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Pirate Gold For The Digging
Somewhere on Cape Cod on a lonely stretch of beach there, are hoards of pirate treasure. The Cape was a hideout for pirates. The story is told of one man of odd and frightful look who visited the Cape once every spring.
He had nothing to do with the people but from the words he said during his troubled sleep he was thought to be a pirate. Ribald and blasphemous words in the night made people think he was in touch with evil spirits or that he was disturbed by the things he saw in his sleep. He was thought to have been one of a pirate crew that had been wrecked on the shore.
His annual visits were to get gold pieces from a hidden hoard that he had buried in the sands. When he died people were certain he was a pirate because around his waist was a girdle filled with gold pieces. Gold coins were found on the beach for many years after the wreck of a pirate ship.
A Wellfleet oysterman told Thoreau in 1852 that he had seen the iron cabin of the pirate ship Whydah on the bar at extreme low tide. The Whydah was captured by Samuel Bellamy a Cape Cod pirate. Bellamy and his buccaneers captured the Whydah, a 100-foot three-masted galley packed with ivory, indigo and thousands of silver and gold coins off the coast of Cuba.
… His fortune secured, Bellamy headed for home. By April 1717 he was off Cape Cod when his fleet was struck by a storm with 70 mph gales and 40 foot waves. The Whydah was top heavy and highly susceptible to the driving winds blowing her ever closer to the shore. According to local legend, Bellamy was returning to Cape Cod for his lover, Goody Hallett, when he met his doom. Condemned as a witch, her spirit is still said to walk the clifftops of Wellfleet near the wreck…
...Only two men survived the natural holocaust. One was an Indian pilot who quickly disappeared into the mists of history, the other Thomas Davis, a Welsh carpenter, whose vivid account of the shipwreck was preserved and passed from generation to generation through Cape Cod folklore…— source
The pirate ship Whydah was later found by diver Barry Clifford on July 20, 1984.
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Posted by capelinks - (website) on 01/27/06
Categories: History, Wellfleet
Keywords: Samuel Bellamy, Whydah, pirates, maritime, treasure, shipwrecks, Barry Clifford
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