September 1999.
On the East coast of America,
Hurricane Floyd thunders over a shipwreck
that had lain undiscovered for nearly 300 years.
The discovery of this wreck could open a window
on to the most notorious pirate in history.
Blackbeard.
For over 300 years, the twisted coastline of North Carolina
has echoed with the tales of pirates that once plundered the trade
routes of the American colonies.
One legend in particular lives on to this day.
The story of Blackbeard, hell raiser of the high seas.
The scant information available about Blackbeard's life,
suggests he was English, possibly from Bristol.
A book written a few years after his death in 1718,
portrays him as a devil,
his face almost obscured by his beard
which was twisted in to braids.
He was heavily armed,
and he wore smoking fuses in his hair to invoke a vision of hell.
The image he created for himself
struck fear in to those who crossed him.
Blackbeard is the one pirate whose myth has survived the centuries.
But now, the myth is becoming a reality.
Wreck hunter, Phil Masters,
first came to North Carolina nine years ago,
and heard stories about Blackbeard's fabled ship,
the Queen Anne's Revenge.
With the Queen Anne's Revenge,
he was the major Naval power in the new world.
She was the dominant ship in the Americas,
and nobody could defy her.
Nobody could threaten her.
Nobody could come to battle with her, including the Royal Navy.
With the Queen Anne's Revenge under his control,
Blackbeard was almost invincible.
But records state that on the 10th June 1718,
the ship went down at Beaufort Inlet.
The area is vast,
and Phil Masters had no idea where to start looking.
An 18th Century eyewitness report, made by a pirate called David Herriot,
provided a vital clue to the wreck's location.
Herriot had joined forces
with Blackbeard after his boat was captured by the pirate.
He had seen exactly where the Queen Anne's Revenge was lost.
He claimed
she had run aground on the sand-bar at the mouth of Beaufort Inlet.
And I knew immediately that I had found what I was looking for
in terms of being able to narrow down, and pinpoint the search
for Queen Anne's Revenge.
It was a eureka moment.
The search for the wreck then shifted to the area of shallow water
over the sand-bar.
Using a magnetometer,
Phil started out by looking for large metal objects like cannon,
or anchors lying on the sea floor.
He searched for nine years, until he noticed something was wrong.
We came to realise we had been magging in the wrong area.
We had a series of historical charts,
starting with the 1738 Wimble map, this is a copy of the Wimble,
showing where the sand-bars had been in those days.
We came to realise we shouldn't be looking where the sand-bars are now,
we should be looking where the sand-bars were in 1718.
And we started looking in this area,
and 11 days after he started looking, right there,
we found Queen Anne's revenge.
20 feet below the surface,
lies a chaotic mass of anchors, ballast stones and cannon.
The problem was,
how could Phil prove this was the remains of Blackbeard's flagship?
Answering that question has led him on an extraordinary voyage of discovery.
A team of underwater archaeologists and historians
have come to Beaufort to join forces with Phil.
They have just two weeks to see if they can find clues
that will identify the wreck.
Time is against them,
and the ever present threat of hurricanes
is posing some serious problems for project leader, Mark Ramsing.
...test the equipment out. But mainly,
and it's going to be the top priority, is looking at the condition of the site,
and we're going to have a lot of deciding
what we might have to bring up now, and how we're going to protect it
for the next few months.
And I don't know that some of
that structure is going to take another hurricane.
With these concerns foremost in their minds,
the team sets out early on their first dive day.
Expertise is not the only thing that binds them together.
They also share an admiration for Blackbeard, the man.
We get this-this picture of a man who was basically larger than life.
That he demanded respect, and commanded men very easily.
I respect him for his intelligence, I respect him for his ability to
put forth an image
that allowed him to accomplish what he did accomplish in a short period of time.
It's the first dive, and they're all anxious.
No-one knows what damage the hurricane will have done to the wreck.
I'm concerned.
You're always concerned when you've got something as fragile as
a wooden hull structure that's been exposed to the elements,
like we have the past month.
