Discovering the whydah

Experts at the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, now plan to examine the skeletons in further detail.

According to Marie Szaniszlo of the Boston Herald , the team unearthed one complete skeleton and portions of five other sets of remains. Some of the bones had been broken, likely when the ship capsized, crushing its passengers. Average rating 3. Rating details. Sort order. Jun 19, Angie rated it it was ok. Informative behind the scenes info as the treasure of the Whydah is about to be on display in my area.

Would have been better off not knowing so much about Barry Clifford's personal life. Well written and interesting tale of a passion mixed with daring and courage. There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. About Barry Clifford. Barry Clifford. Books by Barry Clifford. They discovered hundreds of iron pieces, but not those from the Whydah. There also were remnants from other more recent shipwrecks. Then, one day in the fall of , a diver came up and said he discovered a cannon.

Nearby was a coin dated , and a brass trigger guard for a pistol. That was the final proof for anyone who had been skeptical up to that moment. You can see the same bell right here in the museum when you first arrive. Macort: I really see my job as creating a unique and personal experience for everyone who visits us at the museum. That is why we are so committed to its interactivity. After you have spent an hour or two watching videos of our dives and then going back in history to , you enter our laboratory.

At first, it probably catches you by surprise. Because after living years ago, you find yourself surrounded by high-definition screens projecting X-rays and an array of concretions that begin to reveal everything from a brass-handled flint-lock pistol to a pewter spoon, and gold dust.

I want everyone to feel personally connected to each artifact, and we are right there to explain their origins. So you go from restorer and archaeologist to historian. There are no exhibit cases in the lab. Everything is out in the open. Often, we will pull a concretion directly from its tank on my workshop desk.

We encourage visitors to participate with us, even holding a flashlight while we carefully extract an object. Then, they can actually hold the new treasure. As someone who is from the Cape, I also get very excited about sharing this totally unique Cape Cod story. All but two of his crew perished, including Bellamy.

And the Whydah slammed into a shallow sandbar with the plunder of all those ships disappearing into the sand. Macort: Very true. The shattered ship and most of the booty quickly disappeared under shifting sands. For the next years, it remained out of reach of treasure hunters and salvagers. Barry Clifford was determined to find the Whydah and her treasure. Beginning in , he dedicated all his energies to the hunt. For the next four years, his business and marriage suffered as he single-mindedly studied old records, consulted with experienced treasure hunters, mapped the area with special metal detecting equipment, and recovered pieces of iron that he believed might have been from the ship.

Clifford secured permits from the state to conduct underwater archeology, and crisscrossed the country raising money for an underwater dig. In November of , he "staked his claim" to the site in U. District Court, seeking the right to keep any treasure he might uncover. His request was granted; now he had to find the wreck. Many people believed the story of the Whydah was only a legend; others were sure that the treasure had long ago been stripped from the wreck, or that the remains were too deep and too scattered ever to be recovered.

Clifford persisted, studying documents that referred to the original site of the wreck, using old maps to take into account how the shoreline had shifted, and employing special metal-detecting equipment to pinpoint his search.

Finally, he anchored his foot boat over the spot where he believed the wreck lay. With two huge cylinders powerful enough to blow the sand on the ocean floor into foot craters, he found what he was looking for. Over the next two summers, Clifford and his team recovered millions of dollars worth of coins, artifacts, and gold dust.

Clifford claimed this was just the beginning, but he still had no proof the loot came from the Whydah. Finally, divers brought up a bell; after archaeologists worked to gently clean encrusted material from the bell's surface, the fateful words appeared — "The Whydah Gally Clifford and his team continued to bring up treasure from the wreck, but they still faced a huge challenge.