For seven days in May 1718, the largest naval force in the Western hemisphere boredown on the port of Charleston, South Carolina. Edward Thatch, if that was his real name, stood astride his 40-gun Queen Anne’s Revenge, the spear tip of an armada that outmanned, outgunned and outmaneuvered anything the British used to protect shipping lanes in the fledgling Americas. It was through terrorizing those corridors that the Captain’s reputation had come to precede him. Now, he was simply known as Blackbeard.

Armed to the teeth, face masked by a tangle of soot-colored hair, this was a pirate who recognized the power of PR. (Some historical accounts have him lighting hemp fuses tucked under his hat for added effect, making it seem as though his head was about to burst into flames.) In contrast to his seventeenth-century predecessors who hanged monks, little evidence exists that Blackbeard tortured and mutilated captives — but that doesn’t mean he didn’t threaten to do so. And so it was that as he entered Charleston harbor, he intercepted outgoing vessels and offered to send ashore hostages’ heads one by one until his ransom was paid.

Even for Blackbeard, blockading the wealthiest port in the Southeast was a move of raw audacity, perhaps even desperation: Topping his list of demands was a medicine chest, worth only about 400 pounds. (Among other items, the chest contained pure mercury, which he was in the habit of drawing into a curved syringe and injecting directly into his urethra, to battle syphilis. Some things are worth sticking up Charleston for.)

Ultimately, the medicine was delivered, the hostages were unharmed and Blackbeard’s fleet bolted north to the Outer Banks, to one of the most treacherous waterways on Earth. Less than a month later, the QAR slammed into a sandy shoal outside the tiny town of Beaufort, North Carolina. The 300-ton vessel keeled on its port side, Blackbeard and his men stripped what they could haul away and the Queen Anne’s Revenge sunk into the sand and was crushed by the waves.

By Davin Coburn

Photographs by Matthew Furman

Private Air; August/September 2008

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Today, North Carolina’s coast, a.k.a. “the Graveyard of the Atlantic,” is the final resting place for 5,000 vessels, covering centuries of captains tangling with these waters and losing. A single storm can shift sandbars and underwater terrain enough to make navigational charts obsolete. There are 110 known wrecks off the coast of Beaufort alone — the nearby Cape Lookout is referenced on sixteenth-century maps as Promontorium Tremendum, “the horrible headland” — and maritime history is the main industry in town. Even the local aquarium features a replica submarine in its shark tank.

For scuba divers like me, this is a playground. U-352, the Nazi predator found in these waters 33 years ago, is the most popular wreck to dive; the Queen Anne’s Revenge, however, is the coolest. Not only is it older and inherently more dramatic (it is a pirate ship), it’s largely off limits. North Carolina’s Department of Cultural Resources has declared the site a protected area, and the state’s Underwater Archaeology Branch allows only a few dozen divers to see it each year, exclusively through a $500 Dive Down program. If the excavation proceeds as planned, the QAR should be entirely salvaged by 2011, leaving three excursions still on this year’s docket (they’re already sold out, though spots sometimes open up) and the eight dives scheduled over each of the next two summers as your last chance.

Located at the southeastern crook of the Outer Banks, on a stretch of shoreline known as the Crystal Coast, Beaufort is a suitably isolated, and insulated, home to the Blackbeard legend. This is not the Outer Banks most East Coasters are familiar with — the Wright Brothers’ dunes, quaint kite stores and the snarl of traffic creeping through Duck and Nags Head. This Outer Banks is a more than four hours drive south of that one.

That’s if you drive. On a crystal-clear Tuesday morning, my dive buddy and I climb into a brand-new silver-and-white Cirrus at Westchester County Airport, just north of New York City. The aircraft is a base model SR22 — not even a Turbo — though it hardly matters. We pop off the ground in front of a JetBlue cattle car bound for Florida, then wind our way down the Hudson River and make a few low circles around “the Lady” in the harbor for photos.

We climb back to 10,000 feet, dial in the autopilot on the $500,000 plane and focus on the soundtrack. Side-yoke in hand, the coastline rolls beneath us, from the vast greenery of South Jersey into Delaware, across the Chesapeake and the always-curious site of the Lucius J. Kellam Jr. Bridge-Tunnel diving beneath the water at the bay’s mouth. Soon, we hit a razor-thin stretch of land off our left wing, guiding us out toward Cape Hatteras and then back over the wild horses roaming Shackleford Banks and into Michael J. Smith Field in Beaufort. The trip lasts just over two hours; it would have taken us longer to drive from Raleigh/Durham International Airport.

The canons at Fort Macon are part of Beaufort’s charm.

