For hundreds of days , the Bahamas in the Caribbean has been an invaluable pitstop to some of the most prominent chapter in modern maritime history , from colonist voyages and explorers to pirates and slave traders . Due to all of this sailing body process , not to mention its perfidious waters , it ’s since become home to awealth of shipwreck .
As part of The Bahamas Lost Ships Project , a squad from Allen Exploration have put together a new map of the wrecks found around Bahamas islands in the westerly Atlantic Ocean . unco , this is one of the first attack to full measure the total figure of wrecks that lie resting on the Davy Jones’s locker here .
“ Despite the Bahamas ’ depth of maritime history , no work has proactively sought to measure how many ship foundered in its water system . The unreliable nature of these piddle , studded with low - lying reefs and sand bar , and situated on a Caribbean hurricane itinerary , is take on to have resulted in large numbers of ship losses , perhaps as many as 5,000 , ” reads thereportby Allen Exploration .
Of the 176 maritime vessels the researchers found in archival reports, just 19 wrecks have been found so far.Image Courtesy of Allen Exploration
There ’s no consensus on the phone number of ship that have settle in these waters , but this project find out write up of 176 maritime vessel sinking between 1526 and 1976 in archival materials . Of these , just 19 have been located underwater so far .
“ The gap between the 176 maritime injured party seen in the historic track record and 19 wreck AllenX has discovered so far foreground the country ’s true potential,”saidAllenX Director of Fieldwork , Dan Porter . “ Eighty - nine percent of the entire inventory is still out there , waiting to be find . ”
Allen Exploration is well - versed in the art of wreck hunting . Just last year , their team of underwater Explorer chance upon agold - laden shipwreckin the Caribbean Sea that fell during the “ Golden Age ofPiracy ” .
To assess the nature of shipwreck in the Bahamas , they collaborated with maritime historian James Jenney in 2023 .
Of the 176shipwrecksthey name , three date to the 16th century , eight to the seventeenth century , 10 to the eighteenth century , and 145 to the 19th C . Just two had sunk since World War 2 ended in 1945 . The overwhelming majority of these wrecks come from just three land : the US ( 52 percent ) , Britain ( 24 percent ) , and Spain ( 13 percent ) .
At least 114 of the ship were merchandiser vessels . After all , the Bahamas was an authoritative hub of transcontinental trade . Coffee , corn , cotton , gunpowder , Irish potato , salt , tobacco , andgoldwere shipped backward and forwards across the Atlantic in Brobdingnagian amount during the Age of Exploration , along with a number of pathogens thatproved catastrophicfor the native universe of the Americas .
The new map and the accompanying findings of this newfangled project will go on display after this year in an interactive expo at theBahamas Maritime Museum .
