Queen Anne's Revenge
Queen Anne´s Revenge , contemporary illustration
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Coordinates: 34 ° 41 ′ 35 " N , 76 ° 40 ′ 10" W.
The ship, known as Queen Anne's Revenge as the flagship of the English pirate Blackbeard , was probably built around 1709 in France or the Netherlands for the Atlantic triangular trade . She went on a privateer voyage in 1710 and was converted into a slave ship in 1712. She sailed under the name La Concorde under the French flag until it was seized by the pirate fleet under Captain Benjamin Hornigold and Captain Blackbeard in 1717 . Under Blackbeard's command, she terrorized the Caribbean and the American east coast in 1718. In 1718 the ship was lost when it ran aground in Beaufort Inlet .
history
Buccaneer's ride 1710–1712
The history of Queen Anne's Revenge is not documented until 1713, but according to unsecured sources, the La Concorde set sail from Nantes as a privateer in July 1710. In September of the same year she brought up a Dutch slave ship off the coast of West Africa and sailed to Cape Lahou in what is now the Ivory Coast . In February 1711 she left for Martinique and drove from there via Tobago to Santo Domingo . There she hijacked an English merchant ship off the south coast. After stops in Havana and Bermuda , she returned to Nantes in France in November 1712 . At that time Nantes was one of the French centers of the slave trade, alongside Bordeaux , La Rochelle and Le Havre, and controlled around 45 percent of the French slave trade.
In Nantes she was acquired by the French merchant René Montaudoin at the end of 1712 and converted into a slave ship. As part of the extremely lucrative Atlantic triangular trade, the ships in their European home ports were loaded with goods that were profitably exchanged for slaves on the African coast. Then they transported them to the New World, where they were sold as plantation workers . The ships were finally loaded with local products such as sugar and rum and returned to Europe with them. Just crossing the Atlantic took about two months.
First slave ride 1713–1714
In 1713, at the same time as the end of the Queen Anne's War , which was fought between England and France in North America, the La Concorde set out on her first voyage as a slave ship. In Ouidah ( Benin ) she took an unknown number of slaves on board, of which the 465 survivors in Martinique were sold. In July 1714 she returned to Nantes without incident.
Second slave ride 1715-1716
In the spring of 1715, the La Concorde set out on her second slave voyage to Loango Buali near the mouth of the Congo in West Africa. Since she could not acquire enough slaves there, the cargo was replenished in Gambingue ( Gabon ) and only then was the journey to Leogane ( Haiti ) continued. From Haiti, the ship took the route via the Bahamas and returned to Nantes in the summer of 1716. In the Bahamas, however, five of the crew had deserted.
Third, unfinished slave journey in 1717
On March 24, 1717, the ship under Captain Pierre Dosset set out on its last voyage under the French flag in Nantes. There was a 75-man crew on board. The armament consisted of only 16 cannons, as many gun ports were no longer occupied with cannons in order to increase the loading capacity . The last voyage of La Concorde is very well documented, as the records of two of the French officers have been preserved. According to the records of Captain Pierre Dosset and Lieutenant Francois Ernaut , the La Concorde reached Ouidah (Benin) on July 8 and took in 516 slaves. In addition, the captain and other officers took 20 pounds of gold dust on board for their own use. The planned crossing to Martinique turned into a debacle. During the eight-week crossing, 16 seamen were lost to scurvy and dysentery and 61 slaves died. An unknown number of slaves and 36 seamen were seriously ill and unable to work, the crew had in fact shrunk to 23 men.
Only 100 nautical miles from Martinique, the ship met the pirate fleet under Captain Benjamin Hornigold and Captain Blackbeard . The pirates had two sloops with eight and twelve cannons and a total of 150 pirates. Given the hopeless situation, Captain Pierre Dosset surrendered without a fight and without any further resistance after the pirates had fired two broadsides at the La Concorde .
The handover and conversion to a pirate ship
After the capture, Blackbeard was appointed captain of the La Concorde by Benjamin Hornigold . Blackbeard headed for the island of Bequia as a newly appointed captain , where he let the French sailors and slaves disembark. While the pirates searched the ship, Blackbeard was informed by the French cabin boy Louis Arot that the officers had a large amount of gold on board, which was then handed over to the pirates. Louis Arot and three other members of the crew then ran over to the pirates. Ten other members of the crew were forced by Blackbeard to serve under his command. Among them were a navigator, two carpenters and the La Concorde cook .