So, it's going to be interesting.
Once in the water, the divers face their first problem
The recent hurricane has dumped a layer of fine mud over the site.
Visibility is down to zero.
Nathan, is there anything we can do to help you?
You could clear up the visibility a little bit, that would help a lot.
Are you the one I'm feeling?
No! You're er... feeling Dave!
Er... oh-kay.!
Okay, you said, you're working on the south side
and have located some new wood structure. Over.
I'm not sure if it's new or not. Looks like there was some...
On the dive boat,
project leader, Mark Ramsing waits anxiously for news from below.
...but I believe we're on the south side.
We seem to be working back around the... Over.
Okay, roger that.
If you come up on the anchor or cannons, let me know.
Yeah. Ten four. As soon as I can find it.
The divers soon discover that Hurricane Floyd has blown away
tons of sand that was protecting the ship's hull.
If this battered structure is the remains of the Queen Anne's Revenge,
it started out life under a very different name.
The ship was originally French, and called the Concord.
She was transporting 500 African slaves to the Caribbean,
when on the 28th November 1717,
Blackbeard captured her off the island of Martinique.
Well, we have a number of different documents that
kind of give us the background of how Blackbeard
came in to possession of the Concord.
The crew was weakened by dysentery,
and they had just a few hands available to fight.
They had just completed a transAtlantic voyage,
and so probably were not in the mood to fight off a bunch of pirates.
The ship stayed under Blackbeard's command for less than a year
before wrecking on the sandy shores of North Carolina.
The area is known as the graveyard of the Atlantic,
and with so many wrecks littering the sea-floor,
the team have to be sure
that what they've found is the Queen Anne's Revenge.
We do believe that the ship that was captured and became Queen Anne's
Revenge was 200,250 tons, which would put it around 90 feet in length.
We think it was a three masted ship.
The overall site dimensions that we have here run roughly 90 to 100 feet,
so it looks very good in that regard. The length of the anchors,
the size of the anchors correspond with a ship of that tonnage,
so what we have here, from what we've seen,
fits very closely with the historical records of the Concord.
One of the clues that will help prove the identity of the wreck
is the number of cannon found on the site.
So far,18 have been uncovered.
If this is Blackbeard's ship, there should be more.
People that encountered Blackbeard say that he had 22,28.
Finally, you see this figure 40 thrown out a lot,
but it may be people just repeating the same story.
If we don't find any more than 18,
I don't think that's going to cause us to say,
well, this can't be Queen Anne's Revenge,
but the more guns we find, the better it will look.
But it is certainly important, Because a vessel this well armed
is likely to be a navy vessel, a naval vessel that is reported.
You don't just lose navy vessels
out in the ocean and not know where they are.
So I think that that's important to remember,
that this is a heavily armed vessel, and we have no records
of any heavily armed vessels in that area,
except for Queen Anne's Revenge.
The search for more cannon is a vital part of the project,
and with less than two weeks to go, time is precious.
The following morning, Richard Lawrence unveils
a new piece of equipment
that he hopes will reveal any new cannon hidden under the sand.
This is an instrument called a gradiometer, which is actually two
magnetometer sensors, one up on top and one down below,
and what it does is,
like any magnetometer, it measures the earth's magnetic field,
but it takes these two readings and subtracts from each other,
so you're getting a very localised reading.
And that's what we're looking for,
because we're looking for very localised changes
in the bottom magnetic readings, that will show us
large things like cannons, but also small objects.
The extraordinary sensitivity of the gradiometer means it can't be towed
behind the boat like a magnetometer.
The survey team will have to carry it by hand,
and carefully position it on the sea floor.
Magnetic readings will have to be taken every two and a half feet
across the entire site,
if they're going to spot any new cannon.
The survey covers an area of over 13,000 square metres.
The sheer number of cannon aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge,
and the three other small boats in his fleet,
made Blackbeard a force to be reckoned with.
But he seldom had to use his fire power.
