Raising Blackbeard's "Queen Anne's Revenge"

Following the discovery of the wreck site, the search intensified for historical documents relating to the capture of Concorde and Blackbeard's activities after taking command and renaming the ship Queen Anne's Revenge. Little is known of the French slaver Concorde's early career apart from its three voyages to the West African coast and final capture by pirates in the Caribbean in November 1717. Concorde operated out of Nantes, France, and was owned by Réne Montaudoin, a member of one of the most prolific slave-trading families in French history. The ship's first recorded voyage appears to have begun with its embarkation from Nantes on April 13, 1713, under Capt. Isaac Thomas, commanding a crew of sixty-two men. The vessel obtained a cargo of slaves near Juda (present-day Ouidah) on the West African coast. It arrived back in Nantes on July 31, 1714, after delivering 363 enslaved Africans to the Caribbean Island of Martinique.

Concorde's second slaving voyage began on February 27, 1715, under the command of Capt. Mathieu Denis, with a crew of around sixty men. Africans were purchased at Gabingue near present-day Loango, and the ship arrived in February 1716 at Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti), where it delivered around three hundred slaves. After a brief stop at Bermuda, Concorde returned to Nantes on September 23, 1716.

Figure 2. Wimble Chart, ca. 1738 helped to identify the location of the wreck.

The third and final voyage of Concorde as a French slaver began on March 24, 1717, under the command of Pierre Dosset, with a crew of seventy-five men. The ship obtained more than five hundred Africans at Juda between July and October and sailed toward Martinique. Concorde was captured by pirates, presumably led by Blackbeard, near the island of St. Vincent on November 28, 1717, and taken to the small island of Bicoya (present-day Bequia). The pirates left the French crew a much smaller sloop called Mauvaise Rencontre and continued their marauding activities in the eastern Caribbean before moving west to present-day Belize and Honduras.

Blackbeard renamed Concorde the Queen Anne's Revenge and increased the ship's original armament of fourteen to sixteen cannons to as many as forty (Figure 3). After capturing a number of prizes in the western Caribbean including a small turtle boat off the Caymans and an unidentified sloop off the northern coast of Cuba, Blackbeard continued northward into the Bahamas and eventually toward Charleston, South Carolina. The blockade of the colonial port of Charleston in May 1718 was unquestionably the height of Blackbeard's piratical career. With his flagship Queen Anne's Revenge, three smaller sloops, and as many as three to four hundred men under his command, the pirate captain was at his greatest strength. After taking around a dozen ships entering or leaving the harbor and receiving a ransom of medical supplies from the city of Charleston, the pirate company continued sailing northward.