Underwater "Yellow Brick Road" Leads Explorer To Treasure From Pirate Ship Whydah, Shipwrecked Off Cape Cod, Mass. In 1717

A "yellow brick road" may lead to pirate treasure in the waters off Cape Cod.

Undersea explorer Barry Clifford believes that the "yellow brick road" is sprinkled to clues to a pirate shipwreck in the waters off Cape Cod.

The pirate ship Whydah was wrecked in a storm off Cape Cod in 1717.

Clifford found the wreck off Wellfleet in 1984 and has since rescued hundreds of thousands of artifacts.

Clifford and his team of divers recently discovered that Whydah may have a lot more treasure, buried in the ocean floor since 1717.

The team has pulled up 200,000 artifacts, including sixty cannon, hundreds of gold ornaments, ten thousand coins, sword handles, and even a boy's leg.

The "yellow brick road" is literally sprinkled with gold dust, Clifford thinks.

Around two weeks ago, Clifford and his dive team took a trip back to the wreck site, and Clifford says he is on the brink of the discovery of a road to riches.

"We think we're very, very close," he said.

Right before the Whydah sank, it raided two vessels, according to Colonial-era records. A recent dive that was supposed to be Clifford's last trip of the season uncovered evidence of coins from one of the last raids, so he decided to go back on one last dive.

Clifford went out on the "yellow brick road", a gold-strewn path stretching about 700 feet between the Whydah's cannon and what is likely it's stern.

The coins literally poured from the ship as it broke in pieces and went to rest on the ocean floor 300 years ago, Clifford theorizes.

Divers pulled up concretions , which are rocks that form when metals like gold or silver chemically react to seawater. The concretions were being pulled up one after another without pause, despite the fact that divers were working with zero visibility in "black water".

Diver Jon Matel said that the divers were literally traversing through feet of a fine seaweed called mung; he likened it to diving through fathoms of black gelatin.

"You're going by your feel, your touch, your hands, and the ping of a metal detector," Matel said. "When that thing goes off, it's a great feeling."

The concertions have gold coins inside, according to X-rays. They also uncovered a cannonball piled with coins and a foot-and-a-half piece of iron stacked with 50 coins.

This is evience that treasure was dumped en masse on that spot of sea floor.

"Did all of those coins just happen to fall on this one little piece of iron? Or were there thousands of coins there, and this is just an example of what's left?" he said.

Clifford's pretty sure there's more treasure there-but he has to wait until next summer to recover it.

He doesn't sell the artifacts, but has taken 21 trips at a personal cost of more than $200,000. However, due to a lightning strike resulting in boat problems and winter weather, he has to wait until next June to go out again.

"I'll wake up in the middle of the night this winter and go, 'Oh my God, I know what that means,' when I'm reviewing something from the Whydah," he said. "And then I can hardly wait to get back there in the spring."