The Truth About Hunting for Pirate Treasure

- According to the Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration, there are at least 3 million undiscovered shipwrecks hidden in various places around the globe.

Now, of course, not all of these are of the pirate variety.

Still, there's gotta be a fair number of secret maps floating around in glass bottles that will lead us to unbelievable fortunes hidden in underwater layers, right?

From beloved movies like "The Goonies" and "Indiana Jones" to shows like "Outer Banks" and even "Paw Patrol," we are obsessed with the idea of finding long lost treasure.

What does hunting for pirate treasure really look like?

And what does the treasure itself look like?

I'm Joel Cook, and this is "Rogue History."

[soft dramatic music] [metallic clanking] My greatest hope as a kid was to find buried treasure.

I dig furiously at the beach, in the sandbox, in my mom's flower garden.

Just certain that some peg leg [indistinct] do well have chosen that exact spot to leave their most cherished possessions.

The origin of this legend goes back centuries.

In the 1600s, notorious pirate captain, William Kidd, acknowledged that he had buried one cash of golden silver, and that single tale spiraled into the countless stories of buried treasure that followed.

Regardless, I still doing a little digging from time to time, though treasure now looks a bit different to my experienced sight.

When I'm not hosting "Rogue History," I'm a maritime archeologist, which means I study the cultures of humans in the past, with an emphasis on how they interacted with water.

I've evaluated my fair share of shipwrecks.

While we never go into a dive with profit on our minds, you'd be surprised at the kind of treasure a well-trained archeologist can uncover.

Take the Nan'ao I shipwreck, for example, considered one of the most significant ancient shipwrecks in the world.

This vessel was discovered in 2007 just off Nan'ao Island, the project's namesake, in the Guangdong province of China.

The ship sank sometime during the late 16th or early 17th century during the Ming Dynasty.

We don't know for sure what the Nan'ao I ship was doing when it sank.

At the time, the Chinese government had imposed a maritime commerce ban called the Haijin or Sea Ban, to limit the ability of Japanese pirates to prey on Chinese merchant shipping.

So it's very possible that it could have been a merchant ship that fell victim to these pirates, or even been a pirate vessel itself.

Now, the traditional narrative holds that a pirate vessel should be loaded with gold and silver.

But when it was discovered in 2007, experts found that the Nan'ao I had very little coinage on board.

The most valuable things it carried were blue and white porcelain dragon pattern jars, pottery, iron and copper wears, and organic materials like tea.

So while the Nan'ao I shipwreck may not have been loaded with coins and jewels, it did carry resources worth their weight in gold.

What people at the time of the sinking would've accepted as lost goods became the modern maritime archeologists' code book for uncovering the little details of how those people lived their lives.

On the other side of the world, the items that pirates deemed valuable also went well beyond mere gold, silver, and jewels.

- Any pirate worth his salt is looking for gold and silver in the form of coins mainly.

But the problem was very often, before they attacked them, they had no idea what was on board.

Pirates of the 1700s were sort of on the land.

They didn't have many places that they could go, so they had to stay out in the ocean for quite some time.

They needed food and water.

Lacking traditional treasure, the ultimate goal, they would go after rather mundane items or anything that was on board, really.

- But what about the times where treasure actually was up for crabs?

On July 31st, 1715, a Spanish treasure fleet commanded by Don Juan Esteban de Uvilla was caught in a hurricane and wrecked off their eastern coast of Florida.

Of the 12 ships in the fleet, 11 were destroyed, scattering a large amount of gold and silver coins, gold bars, and jewelry across the sea floor.

- 14 million in gold and silver.

Now, that's 1750 numbers.

There were pirates that lived in Nassau, and once they heard about the golden silver, they had immediately sailed to Otter Day Vero Beach.

- Within 11 days, Spanish salvage operations were underway, but the Spanish were unable to keep the wrecking of such a large treasure fleet a secret for long.

