Celebrated for his sartorial elegance, Captain Samuel Bellamy favored high-end black velvet jackets, breeches, silk stockings, and silver-buckled shoes. This flamboyant pirate from the English county of Devonshire usually carried no fewer than four refined dueling pistols tucked into his belt alongside his sword. Bellamy only accepted the best and scorned the powdered wigs of his time, preferring a simple ribbon to tie his jet-black hair, a style that supposedly earned him the nickname Black Sam. At the age of twenty-eight, less than two years after the start of his meteoric career in piracy, Samuel Bellamy and his crew had amassed a fortune that would be worth 120 million euros today. He was therefore one of the richest pirates in history. For months, the young pirate and his fleet plundered ships in the Caribbean and along the coast of colonial America. But a violent nor'easter that struck off the tip of Cape Cod in the spring of 1717 caused his flagship, the Whydah Gally, to crash against a row of sandbars, leading to the drowning of Bellamy and 144 of the 146 crew members. Designed specifically for the triangular trade, the Whydah was a 33-meter-long slave ship and 300-ton vessel with three masts and capable of sailing at a sustained speed of thirteen knots. Launched in London by the Royal African Company in 1716, the ship had completed two of its three stages of the journey when Samuel Bellamy seized it near the Bahamas after a three-day chase and fired only a single shot. The golden age of piracy, which must be called as such, took place between 1630 and 1730, and was closely linked to the rise of the sugar economy in the Caribbean. The enormous wealth generated by sugar, rum, and molasses from the sugarcane fields where slaves worked accompanied a soaring demand for enslaved labor to tend the crops and maximize profits. The triangular trade exploded. The ocean teemed with merchant ships transporting goods and provisions. Spanish convoys, laden with luxury goods and South American gold and silver extracted by indigenous workers reduced to forced labor or sometimes barely paid, sailed through the Caribbean and headed towards Spain. Pirates went where the money was and gravitated around the bustling slave ports of the west African coast and the prosperous Caribbean and North American colonies. Slave ships were frequently targeted. Pirates not only seized the goods being transported but also recruited or forced crew members and former slaves to join them. For the African slaves in the holds, being captured by pirates could sometimes be a perilous opportunity. Although they were often considered a prize and sold in ports where no questions were asked, they sometimes joined pirate crews where, under the orders of certain captains, life could sometimes be surprisingly egalitarian; more so than on land, at least. For example, there were five black men in Blackbeard's crew at the time of his death in 1718. When she defeated the formidable Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts, known as Black Bart, in 1722, the Royal Navy captured 250 crew members, including seventy-five former slaves. Up to fifty of Samuel Bellamy's crew members would have been from Africa. More than twelve million Africans were kidnapped and sold during the nearly four centuries that the triangular trade lasted. Historians and archaeologists know little about the first stage of the Whydah's journey, but like many other European slave ships, this ship, named after the slave port of Ouidah in Benin, first set sail from West Africa loaded with weapons, textiles, and wine to exchange for slaves among African chieftains or their agents. These slaves were often captured during tribal conflicts or taken during raids and came from a wide variety of backgrounds: there were blacksmiths as well as doctors or farmers, and even royal figures. However, little is known about the 367 Africans who were bought and forcibly transported aboard the Whydah. With this human cargo and tons of ivory stacked in its hold, the ship embarked on the second part of its journey: a crossing of the Atlantic to Kingston, Jamaica. There, the 312 slaves who had survived the violence and emotional trauma of this crossing, now called the Middle Passage, were sold. When Samuel Bellamy took control of the ship, it had already made stops in several Caribbean ports and loaded up with valuable raw materials that were to be sold at high prices upon its return to London. "The slave ships also made excellent pirate ships," explains Dave Conlin, a maritime archaeologist with the U.S. National Park Service (NPS). "They were designed to be fast, to reduce the time spent at sea and to minimize deaths, not out of humanitarian concern, but purely for the profitability of the crossing. It was an industry brutally efficient." A fortune in gold, silver, indigo, rum, sugar, molasses, and spices was aboard the Whydah when Bellamy took it over; a considerable haul, not to mention the value of the ship itself. Enchanted by its lines, Bellamy decided to keep it and make it his flagship. Moreover, as a token of appreciation for his peaceful surrender, he offered his own ship, the Sultana, to the now former captain of the Whydah, as well as twenty pounds sterling, equivalent to 3,400 euros today, to help him pass the cape. This gesture was typical of Bellamy, who was known for the pity he showed towards captains and sailors from whose ships he seized. Born in Devonshire in 1689, Samuel Bellamy went to sea at a young age, joining the Royal Navy in his late adolescence and going abroad to fight. But in 1714, a return to peace after years of incessant wars in Europe saw the navy reduce its manpower, and like many other seasoned sailors, Bellamy found himself idle. In 1715, he traveled to Massachusetts to seek opportunities and