Whydah Gally

The Vessel

The Whydah Gally was a three-masted galley built at Ratcliffe on the Thames in 1715 for the London merchant Sir Humphrey Morice, one of the largest investors in the English slave trade of the early eighteenth century. She was 31 metres long on the keel, approximately 300 tons burden, pierced for 18 guns, and fitted with both conventional square-rig sail and with the sweep-oar ports characteristic of the galley subtype that gave her her class name. She was designed for the triangular trade: manufactured goods from London to the West African coast, human cargo from the Slave Coast to the Caribbean, sugar and tobacco from the Caribbean back to London.

She was named after the Kingdom of Whydah, the small but powerful West African polity on the coast of what is now Benin, which was in the early eighteenth century one of the two principal entrepôts of the European slave trade (alongside Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast). Whydah's port, Ouidah, was where the Whydah Gally was intended to load her human cargo.

Her first trading voyage, from London in early 1716, included a call at Whydah where she embarked 367 enslaved Africans, most of them Fon, Ewe, and Yoruba captives taken in the wars between Dahomey and the Oyo Empire. She delivered them to the English colony of Jamaica in autumn 1716 in what had been, by the standards of the trade, an unusually short Middle Passage with relatively low mortality. She departed Jamaica in February 1717 carrying sugar, indigo, ivory, and silver bullion worth approximately £20,000, on the return leg of the triangle.

The Voyage

On 26 February 1717, in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, the Whydah Gally was attacked and captured by the pirate flotilla of Captain Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy. Bellamy was 28 years old, a former English Royal Navy seaman who had turned pirate in 1716 after an affair in Cape Cod with a young woman whose family had rejected him as a prospect. He was, at the time of the Whydah capture, the most successful pirate in the Caribbean: he had taken approximately 53 prize vessels in fourteen months and had established himself as a self-styled "Robin Hood" of the piracy trade, attacking only Crown and wealthy-merchant shipping.

The capture was negotiated rather than fought. Bellamy signalled for parley; the Whydah's master, Captain Lawrence Prince, surrendered without resistance in exchange for his crew's safe release. Bellamy adopted the Whydah Gally as his own flagship, transferring his flag from the smaller Sultana. He released Prince and most of the Whydah's crew, including her surgeon, onto Sultana; he retained approximately 25 of the Whydah's men who had volunteered to join his pirate company.

Bellamy then sailed the Whydah Gally, by then carrying four and a half tons of silver, gold, and jewellery accumulated from two years of piracy, north along the Atlantic coast of North America. His intention, expressed in contemporary depositions from surviving prisoners, was to return to Cape Cod to see the woman whose father had rejected him two years earlier.

The Disaster

Whydah Gally reached the approaches to Cape Cod on the evening of 26 April 1717. The weather that night deteriorated into what eighteenth-century meteorological records identify as a severe spring nor'easter, one of the worst recorded on the Massachusetts coast in the decade. The storm was accompanied by thick fog and a falling barometer.

Bellamy had caught a small pink, the Mary Anne, earlier that afternoon and had placed a prize crew aboard her to sail her in company into Provincetown Harbor. The Mary Anne's prize crew got separated from the Whydah in the thickening weather at about 22:00. The Whydah continued under reduced sail toward Cape Cod with Bellamy's own company aboard: his pirate crew, the 25 volunteers from Whydah, and a handful of prisoners he had not yet released.

Between 23:00 and 00:00 on the night of 26-27 April 1717, the Whydah Gally struck the sandbar at Wellfleet, on the Outer Cape of Massachusetts, in a northeasterly gale and a strong onshore swell. She struck stern-first and was driven onto the bar. The waves tore her apart within minutes. She capsized, her masts snapped, her hull broke in two, and her cargo of silver and gold was scattered across the bottom of a forty-foot-deep kettle hole forty-five metres offshore.

Bellamy went down with his ship. Of the approximately 146 people aboard her, two survived by clinging to floating wreckage and reaching the Wellfleet beach alive: John Julian, a Native American pirate from the Miskito coast of Honduras, and Thomas Davis, a Welsh carpenter who had been forced into piracy against his will. Davis was tried at Boston in October 1717 and acquitted on evidence that he had been a coerced recruit; his testimony is the principal surviving eyewitness account of Bellamy's final voyage. Julian was sold into slavery by the Boston authorities on the grounds that he was an "Indian"; his subsequent fate is unknown.

The Legacy

The Whydah Gally was the subject of almost immediate searching. Governor Samuel Shute of Massachusetts dispatched Captain Cyprian Southack, a veteran Boston pilot and cartographer, to Wellfleet within a week of the wreck to recover the pirates' treasure for the Crown. Southack arrived on 3 May 1717, found the wreck site already being looted by local Cape Cod residents, and succeeded in confiscating only a fraction of the artefacts that had been scattered on the beach. The bulk of the Whydah's cargo, according to Southack's report, had already been recovered and hidden by the Wellfleet locals. The underwater portion of the site, in forty feet of water a hundred metres offshore, was beyond eighteenth-century diving capability.

She lay where she had sunk, in the shallow kettle hole off Wellfleet, for 267 years. Her general location was known from Southack's chart; her specific site was not. In 1982 the Cape Cod underwater explorer Barry Clifford located the wreck using a magnetometer survey keyed to Southack's coordinates. Between 1984 and 1985, Clifford's Maritime Underwater Archaeological Research Center recovered some 200,000 artefacts from the Whydah site, including 40 cannon, silver coins, gold jewellery, personal weapons, and navigational equipment. The artefacts were authenticated as pirate-era by a unique bronze bell recovered in 1985 bearing the inscription "THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716". The Whydah is the only authenticated pirate shipwreck in history whose identification has been established beyond any dispute.

The recovered collection is now housed at the Whydah Pirate Museum in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, which opened to the public in 1999 under Clifford's ongoing management. The museum is a registered U.S. federal archaeological repository and the collection is not for sale. Clifford's excavation of the site has been ongoing since 1984; new artefacts are recovered each summer, including human remains that are analysed at forensic laboratories in Boston.

The Whydah Gally is, as a historical site, a complex inheritance. She was built for the slave trade and sank carrying the accumulated plunder of a pirate career that had included the robbery of other slave ships. Her recovered artefacts include both pirate cultural material and human remains of at least seven enslaved Africans who had been aboard her when she sank. The modern interpretation of her site at the Whydah Museum addresses both narratives: the Atlantic pirate economy of the early eighteenth century and the slave trade that preceded it. She is the best-preserved evidence we have of both systems; she is also, for the 144 people who went down with her, a grave.