Whydah Gally
Black Sam Bellamy's prize
1715 – 26 April 1717
The Whydah Gally — named for the slave-trading port of Ouidah on the West African coast — was a three-masted English galley launched in 1715 for the transatlantic trade in human beings. She had completed one full triangular voyage (England, Africa, the Caribbean, England) when, in February 1717 in the Windward Passage, she was taken by the pirate Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy.
Bellamy's flagship
Bellamy traded up: he transferred his crew and treasure to the Whydah, gave her former captain Lawrence Prince his old sloop in exchange, and let Prince and a portion of the Whydah's original crew go free. She was an excellent prize — twenty-eight guns, swift, and capacious. Bellamy mounted ten additional guns and made her his flagship.
A short flagship's life
Bellamy sailed her north along the American coast, taking prizes off Virginia and New England, and is generally believed to have been making for Maine — or, by some accounts, returning to find his sweetheart Maria Hallett at Eastham, Massachusetts.
On the night of 26 April 1717, the Whydah was caught in a violent nor'easter off the coast of Cape Cod. The ship was driven onto the bar at Wellfleet and broke apart in heavy surf. One hundred and forty-four men were drowned. Two survived. Bellamy was not among them; he was twenty-eight years old.
The first authenticated pirate wreck
For two centuries the Whydah's location was lost. In 1984, the underwater explorer Barry Clifford located the wreck site in shallow water off Wellfleet. A ship's bell raised in 1985 bears the inscription "THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716" — the only such inscribed artifact ever recovered from a pirate vessel. It remains the only fully authenticated Golden Age pirate shipwreck in the world.
Recovery efforts have brought up tens of thousands of artifacts, including pieces-of-eight, cannons, navigational instruments, and human remains — including, in 2018, a skeleton initially believed to be Bellamy himself, though DNA analysis has not confirmed the identification.
The collection is housed at the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts.