Another passes over the bar-Philip Masters

[SteveS]

Just found out that friend/treasure hunter Philip Masters passed away recently from cancer. He was the President of Intersal, the group still looking for the El Salvador wreck, and the ones who found the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge.

I met Phil many years ago when he sold jewelry in Florida and New York, and he worked with us on a wreck project here in Florida. An ex-Marine, he loved the ocean and soon went to Canada and helped work on the wreck of the HMS Feversham as one of the divers, which produced many rare coins, especially early colonials like the Pine Tree shillings etc.

He was a great researcher, and I remember sitting with him in his apartment going over some research he had on the El Salvador, and him saying, this is the wreck I'm going to try and find. He soon got a lease for the area he believed the wreck to be, outfitted a salvage boat here in Florida, and was soon in North Carolina. He'd also dug up some research on Blackbeard's ship in the rare book section of the NY Public Library, which was also in the lease area and was another wreck he wanted to find. He'd visit libraries all over the country and Canada, and also studied at the University of Florida, where he learned to read the old Spanish and did research in their extensive map library.

Unfortunately, I lost contact with him in recent years and just found out he was sick. I wish his family all the best.

SteveS

 

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[WhiteHunter]

Re: Another passes over the bar-Phillip Masters

I rember when the Queen Anne's Revenge was on a tv program i recorded it. he was a classic guy

 

[ivan salis]

Re: Another passes over the bar-Phillip Masters

sad to lose a fellow researcher and treasure hunter -- Ivan

 

[SimonLakeSub]

Re: Another passes over the bar-Phillip Masters

Some years back Phillip Masters was a quest speaker, at South Street Seaport. (NYS) His talk on the Queen Anne's Revenge was simply awesome, and very well attended. The slides of the artifacts recovered from the wreck were excellent. After the talk we chatted for awhile, He seemed to be a great guy, He will be missed


Simon....

 

[piratediver]

Re: Another passes over the bar-Phillip Masters

I knew Phil well, he was a great guy and loved pirates as much as I do. I bet he is now drinking rum with Blackbeard, Kidd and Morgan among others.


Pirate diver





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August 23, 2007
Philip Masters, True Amateur of History, Dies at 70
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Philip Masters, whose passion was history, which he literally dived into to help find the undersea wreck of the ship of Blackbeard the pirate, died on Aug. 18 in the Bronx. He was 70.

The cause was a metastasized melanoma, his daughter Torrie Lloyd-Masters said.

Mr. Masters, whose jobs ranged from jewelry salesman to lighting executive to cabdriver to stockbroker, was that unusual amateur who succeeds in a professionalized field. He used evenings, weekends and vacations to burrow into 57 archival libraries in the United States and Europe and took an intensive course in Spanish paleography so he could read original documents in the archives in Seville, Spain.

His breakthrough came in 1987 in his favorite haunt, the rare-book room of the New York Public Library. He found a book published in 1719 in London that told of a pirate’s trial in Charleston, S.C., in November 1718. In the book’s appendix was an account of events in Beaufort Inlet off the coast of North Carolina in June 1718, when Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was lost.

Mr. Masters teamed up with archaeologists from North Carolina and other experts to pursue his hunch, and the eventual result was the discovery, in November 1996, of one of the most complete wrecks of a pirate ship ever found. It appeared to be that of Blackbeard, the self-proclaimed “devil’s brother” who was said to have forced a captive to eat his own ears.

Certainty is elusive after nearly three centuries, but there is strong evidence that the ship is indeed the Queen Anne’s Revenge, originally a French slave ship until Blackbeard commandeered it in 1717.

A dozen cannons and large anchors have been recovered, and no records exist of the sinking of a vessel of that size with so much armament in that vicinity other than the Queen Anne’s Revenge, National Geographic News reported in 2005. It added that maritime records of ships lost in the area in the decades before and after the Queen Anne’s Revenge were quite accurate.

A recovered bell was dated 1705, and the average date of 25 recoverable artifacts was 1706. Radioactive dating of the hull indicates it was built sometime between 1690 and 1710.

On the other hand, no records relating to the construction of the French ship have been found. And one cannon had the number 1730 scratched on its surface.

“I think they’ve got a very good case for this being the Queen Anne’s Revenge,” Cheryl Ward, a Florida State University maritime archaeologist not involved in the project, told National Geographic in 2005.

Philip Dominic Masters was born in Brooklyn on June 2, 1937, and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. A straight-A student, he enrolled at Princeton, but left to join the Marines, after which he began his peripatetic occupational path. A lot of it was spent at the Kennedy Electric Supply Company in Jamaica, Queens.

He began scuba diving more than 40 years ago and became interested in shipwrecks in the 1980s. In 1985 and 1986, he participated in the salvaging of the H.M.S. Feversham, a British warship that sank off Nova Scotia in 1711.

“That fueled the fire of him being interested in shipwrecks,” his daughter said.

Mr. Masters heard that Blackbeard’s ship was still waiting to be discovered off the North Carolina coast. He formed a private company called Intersal Inc., and managed to secure all the necessary permits for the area where he suspected the ship’s remains were. He brought in Mike Daniel, president of the nonprofit Maritime Research Institute, of Riviera Beach, Fla., to help pinpoint the location.

With just one day left on the permits, and with Mr. Masters away on business, Mr. Daniel found what they believed to be Queen Anne’s Revenge.

Both Mr. Masters and Mr. Daniel renounced rights to artifacts or profits from them. They helped the Division of Archives and History in the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, which is supervising salvage operations, although both have complained that the work has gone too slowly.

In addition to his daughter Ms. Lloyd-Masters, of Manhattan, Mr. Masters, who lived in Beaufort and was twice divorced, is survived by a son, John, of Gainesville, Fla.; two other daughters, Lisa Earls of Atlanta and Kim Hurley of Orlando, Fla.; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Masters’s research made him take a brighter view of Blackbeard, who had long been pictured as a bloodthirsty ogre who loved torturing victims and getting drunk. Mr. Masters came to believe that the English forced many sailors working under contract into piracy and found that on some ships they elected their captain by democratic vote. He contended that Blackbeard had killed no one until the day he himself was slain.

“Pirates were nowhere near the monsters they were made out to be,” Mr. Masters said in an interview with The New York Times in 1997.