Samuel Bellamy

Overview

Samuel Bellamy was an English pirate whose fourteen-month independent career in 1716–1717 took some fifty vessels before he was lost in a storm off Cape Cod at age twenty-eight. He is principally remembered now for the Whydah Gally — the slaver he refitted as his flagship in February 1717 and which sank with him in April — whose 1984 discovery and continuing excavation off the Wellfleet coast has made his career the most archeologically substantiated of any Golden Age pirate after Edward Teach.

Origins

Bellamy was born in Hittisleigh, Devon, in February or March 1689. He went to sea young, served in the Royal Navy during the War of the Spanish Succession, and emigrated to New England around 1714 in search of work. He is documented in Eastham on Cape Cod in 1715, where he reportedly courted a local woman named Maria Hallett and, declining to marry her without prospects, left for the West Indies to seek his fortune. The Hallett story rests on local oral tradition recorded in the nineteenth century rather than on contemporary sources; she was a real person but her relationship with Bellamy is not documented in the surviving record.

Career

Bellamy joined the small Caribbean pirate fleet of Benjamin Hornigold in early 1716, sailing aboard the sloop Marianne under Hornigold and rising to quartermaster; he and Hornigold sailed in consort with Olivier La Buse, who commanded his own sloop. When Hornigold was voted out of command by his crew in mid-1716 over his refusal to attack English shipping, Bellamy was elected captain of one of the resulting independent vessels. He cruised the Caribbean and the American Atlantic coast through the autumn of 1716 and into the winter, taking a string of small and middle-sized prizes.

The defining capture of Bellamy’s career was the Whydah Gally, taken in the Windward Passage in February 1717 after a three-day chase. The Whydah was a new three-masted London-built slaver of about three hundred tons, mounting eighteen guns and just completing the middle leg of a triangular voyage with the proceeds of slave sales at Jamaica aboard. Bellamy refitted her with twenty-eight guns and made her his flagship for a cruise north along the American Atlantic coast intended to return to New England, where he — according to several accounts at the trials of survivors — intended to retire on his accumulated wealth.

The Whydah was driven onto the bar at Wellfleet, Cape Cod, in a violent nor’easter on the night of 26 April 1717. The ship broke up in heavy surf; only two of approximately 145 men aboard survived. Bellamy was not among them. The crew of the consort sloop Anne, also wrecked on the coast that night, were captured by local militia and seven were eventually tried and hanged at Boston in November 1717.

Treasures

Documented

• The <em>Whydah</em> wreck assemblage

  Thousands of recovered artefacts from the 1984-and-continuing excavation off Wellfleet, including the ship’s bell (positively identifying the wreck), specie from multiple Caribbean prize cargoes, jewellery, weapons, and personal effects. Curated at the Whydah Pirate Museum, West Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

Fate

The Whydah’s wreck site was located by underwater archeologist Barry Clifford in 1984 and has been excavated continuously since. The site has yielded the ship’s bell — positively identifying the vessel as the Whydah, the only Golden Age pirate vessel ever so authenticated — along with thousands of artefacts including coins, jewellery, navigational instruments, and personal items. The collection is curated at the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

Legacy

The Whydah wreck site is, with the Queen Anne’s Revenge site in North Carolina, one of the two principal sources of physical evidence for Golden Age piracy. The recovered material has substantially reshaped academic understanding of the period: pirate crews were younger, more racially mixed, and more materially prosperous than the surviving documentary record had suggested. The Hallett romance has been the subject of multiple novels and stage adaptations; none rests on contemporary evidence.

Associates & contemporaries

• Benjamin Hornigold — Captain under whom Bellamy first served in 1716 before taking his own command.