The about 2500 to 3000-pound anchor is the largest artifact yet recovered from the wreck of the ill-famed pirate's flagship.
The anchor, one of four carried alongside the ship, was atop a pile of detritus, which appears to be the ends of the middle part of the ship, including its cargo hold, said Mark Wilde-Ramsing, a deputy state archaeologist and director of the Queen Anne's Revenge project.
Next week, Wilde-Ramsing said, researchers hope to make a small test hole into the side of the pile where the anchor was removed to get a sense of what else might be out of sight there. They're especially keen to find organic material such as seeds and spores that could help detail the pirates' stops in alien ports.
Queen Anne's Revenge was in the beginning the French slave ship La Concorde that Blackbeard and his band captured in the fall of 1717 in the Caribbean and renamed. It led a four-ship pirate fleet that hunted for prey in the Caribbean over the winter, and then moved up the U.S. coast in the spring of 1718.
After stoping Charleston and holding hostages until frightened residents handed over a chest of medicine as redeem, the pirates ran their flagship aground near the inlet leading to Beaufort in what some think was an intentional act by Blackbeard to reduce the size of the fleet.
Blackbeard, an Englishman whose real name was thought to be Edward Teach, was killed by Royal Navy sailors in a battle near Ocracoke.
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