Gallery · Samuel Bellamy and the Whydah · Room 1 of 5
The Making of a Captain
The earliest official notice of Samuel Bellamy is a governor's paper. Abijah Savage, commander of the sloop Bonetta of Antigua, swore it on 30 November 1716, three months before Bellamy took the Whydah.
One, called the Mary Anne, was commanded by Samuel Bellamy who declared himself to be an Englishman born in London, and the other, the Postillion, by Louis de Boure a Frenchman.
Savage swore in the same deposition that a passenger boy, John King, joined the pirates of his own will, threatening to kill himself, and even threatening his mother, if he were restrained.
The London birth is what Bellamy declared on a stranger's deck, in the words Savage swore to. That Bellamy was English is very likely. The birthplace stays open between a Devon tradition, a Plymouth reading and the London birth Savage records.
John Brown, one of the men later tried at Boston, swore to how Bellamy came to command. In 1716, in the Bahamas company around Benjamin Hornigold, when Hornigold refused to take and plunder English shipping, the company divided, and Bellamy was chosen captain by a great majority while Hornigold departed with twenty six hands in a prize sloop. Very likely
Three months on, on 1 March 1717, the governor of the Leeward Islands reported to London that Bellamy was by then in a ship of twenty six guns, the official framing of the company as a state concern before the wreck.
Before the vote, Bellamy had sailed with Paulsgrave Williams, a Rhode Island man, on a salvage venture to the Florida wrecks, and moved in the Bahamas milieu and for a time in consort with the Frenchman Olivier Levasseur. The month and the mechanism of the election, whether summer or August, deposition or dispute, are given differently by the secondary chronologies.
The election of a captain by the whole company has its own gallery at crew voting and councils, and the officer set to check him at the quartermaster. What the Bellamy case adds is a single sworn line, in which a policy quarrel over English shipping produces an election and a losing party allowed to sail away with a vessel and its hands.