Six shipwrecks from the Golden Age of Piracy found off Nassau — with evidence of what pirates did to victims still visible
In 1718, Woodes Rogers, governor of New Providence, watched 40 ships burn and sink off the shore of Nassau. For more than 300 years, not one of those wrecks had ever been excavated.
That changed in the fall of 2025, when a team of archaeologists and filmmakers received rare permission to dive Nassau’s harbor — a place swept by strong tidal currents and patrolled by sharks. What they found across six shipwrecks was more revealing than a simple count of sunken hulls.
A harbor full of secrets, untouched for three centuries
Nassau was the operational center of the Golden Age of Piracy. Between the 1680s and 1720s, the port town on New Providence island served as headquarters for some of the most notorious sea raiders in history — Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackham, Henry Avery, Benjamin Hornigold, and Anne Bonny among them. At its peak in 1718, Governor Woodes Rogers recorded 40 pirate-burned wrecks lying off Nassau’s shore. Not one had been touched by archaeologists in the three centuries since.
The New Providence Pirates Expedition changed that. After receiving rare diving permission from the Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation of the Bahamas, the team entered the water in September and October 2025. Nassau harbor is not a forgiving place to work — strong tidal currents move through twice a day, and the waters are known for dangerous shark populations. Local divers contributed their knowledge of the terrain, knowledge that proved essential to locating anything at all.
Six wrecks were found in total. Three connect directly to the Golden Age of Piracy.
Burnt to the waterline: the pirate tactic hiding in plain sight
The most striking find sits right in Nassau harbor. What remains of one vessel is largely a pile of ballast stones — the heavy rocks used to stabilize a ship’s hull — resting on a charred wooden skeleton. The burning was not accidental. It was deliberate.
Michael Pateman, director of the Bahamas Maritime Museum in Grand Bahama, explained the logic clearly. After seizing a ship’s cargo, cannons, and fittings, pirates needed to eliminate the evidence. Burning a vessel to the waterline was a well-established method for destroying proof of a crime before authorities could investigate. Pateman described the Nassau hull as showing “all the signs of pirate mischief.”
Despite the fire, the wreck preserved enough to be informative. Planks, frames, and wooden treenails — the fasteners used in traditional shipbuilding — survived in the lower hull, and their presence places the vessel’s construction firmly in the 1700s, confirming the wreck belongs to the right era.
Armed and dangerous: the sloop found 22 miles east of Nassau
Roughly 22 miles (35 kilometers) east of Nassau, the team located a second Golden Age wreck — likely an early 18th-century sloop, a single-masted vessel common in Caribbean waters during this period. The site carries a heavier weapons load than a typical merchant ship would warrant.
Excavators recovered a large deck cannon, an iron swivel gun, a grinding stone used for sharpening swords, lead musket balls, and three cannonballs. The combination points to a ship built for conflict, or at minimum one that expected it.
Marine archaeologist Sean Kingsley, co-director of the expedition, noted that the swivel gun’s style and overall weapons profile suggest two possibilities: a pirate vessel, or a heavily armed ship from the same era defending against piracy. One detail tips the assessment. No cargo remains were found at the site. Kingsley told Live Science that the absence of trade goods makes the pirate scenario more probable — a merchant ship would typically leave some trace of what it was carrying.
Under the old bridge — and into Nassau’s post-piracy life
The third Golden Age wreck required a tip from someone who knew where to look. It lies beneath Nassau’s old bridge, in waters the expedition report describes as home to “a very grumpy bull shark.” The site holds two poorly preserved hulls, one of which has been cut through by a modern pipeline. Even so, rigging, glass bottles, hull planks, and cooking galley bricks were identified. Kingsley believes the ship struck an underwater sandbank during a storm and sank where it stood.
A fourth wreck at the same site tells a different story — one belonging to a Nassau already moving past its pirate years. Decorated clay tobacco pipes bearing the British coat of arms were recovered there, likely manufactured in London during the 1740s or 1750s. The ship was probably English and arrived in New Providence after the threat of piracy had subsided, its cargo reflecting a port town settling into legitimate colonial trade rather than maritime crime.
Beyond the wrecks: what life in Piratetown really looked like
The expedition was never solely about shipwrecks. When the team was not diving, they examined 300-year-old documents and maps, explored pirate caves, investigated a plantation where enslaved people lived and worked, and visited a lookout tower rumored to have been used by Blackbeard himself.
What emerged was a portrait of Nassau that bears little resemblance to the version depicted in films. Kingsley described Golden Age Nassau as “more like a combination of a cowboy frontier town meets an 18th-century holiday camp” — chaotic, improvised, and thoroughly human. The Hollywood version, he said, does not survive contact with the historical record.
The expedition also made institutional history: the New Providence Pirates Expedition became the first group ever granted diving access to the closed zone of Nassau harbor. Their findings will reach broader audiences through a Wreckwatch TV documentary series and coverage in Wreckwatch Magazine.
What these six wrecks ultimately offer is something harder to quantify than artifact counts or site coordinates. They are physical evidence that the Golden Age of Piracy was real, messy, and violent — and that the people who lived it left marks on the seafloor that three centuries of tides could not fully erase. As Michael Pateman put it, for a brief period of mayhem, sailors found a kind of freedom and wealth unmatched almost anywhere on earth. The wrecks off Nassau are what that dream looked like when it ended.