RESEARCHERS have unearthed a 300-year-old shipwreck and discovered a mystery link to the origins of the fabled Pirates of the Caribbean.
The sea raiders, who gave life to the famous Disney franchise, were based in the port town of Nassau in what is now The Bahamas.
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Allen Exploration (AllenX) spent this summer searching for the wreckage from a 17th-century Spanish galleon which sank in northern Bahamian waters.
The Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas, meaning “Our Lady of Wonders”, was a 891-ton, two-deck galleon, armed with 36 shiny brass cannons built in northern Spain.
But the Maravillas drowned late at night on January 4, 1656, on its way to Cádiz, southwestern Spain.
The vessel had approximately 650 people on board, most of whom died in the tragedy.
During a storm in the Florida Strait, the galleon’s flagship rammed it and it struck a reef, causing serious damage.
It was loaded with loot at the time, including a lot of contraband and items that had been recovered from the Jesus Maria de la Limpia Concepción, its supply ship, which had gone missing off the coast of Ecuador.
At the time, the Maravillas was among the wealthiest treasure ships ever lost at sea.
The precious haul included items such as gold and silver coins, jewellery and precious gemstones.
James Sinclair, director of Archaeology for Allen Exploration, told Newsweek: “The Maravillas is famous because of the legendary riches it finally sailed with—at least five million pieces of eight and the same in contraband.
“The ill-fated galleon became the wreck of a wreck, losing both its treasure and the Concepción’s.”
From 1656 until 1679, Spanish salvagers from Havana contributed significantly to the wreck’s salvage, which was later exploited by English and colonial wreckers in the 17th century.
Bob Marx uncovered the remnants in 1972, and his crew and Marex, under Herbert Humphries’ leadership, worked to salvage them once more until the early 1990s.
Worried about the lax regulations surrounding these treasure hunts, the Bahamian government banned wreck hunting in 1992.
Sinclair added: “Only in 2019 did a new age dawn when a new license was given to AllenX, introducing a respectful scientific phase in the wreck’s study.”
The crew at AllenX discovered many new items during their summertime research, which were reported in an Ocean Dispatches report released by the Bahamas Maritime Museum.
These contained Mexican silver coins, Chinese and Spanish ceramics, iron spikes that had originally held the galleon’s hull together, grinding stones from the kitchen, and silver bars.
Carl Allen, director of AllenX and co-author of the report with Sinclair, said: “The western side of the Little Bahama Bank exposed to the Florida Strait is a very rough place. You’re lucky if the howling winds give you three days of diving in a row.”
“Today, when a storm rolls in, we can cut and run to my island base at Walker’s Cay or head south to Grand Bahama.
“When the Maravillas was lost 368 years ago, and Spanish boats arrived to salvage its treasure, there was nowhere in the Bahamas to shelter, fix leaking hulls and buy essential supplies.
“So, we ask ourselves: if it’s so hard for AllenX with all our modern technology, how did salvors manage their operations hundreds of years ago?”
The historians at AllenX studied Spanish and English archives to learn more about how the wreck was “fished” for riches in the latter part of the 17th century, while the crew explored offshore with magnetometers and divers.
They also unveiled a curious link to who would much later become the famous Pirates of the Caribbean.
The crew was “surprised” to learn that the original inhabitants of Nassau, on the island of New Providence, which is currently the most populated in the Bahamas, established themselves primarily to salvage shipwrecks rather than to plant sugar and coffee.
Allen explained: “Not only did the colonial authorities label the die-hards who dived the Maravillas ‘pirates’, real lawless pirates soon arrived in town too.
“They were attracted by loot, whether it was sunken or seized from ships sailing above water.
“We discovered a direct thread linking the loss of the Maravillas, its salvage, and the rise of Nassau as a wreckers’ supply base and pirates’ den.”
Previously, it was thought that the port town of Nassau became a pirate haven after a Spanish treasure fleet, one of the world’s richest at the time, sank south of Cape Canaveral, Florida, in July 1715.
According to legend, the pirates chose this location as a suitable launchpad for plundering the destroyed fleet.
“The wrecks attracted desperadoes who became a who’s who of pirate folklore: Henry Jennings, Blackbeard, Black Sam Bellamy, Paulsgrave Williams, Calico Jack Rackham and Charles Vane,” said Sean Kingsley, another co-writer of the Ocean Dispatches report.
These famed maritime raiders, as well as other notable pirates like the Flying Gang, established their base at Nassau in the early 1700s.
“Nassau was the most infamous pirates’ lair in the world,” Michael Pateman, director of The Bahamas Maritime Museum told Newsweek.
“Major pirate bases were set up in Madagascar and the U.S. Virgin Islands, but Nassau had the baddest reputation thanks to Blackbeard and his gang being based there.”
He added: “The port wasn’t just a town where plots were hatched, prizes landed, booty divided and where pirates partied away their ill-gotten gains, it was said to be a pirates’ republic.
“Unlike anywhere else in the Western world, in Nassau every man and woman on the pirate account was equal.
“They got the same vote, lived by the same rules and earned a fair cut of loot.
“Whether you were black or white, to some, Nassau and the way of the pirate was the most democratic space in the Western Hemisphere.”
According to Kingsley, the most recent findings of the Maravillas call into question the established narrative of Nassau’s past, shedding new insight on what fuelled the port town’s emergence as a known pirates’ haven.
“AllenX’s new research pushes back the date when Nassau took off as a pirate port by over three decades and re-writes what sparked its birth. That trigger was sunken Spanish treasure—only loot lost in 1656 on the Maravillas in the Bahamas, not off Florida in 1715,” Kingsley said.
According to Pateman, the pirates of the Caribbean numbered roughly 2,400 men at their zenith and roamed the waters in the 1710s and 1720s from West Africa to Canada and Brazil in pursuit of treasure.
“The pirates who first settled in Nassau, though, by the early 1680s, were merchants turned pioneering chancers dreaming of finding freedom and great treasures on a few Spanish galleons sunk in the Bahamas.
“Top of their most-wanted hit list was the wreck of the Maravillas,” Pateman said.
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