Samuel Bellamy: One Year as Captain, the Whydah and Wreck Off Cape Cod

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Samuel Bellamy was born in England around 1689, possibly in Devon or London, and served in the Royal Navy in his late teens. Around 1715 he reached Cape Cod, where lore links him to Maria Hallett, sometimes called the Witch of Wellfleet, whose family rejected him. He teamed with the jeweler Paulsgrave Williams to salvage the Spanish treasure fleet wrecked off Florida in 1715, but the wrecks had already been picked over. Broke and armed, they joined pirate captain Benjamin Hornigold, whose mate was Edward Teach, later Blackbeard. In 1716 the crew voted Hornigold out for refusing to attack English ships and elected Bellamy captain. He wore his hair long and unpowdered, dressed in velvet coats with four pistols in his sash, and paired a heavy flagship with a fast pursuit vessel to force surrenders without bloodshed. In about a year he took more than 50 ships and a fortune estimated at nearly $180 million today.

In spring 1717 in the Windward Passage he chased the Whydah Galley for three days. The 300-ton, 102-foot ship had just sold more than 300 enslaved people in the Caribbean and carried gold, indigo and ivory. Captain Lawrence Prince surrendered after one shot and was given the Sultana in exchange. Bellamy mounted 28 guns and sailed north. On April 26, 1717, a nor'easter drove the Whydah onto the shoals off present-day Wellfleet, where it capsized. Only two of 146 men survived. In July 1984 explorer Barry Clifford located the wreck under 14 feet of water and five feet of sand.

• Lore says Hallett hid her newborn in a barn, where he died, and she was jailed in Barnstable and exiled.
• Bellamy cast wealthy lawmakers and merchants as legal thieves and called himself a free prince.
• Six survivors from his fleet were hanged in Boston that November, three weeks before a royal pardon arrived.
• Survivor John Julian, a 16-year-old Miskito, was sold into slavery to John Quincy, great-grandfather of John Quincy Adams.
• A bell recovered in 1985 reading The Whydah Gally 1716 made it the only authenticated Golden Age pirate wreck found in North America.