Author: Jill Schuler, Research Fellow
You may be familiar with the Queen Anne's Revenge... but have you heard of La Concorde?
Blackbeard’s infamous ship Queen Anne’s Revenge is nearly as well-known as the pirate himself. But did you know Blackbeard only had QAR for seven months? Before becoming a pirate ship, QAR was a French slave ship called La Concorde. La Concorde was owned by a French slaver and merchant named René Montaudouin, who lived in Nantes, France. Blackbeard captured the ship only sixty leagues (approximately two hundred miles) from Martinique, where La Concorde was taking captive Africans to be sold into slavery.
“A Tale of Two Ships” (TOTS) is a project of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, with the goal to find more information about La Concorde and share its history more widely here in North Carolina. The project especially aims to learn about the captive Africans that La Concorde brought to the French colonies to be sold into enslavement. TOTS is funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) and collaborates with the Queen Anne’s Revenge Conservation Laboratory.
The first phase of the project in 2018 established what was known about the history of QAR/ La Concorde and how that information was shared in North Carolina. During the summer of 2019, research fellow Hannah Francis travelled to Nantes for ten days to see what additional information could be gathered about La Concorde. After it became clear that there was much more to learn and share, the project received a second grant in 2021 from the IMLS that funded a research fellow to travel to both France and Martinique to gather further information to bring back to North Carolina.
As the research fellow for the project, I travelled to France and Martinique during the first few months of 2024. During my travels, I spent a lot of time in the archives, tracking down additional documents about La Concorde. I also observed how historic sites in France and Maritime interpret the history of the slave trade. One of my archival discoveries, an insurance claim filed after Blackbeard took La Concorde, provides new information on the fates of the 516 captive Africans onboard La Concorde during its final crossing of the Middle Passage. Over the course of four blogs, this series will showcase discoveries from the archives and the historic sites visited in both France and Martinique. Stay tuned for the next update!
Images:
-Main image: A section of the insurance claim filed by Captain Pierre Dosset, after Blackbeard captured La Concorde, found at the Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique in Nantes, France. Image by NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
-Jill standing outside the Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique in Nantes, France. Image by NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
-A ship model of La Marie-Séraphique one of the most well-documented French slave ships, located at the Nantes’ History Museum, inside the Château des Ducs de Bretagne. Image by NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Jill Schuler is the research fellow for the Tale of Two Ships project, an IMLS grant-funded project of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission that is executed in partnership with the Queen Anne’s Revenge Conservation Laboratory. In 2023 she defended her MA thesis, “Guns and Ships and so the Balance Shifts: Using Artifact Patterning to Contextualize a Salvaged Assemblage Dated to the Battle of Yorktown, 1781,” graduating with her MA from the Maritime Studies program at East Carolina University. In addition to her work for the commission, Jill is the Assistant State Underwater Archaeologist for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. She is also a board member of the North Carolina Maritime History Council and associate editor of their peer-reviewed journal, Tributaries. Her research interests include maritime history and material culture during the Age of Sail, particularly the actions and interactions of British, American, and French merchant and whaling ships in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Jill’s work is funded by the NC African American Heritage Commission’s IMLS Award for MH-249108-OMS-21, “A Tale of Two Ships: Part Deux.”