SAN DIEGO – Well, shiver me timbers, Matey. This looks like real pirate treasure.
Indeed, it is.
Hundreds of pieces from among 100,000 artifacts – untouched by human hands for almost 270 years – that were recovered from the sunken pirate ship Whydah Gally off Cape Cod are on display here at the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park. The exhibit, under the sponsorship of the National Geographic Society runs through Sept. 1.
The Whydah, a shallow draft, three-masted craft 102-feet long, was built in London in 1715 for the Atlantic slave trade. Its name is the anglicized version of Ouidah, a port on the Slave Coast of Africa, located in modern day Benin.
In 1716, the galley sailed to Ouidah, traded English goods for more than 350 slaves and made its way to the Caribbean to exchange the slaves for sugar, rum and medicinal ingredients coveted in England. As it headed home, closing the triangular trade route for the second time, the Whydah was captured by Sam Bellamy, an impoverished sailor-turned-pirate captain who commanded two ships.
Bellamy, from an unsourced manuscript, expressed himself thusly:
“I am a free prince and have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sails of ship at sea and an army of 100,000 men in the field and this my conscience tells me.”
Smitten by the heavily armed Whydah, Bellamy took it as his command vessel. The Whydah, sailing north along coast of the American colonies with booty from some 50 assaults, was caught in a violent nor’easter off the Massachusetts coast and ran aground April 26, 1717.
The ship broke apart and sank, killing all but two of 144 crew members, including Bellamy.
The exhibit here is called “Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship.” Whydah artifacts and accompanying panels of historical data shed light on society of the times, particularly piracy and the slave trade.
Money-making pursuits
Piracy could be a heady and remunerative pursuit for former military personnel, felons, the unemployed and bumpkins with few other skills.
Entrepreneurial types such as the private interests that commissioned the Whydah quickly saw the profits to be made by supplying Caribbean and mainland plantations with free labor. Slavers chose candidates from a variety of ethnic and language groups in central Africa. The ideal slave was 16 to 30 years old. Two of every three were men and one in seven was a child.
In transporting slaves to America, ship captains crammed hundreds of people into ship holds with only enough space to squat or lie down for up to 12-week crossings.
Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, published his autobiography in England in 1789. One passage reads:
“The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us.”
A needle in a haystack
Let’s jump ahead a couple of hundred years to meet Barry Clifford, who received a degree in history and sociology from Western State College in Gunnison. He’s been an underwater explorer most of his adult life. He has located shipwrecks in New York’s East River, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean.
Clifford worked initially from a map made by a salvager and cartographer a month after the Whydah went down, spreading its treasures over four miles of Massachusetts coast. A team Clifford assembled started the search for the Whydah in 1983.
The possibility that it was covered by shifting sand was a challenge. Debris from a World War II test-firing range cluttered the ocean floor and the fact that 3,000 ships had sunk off Cape Cod in 400 years could intensify the needle-in-the-haystack search. The team also would have to contend with sudden, violent storms.
Then on July 23, 1984, a diver found a cannon that led to the Whydah under 14 feet of water and five feet of sand.
What you will see
Among the items in the exhibit are:
The bell of the Whydah, found in 1985, on which the name of the ship was engraved, confirmed the authenticity of the discovery by Clifford. The bell is kept in a saline solution for protection against the elements and decay.
Muskets with the stock sawed off, leaving only a pistol grip, constituted a formidable weapon. In addition to projectiles, the weapon could be loaded with “dust shot,” tiny pellets that were useless in battle but handy for keeping rebellious slaves in line.
Numerous cannons that fired 3- and 4-pound balls.
A transparent envelope containing a boy’s leather shoe, a silk stocking and a bit of a leg bone from a young person make it all but slam-dunk certain that they are the remains of John King, a 9- or 10-year-old boy who demanded to join Bellamy’s crew after the Whydah captured a sloop near Antigua on which he and his mother were traveling.
Clumped rope and a deadeye, a disk of hardwood with holes, through which a lanyard is passed to control rigging.
Boarding weapons – an ax blade, wooden handles and grenades.
A chest and boxes, secured in a plexiglass case, from which hundreds of coins spill.
A pewter plate, a spoon and a fork.
Piracy worldwide covered about 80 years from 1650 to 1730, with the heyday in the Caribbean from 1715 to 1725. Exhibit visitors learn that with few exceptions, pirates didn’t bury treasure and certainly didn’t leave maps as portrayed in popular fiction.
Booty, which was divided according to an agreement when a man signed on with a pirate captain, was spent almost as fast as it accrued.
Pirates ruled the waves until about 1730 when governments took the offensive. Pirates who were captured, with few exceptions, were tried, convicted and hanged.
In the last room of the exhibit visitors learn about the techniques used by the Clifford team to find, recover and preserve artifacts from the Whydah.
daler@durangoherald.com
