WHYDAH UPDATE

[piratediver]

Thought everyone would like to know what is happening now on the pirate ship WHYDAH.


Thursday, August 2, 2007
Explorer touts new find from pirate ship

(Vincent DeWitt for The Boston Globe)


By Ryan Haggerty, Globe Correspondent

A boat piloted by underwater explorer Barry Clifford is towing a 10,000-pound mass believed to contain cannons, gold coins, and other artifacts from the sunken pirate ship Whydah to a pier in Provincetown this afternoon, a find that will yield more secrets and treasure from the nearly 300-year-old wreck, Clifford said.

The artifacts are encased in a "concretion," essentially a chunk in which the cannons and other objects have been fused together due to the reaction between saltwater and iron over time.

The concretion, which is about the size of a small car, is the largest ever recovered from the wreck and was too heavy to be lifted by crane, Clifford said by cell phone from his boat, the 75-foot Vast Explorer.

Instead, a custom-built net was attached to the mass, which was lifted from the ocean floor by four flotation bags, Clifford said.

The concretion was discovered last summer in the same spot as a smaller mass of three cannons that was retrieved from the ocean floor last month, Clifford said.

The newly found cannons, believed to be among the approximately 30 cannons that the Whydah had stolen from other ships and was storing in her hold, were found about 10 feet beneath the ocean floor at the spot where the first artifacts from the wreck were discovered in 1984.

The concretion will be tied to a pier in Provincetown tonight and left underwater until it can be transported to a laboratory in Brewster for examination later this week, Clifford said.

"All we know is that there are some cannons and other artifacts sticking out of it, but until we get it in the lab and X-ray it, we won't know exactly what's in there,"� Clifford said. "It's pretty suspenseful."

The Whydah, laden with loot from at least 54 other ships and manned by a crew of about 140 pirates, sank in a northeaster off Wellfleet on April 26, 1717. Clifford has removed about 200,000 artifacts from the wreck since 1984, some 200 of which are on display in Cincinnati as part of a traveling museum exhibit.


If anybody is in New England in the next few months let me know, maybe we can arrange a tour and/or dive.



Pirate Diver

 

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[diverlynn]

If any of you have not read the book THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES, written by Colin Woodard, your missing out. There is quite a bit about the WHYDAH and the Pirate trafficking in the Bahamas and the Caribbean. Good read.
Diverlynn

 

[bowser]

nothing on the news here yet that ive heard

 

[FISHEYE]

So far its just cannons,no gold in the mass.a friend of mine is one of the divers up there.also Clifford is still hireing divers.if interested you may want to check with him.

 

[piratediver]

From the N.Y. Times today:




By KATIE ZEZIMA
Published: August 8, 2007
PROVINCETOWN, Mass., Aug. 7 — As pirate treasure goes, it does not look like much.

About the size of a small car, the mass of fused black metal is spotted with rust and studded with barnacles. It smells like low tide, and at one point Tuesday morning a crab scurried from under it.

But to Barry Clifford, an underwater explorer, and the two dozen or so people gathered at MacMillan Pier here on Tuesday morning to see it raised from the ocean after 290 years, the object is a treasure, a tangible piece of pirate lore.

“Look, it’s a piece of glass,” Mr. Clifford said excitedly as he scrutinized the object, which lay on a flatbed.

“I bet it’s a bottle of rum,” said Nelson Disco of Merrimack, N.H., who is vacationing here and watched the salvage operation.

Mr. Clifford has spent about 25 years looking for and salvaging the remains of the Whydah, a pirate ship sailed by Samuel Bellamy, who was known as Black Sam. The ship sank off the coast of Wellfleet, Mass., during a storm in April 1717.

The mass, about 12,000 pounds, is thought to be part of the wreck and to contain at least seven iron cannons. Mr. Clifford and his team plucked it from below 30 feet of sand last week.

The cannons twisted together and probably preserved numerous artifacts. The exact contents will be determined through X-rays in the next few weeks, but Mr. Clifford expects the concretion, as the mass is called, to contain coins, weapons and perhaps bone, as others have.

“This is the biggest thing we’ve brought up from the shipwreck in 25 years,” Mr. Clifford said. It may also prove to be the best clue yet as to where the more than five tons of gold and silver the ship supposedly carried may be.

Mr. Clifford found a piece of the ship’s hull in 1998 and was sure he was close to the mother lode. Nine years later it has not been found, but Mr. Clifford said this discovery led him to believe that the booty lay nearby, far beneath accumulated sand. Because the treasure and cannons were so heavy, Mr. Clifford said, they are probably near each other. “There’s nowhere for it to go but down,” he said.

Charles R. Ewen, a professor of archaeology at East Carolina University and a co-editor of “X Marks the Spot: The Archaeology of Piracy,” said anything new from the Whydah was significant because it was the only pirate ship that had been “unequivocally found” and offered clues about the pirating life.

“It sank with everything,” Professor Ewen said, “so the material you find with it is very good at comparing with other ships. It’s very important for history and capturing what it was really like to be a pirate, as opposed to Johnny Depp.”

Mr. Clifford said his crews would continue to comb the ocean floor. His discoveries are documented by the National Geographic Society, which is sponsoring a touring exhibition of the Whydah’s artifacts based at the Cincinnati Museum Center. Others are displayed at Mr. Clifford’s museum here, the Exhibition Whydah Sea Lab and Learning Center.

Although the gold and silver may still lie somewhere below, Mr. Clifford believes he has already hauled riches from the sea.

“It’s history, and people are learning,” Mr. Clifford said. “Every artifact that’s brought up is a treasure.”

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Enjoy,


Pirate Diver