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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."

The basis of Clifford's claim that he had located the Whydah was a handful of small artifacts -- part of a pipe stem, several nails, and a piece of clay pottery, which Clifford believed were diagnostic and early 18th century in origin. Although legend held that early Cape Codders -- sometimes known as mooncussers, human vultures who watched the seas for shipwrecks and occasionally abetted nature by setting up lights to lure the unwary into rocks or sandbars -- had essentially stripped the Whydah of its valuable ironwork shortly before the ship broke apart, Clifford remained convinced the artifacts were legitimate. "We are absolutely sure this is the Whydah," he told the New York Times.

"There is no question. This is the most famous pirate ship in the world and we've hit it. When we tried to figure out how much it could be worth, the amount went right off the calculator."

But if the press was hungry to fashion Barry Clifford into a modern-day Sam "Black" Bellamy -- the colorful, romantic captain of the ill-fated Whydah, himself a treasure hunter -- not everyone else was. Beneath his cool exterior and his extravagant generosities to visitors, Clifford was at war. As early as November 1982, fearing "claim jumpers" would rob him of his prize, he had "arrested" the site under a broadly interpreted provision of admiralty law, which roughly states that any unsalvaged shipwreck and its possessions belong to the person who finds it -- who in effect stakes his claim on it and risks his skin to retrieve it. On November 22 Clifford filed a claim to the site in Federal District Court in Boston. Two days later; however, a court order was issued seizing the underwater wreck until the state could determine clear title to it.

Under a 1973 statute designed with the discovery of a valuable relic like the Whydah in mind, the Commonwealth had stated its entitlement to 25 percent of whatever was recovered. The statute also empowered the state, under the auspices of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archeological Resources, to oversee the marine salvage operation, to ensure that the archeological significance of whatever was unearthed was maintained.

Not long after Clifford told the world he had located the Whydah, members of the board as well as staff members of the state archeologist's office viewed the artifacts on which Clifford based his claim. They came to no particular conclusion except, as one member put it, to concur that "the pieces were not diagnostic, and it was generally agreed that the items were 19th century in origin." In sum, the evidence presented failed to convince board members that the Whydah had been located. As some on the board saw it, the artifacts could have come from literally thousands of ships that have gone down in that turbulent area of the Cape -- almost 1,000 alone in the specific locus Clifford was probing.

Clifford, however, characteristically remained steadfast in his belief that he had found the Whydah and argued that whatever he found should be his. The state, applying the 1973 statute for the first time, said that since the site was within the state's legal three-mile extended borders, all admiralty claims were nullified. The board unanimously agreed that Clifford would need to apply for a permit specific to the project. This would involve having the project completely mapped out on paper; having an on-site state-accepted archeologist to ensure that the physical integrity of whatever was found was maintained; and a step-by-step adherence to the rules laid down by the board. Clifford chafed. He dragged the state into court over the matter. The state won. Before he was allowed to disturb one more grain of sand on the bottom of the sea off Wellfleet, he was forced to apply for a permit.

He applied for and was granted a one-year permit in February 1983. He was granted an exclusive deed to a two-square-mile area more or less directly off the site where Guglielmo Marconi's old transmission tower had once stood near the town of Wellfleet. A month hadn't passed before Clifford was back asking the board for a four-mile increase because at least two other salvaging companies had approached the board for permits to dig for shipwrecks in areas of their own -- sites not coincidentally adjacent to Clifford and crew. Angrily Clifford denounced his competitors as claim jumpers and frauds and asserted they had gone as far as cutting his buoys and placing their own over sites where his magnetometers had indicated metal substances lay buried in the sand.

The competitors, if they were that, were essentially fishermen out of Provincetown and Chatham. Both groups presented similar artifacts (some of which were judged early 18th century) to the board, although both groups claimed they were not expressly searching for the Whydah. "What Barry wanted us to do was give him as much of the coast as he needed," said one board member. "That just wasn't feasible." What Clifford said he wanted was sovereignty over enough area to assure the "integrity" of the wreck once it was salvaged. Most of Clifford's belief was based on the writings of Cyprian Southack, a cartographer dispatched by the provincial governor a few days after the Whydah went belly-up. Southack's journals indicated that the wreck may have been strewn in a four-mile pattern along the beach. Clifford believed that possibility alone entitled him and his newly minted company -- Maritime Underwater Surveys, Inc. -- to stewardship of the larger contested area. The board disagreed and issued permits to all sides, but also established a 4,000-foot demilitarized buffer between the operations theoretically to keep the peace.

