|
|
Photo Sue Harrison
Underwater explorer Barry Clifford in the wheelhouse of his boat The Vast Explorer outside his Whydah Museum on MacMillan Pier in Provincetown. |
|
|
Getting under the surface
Underwater explorer Barry Clifford keeps finding the lost ships
Sue Harrison
BANNER STAFF
Barry Clifford found the first documented pirate ship (the Whydah), led several underwater archeological expeditions for the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, wrangled with foreign governments over permits, watched carefully as foreign navies circled his dive locations, was recently named as one of five Discovery Channel scholars and yet retains the enthusiasm of a boy when it comes to the subject of pirates.
He has written three books on his pirate-hunting expeditions, 'Expedition 'Whydah,'' 'The Lost Fleet' and 'Return to Treasure Island: the Search for Captain Kidd,' which was released this year. He will sign copies of 'Treasure Island' this Friday from 1 to 3 p.m. at Yellow Umbrella Books, 501 Main St., Chatham.
Meanwhile, he says that he had no idea or aim to become the guy who goes out and finds pirate ships. Earlier in life he was a teacher, a powerlifter and a salvage diver, but not a pirate hunter.
'It was probably the last thing I thought about doing,' he says sitting in his apartment atop the Whydah Museum on MacMillan Pier. Looking out over the Provincetown Harbor, wearing his trademark baseball cap, Clifford grins when he talks about his unusual calling.
Like a lot of youngsters, Clifford had read Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Treasure Island' and was intrigued by the tales of pirate ships, battles at sea, swords flashing, secret caves full of treasure and all the rest of the pirate lore. He had also heard tales of Black Sam Bellamy's ship the Whydah being shipwrecked off Cape Cod. Then, miraculously, he found the ship.
'One day I was just doing it and I made it up while I did,' he says. 'I got this concept of what I wanted to do and invented my livelihood.'
The Whydah was the first documented pirate ship to ever be found and excavated. Clifford and his crew have been working the site since the early 1980s. Initially, like many private explorers, the idea had been all about the treasure, but for Clifford other things soon came into play.
'At first I just wanted to sell the treasure and make $50 million,' Clifford says. 'Then I realized I couldn't sell it. I had found something so precious. I realized that it started out as a slave ship and that the treasure was used to buy slaves.'
He got caught up in the history more than gold or cannons, caught up in stories that had never really been told.
In his books he alternates chapters between the present expedition and the past. His course and his subject's course are on a collision course that meets on the sea bed with Clifford reaching down through the murk to literally touch the past.
The back and forth technique brings in vast amounts of history (thanks to the research work of project historian Ken Kinkor) told in a lively way. Kinkor is indispensable in all of Clifford's doings and Clifford is quick to say so.
'I started getting really strange letters from Iowa,' Clifford says of his first dealings with Kinkor. 'They just kept coming, they were relentless.'
Clifford quickly realized that Kinkor was the real deal, a man with a vast store of knowledge about pirates and old records and how to find elusive bits of information. He invited Kinkor to come to the Cape and he's been here ever since. 'I couldn't have done any of this without Ken.'
Ironically, Clifford says, Kinkor has no desire to go on the actual expeditions. He just wants to do the research. But he is so thorough that it's as if he has been there and seen it .
When Clifford was searching for Captain Kidd's ship, Adventure Galley, he found Kinkor's information was spot on. 'I had formed a picture in my mind based on what he had told me [about the area where the ship was likely sunk]. When I found it, it was just like I saw it and that was 13,000 miles from home.'
Before taking on Captain Kidd, Clifford dove off the coast of Venezuela following up on reports of cannons scattered over the long reef around the desolate island of Las Aves ('the birds'). With Kinkor on the case, old documents revealed it could be the lost French armada, which disappeared in 1678. It was a catastrophic naval disaster that cost more than 1,000 lives of French sailors and a smaller group of pirates, or buccaneers, who were sailing with them as part of their force. At that time, buccaneers spent part of their time raiding and stealing and part of their time working more or less as hired guns for someone else.
