The Wreck

THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716

The inscription cast into the ship's bell recovered from the wreck off Wellfleet in 1985.

The ship's bell, inscribed THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716 The bell settles that the ship was real, was named, and was of 1716. It settles nothing about the character of her captain. It is material evidence of a kind historians almost never get, physical, undisturbed and indifferent to the story anyone wants to tell about it, consistent with what the record says of the ship and not proof of it, not self-interpreting and not beyond revision, and what it means still has to be argued. Whydah Pirate Museum, West Yarmouth, Massachusetts. Recovered from the wreck in 1985.

On the night of 26 to 27 April 1717 a nor'easter drove the fleet onto the Cape Cod shore. The Mary Anne ran ashore opposite Slutts-bush between ten and eleven at night. The Whydah struck a sandbar and capsized off Wellfleet about midnight, and of roughly a hundred and forty six aboard her only two reached the beach alive, the carpenter Thomas Davis and the pilot John Julian; the dead are given across the sources as between a hundred and forty two and a hundred and forty five.

Barry Clifford located the wreck off Wellfleet in 1984, and the bell recovered the next year, inscribed to the ship and her year, fixed it as the Whydah. Very likely She is the only fully authenticated Golden Age pirate wreck.

Objects have come up from the site since 1984. The Whydah was a London slave ship, and when Bellamy took her she was homeward from Jamaica with the proceeds of that voyage aboard rather than with captives.

Bellamy was aboard and stands on no survivor list, and no surviving source names his body among the dead, so his death in the wreck is an inference from his absence. A leg bone recovered near the site was tested in 2018 against a living descendant of the Bellamy line and proved to be another man's, of Eastern Mediterranean ancestry. The excavation has attributed a fibula in a shoe with a silk stocking to the boy John King, and six skeletons came up in 2021. So far the wreck has given back no bone identified as Bellamy's.

The numbers in this case come from parties with different interests, in different units, and they do not reconcile.

The Whydah's guns: eighteen mounted as she was taken, in the printed trial; twenty six in the governor's report of March 1717; and up to twenty eight after the pirate refit in the later literature, which is probable.
Aboard the Whydah when she struck: about a hundred and forty six.
The dead: between a hundred and forty two and a hundred and forty five, across the sources.
Reached the beach alive: two, the carpenter Thomas Davis and the pilot John Julian.
Cyprian Southack's arrival at the wreck: the second or third of May 1717. Probable.
Buried by Southack, on his own chart: a hundred and two men.

The chart at the entrance to this walk is the paper that led the diver to this wreck. The Cape Cod shore and its waters have their own galleries, and the written articles that bound a crew have theirs.

Records in this room