Nassau was the pirate capital of the Caribbean. Wrecks from its ‘Golden Age’ have finally been revealed.
Underwater expeditions near Nassau found three new wrecks that could shed light on what life was like during the pirate heyday.
In the Bahamas, Nassau’s clear blue waters are beautiful to behold, but diving there can be dangerous. Especially during tide changes, "the currents in there rip,” says archaeologist Michael Pateman of the Bahamas Maritime Museum. “And some bull sharks are living there. They tend to be quite aggressive."
Pateman and other researchers braved the hazards of the city’s busy modern harbor in late 2025 to search for wrecks from what's called Golden Age of Piracy, roughly between the 1650s and the 1730s. As the largest settlement on New Providence Island, Nassau was a tropical haven for seafaring cut-throats who rejected British rule between about 1713 until 1718. At its peak, more than 1,000 pirates lived there, led by an infamous "Flying Gang" of celebrated captains: Blackbeard, “Calico Jack” Rackham, Anne Bonny, “Black Sam” Bellamy, and others.
The underwater archaeology team uncovered the remains of several sunken ships linked to piracy—the first ever found in Nassau. For Pateman, who was born in Nassau and co-led the expedition, a highlight was finding a large wreck that may be the Fancy—a 46-gun frigate captured and captained by the "Pirate King" Henry Avery. Pateman grew up hearing about Nassau's pirates, and they inspired his career in archaeology: "My dream was to find the Fancy," he says.
(Meet the real pirates of the Caribbean.)
Searching for the Fancy
In 1695, Avery led the Fancy and a small flotilla of other ships in a notorious raid on the treasure-laden fleet of India's Mughal emperor. Avery later disappeared along with the rumored loot from the raid. According to historical records, however, the Fancy was stripped and abandoned in Nassau harbor in 1696, in part to pay-off the corrupt English governor of the Bahamas.
The research team don't know if the large wreck is Avery's Fancy. Hundreds of shipwrecks from the 1600s to World War II now litter Nassau's harbor, and the chances of finding the Fancy are slim. But the little wreckage that still survives shows it was the right size and age, with ship-building techniques that fit what's known about the Fancy. The research team found no artifacts at the wreck site, which indicates the ship was stripped of guns and other fittings, just as the Fancy had been. And their investigation shows it was "burned to the waterline" before it finally sank—a common pirate tactic to destroy evidence.
"It's in the right location, from the right period, with the right hull construction," says Sean Kingsley, an independent maritime archaeologist and expedition co-leader based in England. Kingsley is the editor-in-chief of Wreckwatch magazine, which carries a report on the finds in the latest issue. The expedition found a total of six new wrecks, three of them from the Golden Age of Piracy— including the wreck of what may be the Fancy. Their investigations of a wreck site on the coast east of Nassau also revealed an iron cannon, musket balls and a swivel gun—a common pirate armament—though the ship's wooden hull has mostly rotted away.
Part of Kingsley’s motivation for the project was out of concern that Nassau's pirates are now typically seen through the lens of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies: “The pirates of Hollywood fame are cartoon cutouts," he says.
(Here’s what we know about how pirates walked, talked, and dressed.)
A pirate's life was pretty rough
Real pirates were driven more by desperation than adventure. Many sailors had fled poverty at home, but life at sea was hard too. Some had been press-ganged into the Royal Navy, and piracy gave them a chance to escape. It also paid hundreds or thousands of times better, Kingsley notes.
It was a time, too, when transatlantic slavery was growing: Some pirates traded in enslaved people, and some former enslaved people became pirates. Piracy and transatlantic slavery "operated in relationship to one another," says Justin Dunnavant, an archaeologist at the University of California Los Angeles and a National Geographic Explorer. "The slave trade meant that not only people were being transported, but a large amount of wealth was being transported as a result of the slave trade. So that made a lot of ships more valuable, and it made them prime targets for pirates."
Slavery helped fuel Nassau's rise, but it wasn't the first pirate hangout in the Caribbean. Jamaica's Port Royal was once so overrun with drunken pirates and brothels that a visiting English clergyman called it "The Sodom of the New World." (He was so shocked, it is said, that he immediately returned to England.) But Port Royal thrived in the early "buccaneering" period of piracy, when English privateers preyed mainly on Spanish treasure ships and the town was partly controlled by the English authorities.
About a generation later, however, the number of pirates boomed and lawless Nassau—where they had bribed the authorities—became the center of their outlaw life. The town has even been described as a democratic "Republic of Pirates," but most historians now think that was a myth. Pateman and Kingsley hope their archaeological work on shipwrecks from this time will better reveal the true story of piracy.
Tales of sunken treasure
Some experts fear that searching for evidence of historical pirates could encourage dreams of sunken treasure, though there's no suggestion of booty to be found on the wrecks near Nassau. Nevertheless, "pirates are exciting," and can attract the interest of treasure hunters, says Roberto Junco, an underwater archaeologist with Mexico's cultural agency INAH and a National Geographic Explorer. While leading research at Port Royal in 2021 and 2022, he says an important aspect was ensuring that locals would have a role in any future developments: "Our approach was really to empower the local people to tell the story, rather than us telling it."
(We’re still finding treasure from this “golden age” pirate shipwreck.)
Along similar lines, Kingsley says the Nassau expedition provided a chance to help build a Bahamian team of divers and archaeological experts for future investigations. He thinks there are at least a dozen more wrecks to be uncovered in the waters in and around the harbor and hopes to return to search there with underwater drones.
The search for pirate shipwrecks near Nassau could also create heritage opportunities: "There is certainly potential for Bahamians to develop this aspect of Bahamian history through research and especially for presentation in a tourism-driven economy," says archaeologist Grace Turner with the Antiquities, Monuments & Museum Corporation in Nassau. She notes that little from Nassau's time as the pirate capital survives on land, in spite of its fame, because it lasted only a few years until the British Crown restored its control over the island in 1718. "Shipwrecks… are the most important potential source of cultural material from this period," Turner says.
