A source-conscious site about the Whydah Gally — an 18th-century slave ship turned pirate ship that wrecked off Cape Cod in 1717 — and the completed middle-school unit built around it.
Unit status: complete. Ran July 6 – August 6, 2026 at Collins Middle School, Salem, for LEAP4Ed. Public Showcase was August 6. The site is now in its permanent, post-unit shape.
whydahstory.com (GitHub Pages).
Four zones with different maintenance rules:
- The reference (living, growing) — the Whydah story for a visitor who has never heard of the class:
/story/·/people/·/pirate-world/·/the-wreck/·/artifacts/·/why-piracy/·/salem/·/maps/·/glossary/·/sources/·/methods/ - /projects/ — student work, written once: permanent Map Studio story maps from the Showcase
- /curriculum/ — frozen teaching archive: all 20 days as taught, the LEAP planner, guides and handouts, and the dated dashboard snapshot at
/curriculum/as-taught/ - Games (parked, still playable, no login) —
games/: Whydah’s Voyage (navigator/) and Parrot Flip
Tools: map-studio.html (voice pins on a world map or Southack’s 1717 chart) and flythrough.html (19-stop 3D tour).
Old URLs keep working. Root dayN.html stubs into /curriculum/day-N-…/; /unit/ and whydah-dashboard.html are redirect stubs that map the old tab anchors onto the reference pages.
- 5 weeks (July 6 – August 6, 2026), Mon–Thurs
- 13 instructional sessions + 3 field trips + Synthesis Studio + 2 build days + public Showcase
- Driving question: Why would a person choose piracy in 1717, and how would they want you to tell their story?
- Final project: flexible format (story map, presentation, performance, poster) from a chosen historical perspective
Facilitated with GIS/cartography support. Partnership with Real Pirates Salem Museum. Research draws on Marcus Rediker, Colin Woodard, Kenneth Kinkor's Whydah Sourcebook, the Expedition Whydah archive, and primary sources including the 1717 Boston Vice-Admiralty Court records and Cotton Mather's Instructions to the Living.
Every claim on the reference pages is tiered by confidence (🟢 Solid / 🟡 Contested / 🔴 Mythologized); see /methods/ for the methodology and /sources/ for the bibliography.