Gun in a time capsule

Dr Scott Herber, a conservator working on the 300-year-old wreck of Sam Bellamy’s ‘Whydha’, which foundered off Cape Cod in a storm, has been chipping away at material from the ship preserved in a natural time capsule. It is believed one piece may be a long rifle or deck gun off the ship and has been preserved because the iron in the gun has interacted with sea water to form a process called concretion.

His efforts have revealed a metal tip, so that wires can be attached and electrolysis used to zap away the remaining concretion, a process that could take up to a year – a musket ball has already been found. This piece and other salvaged items from the wreck are held at Real Pirates, a museum located in Salem, Massachusetts.

The terms ‘Barbary corsairs’ and ‘Barbary pirates’ (named after the Berbers) are normally applied to the raiders active from the 16th century onwards, when the frequency and range of the slavers’ attacks increased.

In that period,

Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli came under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire, but were allowed to function as autonomous dependencies known as the Barbary States. The Turkish Barbarossa brothers, Hayreddin Barbarossa and Oruç Reis, who were notorious corsairs, took control of Algiers on behalf of the Ottomans in the early 16th century.

The corsairs captured thousands of merchant ships and repeatedly raided coastal towns. As a result, residents abandoned their homes along vast stretches of the Mediterranean coast. Some of these corsairs were European outcasts, such as John Ward of Faversham, Kent, who may have been the inspiration for Jack Sparrow!