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Avis Linnell, Murdered by Her Minister, Inspires ‘An American Tragedy’

The 1911 murder of a 19-year-old music student, Avis Linnell, in the Boston YWCA was one of the most sensational crimes in New England history.

She was several weeks pregnant by a charismatic minister who had dumped her for a wealthier woman. For a while, the minister thought he had committed the perfect crime. He was wrong.

Avis Linnell

Avis Linnell was born in Hyannis Port Dec. 19, 1891. She graduated from the high school in 1908, and from the Normal School in 1910.

She had ‘an exceedingly bright intellect which carried her through school with ease, of a lively and happy disposition, which endeared her to her friends,’ according to the Sandwich Observer.

Avis had a soprano voice described as ‘angelic.’ She sang in the choir at the small Baptist church in Hyannis that she attended with her parents and three sisters.

In 1908, a new preacher, Clarence Richeson, came to her church in Hyannis. People said the tall, handsome giant from Virginia was touched with mysticism. Avis fell in love with him, and he returned her feelings. On her 19^th birthday, he gave her a ring.

Richeson employed an energetic Southern style of preaching. The conservative Cape Codders couldn’t take his exuberance, so he resigned in 1910.

Boston

Clarence Richeson

Richeson got a job at the prestigious Immanual Baptist Church in Cambridge. He then convinced Avis to apply to the New England Conservatory of Music. She did, and in the fall of 1910, she moved to the YWCA in Boston.

In early 1911 Avis told her mother they had broken up. In March, Richeson announced his engagement to Violet Edmands, a well-connected, rich young woman from Brookline.

On Oct. 14, 1911, Avis Linnell was starting her second year at the New England Conservatory when she was found nearly dead on the floor of the YWCA bathroom. She died before an ambulance arrived. An autopsy revealed she was several weeks pregnant and that she had taken cyanide. Her death was ruled a suicide.

But several hours after Avis died, a YWCA matron called Richeson to tell him what happened. He said he barely knew her and demanded to know why she called him. The matron replied that he’d had lunch with her that day and ought to know.

Richeson may still have thought he was safe from suspicion. The matron told him Avis had not regained consciousness after she was discovered. But the crusading newspaper editor of the Boston Post, Edwin Grozier, brought him to grief. Grozier, who came up with the idea of the Boston Post cane, put his reporters on the story. They found Richeson had bought the cyanide from a druggist in Newton, Mass..

Suicide Ruled Out

The Post demanded a police investigation into the death of Avis Linnell. The medical examiner, Dr. Timothy Leary, ruled out suicide as a cause of death.

Excerpt from confession

Richeson was soon in the Charles Street Jail. On Jan. 12, 1912, he signed a written confession that he killed Avis Linnell. He had given her capsules laced with cyanide, telling her it would induce an abortion. He was indicted, convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

While in jail, Richeson tried to castrate himself. His lawyers sought clemency on the basis of insanity.

Massachusetts Gov. Eugene Foss then asked doctors to look into Richeson’s mental health. It turned out he had a family history of insanity, and as a boy he had received several blows to the head.

As a theological student he had asked three women to marry him. He had gotten caught cheating at college, and one of the trustees wrote to his father describing as deranged.

Dr. L. Vernon Briggs, director of the Massachusetts Society for Mental Hygiene, concluded Richeson had delusions, hallucinations, amnesic periods and delirium. Wrote Briggs,

He had exhibited signs and had had attacks of this disease for years, had been recognized as mentally unsound by several physicians who advised specialists in mental diseases to attend him.

Author Theodore Dreiser took a different view. He believed Richeson murdered Avis Linnell because he aspired to wealth and fame through a marriage to Violet Edmands. Dreiser wrote six chapters of a novel based on her murder, but then abandoned it to write about another murder. The work became the novel An American Tragedy.

Clarence Richeson died in the electric chair on May 21, 1912, and now lies buried near his family home in Virginia.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Tiny Militia Captures Crew of Huge British Warship HMS Somerset

In one of the most remarkable engagements of the American Revolution, the tiny militia of Truro captured more than 400 sailors and marines from the massive British warship HMS Somerset.

It was probably the smallest military unit to take one of the biggest prizes of the war.

