By May 1983, Clifford was ready to begin his active search for the long-lost pirate ship. He purchased a boat he named Vast Explorer to serve as the project’s surface vessel. He and several of his crew members took the Vast Explorer offshore, then headed farther out in a small motorized skiff named the Crumpstey, in honor of the captain of the Mary Anne, the last ship that Sam Bellamy captured before meeting the Fisher and setting off the chain of events that led the Whydah to its watery grave. Their destination was the spot in the Atlantic Ocean where, according to Cyprian Southack’s map and Clifford’s other research, the wreck of the Whydah lay.
Barry Clifford and members of his team aboard the surface vessel the Vast Explorer. Together, the team has salvaged more than 100,000 artifacts from the Whydah shipwreck.
The Vast Explorer’s first mate for the summer was John F. Kennedy Jr. The son of the late president, twenty-two-year-old Kennedy was on summer vacation from Brown University. He had met Clifford on Martha’s Vineyard and had become fascinated with both the story of the Whydah and the search for its remains. He was particularly taken with Clifford’s unwavering conviction that he would find the pirate ship. “That optimism,” Kennedy stated, “spreads to everyone. We started talking about diving, and through a shared interest in it we became friends. He was telling me about the Whydah, and he said, ‘If you want to do some diving, that’s fine.’ How often do you get to do something like dive a shipwreck?”
At first, some members of the crew were concerned that the young member of a rich and famous family would not work as hard as he needed to. “When I told [one of my crew members] JFK Jr. was going to be on the crew,” Clifford later recalled, “he frowned and demanded, ‘Is he bringing his butler with him? What am I supposed to do with a Kennedy?’” The crewman needn’t have worried. John Kennedy Jr. would prove to be one of the hardest workers involved in the Whydah search.
Clifford was able to attract quality crew with varied experience. They were a diverse lot, united by a passion for the sea, a love of adventure, and the lure of sunken treasure. The first to join the team was a six-foot-ten veteran fisherman named Richard “Stretch” Grey. He was followed by John Beyer, who was already working for Clifford at his salvage company. The majority of Expedition Whydah’s crew were friends that Clifford had made in college some twenty years ago. They included his former roommate Robert McClung; retired Colorado judge John Levin; Bill Dibble, a former Marine jet pilot who had flown more than one hundred missions over Vietnam; and motorcycle racer and rodeo rider Trip Wheeler; and Todd Murphy, who served with the Green Beret’s combat scuba team.
Along with his full-time crew, Clifford recruited several respected marine archaeologists to serve as consultants to his project. And he scored a real coup by persuading renowned underwater-treasure seeker Mel Fisher to participate as well. Fisher had found and recovered the remainder of the treasure aboard the Spanish fleet that had sunk off the Florida coast in 1715 — the same sunken fleet that Sam Bellamy had gone looking for before becoming a pirate. Fisher won even greater glory when, after aiding Clifford and his team, he discovered and salvaged the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha, which had sunk in 1622. Before salvaging operations were completed, an astounding $450 million in treasure was recovered from that ship.
Clifford was well aware of the enormous challenges that he faced as he began his physical search for the Whydah. Bellamy’s ship had gone down in some of the most turbulent waters off North America. The weather off Cape Cod would permit a search for the vessel for only a few months a year. And given the nature of the ocean floor in the area where the Whydah had met its fate, the vessel was bound to be buried under an untold number of feet of sand that, after more than 265 years, was certain to have shifted considerably.
On the other hand, Clifford was aware that searching for shipwrecks, no matter how old, had changed dramatically since the days when Cyprian Southack had peered over the side of his small open boat, hoping to get a glimpse of the Whydah and its treasure below. Thanks to technical advancements that in many cases had been made on behalf of military navigation or oil exploration, underwater electronic equipment had reached a point where, as one marine archaeologist put it, “our ability to observe the ocean environment . . . has finally caught up with our imaginations.”
In the Crumpstey that first day, Clifford and his crew carried a heavy torpedo-shaped device called a magnetometer. Invented in 1833 by German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, a magnetometer can detect the presence of iron or steel, no matter how far below the surface it lies, and then record it as a “hit” on a graph. Having received almost two centuries of constant improvements, the magnetometer is considered the most effective instrument for locating sunken objects.
Clifford and the crew spent more than three weeks carrying out extensive electronic surveying with their magnetometer, charting wherever they received a hit. At the end of that time, they had received about 150 scattered hits. Hoping they’d identified the location of the wreck, they then brought the Vast Explorer to a spot directly over where they had recorded the largest number of responses and dropped four large anchors to make sure their vessel held its position.
As their work continued, the Expedition Whydah team also used bottom-penetrating sonar to send out sound waves in search of buried artifacts from the ship. With sonar technology, sound waves bounce back like echoes when they encounter hard objects. A computer measures the time it takes for the sound waves and their echoes to return from the object they struck and calculates the distance between the sonar transceiver and the object. By using a series of these pings, the computer can create a picture of the object, revealing its shape and size and how far it lies beneath the sand.
