“Black Sam” Bellamy and the Whydah

Who was Black Sam Bellamy?

Samuel Bellamy was probably the boy baptised on 18 March 1689 in the village of Hittisleigh, in Devon in the west of England. A sailor he captured in 1716 said Bellamy claimed to be from London, so his birthplace is likely but not certain. He is said to have served in the Royal Navy, and he reached New England around 1714 or 1715.

The nickname “Black Sam” is usually explained by tradition: he is said to have worn his own long black hair tied back instead of a powdered wig. No record from his own time confirms this.

How did Bellamy become a pirate?

On 31 July 1715 a hurricane wrecked a Spanish treasure fleet on the coast of Florida, scattering silver on the sea floor. Early in 1716 Bellamy and his friend Paulsgrave Williams sailed south to try to salvage some of it. They found little, so they turned to piracy instead.

They joined the band of Benjamin Hornigold, which sailed from Nassau and included Edward Thache, later known as Blackbeard. In the summer of 1716 the crew voted Hornigold out, partly because he refused to attack British ships, and elected Bellamy captain of about 90 men. In November 1716, near the Virgin Islands, his men took a sloop whose boy passenger, John King, aged about 8 to 11, insisted on joining them.

What was the Whydah, and how did Bellamy capture her?

The Whydah Gally was a three-masted ship of about 300 tons, built in London in 1716 for the slave trade. She was named after Ouidah (Whydah), a port in West Africa, in today’s Benin, from which about a million enslaved Africans were shipped over the centuries. Under Captain Lawrence Prince she carried captives from Ouidah to Jamaica. According to National Geographic, 367 people were bought in Africa and 312 survived the crossing to be sold at Kingston.

Sailing home with gold, silver, indigo, sugar and other goods, she was chased by Bellamy’s ships for three days. In late February 1717, in or near the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, Prince surrendered with little or no fight. Bellamy kept the Whydah as his flagship, raised her guns to 28, and gave Prince his smaller ship, the Sultana, and about £20.

Who sailed in Bellamy’s crew?

Bellamy’s crew came from many places: Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, France, Sweden and elsewhere, as well as Africa and the Americas. Historians agree that many were of African birth or descent, but nobody has a full list. Ken Kinkor, research director of the Whydah project, estimated at least 30 in a band of about 180; others have suggested as many as 50. These men did not come from the Whydah’s captives, who had already been sold in Jamaica.

Two men of colour are known by name:

• Hendrick Quintor, described as a Black man of Dutch and African descent, who was tried and hanged in Boston as a full pirate.
• John Julian, a teenager of Miskito descent, an Indigenous people of the coast of Central America, who may also have had African ancestry. He served as a pilot, guiding the ship in coastal waters.

Not everyone aboard chose to be there: pirates often forced skilled men, such as carpenters, to serve.

How did the Whydah sink?

In April 1717 Bellamy’s ships sailed north towards New England. Near Nantucket they captured the Mary Anne, a ship carrying wine, and put seven pirates aboard her. On the night of 26 April 1717 a violent storm drove the Whydah onto a sandbar off what is now Wellfleet, on Cape Cod. Around midnight her masts broke and she rolled over in the surf, close to the beach.

About 144 of the 146 people aboard died, among them Bellamy, who was about 28, and the boy John King. About 100 bodies washed ashore. Only two men from the Whydah survived: Thomas Davis, a carpenter who had been forced to join, and John Julian. The Mary Anne also ran aground that night, further south, and everyone on her came ashore alive.

What happened to the survivors?

Eight men, the seven pirates from the Mary Anne and Thomas Davis, were tried by a special court for crimes at sea in Boston from 18 October 1717. The court accepted that Davis and Thomas South had been forced and set them free. The other six, including Hendrick Quintor, were hanged near Boston on 15 November 1717. The minister Cotton Mather preached to them. A royal pardon for pirates who surrendered reached Boston too late to help them.

John Julian was never tried. Instead he seems to have been treated as property and sold into slavery, apparently to John Quincy of Braintree, the great-grandfather of a future president. In 1733 a man called “Julian the Indian” was hanged in Boston for killing a man who tried to stop him escaping. Most historians think this was the same John Julian, though it cannot be proved.

How was the Whydah shipwreck found?

Barry Clifford’s team searched off Wellfleet. After first finds in 1982, the discovery was announced in 1984. In 1985 divers raised the ship’s bell, marked “THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716”, which proved which ship it was.

The team has recovered more than 200,000 objects, including about 15,000 coins, gold bars, cannons, weapons, gold jewellery made by the Akan people of West Africa, and brass bracelets called manillas, used as money in West African trade. In 2021 the team announced the remains of six people, one of them a nearly complete skeleton, found inside hardened lumps of sand and metal. A leg bone tested in 2018 turned out not to be Bellamy’s. Many finds are shown at the finder’s Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts.