The Whydah was first launched in 1715 from London, England. A three-masted ship of galley-style design, it measured 31 meters in length, rated at 300 tons burden, and could travel at speeds up to 13 knots.
Christened Whydah after the West African trading town of Ouidah (pronounced WIH-dah), the vessel was configured as a heavily-armed trading and transport ship for use in the Atlantic slave trade, carrying goods from England to exchange for slaves in West Africa. It would then travel to the Caribbean to trade the slaves for precious metals, sugar, indigo, and medicinal ingredients, which would then be transported back to England. Fitted with a standard complement of eighteen six-pound cannons, which could be increased to a total of twenty-eight in time of war, the Whydah represented one of the most advanced weapons systems of the time.
In late February of 1717, the Whydah, under the command of one Captain Lawrence Prince, was navigating the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola when it was attacked by pirates led by "Black Sam" Bellamy. At the time of the Whydah's capture, Bellamy was in possession of two vessels, the 26-gun galley Sultana and the converted 10-gun sloop Marianne. After a three-day chase, Prince surrendered his ship with only a desultory exchange of cannon fire. Bellamy decided to take the Whydah as his new flagship; several of its crew remained with their ship and joined the pirate gang. In a gesture of goodwill toward the captain who had surrendered without a struggle, and who in any case may have been favorably known by reputation to the pirate crew—Bellamy gave the Sultana to Prince, along with £20 in silver and gold.
The Whydah was loaded with 10 additional cannons by its new captain, and 150 members of Bellamy's crew were detailed to man the vessel. Bellamy and his crew then sailed on to the Carolinas and headed north along the eastern coastline of the American colonies, aiming for the central coast of Maine, looting or capturing additional vessels on the way. At some point during his possession of the Whydah, Bellamy loaded an additional 30 cannons below decks, possibly as ballast.
Accounts differ as to the destination of the Whydah during its last weeks. Some legends recount that Bellamy wanted to visit his mistress, Maria Hallett, who lived near the tip of Cape Cod, while others blame the Whydah's route on navigator error. In any case, the Whydah, on April 26, 1717, sailed into a violent storm dangerously close to Cape Cod. The ship was driven ashore at Wellfleet, Massachusetts. At midnight she hit a sandbar in 16 feet of water some 500 yards from the coast of what is now Marconi Beach. Pummelled by 70 mile an hour winds and 30 foot waves, the main mast snapped, pulling the ship into deeper water where she capsized.The nearly 60 cannons on board ripped through the overturned decks of the ship and quickly broke it apart, scattering its contents over a 4-mile area. One of the two surviving members of Bellamy's crew, one Thomas Davis, testified in his subsequent trial that "In a quarter of an hour after the ship struck, the Mainmast was carried by the board, and in the Morning she was beat to pieces."
By morning, dozens of pirate corpses were washed up on the shoreline, and hundreds of Cape Cod's notorious wreckers (locally known as "moon-cussers") were already plundering the remains. Hearing of the shipwreck, then-governor Samuel Shute dispatched Cyprian Southack, a local salvager and cartographer, to recover "Money, Bullion, Treasure, Goods and Merchandizes taken out of the said Ship." By May 3, when Southack reached the location of the wreck, he found that a part of the ship was still visible breeching the water's surface and much of the ship's wreckage were scattered along more than four miles of shoreline. On a map he made of the wreck site Southack reported that he had buried 102 of the 144 Whydah crew and captives lost in the sinking.
According to surviving members of the crew - two from the Whydah and seven from Bellamy's other fleet ship, the Marianne - at the time of its sinking, the ship carried nearly four and a half tons of silver, gold, gold dust, and jewelry, which had been divided equally into 180 fifty-pound bags and stored in chests below the ship's deck. Though Southack did recover some of the items salvaged from the ship, little of this massive treasure hoard was recovered until the wreck's rediscovery in 1984 - nearly three hundred years later - by underwater explorer Barry Clifford.
Nine members of Bellamy's crew survived (two from the Whydah and seven from accompanying ships in his fleet) the storm and wrecking. Six were tried as pirates and hanged in Boston. One of the survivors from the Whydah, a carpenter named Thomas Davis who had been pressed into service when his ship was captured by Bellamy, was captured and brought to trial; however, possibly in part due to the intervention of the famous Puritan minister Cotton Mather, he was acquitted of all charges and spared the gallows. The other survivor of the Whydah, a Miskito Indian named John Julian, was not tried but rather sold into slavery after his capture. Included among the dead were Bellamy himself, as well as a boy, aged approximately 9 to 11, named John King. Young John actually chose to join the crew on his own initiative the previous November when Bellamy captured the ship on which he and his mother were passengers. Among the Whydah artifacts recovered by Barry Clifford was a shoe, silk stocking and femur bone dated to a child between 8 and 11 years old, most likely belonging to that of John King.
Wikipedia and other sites.
British Virgin Is SG?2009