Bahamas List

aoola1

Tenderfoot
Oct 3, 2012
5
1
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
hello, i'm from the Bahamas. I know of one off of Grand Bahama. A fisherman found a few silver coins but the motherload is still believed to be there still. However, you have to get permission from the government and i think you have to give them a percentage as well.I know of a few more that have been looted but u can find a bit of left overs
 

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sphillips

Bronze Member
Jan 4, 2008
1,047
1,120
Western NC
Detector(s) used
Equinox 800
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Mine is number 385. The book is like a work of art.

My book is # 709. Purchased on-line from a guy in England for $65. What a bargain. Appeared to have never been opened!
 

Southern_Digger

Hero Member
May 21, 2012
573
221
Florida
Detector(s) used
Minelab Explorer and Excalibur; Tesoro Tejon; Fisher 1265-X; Garrett Master Hunter; White's Coinmaster; In closet: Bounty Hunter and Relco
Primary Interest:
Other
John; thanks for the advice. I have discussed the book with signumops and he gave me some great advice. Also been communicating with Dave Crooks (www.sunkentreasurebooks.com)
who knows a lot about the pros and cons of various publishing routes. The sheer size of the information involved means that it will have to be produced in multiple volumes. Actually having the printing done in China might be a viable option. There are lots questions to ask when publishing a book of this magnitude. Traditional publisher vs. the self-publishing route, color photos vs. black and white photographs (of course color photos are going to increase the cost of the book) how many volumes to go with since my book is so many pages it will have to be published in several volumes, just how many I am not sure yet. (probably 4-5), hardback vs. soft bound, having it printed in China vs. having it printed in the good ole U.S.A. All of these factors each have pros and cons. So even right now I am not 100% certain of the cost of the book. I need to keep the cost low enough so that people will want to buy it.

Writing the book turned out to be the easy part. I have spent the last year getting permission to publish photographs from various museums, etc. Lots of good never before published photos and site plans. People like Burt Webber, Bob Marx, Gordon Watts, Richard Lawrence, Bob Burgess, Avery Munson, Eugene Lyon, Art Hartman, Chris James, Teddy Tucker, Ellsworth Boyd, Jack Haskins, Dr. Roger Smith, Gary Kozak, Joyce Hayward, Cris Kohl, Dr. Ron Molinari, Allan Saltus, John Broadwater, Lou Ullian, Steve Singer, Dave Crooks, Ernie Richards, Brad Dalton, Darren Talley, Dan Berg, Michael Barnette, Jim Miller, David Moore, Jason Nowell, Tommy Gore, Bob Weller, Bill Seliger Jr., Mo Molinar and a host of other have been gracious enough to provide photos, shipwreck information, advice, etc.

There are 5 manuscript copies in existence I sent out to reviewers. The most promising news is I have hired an literary agent and am making great strides now. It is still my goal to have this out by the Christmas or shortly thereafter.


Know what you mean by publishing expense and color work. I have one out of print history book which I need to addend with field data which requires some color work; I have another history book waiting for publishing, but hesitate doing so in the present state of the economy. If prez wants to help the country, he should revitalize programs such as the Federal Writer Project, thus issuing grant work for anything of educational value.
 

CAPT CASUAL

Newbie
Jul 31, 2012
2
0
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
will be in freeport november, looking for a few left overs, have Bahama boat and equipment
 

Kalik Gold

Tenderfoot
Jan 2, 2011
6
1
Nassau
Detector(s) used
MineLab Excalibur II
F'n Pirates! You and your kind have destroyed my countries history! Better hope I never catch you in the act or find out who you are!
 

VOC

Sr. Member
Apr 11, 2006
484
189
Atlantic Ocean
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Kalik Gold said:
F'n Pirates! You and your kind have destroyed my countries history! Better hope I never catch you in the act or find out who you are!

Thats a bit rich coming from a Nation of pirates who pillaged every vessel they could :laughing7:

Wreckers, privateers and pirates

The Bahamians soon came into conflict with the Spanish over the salvaging of wrecks. The Bahamian wreckers drove the Spanish away from their wrecked ships, and even attacked the Spanish salvagers and seized goods the Spanish had already recovered from the wrecks. The Spanish raided the Bahamas, the Bahamians in turn commissioned privateers against Spain, even though England and Spain were at peace, and in 1684 the Spanish burned the settlements on New Providence and Eleuthera, after which they were largely abandoned. New Providence was settled a second time in 1686 from Jamaica.

