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