Samuel Bellamy and the Whydah

the Pirate Ship Whido Bellame Commandr castaway ye 26 of April 1717 where I buried One Hundred & Two Men Drowned

Manuscript salvage note in Cyprian Southack's hand, written on his engraved chart of the New England coast in 1717.

Cyprian Southack's chart of the New England coast, with his salvage note A paper made at the wreck, and the paper that found it. Southack drew this note across the coast at the start of May 1717, at the wreck of the ship it names. It carries the period spelling "Bellame" for Bellamy, the loss dated to 26 April 1717, and the burial of a hundred and two men in Southack's own count. Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center, Boston Public Library, call number G3321.P5 1758 .S67. Open, no known copyright restrictions.

The same engraved chart, with this salvage note on its face, guided the diver who located the wreck off Wellfleet in 1984. Very likely

A note from the curator

I went looking for Black Sam Bellamy, the gentle pirate of the ballads and the museums, and found that the papers are harder and quieter than the legend. The sworn men who lived to testify remembered a threat to shoot a cook through the head and a threat to whip a carpenter to death at the mast, and they also remembered a captured master sent away with a ship and some money. Bellamy himself never stood in a dock; the sea took him first, and the court that sat at Boston weighed his crew, and hanged six of them, and set two forced men free.

What we have of the man past that is a bell with the ship's name on it, raised from the one Golden Age pirate wreck anyone has ever found and named, and a story, mostly printed after he was already drowned, about a free prince and a lost love. The bell tells us the ship was real. It does not tell us what her captain was, and, so far, the wreck has given back no bone that is his.

Neil Johnson, Curator

Samuel Bellamy drowned before any court could weigh him. What does the sworn record establish about the man beneath the Robin Hood legend, and what can the one authenticated wreck of a Golden Age pirate ship add to a story it can neither judge nor tell?

The Robin Hood of the sea is the popular picture this walk sets out to test. Bellamy commanded a pirate company for about a year, rose to its command by a vote, took a London ship for his flagship, and drowned with her off Cape Cod before any court could weigh him. Five rooms take the story in order.

The rooms

What it adds up to

Each strand of that story carries a different weight. The trial and its verdicts, the executions, the capture of the Mary Anne and the threats sworn aboard her, the wreck and its date, and the bell come from the printed trial, the sworn depositions embedded in it, Cyprian Southack's own chart and the recovered object. One sworn examination has the election turning on a refusal to take English ships. Bellamy took the Whydah for his flagship and sent her master away with a ship and some money; before that, a sloop commander out of Antigua swore to meeting him at sea, and to the passenger boy who chose the pirates. The free prince speech and the whole gentle characterisation come from Charles Johnson's later General History; the ranking of Bellamy as the wealthiest pirate in history is a modern magazine valuation; the total of fifty three ships is an aggregate, set against about a dozen prizes actually named; the romance of Maria Hallett is Cape Cod folklore. None of the documents settles what Bellamy himself was, and the wreck that settles so much about his ship is silent on it, and that silence is the space the legend fills.

The shipboard practices this company used have their own galleries: the election of a captain by the whole company, the written articles that bound a crew, the quartermaster's divided authority, and the division of prize shares. The Bahamas company Bellamy rose in, and the Cape Cod shore where he was lost, belong to the sibling galleries this walk leans on.

Enter the first room