How to Be a Successful Pirate, Singlehandedly

They were not the best-known pirate gang in history, but they were probably the most successful. All 300 crew members aboard the Fiery Dragon became multimillionaires after only two years of brigandry on the high seas under the command of Capt. Billy One-Hand.

“This gang really succeeded,” said archeologist Kenneth Kinkor of the Expedition Whydah Sea Lab and Learning Center in Provincetown, Mass. “Crime, for them, did pay.”

Now a team led by underwater adventurer Barry Clifford has discovered the remains of the Fiery Dragon off the coast of Madagascar, where the crew abandoned it in 1721.

“We believe that the Fiery Dragon will prove to be one of the most intriguing pirate discoveries ever,” Clifford said. “It holds a virtual treasure trove of material appropriated by Billy One-Hand from the dozens of ships he captured.”

The team also found a complex tunnel system under an island at Sainte-Marie in Madagascar that may have been built by earlier pirates to hide their treasure and to serve as a fortress. Similar tunnel systems have been discovered at two sites in North America.

The discoveries are “bound to shed further light on the Golden Age of Piracy,” from 1650 to 1725, said archeologist John de Bry of the Center for Historical Archeology in Melbourne Beach, Fla.

Clifford’s team discovered the Fiery Dragon on an earlier expedition to Sainte-Marie, but misidentified it as the Adventure Galley, the ship captained by the notorious William Kidd, who was hanged for piracy.

The Adventure Galley was, in fact, the object of their original search. They were drawn to the site because a large amount of historical evidence unearthed by Kinkor and others indicated that the ship had been burned on the island in 1698.

Last winter, they reported the discovery of the Adventure Galley, a finding that received widespread news coverage, including a story in The Times’ Science File.

They noted in passing that a nearby shipwreck might be the remains of the Fiery Dragon, but it is now clear that the identifications were reversed.

When the team returned in October and November to further explore what they thought was the Adventure Galley, the explorers began to see several red flags on their earlier judgment, De Bry said. Some Chinese porcelain from the wreck appeared to be of more recent vintage than 1698, the date of the Adventure Galley’s abandonment, and a new look at the timbers suggested that the ship was continental European in origin, not English.

But the clincher was a gold coin discovered by one of the divers and dated 1704. The wreck was not the Adventure Galley.

While the Clifford team was exploring what it thought was the Adventure Galley, the group was also studying another wreck 50 feet away. Intensive examination showed that the second one was Kidd’s ship--although there were few artifacts left in the wreckage.

As the divers began removing artifacts from the first ship from a 36-square-foot test pit they dug into the ballast, its true identity became apparent.

Among the artifacts taken from the pit were a pewter tankard, gold coins, a wooden figure of Christ, a rare ceramic doughnut-shaped flask, an unusually fine terra cotta Chinese lion and a delicate white porcelain figurine of a standing mandarin, his hands clasped in greeting.

Also found were fragments of rare Chinese pottery, originally from Macao, bearing the imprint of a two-headed eagle. Only three pieces of such pottery are in public collections, De Bry said.

The significance of the pottery is that the Fiery Dragon captured the House of Austria, bound from Canton, China, to Belgium. That ship carried pottery destined for the ruling House of Hapsburg, whose coat of arms is marked by a double-headed eagle.

“The physical evidence is very clear,” De Bry said. “This is the Fiery Dragon and no other ship.”

The Fiery Dragon had a colorful history. It was commanded by Capt. William Condon, also known as Christopher Condent or Billy One-Hand, a successful and popular captain who was elected to his position by the crew because of his bravery and fairness. “He was a real pirate’s pirate,” Kinkor said.

Legend says he lost his hand to a gunshot wound suffered when he was trying to extricate a deranged crew member who had locked himself in the hold of the ship.

In January 1720, after a long string of robberies in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, the crew of the Fiery Dragon took a rich prize below the Cape of Good Hope. Then, in August 1720, near Bombay, the band of pirates captured an incredibly rich ship bound for India from Jidda in Arabia. This ship was loaded with gold coins, jewels, silk, spices and drugs estimated then to be worth about 150,000 British pounds, the equivalent of $375 million today.

Another prize was a bag containing 60 to 70 pounds of fine diamonds from mines in India. Legend surrounding this prize suggests that not all the pirates were bright. One sailor, it is said, received a single 60-carat diamond as his share of the loot, while his shipmates each received several smaller jewels. Disturbed by this apparent disparity, he took a hammer and converted the large jewel into several smaller ones.

In 1720, the French government in Mauritius offered all the pirates in the region amnesty if they would abandon their ships and refrain from further buccaneering. On Jan. 16, 1721, the crew sank the Fiery Dragon at Sainte-Marie and dispersed. Capt. Billy settled in St. Milo, France, and became a merchant and businessman. One of the few historical records documenting his stay there is from a court case, in which local gendarmes described him as “a man of utmost honesty and probity,” Kinkor said.

Many of the crew, like other pirates from the era, eventually made their way to the Americas, where they too became successful businessmen and farmers.

“I’ve often wondered how big a role these wealthy pirates, with their knowledge of democracy, played in establishing the United States,” Kinkor said. “Some say they were the vanguard of the American Revolution.”

Clifford’s expeditions to Madagascar were sponsored by the Discovery Channel; the search for Capt. Kidd will be the subject of a documentary to appear on that channel in June.

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Maugh can be reached at thomas.maugh@latimes.com.