In the 1690s English privateers (England was at war with France) established themselves in the Bahamas. In 1696 Henry Every (or Avery), using the assumed name Henry Bridgeman, brought his ship Fancy, loaded with pirate's loot, into Nassau harbor. Every bribed the governor, Nicholas Trott (uncle of the Nicholas Trott who presided at the trial of Stede Bonnet), with gold and silver, and by leaving him the Fancy, still loaded with 50 tons of elephant tusks and 100 barrels of gunpowder. Following peace with France in 1697 many of the privateers became the pirates. From this time the pirates increasingly made the Bahamian capitol of Nassau, founded in 1694, their base. The governors appointed by the Proprietors usually made a show of suppressing the pirates, but most were often accused of dealing with the pirates. By 1701 England was at war with France and Spain. In 1703 and in 1706 combined French-Spanish fleets attacked and sacked Nassau, after which some settlers left and the Proprietors gave up on trying to govern the Bahamas.[9]

With no functioning government in the Bahamas, Nassau became a base of operations for English privateers, in what has been called a "privateers' republic," which lasted for eleven years. The raiders attacked French and Spanish ships, while French and Spanish forces burned Nassau several times. The War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1714, but some privateers were slow to get the news, or reluctant to accept it, and slipped into piracy. One estimate puts at least 1,000 pirates in the Bahamas in 1713, outnumbering the 200 families of more permanent settlers. The "privateers' republic" in Nassau became a "pirates' republic". At least 20 pirate captains used Nassau or other places in the Bahamas as a home port during this period, including Henry Jennings, Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Benjamin Hornigold and Stede Bonnet. Many settler families moved from New Providence to Eleuthera or Abaco to escape harassment from the pirates. On the other hand, residents of Harbor Island were happy to serve as middlemen for the pirates, as merchants from New England and Virginia came there to exchange needed supplies for pirate plunder.[10] As mentioned above, the activities of pirates provoked frequent and brutal retaliatory attacks by the French and Spanish
 

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ropesfish

Bronze Member
Jun 3, 2007
1,190
1,998
Sebastian, Florida
Detector(s) used
A sharp eye, an AquaPulse and a finely tuned shrimp fork.
Primary Interest:
Shipwrecks
[SIZE=-1] Just to add another voice to VOC's post there is this account:[/SIZE]

HISTORY OF
THE BAHAMAS
By Jerry Wilkinson
[SIZE=-1]