The militiamen had some help from Mother Nature. A fierce nor’easter that killed several dozen Cape Codders also hurled the Somerset onto the dreaded shoals near what is now Highland Light.

HMS Agamemnon, similar to the HMS Somerset

HMS Somerset

The Somerset had a long and storied history in North America before crashing on shore outside of Provincetown on Nov. 2, 1778.

Launched in 1748, she was one of the British Navy’s ships of the line. She had 64 cannons and her crew of about 480 included Royal Marines.

Somerset saw action in the French and Indian War at the capture of the Fortress at Louisbourg and Quebec City.

During the American Revolution, the HMS Somerset played a role documented in part by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

Then he said ‘Good-night!’ and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

After the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Somerset rescued British troops from the American militias.

She was the flagship of the British fleet at the Battle of Bunker Hill, though the broadsides she fired at patriot forces didn’t do much harm.

Somerset bombarding Bunker Hill

In 1777, Somerset took part in the Siege of Fort Mifflin, in which British ships captured forts along the Delaware River in order to provision the British forces holding Philadelphia.

The Wreck

By the autumn of 1778, Cape Codders had suffered at the hands of the British fleet. Fishing and whaling vessels stayed in harbor rather than risk capture by the British and having their crews pressed into service by the navy. The British also blockaded the import of staple goods like cloth, flour and sugar. Most able-bodied men were fighting the war or serving on privateers.

Somerset, under the command of Capt. George Ourry, was sailing from New York to confront the French fleet in Boston Harbor.

Highland Light, near the site of the Somerset wreck. By Edward Hopper, courtesy Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Louise E. Bettens Fund.

Then, on Monday, Nov. 2, 1778, Somerset got caught up in a deadly nor’easter. Waves crashed over her decks and her sails ripped to shreds. The ship ran aground on Peaked Hill Bars. Then she lost her rudder and broke open at the stern.

Somerset sat 600 feet from the beach as huge waves crashed over her decks. The crew cut away the masts and threw cannons overboard, hoping to lighten the ship enough so it would float off the sandbar and closer to shore.

By Tuesday morning, everyone in town knew about the wreck, but the surf was so high, no one could board it. By afternoon, three boats came from Somerset, but one sank, drowning 21 men. Capt. Ourry, in the second boat, asked for the principal man. When told it was Isaiah Atkins, a selectman, Ourry handed him his sword and said, “Save the men and the ship will be yours.”

Plunder

By Wednesday the storm subsided enough that the Somerset crew could come ashore safely. Several hundred men and women of Truro, eager to plunder the wreck, met them on shore. Schoolteacher John Greenough described the scene:

Almost all the inhabitants of Truro came down to the wreck, they say as militia, although I could never learn that they were in any military arrangement nor under any command, order or discipline…Others were trading with the seamen for clothing, etc., brought from the ship; and a great number cutting up and carrying off sails, rigging, etc.

Paul Revere

The warship, one of the two biggest British ships destroyed in the American Revolution, made quite a prize. Massachusetts authorities stepped in before the Cape Codders could pick the wreck clean. Two schooners and four sloops sailed to Cape Cod to salvage what they could for the war effort. Sixteen cannons were entrusted to Lt. Col. Paul Revere for fortification at Castle Island in Boston.

Today, houses built with timbers from the ship that once bombarded Bunker Hill still stand on Cape Cod.

The Long March

On Wednesday night, three or four unarmed militia men under the command of Capt. Enoch Hallett escorted the 400-odd sailors and marines off the beach. They went to the homes of Truro’s 250 families for shelter during the night.

Massachusetts gave the Somerset officers the courtesy of taking them to Boston by ship. However the men – many bleeding and hurt – had to march 120 miles from the tip of Cape Cod to Boston in the winter cold. They had little food, and the storm had soaked the Somerset’s provisions. When asked how to feed them, the Governor’s Council responded,

If you have not bread for the prisoners
let them live without as many better
men have done before them.

Local militias escorted the prisoners off the Cape, and the towns bore the cost of feeding them. The ragged horde passed through Eastham, Harwich, Yarmouth, Barnstable and Sandwich. Once they left Sandwich, the Cape militiamen decided their part of the journey had ended. Plymouth raised a company of 28 men to guard the prisoners, but some managed to wander off to freedom.

