The Whydah

by Martin W. Sandler

  True to his flair for the dramatic, Clifford dumped many of the coins out on a wooden table and said, “Imagine the sound of these down in the bilge when [the pirates] counted them.” He concluded the press conference by stating, “If we dug seven and a half test pits a day it would take the next ten years to complete the excavation. They probably had ten tons of treasure on this thing. We have barely scratched the surface.”

  Barry Clifford displays coins retrieved from the Whydah.

  They had indeed hardly begun the excavation process. And they had another challenge as well. Exciting though the second season’s discoveries were, not one of the artifacts they had recovered offered proof that it had come from the Whydah. Jim Bradley, a member of both the Massachusetts Historical Commission and the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources, echoed the sentiments of many of those unwilling to declare that the Whydah had been found. Speaking of what Clifford and his team had discovered on July 24, 1984, he said, “It’s an early wreck, it’s an important wreck, it has some of the same characteristics as the Whydah may have. But to say it’s the Whydah is premature at least. That area of the Cape has one of the highest densities of shipwrecks of any place on the East Coast. There are hundreds and hundreds of wrecks out there.”

  It was frustrating for Clifford and his crew, to say the least. The Expedition Whydah team had recovered millions of dollars’ worth of coins, gold dust, and other artifacts. But Jim Bradley was right. They still had not been able to find any proof that what they were recovering was coming from the Whydah. And those who doubted it were becoming increasingly vocal.

  With both fall and the end of the 1985 diving season rapidly approaching, Clifford decided to act on a hunch. Not far from where the first cannon had been found, the magnetometer had registered a large hit. Knowing that it would probably be the last major effort of the season, he ordered that a large pit be blown at that spot, and he sent Robert McClung down to investigate. Here again, Expedition Whydah would benefit from the ever-increasing sophistication of the technology that accompanied their underwater search. McClung was hooked up to a system that used a microphone and earphones to communicate directly with Clifford and the rest of his team on the Vast Explorer.

  Anxious minutes passed before McClung’s voice broke through loud and clear. “There’s something huge down here,” he shouted, “but I can’t tell what it is.”

  “Maybe it’s a rock and you just don’t recognize it,” someone from the team responded.

  “I don’t think so,” McClung replied. “I think it’s a bell.”

  Knowing that almost every ship of the 1600s and 1700s had a large bell on which its name was inscribed, Clifford donned his diving gear and joined McClung. As soon as he arrived at the site, it was clear to him that the object was indeed a bell. “My heart began to trip,” he later recalled. “I kicked down and tried to rub the side of it clean to see if there was a name etched in its cast-bronze sides. The metal was heavily [covered with layers of ocean matter], and I couldn’t tell what ship it was from.”

  At that point, as the excitement was building among those on the Vast Explorer, Bob Cembrola, a visiting archaeologist, dove down to measure the object and map its location. Returning to the surface, Cembrola, also convinced that it was a bell, declared, “It looks like the right bell. It is definitely eighteenth century. . . . But I don’t know if it’s from the Whydah.” Within days it was hauled to the surface by heavy straps wrapped around it and taken to the laboratory, where it was placed in a tank filled with water. An electric current in the tank was used to break the incrustations away from the bell.

  “I tried not to think about the bell after that,” Clifford remembers. “For one thing, it might not have been the Whydah’s, or it might have been a bell from one of the ships that the pirates robbed. Another reason not to think about the bell was the incrustations that covered it. Sometimes it takes months or even years for incrustations to fall away. You can hurry them a little, especially if they are loose, but usually you want to wait until they are ready to fall off before doing any chipping. That way you avoid damaging an artifact.”

  Fortunately for Clifford and his team, they did not have to wait months or years. Some three weeks after the bell had been placed in the laboratory tank, a large chunk of incrustation fell off, revealing the word “Gally,” a common colonial-era spelling of “Galley.” The excitement in the lab rose to fever pitch. As the team gathered around them, Carl Becker and some of the lab’s other conservationists began carefully scraping away the rest of the incrustation with dental picks. After about twenty minutes, a Maltese cross and the date 1716 were revealed. Then a much larger chunk of incrustation fell away. And there before them on the side of the bell were the words they had prayed would be there:

  The news spread almost immediately, and scores of people, many from the archaeological world, rushed to view what had been found. Among them was Joseph A. Sinnott, director of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources, the agency responsible for monitoring Clifford’s salvage efforts. Stating that the discovery of the bell removed all doubt about the ship’s identity, Sinnott proclaimed, “I don’t think you could hope for more.” Even those archaeologists and other individuals who had previously refused to believe that Clifford had found the Whydah had to publicly admit that the first-ever pirate shipwreck to be found had been authenticated beyond any question.

  The discovery of the bell and its inscription brought about another result as well. Until that development, the Clifford team had assumed that the name of the ship they were searching for was spelled “Whidah.” That’s the way it was spelled in Defoe’s General History of the Pyrates and almost every other contemporary account.

  Barry Clifford with the most important artifact recovered from the Whydah.

  “I guess I’ll have to change all of the stationery,” team member Todd Murphy declared.

  “Not to mention all of the T-shirts and caps,” Clifford responded.

