Tools as Pirate Treasures

by Lara Miller

11/10/1952

When we think of what might be found in sunken pirate ships, most of us likely think of gold, jewels, rum, and other riches. We wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but in the case of the Whydah Gally, tools of the historic trades are among the treasures.

I recently visited the Real Pirates Museum in Salem, Massachusetts—the sister museum to the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts. These museums are dedicated to the found shipwreck of the Whydah and hold its thousands of recovered objects. As I made my way through the exhibits, I learned the history of the Whydah. Unfortunately, when it was built in London in 1715, it was to be a slave ship. After making two voyages from Africa carrying its captive humans, it was captured by pirates in 1717. This group of pirates was led by Samuel Bellamy, who decided to make this three-masted galley their flagship. After only about two months, the ship wrecked off the coast of Cape Cod, killing Bellamy and most of his crew (only two are known to have survived).

The Whydah’s multinational crew were a supposedly egalitarian and diverse group of impoverished European sailors, former enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and others. Among these crew members were various tradespeople, including a Welsh carpenter named Thomas Davis, who was actually one of the two who survived the wreck of the Whydah (along with the ship’s pilot, a Miskito Indian named John Julian). Among the survivors on ships that were part of the Whydah’s fleet when she wrecked was another carpenter, Thomas South. In fact, according to them, both carpenters had been conscripted by Samuel Bellamy and forced to join the crew because of their invaluable skillsets.

When the wreckage of the ship was discovered in 1984, its findings became the largest collection of pirate artifacts ever recovered from a single shipwreck. Among the artifacts are countless coins, silver, gold, jewelry, manillas (copper bracelets used as currency in West Africa), cannons, kitchen wares, navigational tools, and also pottery, vises, hammers, tacks, grindstones (all pictured), and much more. These findings are a fascinating reminder of the importance of carpenters and other tradespeople to the maritime world. After all, not only were these skilled people needed for the construction of ships and the making of much of their cargo, but these ships constantly needed repairs and modifications—many of the spaces on ships often becoming floating workshops.

Items from the Whydah wreckage are still being recovered and preserved today, and I look forward to seeing what other items may be found. I highly recommend a visit to either the Real Pirates Museum in Salem or the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth. You never know what centuries-old tools you might find there.