visit relatives at Cape Cod. There, he fell for a woman whom sources refer to as either Goody Hallett or Maria Hallett. According to New England folklore, her family liked him, but she believed her daughter could do better than marry a poor sailor, no matter how charming and affable he was. Bellamy decided to prove them wrong. Fate soon offered him an opportunity to shine. In the summer of 1715, a hurricane destroyed the India Fleet, leaving behind wrecks and a staggering amount of gold, silver, and jewelry that washed up on the Florida coast. After hearing the news, Bellamy partnered with a New England aristocrat named Palsgrave Williams, whose father was the attorney general of Rhode Island. In 1716, they sailed south together with the intention of making a fortune by looting wrecks. But recovering these sunken treasures proved not as simple as they had imagined. Already considered pirates by the Spanish, who viewed their attempts to loot their treasure-laden wrecks as nothing less than banditry, the two men decided to fully embrace the life of a pirate and turned their attention to ships still afloat. It did not take long before they allied themselves with Benjamin Hornigold, an experienced pirate captain whose first mate was then a fearsome character named Edward Teach, who would later be known as Blackbeard. Samuel Bellamy entered piracy with such panache that Benjamin Hornigold and his first mate soon found themselves excluded from the ship following a vote by the crew. In place of Benjamin Hornigold, the men elected the charismatic newcomer as captain. Under his command, they multiplied raids in the Caribbean at an unprecedented level: they plundered fifty-three ships in record time. Moreover, like many pirates of the same era, Samuel Bellamy distributed the loot equally among his crew members. When the captain of one of the ships that he and his men had seized declined the invitation to join his crew, Bellamy mocked his timidity, and in a famous speech cited in a book by Captain Charles Johnson entitled A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), he outlined his life philosophy, without concession to the wealthy: "They vilify us, these scoundrels, yet what distinguishes us is this: they steal from the poor under the cover of law, in truth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Is it not better to be one of us than to crawl behind these scoundrels to earn a living?" For a simple sailor, the life of a pirate had certainly its attractions: equality, democracy, easy money, and even generous compensation in case of injury or disability, with predetermined amounts for the loss of an eye, a hand, or a leg, for example. Pirates also tended to be in better health than their law-abiding counterparts. No moldy flour or rancid pork for them; they feasted on the delicacies stolen from the officers' messes of the ships they plundered. And since their preferred drink was a punch flavored with green lemon juice, scurvy often spared them. Thus was the golden age, later idealized by the Victorian novelist Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island and in illustrations by artists such as Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. This romanticism did not always reflect historical reality, but some pirates had indeed pet parrots, raised the black flag, and drank large quantities of rum. Pirate crews led extravagant lives. At the port, they did not spend their money like drunk sailors, they spent it like pirates, feasting, playing, and disposing of their loot. Alexandre Exquemelin, a French surgeon and adventurer who may have sailed briefly with the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan, recounts the story of a pirate who supposedly squandered more than five hundred pieces of eight, an enormous sum in the 17th century, in a single night of debauchery. Three months later, the man was sold as a slave to pay off his debts. Bellamy, however, was not destined for such extravagant ruin. Shortly after seizing the Whydah, he left the Caribbean and sailed up the coast of the American colonies to Massachusetts to find Miss Hallett and impress her and her skeptical family with his riches and charm, with the possibility of settling down. On April 26, 1717, Bellamy was off the tip of Cape Cod where he plundered two ships in succession. Despite the clear weather at the beginning of the day, a dense fog arose in the afternoon. By nightfall, the powerful winds of a nor'easter battered the rigging of the Whydah, while a formidable swell shook the ship like a cork. In the small hours of the morning, the Whydah crashed against a sandbar and broke, killing Samuel Bellamy and almost all the men on board. The news that a pirate ship had sunk during the night spread quickly in the neighboring town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The following morning and for several weeks, dozens of treasure hunters scoured the shores. They found many bodies and some loot, but no trace of a ship. It would take another 267 years to discover the wreck. In 1984, the wreck of the Whydah was spotted by explorer Barry Clifford and his team off Wellfleet and under less than 10 meters of sand. Since then, about 200,000 artifacts have been recovered from the wreck, including coins, jewelry, nearly 400 pieces of silverwork produced by the Akans where today are Ghana and Ivory Coast, cannons and all kinds of weapons. In 2021, divers recovered six skeletons trapped in mineral concretions at the wreck site. Although the majority of Bellamy's cargo remains undiscovered, artifacts continue to appear, the most recent being a cannon and 200 brass manillas, small bracelets that served as currency on the coast of West Africa. This remains to date the first (and only) ship of the golden age of piracy to have been fully authenticated.