  Team member Tuck Whitaker had a bigger problem. “Forget that stuff,” he said, pointing to his chest. “I have to change my tattoo.”

  As Clifford and his team knew from the start, excavating the Whydah would always be a seasonal affair. Only in the late spring, summer, and early fall are oceanic and climatic conditions good enough to allow for an effective search. Still, millions of dollars in silver and gold coins, gold bars, gold dust, hand guns, pewter tableware, and other artifacts, including thirty cannons, have been recovered. For members of the team, including the pirate historian Ken Kinkor, each discovery had a meaning well beyond its monetary value. “Look at these,” Kinkor once exclaimed as he held a pile of gold coins in his hand. “The last time a human touched them, they were either being handled by a pirate — or being used to buy human lives.”

  “On July 19, 1998,” Barry Clifford wrote, “we discovered the hull of the Whydah. In all the years I had been digging on this site, discovering the actual vessel that held Bellamy and his crew ranks as the most exciting of all finds, even more so than the discovery of the ship’s bell or the finding of the first bar of gold. This was, after all, the ship itself, a significant piece of the vessel that allowed the world of Bellamy and his pirates to exist.”

  Even more exciting to Barry Clifford and his team than the discovery of Whydah treasure and artifacts has been the discovery of sections and pieces of the ship itself. Here, a diver examines a lead-lined piece of the pirate ship’s gunpowder room.

  Expedition Whydah has now been under way for more than thirty years. Each diving season has resulted in the discovery and retrieval of thousands of artifacts that increase our knowledge of the Whydah’s history and dramatically alter our perception of pirates and their way of life. Yet with all that has been accomplished, Clifford and the archaeologists who serve as his consultants are convinced that there are still many artifacts waiting to be discovered, perhaps including priceless seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century art objects, addition
al sections of the Whydah’s hull, and personal items from both the ship’s crew and the people they robbed. There is no way of knowing how long one of the most fascinating and productive of all nautical archaeological endeavors will continue.

  Furthermore, despite the thousands of coins that have been salvaged, the vast bulk of the more than four hundred thousand coins that the Whydah’s survivors swore were aboard the ship when it went down still remains to be discovered. “To think,” Clifford stated more than ten years ago, “that we have found only a small portion of the Whydah treasure gives me pause. The two hundred thousand artifacts we have already found have caused a bursting at the seams at our conservation lab. Yet how can we stop?”

  SEARCHING FOR, discovering, and excavating the artifacts that accompany shipwrecks like the Whydah are exciting and highly publicized endeavors. But the slower and less-reported efforts to conserve what is retrieved from these wrecks provide immense value to the historical record. Conservation is the process of stabilizing and protecting historical artifacts. It is not the goal of conservators to restore artifacts to their original condition. Rather, it is to preserve an object in its present condition and to stop any further deterioration.

  Each type of material, be it wood, metal, leather, or cloth, requires a specific treatment in order to preserve it. Over the years, scientists and conservators have developed and improved methods and techniques to make their preservation efforts more effective and longer-lasting.

  As the Expedition Whydah team can attest, many of the artifacts that have gone down with ships and lain for years at the bottom of the sea are embedded in concretions — chunks of rock, clay, and sand that are cemented together through chemical reactions that take place over time in seawater. As long as concretions remain covered in salt water, any objects within them will remain stable. But if a concretion, once brought to the surface, is allowed to dry out, its artifacts will quickly deteriorate unless they are preserved.

  When an artifact covered in concretions is brought to the surface, it is quickly X-rayed to discover what lies inside. Mobile digital X-ray technology, a kind of X-ray room on wheels, makes it possible to get a clear image of what is hidden within the concretions. If X-rays reveal artifacts, the entire mass of cemented material is taken to a conservation laboratory and immediately placed in a tank of water that, in order to avoid exposing the material to contaminants, is as pure and fresh as possible. Some four weeks later, it is moved to a tank containing a chemical solution designed to make it easier to get at whatever items may be inside. After the material has soaked for two or three days, a low-voltage electric current is applied in order to encourage the mass of rock, clay, and sand to fall away from the objects inside. Then conservationists painstakingly remove any incrustations that remain, using picks and brushes. Finally, the artifacts are washed and dried, and a protective coating called a sealant is applied to them.

  Two preservationists work on a sail that has been recovered from the ocean floor.

  This long process is nothing compared with some other conservation efforts, such as the preservation of the entire hull of King Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose, which sank in 1545 and was brought to the surface in 1982. In order to preserve this historic treasure, conservators at the Mary Rose Museum continually sprayed the hull with water for twelve years and then sprayed it with a preservative called polyethylene glycol (PEG) for another nineteen years. Today, the Mary Rose remains one of the world’s greatest historical treasures.

  THE ARTIFACTS that continue to be recovered from the Whydah are both unique and revealing, made even more so by the fact that, thanks to the extraordinary number of ships that Sam Bellamy plundered, they come from at least twelve countries on four continents. As Ken Kinkor stated, “Each shipwreck is a time capsule, and each artifact from the Whydah has its own story to tell about what pirates were really like and what life was like on April 26, 1717.”