Sheriffs were dispatched to round up the missing sailors and marines. Traffic sentinels stood guard from the outskirts of Plymouth to Boston.

Fate of the Somerset Crew

When they arrived in Boston, a special guard set up at Boston Neck took them to their new home: a decrepit old French hulk called the Penet.

1886 photo of the wreck of the Somerset

The Somerset’s purser, Edward Cyron, was an old man injured in the wreck. He collapsed during the march and disappeared for several days. On December 5 he petitioned for his release, which was granted. Many of the British sailors and marines were exchanged for American prisoners. Fourteen volunteered to join the American forces and were accepted.

The wreck was buried in the sands, its skeleton exposed by storms and erosion only three times: in 1886, 1973 and 2010. The last time it happened, the National Park Service assumed the timbers would slip beneath the sands again. It recorded an image of the remains using three-dimensional imaging technology.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Sleepy John Sears and the Revolutionary White Gold of Cape Cod

Cape Cod’s once-great salt industry was the brainchild of a retired sea captain nicknamed Sleepy John Sears because of his tendency to nod off during the day.

Onondaga saltworks showing salt being raked from solar evaporation vats of a design copied from the Cape Cod saltworks.

Salt works once lined the coast of the Lower Cape, Massachusetts’ South Shore, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Today they are not only extinct, but pretty much forgotten.

Also forgotten is the importance of salt in peace and in war. Without it, fish, beef, poultry and pork couldn’t be preserved. Salt was a strategically essential but scarce commodity during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. In 1777, New Jersey excused from military service as many as 10 men employed by a salt work.

Sleepy John Sears found a way to produce salt on a large scale during the Revolution and long afterward. Because of his ingenuity, salt was Cape Cod’s white gold through the middle of the 19^th century.

White Gold

Before refrigeration, salt was essential to preserving fish and meat. New England’s fishing industry depended on salt, for without it, cod was a perishable foodstuff rather than a lucrative commodity.

There were no local sources of salt in early America, and the colonists relied on Britain to supply it.

That became a problem as the American Revolution approached. Britain began taxing salt exports and blockaded America’s main source of salt, Turks Island in the Caribbean.

Smugglers were still able to bring in salt from Bermuda and the Bahamas until Gen. William Howe captured New York and Long Island. By the time Howe drove the Continental Army from Philadelphia, he had captured its salt reserves. Washington had sent a desperate message, “Every attempt must be made to save it.”

Profiteers began hoarding salt and the price of the commodity soared. In May of 1776, the Continental Congress issued a pamphlet declaring a bounty of one-third dollar for every bushel of salt made or imported.

That set off a frenzy of colonists boiling seawater for salt. The effort proved futile, as it took two cords of wood and 400 gallons of water to produce a single bushel.

No More Laughter

Sleepy John Sears was already thinking about solar evaporation. Born in 1744 in Yarmouth, he was living in Dennis by the time of the war. His family defended his narcolepsy, saying he had ‘fits of abstraction.’

Sears built the first salt works in the summer of 1776 in Sesuit Harbor. It wasn’t much more than a leaky vat, 100 feet long and 10 feet wide. He hauled seawater one bucket at a time to his salt works. It took 350 gallons of water to produce one bushel of salt. His neighbors laughed at him.

At the end of the summer he produced eight bushels. His neighbors called his salt works ‘Sears Folly.’

During the summer of 1777 he tried again, but only after caulking the vat to make it watertight. That year his salt works produced 30 bushels of salt.

In November 1778 he scavenged a bilge pump from the shipwrecked British Man-of-war HMS Somerset. He rigged it up the next summer so he could pump water by hand from the sea.

He was in business turning seawater into white gold.

Salty John

By 1783, the price of salt had risen to $8 a bushel from 50 cents. Capt. Nathaniel Freeman suggested he use a windmill to pump water. By 1785, Sleepy John Sears rigged up a windmill to pump seawater through pipes – hollow, lead-lined logs – to the vats.

The neighbors stopped laughing. They started calling him Salty John.

West Yarmouth Salt Works.

The industry spread along Cape Cod’s open coastline, to Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Plymouth, Kingston, Rochester, Hingham and Dorchester as well as Maine. By 1837, there were 78 salt works in Provincetown alone, 658 on the entire Cape.

