Issues → September/October 2008 → Interact → 10 Things to Do →
Barry Clifford Discovers Buried Treasure
by James Dodson
Yankee classic from March 1984.
For an update on his discovery of the Whydah and his current projects, click here for Yankee's 2008 interview with Barry Clifford.
"My life right now," Barry Clifford said, "is a fantasy."
"What kind of a fantasy?" I asked. Clifford waited a moment before answerlng. We were at sea on a fine November day cruising in gentle swells a couple of hundred yards off Marconi Beach, a public beach near the tiny town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The beach was empty. He spoke over the throbbing twin 150 Johnson outboards of his rugged Boston Whaler. "What I mean," he said, smiling," is that, how many people actually get to hunt for buried treasure in their lives? And if they do, how many can say they have a great chance of finding it? I can say that. It's going to happen. It's just a question of time."
We chugged along in silence for a moment. The grin disappeared. He seemed distant, daydreaming.
"Hit!" Rob McClung, Clifford's partner; shouted from the windy deck directly behind us. McClung, a dark, muscular, articulate man, sat hunched over a sewing-machine-sized box reading print-outs from an undersea scanning device known as a magnetometer; standard equipment for modern treasure hunters.
"Where?" Clifford shot back.
"Coordinates three, one, seven, nine, two," McClung recited in a loud monotone. "Twenty-five gammas."
Barry Clifford slumped. False expectations are a daily ration in the treasure hunting business. He was looking for something in the neighborhood of nine hundred gammas, a thousand -- a nonferrous reading that might indicate a pirate ship's cannon burled beneath the sand.
"Last summer we had incredible hits," he said. "A thousand, two thousand, it seemed like, every day. Man, it was a great summer."
"But you didn't find a cannon?"
"No."
"That must have been disappointing." He shrugged and adjusted the bill of his black cap which had "Ski Aspen" written on it. Clifford is a ruggedly handsome man, like a male model who advertises outdoor apparel. He seems at ease most of the time, ready to smile. He seldom takes his cap off in public. He can be disarmingly charming, intensely glamorous.
It's been well over a year since Barry Clifford, a Martha's Vineyard teacher turned treasure hunter, proclaimed to the world that he had found the remains of the Whydah, a pirated British merchant ship that went down in a northeaster off Cape Cod in April 1717, loaded to the gunwales with ivory, gold dust, gold and silver coins -- several hundred pounds of treasure that has never officially been recovered. Some estimates place the cargo's modern worth as high as $400 million. A 1975 National Geographic book, Undersea Treasures, listed the Whydah as one of the world's ten greatest lost treasures.
When Barry Clifford announced he had located the remains of the Whydah in less than 20 feet of water off Marconi Beach, he became an instant celebrity. Television crews flocked to the Cape; women approached him in restaurants and requested his autograph; dozens of newspapers ran lengthy feature articles on the lost Whydah and the man who was going to salvage her from the deep. People magazine put Barry Clifford and his crew of 15 divers, including John F. Kennedy Jr., on its cover and pages. "For a while," Clifford said, "I couldn't go anywhere without people mobbing me. It got to be a little annoying. But then I realized people were looking at me as some kind of hero. I was doing something they couldn't do. They were rooting for me."
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