Pirates may have liked books as much as treasure!

Posted by: admin , January 18, 2018

Researchers believe that pirates may have liked books as much as treasure after finding fragments of a book aboard Blackbeard’s ship Queen Anne’s Revenge!
Blackbeard and his crew captured and renamed the ship in 1717 before using it to plunder the seas.
Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground in 1718, with the shipwreck found off the coast of North Carolina in 1996.
The discovery of shreds of paper in warm waters of a 300-year-old shipwreck is said to be ‘almost unheard of’.
Although the largest piece of paper was the size of a quarter, words “south”, “fathom” and particularly ‘Hilo’ were visible, which lead researchers to a 1712 first edition book of by Capt. Edward Cooke titled “A Voyage to the South Seas, and Round the World, Peform’d in the years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711″.
According to Kimberly Kenyon, a conservator at the QAR Conservation Lab in Greenville, some pirates were literate, but it’s not possible to determine whether this book belonged to a pirate or a captive.
Another conservator Erik Farrell says the book might have been used as wadding to be stuffed behind a cannonball.
In other pirate news, a female Jack Sparrow impersonator from Ireland married the ghost of an 18th century Haitian pirate called Jack (who is said to look like Jack Sparrow). The pair married in international waters, with the assistance of a medium who spoke for Jack.