By: Staff Writer
June 2, 2023
The Bahamas is a vast ships’ trap, a legend fueled by the islands’ location in the heart of the ‘Bermuda Triangle’. Mysterious currents and reefs as sharp as barbed wire have sunk countless ships since the 15th century. Nobody has a clue exactly what is down there. Some say the total may exceed 5,000 sunken wrecks.
In 2023 Allen Exploration (AllenX) launched The Bahamas Lost Ships Project in collaboration with James Jenney of In Search of Shipwrecks (ISOS) to explore the character of the total shipping lost in part of the northern Bahamas. This area, being investigated underwater by Allen Exploration, covers the eastern flank of the Straits of Florida, or Old Bahama Channel, one of the world’s greatest highways and sea lane of choice to and from the Americas for Spanish galleons and later European and US shipping.
“While we painstakingly search for missing parts of the Spanish galleon the Maravillas sunk in 1656, we’re very mindful of the wealth of maritime history out here,” says Carl Allen, founder of Allen Exploration. “In our dives, we trip over wreck after wreck. For decades, The Bahamas’ lost ships have been silent phantoms. So many ships of war and trade sailed through and sank in these waters. Finally, we’re figuring out their names, stories and the excitement of what’s still down there.”
The Bahamas Lost Ships Project identified 176 maritime casualties in historical sources dating between c. 1526 and 1976. The lost ships lie in an area corresponding with the waters being investigated by AllenX off the western Little Bahama Bank, the southern shore of Grand Bahama Island and off Gorda Cay, southwest Abaco Island. Three of the lost ships date to the 16th century, eight to the 17th century, ten to the 18th century and the majority, 145 or 82%, to the 19th century. 73% of the losses are clustered off the western Little Bahama Bank, 17% off Grand Bahama Island and 10% off the Abaco Islands. America (52%), Britain (24%) and Spain (13%) saw the heaviest losses.
At least 85% of the wrecked ship are merchant vessels, and an eye-opening cross-section of goods was lost in the northern Bahamas. The 251 cargo types identified are dominated by lumber, sugar and molasses. Valuables, money, specie, silver and gold are listed on eight ships, all seemingly heavily salvaged close to their time of loss.
Materials that could still be preserved underwater include brandy (in bottles), cochineal for making dye, coconuts, madeira wine, military provisions, rum and whisky. Just over half of the cargoes, 52%, are organic and have little chance of being preserved archaeologically: consignments range from bacon, fish and ice to cigars, coffee, cotton, gunpowder, potatoes, salt and tobacco.
“Only by peering into the historical records can we hope to bring the vanished trade back to life. They let us reconstruct a full audit of shipping in The Bahamas,” says James Jenney, the project’s Director of Research who undertook the archival investigation. “The new picture is astonishing. There are tales of the unexpected, like the loss of the 108-ton whaling ship the A. Nickerson from Provincetown, Massachusetts, stranded on the Matanilla Reef on June 14, 1852 with 110 barrels of whale oil. And then traces of rich trade that fed the global economy.”
The cotton trade, the new research shows, was highly profitable. Seventeen cotton cargoes sank between 1822 and 1886. The largest consignment was 3,912 bales shipped on the British flagged Duke, lost off Wood Cay Reef on April 14, 1852. Most cargoes left from New Orleans in Louisiana, Mobile in Alabama and Galveston in Texas. Their intended destinations ranged from New York to Trieste and Genoa in Italy and Liverpool in England. By 1800, the US was producing 40 million pounds of cotton a year. By the 1850s, half of the Old South’s ‘White gold’ passed through New Orleans. Ten of the cotton-trading ships lost off the northern Bahamas were American, three British, one Spanish and one Swedish.
