Treasure & Legends
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The San Jose Galleon: The “Holy Grail of Shipwrecks” and Its Treasure Dispute
A British squadron sank a Spanish treasure galleon off Cartagena in 1708. More than three centuries and a rediscovery later, Colombia, Spain, an American salvage firm, and Bolivia’s Qhara Qhara nation are still fighting over who owns what’s left of it.
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The Flying Dutchman: The Ghost Ship Legend Behind the Curse
The best-known ghost ship in maritime lore was never a pirate vessel. Here’s how a sailors’ story about a doomed Dutch captain reached print, and how a future king logged his own sighting.
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Port Royal: The Pirate Haven That Sank in Minutes
On June 7, 1692, an earthquake liquefied the ground beneath Port Royal, Jamaica — the Caribbean’s pirate capital — and sent two-thirds of the town into the sea within minutes.
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The Great Sea Serpent: The Maritime Legend Sailors Swore Was Real
In 1848, the crew of HMS Daedalus swore under oath they had watched a sixty-foot sea serpent pass their ship. The sighting reveals a belief sailors carried since long before the Golden Age of Piracy.
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Davy Jones’s Locker: The Sailors’ Legend Behind the Phrase
Where the phrase ‘Davy Jones’s locker’ came from, why nobody knows who Davy Jones was, and how a sailors’ superstition about the ocean floor outlived the age of sail.
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Libertalia: The Pirate Utopia That Almost Certainly Never Existed
A supposed democratic pirate colony on Madagascar has been retold as history for three centuries, but the entire account traces back to a single, disputed 1728 book.
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The Treasure of Lima: Cocos Island’s Enduring, Empty Legend
A real 1820 evacuation of colonial wealth from Lima became one of the most searched-for, least-found pirate treasure legends of all time.
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The Oak Island Money Pit: What’s Actually Been Found
Two centuries of digging, six deaths, and not one confirmed piece of treasure. Here’s what has actually come out of Nova Scotia’s most famous hole in the ground.
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The Pirate Round and Indian Ocean Riches
For a few decades, English and American pirates sailed past the Caribbean entirely, chasing Mughal treasure ships on a route historians call the Pirate Round.
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Did Anyone Walk the Plank?
The plank is one of pirate fiction’s most durable images — and one almost entirely invented a century after the pirates themselves were gone.