 |
Video of the Wreck Site!
The Plank |
If it's Blackbeard's ship, who gets the booty?Everybody, it seems, wants a piece of the Queen Anne's Revenge, provided the shipwreck found last year off the North Carolina coast belonged to Blackbeard."Bath is interested. Hatteras is interested. Edenton is interested," says Betty McCain, the secretary of the State Department of Cultural Resources. "Any place Blackbeard put in is interested. We've heard from everybody from Maine to Miami." The politics of who gets what artifacts -- provided the ship did belong to Blackbeard -- will take years to resolve. But McCain says there should be plenty of stuff to go around. "Our long-range plan will have some big show somewhere, some (on display) in Raleigh and some up and down the coast where Blackbeard has been," McCain says. But that's not all. "We have talked about a traveling museum that could go all over North Carolina and even nationally," says Steve Claggett, the state archaeologist. "If this pans out like we think it will there will be tremendous interest. We could have web pages, virtual museums, a lot of ways to do this." Some of the plans are grandious and expensive. More than one person close to the project would like to see what's left of the QAR brought to the surface, preserved and placed on permanent display. Others want to see the state finance a replica of the ship and turn it into a floating museum that would travel up and down the coast. "That's my dream for the QAR," says state Sen. Bev Perdue, a Democrat from New Bern. "It really does belong to all the people."
|
Posted by The Depot and News & Record Online
© Copyright 1997