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The Grounding of the Queen Anne's Revenge (1718)

On or about 10 June 1718, days after lifting his blockade of Charles Town, Blackbeard's flagship Queen Anne's Revenge, formerly the French slave ship La Concorde, grounded on the bar at Topsail Inlet (now Beaufort Inlet), North Carolina, and was lost, the sloop Adventure grounding and being lost with her; Blackbeard stripped the wrecks, marooned part of his company on a sandbar, departed with a smaller sloop and a hand picked crew, and took the King's Pardon from Governor Charles Eden at Bath, and whether the grounding was contrived to break up the company remains disputed between David Herriot's deposition and Captain Ellis Brand's report to the Admiralty.

Also writtenThe loss of the Queen Anne's Revenge at Topsail Inlet; Blackbeard's wreck at Beaufort Inlet; The Topsail Inlet grounding, June 1718

Blackbeard lost his flagship at the mouth of a shallow Carolina inlet on or about 10 June 1718. Within a few weeks he was a pardoned man with one sloop, a hand picked crew and the greater part of the plunder. Whether the first fact caused the second is the central dispute about the episode, and it is not settled.1

The ship that grounded

The Queen Anne's Revenge began as La Concorde, a French slave ship commanded by Pierre Dosset, taken by Blackbeard's consorts in the West Indies on 28 November 1717 and refitted as a pirate warship. At capture she was about 200 tons with 16 cannon and a crew of about 75. Refitted, she is credited with something like 40 guns, a figure traced to a 1924 compilation rather than to a period count, and some accounts stretch her tonnage towards 300. She drew deep water, carried a heavy battery, and was nothing like the shallow sloops of the trade.2

What brought her to the bar

In late May 1718 the flotilla blockaded the harbour of Charles Town, holding up shipping in and out of the port, taking hostages and, in the best known account, demanding a chest of medicines before the prisoners and the ships were released. No general engagement followed. Blackbeard stood north along the Carolina coast.

Two pressures sat behind what happened next. A deep drawing flagship and a company reported in the hundreds were expensive, conspicuous and hard to hold together, and plunder divided among that many hands went thin per man. The coast was the other pressure: the North Carolina sounds and their inlets were shoal, shifting, badly charted and barred at the mouth, Topsail Inlet among them. Blackbeard had a legal exit in view. The royal Act of Grace was still on offer, Governor Charles Eden's North Carolina was a convenient jurisdiction for it, and a smaller establishment would have suited a man intending to come in, though his motive is only a possible reading.

10 June 1718

Entering the inlet, the Queen Anne's Revenge grounded on the sandbar across the mouth of the harbour. Captain Ellis Brand of HMS Lyme, reporting to the Admiralty, wrote that the pirates "endeavour'd To goe in to a harbor, call'd Topsail Inlett" and that "the Ship Stuck upon the barr att the entrance of the harbour". The sloop Adventure came up, to help work the flagship off or otherwise, and grounded in her turn, at a distance the surviving testimony puts "about Gun-shot from the said Thatch." Attempts to heave the flagship off failed and she bilged. Both vessels were lost where they lay.3

The stripping and the sandbar

Blackbeard took what he wanted from the wrecks. The most valuable plunder and the stores went into a smaller sloop. He kept back the men he judged fittest or most trustworthy and set a number of the rest ashore on a low sandbar in the inlet, with neither adequate provisions nor any means of getting off. The marooned party is reported at about fifteen in the depositions of Herriot and Pell and in the project account, and at seventeen in Rankin's narrative. They were taken off by Stede Bonnet, who had put into the same inlet, or otherwise rescued. No deaths among them are recorded.4

Herriot's word

David Herriot had been master of the Adventure before Blackbeard took her from him, and he was among the men left on the bar. In a deposition of 1718, taken in connection with the prosecution of Bonnet's company at Charles Town, he swore that "it was generally believed the said Thatch run his Vessel aground on purpose to break up the Companies, and to secure what Moneys and Effects he had got for himself and such others as he had most Value for." That sentence is the documentary basis of the deliberate grounding, and very little else stands behind it.5

Read closely, it says less than it is usually made to say. "Generally believed" is report rather than knowledge. Herriot is giving the opinion current in the company, in a deposition taken for a prosecution, and the whole strand is partisan. Against it stands Brand's account, written for the Admiralty rather than for a court, which frames the episode as an attempt to enter harbour and a ship caught out by the bar. Popular retellings have hardened it into settled fact and a signature act of treachery.

Bath, and after

Blackbeard made for Bath, where the accounts have him surrender to Governor Charles Eden and receive the King's pardon for himself and the men still with him. Bonnet went to Bath for his own pardon, then resumed piracy under an alias and was captured, tried and hanged at Charles Town later in 1718.6

Whatever the intention, the effect matched what the deliberate reading describes. A company of hundreds was broken up, a favoured minority kept the best of what had been taken, and men were left on a bar. Blackbeard came out of the inlet with a single sloop and a small crew. What followed was an ostensible retirement and a continued low level piracy along the Carolina coast, ending at Ocracoke on 22 November 1718 in the action led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard. The inlet is the hinge between the heavily gunned squadron off Charles Town and the diminished last months.7

The wreck off Beaufort Inlet

Topsail Inlet is now Beaufort Inlet. Intersal Inc. located a wreck off it, and the State of North Carolina announced confirmation of the site as the Queen Anne's Revenge. The identification rests on location, date, the size and armament of the vessel and a large, consistent artefact assemblage, not on any single object bearing the ship's name. That qualification tends to fall away in public presentation. Most scholars accept it. Cannon, anchors, navigational instruments and thousands of smaller artefacts have come off the site, which has made a thinly documented day in a Carolina inlet one of the best materially attested episodes of the Golden Age.8

What the sources cannot yet give is the primary paper. The date stands as "on or about 10 June 1718" because the accounts say around rather than on, and Brand's originals in the Colonial Office and Admiralty series at Kew have not been read. Neither have the full texts of the Herriot and Ignatius Pell depositions, printed in The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet and Other Pirates (London, 1719), the crux of the question, which survive to this account only in paraphrase. The number of men marooned, the officer commanding the Adventure and La Concorde's tonnage and armament are all unsettled between accounts; the French records of her owners at Nantes would fix the last. The surrender at Bath, and the terms Eden is said to have granted, come from the North Carolina project's account of the ship, no North Carolina paper of 1718 having been read for them.

