Musket balls and a burnt hull: First shipwrecks linked to Pirates of the Caribbean discovered in Nassau Harbor, The Bahamas

Nassau, Bahamas has a long history as the pirates’ capital of the world. Blackbeard was here. Same with Anne Bonny, Calico Jack Rackham, and Henry Avery. But despite all the legend, no ship linked to these real-life outlaws had ever been physically located in local waters until now.

A team from the New Providence Pirates Expedition and Wreckwatch TV has found six shipwrecks in and around Nassau Harbor, three of which are connected to the Golden Age of Piracy, the roughly four-decade span between the 1680s and 1730s when seafaring theft was at its peak. These are the first pirate-era wrecks ever found in the Bahamas, and they’re already rewriting what we know about this iconic chapter in history.

A capital of outlaws hiding in plain sight
At its peak, Nassau was home to more than a thousand pirates. Between around 1713 and 1718, the port on New Providence Island served as a sanctuary for seafaring criminals who refused to submit to British dominance, operating under a loose pirate republic headed by a notorious gang known as the “Flying Gang,” reports National Geographic. These were the same figures that inspired Hollywood's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, only the real version was much grimmer.

The dives took place in September and October 2025, following a landmark moment: the first official permission to explore a long-restricted zone of Nassau Harbor, issued by the Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation of The Bahamas, the agency entrusted with safeguarding the island’s cultural and archaeological legacy. Without that clearance, these wrecks may never have been found.

The expedition was co-led by Michael Pateman, an archaeologist born in Nassau who had dreamed of finding these wrecks his whole career. One especially tantalizing possibility: a large wreck that may be the Fancy, the 46-gun frigate once captained by Henry Avery. In 1696, the Fancy had been stripped and left to rot in Nassau Harbor to pay off a corrupt English governor, it was said. Whether this wreck is actually Avery’s ship remains unconfirmed, but researchers are watching closely.

What the ocean floor revealed
Each of the three wrecks from the pirate era tells its own story.

At one site, some 35 kilometers east of Nassau, archaeologists discovered iron cannons, lead musket balls and a grinding stone that almost certainly was used to sharpen swords. Along the vessel’s rails were mounted swivel guns, light weapons designed to spray anti-personnel shot at close range. This was a warship, not a cargo vessel.

A second wreck, inside the harbor itself, preserved wooden hull planks and frames and wooden treenails, a fastening method that pins the vessel to the 1700s. And there were obvious signs of fire damage. Pirates would deliberately burn ships they captured, after stripping them of weapons and valuables, in order to destroy evidence of their crimes, according to National Geographic. Pateman put it this way: “Burning ships to the waterline was an infamous tactic to hide felony from authorities.”

Beneath the old bridge in Nassau, in waters shared by a bull shark, a third wreck was discovered and believed to have been destroyed by pipeline cutting and marina construction. Instead, archaeologists found intact hull planks, glass bottles, bricks from the ship's galley and dozens of clay tobacco pipes. The pipe designs were a unicorn, a horse, a crown and the royal English motto, “Dieu et Mon Droit.” The cargo is from London in the 1740s, which suggests that this was an English trading vessel, arriving after piracy had already been quelled, a port city rebuilding itself through commerce.

Why did so many men turn pirate
To understand why Nassau became what it was, you have to see what the average sailor was running away from. Historian Marcus Rediker, in his book Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, argues that life aboard merchant and naval ships in the 18th century was characterized by brutal discipline, poor pay and hierarchies that gave the common sailor little agency. Floggings were routine. Captains could do almost anything, and wages were barely enough to live on.

Pirate crews provided a rather different kind of opportunity. In his best-selling book The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, economist Peter Leeson argues that pirate ships operated on a surprisingly rational economic model, with more pay, democratic decision-making and even early forms of injury compensation. For a desperate sailor in the early 1700s, the risk of hanging may have been worth it.

Far from fantasy
Project co-director Dr. Sean Kingsley, a marine archaeologist, said the real Nassau was not the polished adventure in Pirates of the Caribbean, but more like a lawless 18th-century leisure camp mixed with a rough frontier town. The tides were savage. Sharks were everywhere. Ships were burned, stripped, and abandoned.

As part of the expedition, they also examined 300-year-old historical maps and documents, visited pirate caves, and examined a lookout tower associated with Blackbeard to help form a more complete picture of the daily life of pirates.

Wreckwatch Magazine is set to publish the first results of the expedition June 4, 2026, and what researchers are calling the first historically based 3D digital reconstruction of the pirate settlement of Nassau circa 1715.

After three centuries of myth-making, finally the seafloor is giving up some answers.