Anchor from Blackbeard ship recovered

[alp227]

Source: CNN

(CNN) -- Dead men tell no tales, but the sea does, as shown Friday when an anchor was recovered from the wreckage of pirate Blackbeard's flagship.

An expedition off the North Carolina coast hoisted the nearly 3,000-pound anchor, one of three belonging to the Queen Anne's Revenge.

Crews were working in just 20 feet of water, according to the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

The Queen Anne's Revenge is believed to have run aground in the shallow waters off Beaufort in 1718. The ship was discovered in 1996, with piecemeal recovery of artifacts intensifying only a few years ago.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/27/north.carolina.blackbeard/index.html

[xmas74]

1. I'll definitely show this to my kid in the morning! nt

[Luciferous]

2. That is so cool! My husband is a shipwreck fanatic, so I'll have to show

him this.

[Raschel]

3. A pirate walks in a bar.

Bartender:"Captain, how did you get that peg leg?"
Pirate: "A mighty shark bit it off"

Bartender: "And Captain, how did you come to have a hook for a hand?"
Pirate: "Some scurvy dog hacked it off but I sent him to Davy Jone's locker with my sword"

Bartender: "And that eye patch, Captain. How did you lose your eye?"
Pirate: "A seagull pooped in my eye."

Bartender: "I didn't know seagull poop made you blind"
Pirate: "It doesn't , it was my first day with the hook."Replies (1) ..

[dbt]

4. What do you call an anchor recovered from a sunken pirate ship?

An arrrrrrrrrrrrrrtifact!

:evilgrin:

[xchrom]

5. Recommend

[DavidDvorkin]

6. It ran aground?

That's anticlimactic. It should have been sunk after being shot to pieces in a days-long running battle with a whole bunch of pursuing Royal Navy warships, all of which also sustained heavy damage.

What kind of pirate was he?

[DavidDvorkin]

7. Arrrr!

[happyslug]

17. Duplicate

No Text (n/t)

[happyslug]

18. It needed to be re-fitted and re-nailed, something Blackbeard did not have the means to get done

In the days of wooden ships, every ship needed to be re-fitted about once every two years, all the nails holding together would have rusted out by then, and thus needed to be "beached" and all the nails replaced with new nails(an exception was the ships of the Persian Gulf, which used no nails, held together by ropes instead).

The Queen Anne's Revenge was to big to be beached AND then re-floated using the tides and the crew (which is how all wooden ships were re-fitted from late Roman times till the late Middle ages, when ships started to get bigger). You can do that with smaller ships but not ships the size as large as the Santa Maria (the Mayflower and Queen Ann's Revenge were both much larger then the Santa Maria, Ships started to get larger around 1200, getting to big for just the crew to re-nail by 1500, finally after about 1750 you had to put them in "dry-dock" to re-nail them).

Now, the above time reference is for the largest ships of the time period. Most ships stayed much smaller, just look at the Nina and the Pinata compared to the Santa Marie, or even the Maria Celeste of the mid-1800s. Such small ships were preferred by Pirates for the simple reason it was repairable by the crew without having to get help from other people to re-fit the Ship?

Thus by the time of the wreck of the Queen Anne's revenge, it needed to be re-fitted, new nails, rotten wood replaced etc. The problem was how such a large Ship? How was Blackbeard to get this done? Blackbeard could not just abandon it, for it was a "prize" and thus the property of the crew. Blackbeard's solution was simple, wrack it, recover what you could and blame it on bad luck. This is is the best explanation to why it was wrecked the Queen Anne's revenge.

The Queen Anne's revenge had a displacement of about 200 tons.

http://www.qaronline.org/History/search.htm

The other two ship used by blackbeard were sloops of only:

More on "Careening" when a ship is beached for repairs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careening

More on Sloops, about the largest ship you car beached and re-float after repairs are finished:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloop

Please note Sloop-of War are much Larger then Commercial Sloops(Pirates used Commercial Sloops NOT Sloops-of-War). The USS RANGER was a US Sloop-of war had a displacement of 308 tons in 1777:

http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/r/ranger.htm

The Marie Celeste of 1861 was a "Brigantine" A Slightly larger Vessel, it only had a displacement of 198 tons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste

[noel711]

8. That is so cool...

Last year the History channel ran a series called:
"Real Pirates of the Caribeean," the real history
of piracy in the early days of the colonies.

It was fascinating, included re-enactments of the
pirate battles, and how their ships were run as
real democracies: the crew got to vote on who'd be
their captain.

Blackbeard was a character, the real rockstar
on the high seas. He was 'out-manned' by a British
captain (musta been a republican) who out-foxed
him.

If you can catch the re-runs, its worth it.
Pour yourselves a run cocktain, and enjoy real
democracy in action.

[RebelOne]

9. Blackbeard was an ancestor of mine according to my father.n/t

[Still Blue in PDX]

14. and of mine, as well, according to me mum's family. nt

[NCarolinawoman]

15. Was he an Arnold Schwartzneger type?

Or did he have a wife/wives?

Two DU members having him as an ancestor just made me wonder.
:wow:

[RebelOne]

10. Dupe post

[Brother Buzz]

11. Cool beans!

I just read about the Queen Anne's Revenge in this months Smithsonian up at ye olde library. Two of the anchors were used in a failed attempt to kedge the ship off the sandbar. A second ship, a smaller sloop assisting with the anchors was grounded and also lost.

The wrecks were mostly looted by the locals and marooned pirates after the boys high graded the prize and fled in their two remaining sloops. They ran, but they didn't get far.

[HughBeaumont]

12. He used to light fuses in his beard.

He didn't like to use force, but rather, intimidation by presence.

When he died, he was slashed/stabbed 20 times and shot at least 5 more.

The ultimate alpha-male badass of the open sea.

[razorman]

13. Gee, I was wondering where I left that thing.

[daleo]

16. I woonder what Flying Spaghetti Monster thinks of this. n/t