Whydah Gally

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The Whydah Gally was the flagship of the pirate "Black Sam" Bellamy. The ship sank in a storm off Cape Cod on April 26, 1717, taking Bellamy and the majority of his crew with it.

The Whydah was first launched in 1715 from London, England. A three-masted ship of galley-style design, it measured 31 meters in length and weighed 300 tons. It was christened Whydah after the West African trading post of Ouidah (pronounced WIH-dah), and was configured as a heavily-armed trading and transport ship for use in the Atlantic slave trade, carrying goods from England to exchange for slaves in West Africa. It would then travel to the Caribbean to trade the slaves for precious metals and medicinal ingredients, which would then be transported back to England.

In February of 1717, the Whydah was attacked by pirates led by "Black Sam" Bellamy, who captured the ship and its cargo. At this time, Bellamy was in possession of two smaller vessels, the Sultana and the Mary Anne (or Marianne), and decided to take the Whydah as his new flagship. The Whydah's captain, Lawrence Prince, was given the Sultana by Bellamy, who sailed on to the Carolinas and headed north along the eastern coastline of the American colonies, heading for Maine.

Accounts differ as to the destination of the Whydah during its last weeks. Some legends recount that Bellamy wanted to visit his mistress, Maria Hallett, who lived near the tip of Cape Cod, while others blame the Whydah's route on navigator error. In any case, the Whydah diverted its route to Cape Cod and, on April 26, 1717, sailed into a violent storm. The ship was driven ashore at Wellfleet, Massachusetts and quickly broke apart. One of the few surviving members of Bellamy's crew, one Thomas Davis, testified in his subsequent trial that "In a quarter of an hour after the ship struck, the Mainmast was carried by the board, and in the Morning she was beat to pieces."

By morning, hundreds of pirate corpses were washed up on the shoreline, and hundreds of Cape Cod's notorious wreckers (locally known as "moondoggers") were already plundering the remains. Hearing of the shipwreck, then-governor Samuel Shute dispatched Cyprian Southack, a local salvager and cartographer, to recover "Money, Bullion, Treasure, Goods and Merchandizes taken out of the said Ship." By May 3, when Southack reached the location of the wreck, he found that the ship's remains were scattered along more than four miles of shoreline.

According to surviving members of the crew, at the time of its sinking, the ship carried nearly four and a half tons of silver, gold, gold dust, and jewelry, which had been divided equally among the 180-man crew and stored in chests below the ship's deck. Though Southack did recover some of the items salvaged from the ship, little of this massive treasure hoard was recovered until the wreck's rediscovery nearly two hundred years later.

Only nine members of Bellamy's crew survived (two from the Whydah and seven from accompanying ships in his fleet), of which six were tried as pirates and hanged in Boston. The remaining two, represented at trial by Cotton Mather, were acquitted of their charges, and the last, an Indian, was sold into slavery. Those who died in the shipwreck included Bellamy himself, as well as a nine-year-old boy, John King, who had joined the crew (on his own impetus) in November of the previous year, when Bellamy captured the ship on which he and his mother were passengers.

The wreck of the Whydah was rediscovered in 1984 by treasure hunter Barry Clifford (relying heavily on the 1717 map that Southack drew of the wreck's location) and has been the site of extensive underwater archaeology. More than 100,000 individual pieces have since been retrieved, including the ship's bell whose inscription "THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716" positively identified the wreck. It is one of only two confirmed pirate ships to be salvaged in modern times (the other being Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge).

In 2006 the possible choice of the Whydah to represent a museum exhibit on pirates caused a minor controversy. The Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, Florida was considering using history and relics from the ship for a display on the Golden Age of Piracy set to coincide with the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End in 2007, but was criticized for using a ship with a history of participation in the slave trade while trivializing that aspect of its past. [1]