I locked myself out of the house. First I thought about breaking a window, then I moved on to set up the drill and try getting through the door that way, and–finally–I called a locksmith.
He said he’d be right over.
He started out trying to pick the lock and I watched how he listened for clicks so quiet, that the sound of the juncos using their beaks to get seeds from dried flowers still standing in my winter gardens, would seem ear splitting. He also tuned in with what he was feeling through the two metal instruments being jabbed into the keyhole. Then he made some diagnostic comments about how there was one pin inside the lock that wouldn’t let him get past it.
I said, “You must have an engineering mind, with a flair for visualizing intricate mechanical patterns.” He said he did and that he’d gone to Worcester Polytechnic Institute to study engineering.
“But my grandfather was a locksmith.” He said. “He taught me the trade.”
I asked him if he liked Minecraft. Yes, he said. But he made sure to let me know that he wasn’t a total freak about it.
We tried another lock on another door. No go. “I always thought our doors had kind of crappy locks on them.” I said. The locksmith told me that people buy fancy door handles and locks, but the lock configurations inside are often the same as the cheap handles, and most are pretty good. He got out his drill, and dismantled the stubborn lock for good.
We went into the house and he began to put together a new handle and lock for the door. He set up his tools, and opened a box divided into compartments containing teensy metal “pins” separated by sizes and colors. I thought the collection of pins, inside the box, was pretty. It was like a box of paints, or beads.
I said to the locksmith, “You must have broken through some cool locks.” He said the most difficult break-in was a bank vault. They are super duper secured, he said. Somehow, a toddler had escaped from his mother’s side at the bank, just as the vault was closing for the day. The child ended up trapped inside. No one could open the vault–the security system had been set up to shut the vault, and lock it electronically, at a specific time every day. The mother of the trapped child became frantic. It took the locksmith more than two hours to break in. He said, “I don’t know how a mother loses her kid like that.” I didn’t say anything. I’ve lost my kids plenty of times, but never inside a vault filled with money. I thought of all the possibilities and opportunities…an innocent child, wearing a coat, with big pockets, casually allowed to get trapped inside a bank vault.
Putting together the new lock for my door, and matching it up to my existing keys, took some time. Next, I asked the locksmith, “You must love stories of bank heists, or detective stories that solve complicated mysteries.” He said he did, but then he told me that what he really loved, were the stories of hidden treasures from shipwrecks.
“My grandfather left his boat to me when he died. It’s a 43 footer. My cousin and I are going to use it to search for buried treasure from the pirate ship Whydah. Do you know about the Whydah?”
I said I’d been to the Whydah Museum in Provincetown when my kids were little.
He brought me further into his obsession: “The ship went down in a nor-easter off the coast of Cape Cod when the captain changed course to visit his girlfriend. It was loaded with stolen treasure. Barry Clifford discovered the wreck in 1984 and you can’t search within the claim areas. But we can search for treasure beyond the claim zone.”
“A nor’easter!” I said. “We’ve got a good one coming today.”
“Yes,” the locksmith said, “A lot of my calls during the winter are from people who lose their keys in the snow.”
I was going to ask him if he just uses a metal detector to find the buried key. But I didn’t.
Instead, I turned on my computer and looked up the Whydah.
The ship was originally a British slave trading ship. It was just over 100 feet long and, as was the design for slave ships, it was easy to maneuver, heavily armed, and fast–being able to reach speeds up to 13 knots. The Whydah set sail for the port of Ouidah, West Africa, (from which it might have gotten its name), and could handle trades of 700 slaves for gold, silver, sugar, indigo.
As the stories go, the pirate Black Sam Bellamy gave chase to the Whydah for three days, after its maiden voyage, and took it to be his flagship. It was February, 1717, during the Golden Age of Piracy which lasted from 1680 until 1725.
Bellamy had plundered more than 50 ships, gaining the still-standing record as the wealthiest pirate known upon the pages of written history. When he took command of the Whydah, it came stocked with gold and silver–all the riches earned through the sale of slaves. Bellamy began to sail north, from the waters near Cuba, bound for Cape Cod, where they say he wanted to see his girlfriend, Maria Hallett, who lived in Wellfleet. Maria was know as the Witch of Wellfleet because she had been cast from the town of Eastham after she bore Bellamy’s child out of wedlock. The child died. To this day, the legend of her hauntings along the coast of Wellfleet endure.
As Bellamy sailed north, a fleet of winds chased after him–the North-East gales. He floated forth, into a danger zone where all the mercy of slavers, combined with all the mercy of pirates, matched all the mercy of coastal storms. The sea beds between Chatham and Provincetown are vast graveyards, overflowing with the remains of more than 1000 shipwrecks. Wintertime was especially treacherous–on average, two ships per month were consumed by the violent rushes of winds and water. In fact, the regularity with which ships were smashed into the shifting sandbars near the coastlines, inspired the local populations to have on hand wagons and carts for the “finders keepers” looting that followed every tragedy at sea.
Pirate Black Sam Bellamy sailed into an ominous blend of thick fog and shifting winds. The fast-forming nor-easter flung 70 mph gusts throughout the air that licked with furious greediness at the surface of the Atlantic, lifting the water into 30′ peaks, with cavernous gullies that swallowed The Whydah. Tempest tossed, the ship was reduced to all the might of a child’s floaty toy, made of twigs. Trapped in the surf zone near Marconi Beach, off Wellfleet, the massive supply of cannons aided the gusty gales and lusty seas in breaking the ship apart. It split in two–the stern sinking one way, the bow sinking another. Its gluttonous belly–filled with blood treasures–spilled everything into the insatiable Atlantic.
All but two people lost their lives to the powers of the north-east gales. 143 men and one boy, who somehow talked his way into being a pirate. When the townspeople showed up after the storm to take whatever the sea tossed up, corpses littered the wrack line. The indifferent currents started the constant work of burying treasure troves into hidden, underwater sand vaults.
The Witch of Wellfleet never saw her bad-boy pirate again. Or did she? His body was never found.
But his pirate ship became known as the most authentic shipwreck in coastal New England lore.
Pirates lived by a surprisingly democratic form of unique governance aboard their ships. I found lists of the rules, one was entitled: The Articles of Gentlemen of Fortune: A Pirate Crew’s Constitution. And, often, when a ship was plundered by pirates, if there were slaves aboard, they were given the option to become a pirate, or take their chances as a slave.
To this day, nor-easter storms like the one we are about to get walloped, slammed, hammered, and buried by, arrive packed with curious combinations of romanticism, anxiety, dread, excitement. And the powers of these storms have not abated over the almost 300 years that have passed since the Whydah sailed right down the throat of a howling nor’easter
Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, is a favorite beach of the world. Each year, I embark on an excursion at the end of wintertime to have a look at how the storms have reshaped the beaches of Cape Cod. It is always dramatic. On dreamy summer days, I like walking at Marconi Beach and looking all the way to the horizon to imagine where I’d end up if I set sail and kept going. Now, I’ll look about 500 feet out to sea and think of the Whydah, going down in only 16 feet of water and having all its secrets buried under 5 feet of sand for about 266 years.
When the locksmith completed his artfully-crafted doorknob and new lock, he handed me his bill for the work of breaking into my house and sculpting the new doorknob. I gasped.
I wanted to say, “That’s a lot of pirate coin!” But he had also told me he planned to name his boat The Whydah and that his dream job would be to work as a gunsmith (designing, repairing, taking apart and putting back together, guns) and he also wouldn’t hesitate to become a mercenary, keeping the seas safe from modern pirates, using sophisticated machine guns.
So I let it go.
Excursions 