Pirate remains found in shipwreck off the coast of Cape Cod

WELLFLEET, Mass. (CNN) - Investigators have found skeletal remains of at least six pirates at a shipwreck site off the coast of Massachusetts.

A team from the Whydah Pirate Museum says the remains are from a ship that shares the institution’s name.

Pirates stole it and wrecked it about 300 years ago.

“When the ship wrecked, it went onto a sandbar in this very ferocious storm in 1717. And the ship turned upside down and everything in the ship fell into the sand,” underwater explorer Barry Clifford said.

Clifford and a group of archeologists will now study the remains.

“It’s like putting a penny on a snowbank in January. Where is it in July? It’s on the sidewalk,” Clifford explained. “Well, that’s the same thing with this deep sand off the backside of the Cape in a place called the Graveyard of the North Atlantic. There were so many shipwrecks there.”

He says the team hopes to identify the pirates in the wreck.

They already have DNA from the captain of the Whydah, Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy, through a relative in England.