National Geographic Tales of the Weird

by David Braun

  Queen Anne’s Revenge

  Blackbeard’s brief career as a pirate lasted only about two years, but during that time he became one of history’s most feared outlaws. Operating in the West Indies and off the coast of colonial America, he struck terror into the hearts of commercial ships’ captains and once held the entire city of Charleston, South Carolina, hostage.

  After running aground on a sandbar in 1718 near the town of Beaufort, Blackbeard’s ship was abandoned but likely remained intact and partly above water for as long as a year before collapsing and disintegrating, according to archaeologist David Moore of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

  Blackbeard’s Sword?

  Because the ship remained above water for so long, “the pirates would have had ample opportunity to take anything that they thought valuable,” said Moore. The newfound hilt may have been left behind because it was unwanted, or it may have been inaccessible, according to Moore’s colleague Wendy Welsh, a conservator on the project. Could this partly gilded hilt have held Blackbeard’s sword? There’s no way to know for sure.

  (Photo Credit 8.14)

  Not the Jolly Roger

  According to legend, Blackbeard’s distinctive pirate flag inspired fear in his enemies when they saw it flying from his ship. On a black background, the flag depicted a skeleton toasting the devil with one hand and thrusting a spear into a heart with the other.

  Elegantly Wasted

  Recovered from the wreck site in 2008, the sword’s quillon (also known as a crossguard) could have been made in England or France, according to Welsh. Beyond the hilt, only a stump of the blade remains, but Welsh said Jan Piet Puype, a Dutch arms historian, thinks the weapon was probably relatively short and was carried by a gentleman with some status—at least before a pirate got hold of it.

  Although it could have been used for self-defense, the sword was mainly a decorative accessory and was manufactured sometime between the mid-17th century and the early 18th century, according to Puype.

  In 2010, divers recovered a carved antler believed to be the sword’s handle, two years after the quillon was found. Experts hope to determine the antler’s origin, which could help pinpoint where the weapon was made, Welsh said. But, she added, there’s “no way of knowing” how the sword ended up aboard Blackbeard’s flagship.

  Archaeology in Bloom

  Where others see flowers and faces, Queen Anne’s Revenge experts see evidence on the part of the sword’s handle called the pommel. For example, the flowers are irises—aka fleurs-de-lis, the royal emblem of France. Before Blackbeard captured the ship and renamed it the Queen Anne’s Revenge, it had been a private French slave ship, Le Concorde. The pommel’s floral embellishments may be clues that the sword too originated in France.

  Deadeye

  The newly revealed, 3-foot-long (91-centimeter-long) wooden deadeye, a pulley that would have helped hold sails in place on the pirate flagship, is almost completely encrusted. The deadeye survived the ocean waters that claimed most of the rest of the Queen Anne’s Revenge because the pulley became overgrown with minerals and was buried for almost 300 years in sand and sediment. Until they can remove the minerals and treat the artifact so it won’t deteriorate in air, conservators are keeping the deadeye underwater in a lab tank.

  TRUTH:

  THERE ARE NO ACCOUNTS OF BLACKBEARD EVER BURYING TREASURE.

  Blackbeard’s Staying Power

  Divers have been removing artifacts from the wreck site since it was discovered in the mid-1990s. Only about half of the wreck site has been excavated, which should leave archaeologists with plenty to do.

  WALL OF THE WISE KING

  King Solomon’s Wall Found

  Proof of Bible Tale?

  A 3,000-year-old defensive wall might be unprecedented archaeological support for a Bible passage on King Solomon.

  A 3,000-year-old defensive wall possibly built by King Solomon has been unearthed in Jerusalem, according to the Israeli archaeologist who led the excavation. The discovery appears to validate a Bible passage, she says.

  Solomon’s Wall?

  The tenth-century B.C. wall is 230 feet (70 meters) long and about 20 feet (6 meters) tall. It stands along what was then the edge of Jerusalem—between the Temple Mount, still Jerusalem’s paramount landmark, and the ancient City of David, today an Arab neighborhood called Silwan.

  The stone barrier is part of a defensive complex that includes a gatehouse, an adjacent building, and a guard tower, which has been only partially excavated, according to Eilat Mazar, who led the dig for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the years, the structures have been partially demolished—their building materials scavenged for later structures—and what remained was buried under rubble, Mazar said.

  Fill’er Up

  A standard bottle of wine holds 0.75 liter (about 0.20 gallon), but wine aficionados can purchase larger bottles that have special names. A “Solomon” is one of the largest. Named for the biblical king, it holds 20 liters (5.2 gallons)—26 times as much as a standard bottle of wine.

  The Bible’s First Book of Kings—widely believed to have been written centuries after the time period in question—says Solomon, king of Israel, built a defensive wall in Jerusalem. The new discovery is the first archaeological evidence of this structure, Mazar says.

  Bearing Out a Bible Passage?

  Ancient artifacts found in and around the complex pointed Mazar to the tenth-century B.C. date. “We don’t have many kings during the tenth century that could have built such a structure, basically just David and Solomon,” she said.

