The Whydah

by Martin W. Sandler

  It was obvious to Southack that between the time of the sinking and his arrival at the beach, opportunistic Cape Codders, many with horses and wagons, had cleared the area of everything that could be carried away. What particularly distressed Southack was the condition of most of the pirates’ bodies. Not only had the locals taken such items as shoes and pistols but rings and earrings as well, many by cutting off the pirates’ fingers and ears.

  More than anything else, Cyprian Southack was a stubborn and determined man. He had to admit that the great treasure that was aboard the Whydah was undoubtedly now lying at the bottom of the sea. But he would make certain that whatever had come ashore and had been stolen by the locals would be returned. He actually had the authority to do so. Governor Shute was willing to do almost anything to get his hands on the Whydah’s loot, and he had given Southack great powers. Southack could “go into any house, shop, cellar, warehouse, room or other place and in case of resistance . . . break open any door, chests, trunks” or anything else that stood in the way of his recovering plundered pirate goods.

  On May 4, 1717, Southack placed an advertisement in the local newspaper stating his intentions and warning citizens that they would find themselves in the “utmost peril” if they did not cooperate with him and return whatever was in their possession that as best as he could tell had been taken from the wrecked Whydah. Paraphrased it read: “Whereas there is lately stranded on the back of Cape Cod a pirate ship and his Excellency the Governor has authorized me to do whatever necessary to recover any of the goods and merchandise belonging to said wreck and all of his Majesty’s loving subjects are hereby commanded to be aiding and assisting me and my deputies or they will answer at the utmost peril.”

  Having made his intentions clear, Southack conducted a weeklong house-to-house, barn-to-barn, warehouse-to-warehouse search of a thirty-mile area. Although the locals allowed the governor’s men to look wherever they pleased, Southack found absolutely nothing. Just as Cape Codders were expert at spotting shipwrecks, they were equally skilled at hiding whatever they managed to spirit away from the wrecks.

  A portion of Cyprian Southack’s warning, in his own handwriting, that those who had concealed items from the Whydah wreck would face dire consequences if they did not return them at once. Southack quickly learned why Cape Codders had become known for their skills at defying authority.

  By this time, Southack was totally fed up with anyone even remotely connected with the Cape. But he was not ready to abandon his mission. If he couldn’t retrieve what had been looted from the beach, he would go after a much bigger prize. He would recover the real treasure that had gone down with the Whydah. Writing to Governor Shute, he informed him, “I am in Great [hope] whare the Anchors are the money is I fancy, and weather [permitting] I have Got a whale boat to fish for [it].”

  Early on May 6, 1717, despite strong winds and driving rain, Southack and six of his deputies set out in his whaleboat to explore the wreck. They managed to row through the heavy surf to where he had been told the Whydah had gone down, where Southack hoped he might recover some of the treasure. But he was forced to admit that because of the terrible weather and “a great sea,” they could “do nothing as yet.”

  Still, Southack refused to admit defeat. Day after day he rowed out to the spot beneath which he believed the Whydah, with its bags of gold and silver, lay waiting to be salvaged. Day after day he recorded the same frustration in his journal:

  Monday, May 6: at Pirate Wreck this morning wind at S.E. and rain, a very great Sea on the Wreck; nothing to be done.

  Tuesday, May 7: at Pirate Wreck this morning, wind at E. Small gale & foggy, a great Sea on the Wreck. Nothing to be done there.

  Wednesday, May 8: at Pirate Wreck this morning wind att S and fogg. Strong gale & great Sea, nothing to be done on the Wreck.

  By May 13, it had become clear, even to the determined Southack, that the Whydah was in water too turbulent, too murky, too deep, and too dangerous for him to make a recovery of its precious cargo. As much as he hated to admit it, the mission had been a failure. All Southack had to show for it was a collection of timbers, cables, beams, and canvas. And he had one other thing — a hefty bill from Eastham’s town coroner for burying the dead pirates that kept washing ashore. Outraged at being asked to pay for these services, Southack refused to do so, which prompted the coroner to sue him for payment. It was perhaps a fitting end to a failed mission. Cyprian Southack, the governor’s treasure seeker, was about to go home, not only practically empty-handed, but with a lawsuit hanging over his head.

