2017 marked the 300th anniversary of the wreck of the pirate ship Whydah off the coast of Wellfleet. Sam Bellamy was the captain who died in that wreck, and his girlfriend Maria Hallett witnessed the tragedy.
The late Yarmouth and HSOY historian Haynes Mahoney once remarked that he had seen a document which mentioned that Bellamy’s girlfriend Maria Hallett was a tavern maid at the Old Yarmouth Inn before she moved to Eastham. Sadly he never revealed the source of that information and it remains a mystery. Was she?
Author Kathleen Brunelle, in her book, “Bellamy’s Bride – The Search for Maria Hallett of Cape Cod,” writes that in some legends Maria hailed from Yarmouth but later settled in Eastham though she wasn’t able to give definitive information. Maria’s birth doesn’t appear in any of the local town vital records. Yarmouth likes to claim her; little has happened on Cape Cod that doesn’t have some Yarmouth connection!
Maria’s age has never been ascertained with certainty. Most of the legends say she was 15 or 16 at the time Sam Bellamy met her in Eastham in 1715. A girl of 15 could be married then as the age of consent in 1715 was 11, based on the 1642 Capital Laws of New England. Maria’s probable Yarmouth ancestor, her presumed grandmother Anne Bearse, married at age 14.
Location of the Whydah wreck off Wellfleet.
Maria is said to have met Sam Bellamy at the Higgins Tavern in Eastham, a place where young girls would not ordinarily be unless, of course, Maria had worked at another tavern earlier – perhaps the tavern in Yarmouth.
We all know the story – a pretty young girl, unmarried and pregnant, sees her beau leave on an expedition to the West Indies. Being pregnant before marriage wasn’t a terribly unusual situation in the early 1700s. More than one in four women were already expecting a child at the time of their marriage. Maria’s baby died shortly after being born in a barn and some believed she killed the child. The town fathers imprisoned her and after she escaped several times they eventually banned her from town. She moved to Wellfleet and became a recluse in what is now the Marconi beach area. That land is still called the Goody Hallett Meadow.
Was she bitter about Sam leaving her and dying? Legends take two directions on this. In one, she pines for Bellamy and is devastated by his shipwreck near her shack. In the other, she blames him and puts a curse on his boat, causing it to wreck. In this version Maria has become a witch, called Goody Hallett, able to do such things.
Since then, many, many authors have given their own spin on the story, with Kathleen Brunelle’s book covering virtually all of the variations in the Maria Goody Hallett legend. Wherever Maria hailed from, her legend lives on.
*********
To learn about a very real pirate’s lady, join us on April 19th at 7:00 pm at the South Yarmouth Library when local author Daphne Geanacopoulos will tell us about her research into and subsequent bestselling book about Sarah Kidd, the wife of the pirate Captain William Kidd. Not legend, Sarah was a very real person and a very interesting one!