Mystery of Blackbeard's pirate ship solved

A piece of paper from books found on board Blackbeard's ship the Queen Anne's Revenge.
Photo: AAP

Via 9news.com.au

Three hundred years after the infamous pirate Blackbeard ran his ship aground on the North Carolina coast, archaeologists have solved an onboard mystery.

Since discovering the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge in 1996, archaeologists have salvaged tens of thousands of artifacts ranging from guns to coins, wine glasses, navigational instruments and even a part of a toilet.

But one mystery object proved particularly difficult to unravel.

Researchers found 16 tiny shreds of paper with words printed on them stuffed inside the chamber for a breech-loading cannon. Even the biggest piece was less than 2.5cm across — but somehow they've managed to identify the exact book the pieces came from.

Words such as "south" and "fathom" weren't much help, indicating only that the book was probably a maritime or navigational tome. But the word "Hilo", with a capital H and printed in italics, proved to be the key that unlocked the mystery.


Johanna Green, a specialist in the history of printed text at the University of Glasgow, pointed researchers to the Spanish settlement of Ilo — or Hilo — on the coast of Peru.

This led them to discover that the fragile pieces of paper were from a 1712 first edition of a book by Capt. Edward Cooke titled "A Voyage to the South Seas, and Round the World, Perform'd in the years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711".

It is extraordinary enough that the tiny pieces of paper survived being 8.5 metres underwater for 300 years, but to determine which book they were from must really have shivered the archaeologists' timbers.

Although this book was ripped up and used for gun wadding, Blackbeard was literate — he wrote a journal and kept books on board.

The ship the fragments came from has a particularly colourful history.

Blackbeard, or Edward Teach, captured a Dutch-built French slave ship in 1717, outfitted her with 40 guns and renamed her Queen Anne's Revenge, and embarked on his piratical career, robbing merchant ships of their cargo all the way from the coast of Africa across to the Caribbean.

In 1718, shortly after blockading Charleston harbour and robbing the ships inside, Blackbeard ran Queen Anne's Revenge aground. He received a pardon from North Carolina's governor, but couldn't resist returning to the pirate's life and died in battle later that year.

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