  Although the coroner’s lawsuit was quickly dismissed, the drama was still not over. At Southack’s request, the vessel Swan, commanded by a Captain Doggett, had been commissioned to sail to Provincetown to pick up Southack, his deputies, and their meager recoveries and bring them to Boston. As it approached Cape Cod, the Swan was suddenly pursued, captured, and boarded by a pirate ship. After robbing Doggett of all his supplies, the pirate vessel’s captain permitted him to proceed to Provincetown, where Southack was waiting.

  The governor’s man had not been idle, however. He had refined the journal he had kept of his misadventures. Most important, Southack, the master mapmaker, had made a map indicating the exact spot where the Whydah had gone down.

  For locals, Southack would forever be linked with the greatest treasure that had ever made its way to the Cape. He had spent day after day rowing out to the wreck site, seeking those extraordinary riches. Had he really found nothing? they wondered. By the time Southack boarded the Swan for his trip home, he had become the subject of rumors that would keep the tongues of locals wagging up and down the Cape. Crafty old Southack, they told themselves and one another, had found Bellamy’s gold and silver. He was about to live like a king. The hunter of plunderers, many Cape Codders were convinced, had become the greatest plunderer of them all.

  THE STORY that Cyprian Southack had discovered a portion of the Whydah’s treasure and secretly spirited it away was only the first of scores of tales that would arise out of the sinking of the Whydah. By the end of the 1700s, there were well-known tales of the ghosts of the drowned pirates tossing coins onto the beach on stormy nights. In one of his books, published in the mid-1800s, the author Henry David Thoreau quoted an early Cape historian who wrote, “For many years after the [Whydah] shipwreck, a man of very singular and frightful aspect used every spring and autumn to be seen travelling on the Cape, who was supposed to have been one of Bellamy’s crew. The presumption is that he went to some place where money had been secreted by the pirates, to get such a supply as [he needed]. When he died, many pieces of gold were found in a [belt] which he constantly wore.”

  The greatest number of stories by far were based on the legend of Sam Bellamy’s relationship with Maria Hallett. According to one tale, within a few months of Sam’s leaving to look for the Spanish treasure, Maria found that she was pregnant with his child. To be unmarried and pregnant in the 1700s was disgraceful and scandalous, and according to the legend, when Maria gave birth, she kept it a secret.

  Then fate dealt Maria an even crueler hand. She left her baby alone in a barn for a short time, and when she returned, she found that the infant had choked to death on a piece of straw. Despite her attempts at secrecy, the townspeople of Eastham discovered what had happened and were outraged at her for having had a child out of wedlock. They began calling her bad names. The town fathers of Eastham went a step further. They put Maria in jail.

  But the jail could not hold her. Time and time again, Maria escaped, which convinced the townspeople that she was a witch and had made a pact with the Devil. Each time she fled from the prison, she ran directly to the spot under the apple tree where she had first met Sam Bellamy; in another version of the tale she ran to the dunes overlooking the ocean, where she anxiously watched for the sails of Sam’s ship.

  Unable to keep her locked up, Eastham’s town fathers released her from jail on the condition that she leave the town and never return.
Fleeing to South Wellfleet, Maria built a small shack on a scraggly plot of land overlooking the ocean, known as Goody Hallett Meadow to this day. As the story continues, things got no better for Maria in South Wellfleet. Convinced that she was a witch, no one in town would talk to her for fear that terrible things would happen to anyone who even glanced at Goody Hallett or dared walk past her shack.

  There are differing versions of the lore about Maria Hallett’s behavior after she settled on Goody Hallett’s Meadow. In the more sympathetic stories, Maria remained loyal to Bellamy and optimistic that he would return to her, loaded with treasure, ready to marry her and take her off to their own Caribbean island. In some variations of the story, Maria, dressed in a beautiful gown she had woven herself, walked the dunes day and night, singing wild songs and constantly looking out to sea for Bellamy’s returning ship. In another version, she spent the days following the wreck closely examining the body of every sailor who washed ashore, hoping he was not Sam, praying that by some miracle Sam had survived the wreck. To this day, the townspeople of Wellfleet and Eastham swear that on certain nights they can hear Maria crying out for Sam Bellamy from high atop the dunes.

