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Barry Clifford Discovers Buried Treasure

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(page 5 of 8)

He had begun scuba diving around the Cape and that gave him a certain cachet, he said, even though his scuba diving credentials were slim. Officially he was not an accredited scuba diver; and most of his dives had been concentrated on the Cape. Getting accredited, he later said, was something he simply never thought to do until he began doing professional salvage work on pleasure ships and other vessels.

It was after Thanksgiving Day lunch at the William Styron house in 1981, Clifford said, that the idea of salvaging the Whydah first arose. A friend of Clifford's who worked as a film producer in New York mentioned it to him. Of course, Barry had heard of the Whydah and its lost treasure. You cannot grow up on Cape Cod and miss hearing about the Whydah. So he started checking around. He went to Boston and pored over nautical records; he went to museums, libraries, and archives in search of historical data on the Whydah -- there was an abundance of material on the subject. He devoured every scrap of Whydah legend and legalese he could get his hands on. He read all about Sam Bellamy and came to see himself in a similar romantic light.

Clifford wasn't dissuaded by the many prevailing theories (including the one about the mooncussers) concerning the fate of the treasure. Another legend held that a man resembling "Black" Bellamy -- who was said to have perished in the storm along with 150 of his men -- had showed up in the area of the shipwreck many years later and had lived out his life in wealthy seclusion.

There was also the fact that hundreds, possibly thousands, of people had set out to find the Whydah before Clifford, and, with the exception of a few who found scattered artifacts -- none of them directly traceable to the Whydah -- all had come up empty-handed.

What Clifford believed he had on his side was technology. Recent advances in underwater surveying techniques and equipment -- side-scan sonars, sophisticated Loran charting equipment, and ultra-sensitive magnetometers -- would enable him, in theory, to conduct the most extensive search to date in those waters off Wellfleet which were some of the most difficult on the east coast -- filled with lethal currents, zero visibility the constant abrasions of sea and sand.

The treasure would also be buried beneath as much as 20 feet of sand, so the expedition would be like searching for a button in a large pitch-black room. All of this would take money, lots of money. At first he had no idea how much a first-rate salvage operation of that magnitude, which could conceivably take years, would cost, but initially he said, he was ready to put up the financing out of his own pocket.

He needed some good advice. He had heard of a world-famous Florida salvor named Mel Fisher; who for years had been embroiled in successive legal battles with the state of Florida over the issue of marine salvage, or treasure hunting. Like most salvors, Fisher operated on the idea that admiralty law assured whatever he found was his. Fisher's diving company Treasure Salvors, Inc., had completed hundreds of successful and profitable dives on Spanish and French shipwrecks in the South Atlantic and Caribbean. In Fisher, Barry Clifford found a mentor. He went to Key West and spent a month with Fisher to see how a big-time salvage operation should properly work.

The debate on the proper way to salvage a potentially valuable relic like the Whydah is a passionate exchange between preservationists, who view the artifact as a valuable resource for knowledge, and treasure hunters, who view it as a finders-keepers proposition. Barry Clifford claimed to fall somewhere between the two. The objections many marine archeologists hold against Fisher's techniques relate in part to a large, metal, elbow-shaped device known as a "mailbox," which utilizes the propwash from a large ship to essentially "blow" a crater in the ocean floor. The idea that such devices might be used indiscriminately off the wreck-intensive Massachusetts coast by Clifford and company was enough to set teeth on edge at the state archeology board.