar.'" The chart also included written sailing directions that Moore said removed any potential doubt as to the location of the appropriate channel.

And, Moore concluded, "…with the early 18th century channel at least arguably identified, it has only made sense to conduct any survey for the remains of Blackbeard's ships in the vicinity of the contemporary entrance to the harbor."

The shipwreck currently under investigation is located on the Beaufort Bar and within three-quarters of a mile of the old channel entrance. And Moore has come calling.