PIRATE BONES TELL DEAD MAN’S TALE!
DNA plundered from Davy Jones’ locker threatens Black Sam’s most chilling secret
SIX skeletons are part of the chilling discovery from a pirate ship that sank 304 years ago, and investigators are hoping DNA tests will reveal if one of them is Capt. “Black Sam” Bellamy, the richest pirate ever to sail the Caribbean.
While more people have heard of Blackbeard, he was a penniless scallywag next to Black Sam.
Only Queen Elizabeth’s privateer Sir Francis Drake’s $115 million haul comes close to the swag looted by Bellamy, the self-proclaimed “Prince of Pirates,” who plundered $130 million in just a year.
More famous Henry Morgan only stole $13 million and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach took a paltry $12.5 million.
Black Sam, then just 28, and 144 crewmen died when his 102-foot, 18-gun ship, the Whydah Gally, capsized and sunk in a storm off the Cape Cod coast in 1717, two years after he took over the former slave vessel.
While the ship was discovered in 1984, experts, using X-ray equipment, have just found the bones of six men in rock hard chunks of stone that formed on the ocean floor.
Investigator Casey Sherman says they hope to identify Black Sam’s remains with matching DNA from one of his descendants in England.
“These newly found skeletal remains may finally lead us to Bellamy as we now have his DNA,” he says.
Born in Devonshire, England, Bellamy joined the navy as a teen and in his mid-twenties became a treasure hunter.
Failing at that, he turned to piracy. The corsair cut a dashing figure in the Carolinas and Caribbean, dressed in velvet-trimmed black coats, silk breeches and with four dueling pistols tucked in his sash.
He and his crew captured and looted more than 53 vessels before perishing in the storm.