Emily Chan
According to Carl Allen, the director of AllenX, the western side of the Little Bahama Bank that is exposed to the Florida Strait is a tough and tricky spot to explore. Three consecutive days of diving would be considered lucky.
“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,” said Allen.
“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 team used magnetometers and divers to search offshore. Meanwhile, historians perused Spanish and English archives to determine how the shipwreck was salvaged for treasure in the second half of the 17th century.
They discovered that the first settlers of Nassau on the island of New Providence established themselves there to salvage shipwrecks, not to plant sugar and coffee.
The port town of Nassau was thought to have taken off as a pirate headquarters when a Spanish treasure fleet was wrecked in July 1715, south of Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The town was a place where treasure was plundered and divided among the pirates. It was also a space where every male and female pirate were considered equal. They lived by the same rules and earned their fair share of loot.
The latest findings call into question what really triggered the rise of Nassau as a haven for pirates.
According to the new research, the team believes that the demise of the Maravillas in 1656 brought pirates to the area instead of the Spanish ship lost in Florida in 1715. That pushes back the birth date of Nassau as a pirate paradise by more than three decades.