What the evidence does not settle

Date of the grounding

  • Exact date of the grounding (about 10 June 1718) unsettledUnverified

Whether the grounding was deliberate

  • Whether the grounding was deliberate rests on Herriot's depositionDisputed
  • Ignatius Pell's corroborating deposition is known only by paraphrase

Tonnage and armament of La Concorde

  • Tonnage (200 to 300 tons) and guns (16 vs 40) divergeUnverified

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

  1. Blackbeard's flagship the Queen Anne's Revenge, formerly the French slave ship La Concorde taken by his consorts in the West Indies on 28 November 1717, grounded on the bar at the mouth of Topsail Inlet, now Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, on or about 10 June 1718 and was lost, the sources giving the date as around rather than on that day. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Institutional project history: North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project (NC DNCR), "Blackbeard's Story and Facts" and "On This Day, the Fate of a Ship was Sealed" (7 June 2018), qaronline.org
  2. As La Concorde the vessel is recorded at 200 tons with 16 cannon and a crew of about 75 at the time of her capture under the French captain Pierre Dosset, and as refitted she is credited with some 40 guns, a figure traced to Philip Gosse's compilation of 1924 with no period gun count for her yet found, the excavated wreck reading as at minimum a twenty-gun ship, and a tonnage put by some accounts as high as about 300; the figures diverge between sources and are carried here as ranges. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Institutional project history: North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "The Pirate Ship's Journey", qaronline.org
  3. The sloop Adventure, which came up at the grounding, ran aground and was lost as well, the surviving testimony placing her "about Gun-shot from the said Thatch", while Captain Ellis Brand of HMS Lyme reported to the Admiralty that the pirates "endeavour'd To goe in to a harbor, call'd Topsail Inlett" and that "the Ship Stuck upon the barr att the entrance of the harbour". Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Admiralty report and deposition, through institutional project history: Captain Ellis Brand of HMS Lyme, report to the Admiralty, quoted by the North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "Blackbeard's Story and Facts" and "On This Day, the Fate of a Ship was Sealed" (7 June 2018), qaronline.org
  4. Blackbeard stripped the two wrecks, transferred the most valuable plunder and stores into a smaller sloop, kept a reduced hand picked company, and put a number of the remaining men ashore on a low sandbar in the inlet without adequate provisions or means of getting off; the marooned party is reported at about fifteen in the depositions of David Herriot and Ignatius Pell and in the project account, and at seventeen in Rankin's narrative, and is carried as a range, and they were taken off by Stede Bonnet, who had put into the same inlet, or otherwise rescued, with no deaths recorded among them. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Depositions through institutional project history: North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "On This Day, the Fate of a Ship was Sealed" (7 June 2018), qaronline.org; the depositions of David Herriot and Ignatius Pell preserved in the 1719 Bonnet-trials print, for about fifteen; Hugh F. Rankin, The Pirates of Colonial North Carolina, for seventeen
  5. The claim that Blackbeard grounded the ship on purpose rests chiefly on the deposition of the sailing master David Herriot, taken in 1718 in connection with the prosecution of Stede Bonnet's company at Charles Town, which states that "it was generally believed the said Thatch run his Vessel aground on purpose to break up the Companies, and to secure what Moneys and Effects he had got for himself and such others as he had most Value for"; the phrase "generally believed" reports common opinion rather than direct knowledge of motive, and it stands against Ellis Brand's contemporaneous account of a failed attempt to enter harbour, so the deliberate reading is a strong and widely favoured tradition and not an established fact. Disputed The sources disagree, and we say how. Deposition and Admiralty report, through institutional project history: Deposition of David Herriot (1718), taken in the vice admiralty prosecution of Stede Bonnet and printed in The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet and Other Pirates (London, 1719), quoted by the North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, qaronline.org; Ellis Brand's report to the Admiralty, same source
  6. Blackbeard went from the inlet to Bath, North Carolina, and surrendered to Governor Charles Eden, receiving the King's Pardon under the royal Act of Grace for himself and the men remaining with him, in June 1718 soon after the grounding. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Institutional project history: North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "Blackbeard's Story and Facts", qaronline.org
  7. The grounding cost Blackbeard his two largest vessels and broke up a company reported in the hundreds, leaving him with a single sloop, a small crew and the greater share of the accumulated plunder, and it marks the pivot from the heavily gunned squadron that had blockaded Charles Town in late May 1718 to the diminished final phase of his career, which ended with his death at Ocracoke on 22 November 1718 in the action led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Institutional project history: North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project, "Blackbeard's Story and Facts", qaronline.org
  8. A wreck located off Beaufort Inlet by Intersal Inc. and announced by the State of North Carolina as the Queen Anne's Revenge is widely accepted as the ship lost in 1718, the identification resting on the convergence of location, date, size, armament and a large consistent artefact assemblage rather than on any single name bearing object, and the site has yielded cannon, anchors, navigational instruments and thousands of smaller artefacts. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Modern archaeology: North Carolina Queen Anne's Revenge project (NC DNCR), qaronline.org