The Whydah Pirate Museum

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] way [Music] put him in bed with the captain's daughter put him in bed with the captain's daughter put him in bed with the captain's daughter in the morning hi there my name is marie kestenzon and i'm an archaeologist here at the wida pirate museum i'm going to be taking you through the gallery today at our authentic pirate shipwreck artifact so all of the artifacts in the cases that you'll be seeing today were recovered by us from the widow in this case over here we do have some of our more unique artifacts the pistol in the middle we call it the sun king pistol because of the engraving at the hilt it is uh one of our more beautiful items and certainly very well preserved we're quite lucky to have found it in such a good condition but you can also see some leather and wood pouches as well as this silk ribbon now these artifacts really don't survive too often in shipwrecks particularly ones that have been submerged for as long as this one had been so we're quite lucky to be able to to have something such a fine delicate material as the cell and then up here in our mock tavern you can see our our famous ring that we have it has an inscription on it we're not entirely sure who it belongs to although some theories have been suggested as to the origin of the names on there it could be a british ring it could be portuguese we're not really sure that's up here okay so in this case right here we do have some uh the sole of a leather shoe we have some delicate artifacts and some personal ornaments like belt buckles and cufflinks that sort of thing and of course our famous gold ring in the center of the case right here and from here we're actually going to go on the ship inside our replica with a galley and you'll get to see some of her crew members including her captain sam bellamy of course we have some other cannons on display as well a danish cannon and an english one as well the different weights and lengths of the cannon would change depending on what would be fired out of it so we do have sort of long range and short-range cannons and they were powerful enough to knock down the mask of a ship that they were pursuing so if they needed to catch up to one and slow it down they could just aim for the main mast and knock that down or they would even use bar shot to puncture the sails and slow the ship down so they could catch up to it so right this way we'll actually go above decks and see the captain and inside these cases we have a remnants of the ship itself some of her rigging and some bits of rope as well you can see it was a very uh involved process to get the ship moving inside it so the the crewmen who would be in charge of that were actually well respected by their fellow pirates and then we see uh nine-year-old john king as well on display on our ship and he happened to be on a merchant ship with his mother when sam bellamy and his crew came across it and he demanded to become a pirate he threatened the life of his mother himself and anyone within reach if they didn't allow him to sign up and join their pirate crew and uh sam bellamy he knew that kid definitely had what it took he was vicious enough to to join up with the rest of the men and in here we can see the captain's quarters inside this ship now most pirates are actually all believed in equality so the captain wasn't really treated any differently than the rest of the crew members his vote was as equal as any other man aboard his ship and most of the time when they captured a merchant ship if it had a fancy area for the captain they would actually tear it apart as a symbolic gesture of how they were different from the merchants everyone was equal aboard their chefs [Music] now the life of a pirate wasn't all that glamorous it wasn't just about chasing after treasure didn't involve a plain a lot of peril involved if you got injured you didn't really have a hospital to go to so you had to make do with what your ship surgeon or in other cases your carpenter if you didn't have a surgeon would be able to do to uh you would have to sever your limbs rather than risk them getting infected and risking that infection spreading to the crew as you can see over here that the carpenter and another crew member working to take apart the ship to make more cargo space below decks you can see our our queen and teapot when that was recovered it actually had a leg bone jammed into the side of it so uh a little gruesome history go along with that and we do see on our plates and forks a lot of the time pirates would carve their initials into it now while they split up their treasure equally it was not the same when it came to their eating utensils they they belonged to themselves and anyone else who stole another pirate's pork would probably have a bad afternoon oh hi there's your mate welcome aboard we have requesting this town as a pirate's trunk the coins in this case are all pure silver they're uh you can see they're different sizes now they measured their coins by weight so they didn't have a uniform system to stamp out those coins they would take the silver and shape it to their needs if a coin weighed too much they would shave off the edge of it and make sure it was equal with another piece of coin that was the same value you can see a lot of the jagged edges in some of these pieces here some of them also you might notice have holes in them and that's because pirates would occasionally wear their coins around their neck or around their wrists like a bracelet sometimes they would even sew them into the lining of their clothing and that was because they knew how easy it was to rub from someone so they like to hold their coins close to their chest over here we do have some interesting strikes of coins over here the royal strike these are spanish coins over here and a french coin as well and over here i can actually show you some of the gold jewelry as well now to a pirate they didn't really have much use for jewelry they weren't going to wear it themselves usually so to them it was just gold in a different form so if somebody got half that someone got the other half they would actually literally tear the piece apart to share it equally and a lot of the times the jewelry and other ornamentation would actually get melted down and made into bars or ingots we have on display here as well and that just made it easier to spend it'd be kind of difficult to pay for something with a necklace but if you melted it down you could shave off a part of it and use it as currency over here you can see a rendering of pirates splitting up their treasure on land of lots of coins and vases and all kinds of valuables they would also appropriate clothing that they stole from the merchant they would dress themselves up in fancy clothing sometimes high heels if they found chests of fine silks and clothes and actually mock the rich people that they were stealing from they would say well what makes you any better than me i look just like you with my fancy red jackets and and my feathered hat so it was kind of like robin hood's men sam bellamy and his crew they stole from the