The beginning of Clifford’s search for the Whydah included not only the use of magnetometer and sonar technology but also the introduction of a practice that involved the use of what he and his team termed a “mailbox.” They took two huge aluminum pipe elbows and placed them over the Vast Explorer’s dual propellers at the back of the vessel. They angled the pipes down so that, when the engines were revved, the powerful wash from the propellers that was directed toward the ocean floor would shove sand aside to form a crater or pit. By doing so directly above the location they’d identified as the most promising, they hoped to expose the Whydah’s coveted artifacts and treasures.
Finally, it was time to dive down and examine the pits. Crew members sifted through the locations of large hits, hoping to find cannons or clustered cannonballs. They dug in and around the places where small hits had been recorded, thinking there might be smaller objects such as coins or jewelry or other personal items. Clifford and his divers used relatively newly developed electronic-ranging devices that sent out radio signals from marked spots so that they could return each day to within three feet of where they had been exploring the previous day.
The divers searching for Whydah artifacts have been forced to work in dark, churning waters. Here, team diver Chris Macort uses a lamp and a metal detector to guide him to small items such as jewelry and coins.
Several of the large hits turned out to be metal sections or iron rods from the radio towers of a Marconi transatlantic wireless station that had been thrown into the sea off Wellfleet when the station was abandoned in 1920. Other hits, large and small, were World War II–era objects, such as bullets, shell casings, and practice bombs left behind by the Army Air Corps, which used the waters off Wellfleet to conduct training exercises. One such discovery provided the team with its first dramatic moment. Early on, one of the divers returned to the Vast Explorer thrilled by a cylindrical object that he had found. Holding the object over his head, he shouted, “I think it’s a small cannon.” To which Todd Murphy, the only person present who had served in the military, shouted, “Throw it back! That’s a bomb!” The diver did throw it back, and fortunately, after an examination by an explosives expert, it was determined that the underwater device was a harmless World War II dummy practice bomb.
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bsp; Finally, on August 4, 1983, underneath about ten feet of sand in one of the first pits that had been dug, team members discovered a ship’s rudder strap, a section of rigging from a mast, bronze chisel-point nails, and firebrick from a vessel. These finds were not bags of coins or anything with the Whydah’s name or other identifying marks on them, but Clifford and his men were convinced they were from the Whydah. In what Clifford would later describe as “that first, terribly dry season . . . it was a ray of hope that they were at least searching in the right place.”
ACCORDING TO OFFICIALS of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “The suite of tools available [to probe the ocean floor and search for shipwrecks] would amaze the ocean explorers of yesteryear.” These tools include such technological marvels as small manned submarines called submersibles; unmanned, remotely operated underwater vehicles known as ROVs; sophisticated sounding devices; and high-intensity lighting and high-resolution imaging techniques, the equivalent of a microscope for researchers examining what lies in the deep sea. While those searching for the Whydah have taken advantage of these technological marvels, they also believe that there is nothing more important when examining the time capsule that is a shipwreck than a human being conducting a hands-on search by diving down to the site of the wreck.
Diving is an ancient endeavor. Artifacts reveal that as long as 4,500 years ago, people from Mesopotamia, breathing through hollow reeds, dove down to the ocean floor in search of pearl oysters. About two hundred years later, Greek sponge divers began to dive for one of the world’s most useful naturally growing products and coincidentally discovered a number of history’s oldest shipwrecks.
The methods used by early divers were extremely limited in terms of both depth and the time they could remain underwater. Arguably the most famous of all the earliest dives took place in 332 BCE, when, during the siege of the city of Tyre, in Lebanon, Alexander the Great, in a forerunner to the diving bell, dove down in a “very fine barrel made entirely of white glass,” to observe obstructions that had been placed at the bottom of the city’s harbor.
In this medieval painting, Alexander the Great, one of the earliest proponents of underwater exploration, is shown being lowered into the Mediterranean in a glass diving barrel.
Beginning in the late 1500s, great breakthroughs were made in diving equipment. The earliest was the development of an effective diving bell, an open-bottomed container that is large enough to hold a person. Once the bell is lowered to the ocean floor, the intense pressure of the water keeps air trapped within the bell, allowing its user to breathe. A window on the side of the bell affords the occupant a limited view of the surroundings. In 1686, William Phips used a diving bell to discover the huge fortune from a sunken Spanish treasure ship that he recovered off the island of Haiti. Phips’s accomplishment inspired legions of future adventurers, including Sam Bellamy and Paulsgrave Williams in 1715, to seek instant riches at the bottom of the sea.
Effective diving suits began to appear in the early 1700s. One of the first was introduced by Andrew Becker and consisted of a leather-covered suit, a helmet that included a window, and a system of tubes extending to the surface for air. In the 1830s, Augustus Siebe improved upon Becker’s creation by building a diving suit featuring a helmet fitted to a full-length watertight canvas garment. Beginning in the late 1800s, most diving suits were made of a solid sheet of rubber between layers of twill.
