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Blackbeard's wreck found?

Blackbeard didn’t leave any fingerprints. No DNA. No signed confession.
Just a shipwreck. And a mystery.

The wreck, if found, likely would contain a mound of cannons, hand grenades, lead shot, trade beads, slave shackles, a syringe for treating syphilis and some flakes of gold.

As for the mystery, that’s been playing out for 10 years, far longer than anyone expected.

For the past decade, scores of historians, scientists and archaeologists have sifted through just such a cache of artifacts, found in the murky, turbulent waters of Beaufort Inlet.

That’s where Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, hit the sand 289 years ago next week.

The researchers hope to discover a definitive link between the objects — described as the richest collection of artifacts ever unearthed in North Carolina waters — and Blackbeard, the most fearsome and famous of pirates.

"We haven’t found ... the smoking blunderbuss," said Jeffrey Crow, a deputy secretary of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources. "It’s like a crime-scene investigation, just like 'CSI,’ just like 'Law & Order.’ "

But those working on the project think they’ve solved the mystery.
Read entire article at http://www.news-record.com (Greensboro, NC)