maximus otter
Recovering policeman
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The notorious 18th-century pirate Blackbeard may have whiled away the hours between raids by curling up with a good book, according to a new discovery.
Archaeological conservators in North Carolina working on the wreckage of Blackbeard’s flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, found 16 tiny fragments of paper “in a mess of wet sludge” that had been in the chamber of a cannon. They worked for months to conserve the fragments, the largest of which was the size of a US quarter, discovering as they worked that a few words were still visible on some of the fragments.
https://goo.gl/images/CMgg13
After months of work, the researchers have determined that the fragments came from the 1712 book by Captain Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711.
Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach, ran the Queen Anne’s Revenge aground in 1718 off the coast of North Carolina. The wreck was discovered in 1996, and conservators have been working to find and preserve artefacts from the vessel ever since.
“It’s so unusual to get any organic material like paper surviving,” said historian Angus Konstam, author of a biography of Blackbeard. “The worrying thing is that one option to keep the powder charge in place in a cannon was to wedge it with paper. The book lover in me hates the fact that the pirates might have torn out a page from a book in order to fire their gun.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...book-recovered-from-wreck-of-blackbeards-ship
maximus otter
Archaeological conservators in North Carolina working on the wreckage of Blackbeard’s flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, found 16 tiny fragments of paper “in a mess of wet sludge” that had been in the chamber of a cannon. They worked for months to conserve the fragments, the largest of which was the size of a US quarter, discovering as they worked that a few words were still visible on some of the fragments.
https://goo.gl/images/CMgg13
After months of work, the researchers have determined that the fragments came from the 1712 book by Captain Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711.
Blackbeard, whose real name was Edward Teach, ran the Queen Anne’s Revenge aground in 1718 off the coast of North Carolina. The wreck was discovered in 1996, and conservators have been working to find and preserve artefacts from the vessel ever since.
“It’s so unusual to get any organic material like paper surviving,” said historian Angus Konstam, author of a biography of Blackbeard. “The worrying thing is that one option to keep the powder charge in place in a cannon was to wedge it with paper. The book lover in me hates the fact that the pirates might have torn out a page from a book in order to fire their gun.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...book-recovered-from-wreck-of-blackbeards-ship
maximus otter
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