Blackbeard and his pirates stole the ship
The Queen Anne's Revenge
in 1717 and wrecked it in South Carolina in 1718, but it was only found
in 1996. Historians and conservators studying the wreckage have
recovered most of the ship's 27 cannons. Inside one of the cannons was a
wad of garbage that turned out to be small bits of paper. And some had
readable text! So what were these pirates reading i their spare time?
Work
by conservationists from North Carolina’s Department of Natural and
Cultural Resources shows that Blackbeard and his crew got a kick out of
reading “voyage narratives”—a popular form of literature in the late
17th and early 18th century that chronicled the true accounts of
maritime expeditions. Specifically, Blackbeard kept a copy of Edward
Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the
Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711, detailing the British naval officer’s
participation in a global expedition aboard the ships Duke and Dutchess.
Now
we know there were books aboard Blackbeard's fleet, and that indicates
that at least some of the crew were literate ...all from a few scraps of
waterlogged trash.
Read more about the find at Gizmodo.
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