There are so many unusual, interesting, and new things you can find – if you just look around a little bit. And libraries are all about mysteries! So, we are looking at a real-life small mystery each week and bringing some library resources to help add some clarity and some thought.

I am not a fan of pirates, pirate movies, and romanticizing pirates. They were not great people, doing not-great things.

So it was pretty cool to see big hint in tracking down one of the bad pirates of history. Archeology is one of the interesting areas of knowledge building that helps us to expand our picture of what life was like and to solve mysteries from the past.

Check out this material about the role some coins found in Rhode Island and how they are helping to add another clue to the mystery of a missing pirate! (You can read the whole article here!)

“A handful of coins unearthed from a pick-your-own-fruit orchard in rural Rhode Island and other random corners of New England may help solve one of the planet’s oldest cold cases.

The villain in this tale: a murderous English pirate who became the world’s most-wanted criminal after plundering a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims home to India from Mecca, then eluded capture by posing as a slave trader.

“It’s a new history of a nearly perfect crime,” said Jim Bailey, an amateur historian and metal detectorist who found the first intact 17th-century Arabian coin in a meadow in Middletown.

That ancient pocket change — among the oldest ever found in North America — could explain how pirate Capt. Henry Every vanished into the wind.

On Sept. 7, 1695, the pirate ship Fancy, commanded by Every, ambushed and captured the Ganj-i-Sawai, a royal vessel owned by Indian emperor Aurangzeb, then one of the world’s most powerful men. Aboard were not only the worshipers returning from their pilgrimage, but tens of millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver.

What followed was one of the most lucrative and heinous robberies of all time.

Historical accounts say his band tortured and killed the men aboard the Indian ship and raped the women before escaping to the Bahamas, a haven for pirates. But word quickly spread of their crimes, and English King William III — under enormous pressure from a scandalized India and the East India Company trading giant — put a large bounty on their heads.

“If you Google ‘first worldwide manhunt,’ it comes up as Every,” Bailey said. “Everybody was looking for these guys.”

Until now, historians only knew that Every eventually sailed to Ireland in 1696, where the trail went cold. But Bailey says the coins he and others have found are evidence the notorious pirate first made his way to the American colonies, where he and his crew used the plunder for day-to-day expenses while on the run.”

Read the whole article here!

How can you bring this small mystery into your library?

• Set up your display of books on ships, boating, and any travel on oceans and water.
• Set up a small archeological dig in your library, or outside. What kinds of materials could you arrange to be found? How could you organize this to be interesting to students/patrons?
• Have students do some research on different kinds of coins. Draw some pictures, write up a report on money systems and how coins were developed.
• Draw pictures of pirates, of treasure, or other exciting details of this story.
• Have students write a short story about archeologists and the history they uncover. What other mysteries could your fictional archeologists solve?