economie

This shipwreck’s gold, silver, and emeralds helped spawn a golden age of piracy in the Bahamas and excavators keep finding more treasure

September 6, 20240
Explorers delve into the remains of the Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas.

Chad Bagwell

In 2019, the Bahamian government gave multimillionaire Carl Allen and his company, AllenX, the rights to explore and salvage what was left — if anything — of the Maravillas. What the company uncovered was astounding.

In the years since, AllenX has found over 10,000 artifacts, including gold chains, silver bars, and emeralds. The company works with archaeologists, including Michael Pateman, director of the Bahamas Maritime Museum, to document both the site and the discoveries.

Even everyday items like olive jars, pipes, and wine bottles are a type of treasure because they help archaeologists working with AllenX understand who was on board, what they ate, how they dressed, and what personal items they traveled with.

Allen started the Bahamas Maritime Museum to hold the recovered treasures, which he said he has no current plans to sell. His company and the government split the finds.

We may never know how many riches went down with the ship.
An illustration of a British Post Office boat under attack by an American privateer.

Print Collector/Getty Images

The Maravillas is far from the only sunken ship in the Bahamas’ waters.

Researchers looked at archival materials and found 176 shipwrecks near the Bahamas between 1526 and 1976. Most shipwrecks were due to reefs and storms, the researchers found. Unlike the treasure-laden Maravillas, many ships carried goods, including coal, lumber, rum, cigars, and coffee.

AllenX has also created a map of some known wrecks in the area. So far, it knows where 19 are, but there are dozens more that remain hidden beneath the sea. Exploring more sites may be tricky, though.

Bahamian politician Jomo Campbell has been critical of modern treasure hunting and said entities like AllenX shouldn’t be able to hold licenses to explore and recover items from multiple wrecks, Tribune Business reported in 2023.

Over 600 people died when the ship sank.
The Maravillas sank near Grand Bahama.

Sean Kingsley/AllenX

The ship sank in relatively shallow waters about 30 feet deep off of what’s now Grand Bahama Island. This attracted numerous groups, including pirates, who immediately began pillaging the wreck for its treasures.

In fact, this wreck likely helped launch a “golden age of piracy” on New Providence Island and its city Nassau, according to a recent report that Patement and his colleagues published in the Bahamas Maritime Museum’s journal.

Pirate ships were able to loot the Maravillas site and then maneuver through waters too shallow for warships to follow, Pateman said. Nassau was sparsely populated, and the settlers were eager to trade with the pirates.

The island’s governors often cut deals and pardoned the pirates. As the illegal salvage continued, “this helped to build Nassau to become what is now known as the ‘Pirate Republic,'” Pateman said.

The golden age lasted until 1718 when Captain Woodes Rogers started pardoning pirates in exchange for them hunting down other looters.

“Some people in the Bahamas consider Woodes Rogers a hero,” Pateman said. “I don’t.” His mission was to eradicate piracy and restore commerce, but he did that by restoring the plantation system and turning the Bahamas into a hub for slavery, he said.

Treasure hunting re-emerged in the 1970s.
A few of the artifacts recovered by AllenX from the Maravillas.

Brendan Chavez/AllenX

There were a few attempts to bring up silver from the wreckage over the next 150 years, but the ship was mostly forgotten, Pateman said. Then in 1972, Robert Marx found artifacts belonging to the ship.

Archaeologists criticized Marx’s work as destructive and unscientific because there was little documentation of where items were found. At least some treasure hunters used explosives to uncover buried artifacts, according to a report from “Ocean Dispatches.”

In the 1980s, another treasure hunter, Herbert Humphreys Jr., claimed to have found emeralds, silver coins, and more artifacts worth the equivalent of about $11 million today. In 1987, his recovery company surfaced a 100-carat emerald.

As part of these salvage licenses, the treasure hunters kept 75% of what they found, and the remainder went to the Bahamian government.

Enough loot ended up in private collections that the Bahamian government put a moratorium on removing items from shipwrecks in 1999.

After a 2012 amendment to regulations on salvaging antiquities in the Bahamas, AllenX was able to apply for exploration and recovery licenses.

A more recent amendment gives treasure hunters and the government an equal split of recovered items, where it used to be 75% went to the finders.