Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship Read Online Free PDF

study of their apartment in Santo Domingo. He laughed when she asked if he’d found “Long John Silver,” yet the question jarred him. For all the luck shipwreck hunters had in finding real pirate ships, he and Chatterton might as well have been looking for Noah’s Ark.
    —
    E VEN DURING THE G OLDEN A GE of Piracy, between 1650 and 1720, pirates were rare. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but according to British historian Peter Earle, in the period around 1700, “it seems unlikely that they ever had much more than twenty ships at any one time and less than two thousand men.” By contrast, there might have been as many as eighty thousand sailors and navy men working on legitimate ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean at the time. It’s difficult to say how many pirate ships in total might have sailed during the seventy-year Golden Age, but the number, in any case, would have been small, perhaps fewer than a thousand.
    Not all of those ships had been lost or sunk. Some were captured by authorities; others were sold or traded by the pirates and put tolawful uses. So the number of lost pirate ships is just a fraction of those that ever sailed. Finding any of them would be a long shot. Identifying one would be virtually impossible. The reason lay in the shadowy nature of crime itself.
    Stealth was the lifeblood of a pirate ship. To survive, she had to be invisible, anonymous. Pirate captains didn’t publish crew lists or file sailing plans, and they didn’t paint names on the hulls of their ships. Whenever possible, they sailed in secrecy. These measures helped them evade the forces that hunted them, but it also meant that when they sank, they didn’t merely settle to the bottom; they disappeared from existence. No government went looking for them because they belonged to no country. Witnesses to a sinking couldn’t have described the location precisely in any case, as measures of longitude were unreliable during the era. If any pirates survived the ship’s demise, they weren’t going to report the loss to authorities.
    Nature took over from there. It might take just a few years for mud and sand to bury a shipwreck completely.
    That didn’t mean, however, that a sunken pirate ship was never to be seen again. Over the ages, it was near certain that explorers, fishermen, and even snorkelers had stumbled across the scattered remains of Golden Age pirate ships. Few, however, would have known that the debris was special, or could have identified what they’d found. Much of what a pirate ship carried—dishes, rigging, tools, ballast stones, coins, weapons, even cannons—was carried by merchant ships, too, which meant that even if a finder dared to dream he’d discovered a pirate ship, proving it would be near impossible.
    Except for one man.
    As a boy, American Barry Clifford had heard stories about the pirate captain “Black Sam” Bellamy, whose ship had been lost in 1717 off Cape Cod. As an adult, Clifford went out and found Bellamy’s ship, the
Whydah
, not far from Clifford’s own childhood home. News of the 1984 discovery reverberated worldwide, but it wasn’t just the artifacts or piles of silver or even the story of the crew’s dramatic endin a storm that fired people’s imaginations. It was a bell Clifford had pulled from the wreckage, inscribed “The Whydah Gally 1716.” It made identification of the wreck ironclad, and the
Whydah
the first pirate ship ever confirmed to be found. No one else had ever gotten so lucky.
    But that didn’t keep capable people from trying.
    In the years after Clifford’s discovery, research teams claimed to have found the ships of two of history’s most famous pirates. Neither team, however, seemed able to prove the identity of its wreck.
    The first of the two discoveries had come in 1996 at Beaufort Inlet, just off the North Carolina coast. There, a shipwreck exploration firm discovered what appeared to be the wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship,
Queen Anne’s