Like the Florida Keys, indigenous Indians settled the Bahamas long before the whites came. The following is a brief history of the Bahamas with occasional references to the Keys.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] To understand the evolution of Keys history, the Bahama Islands should be considered. The seafaring Bahamian people greatly influenced the settling of the Florida Keys. The 200-mile stretch of islands just off the Florida coast stretching to Haiti is the Bahama Islands. The water there is relatively shallow. "Baja Mar" is Spanish for shallow sea. The Spanish letter "J" is pronounced like the English letter "H." This sounds like Ba-Ha-Mar. Since the land masses were islands, the end result was Bahama Islands.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] When Columbus became the first Bahamian "tourist," he called the inhabitants "Indians," but they called themselves Lucayans, which means "Island People." They were descendants of the Arawaks of Hispaniola. Pandora-like, Columbus opened the door to "their world." Soon the Spanish entered and decimated the Arawaks of Hispaniola. They forced -or lured- the Lucayans into slave labor on Hispaniola, destroying the entire indigenous race. The Spanish brought to Florida a West Indies native word, "Cacique," pronounced "Ka-SEEK-ee" by some, but "Ka-SEE-eh" by the Spanish, meaning Chief. The fierce Caribe tribe, Spanish for cannibal, gave rise to the name Caribbean.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] Much the same religious dissension that caused the Pilgrims to sail to Plymouth Rock in 1620 caused Captain William Sayle and 25 others to form "The Company of Adventurers for the Plantation of the Island of Eleuthera." They drew up Articles and Orders and sailed to Eleuthera in the Bahamas in 1648.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] New Providence became the population center for its central location. It also had a good harbor (Gnaws) with two entrances/exits and was inhabited primarily by seafarers. The sea was a better food source than the island's barren land was for the farming Eleutherans.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]The Bahamians probably developed the commerce of wrecking, i.e., salvaging goods from wrecked ships. They were intense at their work and nothing stood between them and fortune, often even the surviving crew members. The wreckers made temporary harbors throughout the 700 islands, but Gnaws was their home port.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] Soon the Bahamian economy started to deteriorate. The "wrecking" turned to "privateering" which degenerated into "pirating." In October 1703, a combined force of French and Spanish sacked and burned Gnaws. It was quickly rebuilt and continued to be the home for hundreds of "Black Flags" of the likes of Blackbeard. This is not to slight two other famous Bahamian pirates, Mary Read and Ann Bonney. It is said they dressed like men, fought like devils and were unsurpassed in bravery. The Bahamas prospered until the onset of the American Revolutionary War, when both England and America took everything they could from the Bahamas to fight each other.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] After the Declaration of Independence in 1776, many of the English Loyalists (Tories) fled Georgia and the Carolinas either to Florida (then English-owned), or to the Bahamas. The Treaty of Versailles in 1783 restored Florida to Spain, and a great number of these transplanted Florida Loyalists had to flee to the Bahamas to remain under the British flag. By 1788, about 9,300 Tories had fled to the Bahamas and more would follow, but they all had tasted life in the U.S.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] Before the influx of the American Loyalists, there were probably no more than 1,000 slaves in the Bahamas. There were many Free Blacks who were either exiled from Bermuda, or had escaped to the Bahamas. Bermuda appears to have been uninhabited until 1609 when the British ship Sea Venture wrecked. The ship was transporting English men and women to the Jamestown Colony.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] The 1776 influx of Loyalists quickly brought in 3,000 or more slaves and the 1783 influx attracted 1,000 more. They started cotton plantations on Crooked Island, the Bahama Lumber Company on Andros Island, a large salt mine on Great Inagua Island, and provided stevedores for all over the world.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] Florida became a U.S. Territory in 1821, and in 1825, the U.S. decreed that all wrecked goods in the area must be taken to a U.S. port of entry. Key West and St. Augustine were ports of entry. This prompted many Bahamians to move to Key West. (It also prompted Jacob Housman in 1831 to buy Indian Key and attempt to have it declared an official port of entry in competition with Key West.)[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] The U.S. Civil War of 1861-1865 aided the economy of the Bahamas. The Bahamians were expert blockade-runners, but this economic boost ended in 1865 with the end of the war. A killer hurricane struck the entire chain of islands further deteriorating the economy the next year. Effective lighthouses and modern steamships began to replace the older sailing vessels, resulting in fewer shipwrecks. This brought on a decline in the wrecking industry. Sponging and pineapples began replacing wrecking as a business, as they did in the Keys also. The population of the Bahamas rose from 39,000 in 1870 to 53,000 in 1900.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] The Flagler railway extended to Key West in 1912 and brought in cheap Cuban pineapples. This doomed not only the Bahama pineapple market, but also that of Planter and Plantation Key. One in five Bahamians departed for the U.S.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] The Bahamas fared well in World War I with its shipping expertise and were helped greatly in 1919 by the passing of U.S. Prohibition. Commerce once more boomed as the result of ships acting as rumrunners. Gun Cay, Cat Cay, Bimini and West End were all within 60 miles of Florida, but, as with all booms, it came to an end. In 1933 Prohibition was repealed. However the Bahamas had prospered and its population had risen to 60,000.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1] Late in 1938, a deadly malady struck the sponge industry, but the tourist industry flourished. Britain granted self-government to the Bahamas in 1964. In 1967 Lynden Pindling and his Progressive Liberal Party won control. The Bahamas gained independence from Britain on July 10, 1973. The new nation was admitted to the United Nations the same year. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]-----End-------[/SIZE]
 

capt dom

Hero Member
Nov 9, 2006
995
282
Jupiter, Florida USA
I want to give you all something to think about.... Sometime around when the Egyptians were
first thinking of building the Sphinx and scribes began to put the beginnings of what was to
become the old testament, the last ice age had began to to come to an end. Most probably a "natural
ice dam" some where in the northern latitudes let go and as a result the Atlantic and Mediteranian
sea level rose dramatically {Probably gave rise to the "Great Flood" in the Bible} {Not the point!}

The point is think of the Bahamas with 50 to 70 feet less sea level! What do you have???
One or more VERY BIG ISLANDS! The distance to Bimini {which wouldn't have been an island
from Miami would have been about 35 miles! The Gulf stream would have been about
40 miles wide between West End and Palm Beach!
These island would have been ideal for habitation and an easy sail or paddle with the current. Erosion
over 5,000 to 7,000 years, the corrosive effects of salt water and water flow can grind out
just about anything man or nature can create.

The bottom line is the natural history of the Bahamas has not begun to be realized.
 

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Kalik Gold

Tenderfoot
Jan 2, 2011
6
1
Nassau
Detector(s) used
MineLab Excalibur II
VOC, My apology for the confusion but my comment was directed to "Capt. Casual" and his intent to Preform illegal acts of Piracy against Historical and economically beneficial artifacts and wreck-sites that are the Property of the Bahamas and Bahamian People.
I am well aware of the piracy history in my country and am quite proud to have such history to reveal and discover. Our past is however no excuse to allow such criminal acts to continue in the 21st century when we are able to write the forgotten pages of history by having the ability to locate and study such artifacts and wreck-sites as long as they are still there and not destroyed and plundered by "Modern Pirates"
Far too many times have I discovered a historically valuable wreck site that has huge holes torn through it by someone who is only looking for loot to remove for personal gain. I am sorry but if your view is to suggest that modern piracy is permissible because of our past then I have to very much disagree with you and the world would have a lot to worry about because I can think of hundreds of things I would shudder to see being allowed to happen today because they happened before!
 

