
DATE: Thursday, October 23, 1997            TAG: 9710230543

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: MOREHEAD CITY                     LENGTH:  100 lines

ENCRUSTED CANNONS THOUGHT TO BE PIRATE'SDIVERS BROUGHT TO THE SURFACE WEDNESDAY TWO HAEVY WEAPONS SUBMERGED ALMOST 300 YEARS.

A moray eel shot out of the top and seaweed slid off the bottom as the cannon's barnacle-encrusted barrel emerged from the ocean Wednesday for the first time in nearly three centuries.

Underwater archaeologists say the last person who saw the 8-foot-long cannon may have been Blackbeard when his prized pirate ship was sinking off North Carolina's coast in 1718.

Divers discovered 11 cannons this month near the remains of what they say may be the Queen Anne's Revenge. Wednesday afternoon, crews hoisted the first two of those guns off the sea floor.

Scientists are planning to scrape an almost inch-thick layer of shells and sediment from the badly rusted iron barrels. They hope to uncover an engraving that would show where and when the armaments were made. Such a stamp could help prove that the cannons were among the 40 that Blackbeard included in his on-board arsenal.

``One down, 39 to go,'' Gerry Compeau shouted as the first barrel broke the sea's surface at about 11 a.m. Compeau commanded the 90-foot state research vessel Dan Moore carrying the crane that lifted the cannons. The shipwreck sits in about 20 feet of water two miles off Beaufort - within sight of the sandy shore.

``These cannons could've shot nine-, 12-, up to 24-pound balls,'' Leslie Bright said, running his hand along the broad barrel resting on wooden wedges aboard the state ship. ``Ordinarily, it would've taken five people to load and fire this thing. But you could've done it with two or three.

``Blackbeard had more than 400 pirates in his command. So he would've had plenty of hands to man 40 guns - as long as most of them weren't drunk,'' Bright said. ``And many of those pirates probably were.''

Sitting on a pile of ballast rock, buried about half-way up their barrels in sand, the cannons weigh 2,200 and 2,500 pounds apiece. They have fist-size knobs on each side in the center that probably were mounted onto the ship's decks. Balls they fired probably were as big as shot puts.

But the openings at the end are so encrusted now that they're only a silver-dollar wide.

``We're going to spend all winter cleaning these things up. They'll be stored in two freshwater tanks so we can work on them,'' Bright said. ``Right now, we think they could've been made in England, France or Spain.

``But you never know with Blackbeard - he captured ships from several countries, disabling at least 20 in the Caribbean even before he made his famous blockade on Charleston.''

Just as the pirate plundered the world's oceans, his sunken ship has attracted media attention across the globe. Television and newspaper crews from as far away as Australia and South Africa have called the tiny town of Beaufort seeking information about the underwater artifacts that may have belonged to Blackbeard. Camera crews from The Discovery Channel were shooting a documentary of Wednesday's dive.

``Blackbeard's mystique is incredible. Everyone from age 3 to 83 is interested in this outlaw,'' said Phil Masters, whose private dive company found the shipwreck about a year ago while searching for a sunken Spanish treasure ship. ``It's as if he was the original boogie man.''

An English privateer who historians say was named Edward Teach, Blackbeard captured the ship he renamed Queen Anne's Revenge in 1717. The wooden vessel, probably made of white oak, was 103 feet long, 24 1/2 feet wide and required at least 13 feet of water to float. It was built in Britain in 1710 and was one of four ships the pirate commanded when he anchored his operations off the central coast of North Carolina.

In May 1718, Blackbeard's reign of terror peaked when his crew blockaded Charleston, S.C., for more than a week demanding medicine from the local officials. On his way back up the coast the next month, Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge became grounded on a sandbar near Beaufort and sank. Blackbeard was killed during a battle off Ocracoke Island six months later.

Historians say there probably isn't any treasure on board the pirate's flagship because he would have had time to transfer it to another boat while the Queen Anne's Revenge was sinking.

But the shipwreck itself is an invaluable historic treasure, underwater archaeologists say.

So far they've found two anchors, a grappling hook, ship's rigging tackle, a plate believed to be made of pewter, several pieces of a thick ceramic storage container, broken bits of glass bottles and fragments of barrel hoops. The cannons are the heaviest artifacts uncovered - and the first big ones to be brought out of the ocean. Five divers, 45 crew members and four boats spent about six hours Wednesday lifting the guns with truck-sized air bags and an industrial crane.

``We're just scratching the surface of this whole thing. We've done very little excavating so far. We've only retrieved what's been sitting on the sand,'' diver Steve Brodie said. ``We hope to get some digging in soon to see what else is out there. This is a fantastic find.'' ILLUSTRATION: ARMAMENT OFF BLACKBEARD'S SHIP

[Color Photo]

DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot

Leslie Bright, an underwater archaeologist with East Carolina

University, guides one of the cannons believed to have been

Blackbeard's.

DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot

Exuberant underwater archaeologists watch as one of the two

retrieved cannons is weighed on the deck of the research vessel Dan

Moore. One weighs 2,200 pounds; the other, 2,500.

Blackbeard