His flag was enough to strike terror in to his victims,
causing them to surrender without a fight.
It portrayed a skeleton of the devil holding a spear and an hour glass.
The message was clear, surrender now,
your time is up.
For seven months, Blackbeard sailed the coast
from the Caribbean to North Carolina, amassing a fortune.
He took over 23 ships and robbed them of anything that had any value.
During his reign of terror, nobody could stop him,
not even the Royal Navy,
who had a mere ten ships defending the entire American coastline.
In the end, firepower alone couldn't protect the Queen Anne's Revenge.
Eyewitness testimony reveals that on the 10th June 1718,
she struck a submerged sand-bar,
and was unable to free herself.
Abandoned to the elements, she gradually fell apart,
spilling her contents on to the sea-floor.
This is all that remains today.
Most of the timber has rotted away, but parts of the hull lie exposed.
Their position suggests that she keeled over on to her left side.
The archaeologists will need to look at every fragment of evidence over
the entire site if they are going to shed more light on to
Blackbeard's story.
In an area that has been mapped and re-mapped,
Wayne Lusardi, the project conservator,
has discovered something new, uncovered by the recent hurricane.
It's a folded up pewter platter,
the seventh to have been brought up from the site,
and each one has provided vital clues.
We're not real sure if these platters were being used on the ship,
or if they were plunder taken from other ships,
or even if they were left over trade goods destined for
the African market when Concord was still a slaver.
Several of the platters we found
impressions of fabric along the rim, suggesting that they were in storage,
and wrapped up in some type of material.
And none of them have extensive cut marks,
anything other than abrasive marks that were formed on the bottom.
So it doesn't look like any of them were used,
so it certainly suggests they were in storage.
Cleaning the platter is a priority.
The other six were all found to have letters stamped in to the surface.
Some are manufacturer's marks, which have been traced back to London
in the early part of the 18th Century,
precisely the right period if the ship is the Queen Anne's Revenge.
Other marks may provide even more positive proof.
These letters BSA,
are probably a monogram,
unique to an individual and can potentially be traced.
If you could somehow tie that to a captain
or a ship that was captured by him.
Or a wealthy passenger.
Or a wealthy passenger, something like that I think would.
Something that is very specific,
very definite to one ship. Another advantage we have,
potentially, at some point,
is knowing all of the men who sailed on the Concord,
all the officers, all the men and their names.
And at some point we could find
anything, a ring, medallion, anything that had a monogram, or actually
name insized or etched or whatever, on something like that,
then track it back to the original crew of the Concord
before it was even captured.
The platters were not the only stolen pewter wear
that Blackbeard left behind.
Pewter was the plastic of the 18th Century,
cheap and malleable,
it could be made in to almost anything,
and this battered object would have been a vital edition
to life aboard a pirate ship.
Syringes like this were used for
typically for the treatment of venereal diseases.
They were filled with mercury and that was injected.
Doesn't sound very pleasant.
Syringes in general were pretty common in medicine chests
on board ship, especially on transAtlantic vessels.
But there is quite a few rumours that Blackbeard's crews were
engaged in all sorts of extra-curricular activities.
Many of his men purportedly had -
came down with venereal diseases and
he needed medicines for that those treatment.
Medical supplies would have been a valuable prize in a pirate raid,
and the syringe certainly dates from Blackbeard's period,
but it's not enough to prove it was his.
The historians know his ship went down in 1718.
If this is the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge,
everything found on the site has to come from before that date.
If we were to locate anything out there on the site
that would post-date 1718.
If we were to find a coin or something else with a date
etched in it,1719 or later,
it would basically be back to the drawing board.
Each artefact they find
has the potential to throw the project in to disarray,
and so far, only one item brought up from the site
is actually date marked.
Perhaps the most important
artefact that has come from the site actually
had a date on it, and that was a bell,
about 14 inches tall,
that is not French, it's not English.
It appears to be Spanish
with the inscription Anno Dei 1709 or year of 1709,
around the bottom of the waste of the bell.
