A close perusal of the “Pirate’s Own Book,” published at Portland in 1859, would no doubt reveal further adventures involving Cape Cod; and in 1717, at any rate, there was an encounter with pirates off the “Back Side” that was brought to a successful conclusion by the wit of a Cape Cod seaman. The Whidah, Samuel Bellamy, captain, of some two hundred tons burden with an equipment of twenty-three guns and one hundred and thirty men, while cruising offshore had the good fortune, which turned to ill, to take seven prizes. Seven prize crews were put aboard to take the vessels to port there, presumably, to sell them at a price. The master of one, seeing that his captors were drunk, took his boat straight into Provincetown and gave the pirate crew into custody. Nor was their chief to meet a better fate. One of his prizes was a “snow,” and seeing a storm coming up, he offered its skipper the boat intact if he would pilot the Whidah safe around to Provincetown Harbor. The bargain struck, a lantern, as guide, was hung in the snow’s rigging. Some say the skipper, trusting to the lighter draft of his boat, ran her straight for shore, the heavy pirate craft floundering after; another story has it that he put out his mast-light and flung a burning tar-barrel overboard to float ashore and lure the Whidah to her doom. Be that as it may, the sequel was successful. The Whidah and two of her attendant ships were dashed on shore near Nauset, and only two men of the crews, an Englishman and an Indian, escaped drowning. As for the storm, it was sufficiently heavy to furrow out the first Cape Cod Canal, the ocean making a clean break across the Cape near the Orleans line, and “it required a great turnout of the people and great efforts to close it up.” Captain Cyprian Southack, sent from Boston to inspect the wreck and landing on the bay shore, refers in his report to “the place where I came through with a Whale Boat,” and adds that he buried “one Hundred and Two Men Drowned.” Having buried the pirates, Southack set a watch over their property, and had some complaint to make of the inhabitants, who came from twenty miles around to share in the spoils. As usual, there seems to have been a clash between government and individual rights; but Southack advertising retribution for any private profiteers, several cartloads of the stores were retrieved and sent to Boston. And there is a story of the right pirate cast in regard to a man “very singular and frightful” in aspect who, every season for many years after, used to revisit the neighborhood of the wreck. Taciturn and uncommunicative in his waking hours, his dreams were perturbed as needs must be, and then such ribald and profane words passed his lips as proved him in league with evil spirits with whom he communed on past bloody deeds. Plainly he was the one English survivor of the Whidah returned to the scene to dig for buried treasure; and to prove the case, when he died a belt filled with gold