Thursday, March 28

The Blackbeard Book Club? A Surprise Find After 300 Years Produces a Book from the Pirate’s Sunken Flagship

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You may wonder what pirates did in their spare time, when they weren’t raiding, plundering and killing their victims at sea? Turns out, at least some of them spent their time reading.

Conservators for Queen Ann’s Revenge, Blackbeard’s flagship, which sank off the North Carolina coast 300 years ago, found 16 fragments of paper with legible printing, none larger than a quarter, wedged into a chamber of a canon. After more than a year of research, they determined that the fragments came from the first edition of a book by Capt. Edward Cooke published in 1712 called A Voyage to the South Seas. They don’t know who it belonged to on Queen Anne’s Revenge. But it is known that some of the pirates, and often some of their captives, were able to read.

“They were literate men,” Kimberly Kenyon, one of the ship’s conservators told the Associated Press. “People always assume pirates are ruffians from bad backgrounds, but that wasn’t always the case.”

Royal Navy volunteers killed Blackbeard in a fierce battle (pictured above) in Ocracoke Inlet in 1718 and returned to port with his severed head hanging from their sloop’s bowsprit.

Read more:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/booty-and-books-new-evidence-of-pirates-interest-in-both-1.3760392

 

 

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