“Another line of shipping in the northern Bahamas forces us to confront the horrors of the slave trade,” says Dr. Michael Pateman, Director of The Bahamas Maritime Museum. “The 55 consignments of sugar, molasses, cigars, coffee, tobacco and timber on 28 wrecks are tied to the transatlantic slave trade between West Africa, the Americas and especially Cuba. 71% of these ships sailed after 1820, when the Spanish slave trade in Cuba was supposedly illegal.”
Two large slavers working out of Havana, Cuba, and outbound to West Africa, were stranded in a storm on the Matanilla Reef on January 23, 1817. Two years later, the Celeste, inbound from West Africa with 170 enslaved people, was wrecked off the west of Grand Bahama Island on March 24, 1819 after being seized by the Patriot privateer.
“Through the sunken hatches of The Bahamas, you can trace the whole arc of the slave trade,” says Dr. Sean Kingsley, project collaborator and editor of Wreckwatch magazine. “The lost ships held shackled Africans, timber to install slave decks in merchant vessels, and boards to make crates for exporting the sugar and cigars produced by slaves in Spanish Cuba. By 1862, 437,000 enslaved Africans were forced to work on 2,430 sugar estates in Cuba. Little wonder writers called Havana a banquetting place of death.”
Colossal Cuban exports represented in The Bahamas Lost Ships Project inventory include sugar consignments peaking at 5,700 bags per ship. The 1,700 boxes exported from Havana on the Danish ship the Hannah, lost off the Memory Rock on June 30, 1852 and heading to Copenhagen in Denmark, weighed in at a profitable 311 tons of sugar.
Although The Bahamas is infamous for the hurricanes that cross the islands, most lost ships met their destiny after being stranded on reefs and island shores (82% of the total). “The lost ships were not hard to salvage,” says James Sinclair, Director of Archaeology for Allen Exploration. “So much so that wrecking – diving or ‘fishing’ to salvage cargoes – became the lead profession in The Bahamas’ economy. The good folk of Nassau preferred chancing dangerous get-rich-quick schemes over breaking their backs working the fields.”
The Bahamas Lost Ships Project found that 60 ships in its list were salvaged by local wreckers between 1656 and 1908. Of 37 types of cargo saved, cotton and sugar were most common followed by lumber, molasses, staves, gold, silver and specie. Salvors were not picky. Almost anything could turn a buck from bacon and gunpowder to potatoes and whiskey. Bahamian salvors took 45-66% of the value of cargoes saved and sold. Most were auctioned off by the likes of H.F. Armbrister or Henry Adderley & Company in Nassau.
The Bahamas Lost Ships Project has unearthed the forgotten names of many boats that fished stricken ships in The Bahamas, such as the Experiment, Triton, British Queen, Avenger, Spy, Lady of the Lake, Thetis, Struggle and Adeline. At the height of a salvage job, when the Margaret foundered off the western Little Bahama Bank on December 18, 1859 with 1,340 bales of cotton, at least 20 wreckers rushed to recover the American ship’s cargo.
For the first time, The Bahamas Lost Ships Project has enabled the full historical shipping in the area being surveyed by Allen Exploration underwater for shipwrecks to be assessed. “The gap between the 176 maritime casualties seen in the historical record and 19 wrecks AllenX has discovered so far highlights the area’s true potential,” says Dan Porter, Director of Fieldwork at AllenX. “89% of the total inventory is still out there, waiting to be discovered.”
“The large number of ships identified in dusty archives has created the first master map of the region’s immense maritime legacy.” says Carl Allen. “It’s a fresh historical treasure to add to the shiny treasure we’ve been discovering. We hope this will help The Bahamas manage its unique underwater heritage. The potential for maritime archaeology in The Bahamas is extremely bright.”
The results of the Bahamas Lost Ships Project will feature in a special interactive exhibit in The Bahamas Maritime Museum. The project is being launched at The Explorer’s Club in World Oceans Week on June 6, 2023.
The project is being expanded to document all maritime historical losses in The Bahamas. This will make the country the first in the whole Caribbean region with a master database of its total wreck casualties.