|
|
|
Photo Kevin Mullaney
Marine explorer Barry Clifford talks to a rapt crowd at Truro Central School. |
|
|
|
Clifford captivates in pirate ship talk
By Kevin Mullaney
Banner Correspondent
Clifford captivates in pirate ship talk
By Kevin Mullaney
BANNER CORRESPONDENT
TRURO — When the pirate ship Whydah ran aground off Cahoon Hollow in Wellfleet in April 1717, it was full of treasure. Built in London as a slave ship, the Whydah had been captured by the pirate Samuel "Black Sam” Bellamy on its maiden voyage the year before. Between then and the fierce nor’easter that sank her, Bellamy and his men robbed 50 different ships. Loaded down with the treasure and a ballast full of cannons, the ship turned turtle, sending the cannons crashing through the deck above, trapping all that treasure in the sand below.
“We didn’t know how important a find it was,” said Barry Clifford, the marine explorer who first located the wreck of the Whydah in 1983, as he spoke in the gym at Truro Central School Friday night. “We were young men looking for treasure, for adventure,” unaware of the “very valuable time capsule” they had found, he said.
Clifford has become pretty famous since then. His talk in Truro follows on the heels of a “Good Morning America” segment filmed out here a few weeks ago, which dovetails with the opening in Cincinnati of the 15,000 sq. ft. National Geographic-sponsored exhibition of Whydah artifacts as it travels the world. His talk, for the Truro Historical Society, was a somewhat spontaneous benefit for the Highland House Museum. The “Good Morning America” segment will be aired this morning (Thursday, Oct. 4).
It is an exciting time for the Whydah. Already more than 100,000 artifacts have been recovered — millions in gold and silver, coins and bars, cannons and firearms, hand grenades, bones, even a silk ribbon — but there’s way more to come. Based on a hunch from a ship’s log and after 25 years of digging pits, Clifford and his team returned to the spot of their original find, went deeper and hit the jackpot. Beneath the sand, all fused together with the cannons that trapped them, is a whole new layer of artifacts. The cannons’ mass and weight kept the treasure from being dispersed by the surf and currents. It all got buried, “right where we started in 1983, 10 feet deeper,” he told the crowd. Salvage operations were shut down for the winter 10 days prior to his presentation.
In recounting their searches and research and what they have learned in the years since, Clifford enthralled the modest-sized crowd from start to finish. He didn’t divulge the surprises to be unveiled on television, but no matter. Speaking somewhat extemporaneously as he showed slides of their hunt for the Whydah and other wrecks, the former college football player gave a first-class, compelling symposium on underwater archaeology, from trying to dig a hole in the bottom of the ocean and maritime history, to the evolution of their high-tech conservation efforts.
“We have opened up a new page in the history of who these people were,” he said, speaking of the pirates as outlaws and thieves, but also as renegade experimenters in democracy. They freed slaves. There were blacks and Native Americans aboard the Whydah, even a runaway child. Each had an equal share and a vote. In testimony, captured pirates spoke of themselves as freedom fighters, Robin Hood-like robbers. They were Freemasons. Clifford compares them to our founding fathers and their rebellions for democracy — men who would’ve been hanged had we lost that war. In addition to the Whydah, he found the wreck of Capt. Kidd’s ship, the Adventure, off Madagascar and believes he has located the wreck of the Santa Maria near Haiti. Columbus never seemed so real.
Clifford emphasizes that they have not sold any of the treasure from the Whydah. They are not a big corporate treasure-hunting scheme, which just goes for the gold and treasure and wrecks the rest.
It’s the only verified pirate ship ever found. And technology allows them to look into the aggregations of fused treasure, iron and lead. They can see in and go straight to the spot, he said, “But once you take the accretion apart you are into a huge conservation effort.” They have hundreds of accretions still submerged in salt water to keep the secrets intact. Clifford told the crowd that every new finding tells a story and he can’t see the end to this tunnel. “This project will take certainly my lifetime,” he said, concluding that, “It’s not what you find, but what you find out.”
|
H2-B or not to be?
Water plan gets flushed
Provincetown sewer contruction update
For Your Information
Outer Cape Worship Services
School lunch menus
|
|
|
|
|
Oct 4th, 2007