Patients at Franciscan Children’s Hospital in Boston will explore for treasure via a virtual sea-lab later this month as part of a new program with the Whydah Pirate Museum on Cape Cod.
NWN Carousel, a Waltham-based cloud communications service provider, is partnering with the museum and the hospital to provide access to the virtual lab, the Yarmouth-based museum said in a statement.
The kids and teens at the hospital’s inpatient behavioral health units will get to watch as a team of archaeologists excavate treasure recovered from the Whydah Gally, which sunk during a violent nor’easter off Wellfleet, over 300 years ago, the statement said.
“Being able to watch as scientists discover archeological treasures in real time is something that would be very interesting and meaningful for them,” Ralph Buonopane, director of Franciscan Children’s Acute Mental Health Programs said in the statement. “Our deepest thanks to the Whydah Pirate Museum and NWN Carousel for making this possible.”
The nonprofit museum chronicles the history and discovery of the 1717 Whydah discovered by explorer Barry Clifford and John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1984, the statement said.
Over the years Clifford and his team have uncovered everything from gold coins, to six skeletons, the Globe has reported. At one point, in 2018, they ran DNA tests on the skeleton’s femur, thinking that it may have belonged to the ship’s captain, Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy. But DNA tests later confirmed that the bone did not belong to the famed pirate.
Bellamy captured the Whydah in early 1717. The ship was said to have had four and a half tons of gold and silver on board, and Bellamy was believed to have been the world’s richest pirate, with a fortune worth an estimated $120 million in modern dollars.
“We’d like to thank NWN Carousel and the caregivers at Franciscan Children’s for the opportunity to share our work with young people who otherwise may not be able to visit our museum,” Clifford said in the statement. “The children will get to witness live, and in real-time, major archeological discoveries that have been buried in the sand for centuries.”