Captured (30 page)

I

The
Marie,
its captain and crew are loosely based on the famous pirate ship
Whydah.
Its captain was a White man in his late twenties from the colonial northeast, who went by the name of Samuel
Black Sam
Bellamy. According to historians, over a third of his crew members were men of color, including fugitive slaves, Native Americans, and free Blacks. In fact, the
Whydah
was a slave ship when Bellamy first attacked it and claimed it as his own. When he targeted other slavers he often offered the captive Africans on board the opportunity to join his crew. In April 1717, the
Whydah
went down in a violent storm off the coast of Cape Cod. Of the 146 crewmen on board, including an eleven-year-old boy, only two survived, a Welshman named Thomas Davis, who was subsequently tried for piracy, acquitted, and released, and John Julian, a half-blood Native American, also tried for piracy, but found guilty and sold into slavery—some reports say,
back
into slavery.

Although the career of Bellamy and his crew lasted only a year, they succeeded in taking down 53 ships, and all that plunder was inside the
Whydah’s
hold when it sank off Cape Cod. For over two hundred years the exact resting place of the wreck and its legendary treasure was searched for but never found, until 1984, when treasure hunter Barry Clifford located the ship’s remains on the ocean floor, near Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Since the discovery, he and his team of divers have recovered over 100,00 items, including the bell, assorted cannons, an ornate pistol, gold coins, and the leg bone of the eleven-year-old sailor mentioned earlier. As I write this, some of the artifacts are touring the country in an exhibit sponsored by
National Geographic
titled:
Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah—From Slave Ship to Pirate Ship.
You can read more about this fascinating exhibit, tour dates, and locations via the
National Geographic
website. Make sure you check it out when it comes to a city near you.

I’ve been wanting to do a story set during the American Revolution for some time because very little is known about the contributions made by people of African descent to the fight that freed the colonies from the crown. An estimated five thousand men of color fought on the side of the rebels. According to historian Benjamin Quarles, Negro soldiers served in the minutemen companies of Massachusetts in the early weeks of the war, in state militia of Northern colonies, and in Continental forces. At Yorktown, Baron Von Closen, an aide to General Rochambeau noted that three-quarters of the Rhode Island regiment consisted of Negroes, and when they passed in review, the men were the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in their maneuvers. Recently, in Savannah, Georgia, a monument was erected in honor of the Haitians who fought on the side of the Americans, so the next time you are in that historic city, please seek it out.

In writing
Captured,
I barely scratched the surface of this “lost” piece of American history, but it is my intent to do more books set in this period, in the near future. To help you get a head start on the research, here are some of the sources I used to tell the story of Dominic and Clare.

Bolster, W. Jeffrey.
Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Cordingly, David.
Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates.
New York: Random House, 1995.

Lanning, Michael Lee.
African Americans in the Revolutionary War.
New York: Citadel Press, 2005.

Quarles, Benjamin.
The Negro in the American Revolution.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.

Thomas, Hugh.
The Slave Trade. The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Webster, Donovan. “Pirates of the Whydah.”
National Geographic Magazine.
V. 195, no. 5. May 1999.

In closing, I’d like to thank my readers for their continued support. It’s been fifteen years since the publication of my first historical,
Night Song.
I loved you then and I love you even more now. Be blessed and keep reading.

B.