Queen Anne's Revenge
Blackbeard's flagship
1710 – 1718
Queen Anne's Revenge began her life in Bristol around 1710 as the merchantman Concord. The French acquired her, renamed her La Concorde de Nantes, and put her into the transatlantic slave trade. In November 1717, off the island of Saint Vincent in the Lesser Antilles, Edward Teach captured her after a brief fight. The French crew, weakened by scurvy and dysentery, offered little resistance.
The refit
Teach pierced her sides for additional gun ports and mounted, by various accounts, between twenty-six and forty guns — enough to make her among the heaviest-armed vessels in the Atlantic outside of European fleets. He renamed her Queen Anne's Revenge, almost certainly a reference to the Jacobite cause, and made her his flagship.
A year at large
For roughly seven months, Queen Anne's Revenge anchored Teach's small fleet across the West Indies and along the American coast. In May 1718 she lay off Charleston Bar while Teach extorted a chest of medicine from the city. She was the most powerful pirate vessel afloat — and also a logistical burden: she drew too much water for shallow inlets, ate provisions at a heavy rate, and could not be easily careened.
Beaufort Inlet
In June 1718, attempting to enter what is now Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, the Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground on a sandbar and could not be refloated. A second vessel, the Adventure, was lost trying to assist. Teach transferred himself, a small group of trusted men, and the bulk of the loot to a third sloop. The rest of his crew — some three hundred men — were marooned on a sandy islet, then later collected and granted royal pardon.
The grounding may have been an accident. It may also have been deliberate: by leaving the bulk of his crew behind, Teach drastically reduced the number of mouths to feed and shares to pay from his cache.
The wreck
In 1996, the marine archaeology firm Intersal Inc. located a heavily armed early-eighteenth-century shipwreck off Beaufort Inlet in approximately twenty-five feet of water. The site has been identified — with strong but not absolute certainty — as the wreck of Queen Anne's Revenge. Recovery operations have brought up cannons, anchors, surgical instruments, glass, and gold dust. Many of the artifacts are now on display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum.
Related: Blackbeard · Battle of Ocracoke Inlet