Why it's Spanish? Was it plunder,
captured and taken off of an earlier prize,
we just do not know. But, nonetheless,
the important element on the bell is that date 1709.
Every time an object is recovered,
the archaeologists try to date it.
Despite the destruction caused to the site by hurricanes,
a delicate glass wine bottle has been found,
perfectly preserved by a layer of sand.
Wine bottles like these have a highly distinctive shape
and are easily dated.
The design involved, over time and by comparing it to others,
they can tell this bottle was made in about 1712,
six years before the Queen Anne's Revenge went down.
But there's another object in the lab that might
threaten the whole project.
It appears to be dated 12 years after she sank.
This cannon, brought up two years ago,
has been sitting in a tank being cleaned.
As the centuries of encrustation have fallen away,
marks etched on to the surface have gradually been revealed,
a series of numbers that have got the team worried.
Between these two reinforcement bands,
there's a series of numbers,
and if you shut the lights off I can show you,
with a shadow, here it goes.
Right here is the first number, one,
and then following on there is a 7. Let's see here.
And then a 3.
Then over here, a smaller zero,
or possibly a zero.
You have 1730.
As everyone knows, the Queen Anne's Revenge went down in 1718,
so we're hoping that this does not represent 1730 date,
otherwise we're going to have to find a new project for it.
What it likely represents is the weight of the gun
in hundred weights. It was very important to know
the weight of guns so that you can ballast the ship properly.
So we have the 17 and a 3 and a possibly zero.
And if you turn the lights back on...
During this time they would weigh these in hundred weights
and quarter weights, and a hundred weight
at the time is a 112Ibs, a quarter weight was 28.
So if you do the maths, by multiplying 17 x112,
and then add that to 3x28, come up with 1988Ibs.
What we're going to do is we're going to weigh this gun and see how
favourably it compares with what these markings are.
Doesn't weigh anything.
Zero, we were wrong.
What's the weight?
It's between 1800 and 1900Ibs.
That's what those numbers say there. Yeah.
I'd say it's a weight. I'd say it's a pretty close match.
It's not exact. It's not exactly 1988Ibs,
but it's very close.
So the cannon may still date from before 1718.
The theory that the wreck is the Queen Anne's Revenge
remains intact.
Day five, and the hunt for more cannon continues.
Data from the gradiometer survey looks intriguing,
but only 800 readings have been taken so far.
There's another 1300 to go.
122 metres to the south of the survey area,
the divers have made an amazing discovery.
The find is completely unexpected and may reveal exactly what happened
the day Blackbeard lost his flagship.
It's an anchor, but it had a very specific use.
When we first saw it, all we saw was a fluke sticking up out of the sand.
We dredged out around it and discovered that the wooden stock
on the anchor is in excellent condition.
Finding a wooden stock
was the key to linking this anchor to the main wreck site.
When the wood was dated, it matched precisely to Blackbeard's time.
The anchor is a long way from the ship,
and the reason for this could force the team to completely rethink
the events of June 10th,1718.
The wrecking of the Queen Anne's Revenge
is described in the deposition signed by David Herriot.
Herriot claims that the disaster was not an accident.
He insisted
that Blackbeard had intentionally run his own flagship aground.
It was his testimony that Blackbeard had, indeed,
run the ships aground on purpose in order to break up the company.
They had anywhere from 3 to 400 men
in that command and four ships, and it appears that Blackbeard was,
indeed, attempting to downsize his crew
for any number of different reasons.
According to the testimony,
Iosing the Queen Anne's Revenge was part of Blackbeard's plan to
get rid of some of his men, including the resentful Herriot.
But close examination
of the south anchor seems to tell a different story.
Dredging away the sand, the archaeologists
uncovered the anchor ring and found it was stretched out.
This position suggests a completely different sequence of events.
When QAR got stuck,
they sent a small boat out with the south anchor.
They dropped it far enough away so they could pull on
the anchor to perhaps pull themselves off of the sand.
