Blackbeard returns

Well his ship at least, or rather bits of it. The anchor of the flagship of the pirate known as Blackbeard, who's real name was probably Edward Teach, or Edward Thatch, and born in Bristol in 1680, has been recovered. Like the pirate Captain Kidd, Teach started out as a Privateer. His letter of Marque was to attack French and Spainish ships during the War of the Spanish Succession. Also like Kidd he then went pirate and started to attack everything, but unlike Kidd he was actually rather good at piracy.

Blackbeard deliberately cultivated a fearsome reputation in order to try and get is prey to surrender without having to fight. This was the reason that he tied lite fuses into his beard before boarding ships: he wanted to look like something demonic and frighten people. It was also the reason why almost all pirates flew a black flag. They wanted to frighten people so they could capture their ships without a fight.

One interesting fact that this investigation has brought up as well as the anchor is ammunition used in the cannon. It appears that Blackbeard preferred to use improvised grapeshot. This shows that he wanted to take the ship's he attacked intact. If he wanted to damage or sink ship's he would have used round shot. To destroy rigging the chain shot would have been the weapon of choice. However grape shot flows over a broad area in a similar way to a shot gun blast and it was used principally to kill a ship's crew. Presumably if a crew wasn't willing to submit to him without a fight then he wanted to get rid of them and replace them with one he could trust when he added the ship to his flotilla.

The timing is rather strangely good for the new Pirates of the Caribbean film. Is an amazing coincidence that this recovery happened just at the correct time to get some more publicity for the film. If you're cynical you might even think they were connected, but if they are then I can only applaud the films PR department for helping an important and difficult piece of marine archeology.