On Bequia, Blackbeard had the ship converted into a kind of frigate and upgraded to a total of 40 cannons. Under the name Queen Anne's Revenge, the ship became the flagship of Blackbeard's pirate fleet with which he plagued the Caribbean and North American coastal waters.
The pirate trips 1717–1718
At the end of November 1717, the new Blackbeard fleet near St. Vincent attacked the well-armed merchant ship Great Allen and plundered, pillaged and sank the ship. The incident was reported in the Boston News Letter and the Queen Anne's Revenge was described as a French 32-gun ship, according to the linguistic usage at the time, a full ship , a 32-gun class frigate . The other ships in the pirate fleet were classified in the report as a brigantine with 10 cannons and a sloop with 12 cannons.
On December 5, 1717, the fleet captured the sloop Margeret near Anguilla . The captain of the ship described the Queen Anne's Revenge as a large slave ship of Dutch design with 36 cannons.
The whereabouts of the pirate fleet from mid-December 1717 to March 1718 is unclear. The pirate fleet was blamed for several incidents off St. Christopher Island and on the north coast of what is now the Dominican Republic , but there is no real evidence for this assignment. First documented is the deployment of the Adventure , a sloop from Jamaica in March 1718 off Turneffe Island . The ship's captain, David Harriot, and his crew voluntarily defected to the pirates on this occasion. Then the fleet set out for Honduras , where they added four more sloops and an unspecified ship to the pirate fleet.
On April 9, Blackbeard looted and sank the Protestant Caesar , an armed merchant ship from Boston . The fleet with the Queen Anne's Revenge then sailed to Grand Cayman and from there to Havana. He may have brought up several small ships on this voyage. From there the fleet headed for the west coast of Florida before heading north towards South Carolina .
The Charleston blockade
In May 1718 the pirate fleet appeared in front of Charleston and blocked the harbor. All ships that wanted to reach or leave the port were seized by the pirate fleet. The first boat to fall victim to the pirates was the Charleston pilot boat. In the six days that followed, the pirates captured at least nine ships trying to break through the blockade. One of these ships was the Crowley , on which several prominent Charleston citizens were. Blackbeard took them hostage and demanded medicine and medical equipment as a ransom. Otherwise he wanted to behead the hostages and sink all angry ships in the port entrance.
After handing over the required utensils, Blackbeard released the hostages and the looted ships and ended the blockade of Charleston after a total of nine days.
The loss of Queen Anne's Revenge
After the blockade of Charleston, the fleet sailed about 200 km north on the Atlantic coast and tried to reach the port of Beaufort to overtake their ships. During the passage of the shallows in the Beaufort Channel, the Queen Anne's Revenge and the Adventure ran aground at Beaufort Inlet and were lost. Blackbeard left the ship with much of the valuable booty and took off with the sloop Revenge .
The name Queen Anne's Revenge
Bequia baptized Blackbeard the La Concorde in Queen Anne's Revenge to. To understand this name, you have to know that Edward Thatch alias Blackbeard set sail from Jamaica on behalf of the English during the Wars of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The captains of these ships had official letters of secrecy which authorized them to hijack enemy ships and to steal booty in the name of the British Crown. The parallel theater of this war between England and France, which took place in America, was also named Queen Anne's War (1702–1713) after the British Queen Anne . In this war Edward Thatch fought on the side of the English as a privateer against French and Spanish ships. At the end of the war, however, these irregular naval forces were not taken over into the English Navy, but left to their own devices and then almost without exception turned to piracy.
Revenge (Engl. Revenge ) to the English crown for this betrayal of the privateers in their service was therefore a widespread attitude of the English-born Pirates of the Caribbean. At the same time, the ship's name Revenge was a subtle historical quote that goes back to the ship of the same name, launched in 1577 by the later ennobled privateer Sir Francis Drake . The name Revenge thus underlined in two ways the injustice that had befallen the privateers at the end of the wars of Spanish succession.
