Beneath the cruise ships and tourist traps of Nassau harbour, a charred wooden hull sits on the seabed, still pinned under its own stone ballast. It has been there for roughly 330 years. Until now, nobody had been granted official permission to look.

An international team of marine archaeologists has uncovered the first shipwrecks ever found in Nassau linked to the golden age of piracy — the decades around the turn of the 18th century when Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackham, and Anne Bonny used the Bahamas settlement as their headquarters.

The expedition, co-directed by British marine archaeologist Dr Sean Kingsley and Bahamian archaeologist Dr Michael Pateman, found six wrecks. Three date to the pirate era. The most tantalizing may be the Fancy — the 46-gun frigate commanded by Henry Avery after his 1695 raid on a Mughal emperor’s treasure fleet, netting loot worth more than £85 million today. Historical records say the Fancy was stripped and abandoned in Nassau in 1696. The wreck matches: right location, right construction, no artifacts, burned to the waterline — a classic pirate tactic for destroying evidence.

The team also recovered an iron cannon, 25 lead musket balls, a sword-sharpening stone, and a swivel gun, the pivot-mounted anti-personnel weapon that the team called “a calling card of pirate attacks.”

What the wrecks did not yield was treasure. The pirates took everything of value. As Kingsley told National Geographic, “The pirates of Hollywood fame are cartoon cutouts.” The $4.5 billion film franchise delivered fantasy. The seabed offered something better: clay tobacco pipes stamped with English royal crests, glass wine bottles, bricks from a ship’s galley — the everyday debris of maritime life, from both the pirate era and the trading vessels that followed.

Kingsley believes dozens more wrecks may survive in the harbour, despite decades of dredging. Pateman, who was born in Nassau, told National Geographic: “My dream was to find the Fancy.” The charred hull has not yet confirmed that dream. But after three centuries of silence, Nassau’s pirate past is finally talking back.

Sources