The Whydah: A Pirate Ship Feared, Wrecked, and Found by Martin W. Sandler (review)

By eighteenth-century standards, the Wydah Gally was a state-of-the-art beauty, over a hundred feet long, carrying eighteen cannons, with room for three hundred tons of cargo, and able to reach the dizzying speed of fifteen miles per hour. It had to be big and fast: it was a British merchant slave ship plying the Triangle Trade between West Africa, the Caribbean, and England. Just two years into her dark career, she ran afoul of the pirate Sam Bellamy, who took her and her treasure as his prize. He dismantled the Wydah’s cumbersome features from her slave trading days to create a sleeker, faster, better armed ship, perfectly adapted to running down hapless merchant ships. Whydah’s piratical career was cut short, though, when she ran aground in a storm off Cape Cod, with Bellamy and nearly all hands lost and the bulk of the treasure gone as well, unreachable in the turbulent waters of Cape Cod’s ship graveyard. Fast forward to 1984, when marine salvager Barry Clifford raised money for a systematic search for the Whydah, located the wreck, confirmed its identity, and began the still-unfinished task of bringing Whydah’s wealth to the surface, where it is housed in a dedicated museum. Sandler keeps the multiple threads of Whydah’s story running smoothly, even integrating legends about Bellamy and the haunted wreckage seamlessly into the factual information. Each chapter also features an insert of related interest, culminating in a recap of the ways in which Whydah’s material evidence has reshaped what we know about pirate life. Weighing in well under two hundred pages, this quick high interest read is an ideal recommendation for kids who “have to read a nonfiction book,” and pirate and archaeology enthusiasts will certainly be thrilled. Notes, bibliography, and index are included.