In the process of doing that, when you use a kedge anchor,
you cause a stress on the rope and the anchor,
the anchor will swing around so that its shaft points directly
to the direction it's being pulled from.
So when we found it, the first
thing we checked to see was which way the shaft was pointing,
and the shaft is pointing directly at QAR.
This would mean that although Blackbeard was a highly
skilled navigator,
and knew the treacherous coast of North Carolina well,
it's possible that he was caught unawares by the sand-bar.
My impression is that
he would have not intentionally grounded Queen Anne's Revenge.
She was the instrument of his power,
and I believe it was an accident, and once it happened,
he did the best he could to make the best of a bad situation,
but that was not an intentional act.
With the ship lost,
Herriot's testimony explains that Blackbeard marooned
his unwanted crew on a barren island.
He then sailed away on one of his smaller boats,
taking their share of the treasure with him.
With no way of escaping, the men would have died
if a ship hadn't passed by a few days later.
By treating his men cruelly,
Blackbeard maintained his fearsome image.
His often ruthless outbursts were designed for maximum effect.
One night, he suddenly turned on Israel Hands,
one of his most trusted men.
In a moment of sheer devilry,
he slipped his pistols from his bandoleer,
without pausing to explain, he shot the man through the knee.
When asked why he had done such a thing, he answered,
"if I did not now and then kill one of them,
they would forget who I was"
Although life was harsh in Blackbeard's fleet,
there existed a strange kind of democracy,
which meant his crew could have voted him from his command,
had he tried to rule by terror alone.
He remained their leader for as long as he was successful
in making them rich.
Back at the site,
buried in the heart of the wreck,
Wayne Lusardi has spotted evidence
of the treasures the Queen's Anne Revenge would once have carried.
Hidden in the silt lie small,
but tantalising clues.
It was just luck. It was just I was looking in the right
spot at the right time, and something caught my eye.
I just picked it up and it was a small gold grain.
I wouldn't even call it a nugget, because these things are just tiny.
And over the course of the next few weeks or so, I found about
seventy of them on the bottom.
The fact that the gold is so small
has provided Wayne with another piece of the jigsaw.
There are several historical accounts that actually place gold-dust,
not gold coins, not gold bars, not gold jewellery or anything like that,
but gold dust on board the Concord when she was captured by Blackbeard.
And then we didn't find jewellery or coins or bars,
we found gold dust.
And so that it's a bit of circumstantial evidence that
supports the identity of the shipwreck, along with all of the
historical accounts that place it in this area and the other
artefacts that date the ship to the right time period.
When Blackbeard captured the slaveship, Concord,
and transformed it in to the Queen Anne's Revenge,
he found 20Ibs of gold-dust on board.
A year later, when the ship hit the sand-bar,
he would have had plenty of time to remove any gold before abandoning her.
The question for the team's geologist, Jim Craig,
is why was any gold left behind?
We believe that the gold that was found
probably was unknown to the pirates.
Probably, it was from someone who was on the Corcord
before it was captured by Blackbeard.
You can imagine that if they have word that the pirates are coming,
that you could hide your gold,
and probably the gold was hidden up behind a plank
somewhere below decks.
Then, of course, once the ship had foundered,
of course, that gold would have been in some kind of a small pouch,
probably a small leather pouch.
And then, of course, when thatdeteriorated,
that gold would have fallen to the bottom in a relatively small area,
where it has been recovered.
Jim Craig is working on ways of testing this theory.
If the gold-dust did belong to the crew of the Concord,
it probably came with them from West Africa.
His analysis shows that this is placer gold,
the type found by panning in rivers and streams.
We do know it's placer.
We do know it had to be placer gold that was accessible before 1718,
and it had to be gold, probably somewhere from
the route that they would have travelled.
What we're trying to do now,
though, is to examine the potential places,
West Africa, the Caribbean,
Northern South America,
where gold with the same kind of composition and rim structure
have been known to occur.
Blackbeard's story lies in the fine details emerging from the wreck.
