The Pirate's shipwreck!

Hi, I'm Jonathan Bird and welcome to my world!

Arggg! I be Blackbird the pirate, and welcome to me…barge?

How I ended up a pirate on a barge is an interesting story! It all started back in 1717, when Edward

Teach, better known as Blackbeard the Pirate, was roaming the Atlantic from Africa to the

Caribbean, plundering ships as he went. Although reported by his crew to be a fair and decent

man, Blackbeard had a fierce reputation, partly due to his clever use of lit fuses in his

hat to intimidate his enemies.

Off the island of Saint Vincent, Blackbeard and his crew captured a French merchant vessel

and quickly converted it to a pirate ship with 40 cannons, renaming her the Queen Anne’s

Revenge. She was Blackbeard’s flagship in a growing armada of captured ships.

But in 1718, Blackbeard ran the Queen Anne’s Revenge aground on a sand bar outside Beaufort,

North Carolina. Experts believe the grounding was intentional-the pirate version of corporate

downsizing. He stranded many of his crew and fled in a smaller ship. Latter that year,

Blackbeard was killed in a battle with British forces not far away at Okracoke Island.

The Queen Anne’s Revenge was lost for hundreds of years until being discovered in 1996.

The shipwreck is now an active underwater archaeological site administered by the North

Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. And that’s where I come into the story.

It’s nearly morning in Beaufort, North Carolina and I’m getting on a barge--with a team

of archaeologists. But not just any archaeologists! These are underwater archaeologists who are

excavating the wreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge.

My good friend Rick Allen is in charge of all cinematography that takes place on the

site and today he will be my underwater cameraman.

Everyone sets up their gear and it’s time shove off for the pirate adventures on the

high seas!

As we head out under draw bridges making our way from the inlet to the open ocean, Wendy

Welsh, the project director prepares for the day’s work. It’s going to be a long day

as the weather has been bad, and the team has lost a lot of time this week. So we have

a lot of scuba tanks.

Wendy talks with nautical archaeologist David Moore, whose research original helped pinpoint

the location of the wreck.

If you can get it Rick, take it up!

Soon we arrive at the wreck site, and the barge is anchored directly above it.

Alright, it’s been a while sine we have been out here so we’ve got some work to

do today so I hope you guys are ready to go. The way we left the site was, we have both

of our big dredges, they are laying on seventy stake, which is what our double buoys are,

and then we have our frames that are on the pile. What I want to do first is get two divers

in and kind of do a site assessment, see what’s going on…

The first team suits up to check on the wreck and visibility. The water is not known for

clarity here in this shallow, sandy area.

The archaeological team needs to be able to talk to each other underwater so they can

get things done, so they’re all wearing these full-face masks, which have communications

gear in them. You can talk by pushing this button, and you can hear what other people

are saying through this little earpiece. So I’m going to be wearing one too, I’ll

be able to talk to everybody, and hear what they’re saying!

We’ll get in, go to the bottom, get comfortable and follow the hoses down…

Rick and I have a quick discussion about out dive plan and then it’s time to see this

wreck for myself.

Woo! Ready?

Jonathan, Jonathan, this is topside for a comm check.

I hear ya loud and clear!

Copy that, thank you Jonathan.

The visibility on the bottom is terrible! I can barely see 4 feet! It’s hard to describe

how difficult it is to do the work in such bad conditions!

Eventually I find my way to one of the only landmarks on the wreck.

This is the north anchor, the largest anchor on Blackbeard’s ship. It’s about 13 feet

long--that’s as big as a car!

Soon the crew fires up the pumps on what is essentially a big vacuum cleaner, called a

dredge.

Down on the bottom, this equipment is used to clear sections of the wreck by vacuuming

up the sand the continually accumulates.

I’m using the vacuum to clear an area around an object, but I have no idea what the object

is.

What is this?

I’m not sure. It might be part of a cannon.

To me, everything we uncover looks like a rock. But to an expert, these concretions,

as they are called, are treasure.

While most of the wood on a shipwreck is consumed by the sea; metal, glass and ceramics often

survive. But hundreds of years of marine growth like barnacles and oysters add layer after

layer of concretions on the artifacts. It takes an expert eye to identify artifacts

in these rock-like concretions.

Up on deck, the water and sand from the dredge go through a sluice where larger objects are

sieved out, and heavier particles settle out. There’s all kind of good stuff in here that

we’ll go through later.

Down on the bottom, I know we’re digging out something big.

What are we digging out here, is this a cannon?

This is an anchor. There should be a cannon right next to it, a little deeper buried down.

Wendy has joined us in the water and enlists my help to take some electrical readings.

The cannons, which are made of iron, produce a tiny electrical current as they corrode.

Wendy wants to measure the voltage they are producing as a way of learning how fast the

corrosion is taking place, and which cannons should be excavated first.

Our first step is to gently drill a hole through the marine growth on cannon to reach the metal.

Then I apply an electrode.

Jonathan is holding the electrode. You can start the two minutes and let him know when

it is complete.

Copy that Wendy, starting the two minutes now.

Okay, start the reading on the concretion for C7.

I have to hold the probe on the cannon for two minutes to allow the reading to stabilize.

Then they record the reading up on the barge.

After doing that for an hour, I feel like a real archaeologist! I’m a regular underwater

Indiana Jones!

But soon my tank is getting low and it’s time to go back to the surface.

Wow!

What’d you think of that?

You know, normally I’m not a fan of vacuuming, but vacuuming a cannon out of a shipwreck

is really fun!

