BLACKBEARD - Recovering "Queen Anne's Revenge"

Historical Investigations

The UAU maintains research files on more than five thousand shipwrecks reported lost in North Carolina waters. Of the 112 vessels that sank in the vicinity of Beaufort Inlet, eleven are known to have been lost during the eighteenth century (Table 1). Those shipwrecks include Queen Anne's Revenge (1718), the sloop Adventure (1718), and the Spanish snow El Salvador (1750). Those vessels carried forty, ten, and eight cannons respectively. Current research indicates that the other eighteenth-century vessels were lightly armed or unarmed coastal merchantmen that sank in the latter part of the century.

While North Carolina abounds with Blackbeard lore, the fact that he lost Queen Anne's Revenge and Adventure off its coast is not well known. Extensively researched shipwreck charts such as National Geographic's 1970 edition of The Ghost Fleet of the Outer Banks and Duke University Marine Laboratory's An Oceanographic Atlas of the Carolina Continental Margin (1971) fail to acknowledge their presence. No serious thought was given to locating the pirate vessels until a field school hosted by the UAU and East Carolina University's Maritime History Program (ECU)

Table 1

Eighteenth-Century Shipwreck Candidates

In The Beaufort Inlet Area

Shipwreck Type Lost Location

Queen Anne's Revenge ship 06/1718 Topsail Inlet

Adventure sloop 06/1718 Topsail Inlet

El Salvador snow 08/30/1750 Cape Lookout area

Unknown brig 10/19/1769 South of Old Topsail Inlet

Freedom brigatine 11/16/1769 Near Cape Lookout

Betsy sloop 01/01/1771 Old Topsail Inlet

Unknown brig 05/1778 At Old Topsail Inlet

Hero schooner 02/09/1790 Beaufort Bar

St. J. Planter unknown 1791 Near Cape Lookout

Polly sloop 07/16/1793 Ashore near Beaufort

was scheduled for the summer of 1982. Although background archival investigation of Cape Lookout indicated that the two pirate vessels had been lost at Old Topsail Inlet (present Beaufort Inlet), Queen Anne's Revenge was not found for fourteen years after the field school project. Key to its discovery was the Wimble chart (1738), which shows the approximate location of the channel when Blackbeard attempted to enter the inlet in 1718 (Figure 2). The shipwreck was found along the present day 20-foot contour, which represents the remnant of the early-eighteenth-century ocean bar.