Reply #18: It needed to be re-fitted and re-nailed, something Blackbeard did not have the means to get done

[happyslug]

In the days of wooden ships, every ship needed to be re-fitted about once every two years, all the nails holding together would have rusted out by then, and thus needed to be "beached" and all the nails replaced with new nails(an exception was the ships of the Persian Gulf, which used no nails, held together by ropes instead).

The Queen Anne's Revenge was to big to be beached AND then re-floated using the tides and the crew (which is how all wooden ships were re-fitted from late Roman times till the late Middle ages, when ships started to get bigger). You can do that with smaller ships but not ships the size as large as the Santa Maria (the Mayflower and Queen Ann's Revenge were both much larger then the Santa Maria, Ships started to get larger around 1200, getting to big for just the crew to re-nail by 1500, finally after about 1750 you had to put them in "dry-dock" to re-nail them).

Now, the above time reference is for the largest ships of the time period. Most ships stayed much smaller, just look at the Nina and the Pinata compared to the Santa Marie, or even the Maria Celeste of the mid-1800s. Such small ships were preferred by Pirates for the simple reason it was repairable by the crew without having to get help from other people to re-fit the Ship?

Thus by the time of the wreck of the Queen Anne's revenge, it needed to be re-fitted, new nails, rotten wood replaced etc. The problem was how such a large Ship? How was Blackbeard to get this done? Blackbeard could not just abandon it, for it was a "prize" and thus the property of the crew. Blackbeard's solution was simple, wrack it, recover what you could and blame it on bad luck. This is is the best explanation to why it was wrecked the Queen Anne's revenge.

The Queen Anne's revenge had a displacement of about 200 tons.

http://www.qaronline.org/History/search.htm

The other two ship used by blackbeard were sloops of only:

More on "Careening" when a ship is beached for repairs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careening

More on Sloops, about the largest ship you car beached and re-float after repairs are finished:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloop

Please note Sloop-of War are much Larger then Commercial Sloops(Pirates used Commercial Sloops NOT Sloops-of-War). The USS RANGER was a US Sloop-of war had a displacement of 308 tons in 1777:

http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/r/ranger.htm

The Marie Celeste of 1861 was a "Brigantine" A Slightly larger Vessel, it only had a displacement of 198 tons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste