The Black Bellamy

This week features an excerpt from the book, The Narrow Land: Folk Chronicles of Old Cape Cod: Elizabeth Reynard. Chatham Historical Society, Chatham, MA, 1933.

Here is just one of the stories found in Cape Cod folklore that explores the story of Sam Bellamy. His body was never identified after the wreck of the Whydah Galley, and some of the stories speculate that he survived the wreck and lived out his life on Cape Cod.

The Black Bellamy came out of the West Country, England, and when he was old enough to know better he staked his fortune on the salvaging of “bags of silver” from a Spanish vessel wrecked in the West Indies. On the way to this doubtful venture he put in at Eastham Harbor and tried to interest Cape men in his scheme; but the Narrow Land knew too many wrecks bleaching their beams off the outer reefs to spend money on an unseen hulk sunk in the Spanish Seas. Her sailors wished the “bonnieman” luck and nodded approval of his tight little sloop, old and “sea-kindly”; for this happened in the spring of 1715 while Samuel Bellamy was staying at Higgins' Tavern in Eastham, not far from the Burying Acre, and near the Minister's Pond.

One evening to clear his head from the fumes of Sandwich ale and cod muddle, Sam took a stroll through the “Judgment Lot,” and as he reached the southern end of it, heard a girl's voice, singing. He traced the song to a circular hollow surrounded by trees, and coming to the edge, saw, below him, a white cloud floating. From the cloud rose a song. He strode downslope, through 'Tarnity Briars, and found that the cloud was a flower apple tree. Under the tree stood Maria Hallett, a drip-rush lanthorn in one hand and blossoms in the other. She was fifteen years old; her hair glistened like corn silk at suncoming; her eyes were he color of hyacinth, like the deeps of Gull Pond. Black Bellamy made masterly love, sailorman love that remembers how a following wind falls short and makes way while it blows. Maria Hallett had never seen a man as handsome as Sam Bellamy; just out of the West Country, his black hair curly, his fortune buckled in his three-cornered pocket and mighty dreams in his eye. Love was settled between them in no time at all, under the apple tree by the Burying Acre, and Sam sailed with a promise to Mara that when he returned he would wed her by ring to the words of the Rev. Mr. Treat, and in a sloop, laden with treasure, carry her back to the Spanish Indies, there to be made princess of a West Indian Isle.

Maria went home to wait for him, and in time gave birth to a “bonnieman's child” with black eyes and black hair. Maria was afraid to show it. She hid the boy in the Knowles' barn, and crept put there to feed it, but a straw caught in its throat and it died. A week later the selectmen confined her in Eastham prison, but she proved as wild as Nauset wind, and her wistful eyes and silky hair made her pleadings irresistible to jailors. Time after time she escaped and was caught, for as soon as she won freedom she went to the apple tree hollow, or ran to the Backside to watch for the sails of Bellamy's ship. The sheriffs had only to walk to the high Clay Pounds to discover her, a small figure standing silhouetted against the sea.

After a time the elders grew weary of chastising her, and the townspeople, impressed by her ability to break jail at will, stoned her away from Eastham as a witch. She went north, far from habitation, and with her own hands built a hut on the Backside. From the sand meadow at her doorstone she looked to the east where ships rode like ivory beads on the long blue chain of the Cape's seaway. Below the sand meadow, breakers foamed, eating the tall cliffs, licking the peat strata from which Maria Cut fuel. The slow withdrawal of the tides at ebb left unending reaches of sand, over which lights danced and ships seemed to ride.

No woman on the peninsula wove the beautiful patterns that Maria Hallett knew how to draw from her loom. Many fine weavers tried to copy them, but the wools snarled and the designs faltered, so Maria took in weaving in exchange for bread; and because she never lacked for food, an was independent as tidewater, people continued to think her a witch, and said that she danced on Sabbath nights in the hollow by the Burying Acre, and that she had signed a pact with the devil in exchange for young Bellamy's soul.

All this time, in the hot Indies, a young man from the West Country toiled over a waterlogged wreck, spent his last farthing, with never sixpence to show for it, not to mention silver or gold. With him worked a Nantucket sailorman named Paul (or Paulsgrave) Williams, and the two became close friends. Whether or not Sam Bellamy remembered his promise to Maria, he soon grew impatient at the failure of his salvaging, and as a swifter road to wealth, he and Williams decided to turn pirate, or, as they put it, “to go on the account.” Bellamy possessed his sloop, long due at the Sea of Sargossa, but he could sail her, under press of canvas, like a ghost vessel.

During the first weeks of their “piratical undertaking,” they fell in with Benjamin Hornygold, a stouthearted buccaneer in command of the Mary Anne, an also with Captain Lebous in the sloop Postillion. The combined fleet made several rich captures; but Hornygold refused to plunder English vessels, and on this issue Sam saw his chance to foster disaffection among the buccaneers and profit by discontent. When the matter of plundering the king's ships was finally put to a vote, only twenty-six pirates were willing to follow Hornygold, while ninety elected Bellamy as their new captain and determined upon a career of swift, relentless looting, with the rapid accumulation of a fortune, and prompt purchase of the king's pardon.

To be continued...