“Every man living near the salt water had his patch of salt works, if it took his last patch of cornfield or potato yard,” according to Shebnah Rich in his book Truro–Cape Cod, Or, Land Marks and Sea Marks. Building and repairing the worlds employed many mechanics, and making the salt gave jobs to elderly men and boys.

Another inventor devised a sliding cover to keep the vats protected from the rain. Townspeople would race to the salt works to cover them when rain threatened.

Jack Johnson, in his 1944 book Stories of Cape Cod, quotes an old Cape Codder who remembered salt works on his grandfather’s farm.

There were rows and rows of them on my grandfather’s farm. And my grandmother! She had only 14 children. Generally three of them were in arms. Many a time when grandfather and the boys were at the flats (the shore) and a rainstorm came up, grandmother would walk half a mile, carrying one child, leading another, and the three-year-old toddling behind – to the salt works to cover them before the rain came on. Rain freshened the salt, you know.

During the War of 1812, British ships roaming the coast threatened the salt industry. Commodore Richard Ragget of the H.M.S. Spencer threatened to destroy Brewster’s salt works unless the town paid him $4,000. Brewster paid up.

Cape Cod’s vulnerability to military attack and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 contributed to the demise of its salt works. Investment shifted to upstate New York, where a salt springs was discovered in Onondaga

The gradual shut down of Cape Cod’s salt works left 1.425 million feet of wood from the vats. Cape Codders dismantled them and used the wood to build barns and homes.

The last salt work on Cape Cod closed in 1888. Sleepy John Sears did not live to see the demise of the industry he created. He died a rich man in 1817, and was buried in a nondescript grave in West Brewster.

You can see his headstone in the Sears family cemetery at the corner of Airline Road and Old King’s Highway. His epitaph reads, “John Sears, Inventor of the Salt Works, Aged 72 y’rs.”

With thanks to Edible Cape Cod magazine.

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Remembering the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635

The Great Colonial Hurricane, possibly the strongest storm in New England’s history, struck on Aug. 25, 1635. The Rev. Richard Mather and Anthony Thacher had the misfortune of being on board ships that day.

The James unloading after a somewhat more serene trip than it had during the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.

Mather, father to Increase Mather and grandfather to Cotton Mather, had been suspended by the Church of England for failing to conform to church expectations in conducting services, particularly in his dress. With his prospects limited in Britain, Mather decided he had better opportunities in the New World.

He set out on his journey to Boston with his wife, father-in-law and four children in June 1635. They were among 100 passengers on the James, one of five ships carrying Puritans during the Great Migration. Three smaller ships on the journey crossed quickly and landed safely.

The James (at 220 tons) and the Angel Gabriel (at 240 tons) were slower and crossed together for most of the trip. During early July they parted company, with the James moving somewhat faster.

Both arrived in the teeth of the hurricane, however. Both ships had to wait out the storm off the coast. The Angel Gabriel was able to send most of its passengers ashore at Pemaquid in Maine, and they slept as guests of the villagers already living there while their ship rested at anchor in the harbor.

Great Colonial Hurricane

Richard Mather

By morning, the storm tore the Angel Gabriel from its anchor and reduced it to rubble. The several crew and passengers who stayed on board were lost and the remaining passengers were left to recover what they could of their belongings from the surf.

Farther south down the coast, the James had its own problems. The captain tried to find a safe harbor at the Isles of Shoals, but lost all his anchors in the effort as none of his cables were strong enough to withstand the storm.

On board, the passengers feared the worst as the wind and 20-foot storm surge began pushing the ship steadily toward the rocks. Waiting and watching as the ship edged nearer to calamity, the crew finally rejoiced when storm moved northeast. The hurricane winds reversed and began pushing the ship away from the islands.

Now, however, the ship faced the danger of crashing onto the rocks on land. With a careful deployment of a storm sail, the crew managed to direct the vessel into Hampton Harbor, where it finally found refuge. The James limped into Boston, its sails in tatters.

Mather described the passengers’ feelings in his diary:

When news was brought to us in the gun room that the danger was past, oh how our hearts did then relent and melt within us! And how we burst into tears of joy amongst ourselves, in love onto our gracious God, and admiration of his kindness in granting to his poor servants such an extraordinary and miraculous deliverance.

