The Wreck

Curator's note

Everything else in this Collection is paper. This room is the exception: a wreck on the sea floor is a different class of evidence entirely, gathered by different people under different rules, and it is worth pausing on how its conclusions are reached.

The ship's bell, cast 1705, from site 31CR314 A bronze bell bearing the date 1705, raised from the wreck site designated 31CR314 off Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina. It is one of the diagnostic finds behind the attribution of the site, because it fixes a date before which the vessel cannot have been lost and is consistent with a ship of La Concorde's build and career. The object is held by the state of North Carolina and conserved at the Office of State Archaeology Conservation Lab on East Carolina University's West Research Campus. Site 31CR314, found 1996. Physical access and imaging are controlled by the state programme.

The site was found in 1996. On 29 August 2011 the state of North Carolina announced its determination that it is the wreck of Queen Anne's Revenge.

Nothing recovered from the site carries the ship's name. The determination rests on an accumulation: the location, matching the reported grounding at Topsail Inlet around 10 June 1718; the size and armament of the vessel; the date range of the datable objects, of which the bell is the clearest; and the absence of a competing candidate for a wreck of that description in that place.

The distinction is the point of the room. A signed proof and a strong cumulative case are different things, and archaeology in this period usually produces the second. The state's finding is the best-supported answer available, and it is an inference. Both statements are true at once, and the walk is better for holding them together.

Records in this room

Ship Queen Anne's Revenge French slave ship La Concorde, captured and renamed by Blackbeard in 1717, wrecked at Beaufort Inlet in 1718; the wreck (31CR314) was identified as Queen Anne's Revenge in 2011.