One can only imagine the number of ghostly, broken hulls of ships and chests of loot that have littered the bay floor since John Smith settled Jamestown. Antiquities Law clearly states that found pirate treasure belongs to the location, which in the case of the Tory Treasure is Virginia. Of course, if the treasure can be traced back to the vessels from which the loot was originally seized, then the vessel’s point of departure is highly likely to unfairly claim the treasure, and there will be a long, drawn-out battle in court. I strongly suspect that Wheland’s remarkable stash will be claimed by North Carolina. But all of this is moot if individuals can find the treasure first and quickly pass it off to dealers at a very high price. I am stating the obvious to mention that no one is more capable of rapidly locating and seizing the Tory Treasure than the descendants of pirates who now live on Tangier Island and know the ways of the bay better than any other human beings.
It is my contention that the treasure belongs to the watermen, and we should allow them to have it. Tangier’s economy is depressed. There are strict limits on the number of blue crabs they can trap, and the crab population has been shrinking for years. I am asking everyone, including the governor, to stay away from that crab pot marked by a yellow buoy that is approximately 10. 1 miles off Tangier’s western shore. Let decency prevail and greed vanish as you consider that most of us don’t suffer the hard, often unrewarding lives of the watermen. Since their ancestors suffered so much when Joseph Wheland set up his winter headquarters on their island long ago, it would be only fair and right for today’s Tangiermen to profit from that evil pirate’s ruthlessness. It may very well be a perfect example of poetic justice.
Anne Bonny and Wheland never met the punishment they deserved. Even Blackbeard didn’t get what was coming to him. Hacking him to death and impaling his severed head on a gunwale was light punishment compared to the way some pirates were dealt with in other parts of the world. Before piracy was first romanticized in modern times and then mundanely reduced to armed robbery, it was taken with grave seriousness in past centuries. All you need to do is flip through the pages of the two-volume 1825 edition of The Terrific Register: or Record of Crimes, Judgments, Providences and Calamities, and you will be shocked and sickened to see what I mean.
By way of example, I offer what was the typical fate of Russian pirates on the Volga, which in centuries past was so infested with pirates that merchants stopped transporting any cargo of value down the river unless the ships were accompanied by an armed convoy. These
Russian pirates, who were not nearly as cold-blooded as Bonny, Wheland, or Blackbeard, were taken alive and no doubt became quite unsettled as they observed soldiers building a float and erecting gallows on it that were equipped with huge iron hooks.
The captured pirates were stripped naked and hung by their ribs on these hooks, and the float was sent slowly drifting down the river, allowing one and all to view the ghastly sight and hear moans of pain. If anyone in the bordering villages and towns the floating gallows passed showed a whisper of pity by offering the wretches water or liquor or a merciful death by gunfire, the punishment for being a Good Samaritan was to suffer the same slow, tormenting death as the pirates. This threat was sufficiently severe to prevent the public from intervening, and in fact, when one pirate managed to escape from his hook and, nude and trembling from pain and blood loss, came upon a simple shepherd, the shepherd’s unsympathetic response was to beat the pirate’s brains out with a stone.
I’m sure the shepherd was quick to loudly boast throughout the village about the unkind thing he had just done, otherwise the story would never have made it into historical records. This is not to say that I believe in vigilantism or torturing prisoners on death row. Nor should you assume I approve of the way the Russians dealt with piracy. But my point is that Bonny, Black-beard, and Wheland, and their bloodthirsty sea dogs were just lucky they weren’t caught in Russia.