rich and redistributed amongst themselves and over here you can actually see some of our gold pieces as well we don't have too many pieces of gold it just wasn't a form of currency that was used in this part of the world back then but you'll notice on some of these gold bars that there are indentations and strike marks on it and that's because any good salesman would make sure that his money that he was taking was actually true gold so they would actually scratch parts of it off to make sure it wasn't just gold paint that was placed on top of an iron bar or a piece of lead a lot of times people would try to pass off this fake money as real gold so you might see people biting into a coin to make sure it bends and if it bent it meant it was a true coin and if not it wasn't made of either gold or silver so in in the course of sam bellamy and his crews history is pirates they overtook 50 ships in a year and because they had all this treasure from all of these ships all their cannons and casks of wine and chests full of silver the widow was actually extremely heavy and slow moving through the water [Music] now in the end of april they were sailing up north back to cape cod and encountered a uh fairly terrible storm it was so foggy that they didn't realize quite how close the story they had gotten and by the time they realized where they were it was too late they tried to drop anchor and turn around and try to ride out the storm and it just was not working out for them their ship was too heavy they were too greedy they had too much treasure so when the ship went up in a wave it crashed down in the breakers smashed into the ocean floor and pretty much shattered on impact the main mast broke off tipped over and tilted the whole ship there were cannons crashing through the sides of the ship men getting crushed and washed overboard most of them were young boys they they didn't really know how to swim despite the fact that they were on the scenes their whole life they just didn't have that skill so they couldn't have swam to shore even though it was only 500 feet away the waves were too rough and the water was just too cold unfortunately all but two men from the widow did not survive the shipwreck [Applause] so this is one of the most exciting parts of my job and it is working with these objects that we call concretions now the reason that these form is because there are lots of pieces of pieces of iron from the shaft rack and as the iron interacts with the salt water it starts to uh decay a little bit that the elements will uh interact and it almost like magnetizes anything else that's in the area and draws it together into this form that we call the concretion like the bits of dirt and sand and rocks and shells like a concrete mixture form these hard blunts now a lot of the artifacts that we've seen today originally were in this concretion not this one in particular but most of them do come from concretions now sometimes there are loose coins at the bottom of the sea floor but most of the time we do have to work at getting them out of these objects here so this spanish coin that we found a couple days ago just started becoming uncovered from this larger piece so we will try to separate this from the rest of the concretion we will clean it up and it will go through our conservation process so that it doesn't start to disintegrate because these objects were under water for 300 years they want to be kept moist they want to stay in that underwater condition so we do have to keep them either submerged in a tank or spray it down with a water bottle here while we're working on it just so that they stay nice and wet otherwise they will start to crack on their own and would damage some of the artifacts that are inside now all of our concretions we do x-rays so we can get a picture of what artifacts might be inside this one in particular has an iron bar across here and several dozen coins inside this one piece this coin is worth about on the one hand it is pure silver so the market value of silver today if we were to just melt this down and sell it as silver has one value but then on the other hand it could be a 400 to 300 year old coin so that adds another value to it for say a coin collector or something like that but then it is the only authentic pirate shipwrecked treasure that's ever been found so there really is nothing else to compare it to because we are the only people who have these objects so for one coin it's priceless for the whole collection it it's another value people have appraised them before but uh anywhere from 15 million dollars to 200 to 400 million for the entire election would you let me touch that i will actually um you can go ahead so you are one of the first people to touch this coin in over 300 years and it's worth about it's priceless it really is i'll take it with me i'm slipping this concretion in your pocket and seeing how that goes but there are several other coins in here that we're working to get out it is a very delicate and patient process that we have to go through we really don't want to risk damaging anything this is a piece of iron right here the little flecks in it right here are actually mica and it's just the way the concretion has formed which is why it looks like that we've broken other pieces off of it we do always keep them we we do x-rays afterwards just to make sure we didn't leave anything behind and i'll show you i call these coin fossils now this is bits of the concretion like this this would have been stuck over here on top of a coin not this one in particular but one of the other coins we got out and you can actually see the imprint of the design of the coin that this was attached to oh yeah so uh there we go this one in particular it has you can kind of see some of the letters on that one as well this would have been the back of a spanish coin and uh on this one as well you just sort of from the front you can see the uh the little bits of the spanish cross your work must be fascinating it is i love it where where else can you go to work and play with pirate treasure nowhere exactly i guess you're the only person i ever met who did that it's it's such an exciting career i think just to be able to have a museum on one side and then to have this working lab attached to it so you can see what goes into uncovering these artifacts and what the process is to to get them out from under the water i mean they're buried 15 feet of water and then underneath that 10 to 30 feet of sand before we can even get to them marie on behalf of my viewers on the let's visit show i want to thank you so much for the tour so much for this school it has been my pleasure i always love getting people excited about their history they have to come to cape cod to see this this is it's the only place in the world where you can see a real authenticated pirate treasure thanks again thank you [Music] you

Channel: pixiecropolis

Views: 4,815

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: pirates, cape cod, new england ship wrecks, dave welsh, pixiecropolis, pixie video, barry clifford

Id: iJqii1-2_xs

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020