Edward Thatch has already taken over a pirate ship from the pirate Stede Bonnet , which was named "Revenge". Queen Anne's Revenge was thus the second ship in the pirate fleet that had the "revenge" in its name, but in this case with clear reference to the pirate war from 1702 to 1714, during which the now outlawed pirates were still honored by the English crown had pursued legitimate craft.
The type of ship
The exact type of ship of the Queen Anne's Revenge , as well as the exact location of the keel-laying, is not documented. However, based on the findings on the wreck and the known descriptions of the ship from contemporary documents, a relatively clear picture of the ship and the type of ship emerges. The data at the site show that the ship had a tonnage of approx. 300-350 tons. The ship had a continuous cannon deck and relatively large holds. The statements of the captains of the Great Allen and the Margeret , who described the ship as a Dutch merchant ship and frigate-like with full-ship rigging, provide further clues . This information suggests that the Queen Anne's Revenge is a Dutch or French pinass ship . This type of ship was also the only one suitable for the described conversion of the merchant ship into a warship with 40 cannons.
Pinass ships were the typical large general cargo drivers in the Atlantic triangular trade of the time and, due to their high maneuverability and strong armament, were the model of the military frigates. Buccaneers and pirates liked to use these ships because they combined a high combat power with a high loading capacity. The somewhat larger Whydah of the pirate Samuel Bellamy was like the Queen Anne's Revenge also a slave ship and was also classified as a pinass ship.
The wreck
In 1996 the treasure hunter Phil Masters was able to find the wreck in the Bay of Beaufort . Masters relied on notes from one of Blackbeard's sailors in his search. The large number of cannons found showed that the wreck must have been a pirate ship even before the final destination of the wreck. The wreck is still being studied by underwater archaeologists and is the destination of diving trips. At the end of May 2011, an anchor of the ship was lifted and is to be part of an exhibition at which preserved items from the ship are presented.
It is one of only five ships that could be clearly identified as pirate shipwrecks: On July 19, 1998, the hull of Samuel Bellamy's Whydah was discovered . The ship Speaker of the pirate John Bowen was discovered by the historian Patrick Lizé in 1980 off the coast of Mauritius and the ship William Kidds , the Adventure Galley , in 2000 off Madagascar. The last pirate shipwreck found, proven is the 1721 decline Fiery Dragon by William Condon , which also Barry Clifford in 2000 in the harbor of the prior Madagascar situated island of Sainte Marie was discovered.
Film and books
- David Johnson: Blackbeard's sunken pirate ship. Documentation of the excavations on the mentioned wreck, Great Britain, 2009, 47 min.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides , fourth installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series.
- Percy Jackson - Under the spell of the Cyclops, second volume in the Percy Jackson series
- Black Sails , 2nd and 3rd seasons
Web links
- Blackbeard's pirate ship moored off the coast of North Carolina , National Geographic Society , Nov. 9, 2017
- Angelika Franz, Missing Buccaneers: The Secret of the Dead Pirates , Spiegel Online , June 25, 2006
- Site of the Queen Anne's Revenge Project for the research and preservation of the wreck (Engl.)
Footnotes
- ^ Encyclopedia Britannica, keyword: Queen Annes Revenge , accessed October 20, 2009
- ^ Beaufort Historic Association: History of Beaufort, NC. 2002, archived from the original on January 30, 2011 ; Retrieved on February 12, 2011 (English): “Recently, almost 300 years after the incident, the wreckage of what is believed to be Blackbeard's ship the Queen Anne's Revenge was discovered by divers in the present Beaufort inlet between Shackelford Banks and Bogue Banks. Artifacts are being brought to the surface, cleaned, preserved, and displayed at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. “ The Beaufort Inlet is about 1,000 meters wide.
- ^ Anchor from Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge boarded ship , www.astropage.eu, May 28, 2011; Retrieved March 11, 2012
- ↑ Angelika Franz, Verschollene Freibeuter: The Secret of the Dead Pirates , Spiegel Online from June 25, 2006
- ^ Page on this at Arte ( Memento from May 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). Among other things, Johnson shows the archaeological work and the methods of identifying the wreck at Beaufort. Broadcast on May 1st and 2nd, 2010