Our destination is an idyllic seaside town marked by weathered brick and history: grand old homes along Front Street, with sprawling porches and plaques marking their heritage; or the 300-year-old cemetery at the corner of Queen and Anne streets, where Wisteria vines climb the oak trees and cast shadows across wrought-iron gates and crumbling burial vaults. Nearby is Fort Macon, with arching staircases leading to canons aimed at the coastline, as they have since General Burnside’s troops re-seized them at the start of the Civil War.

The shrimp boats filter their catch at the north end of town, while the soul of the place is found in places such as the Beaufort Grocery, with its sweet-potato chips, and the 20-year-old port at Sharpies Grill & Bar. Also blessed with a generous complement of deepwater slips, as well as dozens of eight-bedroom rental properties with hot tubs on their decks out along the beach, the area would be a great weekend retreat even for people who aren’t divers. But, truth be told, Beaufort is a gem that doesn’t entirely want to be found. One afternoon, we relax in a century-old courtyard behind the Backstreet Pub, where we’re questioned by patrons who want to know why we have to encourage “people from New York” to visit.

Three centuries ago the town scraped by on an influx of goods brought into the ports — largely by pirates, whose black-market merchandise circumvented heavy British tariffs. “Pirates were, effectively, armed commodities brokers,” says Lindley Butler, the preeminent historian on North Carolina’s colonial period. “They were wealthy, and there were any number of widows looking for companionship at that time. After years of Indian wars, yellow fever, poor crop cycles and other basic hardships of colonial life, pirates were the least of their worries.”

It worked both ways: The unpredictable waterways and weak authority of the local officials made for a great hideout for sea wolves running from the gallows. Many pirates took wives, sired families and established homes here. Over the centuries, Beaufort has fretted about the seemliness of advertising its pirate roots. Since the release of the first Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003, though, pirate pride is again running high. In fact, says Chris Southerly, chief archaeologist for the QAR research program, the town suddenly seems to be full of people who claim they’re descendants of Blackbeard. It’s human nature. “Everyone wants to be related to the Captain Jack Sparrow character. Nobody goes around saying, ‘Yeah, my great-great-grandfather was the guy with the funny eye.’ ”

Left, the Cirrus SR22 made the trip from New York to the Outer Banks in just over two hours. Right, the view across New York Harbor.

For all his fame, everything we know of Blackbeard comprises less than two years of his life. The record picks up in the middle of 1717, just as he was making the transition from privateer — essentially a government-sanctioned pirate — to freelancer during Queen Anne’s War. He was no mindless raider. The Captain’s journal proves he could read and write, hardly a given at the time, and he appears to have been on the cutting edge of military technology and its various tactical, even surgical, applications. Naval forces in the seventeenth century destroyed vessels to cripple  an enemy’s ability to make war, but for a pirate, shredding a ship with canon fire was worse than overkill. It was bad for business.

In November 1717, just six months before his assault on Charleston, Blackbeard and his two small vessels of 20 guns and 150 men were sailing 100 miles off Martinique when they came upon the French frigate La Concorde. The 163-foot vessel was sailing from Guinea with 516 slaves and an illness-ravaged crew — perfect, in other words. After two volleys from Blackbeard’s canons, Concorde waved the white flag. Blackbeard enlisted four volunteers as new crew and forcibly conscripted the ship’s surgeons, carpenters, a cook and a musician. The rest were offered one of Blackbeard’s sloops and told to vamoose. The slaves were soon released.

The new captain promptly brought aboard more canons, doubling the ship’s total to 40.  In the weeks ahead, he picked up two smaller vessels, creating a fleet with 60 canons and 400 men. By this time, Blackbeard had dispensed with any loyalties to king or country, and over the next six months his force seized dozens of prizes in an epic tour of destruction. And with the unpopular German monarch King George I having succeeded Anne to the British throne, the pirate renamed his flagship the Queen Anne’s Revenge.

Left, the grandeur of Beaufort’s historic homes. Right, the town’s 300-year-old Burying Ground.

The Olympus dive boat is rocking. I’m assured these four-foot swells are nothing for the mouth of Beaufort Inlet, but I still stumble on deck as I hook my regulator to the tank. Between waves of nausea, I’m thinking back to the program’s two-day seminar about underwater archaeology and coastal geology. Blackbeard ran aground here in 12 feet of water; the seabed has shifted enough that the remains of the Queen Anne’s Revenge now lie 26 feet down in a scatter about 150 feet long and 75 feet wide. The ship could have been destroyed in as little as a week’s time, and three centuries of storms have since tried to grind it into nothingness. The site often sees three-knot wave speed on the bottom, enough to rip the mask off your head, with un-diveable spikes of eight knots. “Remember,” says Lauren Hermley, the program coordinator, “this wreck can hurt you a lot more than you can hurt it.”