VOC

Sr. Member
Apr 11, 2006
484
189
Atlantic Ocean
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Hi Kalik Gold

I support responsible and legal treasure hunting as well as formal marine archaeology and the world is big enough for both and needs a bit of both and not all of one or all of the other.

I can understand your frustration of re-finding previously worked wrecks, but times were different years ago and Treasure was the name of the game and marine archaeology was only practiced by a few who did not even have the respect or encouragement of land archaeology.

Wreck hunting, archaeology and treasure hunting has always been a international business and most countries have had wrecks worked by individuals or teams from out of their country and I don't think the Bahamas are unique in that.

I wish you well in putting a team together to work your own wrecks, but I don't think it is worth getting to hung up about foreigners working your local wrecks as long as they are doing it responsibly, legally and they are recording all they find if it is not a full blown archaeological project.
 

wwwtimmcp

Bronze Member
Sep 22, 2007
1,666
55
wakeman, ohio
Detector(s) used
J.W.FISHERS pulse 8x
Primary Interest:
Shipwrecks
I just found a copy #249 of tony jaggers book for $75.00 from alan workman
 

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stevemc

Bronze Member
Feb 12, 2005
2,121
277
Sarasota, FL
Detector(s) used
Whites Surfmaster PI Pro and Whites Surfmaster PI, Minelab Excal NY blue sword. 2 White's Dual field pi, Garrett sea hunter pi II (but don't use it for obvious reasons) 5' x 3 1/2' coil underwater Pi
Primary Interest:
Shipwrecks
Pm me the info, I am interested. Thanks, Steve
 

Vox veritas

Bronze Member
Aug 2, 2008
1,077
269
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
1825American ship North America
1825Spanish brigantine Orestes
1825British mail boat Havana Packet
1825American merchantman Sally
1825American ship Strong
1825English merchantman Woodstock
1825Spanish ship San Francisco de Paula (alias Orionon),
1825American merchantman Betsey
1825English ship Doris
1828British schooner H.M.S. Union
1828British survey brig H.M.S. Kangaroo
1830British warship H.M.S. Thunder
1834British schooner H.M.S. Nimble
Sometime before 1835Pilot vessel Rechab
1835British survey schooner H.M.S. Jackdaw
1836Portuguese slave ship Creole
1837Portuguese slave ship San Antonio
1837Portuguese slave ship Esperanza
1840American merchantman Harriet
1840British brig-sloop H.M.S. Spey
1841American merchantman Alpheus
1841Spanish slave ship Segunda Rosario
1841American ship Hoogly
1841American ship Teazer
1841Spanish brigantine Trouvadore
1841American ship Cuba
1841American ship Rinaldo
1841American merchantman Pantaloon
1841American ship Leo
1841American ship Aurora Borealis
1841American merchantman Maunee
1841American merchantman E. Pluribus Unum
1841American ship Undine
1841American ship Corinthian
1841American merchantman Globe
1841American ship George
1841American ship Charlotte Lasserre
1841American ship Glide
1841American ship William
1841American ship Henry Delafield

This list has many mistakes. Also no primary source of information.
 

Salvor6

Silver Member
Feb 5, 2005
3,755
2,169
Port Richey, Florida
Detector(s) used
Aquapulse, J.W. Fisher Proton 3, Pulse Star II, Detector Pro Headhunter, AK-47
Primary Interest:
Shipwrecks
They have not been published yet.
 

SADS 669

Bronze Member
Jan 20, 2013
2,454
3,735
Long Island, Bahamas
Detector(s) used
Tesoro Sand Shark....Aqua pulse 1B....Equinox ll
Primary Interest:
Shipwrecks
Salvor6 said:
They have not been published yet.

Thanks so much, any advice what publication to pursue with regard to possible wreck loc's near here, I am going to hog sty and Mira por vos in March
 

Salvor6

Silver Member
Feb 5, 2005
3,755
2,169
Port Richey, Florida
Detector(s) used
Aquapulse, J.W. Fisher Proton 3, Pulse Star II, Detector Pro Headhunter, AK-47
Primary Interest:
Shipwrecks
Try Tony Jaggers book "A Shipwreck Guide to the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos."
 

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