By: Staff Writer
August 9, 2022
The opening of the Bahamas Maritime Museum offered onlookers a glimpse of what is underneath the waters off of Grand Bahama with stunning rare treasure salvaged from its site where it sank in 1656.
There may be a strong likelihood that treasure is scattered all throughout the Caribbean, from Trinidad to Bermuda just like what they found on the Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas
Dr Michael Pateman, curator of the BMM, told Caribbean Magazine Plus: “The Caribbean like the Bahamas, we have a lot of reefs. Europeans of transshipped through and so there are wrecks all over the Caribbean. But one of the key things about the Bahamas-and I would hazard an academic guess- that we probably have more wrecks in our waters and elsewhere in the Caribbean because the Bahamas channel was the shipment out of the new world.”
Since mid-2020, Dr Pateman and his team have found 18 other wrecks similar to that of the Maravillas and feel encouraged to look for even more wreckage around the Caribbean.
Dr Pateman added: “While I don’t like to give him credit, the reason Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas first is the trade winds blew him here. So especially during the age of sail ships would have come into the Bahamas and that’s why I don’t want to say discovered The Bahamas, but this is where they got lost for us.”
Along with Spanish galleons shipping plundered wealth from the Western Hemisphere, there is reason to believe there are French, British, Dutch ships of similar vintage in Bahamian waters in addition to American Civil War era ships. He cautioned, however that “some of these wrecks may not all be treasure ships, but just regular wrecks.”
The BMM is not just a showcase for the sunken Spanish treasure or any particular treasure find, it is a museum, laboratory and library, stocked with books about the maritime industry in addition to relative computer software and equipment for students studying maritime archaeology or other maritime related work.
But thus far, in the BMM have found gold rope chains, pendants with precious stones in them, gold coins, silver coins, solid silver bars, silver plates and jars and other miscellaneous items including a solid gold necklace with a pendant of Jesus Christ on the Cross and other non-precious items.
