Sneak Peek Day: Read an excerpt from my new book!

                                                         The Unknown Survivor

                  There are only two known survivors of the wreck of the Whydah Galley, commanded by Sam Bellamy: Thomas Davis, a carpenter, and John Julian, a pilot. But were they the only two men to survive the wreck?

                   Bellamy and his crew were sailing north along the east coast of what is now the United States. Folklore says their intended destination was Eastham in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Bellamy intended to pick up Maria Hallett, believed to be his lover, on their way to Rhode Island or Maine. He may also have been hoping to sell some of their booty.

                                                                     The Storm

                    April 26, 1717, started out like any other day for the pirates. In the morning, they captured the Mary Anne, “a pink with more than 7,000 gallons of Madeira wine on board… and then the Fisher – a small sloop with a cargo of deer hides and tobacco” in the afternoon. (Clifford, Real, 130) Per customary pirate procedure, smaller groups of pirates were sent over to these ships from the Whydah to act as the new crews of their “prizes.”

                    At the time of the wreck, the Whydah boasted a complement of about 150 men, all crammed into a ship that measured thirty feet wide and one hundred feet long. With the bulk of the pirates’ booty stored on the Whydah, the decks were probably starting to sag. Along with such items as “[e]lephant tusks, sugar, molasses, rum, cloth… indigo, and… dry goods…there was the precious metal, 180 sacks of coins, each… weighing fifty pounds.” (Clifford, Expedition, 260) What this meant was the Whydah would have been very low in the water, a dangerous condition in a storm.

                    Throughout the afternoon a dense fog had rolled in, what should have been an early storm warning for the pirates. In the late afternoon the storm itself began. Instead of steering out to sea, Bellamy chose to stay close to the land, a move which leads many to believe he did indeed wish to try and make port somewhere in Cape Cod.

                     Sometime after 5pm Bellamy ordered all three ships to light lanterns on their sterns, a common navigational aid. But conditions continued to get worse. “An arctic storm from Canada was driving into the warm air that had swept up the coast from the Caribbean. The last gasp of a frigid New England winter, the cold front was about to combine with the warm front in one of the worst storms everr to hit the Cape.” “According to eyewitness accounts, gusts topped 70 miles [113 kilometers] an hour and the seas rose to 30 feet. [9 meters].” (Donovan)

More Levasseur in pirate fact, or fiction?

I found this interesting fictional log entry alleged to have been written by Israel Hands in 1717. It's from the novel Paragon Island by Erik Alexander Dresen. His novel is a “what-if” scenario of an Englishman finding the long-lost treasure of Olivier Levasseur. I thought it was an interesting speculation of what one of Levasseur's contemporaries might have written about him after meeting him.

“Rough log entry on Saturday, January 23^rd; we lay at Teach's Hole again, an Anchorage near Okerecoke Inlet; the Corsair with the Cognomen of Buzzard, thus Blackbeard called him by the fire of bones, about a score and ten summers at most, was of sanguine complexion, as if he was drinking in a sniff of pure sea breeze and a pinch of carmine brine for years. His frame was beefy and his features were sharp; a Heavy of his Calibre in the flesh. Caused by a cutlass but one of his eyes was damaged and there he had a Scar across his brow and right cheek. His sound eye was bluish, with a tinge of aquamarine and some turquoise scatterings, fixating on me as if it were seriously considering rounding on at the very next blink.

The longer I observed him, the more rapacious he appeared to me, with rapid moves, seemingly on the hunt for easy prey. The mere though of it provoked an uneasy feeling of being menaced in my guts. Once I pictured him as an albino creature; and his skull and the orbits were fully illuminated by blazing streams of sunlight, allowing his blood vessels to shine through.

'That's his real soul,' I figured instantly; and that vivid fancy of mine sent frosty shivers up and down my Spine. 'In sooth it's in my soul,' inkhorny as he spoke; and it was as though he's divined my thoughts. His pitch-dark plait was neatly stowed under a cocked Hat that was enthroned on his head askew. The Frenchman comported himself in an elegant, literate and gentlemanly manner, being a connoisseur of classical languages and endued with maritime prowess. Apart from his masterly touches, he was a real Ringleader and a Migrant afloat; and I reckon that he was leal and faithful unto Death.

His preponderantly French crew was an aggressive and bloodthirsty flock of inseparables of a feather. 'Birds of a feather flock together!' as that Captain used to say/ 'Howsoever,' I says, 'and so be it!'

I.H., Master of Teach's ship, 1717.

Paragon Island, by E.A. Dresen, 2015.