The story

Unit complete

Navigating Piracy ran July 6 – August 6, 2026 at Collins Middle School, Salem. The public Showcase was Thursday, August 6. The class is over. The story stays up.

• Student story maps: Map Studio projects from the Showcase, committed permanently — open the archive →
• Curriculum archive: all twenty days as taught — enter the archive →
• Tools that remain: Map Studio, the 3D flythrough, and the games (still playable, no login).

What follows across these pages is the reference record: people, timeline, maps, artifacts, and how we sorted the evidence.

Welcome aboard

This site holds a real piece of local history: Black Sam Bellamy and the Whydah, wrecked off Cape Cod in the early 1700s. The unit name meant two things at once. Students learned the navigation tools and techniques pirates actually used to cross an ocean: reading maps, using the stars to find direction, and keeping track of how far and which way they sailed. And they navigated the real story of who these people were and why they made the choices they did.

The Whydah Gally was a slave ship, one of the largest of her kind in 1717. In February of that year, a 28-year-old pirate named Sam Bellamy captured her off the Bahamas. Ten weeks later, on the night of April 26, she ran aground off Wellfleet in a midnight nor'easter and split apart. Of the 146 people on board, 144 drowned in less than fifteen minutes.

The wreck stayed buried under Cape Cod sand for 267 years. In 1984, a man named Barry Clifford found her using a chart drawn in 1717. The Whydah is the first authenticated Golden Age pirate shipwreck ever recovered. Every coin, every bone, every piece of silver in the museum comes from someone who actually lived this story.

Across five weeks, students spent time with the captain, the crew, the people they captured, the Salem minister who walked the condemned survivors to the gallows, and the cartographers whose maps stitched the whole thing together. They learned to read maps the way a pirate did, made their own, and each picked one person from this story to tell it the way that person would want it told.

Explore any page. The voyage is finished; the record remains.

Driving question

"Why would a person choose piracy in 1717, and how would they want you to tell their story?"

Four supporting questions (one per week)

1. How do people use maps and navigation to exercise power, in 1717 and today?
2. What do Atlantic trade routes tell us about who benefits and who suffers from global commerce, then and now?
3. How does geography shape the choices people can make, from 18th-century piracy to modern chokepoints like Suez, Malacca, and Panama?
4. Whose stories get mapped, and whose get buried, across time?

Three threads running through the whole unit

1. Cartography and navigation. Maps are the tool. We learn to read and make them first. The Whydah story holds together on cartography too: Cyprian Southack's 1717 salvage map is what Barry Clifford used in 1984 to find the wreck.
2. The Whydah's Atlantic world. The ship's journey carries everything else: trade, slavery, piracy, the wreck, the recovery.
3. Modern Oceans. Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Panama, Malacca, container shipping, the Houthi attacks. Same chokepoint logic as 1717, different water.
4. Running through all three: a social justice lens: whose stories get told, whose get buried. Not a separate pillar; the constant theme across cartography, the Atlantic world, and modern oceans.

Holding the hard parts at the same time

The Whydah's crew were escaping real brutality and they stole for a living. The Ship's Articles were democratic and they were a mutiny. A Member of Parliament funded the ship as a slaver in the first place. None of these things cancel each other out. Your job is to hold all of them at once, without glorifying piracy and without flattening it into a costume.

Voyage Journal + final project

Students kept a Voyage Journal across the whole unit: one entry per session, 16+ artifacts by Week 5 (maps, writing, analysis cards, sketches, character notes). The final project was a new piece built from that Journal: each student picked a perspective and a format (12 options), and cited at least 3–4 Journal entries as source material.

See the archived project menu for the formats, and Student story maps for the Map Studio work archived after the Showcase.

Field trips (as run — contingent for any re-run)

Summer 2026 used three field experiences. They depend on museum staffing, an outfitter, and a ferry booking. Treat them as planned if logistics hold, not guaranteed.

• Day 6 — Field Trip 1 (as run Wed Jul 15): Real Pirates Salem + Salem Maritime NHS rotation. Two-section swap. Curator-led at Real Pirates if staffing allows.
• Day 7 — Field Trip 2 (as run Thu Jul 16): Kayaking / life-at-sea day, with a short pre-paddle brief on the Why Piracy page.
• Day 11 — Field Trip 3 (as run Thu Jul 23): Georges Island / Boston Harbor Islands — harbor gateway to the city where the Whydah story ended. See the Salem Connection page.

A planned second museum trip was dropped. Day 17 (Mon Aug 3) was an in-class Synthesis Studio instead.