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Apparently, dead men do tell lots of tales.
Pirates of the Caribbean is more than just the title of a movie franchise. For the first time ever, archaeologists have discovered six shipwrecks potentially linked to the real-life buccaneers who inspired the blockbuster sword and sash film series.
These historic hulls, discovered off Nassau in the Bahamas, contained guns, ammunition, planks and other pirate artifacts, National Geographic reported.
“The Nassau hull shows all the signs of pirate mischief,” Michael Pateman, who is the director of the Bahamas Maritime Museum in Grand Bahama, said in the statement, Livescience reported.
Pateman and his team happened upon this pirate ship cemetery in 2025 while exploring the port city’s waters for wrecks from the Golden Age of Piracy.
During this halcyon era from the late 1600s to the early 1700s, maritime marauders plundered merchant and military vessels sailing the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and elsewhere, with their exploits forming the basis for “Treasure Island,” “Pirates of The Caribbean” and other iconic depictions of pirates in popular culture.
Nassau was a haven for these high seas swashbucklers, housing over 1,000 pirates as its peak, including such big names as Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackham, Henry Avery, and Anne Bonny.
In 1718, New Providence governor reported seeing 40 shipwrecks sunk by pirates off the metropolis, but the were subsequently lost to Davey Jone’s Locker — until now.
With the blessing of Bahaman cultural authorities, Pateman and his team dove Nassau’s shark-infested harbor, uncovering the aforementioned shipwreck sextet — including three with suspected ties to piracy.
One might have been the sunken skeleton of the Fancy, a 46-gun frigate commandeered and captained in the 1690s by Henry Avery, according to the Smithsonian.
This bloodthirsty sea raider notably pilfered over £600,000 worth of precious metals and jewels—worth approximately $150 million today—from a Mughal Empire fleet in 1695, whereupon both the boat and its treasure trove seemingly vanished into thin air.
According to historical records, the Fancy was stripped, scuttled and abandoned following this lucrative “booty” call.
While the chances that the wreck in question belonged to said ship are slim, it matched accounts of the ship’s age, size, and shipbuilding techniques, while the absence of artifacts indicated it had been similarly stripped.
Meanwhile, evidence suggested that the vessel had been “burned to the waterline” — a popular pirate method of hiding evidence after a looting.
“To actually see and touch [the charred hull] really was a once-in-a lifetime moment and quite emotional,” editor-in-chief of “Wreckwatch” magazine Sean Kingsley, who co-led the expedition, told the Guardian.
While searching another site 20 miles east of Nassau, the crew discovered a wooden wreck with iron cannons, lead musketballs and a swivel gun — a common pirate armament used to clear enemy decks.
Meanwhile, under and around Nassau’s old bridge, the team found hull planks, rigging, glass wine bottles, wooden shipping crates, as well as 143 clay tobacco pipes emblazoned with the royal crest of England, indicating it was an English cargo vessel from the 1740s.
However, Kingsley believes “these finds are the tip of the iceberg.” In the future, the crew hopes to survey the area with drones and glean more insight into this oft-romanticized epoch.
Based on what they know already, the real life players during this Golden Age were a far cry from the “cartoon cutouts” portrayed in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, Kingsley said.
“The world we uncovered, for the first time in history, turned out to be nothing like the Hollywood fantasy,” he declared. “Nassau’s Piratetown was more like a combination of a cowboy frontier town meets an 18th-century holiday camp.”
English (US)