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| Ile Sainte-Marie: just another pirate paradise |
Last week, "H2," previously known as "History International," aired three shows targeted towards the drunken pirate demographic. The first I stumbled into (on G'Ma's TV), and when I looked on the Comcast guide and set the DVR for a full showing of that I found two more. The first, accidental discovery was the best as an actual documentary: Pirate Island, about investigations of Ile Sainte-Marie off northeast Madagascar. Ile Sainte-Marie was one of the premier pirate havens of the Golden Age, because it had everything you could ask for--a location close to the rich shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean yet undisclosed to the law, a harbor to keep ships same from both storms and the Navy, and a local supply of fruit and water. Kidd, Levasseur, Every, and other legendary pirates of the era used the island as a base at one time or another. It was known for having vestiges of pirate days, but no professional archaeological survey had ever been done.
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| Bell of the Whydah |
The team leader for the investigations documented in Pirate Island is a modern name well known to pirate buffs, Barry Clifford. Clifford reached fame in 1984 with his discovery of the Whydah (pronounced WID-ah, not WIDE-ah). The Whydah started as a trading and slave ship in 1715, but two years later it was captured in the Caribbean by the pirate "Black Sam" Bellamy. Bellamy added cannons, made the 105-foot vessel his flagship, and preyed off the East Coast. Unfortunately, in April, 1717, the Whydah was caught in a storm near Cape Cod. Gale-force winds snapped the mainmast, and the ship capsized and broke apart. Over a hundred pirate corpses washed up on the beach the next day as well as scattered goods that were quickly picked over by wreckers. Three hundred years later, Clifford found the wreck of the Whydah. Over 200,000 artifacts have now been recovered, ranging from buttons and buckles to grape shot and grenades...and 10,000 coins and 400 jewelry fragments. The key find was the ship's bell, clearly inscribed with "The Whyday Gally 1716." Clifford had found the first positively identified pirate shipwreck.