  Many more of the stories painted a much different picture of Maria. In these, after being shunned by those around her and feeling abandoned by Sam, Maria grew so bitter that she sold her soul to the Devil, who, in return, gave her the power to cast evil spells. At the height of her bitterness, she conspired with the Devil and caused the storm that destroyed the Whydah. For days afterward, she was seen standing at the ocean’s edge, head raised skyward, screaming thanks to the Devil for helping her wreak vengeance on Sam Bellamy, the man who had broken her heart.

  Still other stories have grown up around Maria that are not about her relationship with Sam Bellamy. Some claim that on the night the Whydah went down, Maria retrieved a large chest of gold from the wreckage, which she buried in the Wellfleet dunes. But she lost her mind shortly thereafter and went to her grave having completely forgotten where she had hidden the treasure.

  Even Maria’s death is the subject of legend. According to one story, the townspeople of Wellfleet and Eastham became so horrified by what they believed Maria had done — and was capable of doing — that they drove her into the sea with torches and pitchforks. Even today, the people of Wellfleet insist her ghost wanders a section of town often referred to as the Devil’s Pasture.

  Perhaps the most fascinating of all the legends regarding the Whydah is the story of Black Sam Bellamy himself. As the story goes, on a spring day in 1720 — three years after the wreck of the Whydah — a stranger went to the cemetery where Sam Bellamy and Maria Hallett had first met, lay down under the apple tree, and fell asleep. A few days later, the stranger was found there, not asleep but dead. Those who got a good look at him before he was carted off got the shock of their lives. They were absolutely convinced that the handsome young man with the long black hair was Black Sam Bellamy.

  In the late 1940s, a popular New England figure named Edward Rowe Snow brought the Whydah back into the headlines. Snow was an author and a radio show host who was best known for a generous act he performed each December. Every Christmas, he flew his small plane along the New England coast and dropped gifts to the men and women who tended the region’s lighthouses. A history buff, Snow was familiar with the story of the Whydah. One day, as he was flying over Eastham on one of his Christmas journeys, he looked down upon unusually clear waters and was certain he’d spotted the Whydah wreck. Without hesitation, he turned his plane around, swooped down low, and dropped a buoy marking the spot.

  In the weeks that followed, Snow, at his own expense, constructed a fifteen-foot diving platform and had it towed to a position directly over where he thought the wreck was located. He then sent divers down in search of the Whydah’s treasure. The results were far from what he had hoped for. “Diver Jack Poole,” he wrote, “tried his best to salvage a substantial amount of gold or silver from the wreck, but a handful of [coins] . . . was all he ever brought to the surface. We almost lost one boy by drowning when he attempted to swim ashore from the platform at high tide, and then a terrific storm hit which smashed the platform to pieces.”

  PIRATES, who have been and remain among the most popular and most colorful figures in literature and on the movie screen, have been surrounded by misconceptions since their heyday in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Three conceptions in particular that have been widely believed are in fact substantially false.

  The first is the notion that pirates buried their treasure and then drew maps indicating where it lay hidden. The truth is that most pirates didn’t hold on to their loot long enough to bury it. Many gambled or drank it away. Others spent it in pirate havens such as New Providence, in the Bahamas, and Port Royal, in Jamaica, in shops especially established to relieve them of the money they had stolen. Also, much of the pirates’ booty was not gold or silver or jewels but ordinary trade goods, such as lumber, cloth, and animal hides — all items that would have been ruined if they had been buried.

  So where did the notion of pirates’ buried treasure come from? It was established in the pages of popular nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century books such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and it has been kept alive in stories that feature the search for buried treasure as an integral part of their plot, from the novel Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome in 1930 to movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean.

