Gallery · Blackbeard · Room 2 of 7
The Flagship
Curator's note
The best evidence for the most famous pirate ship in the world is French, and it is administrative. Two of La Concorde's officers went before a notary at Nantes and described what had happened to their vessel. The account that follows sets out what they swore. The wording is mine; the dates, the figures and the names are theirs.
La Concorde, a slave ship out of Nantes, was taken near St Vincent on 28 November 1717 by two pirate vessels, one of twelve guns and one of eight, carrying about two hundred and fifty men between them. She had embarked 516 Africans, and 455 were aboard her when she changed hands. She was carried to Bequia and renamed Queen Anne's Revenge.
The renaming at Bequia and the figures for guns and crew come through the Queen Anne's Revenge project's report on the French archives rather than from the notarial originals.
Four hundred and fifty-five people were aboard her as cargo on the day she was taken. Their number survives, and almost none of their names. That figure belongs in this room at full size, because the vessel that became the most celebrated pirate ship in the world had spent the previous months carrying human beings across the Atlantic for profit, and she was worth taking for exactly the qualities that made her good at it: she was large, fast and well found.
The name he chose is the one piece of self-presentation he certainly authored. Queen Anne had been dead three years. The choice reads as a gesture toward the last war, when men of his sort had sailed with commissions and been called privateers, and it is the closest thing he left to a statement of how he wanted to be seen. He kept her until she went aground the following June.