We’re still finding treasure from this ‘golden age’ pirate shipwreck
History presents the Whydah Gally's crew as swashbuckling sailors who looted a fortune before perishing in a storm. But before its days of piracy, the ship played a role in the transatlantic slave trade.
A famously stylish dresser, Captain Samuel Bellamy favored expensive black velvet waistcoats, knee breeches, silk stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. The flamboyant pirate from Devonshire, England, was usually found with no fewer than four elegant dueling pistols thrust in his sash along with his sword. Nothing but the best for Bellamy, who spurned the powdered wigs of the period for a ribbon with which he tied back his jet-black hair—a fashion that allegedly earned him the nickname Black Sam.
By the age of 28, less than two years into his meteoric career in piracy, Bellamy and his crew had amassed a fortune that would be worth $140 million today, making him one of the wealthiest pirates in recorded history.
For months the young pirate and his fleet plundered vessels in the Caribbean and along the eastern coast of colonial America. But a violent nor’easter off Cape Cod in the spring of 1717 dashed their flagship, the Whydah Gally, against a line of sandbars, drowning Bellamy and all but two of the 146-man crew.
(These pirates left the Caribbean behind—and stole the biggest booty ever)
From slave ship to flagship
Purpose-built for the transatlantic slave trade, the Whydah was a trim 110-foot, 300-ton, three-masted galley capable of moving along at a brisk 13-knot clip. Launched in London by the Royal African Company in 1716, the ship had completed two legs of its planned three-part voyage when Bellamy captured it near the Bahamas after a three-day chase and with only a single shot fired.
The so-called golden age of piracy between 1650 and 1730 was inextricably intertwined with the growth of the plantation economy in the Caribbean. With enormous wealth being made in sugar, rum, and molasses from sugarcane fields worked by enslaved people came surging demand for more enslaved labor to grow the crops and maximize profits. Trade boomed. The seas teemed with merchant vessels carrying valuable commodities. Spanish treasure fleets laden with luxury goods and South American gold and silver, mined by Indigenous workers under conditions of coerced and, sometimes, incentivized labor, plied Caribbean waters on their way to Spain. Pirates went where the money was and gravitated toward bustling slave ports along the West African coast and prosperous colonies in the Caribbean and North America. Slave ships were frequent targets, with the pirates not only taking whatever valuables the ships were carrying but also recruiting or forcing crew members and formerly enslaved men to join them.
For the enslaved African people belowdecks, capture by pirates sometimes provided a dangerous opportunity. Although they were often regarded as booty and sold by the pirates in ports where no questions were asked, sometimes they joined the pirate crews, where life under certain captains was surprisingly egalitarian—far more so than on land. Blackbeard’s crew included five Black men at the time of his death in 1718. During their defeat of the notorious Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts, known as Black Bart, in 1722, the Royal Navy captured 250 crew members including some 75 formerly enslaved men. As many as 50 of Bellamy’s crew are believed to have been from Africa.
More than 12 million Africans were kidnapped and trafficked during the nearly four centuries the transatlantic slave trade was in operation. Historians and archaeologists know few details about the first leg of the ship’s voyage, but like many other European slave ships, the Whydah—named after Ouidah, Benin, a West African slave port—first sailed for West Africa loaded with arms, textiles, and wine to trade with African leaders or their agents for enslaved people. Such captives were often seized during tribal conflicts or kidnapped by raiding parties and came from many walks of life, from metalworkers to doctors to farmers—even royal personages. But little is known about the 367 African people who were purchased and forcibly transported aboard the Whydah. With this human cargo and tons of ivory crowded into its hold, the ship embarked on the second leg of its journey, across the Atlantic to Kingston, Jamaica. Here the 312 enslaved people who survived the violence and emotional trauma of the crossing, known today as the Middle Passage, were sold. By the time Bellamy commandeered the ship, it had stopped at various ports around the Caribbean and taken on board valuable raw commodities to be sold at a high profit on completion of its voyage back to London.
“Slave ships made excellent pirate ships,” says Dave Conlin, an underwater archaeologist with the U.S. National Park Service. “They were designed to be fast, to reduce the time at sea, and minimize deaths—not out of any humanitarian concern, but purely for the profitability of the crossing. This was a brutally efficient industry.”
A fortune in gold and silver, as well as indigo, rum, sugar, molasses, and spices, was aboard the Whydah when Bellamy hijacked it—a substantial haul, to say nothing of the value of the ship itself.
Liking its lines, Bellamy decided to keep the Whydah and make it his flagship. And in appreciation for its peaceful surrender, he gave the captain his own ship, the Sultana, along with £20—the equivalent of about $4,000 today—to tide him over. It was a gesture typical of Bellamy, who was known for his mercy toward the captains and sailors whose ships he captured.
