Carcosa Bound

There's a memorial in the middle of town, to the 20 people killed by the good people of Salem, during the witch craze in the spring of 1692.

It's an affecting site – especially when you look slightly more into the story. Further details that have since emerged that the allegations, trials and murders showed once again, the motives were more upon the earth, rather than under it.

One young accuser, Ann Putnam, accused over 60 people. Her father would buy their land at cut-rate prices; the veritable fire sale.

It highlights the error of attributing to devils what people are perfectly capable of doing for, or to, themselves.

This memorial stands in stark contrast to the mid-century, highly affected gropings towards some “witchiness”; that weird American expression that gets tangled up with feminism, social issues and various flavours of New Thought. This is fine, as far as it goes – but you have to ask where the other bits are; the flying ointments, Sabbats, shapeshifting, the arrangements with tutelary spirits. All the actual magical bits, where things go bump in the night.

Beyond this, what is most curious about this is just how sexless, safe and neutered the end result is. It all seems very ... confected.

A wild quest; illicit love, pirate gold and lost history

A few minutes away, near the Salem seaside, there’s a museum bearing testament to something that seems too outrageous to be true – and the hoard of pirate treasure to prove it.

An underwater archeologist and treasure-hunter named Barry Clifford weathered ridicule for years, hunting for a rumoured lost pirate ship he heard about as a boy: the Wydah.

Clifford was possessed by the story of the captured slave-transport ship, which had been turned to the pursuit of extra-legal income gathering activities by a gathering of rogues and rapscallions in the early 1700s.

The ship, as a so-called republic of the sea, was governed by the egalitarian, libertarian values of “the articles”, the code which each sailor would swear to uphold. The ship was captained by the dashing Sam Bellamy, who turned to piracy for love – specifically, the love of Maria Hallett.

After a stellar career as a pirate captain, Bellamy was apparently heading around the Massachusetts coastline.

About this time, Maria was branded “the Witch of Wellfleet”, apparently due to being seen howling, pleading and cursing on the beach.

The god-fearing locals thought she was communicating with the devils of storm and sea; they did not know that her pirate love, and his crew of free men, were sailing through ship-wrecking seas to meet her. They also did not know she was with child.

Bellamy’s ship, laden with a legendary horde of reallocated Spanish gold, was lost that night; those who didn’t drown were captured and hung. The body of Sam Bellamy was never found. Maria Hallett apparently gave birth to a boy, though never revealed who the father was.

Sometime after, she and the child also disappeared. Another mystery – no one knows where she went, or what happened next. There is a theory he survived, and they were reunited, and lived out their lives together – though this is just a tale; do the stories of pirates and witches get happy endings?

Three hundred years later, after a decades-long treasure hunt, Barry Clifford found the wreck, with 200,000 catalogued items – among which – in a story almost too fantastic, the hoard of the actual pirate treasure.

The exhibition deftly placed piracy in the context of the time, and tells these stories. It’s all there, including the treasure. It’s a wonderful, exciting place to visit, and so well done.

So, on the face of it, it seems Salem’s history of witchcraft is largely fabrication, misapprehension, and wilful ignorance, capitalised on with an evocative and high-valence PR exercise. Meanwhile, other stories, no less compelling, remain largely underexposed.