More of the pirate Sam Bellamy’s gold may still be buried on the ocean floor off Marconi Beach on Cape Cod. Barry Clifford, the diver and explorer who discovered Bellamy’s shipwrecked vessel, the Whydah, is in the news again this week. Clifford’s team of divers has continued to explore the shipwreck site since its discovery in 1984, and based on work conducted late this summer, Clifford believes there may be far more gold coins and other artifacts still hidden under the sand on the ocean floor.
The shipwreck of the Whydah, in April 1717, was big news in colonial New England — and an ominous event for Philip Ashton, who was just fourteen years old that year. A few members of Bellamy’s pirate crew survived the shipwreck near Cape Cod and, as I note in At the Point of a Cutlass, set off in search of a new vessel. The pirates held a small fishing shallop and its crew for a few days before they decided to take another vessel instead. So, less than two weeks after the Whydah shipwreck, that fishing shallop sailed back to Ashton’s hometown. The fishermen’s brush with the pirates from Bellamy’s crew was the talk of Marblehead for days. The young Philip Ashton, who would also soon be setting off on fishing voyages to the Canadian coastline, could never have anticipated his own dramatic capture by a pirate crew just five years later.
Video: Cape Cod Times.
