About my research

The Whydah Galley wrecked off Cape Cod on April 26, 1717. Its discovery over 250 years later sparked a battle over the public history of the slave ship-turned-pirate ship. My dissertation retraces the fateful 1717 voyage of the Whydah, its captives, and its crews across the Atlantic. Engaging with archival sources and material objects, I investigate the intertwined histories of slavery - whether slave societies in the western Atlantic and Caribbean, enslaved people themselves, or the transatlantic slave trade - and piracy in the years surrounding the sinking of the Whydah Galley. The ship’s final voyage provides a unique vantage point for a comparative study of how slavery and piracy shaped five different points across the early modern Atlantic: London, Ouidah, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Massachusetts. Part of the broader dissertation project, this paper examines the entangled economies of slavery and piracy in during the Whydah’s life and death as both slave ship and pirate ship. It focuses primarily on Jamaica and Massachusetts to trace local intersections of slavery and piracy across licit and illicit Atlantic economies. The site of the 1717 Whydah shipwreck and the trial and execution of the survivors, colonial Massachusetts was also home to many merchants who provisioned Jamaica’s growing plantation society. At the same time, the loosening of the Royal Africa Company’s monopoly meant that by the time the Whydah set sail, pirates increasingly served as disruptors instead of suppliers within the slave trade. As more and more localities transitioned, in the words of Ira Berlin, from “societies with slaves” to “slave societies,” they also transformed from economies dependent on piracy and contraband to those that openly shunned maritime marauders. Disentangling the histories of slavery from a famous episode of piracy provides a deeper understanding of the interconnected economic forces driving the early modern Atlantic world.