The men who chose the pirate life were not what history has cast them as being. They elected their captains and could remove them from their post with a simple majority vote. They shared the spoils by equal shares and being black was no stumbling block.
'Color didn't matter then,' Clifford says. '[Piracy] was an interesting experiment in democracy. It's important to look back at how democracy started. A lot of subcultures never recorded their own history, it could have been used against them. Pirates were outlaws and a third of them were slaves. It's important to go back and get those stories.
'One of the most successful pirates ever, Laurens de Graff, was described at the time as a 6-foot-4-inch blond when in fact he was a former Dutch slave,' Clifford says, adding that the last thing a plantation owner wanted was for his slaves to get the idea that they might have freedom or a future. Clifford went to Las Aves to film the wrecks for the BBC. Snafus and bureaucratic bumbling kept the project in danger the whole time but they were successful in finding the ships and making a map of the whole site. Today, the area is a national park protected from treasure hunters.
He remembers the night they left Venezuela. A national election had just picked the first-ever president from the barrio instead of the upper class power echelon, and the streets were electric with possibility.
'It was like being in a Hemingway novel,' he says. 'Everything was buzzing. Men were walking around with machine guns.' The political climate, he says, has not been right to safely return yet.
Clifford's eyes then turned to Captain Kidd, a man who had been a pirate and then crossed over to the law-abiding side and moved to New York where he married well and became a prosperous businessman. Then, for whatever reasons, he signed on as the first and only privateer authorized by the English king to captain a boat that would go and capture pirates and take their plunder from them. Problem was, Kidd didn't catch any pirates and instead began to attack ships he met, even those under friendly flags. In short, he became a pirate. Which brings us to Ile Sainte-Marie off the coast of Madagascar. The island was a pirate outpost where ships could be brought in, fixed up and the men could take a shore leave in paradise. It was here that Kidd's Adventure Galley was burned and sunk after his men abandoned him.
Clifford's three trips to Ile Sainte-Marie for the Discovery Channel were fraught with the same mix of problems as his earlier filmed expeditions, but the discoveries were just as exhilarating including mysterious caves leading to the ocean, a pirate cemetery and ghostly remains of several ships in the harbor.
And, like Las Aves, the crew barely got out before political unrest closed the airport for a month.
When asked what is most dangerous, he says it's not the sharks or the hostile locals, it's the machinery. Even on the Whydah site, with the work boat The Vast Explorer anchored just beyond the surf line, there is only a small line that keeps you from being swept off. And, in the fall, by 2 p.m. when the wind is howling and the surf is breaking and even heavy equipment underwater begins to dance around, it gets scary.
Talking about cultural differences, he tells of a huge set of shark jaws for sale in a market on Ile Sainte-Marie. He asked the man how he caught the shark and the man barked like a dog. A translator told Clifford what he meant.
'The natives go out in a boat and duct tape a large hook to the belly of their dog which they throw into the water with a rope running from the hook. If there is a shark, he takes the hook - and the dog. If there is no shark that day, the dog is pulled back in the boat and comes home to sit with the family by the fire that night.'
Returning from some of his trips to distinctly third world states, he says, is in ways harder than being there.
'It's more of a culture shock to come back,' he says. 'We have so much. Everybody has an ice cream cone, and we are coming back from a place where people are sick and starving.'
His next expedition will be to try to recover the lost treasure of the Jesuits in Uruguay. The treasure, 13 chests full of reliquary and other valuables was lost when the boat carrying the treasure, the Gamela, sank at the foot of a waterfall in the Rio de la Plato.
He is also working on a mysterious Project X for the Discovery Channel about which he will say only that a special will be aired on that expedition in 2004.
Over all, he says, sometimes he forgets the power of the treasure story and how people are captivated by the idea of gold and silver just waiting to be found. But his rule of thumb is to 'expect the unexpected,' he says. 'You will get stuck in the airport, trouble and problems will happen. And never forget to factor in greed.'
|
In the arts
|
|
|
|
|
Nov 27th, 2003