Watch and Wait

The news was not so good even farther to the south. Anthony Thacher and his cousin Avery had packed up their families and one family friend – 19 in all – and boarded a small ship, the Watch and Wait. They left for a journey that would take them from Ipswich, Mass., out around Cape Ann, and into Marblehead, where the families planned to relocate.

Together with four sailors, the hurricane caught the two families on board their vessel off Gloucester, Mass. The sailors made what seemed a sensible decision to try to ride out the rough weather at anchor.

Thacher Island today

But in the winds of the hurricane, it was a fatal choice as no anchor would hold. The wind and waves tossed the ship until it came crashing upon the rocks of an island off shore. The roiling sea smashed apart the small boat.

As the mariners were washed into the sea, Thacher bemoaned the ship’s fate, close to land but hung up on the rocks. He later wrote, “O cousin, it hath pleased God to cast us here between two rocks, the shore not far from us, for I saw the tops of trees when I looked forth.”

Resigned to his fate, he said to his cousin, “I am willing and ready here to die with you and my poor children. God be merciful to us and receive us to himself!”

The waves crashed over the boat, carrying Thacher and all his family into the sea. For a time, they managed to cling to a rock, but soon the storm swept them away. The waves carried Thacher and his wife to safety on the island. All the rest drowned.

The Damage Done

The Thacher monument. Photo courtesy Boston Public Lilbrary.

The Thacher monument. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

On land, the damage was staggering. The tides at Narragansett Bay were reported at 20 feet higher than normal. Unknown numbers of Native Americans caught in the surge drowned. Buildings in Plymouth and Bourne blew down and flooded. The storm damaged Boston less than Providence, but downed trees throughout the colony.

William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, called it “a mighty storm of wind and rain.” None living in these parts, either English or Indians, ever saw anything worse, he wrote. Indians climbed into trees for their safety.

“It blew down many hundred thousands of trees, turning up the stronger by the roots and breaking the higher pine trees off in the middle,” he wrote. “And the tall young oaks and walnut trees of good bigness were wound like a withe, very strange and fearful to behold.”

Legacy

Bradford predicted the marks of the great colonial hurricane would remain for a century.

Though the storm was noted in the records of the Virginia colony at Jamestown, it was not recorded as a major event, probably because it didn’t make landfall. When it hit New England, it was probably what today we would call a category three or four storm, with winds well over 100 miles per hour. Meteorologists reckon it the strongest storm to hit north of North Carolina.

Diarists noted as late as 1685 that they could still see damage from the storm. Thacher Island in Rockport, Mass., granted by the General Court to Anthony Thacher after the storm, still bears his name. It’s now home to twin lighthouses. Thacher ultimately settled in Yarmouth, Mass., where he is buried near a monument named after him.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Thacher Island By Tim Pierce – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11761953.

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Acadians Refuse To Take a Loyalty Oath to the British King and Pay the Price

For nearly 40 years in the early 18th century, Acadian farmers in Canada refused orders to take an unconditional oath of loyalty to the British Crown. Since there were far more Acadians than British military forces, the Acadians got away with it.

Expulsion of the Acadians

The British had taken Acadia in 1710 as part of their continuing struggle with the French to dominate North America. At the end of Queen Anne’s War, fought largely in Maine, Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, Britain won the southern part of Nova Scotia in the Treaty of Utrecht.

They didn’t have much of a presence in the region, though. The French had encroached by building two forts in what is now New Brunswick: Beausejour, in Aulac, and Gaspareaux, near Port Elgin.

But in June 1755, France’s Fort Beausejour fell to the British and Gaspareaux surrendered without a fight. Shortly thereafter, acting Gov. Charles Lawrence ordered the Acadians to take the loyalty oath. This time, the British could back up their orders with force, because three regiments and New England Ranger units had arrived.

But the Acadians did not want to pledge allegiance to a Protestant monarch and forswear their loyalty to the pope.

Acadians Refuse Loyalty Oath

Father Jean-Louis Le Loutre

By 1755, decades of fighting with the French and Indians left the British fed up with Acadian intransigence. Dummer’s War followed Queen Anne’s War, and King George’s War followed in 1744. The Catholic Acadians scattered throughout the region were ostensibly neutral during these conflicts.