The man who brought the world of diving into the modern era was the French oceanographer, inventor, researcher, and filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Between 1942 and 1943, Cousteau, with his partner Emile Gagnan, invented the Aqua-Lung, a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) that featured a demand regulator to supply divers with compressed air. Not only did the Aqua-Lung revolutionize diving by making it possible for those who explore and salvage shipwrecks to conduct their operations more “up close and personal” than ever before; it also opened the door to recreational diving for millions of people.
Extraordinary tools of underwater exploration continue to be invented. In 2014, the world was introduced to what can legitimately be called the most amazing form of diving apparatus yet. Called an Exosuit, it is a diving outfit that weighs 530 pounds, can dive to depths of one thousand feet, and can remain underwater for approximately fifty hours — deeper and longer than is possible with even the best conventional scuba gear. Prior to the development of the Exosuit, only submersibles could reach those depths and maintain them for so long, but the Exosuit contains 1.6-horsepower foot-controlled thrusters and eighteen rotary joints in its arms and legs to provide its user with a freedom of movement far greater than can be achieved in even the most nimble submersible.
FOR THE EXPEDITION WHYDAH CREW, the winter and early spring of 1983–1984 seemed to drag on forever. Well past April 1984, the weather was too harsh and the ocean was too turbulent for the group to consider diving. Finally, in late May, the weather turned calm enough for the expedition’s second season to begin. But try as they might, Clifford and his men spent the next two months experiencing the same frustrations and lack of success that they had the previous season. Again the only things their dives netted them were reminders of World War II training drills and sections of the Marconi towers. Even more serious, they were running out of money. Clifford was all too aware that unless something dramatic enough to attract additional investors took place — and soon — the entire project was in jeopardy.
Adding to Clifford’s problems was the prospect of being embarrassed before millions of viewers on national television. Filled with optimism when the season began, he had invited nationally known television reporter Nancy Fernandes to bring her NBC crew out to the Vast Explorer to film the progress he was certain Expedition Whydah would be making by then. Now, with his artifact lockers still almost completely empty, he dreaded the film crew’s arrival.
When Fernandes and her crew climbed aboard on July 20, Clifford, anxious to postpone the disaster for as long as possible, had them transferred to the Crumpstey and taken on a whale watch. But he could not continue to delay the inevitable. When they returned to the Vast Explorer, Clifford had the mailboxes blast out a twenty-foot pit. Then he sent down a diver named Mike Kacergis, who had just joined the team, to investigate. As Clifford would later admit, if the television crew had not been there, he would probably not have conducted any explorations that day. Kacergis, Clifford would recount, “was young and excited and ready for action. The rest of us were tired, burned out, and somewhat cynical. It was probably the fiftieth hole we had blown and examined since the excavation started. None had contained artifacts. We expected the same would be true of this hole, too.”
But he was wrong. Within a short time, Kacergis was back up on deck. With the television cameras rolling, he tore out his mouthpiece and shouted, “Hey, you guys! There’s three cannons down there!”
Clifford was suffering from an ear problem incurred on a previous dive, but he quickly sent others down to the pit. And they could not believe their eyes. There lay cannons, musket balls, a rusty cutlass, a flintlock pistol, and a shoe with, as one of the searchers described it, “toe prints still in the leather.” Scattered around the pit were small, flat, encrusted objects that gave promise of being coins.
The storm that sank the Whydah broke the ship apart, scattering it over the ocean floor. Here, an Expedition Whydah diver locates part of the ship and prepares to have it hoisted to the surface.
The team members returned to the Vast Explorer, bringing one of the smaller objects and what appeared to be a cannonball up with them. When the incrustations covering the round object were removed, a cannonball from the Whydah era was indeed revealed. While others worked on the cannonball, Clifford carefully chipped away at the small, flat object. “At first,” he later wrote, “I’d thought it was an odd-shaped shell. But as I succeeded in loosening it, I could see it wasn’t. I held the coin in my hand and flipped it over. There was a silver cross on it and clearly visible, a date: 1684.”
“This artifact,” Clifford stated, “represented only a beginning for us. Still, July 20, 1984, was a heady day for us. From now on we knew that we were digging in the right area and could actually start finding the things we had come for. We passed around the cannonball and coin for several hours, elated at having found an authentic piece of the Whydah.”
The objects recovered on July 20 were indeed “only a beginning.” Buoyed by their initial discoveries, and with their morale fully restored, the Expedition Whydah team spent the next five months working harder than ever, blasting pits, diving down, examining the pits, and retrieving the artifacts they discovered.
In early December 1984, Clifford held a press conference. And he had much to report. Since the first discoveries in July, the team had uncovered and retrieved a treasure trove. One pit alone had yielded, among other items, more than three thousand silver coins from the Spanish Empire; four gold coins, each worth $40,000; and gold and silver jewelry. From another pit, Clifford reported, his crew had recovered four cannons, an eight-foot-long anchor, gold bars, a silver bar, silver coins, gold dust, and brass shoe buckles.
The Whydah Page 8