  For example, the huge quantity of stylish white shirts, satin, silk, and velvet britches, embroidered vests, expensive cuff links, silver buckles, brass buttons, and neck chains found on the ocean floor around the Whydah reveal that the pirates were far more fashionable, even dandyish, in their dress than previously believed. Historians have concluded that the wearing of these items, presumably taken from wealthy passengers aboard the ships they looted, was an act of defiance against the rigid class hierarchy of the day in which only the upper class dressed in such elegant fashion.

  A member of the Expedition Whydah team works to preserve a grindstone brought up from the wreck.

  Sailors on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century navy and merchant ships spent mealtimes sharing a bucket of meat and a tray of biscuits among a group of up to nine men. The only utensil these sailors had was their personal knife, the same one they used in battle. They would dip a biscuit into the bucket, scoop out some meat and some juice, and eat it. There was no such thing as plates aboard.

  Up until the artifacts from the Whydah began to be uncovered, that crude method of dining was thought to be typical on pirate vessels as well. However, forks, spoons, knives, and, most interestingly, pewter plates, inscribed with the initials of members of the Whydah’s crew, tell us that the pirates not only dressed better than common sailors, they also ate in a different, more sophisticated manner than had previously been known and has commonly been portrayed.

  The Whydah pirates enjoyed a far more varied diet than the sailors on merchant or navy ships. Perhaps this should not be surprising, since the booty on the Whydah included foodstuffs taken from ships carrying cargo that originated in many different countries. Items brought up from the Whydah site also disclose that the pirates’ meals included such items as fish, turtles, and birds that they caught.

  If one were to believe the depictions of pirates in books, movies, and television, one would expect the most common objects salvaged from the Whydah to be eye patches, bottles of rum, and perhaps even the remains of parrots. The truth, however, is that the most common items of all have been musket balls, shotgun pellets, and homemade baseball-size hand grenades, all designed to force into surrender the ships they boarded and to subdue those who dared put up a fight.

  Historians and archaeologists have been particularly surprised by the inscriptions on a large number of wax seals that continue to be found near the wreck. Because many of the pirates, like millions of other people of their day, could neither read nor write, they signed documents, such as the Articles of Agreement, using a stamplike device called a seal. Often the seals contained their initials, but they might also bear images and symbols that said something about their owner’s personality. A significant number of the seals recovered from the Whydah express love, hope, or desire, sentiments that have not often been associated with individuals who are more often described as “thuggish white men with sabers.” Many archaeologists regard seals as invaluable in helping us understand an emotional side of pirates that had not been revealed previously.

  Medical syringes were another startling discovery among the Whydah’s artifacts. In an age when medical knowledge and practice were primitive at best, the syringes represent a degree of medical sophistication not previously thought to exist among pirates.

  A syringe was among the pieces of sophisticated medical equipment at the disposal of the Whydah’s doctor, James Ferguson.

  The finest treasure found at the wreckage site is gold jewelry made by the Akan, a people native to what is today Ghana and the Ivory Coast, in west Africa. At the time the Whydah was capturing and looting ship after ship, Akan jewelry was being traded in Africa and sold in Europe. The pieces of Akan jewelry recovered from the Whydah are of particularly great value and interest to anthropologists and historians because experts have determined that they are the oldest examples of this type of jewelry ever found.

  Members of the Expedition Whydah team have also retrieved a significant number of gold bars. The gold bars have all been scored with a knife, indicating that either Bellamy’s men or the captain of the s
hip that originally traded for the bars wanted to make sure that they were solid gold and not lead with a gold coating. The silver bars found in the Whydah wreckage were made by the pirates themselves by melting down various types of silver objects from their booty. Turning looted silver and gold into bars made them easier to carry and, more important, easier to divide among the crew.

  Then there are the coins, the essence of any pirate treasure. Although the Expedition Whydah’s crew has not yet been able to find anywhere near the four hundred thousand coins the ship was purported to be carrying, a small fortune in coins has been recovered. And, aside from their monetary value, they are special.

  “In twenty minutes one day,” Clifford recalls, “I found 280 coins. They weighed almost twenty pounds. I could have tied them to a line and raised them that way, but I did not want them to leave my hands. These coins were the heart and soul of the Whydah and the primary reason that her pirates had become pirates. I wanted to hold them close for the secrets they could tell me.” To Clifford, holding them close has not meant keeping them in his personal possession. Almost all the artifacts recovered from the Whydah thus far, including almost all the coins, are on display in the Whydah Pirate Museum that Clifford established in Provincetown, on Cape Cod.

  OF ALL THE VARIOUS TYPES of artifacts that open up windows to what has gone on before us, none are more revealing than coins. Archaeologists who study coins regard them as a vital source of information about the history, the ways of life, the values, and the cultures of the past, along with how art, religion, music, dance, and myths have helped shape societies. Coins tell us so much about the past that they have been called both “newspapers in metal” and “miniature libraries of history.” At a time before the rise and spread of newspapers, radio, magazines, and other forms of media, kings, emperors, and governments used the depictions they engraved on their coins to celebrate or commemorate events, honor individuals, or otherwise spread their messages.