Nassau Harbour’s buried past is beginning to yield its secrets. In the first official underwater archaeological expedition ever permitted there, researchers identified six shipwrecks, including three linked to the golden age of piracy, and recovered artefacts that range from clay tobacco pipes to iron cannons and a swivel gun.
The work was carried out by the New Providence Pirates Expedition, organized by Wreckwatch in partnership with the Bahamas’ Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation. After two years of research that combined satellite imagery with local knowledge, the team entered a harbour long shaped by dredging, heavy maritime traffic, and restricted diving conditions. For the archaeologists, the challenge was not only finding wrecks, but finding anything at all.
Among the most intriguing discoveries is a charred wooden hull that may be connected to Henry Every’s ship the Fancy, the vessel he used in his 1695 attack on the treasure-laden Grand Mughal fleet in the Arabian Sea. Sean Kingsley, the marine archaeologist who co-directs the project and founded Wreckwatch, says the hull is consistent with an early wreck built in the age of piracy and comparable in size to the Fancy. Still, he is careful not to overstate the case. Pirates kept no records, and Nassau Harbour has claimed many ships over the centuries.
Another find came from a heavily dredged section of the harbour, where the team recovered hull planks, rigging, bricks from a ship’s galley, and 143 clay pipes decorated with unicorns, horses, crowns, and England’s royal crest. Kingsley says the pipes likely belonged to a ship traveling from London to Nassau in the 1740s, and that they offer a direct link between maritime life and the habits of pirates and privateers.
The harbour’s significance is not new. Nassau, on New Providence Island, was once the center of a pirate republic that reached more than 1,000 people at its height in the early 18th century. Its sheltered position near major shipping routes made it an ideal refuge, and in 1718 Woodes Rogers, the British governor of New Providence, recorded 40 vessels sunk and burned in the area. A database created by the expedition and Allen Exploration now lists more than 504 ships lost between 1651 and the First World War.
The project also reflects a broader effort to reverse decades of looting and neglect. Kingsley says treasure hunting was rampant in the Bahamas from the 1960s through the early 1980s, and that the expedition aimed to act as a custodian of the site rather than a scavenger. The recovered materials belong to the Bahamas and will undergo conservation and study, adding a new layer to the history of a harbour that once helped define the pirate imagination — and may still hold more of its own story beneath the water.