But the bad visibility means there's a limit
to what can be done under water.
With rough weather forecast,
the archaeologists have decided to bring up a large mass
they have found towards the centre of the wreck.
The team are convinced there's something entombed within it.
They have named the object after a chocolate bar, a Baby Ruth.
They won't know what it is until they get it back to the lab.
Early in the morning, the team make the mile long journey
back out to the site.
It's going to be a tense day.
The dive boats have some added muscle.
The RV, Dan Moore, is equipped with a five ton lifting hoist.
But it's not going to be easy.
Unless the lifting straps balance the weight of the mystery
object exactly, it could snap in half.
The divers hope that two bags pumped full of air will be able to lift
the 1100Ib weight.
Nathan, this is topside.
We're standing by up here. How are things going?
Topside, Nathan is beginning to fill the bag, over.
Okay, roger that. You keep us posted please, Rick.
Dan Moore, this is Sea Hawk.
Sea Hawk, this is Dan Moore, over.
Just want to let you know the divers are on the bottom.
They're hooking up the bags,
and it should be a matter of a few minutes here.
Okay. Roger that, and we'll be standing by
and waiting instructions. Over.
Okay, topside, the Baby Ruth is starting to bounce-stand-by.
Alright.
Okay, she's up off the bottom,
just a little bit, getting ready to go.
Roger that.
Okay, topside, they're coming up, they're coming up.
Safely at the surface, the divers swim the object
over to the crane.
They now get their first glimpse of the underside.
Nathan, that looks like a gun under there.
Yeah, it's definitely a cylindrical iron object.
Are you guys saying it looks ...Iooking good for
a gun like object, over?
It's a sawn off cannon, man.
Sawn off cannon, alright.
Topside, we're ready for them to lower down that shackle for us.
We also seem to be losing a little air out of one of our bags.
We need to get them hooks down here as soon as we can.
Okay, the hook is on the way.
Nathan's got the hook.
Once attached to the hoist,
the Baby Ruth begins to swing dangerously.
The object weighs over a 1,000Ibs, and the divers are getting nervous.
It's a frustrating moment for Mark, the project's leader.
He's stranded on another boat,
desperate to see what's beneath the cluster of stones.
I can't tell what it is. It looks like a Baby Ruth...
As the object is swung on to the deck,
the team get their first detailed look at the under-side.
It's like a cannon.
It's now clear what they've found.
Hold on.
Alright.
Roger, Sea Hawk, when the concretion
came out of the water, we could see the underneath side,
it's very clearly a gun, much smaller than the ones
we've seen or recovered so far,
probably like a 1 Iber, but you could see
the trunnions and the outline of the tube,
so we definitely have another cannon up here, over.
Hot dog.
If there is a cannon entombed within the lump,
it might well be marked with a date.
Before they can find out, they need to remove centuries of encrustation.
Wayne Lusardi has perfected a unique method.
I'm going to take a 3Ib sledge hammer and start beating on it.
Starting to get stage fright.
It may look like a brutal way of treating a 300 year old object,
but hitting it with just the right force
sends shockwaves through the concretion,
and bit by bit, pieces sheer off.
That's the cannon surface right there.
Three hours in to the procedure, and the cannon is beginning to appear.
He's also found some identifying marks.
And there's a single line here, maybe an I or a 1 or something like that.
And then what looks like a B maybe, or an E, here.
And possibly another letter here.
A letter round the trunnion
often signified the foundry where the gun was cast.
The cannon is much smaller than the 18 found so far,
which is good news for the team.
Blackbeard would have taken cannon from any ship he sees,
and the archaeologists were hoping they'd find many different
types on the site.
What they need now, is more cannon,
and it looks like the hard work on the underwater
survey may have paid off.
The magnetic highs and lows of the whole site have now been mapped out.
Individual cannon that are already known to the team
show up like bar magnets,
with a high reading in red at one end,
and a low at the other end in dark green or blue.
But, in one corner of the site, there is a patch of sand
which hasn't been excavated.