  Another myth, almost as popular as they myth of buried treasure, claims that pirates made their victims walk the plank. Pirates were not above torturing their victims, but there is not a shred of evidence that any pirate crew made someone walk the plank. As one pirate historian has noted, why make victims walk the plank when it’s easier to just throw them overboard?

  The third popular pirate myth concerns how they spoke. Thanks once again to movies made from the novel Treasure Island and other pirate stories, we’ve been led to believe that such expressions as “Shiver me timbers,” “Ahoy, matey,” and “Arrrrrr” were staples of what has been termed “pirate speak.” It’s simply not true. Given their origins, most pirates spoke the same way that all lower-class sailors from England, Scotland, Wales, and the American colonies spoke at the time. It is interesting that one man can be credited for having created the fictitious pirate speak — the British actor Robert Newton. In 1950, he played Long John Silver in the movie version of Treasure Island, and went on to play him in a television series in which he popularized the accent and many of the sayings that are commonly associated with pirates today.

  Eventually it would be discovered that the wreck Snow had probed was not the Whydah but another victim of the sea. But the warning that Snow issued after his experience still held true. “It will be a very lucky treasure hunter,” he cautioned, “who ever does more than pay expenses while attempting to find the elusive gold and silver still aboard the Whydah. . . . The great billows which constantly break at this part of the coast will cause all but the most determined treasure seekers to give up in despair after a few hours of being battered and tossed by the [waves] of Wellfleet.”

  WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG,” historian Arthur T. Vanderbilt wrote some fifty years after Snow issued his warning, “my grandfather told me the story of the pirate ship Whydah. For many summers thereafter, I walked Cape Cod’s outer beach, looking not for smoothed pebbles or flawless shells, but for pieces of eight. On winter nights when the wind roared under the eaves like the surf booming along the coast, I dreamed of finding a doubloon gleaming in the wet sand, the first of a cache of coins the waves would wash about my feet.”

  The story of the pirate ship Whydah might well have ended with its sinking had it not been for Martha’s Vineyard real-estate developer, builder, and salvage company owner Barry Clifford. His real passion, however, was something else again. In whatever spare time he could manage, he dove the waters off Cape Cod and the Vineyard, looking for sunken ships.

  As he was growing up on Cape
Cod, one of the things Clifford most loved to do was listen to his uncle Bill tell him stories about Cape Cod shipwrecks, pirate ships, and sunken treasure. His favorite tale was about the Whydah. He could not understand how a ship containing so much gold, silver, ivory, and precious jewels could remain undiscovered for almost three hundred years.

  The older Clifford got, the more intense his interest in the Whydah became. On November 7, 1982, at the age of thirty-seven, he announced that he was going to devote himself to finding the pirate ship.

  He began his quest in libraries, seeking what little information existed about exactly where the Whydah had sunk beneath the waves. He read every newspaper account of the shipwreck, but his most valuable resources by far were the letters, journals, and maps of Cyprian Southack. According to Clifford, finding these documents was like discovering a compass to the wreck site. “He told us where the ship was and why he couldn’t get to it,” Clifford explained. Nothing was more useful than the map that Southack had drawn of the waters off Eastham and Wellfleet, particularly the two miles of ocean surrounding the spot that Southack had labeled “The Pirate Ship Whido Lost.”

  Cyprian Southack’s 1717 map of Cape Cod, used by Barry Clifford to finally find the wreck of the Whydah, was a typical example of his map-making skills in both its accuracy and the amount of detail it provided about various locations.

  Coming close to the importance of Southack’s map were two entries in his journal. In one of them he had noted (as paraphrased), “At 5 in the morning the English man [Thomas Davis] that was saved out of the pirate ship came to the house of Samuel Harding, two miles from the wreck.” In the other entry (also paraphrased), Southack had written that it was “3 miles ½ by land from the wreck to Billingsgate [an island in Wellfleet Harbor].” Clifford found parts of the original foundation of Samuel Harding’s homestead and carefully measured off the two miles to locate the spot in the ocean where Southack had indicated the Whydah lay, and he measured off the 3½ miles from Wellfleet Harbor to find the spot where the measurement from the Harding homestead and the one from Wellfleet Harbor met.