But some waged guerilla war against the British with their allies, the Wabanaki and the Micmac people, who were also Catholic.

Halifax

In 1749, the British tried to tighten military control over Nova Scotia. They built forts in the most important Acadian communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They also provoked the Micmac people by founding the Protestant settlement of Halifax, a violation of their treaty with the Indians.

The founding of Halifax touched off Father Le Loutre’s War. Acadian and Micmac forces attacked Halifax in at least half of the 24 battles, raids and skirmishes of the conflict. The French also built their own forts, including Fort Beausejour on the border between Nova Scotia and Acadia.

Father Le Loutre was joined by an Acadian resistance fighter, Joseph Broussard, known as Beausoleil. In 1750, Le Loutre led many Acadians and Micmacs to new homes in unsettled regions controlled by the French: Chignecto, Prince Edward Isle and Cape Breton. The British called him Moses.

The Final British Push

Map of Fort Beausejour and cathedral

The British began their final push against the Acadians in Canada on June 4, 1755, when Lt. Col. Robert Monckton began to move toward Ft. Beausejour. He led 2,400 men: three British regiments and New England Ranger units led by Joseph Gorham of Yarmouth, Mass.

The 400 French, Acadian and Micmac men were no match for the combined British and New England forces that laid siege to the fort. A cathedral next to Fort Beausejour had just been finished a month before the British laid siege. Father Le Loutre ordered it burned so the British wouldn’t occupy it. He saved the cast-iron bell, still at the site of the fort, now a National Historic Site of Canada.

The fort surrendered on June 16. British troops moved on to force the other French forts in the region to capitulate.

Acadian Expulsion

Two weeks after the fall of Fort Beausejour, Lawrence ordered the forcible removal of the entire Acadian population from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and parts of what is now Maine. Estimates vary, but the British rounded up as many as 10,000 Acadians out of a population of 12,000. Then they boarded them onto ships and sent them to the 13 British colonies in North America and to France. Several thousand died of disease, starvation and drowning.

Charles Lawrence

The British seized their farms and livestock, pillaging and burning their homes to make sure they wouldn’t return.

Father Le Loutre escaped to Quebec and sailed to France, but the British captured him on the journey and imprisoned him for eight years. After his release, he tried to help Acadians deported to France. He died Sept. 30, 1772 in Nantes, France, leaving his worldly possessions to the expelled Acadians.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about the expulsion of the Acadians, called Evangeline. Beausoleil led a group to settle in Louisiana. One of his descendants is a performing artist known as Beyonce.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Black Sam Bellamy, The Pirate Who Fought Smart, Harmed Few, Scored Big

Black Sam Bellamy became the wealthiest pirate in history not because of greed but because of anger – anger at the English system that exploited poor country boys and sailors like him.

British press gang

After his early death in 1717 he left a legacy of folklore on Cape Cod and a ship loaded with treasure off its coast. In 1984, treasure hunters found his ship and in 2018 archaeologists believed they found his remains.

Black Sam Bellamy ran his pirate operation democratically. His men were slaves and Indians and sailors pressed into service. Bellamy treated them equally and let them vote on important decisions.

In a famous speech attributed to Bellamy, he scorned the wealthy merchants he plundered: “They rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.”

Pirate historians have traced Bellamy’s career, summarized by Colin Woodard as ‘Fight smart, harm few, score big.’

Robin Hood of the Sea

Bellamy and his crew captured 53 ships before he died in a shipwreck at 28. They called him Black Sam Bellamy because he eschewed the fashion for powdered wigs and wore his black hair tied with a black satin bow. He had good manners, dressed neatly in fancy clothes, and he always wore four ornate dueling pistols in his sash.

Black Sam Bellamy called himself ‘Robin Hood of the Sea,’ and his men called themselves ‘Robin Hood’s men.’ There is no record of him ever killing a captive, and he often returned captured ships and cargo if they didn’t suit his purpose.

We know little of Black Sam Bellamy’s early life, though he is presumed to have been born in Devon in the west of England. The woman who was probably his mother died in childbirth and was buried Feb. 23, 1689. His parents were likely tenant farmers, hovering on the edge of starvation like half of England.