Barry Clifford was incensed. He called the board "archeocrats." "I'm a pure archeologist," he told me one afternoon when I first came to see how his operation was going, more than a year after it commenced. "The treasure is really secondary where I'm concerned. It's the romance of this thing that's so appealing. This legal stuff drives me crazy. It's so unjust. It has made me a wild man at times."

If Barry Clifford had simply appeared as one of those people that celebrity innocently anoints and hoists into the public view, however briefly and fleetingly, a human firefly or a historical nova, it would have been one thing. But Clifford's life, as much as anything else, has been a life devoted to a search for buried treasure of one kind or another.

Barry Clifford grew up around Cape Cod, the waters that he is now mining for treasure, His parents were successful brokers in real estate and antiques, occupations that go right to the heart of Cape Cod culture. At 16 he was sent to prep school in Maine, but it interested him only to the extent that he could develop his interest, as he put it, "in women and sports." He was a natural athlete, principally a football player. He won a football scholarship to tiny Trinidad Junior College in Colorado, which he described as a football factory -- it turned out players who went on to illustrious careers in the NFL.

For a while Barry Clifford envisioned himself as a linebacker in the NFL. He continued to tell people he played linebacker; a position he had once played in high school, even though he had been moved to the defensive line in college. In the hierarchy of football, a linebacker is a somewhat glamorous figure -- fluid, in control, very visible. "People refused to accept the fact that I was a defensive lineman," he said. "They said I looked like a linebacker. So I let them think what they wanted to think."

At Trinidad Clifford roomed with another player named Rob McClung, a champion diver from Florida. The two of them became fast friends. The pair of McClung and Clifford took up skiing, mountain climbing, hiking, fishing, and hunting. "It was incredible," Clifford remembered. "Rob and I, when we were in Colorado, would just go off on these incredible adventures. We'd put .22 pistols in plastic bags and go down the Purgatory River on our backs. We'd shoot our lunch. I wasn't a great student but I had a lot of great times."

In summer Clifford and McClung returned to Cape Cod and took jobs as lifeguards at the public beach at Dennis. On the job Clifford had a favorite ploy. A skillful snorkler in the swirling waters off the Cape, sometimes he would kill a shark, attach it to a buoy and wait until the beach filled up with girls. "Then I would swim out with a knife between my teeth and thrash around with the shark." Back onshore, people were often terrified by the sight of such a maelstrom. But they also fiercely admired Barry Clifford.

After two years at Trinidad College, Clifford and McClung transferred to Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, which Clifford said he picked for its proximity to Crested Butte, a prominent skiing area. Barry loved the ski slopes and the type of people attracted to them -- healthy outdoorsy types with money position, and influence. There he met some of the people who would later be instrumental in his quest to salvage the Whydah.

It was a very good time for Barry. He met a champion skier named Patti Smith, and they were married. It was 1969, and Vietnam was still festering in America's side. Clifford, a patriotic athlete, wanted to go serve his country. He passed the Navy flight exam, but flunked the physical when it was determined he was color-blind. Suddenly he was at a crossroads. He was too small to play pro football. He was a terrific skier with a degree in sociology "I had no idea what I was going to do with my life," he said. "All I knew was I was having a lot of fun and I didn't want it to stop."

So Barry Clifford came home to New England. His good looks, engaging manner, and athleticism helped him find decent jobs in the South Shore area -- first as a Boy Scout administrator; then as a high school physical education teacher. He fathered two children and his marriage dissolved after four years.

Barry wanted something more out of life than working for the Boy Scouts or coaching junior varsity football. It was the early 70s, and he began investing in real estate. He discovered that making money in that way was almost as easy as making tackles on the gridiron. "I began buying up land and building houses. Between 1971 and 1978 I built a million dollars' worth of property. Making money was never that difficult for me."

In 1974 Barry Clifford moved to Martha's Vineyard. For $40,000 he purchased a dilapidated warehouse next to the water. He restored it, laying 20,000 bricks by hand himself. A restaurant, the Beach Club, opened in his building. Playboy Magazine wrote favorably about it; the right sorts of Vineyard crowds began to drift into it, and into Barry Clifford's life.

