Treasure Of The Pirate King

One of the great frontier outposts of North America is yielding up its treasure. Not a fur trade outpost in the wilds of Montana, nor a frontier bastion along the shores of a northern lake…

Talkin’ about Nassau in the Bahamas, capital of the so-called Pirate Republic, and setting of my beloved Black Sails.

Bestill me bloody, beating heart…

Per The Guardian:

The first shipwrecks linked to the real pirates of the Caribbean in the Bahamas have been discovered by an international team co-directed by a British marine archaeologist.

Blackbeard and Calico Jack Rackham were among pirates who, between the 1690s and 1720s, turned Nassau on the island of New Providence into a hideout where they plotted their next heists on the high seas and divided up their plunder.

Now, following the first-ever official permission to dive in the closed zone of Nassau harbour, an expedition has found six wrecks, three of which can be traced to the “golden age of piracy.”

…The discoveries are all the more exciting because, while a handful of pirate wrecks have been found between Mauritius and North Carolina, not one had previously been discovered in Nassau, “the home port of the pirates of the Caribbean in the Bahamas,” [project co-director Dr. Sean] Kingsley said.

The greatest possible find would be Henry Avery’s flagship Fancy.

Henry Avery is among the most remarkable Frontier Partisan outlaws in history. He took the Mughal ship Ganj-i-Sawai, (Anglicized as the Gunsway) off the coast of India in 1695, outraging the powerful Muslim ruler, endangering the position of the East India Co., and kicking off the first worldwide manhunt, recounted in the excellent book Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt, by Steven Johnson.

After the brutal taking of the ship, Avery and his crew sailed Fancy halfway around the world to New Providence Island in the Bahamas, where they abandoned it at Nassau and dispersed. Avery was never captured.

But wait… this gets better. We can watch all of this unfold free and “on the account” at YouTube.

 

 

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You knew I would provide proper musical accompaniment…