The Man the Wreck Has Not Given Back

This room leads on an absence, the one room in the Collection that does. No object can close the gap, because the gap is a property of the surviving record.

Samuel Bellamy was never tried. No court adjudicated his personal guilt for any act. The only verdicts the case produced belong to the survivors of his company, tried at the Court of Admiralty in Boston in the autumn of 1717, and each verdict answers for the man it names and the acts in his indictment, and not for Bellamy.

Set out what the record would hold for any man the court had weighed. An arraignment, printed with the rest. A plea, entered at the bar. A verdict, returned by a jury. A sentence, passed from the bench. An execution, recorded on a day. A body, identified among the dead. A birthplace, fixed in a parish record. A likeness, drawn from life. For Samuel Bellamy the case holds a governor's notice of him, a printed trial of his crew, and a salvage chart with his name misspelled, and not one of those endpoint records holds the man himself.

His body was never identified among the drowned. He commanded the Whydah, and he stands on no survivor list, so he is taken to have gone down with her. Very likely

A leg bone recovered near the site and tested in 2018 was another man's, of Eastern Mediterranean ancestry, and the wreck has to this day given back no bone identified as his. Bellamy was English; his birthplace is given three ways, a Devon tradition, a Plymouth reading and the London birth he gave at Antigua.

The print that filled the silence

The gentle Robin Hood of the sea, and the free prince speech that is its centrepiece, come from Charles Johnson's General History, whose Bellamy chapter belongs to the second volume of 1728. Johnson names only a Captain Bellamy, without a forename, and the same words are read by others as belonging to a different pirate, Charles Bellamy.

The ranking of Bellamy as the wealthiest pirate in history is a magazine valuation of 2008, which admitted that it left out pirates who may have exceeded him. The round total of fifty three ships is an aggregate of uncertain origin, set against about a dozen prizes actually named. The romance of Maria Hallett, the lost love of the Cape, is Cape Cod folklore, and its developed form is a book of 1934.

John Julian, one of the two men off the Whydah to reach the beach, was never tried; the story that he became the man enslaved to the Quincy family and hanged in 1733 is a modern reconstruction. The epithets Black Sam and Prince of Pirates are later coinages, given by no document of the period. Every one of these tellings came after the sworn record.

The bell raised from the wreck named the ship. It did not name the man.

The chart that opened this walk named the wreck and the man in one hand, and it is where the loop closes. The Bahamas company Bellamy rose in has its own gallery. Where this Archive has got something wrong, it is set down and dated on the corrections page.