Isn’t that neat?

Yeah, but I got a lot of sand in my gloves! That was great!

After a long day at sea, we finally turn and head back to the dock. But my work is far

from done.

My next stop is the QAR field lab, where archaeologist Lisa Briggs is panning for treasure.

Hi Lisa!

Hey Jonathan, welcome. Come on in, this is our field lab. This is where we are doing

the micro artifact extraction.

At the field lab, Lisa is looking through all that sand and sediment we collected in

the sluice for micro-artifacts.

We find all sorts of tiny little artifacts that would be overlooked if we were to look

on site or underwater. It’s really difficult to identify things perfectly underwater. We’ve

got low visibility, lots of currents, lots of stuff going on when we are actually underwater,

so we save all the sediment, we bring it back here and then we process it to try to find

the tiny little cool bits of treasure that we missed when we are actually physically

digging underwater.

The most common micro-artifact on the wreck is lead shot--tiny lead balls that would have

been ammunition for muskets.

Some of the shot that we find was actually used in hand-help muskets and smaller hand-held

firearms, and then some other shot that we’re finding even the very small pieces, grape

shot or seed shot, would have been used in bags inside of cannons. And that was used

mostly to try to take out the rigging of an enemy’s ship.

Lisa gives me a lesson in panning through the sand to separate the heavier lead from

the lighter sand and rocks. It’s a very similar technique to panning for gold.

You know, if it doesn’t work out, as an underwater archaeologist, I can go gold prospecting

after working on this site.

We’re going to find you in Alaska next year?

Oh yeah!

Actually, pick up the lip a little bit…

I’m going to starve if I have to feed myself with finding gold this way.

Finally, after I get the technique down, I find something!

Oh I think I see something.

Aarrrgh, there be lead in this here pan! Look at that!

We have found, in total, I think over 250 thousand pieces of lead shot.

Now you might not think of lead shot as treasure, but for a pirate, ammunition is critical.

And to an archaeologist, this stuff is like gold.

I spend hours sifting through the sand for micro-artifacts! And I have become pretty

good at panning for lead shot. But now it’s time for my next stop.

Let’s get out of here before she makes us do any more!

Not far from the field lab, tucked away in a warehouse is the Queen Anne’s Revenge

restoration lab. I meet up with the project director Wendy Welsh for a tour.

Hey Jonathan, welcome to the lab!

Hi Wendy, how are you?

Nice to have you.

Inside are tons of artifacts that have been rescued from the shipwreck, all awaiting restoration

so they can be put on display.

This is the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources Queen Anne’s Revenge conservation

lab. What we do here is we take all the artifacts that come in here from the QAR shipwreck,

put them in storage. We conserver them and make them ready for public display and everything

in between.

Show me how you do that!

All right! Well, we’ve been out to the site and you have seen kind of what it looks like,

you have seen a site map and is the way these things come up are in large amorphous lumps

called concretions, and what we do here immediately is of course store them in wet storage.

All the artifacts are stored in tanks filled with water. They are being treated with special

chemicals and an electric current to drive the salt molecules out of the metal. Without

this process, these ancient artifacts would crumble into dust when they left the water.

Everything from the tiniest brass fitting to the largest iron cannon has to be slowly,

painstakingly treated with this process. And for large object like a cannon, the process

can take years.

So let me ask you, just out of curiosity…if you took a cannon out of the water and you

didn’t do anything…you were just like “hey, check it out, we found a cannon”

and you brought it out and maybe cleaned off all the marine growth and just put it in the

museum, what would happen?

Well, it would look pretty cool for like the first few days. And then after that it would

start to rust, and then the salts that had been permeating that iron for many many years

is going to start to crystalize as it dries out. And then one that happens it will start

popping off surfaces. And then you have no nice pretty cannon any more. That’s why

we have to do our process that we do and it does take a good while, but it’s actually

a payoff in the end if you think about it. Our cannon were underneath, submerged for

almost 300 years. To get into a conservation lab, for it to take five or six years to be

complete, that’s actually not a bad ratio.

Next Wendy shows me the largest artifact the team is restoring. It’s so big they had

to build a huge custom tank for it. We pull off the cover to reveal an anchor.

This is the anchor that we recovered from the site last May. It’s 12 feet long and

about eight feet, nine feet wide.

After seeing some of the artifacts being preserved, Wendy shows me how they get them out of the

concretions. It starts with an X-ray of the concretion, so the archaeologists can see

exactly what is inside them before they start doing any work.

This concretion has a couple grenades in it as well as a number of other items. The X-ray

clearly shows the location of the smaller artifacts buried within the concretion.

So this is an air scribe and I’ll turn it on and hopefully it won’t hurt your ears.

Next, using an air scribe, Wendy demonstrates how the marine growth is slowly cut away from

the artifacts, ever so carefully.

Using this technique, over time, thousands of artifacts have come out of concretions,

preserved and ready to go into an exhibit. In fact, right now there are more artifacts

than there is space to display them.

This is what’s to come as far as going into the museum next. So hopefully you’ll see

some of these on display soon enough.

I head over to the North Carolina Maritime Museum to check out the Queen Ann’s Revenge

exhibit, where some of the coolest finds are on display for the public to see.

There I meet up again with the Nautical Archaeologist David Moore to learn about the exhibit.

What we’re weeing here in just this small space is literally just the tip of the iceberg.

We’ve got some 300 unique artifacts just in this one area. Of the material that has