Shipwrecks Discovered Near the Bahamas Tantalize Researchers With Possible Ties to the Real Pirates of the Caribbean

A team of archaeologists and filmmakers got permission to dive in the closed zone of the Nassau harbor and discovered six wrecks, including three with suspected ties to the era of piracy

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

June 5, 2026 9:43 a.m.

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Today, Nassau is a popular tourist destination in the Bahamas, with white-sand beaches and cerulean waters ideal for swimming, snorkeling and diving. But centuries ago, it wasn’t travelers who flocked to its sunny shores—it was pirates.

During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Nassau was a notorious hideout for buccaneers, privateers and outlaws, attracting infamous figures like “King of Pirates” Henry Avery, Blackbeard, Benjamin Hornigold, “Calico” Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny

Now, archaeologists and filmmakers have discovered remnants from that period, often referred to as the Golden Age of Piracy. Their work is the subject of a new Wreckwatch TV documentary series and a feature story published in the latest issue of Wreckwatch magazine.

In late 2025, researchers dived with permission in the closed zone of Nassau’s harbor and discovered six wrecks, including three with suspected ties to the era of piracy. They think one might be the Fancy, a 46-gun frigate captured and helmed by Avery in the 1690s.

After Avery and his crew looted more than £600,000 worth of precious metals and jewels—equivalent to roughly $150 million today—from Mughal Empire ships in 1695, the vessel and its treasure vanished without a trace. Legend has it that Avery made off with the loot, while the Fancy was stripped of valuables and scuttled in Nassau’s harbor.

The team hasn’t definitively identified the wreck as the Fancy, but the vessel is the right age, size and construction style. It’s held together by wooden treenails, a fastening method commonly used in 18th-century shipbuilding. It also appears to have been burned, which was how pirates got rid of potentially incriminating evidence after extracting a vessel’s valuable cargo, weapons and fittings.

“To actually see and touch [the charred hull] really was a once-in-a lifetime moment and quite emotional,” Sean Kingsley, a marine archaeologist and editor-in-chief of Wreckwatch magazine who co-directed the expedition, tells the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge.

The Pirate King's Treasure: Our First Look at Nassau's Hidden Pirate History

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At another site roughly 20 miles east of Nassau, the team found a wooden wreck with iron cannons, a grinding stone for sharpening swords and lead musketballs.

And under Nassau’s old bridge, they found hull planks, rigging, glass wine bottles, wooden shipping crates and bricks from a ship’s galley. Nearby, they found 143 clay tobacco pipes decorated with a unicorn, horse, crown and the royal crest of England, “Dieu et Mon Droit,” which means “God and my right” in French. They suspect the vessel was an English ship delivering cargo from London in the 1740s.

The team hopes to return to the harbor in the future, this time using underwater drones to search for additional shipwrecks. They suspect dozens more might remain hidden beneath the water’s surface—though there’s no evidence to suggest any of them contain treasure.

“These finds are the tip of the iceberg,” Kingsley, who is also a history correspondent for Smithsonian magazine, tells the Guardian.

At one point between the 1650s and 1730s, Nassau was home to more than 1,000 pirates. Why so many? Some had been forced to join the Royal Navy and saw piracy as a means of escaping “whipping, poor food and worse on navy warships,” according to a statement shared with Smithsonian magazine. The 1710s, in particular, was a period of poverty, when sailors could often earn far more as pirates than by working aboard merchant vessels.

Piracy also proliferated alongside the transatlantic slave trade, which meant that “not only people were being transported, but a large amount of wealth was being transported,” Justin Dunnavant, an archaeologist at the University of California Los Angeles who was not involved with the project, tells National Geographic’s Tom Metcalfe. “So that made a lot of ships more valuable, and it made them prime targets for pirates.”

Overall, the team hopes to shed light on the lives of real pirates, in contrast to the “cartoon cutouts” portrayed in popular culture, Kingsley tells National Geographic. When they weren’t diving in search of wrecks, they scoured historic maps and documents, ventured into alleged pirate caves and climbed to the top of “Blackbeard’s Tower.” Based on their findings, they also created a 3D digital model of what Nassau might have looked like when it was overrun with pirates around 1715.

“Our aim was to reconstruct what life was truly like in the ground zero of the real pirates of the Caribbean,” Kingsley says in a statement. “The world we uncovered, for the first time in history, turned out to be nothing like the Hollywood fantasy. Nassau’s Piratetown was more like a combination of a cowboy frontier town meets an 18th-century holiday camp.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.