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 With the Whydah as his new flagship, "Black Bellamy" led a fearsome pirate flotilla, seizing ships and plundering them for their riches. By the time his fleet reached New England, they were carrying booty plundered from more than 50 vessels.
Legend has it that Bellamy intended to cash out and return to his lady-love, Maria Hallet, in the hopes that her wealthy farming family would be more receptive to a rich man than they had been to a poor one. With this goal in mind, Bellamy headed his flotilla up the Atlantic coast toward Cape Cod.
The Great Storm
On the evening of April 26, 1717, a dense fog rolled in. An arctic gale from Canada was colliding with a warm front moving northward from the Caribbean. Their confluence produced one of the worst storms ever to strike Cape Cod.
The nor-easter hit the Whydah full force. The ship ran hard aground on a sandbar. The mainmast and other rigging snapped like twigs, and the Whydah rolled over. Although the beach was just 500 feet away, the bitter ocean temperatures were cold enough to kill the strongest swimmer within minutes.
 A Crew's Watery Grave
Of the 146 men aboard the Whydah that night, only two survived. Somehow Thomas Davis, the carpenter, and John Julian, the Miskito pilot, managed to swim to shore and scale the steep sand cliffs.
Young John King—the boy who threatened to kill himself if he couldn't to join the pirate crew—did not survive. He died pinned to the seabed by a cannon, his legbone, shoe, and stocking later discovered by Barry Clifford's Whydah Expedition.
Continue through the The Whydah's Loss: The Pirates' Trial. >>
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