BOSTON (AP) — Fog was swallowing his ship’s bow, thewinds were picking up and undersea explorer
Barry Clifford figured heneeded to leave within an hour to beat the weather back to port.Itwas time enough,
he decided, for a final dive of the season over thewreck of the treasure-laden pirate ship, Whydah, off Cape
Cod.ThatSept. 1 dive at a spot Clifford had never explored before uncoveredproof that a staggering amount of
undiscovered riches — as many as400,000 coins — might be found there.Instead of packing up forthe year,
Clifford is planning another trip to the Whydah, the onlyauthenticated pirate ship wreck in U.S.
waters."I can hardly wait," he said.TheWhydah was built as a slave ship in 1716 and captured in
February 1717by pirate captain "Black Sam" Bellamy. Just two months later, it sank ina ferocious
storm a quarter mile off Wellfleet, Mass., killing Bellamyand all but two of the 145 other men on board and
taking down theplunder from 50 vessels Bellamy raided.Clifford located theWhydah site in 1984 and has since
documented 200,000 artifacts,including gold, guns and even the leg of a young boy who took up withthe crew.
He only recently got indications there may be far more coinsthan the roughly 12,000 he’s already
documented.Just before hisdeath in April, the Whydah project’s late historian, Ken Kinkor,uncovered a
Colonial-era document indicating that in the weeks beforethe Whydah sank, Bellamy raided two vessels bound
for Jamaica. "It issaid that in those vessels were 400,000 pieces of 8/8," it read.The 8/8
indicates one ounce, the weight of the largest coin made at that time, Clifford said."Now we know
there’s an additional 400,000 coins out there somewhere," he said.Thefinal dive may have provided a big
hint at where. Diver Rocco Paccionesaid he had low expectations when Clifford excavated a pit about 35
feetbelow the surface and sent him down. But his metal detector immediatelycame alive with positive, or hot,
readings."This pit was pretty much hot all the way through," he said.Themost significant artifact
brought up by Paccione was an odd-shapeconcretion, sort of a rocky mass that forms when chemical reactions
withseawater bind metals together.X-rays this week revealedcoin-shaped masses, including some that appear to
be stacked as if theywere kept in bags, which is how a surviving Whydah pirate testified thatthe crewmen
stored their riches.Clifford doesn’t sell Whydahtreasures and said he would never sell the coins
individually because hesees them as historical artifacts, not commodities. But he has givencoins away as
mementos. Two have been sold at the Daniel Frank SedwickLLC auction house in Florida, with the highest going
for about $11,400.The price per Whydah coin would plummet if tens of thousands hit themarket, but a retail
price of $1,000 each is a reasonable guess, saidAugi Garcia, manager at the auction.Ed Rodley, who studied
Whydahartifacts during graduate studies in archaeology at the University ofMassachusetts Boston, said the
Whydah site keeps producing treasuredecades after its discovery partly because it’s so tough to work.Thesite
is on the edge of the surf zone, where waves start breaking towardshore. Clifford needs seven anchors to
hold the boat in place and themurky ocean bottom is just as active underneath him. Rodley said anypits dug
by archaeologists would collapse within hours.What Clifford has gradually gotten to, three centuries after
the Whydah went down, is impressive, Rodley said."It’s crazy the stuff that’s come out of that site and
keeps coming out of that site, year after year after year," he said.Copyright 2013 The Associated
Press. All rightsreserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten orredistributed.
