Photo Gallery: Archeologists at the Whydah Pirate Museum work to excavate bone 
 
 Of the Whydah’s 146-man crew, two survived and 102 washed ashore, leaving 42 men unaccounted for, including the captain of the ship, Black Sam Bellamy, said Christopher Macort, an underwater field archaeologist with the museum. “It’s like walking through a history book.” 
 
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 And there’s a chance these remains could be of pirate captain Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy, an English sailor who had lived in Wellfleet, Macort said. Sign up for more newsletters here 
 
 Now Casey Sherman, who is creating a movie about finding the wreck, said he is helping the museum coordinate with forensic experts at the University of New Haven to compare DNA found in the remains with that of a known descendant of Bellamy living in England. Sherman, who co-founded a production company called Whydah Productions, which was named for the sunken pirate ship long before Sherman’s partnership with Clifford, said Clifford’s story and the ever-unfolding mystery of the Whydah is prime material for entertainment. Experts have been trying to recover artifacts from the wreck since it was discovered by Barry Clifford and his diving team in 1984, said Macort. Advertisement 
 
 Clifford has recovered millions of dollars worth of treasure from the wreck site, according to Sherman’s statement.
– When the Whydah Gally went down in a 1717 storm 144 lives were lost—none so noteworthy as that of Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy. The New England Historical Society describes the pirate as infamous, but not infamously cruel: As historian Colin Woodard puts it, he followed a credo of "Fight smart, harm few, score big," and big he did score—plundering 54 ships before his watery death at age 28. The wreck of the Whydah Gally was found off Wellfleet, Mass., in 1984 by Barry Clifford, whose Whydah Pirate Museum now features coins, weapons, and other items pulled from the wreckage, with the Boston Globe reporting the ship also had four tons of silver and gold aboard. It notes a 2008 report from Forbes that weighed in on just how successful Bellamy was on the financial front: It estimated he had pilfered the equivalent of $120 million as a pirate. The museum earlier this month announced that archaeologists in 2017 located remains in a huge concretion (that is, a hardened mass of sand and stone) pulled from the wreck near what they suspect is Bellamy's pistol, reports the AP. University of New Haven scientists now plan to compare whatever DNA they can recover from the femur with that of one of Bellamy's modern-day relatives, with results due in roughly 6 weeks, reports the Cape Cod Times. If the bones are indeed Bellamy's, they'll be buried in his native England. As for his nickname, "Black Sam" came from the fact that declined to wear the powdered wigs popular in the day, instead simply securing his black hair with a black satin ribbon. (A surprising find was recently made in Blackbeard's cannon.)