Thache Captures La Concorde or Queen Anne's Revenge

QAR at the island of Bequia

Until other primary evidence appears to support Johnson-Mist’s claim and effectively disputes the French depositions, Edward Thache must be credited for the capture of La Concorde or Queen Anne's Revenge. Too much reliance has traditionally been placed on Johnson-Mist’s work. Even Angus Konstam, who had the French evidence available to him and performed an excellent analysis of these events, still became confused and still referred to Thache as Hornigold’s “pupil” and “former protégé,” and Hornigold as his “mentor.”  Again, there is no reason to assume any of this, aside from Johnson-Mist’s erroneous revision. This bias still plagues every good analysis. 

There is a document preserved at the Centre des archives d’outre-mers in Aix en Provence, France, dated December 10, 1717, that illuminated the results of this event. Written by one Mesnier, the Steward of Martinique, it stated:

The 7th of this month arrived here a ship captained by Pierre Dosset [of] Nantes with 246 negroes, black women, black male female children under 13 [later totals from two trips were quoted at 171 males, 147 females, 47 boys, 9 girls, and total of 374]. This captain left Nantes[, France] on April 12 last commanding the ship La Concorde to trade Negroes on the coast of Guinea [Africa] where it had arrived on July 8 and, after trading 516 negroes left 2 October to make his return to this Isle. But on 28 November, being 60 leagues from here by 14 degrees by 27 minutes of latitude north, having been attacked by two English pirate ships, one 12 and the other of 8 guns armed with 250 men commanded by Englishman Edouard Titche, was taken by the pirates with 455 Negroes, who left said Dosset with his crew in the Grenadines on the island of Bequia near Grenada.

Sample of December 10, 1717 correspondance of Governor François de Pas de Mazencourt, marquis de Feuquières of the Windward Islands, FR ANOM COL C8A 23 F° 39.

René Montaudoin, owner of La Concorde (later, QAR), operated his slave trade from the French port of Nantes.  Generally, they would pick up a cargo on the West African coast and sail them to the West Indies.  This last voyage of 1717 was the third of its career under Montaudoin’s ownership. Disease and the hardships of the Middle Passage claimed sixteen crew and sixty-one of 516 total slaves. Depositions by Captain Pierre Dosset and Lieutenant Francois Ernaut explained the events of their capture by Thache on November 28, 1717. Ernaut testified that two pirate sloops attacked the slave ship La Concorde: one with 120 men and twelve cannon, and the other with thirty men and eight cannon (see figure). This estimate was 100 pirates shy of his captain’s.  

Edward Thache captured QAR without Benjamin Hornigold's help... regardless of what that literary pirate Capt. Charles Johnson may have written 300 years ago.



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