Barry Clifford, famous for discovering the wreck of pirate captain Samuel Bellamy’s ship Whydah off of Cape Cod, has surfaced in the news with the claim that he has recovered a silver bar from the wreck of Captain William Kidd’s “pirate ship,” the Adventure Galley, off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. If so, it would be one of the very few pirate ships ever salvaged, along with the Whydah and another pirate ship, the Quedah Merchant, also one of Kidd’s ships.
I’ve summarized Kidd’s career as a pirate-hunter turned pirate here. (For more details, Robert Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates (1986) does an excellent job of combining scholarship with a lively narrative.) The Adventure Galley was the original pirate-hunting ship Kidd sailed to the Indian Ocean. Kidd abandoned it in 1698 on the island of Sainte Marie, a popular pirate haven just off the east coast of Madagascar, because the vessel was unseaworthy. The Quedah Merchant had been Kidd’s most lucrative prize as a pirate; he sailed that vessel from Madagascar to Hispaniola, before abandoning it in 1699 as too obvious an indication that he had indeed become a pirate.
Is Clifford’s find the Adventure Galley? As I’ve mentioned, many other pirates used Sainte Marie. In fact, a whole series of legendary tales developed around the pirates of Madagascar. (I’ll be offering a transcription of one of the oldest such stories sometime before July.) So while Clifford has the Whydah to his credit, Ritchie is right: there are other possibilities, and the silver bar in itself doesn’t tell us which ship it came from. It’s not like the Whydah, where Clifford found the ship’s bell inscribed with the ship’s name on it. I have to wonder if Clifford has seized on Kidd because his name is better known than that of the other Indian Ocean pirates. Nevertheless, I’m rooting for him to at least have found a pirate ship.
There are no surviving pictures of the Adventure Galley, but this is of a very similar ship, the Charles Galley
Sillyhistory 
Are there plans to look further? It would be amazing if the ship was found.
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The salvage effort is ongoing. Clifford took years to salvage the “Whydah,” and then to prove that was indeed what he had found, so I would expect nothing less from him here, if funding holds out.
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Surely there’s only one way to 100% prove it’s identity, and that’s to find its name somewhere about it—which seems unlikely, so many years in the water.
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Clifford did manage to find the Whydah’s bell, with its name on it. But other than that happening again, which would be quite a stroke of luck as you say, it’ll probably be a matter of trying to tie the contents to the known history. This will be difficult for the “Adventure Galley,” as it was likely cleared of most of its contents before being abandoned. (It did not go down in a storm, unlike the Whydah.)
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