I sometimes wish I didn’t have a life, so I could participate in these things:::

BEAUFORT, North Carolina (Reuters) – Nearly three centuries ago, the notorious pirate Blackbeard ran aground in his ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, off what is now a North Carolina beach town.

This month, a crew of 13 heads out to sea each day, hoping for clear-enough weather to dive the 20 to 25 feet to the ocean bottom to excavate what they believe is Blackbeard’s ship.

I would LOVE to be a part of this, I really would.

The team has found cannons, a bell, lead shot of all sizes, gold dust, pewter cups and medical devices, like a urethral syringe used to treat syphilis with mercury.

“A saying at the time was ‘a night with Venus and a month with mercury.’ And mercury doesn’t even cure you,” lead archeologist Chris Southerly said in an interview.

In past years, Southerly and his team did spot digs to map the debris field measuring 150 feet by 70 feet.

This year, divers are excavating the southern one-third of the site. They use PVC and aluminum pipe to measure five-foot squares and meticulously record where objects are found.

But, working 1 1/4 mile off North Carolina, there are problems that landlubber archeologists don’t encounter.

“Once we excavate down 2, 3, 4 feet, because of the currents and sand, it falls back in,” said Southerly.

The process of mapping sites under water is painstaking at best; and often impossible is the norm. This wreck is in shallow water so it’s much more difficult. The high sea wrecks such as the Titanic, which is 2 1/2 miles down, are much easier to map.
The sand down there is thick, heavy mud and doesn’t drift or move but a few centimeters each decade. There are no currents in the deep ocean. Titanic Canyon, that vast area surrounding the wreck of the ship, was mapped 20 years ago and nothing has changed since then. Of course it is much harder to get down to those depths, and very dangerous.

This classic archeology focuses on one of the most unusual men of an unusual era — Blackbeard.

His real name, which may have been Edward Teach or Thatch, is the subject of speculation, as are his birthplace and birth date. He knew how to navigate, but there is only one sample of what could be his writing — a ship’s log entry.

“We don’t know how tall (he was), but he seems to be taller than average for that period. One account calls him a ’spare’ man. He certainly had charisma,” says Lindley Butler, a retired history professor of Rockingham Community College, in Wentworth, North Carolina. Butler specializes in North Carolina history.

There were accounts that he tied slow-burning cannon fuses to his long black hair before going into battle.

As with many people of the long past, much of this is more legend than fact. One of the reasons this expedition is happening is to weed out the fact from the fiction.

In May 1718, Blackbeard’s pirates sailed into the port of Charleston, South Carolina and, in a stunningly audacious move, blockaded the harbor. The ransom demanded, and paid, was a chest of medicine worth 400 pounds, says Butler.

“In a way, I guess it did sort of terrorize that port. Blackbeard at that time had a fleet of four vessels, with 60 cannons. This was the most powerful fleet in this hemisphere at this time,” says Butler.

Shortly after terrorizing Charlestown, Blackbeard lost his lead ship, running the Queen Anne’s Revenge aground on one of the many shifting sandbars off North Carolina, says Butler.

After the wreck the governor granted him a royal pardon, and Blackbeard went into at least semi-retirement in June 1718, spending chunks of time in Ocracoke, a barrier island off North Carolina.

But Virginia Governor Alexander Spotswood was apparently unconvinced Blackbeard had actually given up pirating.

“Gov. Spotswood was having nightmares about this pirate sitting down here in North Carolina,” says Butler.

He sent troops to find Blackbeard, and the two sides battled it out on November 21, 1718 on tiny Ocracoke.

Blackbeard was killed in ferocious fighting. Casualty figures vary but at least eight other pirates were killed, and eight British seamen. Blackbeard’s head was cut off and stuck on a stake. His body was tossed overboard.

Heh. I hope this mission is a success, and that they find treasures from long ago that will give us better insight into who the real Blackbeard was.

God Speed.