Samuel Bellamy
Samuel Bellamy (or Ballamy , also Black Bellamy , Black Sam or Pirate Prince; born March 18, 1689 in Plymouth in Devonshire ; † April 26, 1717 off Cape Cod , Massachusetts , when his ship sank) was an English navigator and pirate in the New World colonies . Bellamy was one of the most successful Caribbean pirates. His trademark was neither particularly brutal nor a grotesque appearance, but rather captivated by his nautical professionalism. He was also one of the outlawed pirates (also known as Flibustier or Bucaniere ). B. Francis Drake or Robert Surcouf boarded with letters of the Crown and owed this part of the booty.
Life
According to accounts of his life, he was pirated because he was in love with Maria Hallett of Eastham , but whose parents did not want him to be part of the family because of his low income as a seaman.
Sam Bellamy grew up without his mother, who died in childbirth, and went to sea early. During the War of the Spanish Succession he served in the English fleet. When the war ended, Bellamy became unemployed and immigrated to Cape Cod to live with relatives in 1715 . Bellamy persuaded a wealthy patron, the jeweler Paulsgrave Williams, to finance a ship and crew to sail south and search for sunken Spanish treasures off the coast of Florida . Unsuccessful in this, he looked for other ways to get rich quick.
In 1716, like the future Blackbeard, he was a member of the crew of pirate captain Benjamin Hornigold . In its fleet he was elected captain and got his own ship, the Mary Anne . He is said to have captured and robbed over 50 ships in just one year. At the beginning of 1717 his fleet sighted the British slave ship Whydah (named after the port of Ouidah in today's Benin ), a three-master. As she headed north, Bellamy knew she had riches on board, not slaves. The captain of the Whydah , Lawrence Prince , left the ship to the pirates without a fight after a three-day chase. Bellamy built it into its flagship with funds from the sale of the captured slaves and ivory . Shortly afterwards, with a crew of 150, he is said to have captured the Tanner , a Jamaican merchant frigate, and captured enormous amounts of sugar and indigo as well as French silver money worth 5,000 livres .
Now he had enough financial means to marry his bride. But on the night of April 26th to 27th, 1717, the Whydah got into an almost hurricane-force hurricane just 150 meters from the coast of Cape Cod and 250 meters from Maria's house, ran onto a sandbar and sank. Sam Bellamy drowned, only two men could save themselves.
literature
- Lutz Bunk: Ships. From Noah's Ark to Cap Anamur. Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2004, ISBN 3-8067-2548-9 .
- Barry Clifford, Paul Perry: The Pirate Ship. The story of Whydah and the recovery of her treasure. Munich 2000.
- Barry Clifford: My search for the Whydah pirates. In: Hartmut Roder (Ed.): Pirates - The Lords of the Seven Seas. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2000, ISBN 3-86108-536-4 .
- Captain Charles Johnson : A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. London 1724/1728. Reprint: The Lyons Press 2002, ISBN 1-58574-558-8 .
German edition: Comprehensive history of the robberies and murders of the notorious pirates . Robinsong, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-88592-009-3 .
Individual evidence
Web links
- Life story of Bellamy (pirate website without references)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bellamy, Samuel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Black Sam; Bellamy, Black; Pirate prince |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English pirate |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1689 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Plymouth |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 26, 1717 |
| Place of death | off Cape Cod , Massachusetts |