He bought a house in West Tisbury, where Katharine Graham, who owns the Washington Post, became his neighbor. He cut deals in real estate. Professionally and socially Barry Clifford was in demand.

A tradition of sorts started when he began going to author William Styron's house on Thanksgiving Day. He mingled with people like John Belushi, James Taylor and Carly Simon, Mia Farrow, Robert McNamara and his family. The rich and famous talked to Barry as if he were their equal.

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.

Clifford calculated about $300,000 start-up costs. That would buy ships, crew, housing, and salary for a first summer expedition. At first he contrived to raise the money among his best friends. Several of them jumped at the chance to be part of the adventure. Rob McClung, by then the chief of police in Aspen, was tired of arranging security for ex-presidents and visiting TV stars. Eventually he quit his job, liquidated his assets, and came back East to help his college buddy try to raise the Whydah. A friend of McClung's, a superior court judge named John Levin, also joined the entourage. Together; Levin and Clifford devised a scheme to finance the project through what Clifford ambiguously called the selling of "inside stock." Clifford told me he sold 25 shares of "inside stock" at $10,000 a crack to acquire his start-up money.

As a business venture, betting on the weather may offer a safer return than an underwater treasure hunt. But for certain investors in a high income bracket, a treasure hunt can be irresistibly alluring. The idea of a good tax shelter is to find a place to dump a large chunk of capital quickly preferably into a venture that has little or no chance of making money anytime soon.

Also, there is the adventure element, the idea that being part of something like a treasure hunt, even vicariously, hearkens back to an age when men battled for their destinies with their hands as well as their wits. I asked Clifford if this was how his operation worked -- essentially the way Mel Fisher conducts his company -- and Clifford, smiling wanly, shook his head.

After some false starts looking for investors and a decent research vessel, Clifford saw an ad in the National Fisherman for a 60-foot research vessel called the Vast Explorer II, which had once belonged to the U.S. Navy. To Clifford it seemed like an answered prayer. He flew to South Bristol, Maine, and offered the owner $80,000 for his $160,000 boat. Over the next summer Clifford had the engine of the Vast Explorer rebuilt and a new generator installed. "It's now worth about $200,000," he told me. "It's probably the company's largest capital asset."

The state of Massachusetts entered Clifford's life not long after he announced he had located the Whydah, and the permit squabble ensued. Before the board issued Clifford his digging permit, he was required to have an on-site, full-time, board-approved field archeologist to oversee the step-by-step recovery of artifacts and report directly back to the board. Clifford attempted to acquire the services of Duncan Mathewson, Mel Fisher's longtime associate.

The board rejected Mathewson almost the instant his name was mentioned because of his association with Fisher; who, as one board member described it, "has a well-earned reputation for devastating every site he works on. There was no way we were going to allow Fisher or anyone associated with him to dig off the Massachusetts coast." Mathewson, however; suggested a possible replacement, Edwin "Ted" Dethlefson, a man with impeccable credentials, the newly elected president of the Society for Historical Archeology. Dethlefson, a Harvard-educated biological anthropologist, held relatively liberal views about salvaging shipwrecks, but his scholarly mien and academic credentials satisfied the board. He was approved.

At first Dethlefson and Clifford struck a verbal agreement that the archeologist would represent Maritime Underwater Surveys in all hearings and meetings with the state board. Dethlefson wrote a 30-page proposal describing the history of the shipwreck, plus a general statement of the recovery procedures that would be followed. Clifford flew the gray-bearded archeologist to Colorado to meet investors face to face, to chat about the project, to drum up support. Clifford made it clear to these investors that Dethlefson would be calling the shots to make sure everything was done right. "Barry kept saying we were going to start any day now -- this was late winter -- as soon as the weather broke. Everything, he said, was ready to go," said Dethlefson.

So Dethlefson went home to western New Hampshire to wait for Clifford's call. March ran into May. The weather off the Cape cleared. Dethlefson waited. May turned to June. "I hadn't been paid for the services I'd rendered, but Barry said that would be taken care of," Dethlefson said. "He was very reassuring. I finally was invited down to the project in mid-July. When I got there, there was a great deal of excitement. They threw a big lawn party. There were lots of pretty girls around. Barry was handing out T-shirts and caps with the company logo on them. It was a very festive atmosphere. I thought, 'Gee, this might be interesting.'"

