hree hundred years ago he used them to capture both merchant vessels and headlines. Now Blackbeard's cannon are capturing public attention again.

On May 9, divers working with Carolina's Institute of Marine Sciences and a slew of other North Carolina institutions—UNC-Wilmington, East Carolina and Appalachian State universities, the state's Department of Cultural Resources, and others—hoisted from the seafloor a half-ton chunk of barnacle and stone that may contain a cannon from the Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard's sunken flagship.

A private company found the shipwreck site in 1996. Researchers found this particular cannon, which they've dubbed Baby Ruth 2, last fall. But they couldn't bring the cannon to the surface until they could build a suitable tank in which to clean and preserve it.

Baby Ruth 2 is the fifth cannon to be raised from the wreck, and magnetic tests indicate that up to 40 more cannon lie buried at the site.

There's still no conclusive proof that the ship lying just off the Carolina coast is the Queen Anne's Revenge. But researchers hope to find their smoking gun soon. The wreck's cannon are of various sizes and origin, unlike the more uniform setup that would have appeared on a naval vessel. In fact, this wreck will eventually yield the most diverse array of cannon yet to be recovered from one ship.

iologists have identified the wreck's hull wood as white oak and red pine, which is consistent with the building records of the Concorde, the ship Blackbeard captured and renamed the Queen Anne's Revenge. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the trees used to build the hull grew in the mid-1600s. The Concorde was built around 1713.

As the mystery unfolds, researchers are using sophisticated instruments to track changes on the seafloor that might affect the wreck. Jesse McNinch, a visiting research assistant professor at Carolina, says that the information researchers are gathering will create a conceptual model that will help predict the long-term fate of cultural resources in coastal waters.

"Blackbeard's misfortune has given us an incredible opportunity to understand the processes controlling the fate of artifacts in the marine environment," McNinch says.