DEEP INTO PIRATE HISTORY : BLACKBEARD'S SHIP REPORTEDLY FOUND OFF NORTH CAROLINA.

Byline: William J. Broad The New York Times

He was an ogre, tall, bloodthirsty, strong, with a booming voice, a savage appetite and a bushy black beard which hung down to his belly. Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, was one of history's most famous and cruel pirates, a man who apparently loved torturing his victims as much as he loved a drunken orgy.

Sailing from a base in North Carolina, he sacked and pillaged the Carolinas and the Caribbean during the golden age of piracy, directing a large fleet as well as his own flagship, a captured French merchantman which he packed with 40 guns. His bloody rampage was interrupted temporarily when his flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge, sank in June 1718 off the coast of Beaufort, N.C., seemingly lost to history with whatever cannons, cutlasses and plunder it may have carried. Blackbeard and his men escaped.

Now, a team of marine archeologists from a private company and the state of North Carolina have found what they believe to be the shattered hulk of Blackbeard's flagship lying off Beaufort in a watery graveyard strewn with hundreds of lost ships. On Monday in Raleigh they announced the discovery, which was made in November after a decadelong search.

The archeologists said the wreck already had yielded a foot-tall bronze bell, the brass barrel of a blunderbuss, a cannonball and a lead sounding weight. They said the big anchors and large number of cannons at the site strongly suggested that the ship is in fact the Queen Anne's Revenge, though positive identification has yet to be made.

``I'm 90 percent convinced this is the ship,'' Richard Lawrence, the underwater archeologist for the state of North Carolina, said in an interview. ``It all just falls into place - the date on the bell, the blunderbuss, the cannon that we've observed, the lack of any other candidate in this area. The ship is right where it should be.''

Proving its identity might take four or five years, Lawrence said. No matter what, the experts plan to excavate the ship as an archeological monument, putting its artifacts in a museum rather than selling them.

``It's a significant discovery,'' said Jeffrey Crow, director of the Division of Archives and History in the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, which oversees the underwater archeology work. ``Everything points to it being associated with Blackbeard.''

But, he said, no matter what its identity, the ship is old enough and well-enough preserved to make it ``the most important underwater archeology discovery since the USS Monitor,'' a Union ironclad that fought a famous Civil War battle in 1862 and was found in 1973.

Although lost treasure figures prominently in the Blackbeard legend, the experts said no booty was likely to be found if the ship proves to be Blackbeard's. Historical records suggest he took any treasure with him before the ship sank.

Still, they said the find was historically exciting because only one other pirate ship had ever come to light: the Whydah, the ship of Samuel (Black Sam) Bellamy, which sank off Cape Cod, Mass., in 1717. The new discovery is thus seen as likely to shed light on an era whose history is riddled with myths and distortions.

The sunken ship believed to be Blackbeard's lies less than two miles off the North Carolina coast in 20 feet of water. The area off North Carolina is often referred to as the Graveyard of the Atlantic because the sea bed there is littered with hundreds of vessels lost over the centuries.

The state is keeping the exact site of the wreck a secret because of the risk of plunder by modern pirates.

``It's in surprisingly good shape,'' Lawrence said of the sunken ship. ``We saw some evidence of wooden hull structure, and hopefully there's a good deal of that remaining.

``To us, that's as important as the artifacts. The hull might shed light on the historical accounts of this ship and teach us things about shipbuilding in the early 18th century that aren't recorded anywhere else.''

In the past decade or two, technological advances have opened much of the secretive sea to divers and robots, resulting in numerous discoveries. The wreck believed to be the Queen Anne's Revenge was found after a hunt begun in 1986 by Philip Masters, who now heads Intersal, a company in Boca Raton, Fla., which searches for historic shipwrecks.

``It's taken a lot of hard work,'' Masters said of the discovery in an interview. ``We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the decade, and we finally got lucky.''

Blackbeard unleashed his reign of terror from 1716 to 1718 in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coast of North America. Apparently he turned to piracy after a career as a privateer working for Britain during the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1701 to 1713.

Sailing from North Carolina (with whose governor he quietly shared his booty), Blackbeard attacked the coastal settlements of Virginia and the Carolinas. An 18th century writer called him a ``meteor'' that ``frightened America more than any comet.'' He also ventured throughout the Caribbean, capturing many ships and building a large fleet.

``Many who knew him thought him insane,'' Frank Sherry said in ``Raiders and Rebels,'' a 1986 book about pirates. Sherry said Blackbeard was happy to cow his victims with acts of outrageous terror. It is said that on one occasion he forced a captive to eat his own ears.

In May 1718, Blackbeard blockaded the harbor at Charleston, S.C., for a week, with Queen Anne's Revenge in the lead. In June, while coming up the coast after the action, the flagship ran aground on a sandbar as it tried to enter Beaufort Inlet. Eventually it sank, although Blackbeard is thought to have taken whatever booty was on the ship with him.

After a spell of drunken debauchery and feasting on Ocracoke Island off the tip of Cape Hatteras, Blackbeard was set upon by a force of British troops sent from Virginia, who killed him Nov. 22, 1718, during a bloody engagement. The famous pirate was beheaded, and the victors hung his head from the bowsprit of a conquering ship.