But the serious scientist in Dethlefson also heard alarms going off in his head.

The chain of command, he shortly discovered, seemed vague and inconsistent at times. "The whole thing was thoroughly disorganized. They were a secretive, whispery group on the boat, and I found people countermanding my directions all the time. It was like being in charge of a bunch of precocious seventh-graders who were all trying to impress Big Daddy. By day we dove for the Whydah. By night, the crew went off the boat to bars in Orleans or Wellflett. I felt terribly -- I think the word is -- used. I mentioned my concerns to Barry, and he promised things would get better, but they never did. I finally blew up one day when Barry brought up artifacts from another ship called the White Squall, and I discovered there were reporters on the way out to the boat. I took off my scuba gear and swam to shore."

Dethlefson resigned from the project at the end of September 1983. He went back to New Hampshire and commenced writing his own book about the Whydah. He was disappointed that the project disintegrated beneath him, disappointed that a serious hunt for the Whydah had become, in his belief, a secondary activity for Maritime Underwater Surveys.

"The press thing is focal, central to the whole issue. The courting of the press, all the good-looking ladies, all the camp followers on board," he said. "The publicity got out of hand, the idea that we were blowing holes in the ocean floor and bringing up artifacts almost indiscriminately not cataloging, not following procedure...it was a show to impress investors." His voice lifted in irritation, then trailed off. I remembered what Clifford had said when I asked him why Dethlefson had left the Whydah project. "He's too old to do the type of work we are doing," Clifford said. "It was better for us both that he left."

It was a November afternoon almost exactly a year after he told the world he had found the Whydah, and Barry Clifford stood at the place where Guglielmo Marconi had dispatched Teddy Roosevelt's sober greeting across the Atlantic to King George. This time, however, Barry Clifford was on land, looking out at sea. The weather was still holding, and the day seemed full of extravagant promise. Only a few days before, Clifford had been informed by the state board that his permit to dig any more holes off Wellfleet had been temporarily lifted pending the replacement of Ted Dethlefson. In February 1984 the board would meet to decide whether or not to renew Clifford's permit to dig on the Whydah.

Dressed in khaki slacks, deck shoes, a light velour sweater and the omnipresent black ski cap, Barry was absorbed with a Sony video camera. He had many things on his mind that day, he said. His mood was subdued. Almost all day he had been lugging the camera around, not talking much, just taking moving pictures of the sea, of sand dunes, of the sky.

Once, for a brief moment, he removed his cap and I was surprised to see that he was almost totally bald. Without the cap he looked older, more sedate... "This is not a good time for me," he admitted. "I get so restless when the winter closes in, and everybody goes away."

In an ideal world, Barry Clifford would find the Whydah and dispel any doubt of his greatness. He would find a way to keep the magic going. But as it is, he is spending about a thousand dollars a day and playing a waiting game...Officially the state of Massachusetts does not believe he has found the Whydah... Only time will tell.

But even if the world of Barry Clifford is not ideal, it does still embrace shimmering possibilities. "From the beginning," Clifford reflected soberly, "I've said this thing might take five years to do properly You can't rush it. And also, I've never thought I would get rich off the Whydah. I don't know a treasure hunter who isn't broke. But I do see other possibilities. Good things. We've had so much great publicity.

"I see films and TV coming out of this," he explained, "and books." He told me Jackie Onassis, who is an editor at Doubleday, called him at home one morning at seven and told him she thought his story would make a terrific book. Negotiations followed. "The deal fell through," Clifford told me with a shrug. "They wouldn't give me the control I needed."

He also envisions a museum: an extravaganza you could walk through via interconnecting glass tubes and view the only genuine underwater pirate ship.

He is still a summer boy who misses the warmth and good limes when the crowds vanish. He is almost 40 and his doctor says he should give up diving because the pressure is slowly destroying his hearing. He will dive less, he admitted, and think more about business. The 18-room Cape house he has rented for the winter is in disarray -- files piled up in loose bundles, photographs and clippings to sort through, so much work. "We've got to get organized over the winter," he said. "Before we know it, it will be spring and we can start again after the Whydah."

Barry Clifford smiled engagingly when he said this. He straightened the bill of his cap. He flipped off the camera. In a certain faltering light, he still looks like a linebacker.