By Ryan Haggerty, Globe Correspondent

 

A boat piloted by underwater explorer Barry Clifford is towing a 10,000-pound mass believed to contain cannons, gold coins, and other artifacts from the sunken pirate ship Whydah to a pier in Provincetown this afternoon, a find that will yield more secrets and treasure from the nearly 300-year-old wreck, Clifford said.

The artifacts are encased in a "concretion," essentially a chunk in which the cannons and other objects have been fused together due to the reaction between saltwater and iron over time.

The concretion, which is about the size of a small car, is the largest ever recovered from the wreck and was too heavy to be lifted by crane, Clifford said by cell phone from his boat, the 75-foot Vast Explorer.

 

Instead, a custom-built net was attached to the mass, which was lifted from the ocean floor by four flotation bags, Clifford said.

 

The concretion was discovered last summer in the same spot as a smaller mass of three cannons that was retrieved from the ocean floor last month, Clifford said.

 

The newly found cannons, believed to be among the approximately 30 cannons that the Whydah had stolen from other ships and was storing in her hold, were found about 10 feet beneath the ocean floor at the spot where the first artifacts from the wreck were discovered in 1984.

The concretion will be tied to a pier in Provincetown tonight and left underwater until it can be transported to a laboratory in Brewster for examination later this week, Clifford said.

"All we know is that there are some cannons and other artifacts sticking out of it, but until we get it in the lab and X-ray it, we won't know exactly what's in there,"� Clifford said. "It's pretty suspenseful."

 

The Whydah, laden with loot from at least 54 other ships and manned by a crew of about 140 pirates, sank in a northeaster off Wellfleet on April 26, 1717. Clifford has removed about 200,000 artifacts from the wreck since 1984, some 200 of which are on display in Cincinnati as part of a traveling museum exhibit.