  According to the Bible, King David, of David-and-Goliath fame, was the father of King Solomon, who is said to have built the First Temple of Jerusalem on the Temple Mount. Ceramics found near the wall helped narrow the date down, being of a level of sophistication common to the second half of the tenth century B.C.—King Solomon’s time, according to Mazar.

  Three-foot-tall (one-meter-tall) earthenware storage vessels were found near the gatehouse, one of them with a Hebrew inscription indicating the container belonged to a high-ranking government official. Figurines typical of tenth-century B.C. Jerusalem—including four-legged animals and large-breasted women likely symbolizing fertility—were also uncovered, as were jar handles bearing impressions reading “to the king” and various Hebrew names, she said.

  An excavated Jerusalem site includes a wall claimed to have been built by the biblical King Solomon. (Photo Credit 8.15)

  The artifacts may hint at the areas street life in biblical times. Here ancient Jerusalemites would have gathered around the wall’s city gate to trade, settle disputes via street-side judges, engage in ritual practices, and stock up on water and supplies for treks out of the city, Mazar said.

  “I think that with archaeology, we need to use every possible source of data at our disposal. If you were interested in ancient India, you’d want to have an objective look at the Mahabharata. We try to create an objective historical archaeology.”

  Thomas Levy

  anthropologist, University of California, San Diego, on the importance of considering diverse sources of information when examining a historical site

  How Reliable Is the Bible?

  Tel Aviv University archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, who was not involved in the excavation, agrees that it’s possible King Solomon constructed the wall. But Finkelstein cautioned against leaning too heavily on the Bible to interpret the findings.

  Familiarity with religious or historic texts connected to any given site is important, he said, but their usefulness can vary. “It depends upon the text. Each has its own characteristics, each needs to be approached differently,” he said. “There is the question as to when it was written—300 years after, or at the time of the events? What are its goals and its ideology? Why was it written?”

  For her part, Mazar believes it’s natural for archaeologists excavating in the Holy Land to consult with biblical texts along with other ancient documen
ts. “I don’t believe there is an archaeologist who would excavate a site upon which texts have been written without being familiar with those texts,” she said.

  CRYSTAL SHIP

  Vikings Navigated

  With Translucent Crystals?

  Vikings may have navigated by looking through a type of crystal called Icelandic spar, a new study suggests.

  In some Icelandic sagas—embellished stories of Viking life—sailors relied on so-called sunstones to locate the sun’s position and steer their ships on cloudy days. These sunstones have turned out to be a true part of the story, a new study says.

  “The Vikings could have discovered this, simply by choosing a transparent crystal and looking through it through a small hole in a screen. The … knowledge of the polarization of light is not necessary.”

  Guy Ropars

  physicist and study researcher, University of Rennes, France

  Polarizing Properties

  Sunstones would have worked by detecting a characteristic of sunlight called polarization. Polarization is when light—which normally radiates randomly from its source—encounters something, such as a shiny surface or fog, that causes the rays to assume a particular orientation.

  Due to this property, as sunlight moves through the atmosphere, the resulting polarization gives away the direction of the original source of the light. Detecting light’s polarization is a natural ability of some animals, such as bees.

  In 1969, a Danish archaeologist suggested real-life Vikings might have employed sunstones to detect polarized light, using the stones to supplement sundials, stars, and other navigational aids. Since then, researchers have been probing how such a sunstone might have worked. On that point, though, the sagas were silent.

  Crystal Clear?

  Now, Guy Ropars, a physicist at the University of Rennes in France, has conducted an experiment with a potential Viking sunstone: a piece of Icelandic spar recently found aboard the Alderney, a British ship that sank in 1592.

  In the laboratory, Ropars and his team struck the piece of Icelandic spar with a beam of partly polarized laser light and measured how the crystal separated polarized from unpolarized light. By rotating the crystal, the team found that there’s only one point on the stone where those two beams were equally strong—an angle that depends on the beam’s location.

  That would enable a navigator to test a crystal on a sunny day and mark the sun’s location on the crystal for reference on cloudy days. On cloudy days, a navigator would only be able to use the relative brightness of the two beams.

  The team then recruited 20 volunteers to take turns looking at the crystal outside on a cloudy day and measuring how accurately they could estimate the position of the hidden sun. Navigators subdivide the horizon by 360 degrees, and the team found that the volunteers could locate the sun’s position to within 1 degree.

  The results confirm “that the Icelandic spar is an ideal crystal, and that it can be used with great precision” for locating the sun, said ecologist Susanne Akesson of Sweden’s University of Lund, who was not part of Ropars’s research team.

  In 2010, Akesson and her colleagues showed how local weather conditions may have influenced how light polarizes in the sky at Arctic latitudes, something Vikings would have needed to account for in their navigation. “But the question remains,” she said, “whether [Icelandic spar] was in common use” in Viking times.

  On that point, physics is also silent.

  TRUTH:

  ICELAND SPAR IS A PURE, TRANSPARENT FORM OF CALCITE, AND IS ALSO KNOWN AS ICELAND CRYSTAL.

