An article in the Jacksonville Daily News mentions that the Queen Anne's Revenge, the boat of Edward Teach (North Carolina's most famous pirate "Blackbeard"), was formerly used in the colonial slave trade to the New World from Africa.
"In a display case at the N.C. Maritime Museum," the article says, "beside a model of the Queen Anne's Revenge, sits a detached cross section of the replica representing the half deck. ...
"It is not the most notorious part of the ship's history - most people associate the QAR with the infamous pirate Blackbeard and his blockade on Charleston Harbor.
"Yet the QAR holds just as many links to African-American history as it does to pre-revolutionary piracy.
"For some years prior to its capture by pirates in November 1717, the QAR was the Concorde, a French slave ship that traveled the seas back-and-forth from Europe to Africa to the Caribbean."
What is intriguing is that history tells us that five of the QAR's nine crew members who survived at Ocracoke were black. (Blackbeard didn't make it out of the battle alive.)
"Researchers do not know if Blackbeard kept these five aboard from the Concorde or if they came from another slave ship captured by the pirates just prior to the battle, Moore said.
"What researchers do know is that the QAR is not the only pirate ship with ties to the colonial slave trade."
No comments:
Post a Comment