The Whydah Finds a Permanent Home?

[Thagarr]

For the last couple of years, artifacts from the pirate ship Whydah, Black Sam Bellamy's flagship, has been touring North America in a touring exhibit sponsored by National Geographic. Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to see the exhibit, but I have heard it is absolutely incredible!If your not familiar with the Whydah, you can read more about her, and see the online exhibit HERE!

It is really quite a fascinating story, and Barry Clifford has done a fantastic job preserving and documenting the most intact, authentic pirate ship ever found! This one wreck has done more than almost any other single discovery to fill in what it was really like aboard a pirate ship of the Golden Age.

Anyway, I just ran across a news story out of Cape Cod, Mass. stating that the exhibit may have found a permanent home in a building that formerly the Hyannis National Guard Armory, the same Armory that US president John F. Kennedy made his presidential acceptance speech in. The proposal isn't final yet, but it sure sounds like it is very likely to happen.

HYANNIS — The building where John F. Kennedy made his presidential acceptance speech 52 years ago may someday be the place to see pirate treasure, treasured art or treasured memories of Cape Cod's famous family.
The town of Barnstable has received five formal responses to a request it issued to gauge interest in the now town-owned former National Guard Armory on South Street.

The most extensive ideas came from the Cape Cod Art Association and a group seeking to open an exhibit centered around artifacts from the wrecked pirate ship Whydah, which was lost at sea during a nor'easter in 1717 and found off Provincetown in 1984.

Other respondents included the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod and the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum. Those three organizations expressed a willingness to collaborate but offered few details about their ideas for the space.

The Whydah group includes Barry Clifford, who discovered the wreck of the ship captained by pirate Samuel Bellamy,, as well as local developers Charles F. Doe Jr. and Robert Carlton, according to David Lawler, an attorney representing the group proposing the Whydah exhibit. The men plan to form a limited liability corporation to run the exhibit.

If chosen, the exhibit would essentially mirror a Whydah exhibit currently traveling around the country that is a collaboration between Clifford and National Geographic, Lawler said.
"We think that this will probably be one of the largest if not the largest attractions for people, obviously short of the beaches," he said.

He estimated it would draw at least 150,000 people annually.

You can read the full story over at the Cape Cod Times HERE!