Both the Spanish and the pirates deployed indigenous and Black divers to complete the difficult free-diving work necessary to bring up the sunken treasure.

While Spanish colonial officials maintain their diving teams for future wrecks, the pirates were much more likely to, well, pirate them.

In 1717, a crew of enslaved divers bound for the Spanish wreck site were kidnapped again by a pirate crew intent on using them for the same purpose.

And it wasn't just enslaved divers that pirates would capture in an attempt to make a journey to the wreck site a successful venture.

From the diving itself to navigating, cooking, translating, the stolen labor of indigenous and Black populations provided an immeasurable amount of value to these salvaging ventures.

And if the pirates failed to find gold, as they often did, they could sell their human cargo to reap financial rewards.

The idea of finding one's fortune by picking through the wreckage of a sunken vessel is still one that holds a lot of power today.

I mean, the area where the shipwrecks are located is called the Treasure Coast, and attracts looters to this day.

So treasure hunters, both amateur and professional, have hunted for generations, diving and digging and destroying.

Let me explain.

For a maritime archeologist, context is everything.

The best case scenario for us to glean information from an archeological site is for us to examine its artifacts in situ, in their original place.

When we have the ability to do that, it helps us put together a better picture of what exactly happened.

Once we've documented this information, we can make informed decisions about whether to take artifacts in for museum conservation or leave them safe and sound in their watery homes.

When treasure hunters rifle through those sites before we can evaluate them, we lose the opportunity to answer contextual questions about them, and governments become wary of sharing details of discoveries for fear of them being looted.

This means that the public, aka you, may miss out on opportunities to interact with these incredible archeological discoveries.

Take Black Sam Bellamy's Whydah pirate ship, for example.

Constructed in 1715 as a slaving vessel, Bellamy captured it in February of 1717 and lost it just a few months later when it broke apart off Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The ship was rediscovered some 260 years later, in 1984, when underwater explorer, Barry Clifford, found it by using a 1717 map created by a salvager and cartographer named Cyprian [indistinct].

Okay, so there's at least one old map that led to buried treasure, sue me.

- The Whydah, they're still bringing things up from the ocean floor, and what they found so far is nothing short of amazing.

Of course, the gold balloons and the silver pieces of [indistinct] are very dramatic.

They've brought up many of the cannons and guns and some jewelry that was on board, which gives fascinating insights into life on board a pirate ship.

What has been brought up and what still remains underneath the sand off of Cape Cod is an archeological treasure trove of items and history.

- Clifford was awarded full ownership of the Whydah based on the federal admiralty laws in place in 1988.

But unlike many others who came across similarly valuable shipwrecks, he refused to sell or separate the collection.

Leaving the collection together allowed for many maritime archeologists, including a few of my former classmates, to evaluate Whydah as both a pirate ship and as a former slaving vessel.

For two threads of history, piracy and slavery, that have very little physical archeological evidence to work with, to not separate the contents of the Whydah archeological site allowed for studies ranging from forensic theology of the skeletons found on board to gendered evaluations of the slavery-related material culture.

But Barry Clifford's actions are extremely, extremely rare in the salvage community.

Many valuable shipwreck sites have been disturbed or even destroyed by modern-day salvagers attempting to seek their fortunes.

Is the loss of archeological and cultural information forever worth the money they might make?

Treasure comes in many shapes and sizes.

While no one can stop people from seeking their fortune however they choose, the ethics of doing so matter.

Treasure hunting and salvage laws vary depending on what part of the world you live in.

But in my professional opinion, there's something unsavory about disturbing a cultural treasure for personal gain.

For me, a person descended from African people whose stories, and let's be honest, graves, are often disturbed or destroyed by these modern-day fortune seekers, there's a perpetual pain in my heart over what has been lost.

The value of anything, an object, a person, a moment is defined by the person viewing it.

I hope that you've treasured this moment with us here at "Rogue History."

Till next time.

[soft dramatic music] ♪