  DE SOTO WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA

  Jewelry Shows De Soto Deeper in U.S. Than Originally Thought

  The path of 16th-century conquistador Hernando de Soto may need to be redrawn, thanks to a “stunning” jewelry find in Georgia.

  Under a former Native American village in Georgia, deep inside what’s now the United States, archaeologists say they’ve found 16th-century jewelry and other Spanish artifacts. The discovery suggests an expedition led by conquistador Hernando de Soto ventured far off its presumed course—which took the men from Florida to Missouri—and engaged in ceremonies with Native Americans in a thatched, pyramid-like temple.

  TRUTH:

  HERNANDO DE SOTO IS BEST KNOWN FOR DISCOVERING THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER.

  A New Route

  The discovery could redraw the map of de Soto’s 1539 to 1541 march into North America, where he hoped to replicate Spain’s overthrow of the Inca Empire in South America. There, the conquistador had served at the side of leader Francisco Pizarro.

  A continent and five centuries away, an excavation organized by Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History found buried glass beads, iron tools, and brass and silver ornaments dating to the mid-1500s. The southern Georgia location—where they’d been searching for a 17th-century Spanish mission—came to be called the Glass Site.

  “For an Indian in the South 500 years ago, things like glass beads and iron tools might as well have been iPhones,” said project leader Dennis Blanton, an independent archaeologist who until recently was Fernbank’s staff archaeologist.

  “These were things that were just astonishing to them. They were made of materials that were unknown and were sometimes in brilliant blue and red colors that were unmatched in the native world.”

  Blanton called the finding a “stunning surprise.” Prior to the discovery, it had been generally accepted that de Soto and his men had crossed a river about 100 miles (160 kilometers) upstream of the site, but archaeologists hadn’t suspect that the expedition had ventured so far south and east.

  The trove of items—all of which could fit into a shoe box—represents the largest collection of early 16th-century Spanish artifacts ever found in the U.S. interior outside of Florida, according to Blanton, whose work was funded in part by the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration.

  Quid Pro Quo?

  Excavations by Blanton’s team suggest that a large building with a thatched, pyramid-shaped roof once stood at the Glass Site. The structure was surrounded by a ditch, contained a large central hearth, and may have served as an important ceremonial center or temple.

  This illustration shows de Soto crossing Georgia’s Ocmulgee River as Ichisi Indians watch. (Photo Credit 8.16)

  The concentration of Spanish artifacts at the Glass Site suggests de Soto may have participated in a gift-exchange ceremony with the town’s chief and other leaders. It’s not known what the Spaniards would have received in return, but they commonly asked for food, information, free passage, baggage carriers, and perhaps female company Blanton said.

  By comparing the archaeological results with journal accounts by the Spanish party, Blanton and his team think the Glass Site was an important village in a province ruled by the Ichisi Indians. The team also believes de Soto and his men stayed there between March 30 and April 2, 1540, according to journals.

  Native American Noshes

  Many of our yummiest snacks have their origins in Native American culture. Here’s a small sample:

  1. Chewing gum: The Aztec chewed chicle, a latex from the sapodilla tree.

  2. Chocolate: Two thousand years ago the Maya cooked up Earth’s first chocolate from cacao beans.

  3. Vanilla: Indians in what is now Mexico first used the pods of the vanilla orchid to flavor their food.

  4. Popcorn: Some Indians roasted cobs over a fire, weenie-roast style. And in South America the Moche made popcorn poppers out of pottery.

  The Man Who Fell to Earth

  De Soto’s party consisted of more than 600 men and hundreds of pigs and horses—animals that many of the Indians had never seen before. “There are accounts in the chronicles of how Indians at first imagined the mounted men to constitute a single creature,” Blanton said.

  To encourage cooperation among the Indians and avoid conflict, de Soto sometimes claimed to be a god. “De Soto took advantage of the fact that the Indians revered the sun and eve
n at Ichisi made the claim to be descended from it,” Blanton said.

  By 1540, rumors of an “alien people” had already spread among Native Americans in southeastern North America, but few Indians would have encountered any Europeans in the flesh, he said. “A de Soto encounter would have been for most, if not all, of the people at the Glass Site a wholly new—and undoubtedly startling—experience,” Blanton said.

  The fact that there is no evidence of mass killing or vandalism at the Glass Site suggests de Soto and his men were treated well during their stay, he added. And in fact Spanish journal records say the Spaniards were lavished with food and hospitality at an Ichisi village, which Blanton suspects was the Glass Site settlement.

  This wasn’t always the case.

  “The Spaniards often treated the Natives very badly, and when the local people did not accede to their demands, de Soto would usually take the local leader hostage until he got his way,” said Jeffrey Mitchem, a de Soto scholar with the Arkansas Archeological Survey, who was not involved in the discoveries. “Usually their demands for food and young women wore out their welcome very quickly,” Mitchem said, “so the natives were almost always trying to make them leave as rapidly as possible.”

  Perhaps a Lost Colony

  Mitchem agreed that the discoveries support the idea that de Soto and his men camped for several days at the Glass Site. “Many of the specific types of artifacts that have been found at [Glass Site] are the same types recovered from other sites that were contacted by the Hernando de Soto expedition,” he said.