Researchers find signs of pirate literacy
The pages survived being underwater for 300 years
RALEIGH, N.C. — Dead men tell no tales, but there’s new evidence that somebody aboard the pirate Blackbeard’s flagship harbored books among the booty.
In an unusual find, researchers have discovered shreds of paper bearing legible printing that somehow survived three centuries underwater on the sunken vessel. And after more than a year of research that ranged as far as Scotland, they managed to identify them as fragments of a book about nautical voyages published in the early 1700s.
Conservators for Blackbeard’s ship the Queen Anne’s Revenge found the 16 fragments of paper wedged inside the chamber for a breech-loading cannon, with the largest piece being the size of a quarter.
The Queen Anne’s Revenge had been a French slave ship when Blackbeard captured it in 1717 and renamed it. The vessel ran aground in Beaufort, in what was then the colony of North Carolina, in June 1718. Volunteers with the Royal Navy killed Blackbeard in Ocracoke Inlet that same year.
Tens of thousands of artifacts have been recovered since Florida-based research firm Intersal Inc. located the shipwreck off the North Carolina coast in 1996 but few, if any, are as surprising as pieces of paper. To find paper in a 300-year-old shipwreck in warm waters is “almost unheard of,” said Erik Farrell, a conservator at the QAR Conservation Lab in Greenville.
Eventually, the conservators determined that the words “south” and “fathom” were in the text, suggesting a maritime or navigational book. But one word, Hilo, stood out because it was both capitalized and in italics, said Kimberly Kenyon, also a conservator at the lab.
They turned to Johanna Green, a specialist in the history of printed text at the University of Glasgow, who pointed them to the Spanish settlement of Ilo — or Hilo — on the coast of Peru. The fragments eventually were determined to be from a 1712 first edition of a book by Capt. Edward Cooke titled “A Voyage to the South Seas, and Round the World, Peform’d in the years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711.”
“The fact that they’re literate doesn’t mean they’re not terrible, marauding people,” Farrell said. “It just adds some nuance.”