Archaeologists
dive into a pirate's paradise
January 24, 2001
Pirates roamed the seas, looting, plundering, and occasionally, sinking. Now,
archaeologists who have unearthed a pair of buccaneer boats report they offer
new clues to pirate culture.
An expedition led by explorer Barry Clifford announced last week they have located
the remains of the Fiery Dragon, captained by a pirate known as "Billy One-Hand."
The ship lies under mud and 20 feet of water in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern
coast of Madagascar, an island nation east of southern Africa.
The pirates sank the ship themselves in 1721 as part of a pardon they purchased
with their ill-gotten gains.
The Discovery Channel, which funded the expedition, plans a June documentary
on the expedition's find of the Fiery Dragon and, earlier, the Adventure Galley,
a ship belonging to the notorious Captain Kidd.
"Both ships, especially the Fiery Dragon, represent important finds for historical
and archaeological data on pirates," says expedition member John de Bry of the
Center for Historical Archaeology in Melbourne, Fla.
Several years ago, Kenneth Kinkor, historian for the Provincetown, Mass.-based
expedition team, found an old crew testimonial from Kidd's trial divulging the
location of his ship. He alerted Clifford, who approached the Discovery Channel,
which since 1998 has funded such expeditions. Clifford and the network paid
de Bry to join the team and find French maps that further narrowed the search.
Working together, they pinpointed the site to a sandbar where pirates often
beached their ships for repairs. During three trips, in February, June and October
of last year, expedition divers explored the sandbar, where the Adventure Galley
reportedly sank after a mutiny in 1698. At first, they thought the Fiery Dragon
was Kidd's ship.
"Certainly it came as an utter surprise," says Kinkor. The Fiery Dragon was
filled with Chinese porcelain and statuary, and held 11 gold coins left behind
by a departing pirate. Dates from the coins and the porcelain ruled it out as
Kidd's ship.
Returning in June, the explorers discovered a cyclone had removed some mud from
the seabed, revealing a second pile of ballast stones (weights used to adjust
a ship's trim as it sails) 50 feet away. Divers found the Adventure Galley.
Finding the ships "wasn't two weeks in paradise," says Douglas Miller, a geo-acoustics
scientist with Witten Technologies in Washington D.C., an underground-imaging
company that more often looks for ruptured pipelines using radar. In June, Miller
put together a map, using intricately plotted sonar measurements of the seabed,
to reveal the Fiery Dragon's location.
Taking the measurements required five days of five-hour dives spent cranking
a sonar-equipped "fish" along a clothesline-like grid, an effort that forms
the backdrop of the Discovery documentary.
Only after the October visit did Clifford's team confirm the identity of the
Fiery Dragon.
The two finds, along with the remains of a settlement, confirm that nearby Island
of Sainte-Marie was a pirate base for at least 30 years and shed some unexpected
light on pirate culture, says Clifford. Kidd, the stereotype of a tyrannical
pirate captain, suffered a mutiny, while the captain of the Fiery Dragon was
a popularly elected figure who shared treasure equally with his crew, Clifford
says.
Boarding a Bombay-bound ship full of religious pilgrims and merchants in 1720,
the pirates captured treasure worth about $ 375 million today, mostly in gold
coins, drugs and silks.
After some dickering, the pirates purchased pardons from the French governor
of the island of Mauritius the next year. Billy One-Hand retired a respectable,
wealthy figure in France. "Most of the pirates you hear about were, to put it
one way, losers," Kinkor says. "The winners just quietly became part of society."
Citing their legendary greed, de Bry believes the pirates left little of value
behind in any of the local wrecks. "It's important to say these are not treasure
sites," he says.
Expedition members believe they have sighted seven other wrecks of pirate ships
in the area of Island of Sainte-Marie, whose harbor was "pirate heaven" for
as long as 50 years, Clifford says.
He led the effort that unearthed the Whydah, a pirate ship that sank off Wellfleet,
Mass., in 1717. That effort was criticized by some academic archaeologists,
who suggested his team had overly commercial motives. However, all artifacts
from the ships go to the government of Madagascar, which owns Sainte-Marie,
says Clifford, who hopes to write a book about Sainte-Marie, an unparalleled
center of pirating in the 1700s.
A small islet in the harbor, Ile-aux-Forbans (French for Pirate Island), yielded
more intriguing signs of pirate activities in June for Clifford's group. Alan
Witten, a geophysicist with the University of Oklahoma and head of Witten Technologies,
found signs of tunnels. "It's like something out of Treasure Island," Clifford
says.
Researchers theorize that the island acted as a refuge and storehouse for pirates.
Images gathered by ground-penetrating electric signals revealed an air-filled
void, perhaps a tunnel 100 feet long, under Pirate Island, now sealed off by
a cave-in from two extant entrances.
A second tunnel apparently lies under the beach, perhaps leading under the harbor
or acting as a source of floodwater for any booby traps left behind by the pirates.
Carvings on the island of shattered hearts, a pirate symbol, resemble artifacts
found on the Whydah, leading expedition members to theorize the island may contain
a buried storeroom, perhaps guarded by tunnels designed to flood with every
high tide, buried deep inside the hill.
The discoveries, Clifford says, paint a picture of a semidemocratic, long-term
pirate lifestyle that lasted for decades in one location. The so-called "Golden
Age of Piracy" lasted from 1650 to 1725, when the British Navy rousted the pirates
from Sainte-Marie.
The team plans to return to Madagascar next year, hoping to continue to examine
both shipwrecks and to undertake further exploration of Pirate Island. De Bry
says he hopes a university will eventually adopt the site for full-scale archaeology.
GRAPHIC: GRAPHIC, Color, Sam Ward, USA TODAY, Source: USA TODAY research(Diagram);
PHOTO, Color, Chad Henning, Discovery Channel; PHOTO, Color, NickCaloyianis,
Discovery Channel; But no bottle of rum: Ile-aux-Forbans, above, inSainte-Marie
Harbor off Madagascar. At right, marine archaeologist John de Bryholds a stash
of gold coins left behind on the Fiery Dragon. Looted porcelainlitters the seabed
nearby.