Barry Clifford, an underwater archaeological explorer and treasure hunter asserted that he has located where the Whydah Gally legendary treasure keeps after decades of searching through the muddy waters washed out from Cape Cod. Whydah Gally is the only accredited discovery of Clifford.
Whydah Gally previously was a slave ship and was governed by the English pirate Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy. In 1717, the pirate ship sank to the bottom of the ocean amid turbulent seas off Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Only a few of the almost 150 crew died when the ship immediately sank due to heavy loads of unlawful riches taken from more than 50 ships.
Since Whydah Gally's discovery in 1984, Clifford and his team always come back almost every year to the shipwreck since he has special rights. The group already retrieved some 200,000 artifacts which include Spanish silver coins, more than a dozen of cannons, hundreds of remnants and pieces of scarce African gold jewelry, different colonial-era objects, and other treasures, MSN reported.
Clifford's latest expedition sited a huge metallic stockpile and is persuaded that it could be some of the 400,000 coins and other wealth reported to be confined on the ship.
According to Fox News, Clifford concluded in 2014, that he located the Santa Maria wreck, Christopher Columbus' flagship from his first expedition in 1942 to the Americas off the Haitian coast. However, UNESCO researchers claimed that it was more liable to be a ship from the later period because of the occurrence of copper and bronze fasteners.
"Barry Clifford's many claims can be very exciting if they can be verified with photographs or scientific proof," said Paul Johnston, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. who specializes in shipwrecks. "Until then, it's just talk."
UNESCO's underwater heritage specialist, Ulrike Guérin, refused to remark on Clifford's recent claim regarding Whydah Gally's long-lost treasures but mentioned that Haiti and Madagascar adventures emphasize how Clifford's work is deprived of important scientific approach.
