Queen Anne's Revenge

The account

She started life as a French slave ship called La Concorde, and in 1717 the most feared pirate of the age took her for his own. Edward Teach, Blackbeard, mounted forty guns on her, renamed her the Queen Anne's Revenge, and made her the flagship of a small pirate navy that terrorized the Caribbean and the American coast, at one point blockading the whole port of Charleston until the city paid him off.

It did not last a year. In June 1718 Blackbeard ran the Queen Anne's Revenge hard aground on a sandbar at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, and she was lost. Five months later he was cornered and killed in a sword and pistol fight off Ocracoke, his head hung from the bowsprit of a navy sloop. The ship sank into the sand and the legend, and stayed there for almost three centuries until divers found her in 1996, the only pirate flagship ever positively identified, her name on a bell, her decks scattered with cannon.

Here is what they did not find: treasure. Three hundred thousand artifacts have come up from the wreck, cannon and anchors and medical tools and a few grains of gold dust, but not the plundered fortune of fifty captured ships.

Which has only deepened the mystery rather than ending it. Many believe Blackbeard grounded the Queen Anne's Revenge on purpose, to break up his oversized crew and slip away with the best of the loot to a place of his own choosing, weeks before he died with the secret. So the most famous pirate ship in the world has been found and emptied, and it answered one question only to open a sharper one: if the gold was not on the ship, then where, in the months before his death, did Blackbeard put it.

Known intelligence

• Built in 1710 as the French slave ship La Concorde, captured by Blackbeard in 1717 and made his flagship.
• Run aground at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, in June 1718, months before Blackbeard was killed in battle.
• The wreck was found in 1996 and confirmed as the Queen Anne's Revenge by the state in 2011.
• Over 300,000 artifacts have been recovered, including cannon, anchors, a 1705 bell, and gold dust, but no great treasure hoard.

Theories of the hunt

• Blackbeard grounded the ship on purpose and moved his plunder ashore before she broke up.
• The richest cargo was carried off by Blackbeard and his chosen men and hidden separately, never found.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The wreck is found and worked off Beaufort Inlet, so the open question is the missing plunder, and the lead is documentary: where Blackbeard offloaded before grounding.
• His movements after the Charleston blockade, the stops at Ocracoke and Bath and the testimony from Stede Bonnet's trial, are the rational corridors for any cached loot.
• The state's QAR Lab conserves over 400,000 artifacts that are ship's gear, not treasure, confirming the gold left the ship before she sank.
• Most buried-Blackbeard sites from the Outer Banks to the Caribbean are folklore; weigh them against his documented final months.

The trail, in order

• 1710: the ship is built as La Concorde.
• 1717: Blackbeard captures her and makes her his flagship.
• June 1718: she runs aground at Beaufort Inlet.
• 1996: the wreck is found; 2011: North Carolina confirms her identity.

Sources and the record

• Queen Anne's Revenge (Wikipedia)
• Blackbeard's Ship Confirmed off North Carolina (National Geographic)