Whydah Gally

1717

Black Sam Bellamy, Cape Cod, the pirate wreck Location: off Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Massachusetts · Coordinates: 41.93°N 70.00°W · Casualties: 144 · Survivors: 2 · 9 captured · Depth: 9 m · Cause: storm · grounding — Caught in a violent nor'easter off Cape Cod on the night of 26 April 1717 while commanded by the pirate Samuel 'Black Sam' Bellamy. Blown onto the sandbar off Wellfleet stern-first in darkness. Broke apart in minutes and sank in shallow water. · Fate: located 1984 · Whydah Pirate Museum · Type: galley · pirate flagship (former slaver) · Tonnage: 300 tons · Crew: 146 · Flag: pirate · Jolly Roger · Launched: 1715 Former slave ship, galley-built, captured in February 1717 by the pirate Sam Bellamy off the Windward Passage. Caught in a nor'easter off Cape Cod two months later, she struck the sandbar at Wellfleet in the night. Bellamy and 142 of his crew died; two men made shore alive, nine more were captured and hanged in Boston the same year. Discovered in 1984 by Barry Clifford, the first authenticated pirate shipwreck ever excavated. The Vessel The Whydah Gally was a three-masted galley built at Ratcliffe on the Thames in 1715 for the London merchant Sir Humphrey Morice, one of the largest investors in the English slave trade of the early eighteenth century. She was 31 metres long on the keel, approximately 300 tons burden, pierced for 18 guns, and fitted with both conventional square-rig sail and with the sweep-oar ports characteristic of the galley subtype that gave her her class name. She was designed for the triangular trade: manufactured goods from London to the West African coast, human cargo from the Slave Coast to the Caribbean, sugar and tobacco from the Caribbean back to London. She was named after the Kingdom of Whydah, the small but powerful West African polity on the coast of what is now Benin, which was in the early eighteenth century one of the two principal entrepôts of the European slave trade (alongside Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast). Whydah's port, Ouidah, was where the Whydah Gally was intended to load her human cargo. Her first trading voyage, from London in early 1716, included a call at Whydah where she embarked 367 enslaved Africans, most of them Fon, Ewe, and Yoruba captives taken in the wars between Dahomey and the Oyo Empire. She delivered them to the English colony of Jamaica in autumn 1716 in what had been, by the standards of the trade, an unusually short Middle Passage with relatively low mortality. She departed Jamaica in February 1717 carrying sugar, indigo, ivory, and silver b The Disaster Whydah Gally reached the approaches to Cape Cod on the evening of 26 April 1717. The weather that night deteriorated into what eighteenth-century meteorological records identify as a severe spring nor'easter, one of the worst recorded on the Massachusetts coast in the decade. The storm was accompanied by thick fog and a falling barometer. Bellamy had caught a small pink, the Mary Anne, earlier that afternoon and had placed a prize crew aboard her to sail her in company into Provincetown Harbor. The Mary Anne's prize crew got separated from the Whydah in the thickening weather at about 22:00. The Whydah continued under reduced sail toward Cape Cod with Bellamy's own company aboard: his pirate crew, the 25 volunteers from Whydah, and a handful of prisoners he had not yet released. Between 23:00 and 00:00 on the night of 26-27 April 1717, the Whydah Gally struck the sandbar at Wellfleet, on the Outer Cape of Massachusetts, in a northeasterly gale and a strong onshore swell. She struck stern-first and was driven onto the bar. The waves tore her apart within minutes. She capsized, her masts snapped, her hull broke in two, and her cargo of silver and gold was scattered across the bottom of a forty-foot-deep kettle hole forty-five metres offshore. Bellamy went down with his ship. Of the approximately 146 people aboard her, two survived by clinging to floating wreckage and reaching the Wellfleet beach alive: John Julian, a Native American pirate from the Miskito coast of Honduras, an