It looks like it might be hiding another cannon.
The more they find,
the more likely it is that they can identify the wreck
as Blackbeard's flagship.
We're really excited about the
potential of this gradiometer survey, and I think what we've done out here
is something that no-one's really tried before.
And what we want to do today,
we're setting up a grid square that will encompass this area right here,
will excavate down, and see if there is a cannon or
maybe more than one cannon located in there that will help confirm the
results of the gradiometer survey.
It's the last day of operations,
and the crew have one final chance to find more cannon.
If the survey is wrong, they leave the site empty handed.
Let's get this baby going.
We're in a virgin area that's never been dug,
so that's another thing, in uncovering this cannon,
we may uncover some other artefacts, which will be exciting.
It's always fun to find new things, to me.
The bad visibility which has been dogging the team over the past
fortnight refuses to let up.
Finding the right area to dredge is proving difficult.
Okay. Then we need to go West, young man.
Pump is still running, right?
Yes. Okay, we're pumping sand.
That's what I want to hear.
I think we lost our vis.
Curious about the letters on the cannon, Wayne refers to a book,
which has the information he needs.
These two trunnions illustrated in the book here have the initials IEC on them,
and this is identical to the trunnion that we exposed
on the small cannon from the Baby Ruth concretion.
IEC stands for a man by the name of Yaspur Erin Croytz,
who was the founder of a cannon works in Sweden,
in 1689, which operated to 1750.
The two guns here that are illustrated, both have date marks,
and it's - It's a very strong possibility
that date occurs on the opposite trunnion.
20 feet down,
the divers have found what they were hoping for.
Despite the appalling visibility,
they can feel the unmistakable shape of another cannon.
With each new cannon discovered,
the team are getting closer to matching the 40 cannon that
Blackbeard was supposed to have had on board the Queen Anne's Revenge.
Delighted with the results,
the divers returned to the conservation lab.
Wayne has spent the whole day cleaning up Baby Ruth,
and he has a surprise for them.
Hidden under the stones is another small cannon.
we didn't even know there was a cannon there until we saw it come up,
and saw the underneath side of it,
and just assumed everything else on there was ballast stone.
It is looking good.
That's too cool, yeah.
We do have our 21 gun salute already.
After 10 long hours,
Wayne has finally uncovered the one
area of the cannon that could be
marked with a date.
And it's marked.
What appears to be a 7, a 1 and a 3.1713.
And that's very good news. It fits within its foundry mark.
It doesn't post-date our wreck. So there's nothing bad about that.
Just heard 1713,which is - which is very good.
We have the bell at 1709,
but this puts it in a little bit closer to the 1718 date.
We didn't expect it to be any later, of course,
and, of course, if it had been, that would have been bad.
But everything, not just the cannon,
just not the-that date, but all the artefacts
seem to date to the right period.
When you look at the makers marks on the pewter the cannons,
it's people that are making artefacts from that time period.
So we just
- It's got to be Queen Anne's Revenge.
The archaeologists are now convinced they've finally
identified the shipwreck as the Queen Anne's Revenge.
But Blackbeard's own story doesn't end here.
After he lost his ship,
Blackbeard sailed away with his remaining crew.
By the beginning of winter they sought shelter on the island
of Ocracoke.
On November 21 st,1718,
they came ashore at Springer's Point.
Amongst these gnarled oak trees,
legend has it that they met with other pirates
and drank the night away.
Nobody saw the two Royal Navy boats laying in ambush around the point.
As dawn broke the following morning,
the Navy moved in to attack.
Declaring that he would never surrender, Blackbeard launched
in to the fray and fought like a devil.
He was shot five times and suffered 20 cuts.
The final cut sliced off his head.
With his death, the golden age of piracy passed in to legend.
Just as the archaeologists have begun to open this small window
on to Blackbeard's life and times,
it seems the sea wants to reclaim its notorious son.
Two days after the team left the area,
the fourth hurricane of the season
raged over the site of the Queen Anne's Revenge.