Bellamy left home at a young age for a port – London, Bristol or Plymouth. He became a ship’s boy at 13 at the outset of the War of Spanish Succession. By the end of the war in 1712 he was a skilled sailor.

Turn to Piracy

Gold recovered from the Whydah

No one knows how Black Sam Bellamy ended up on board a British ship. A press gang may have grabbed him. In the early 18^th century, Britain didn’t have anywhere near enough sailors. The press gangs tricked country boys into signing up or simply kidnapped and forced them on board ships.

Once in service, ship captains routinely cheated sailors of their wages. They gave the sailors vague IOUs instead of wages, or paid them for their last voyage just before they left port for the next. Sometimes they simply didn’t pay them at all.

Black Sam Bellamy sailed to Cape Cod in 1714 or early 1715 to seek his fortune, arriving in Eastham where he may have had relatives. There he had an affair with the beautiful Maria Hallett, all of 15. After impregnating Maria he sailed to Florida to recover Spanish treasure with his friend from Rhode Island, Paulsgrave Williams. Others got to the treasure first.

The two men turned to piracy under Benjamin Hornigold, but the crew mutinied and elected Bellamy as their captain.

Hen-hearted Numbskulls

In 1717 Bellamy and his crew captured the Whydah Gally, a slave ship he refitted as a flagship with 28 guns. The Whydah had an advanced weapons system capable of attacking any man-of-war in the Americas.

In a year, Black Sam Bellamy and his crew raided 54 ships along the U.S. East Coast and the Caribbean. All in all they captured treasure worth $120 million today, according to Forbes magazine. That made him the top-earning pirate.

The Whydah Gally also captured a sloop under the command of a Capt. Beers. Black Sam Bellamy wanted to let him keep his ship, but his crew had voted to burn it. Bellamy asked the captain to join the pirates, and Beers declined. That allegedly inspired the speech attributed to the pirate:

I am sorry they won’t let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you.

Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls.

They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?

Black Sam Bellamy Lost and Found

Map of the Whydah wreck

The Whydah and the Mary Anne, commanded by Williams, headed north to New England. Williams and the Mary Anne broke off to Rhode Island, where he wanted to visit his family. Bellamy continued on, perhaps to Eastham to see Maria, but a terrific Nor’easter on April 26, 1717 wrecked the Whydah off the coast of Wellfleet. Black Sam Bellamy and all but two of the 142 men on board perished.

Eventually, 102 of the bodies from the Whydah Gally were buried in a mass grave. The Mary Anne was shipwrecked a few days later, leaving seven survivors.

In 1984, underwater explorer Barry Clifford rediscovered the Whydah in 14 feet of water and five of sand. The Whydah’s artifacts can be seen at Expedition Whydah Sea-Lab & Learning Center in Yarmouth, Mass.

Since Clifford found the wreck of the Whydah, archaeologists continued to search the site. In 2018 they announced they may have found the remains of Black Sam Bellamy himself.

Legacies

The U.K. Telegraph reported scientists found a femur encased in a mass of iron, stone, silver, gold, tools and weapons. They also found pieces of a crushed helmet, indicating a violent death. And they discovered an ornate pistol wrapped in a ribbon that probably belonged to Black Sam Bellamy.

In 2016, an Englishman from Devon came to the Whydah Pirate Museum with documents that showed he was descended from Black Sam Bellamy. Scientists from the University of New Haven tested the bones for a DNA match with the presumed descendant. They found the man’s DNA didn’t match Sam Bellamy’s.

However, in 2021, investigators from the Pirate Museum announced they’d found six pirate skeletons in hard masses of minerals from the shipwreck site. Clifford said he hoped to identify the pirates and connect them with any descendants.

Black Sam Bellamy did leave another legacy. Maria Hallett gave birth to Bellamy’s baby, who died. She spent a short time in jail. According to local lore, she lost her mind or withdrew from society and moved to a shack in Wellfleet. People called her ‘Goody Hallett’ or ‘The Witch of Wellfleet.’ Today a meadow in Wellfleet is known as Goody Hallett Meadow.

With thanks to The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard. This story about Black Sam Bellamy was updated in 2023.

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