A pirate's life
Born in Devonshire in 1689, Bellamy went to sea at an early age, joining the Royal Navy while in his late teens and seeing action abroad. But in 1714 an outbreak of peace after years of incessant warfare in Europe saw a downsizing in the navy, and, like many other battle-hardened sailors, Bellamy found himself at a loose end. In 1715 he traveled to Massachusetts to scout for opportunities and visit relations on Cape Cod. While he was there, he fell in love with a woman whose name is given variously as either Goody Hallett or Maria Hallett. New England lore has it that her family liked him well enough but thought their daughter could do better than an impecunious sailor, however handsome and personable he might be.
Bellamy decided to prove them wrong.
Fate soon handed him a golden opportunity. A hurricane in the summer of 1715 destroyed that year’s Spanish treasure fleet, leaving wreckage and a staggering amount of gold, silver, and jewels strewn along the Florida coast. On hearing the news, Bellamy formed a partnership with a blue-blooded New Englander named Palsgrave Williams, whose father was attorney general of Rhode Island. Together they sailed south in 1716, hoping to make their fortunes by plundering the wrecks.
But salvaging sunken treasure was not as easy as they’d imagined. Since they were already considered pirates by the Spanish, who regarded their attempts to loot the treasure-laden wrecks as nothing short of robbery, the two men decided to embrace the pirate life and turned their attention to ships that were still afloat. It was not long before they joined forces with Benjamin Hornigold, a veteran pirate captain whose first mate at the time was a formidable character named Edward Teach—later known as Blackbeard.
Bellamy took up piracy with such swashbuckling élan that Hornigold and his second-in-command soon found themselves voted off the ship. In Hornigold’s place the crew elected the charismatic newcomer, Bellamy, to be their captain.
He led them on an unprecedented spree of piracy through the Caribbean, robbing 53 ships in an astonishingly short period of time. And, like many pirates of the period, he divided the loot almost equally among his crew. When the captain of one of the ships he and his men seized declined an invitation to join their crew, Bellamy scorned the man’s timidity and in a famous speech—quoted in Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, 1724—he set out his eat-the-rich philosophy of life:
They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference: They rob the poor under cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you better not make one of us than sneak after these villains for employment?
For a lowly seaman a life of piracy certainly had its attractions: equality, democracy, easy money, and a generous workers’ compensation package if you were injured or incapacitated, with preestablished figures set for the loss of an eye, a hand, or a leg. Pirates tended to be healthier than their law-abiding counterparts too. No wormy flour and rancid pork for them; they dined on the dainties they stole from the officers’ messes of the ships they robbed. And since rum punch laced with lime juice was their regular tipple, they seldom suffered scurvy. This was the golden age, romanticized by the Victorian novelist Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island and in illustrations by artists such as Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. The romance did not always reflect historical reality, but some real-life pirates did keep parrots as pets, fly the Jolly Roger, and drink copious amounts of rum.
Pirate crews lived outsize lives. When in port they didn’t spend their money like drunken sailors, they spent it like drunken pirates—carousing, gambling, and fencing their loot. Alexandre Exquemelin, thought to be a French surgeon and adventurer who sailed for a time with the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan, wrote of a pirate who went through more than 500 pieces of eight—an enormous sum in the 17th century—in a single wild night. Just three months later the man was sold into servitude to pay his debts.
Missing artifacts
Such profligate ruin would not befall Bellamy. Not long after he captured the Whydah, he quit the Caribbean and sailed up the eastern seaboard of the American colonies, back to Massachusetts to see Miss Hallett and impress her and her skeptical family with his wealth and charm—and possibly settle down.
(These treasure-hunting pirates already came from riches)
Late April 1717 found Bellamy off Cape Cod, where on the morning of the 26th he robbed two ships in quick succession. Despite the fine weather at the start of the day, a dense fog closed in that afternoon. By nightfall the powerful gale-force winds of a nor’easter were howling through the Whydah’s rigging, and a huge swell was tossing the ship like a cork.
Sometime in the small hours the Whydah slammed against a sandbank and broke apart, killing Bellamy and almost every man aboard. Word that a pirate ship had foundered during the night spread quickly through the nearby town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The next morning, and for weeks afterward, scores of fortune hunters scoured the shores. They found many bodies and some loot but not a trace of the ship. It would remain undiscovered for another 267 years.
In 1984 the wreckage of the Whydah was located by explorer Barry Clifford and his team off the coast of Wellfleet and under more than 30 feet of sand. Since then, some 200,000 artifacts have been recovered from the wreck, including coins, jewels, nearly 400 pieces of Akan goldwork from what is now Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, cannons, and other weapons. In 2021 divers recovered six skeletons encased in mineral concretions at the shipwreck site. Although the bulk of Bellamy’s cargo is still unaccounted for, artifacts keep turning up, most recently a small cannon and some 200 manilla brass bracelets, which were used as currency along the West African coast. What has been found to date remains the world’s first and only fully authenticated golden age pirate ship and treasure.
