Picture a legendary shipwreck full of silver coins, jewels, and other treasures, and you just might be imagining the Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas.
The ship sank 368 years ago near the Bahamas. In the centuries since, pirates and treasure hunters have made off with millions in silver pesos, dazzling emeralds, weapons, and other loot.
Experts once thought there was little of the wreck remaining. Since 2019, though, divers have found thousands of artifacts. They’ve helped scientists learn more about the Bahamas’ past, including how piracy shaped the islands.
Experts think there’s more to discover. What remains under the sand could be worth millions.
No one was sure if there was anything left of the wreck.
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.
The ship’s artifacts are strewn across almost 2 miles of the ocean floor, some moved around by storms. Many are buried deep in the sand, so archaeologists use devices called magnetometers to detect them.
After all this time since the ship sank, it’s difficult to know what remains. There may still be $100 million worth of artifacts under the sand, Jim Sinclair, who works with AllenX, told CBS News in 2023.
Before setting sail, the Maravillas took on gold and silver from another ship. There’s no list of exactly what was brought aboard. The ship also stopped in Mexico, but there’s no record of what that cargo contained, either.
“We’re still trying to uncover that mystery,” Pateman said.
Poor record keeping, marauding pirates, and hurricane-prone waters mean the extent of the original cargo and what’s still on the seafloor is impossible to know.
There are other shipwrecks waiting to be rediscovered.
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.
In January 1656, the Maravillas and another ship accidentally collided, causing the Maravillas to crash into a reef.
The other ship continued on, but the damage to the Maravillas dragged its many riches and hundreds of passengers toward the seafloor in under an hour.
“Shortly after this happened, what we call these winter storms in the northern Bahamas started to blow through,” Pateman told Business Insider. “So it made the environment a lot more treacherous.”
Over 600 people, a combination of sailors, passengers, and prisoners died by drowning or hypothermia, according to historian Leonardo Moreno-Álvarez. Only 45 people survived.
People immediately began salvaging the silver.
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.
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.
The post This shipwreck’s gold, silver, and emeralds helped spawn a golden age of piracy in the Bahamas and excavators keep finding more treasure appeared first on Business Insider.