We’ve finished a training dive on the Theodore Parker, a 441-foot cargo vessel that was sunk as an artificial reef in 1974. The idea was to adjust to limited visibility — these sites can have 20 feet of visibility, or they can have three — but there was enough for my group to find octopus, barracuda and a sand shark. As we settle over the QAR, the seasickness loses out to adrenaline.

Since noted treasure hunter Mike Daniels discovered the wreck in 1996, some debate remains about whether North Carolina Shipwreck 31CR314 is, in fact, Blackbeard’s famous frigate. In 1,477 dives on the site, researchers recovered shackles they believe held slaves, ship timbers that show a French fastening pattern, wine bottles, pewter and surveying instruments they say support their claim. Unearthing a bell with the words la concorde would pretty well end the discussion, but, as yet, nothing that definitive has been discovered. “Everything we’ve found to date — and that’s a lot — suggests this is the Queen Anne’s Revenge,” Butler says. “If we find a bell down there tomorrow from 1720, obviously we’ll rethink some things. But I’m convinced it’s the QAR.”

We draw straws for dive order. Two will stride in with each certified instructor; I’m part of the first team. Following the dive line into the green water, I find the visibility a step down from the Theodore Parker, but it adds to the drama. Hermley and I work our way north along guidelines on the seafloor, toward the bow of the wreck. And then seemingly from nowhere, a 13-foot-long, 3,000-pound anchor rises from the ocean floor. I circle it slowly, trying to imagine the men who forged it, and those who abandoned it here.

We wash 30 feet back toward the center of the wreckage, affectionately known as “the pile,” now covered with urchins, toadfish and rocks concretized to the iron artifacts. I run my hands across two more massive anchors, which are surrounded by a half-dozen canons — excavators have now found so many, they simply shift them around the site because the warehouse on land is full. We find barrel hoops and ballast stones from ports across the Atlantic.

There’s also gold here somewhere — the only mineral entirely stable in the ocean. The QAR was no treasure ship, but individual crewmembers carried gold dust, amounting to a total of about 20 pounds. Archeologists, and participants in the Dive Down program, have recovered thousands of gold flakes, most requiring tweezers, none of which would move a scale.

Part of the QAR’s rigging lies a few feet east of us; a chunk of the ship’s hull is just out of reach. But the water is beginning to churn. We can sense the breakers sweeping inland and toppling directly above our heads. It’s as if Mother Nature intends to once again shake humanity free from this shoal. Through the years, archeologists have had to clear one five-by-five-foot unit of sea floor four separate times, and there are days they use one induction dredge to dig out the other induction dredge. We check our dive computers, and I work my way back against the current to the north anchor, and reach out my hand for one last grasp of the iron shank.

Left, a diver chases Blackbeard’s ghost. Right, QAR program coordinator Lauren Hermley chats with the author.

That evening, a few of us gather at Bistro by the Sea, a piano bar in nearby Morehead City. Once I’ve downed my grog and tasty seared-tuna rations, I sit back and study the locals. After his ship’s foundering, Blackbeard moved his operations onto shore and became a celebrity in Beaufort. He took a teenage wife (either his second bride or his fourteenth, depending on which history you believe) and a stab at settling down. But domesticity seems not to have sat well with the pirate (he brutally prostituted his wife to his men) and, at any rate, was short-lived. He was killed on November 22, 1718, by a full-fledged invasion from the Virginia military, which lashed his severed head to the bow-sprit of one of his remaining sloops and sailed up the coast as a warning to other would-be ne’er-do-wells.

There are conflicting reports as to whether Blackbeard really fathered any children in Beaufort. As I compare the features in Bistro by the Sea to drawings I’ve seen, I wonder if these people would even want to claim him as a descendent if they thought about it. Over time Beaufort has become a town of artisans crafting wooden boats, and retirees selling canned preserves from their porches, a town that was shaken to its core by a murder early this year. Yet there’s still a canon in the Old Burying Ground, and a hint of stink eye that greets the 150-foot Browards that line the docks on holiday weekends. No, Blackbeard’s spirit will live on. Long after his ship’s final, fragile remnants have been pulled from the sea or crushed by its fury, something of the man will survive in stories ghastly and triumphant, heroic and horrible. Just the way a pirate tale should be.

The author reaches out for one of Blackbeard’s canons, now concretized after nearly 300 years on the sea floor.