This featured on our 60 Minutes last night and the concreted mass of coins and cannons etc was mentioned. This Clifford bloke is more in it for the history and was referred to as a gentleman treasure hunter (as opposed to other operations featuring in the news recently I guess). He's been working on the wreck since the 1980s.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/...wreck_off_cape/By Ryan Haggerty, Globe Correspondent | August 3, 2007
A boat piloted by underwater explorer Barry Clifford towed a 10,000-pound mass of cannons, gold coins, and other artifacts from the sunken pirate ship Whydah to a pier in Provincetown yesterday, a find that is expected to yield more secrets and treasure from the nearly 300-year-old wreck, Clifford said.
The artifacts are encased in a concretion, a mineral composite formed by a chemical reaction between iron and saltwater. The concretion is the latest and largest recovered from the wreck and was too heavy to be lifted by crane, Clifford said by cellphone yesterday from his boat, the 75-foot Vast Explorer.
A custom-built net was attached to the mass, which was lifted from the ocean floor by four flotation bags, Clifford said.
Clifford discovered the concretion last summer in the same spot, about 50 feet down and 2000 feet off Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, as a smaller mass of three cannons that he retrieved last month, Clifford said.
The newly found cannons, believed to be among about 30 the Whydah had stolen from other ships and was storing in its hold, were found about 10 feet beneath the ocean floor at the spot where Clifford discovered the first artifacts from the wreck in 1984. He owns the wreck site.
The concretion, about the size of a sedan, was to be tied to a pier in Provincetown last night and left underwater until it can be transported to a laboratory in Brewster for examination later this week, Clifford said.
"All we know is that there are some cannons and other artifacts sticking out of it, but until we get it in the lab and X-ray it, we won't know exactly what's in there," Clifford said. "It's pretty suspenseful."
The Whydah, laden with loot from at least 54 other ships and manned by a crew of about 140 pirates, sank in a northeaster off Wellfleet on April 26, 1717. Clifford has removed about 200,000 artifacts from the wreck, some 200 of which are on display in Cincinnati as part of a traveling museum exhibit. He declined to put a value on the recovered items, which he has said are priceless.