The Queen Anne's Revenge and non-salvor interpretation of shipwreck history

Last week, I visited the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort to see their exhibit on the Queen Anne's Revenge, formerly the French ship Concorde, which was later converted to a merchant ship, then to a slave ship, and finally into the flagship of the famed pirate Blackbeard. The Queen Anne's Revenge wrecked in June 1718, when it was stranded in the shallow waters of the Beaufort Inlet and was abandoned by Blackbeard and his crew, who took with them any commercially valuable items (plunder) as they evacuated.

The wreck site was found under 20 feet of water by Intersal, Inc. in 1996. Intersal subsequently turned over their rights to the wreck to the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, which, in conjunction with the North Carolina Maritime Museum, has headed the excavation of the site since 1997.

The museum's exhibit is small, encompassing one corner of the museum and another nearby section of wall. The first section of the exhibit contains wall panels interpreting the discovery of the wreck, its sinking and its identification as the Queen Anne's Revenge. Below these panels are exhibit cases containing a variety of recovered artifacts, including bullets, personal artifacts, navigational tools, and a small amount of gold. Cases to the left of this display contain more recovered artifacts, including plates, cannonballs, and a ship's bell.

To the left of these sections is the exhibit's most unique display. Below a television screen playing a video about the ship's excavation is a concretion containing a number of artifacts submerged in a saltwater tank. An x-ray image shows the visitor what artifacts are contained within the fused mass.

The aforementioned nearby section of wall contains labels about the history of Blackbeard's life and exploits aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge and beyond.

Though I had wished the exhibit was larger (it obviously had neither the space nor the budget of Odyssey Marine's SHIPWRECK! Pirates and Treasure), it was informative nonetheless. It also included information about artifact conservation and the wreck's discovery without losing focus on the wreck's history. The emphasis on technology seen in SHIPWRECK! was significantly subdued in the Queen Anne's Revenge exhibit.

Additionally, while Odyssey's labels often restricted their information to the name of the wreck from which the artifact was recovered, the depth at which it was recovered (emphasizing Odyssey's ability to reach great depths), and the type of ship on which it was found, the North Carolina Maritime Museum's labels contained more information about the nature of the artifact and some labels even included information about the artifact's context within the wreck site. For example, a label for a piece of large lead shot mentioned that large amounts of this type of shot had been "found either loose on the bottom or embedded in concretions" and had mainly been recovered from the stern area of the wreck. Tatiana Villegas Zamora has written that salvor-created exhibits "provide no mention of the relationship of the objects to the structure in which they were found, or traces of serious archaeological surveys of the ship's construction." Since anti-salvage commentators like Zamora often charge commercial salvage groups with losing the context of recovered artifacts, Odyssey's lack of this type of information in its labels seems to only reinforce this accusation.

Interestingly, the museum had agreed to allow some of the Queen Anne's Revenge artifacts to be loaned to Discovery Place to augment SHIPWRECK!, but the loan was stopped by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.