Marine Archaeologist Sean Kingsley has explored more than 350 shipwrecks — from pirate ships in the Bahamas to  British India Steam Navigation ships off the coast of Ireland. We ask him what discoveries he’s made so far and what else he hopes to find.

Guests

Sean Kingsley, marine archaeologist, historian and author. He has explored over 350 shipwrecks. Founder of Wreckwatch Magazine and co-founder of Wreckwatch TV.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: When archeologist Sean Kingsley starts his day at a dig site, preparations take a little longer than usual. He’s got a lot of equipment he needs to get ready, including a mask, regulator, oxygen tanks, wetsuit, and fins.

SEAN KINGSLEY [TAPE]: We’re in the middle of the beautiful azure blues of the Bahamas. We thought we were going just east of Rose Island, but we’re actually between New Providence Island and Eleuthera, about two hours out. Beautiful conditions and Nick is navigating not by the stars, but by the feel. There’s reefs strewn all over this place which cause loads of ships in serious trouble, and, uh, he’s got a spot here where he knows there’s a shipwreck. He’s dived it. He’s seen it. We’re keeping our ears out for some hollering and hoping for the best He tied a rope around his waist, jumped into the water, and he put us, bang, right on top of a probable pirate shipwreck of the 18th century. Mind-blowing.

CHAKRABARTI: Sean Kingsley is a marine archeologist. He’s explored over 350 shipwrecks around the world, but his latest excursion is in the Bahamas, where he and his team were granted the first ever permissions to dive in Nassau Harbor.

From 1690 to 1725, these waters were home base for pirates in what’s known as the Golden Age of Piracy. There could be thousands of shipwrecks still waiting discovery. Sean and his team have created a documentary of their work. Here’s a moment when they discover a ship that just might have belonged to the pirate Henry Avery, a ship known as The Fancy.

CHRIS [TAPE]: Sean goes over to investigate further. He starts hand fanning and looking, and soon I see him wave me over, and now he’s uncovering wooden planks.

SEAN [TAPE]: But we move towards the northern side, and suddenly my heart starts pounding. There’s wood on the seabed. Michael and I start cleaning it off, one meter, two meter, three meters.

CHRIS [TAPE]: I see him get more excited. Then Michael comes over. Both of them are very delicately but excitedly hand fanning this wood. And as the silt is being removed, you start to see more planks, you start to see ribbing. You start to see all of this structure underneath this, this ballast pile. And that’s when the imagination starts going, “What else is here?What could be underneath of this?”

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Sean Kingsley is also founder of Wreck Watch Magazine and co-founder of Wreck Watch TV, where you can watch the documentary The Mystery of the Pirate King’s Treasure. That’s where those clips came from. And he joins us now from London, England. Sean Kingsley, welcome to On Point.

KINGSLEY: Hi, Meghna. A pleasure to join you.

CHAKRABARTI: It is wonderful to have you. Can you tell us a little bit more about that moment that we just heard about, um, maybe The Fancy when you, when you discovered it under the water?

KINGSLEY: Sure. To be honest, your first sort of sensations are, are nerve jangling. You’ve got your scuba gear on, you’re going through the water column, um, and you’re asking yourself, you know, “Is this real, this thing you’ve come from the other side of the world to try and find, or is this gonna be a very expensive bust?”

And as the sediment starts to clear and you see this thing for the first time, that’s when you start to hyperventilate. Or, or maybe not hyperventilate because you’re underwater with your, all your scuba gear on. That, that’s me being totally professional, right? I mean, that is your first sensation, is just shock that this thing has survived the centuries of coastal exploitation and it still survives, and you’re touching the Hot Wheels from the Golden Age of Piracy.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so tell me, was the, was this ship actually, could you determine that it was The Fancy?

KINGSLEY: The Bahamas is a small place, and rumors started to spread pretty quickly. What I would say, I knew a lot about the Fancy.

I wrote a book with Rex Cohen called The Pirate King about Henry Avery, and we’d uncovered a lot of documents saying that he actually did scuttle the ship the Fancy, a 46-gun frigate inside Nassau Harbor and you know, this thing was in the right place, right time, right date. Pirates used to like to burn their ships to get rid of signs of evidence, and this thing is burnt down to the waterline.

So all the forensic clues are there, but this, this was a kind of a baseline study that we did last year. No one had been to the Nassau Harbor the home base of Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet, Calico Jack Rackham, had permission to dive there. So it was a real big chance that we’d find nothing, go home with egg on our face.

So it was really sort of baseline, could anything survive? And the very fact of finding six shipwrecks was just astonishing. So we did some, you know, some basic analysis, but you know, really there’s n- there’s still a lot to do s- uh, to try and pinpoint whether this is the final resting place of the most iconic pirate shipwreck in time.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so this book is from 2024, and as you said, you co-authored it with Rex Cohen. It’s called The Pirate King: The Strange Adventures of Henry A- Avery and the Birth of the Golden Age of Piracy. I have to admit, Blackbeard’s the only one in that group that you mentioned that I have any familiarity with. Can you tell us more about Henry Avery?

KINGSLEY: That’s right. It was a mystery to me. A whole bunch of coincidences sort of converged for me to get interested in piracy and one of them was I was doing a special issue on pirates for my magazine, Wreck Watch, and I was talking to an old salt, another sort of wreck hunter called Rex Cowan, um, about something completely different, and my mind just wandered.

I said, “Here, Rex, do you know anything about pirates?” And he ran upstairs and came down with these dusty files, said, “Here, they’re yours. We found Henry Avery.” I said, “What do you mean you found Henry Avery?” Henry Avery was a sea dog in 1696 he stole a ship called the Charles II, made it the Fancy, went over to India, and ripped off the Gunsway, which was one of the biggest treasure ships in the world, belonged to the Mughal Emperor of India, and it had 600,000 pounds worth of gold, silver and precious gems in it, worth a cool $149 million today. Um, so and then he goes to Nassau to hide low and divide the spoils and decide how he’s gonna keep his head on his head on his neck and disappear with his, with his ill-gotten gains. So he really is … Yeah, you’re right. A lot of people haven’t heard of Henry Avery, but ballads and poems of his life were being sung in taverns, you know, from Boston to London and in coffee shops, and this is the guy who lit the fuse and threw the grenade that really started the Golden Age of Piracy.

CHARKRABARTI: Okay, and so what is that Golden Age? And, and why at that time also?

KINGSLEY: Well, those are very, very tricky questions. So, you know, pirates had been doing legal piracy between 1701 and 1714. There was one of these endless wars between Britain, Spanish, and France and at the time the monarch gave all these sea dogs something called marks of letters, which let them be privateers.

It goes back to Sir Francis Drake which gave you permission to go to the other side of the world take enemy ships, keep most of their cargo or plunder, give the crown a little back, and it was a really good money earner. But then suddenly, in 1714, the war ends, and overnight 60% of the Royal Navy are let go.

Can you imagine going into the office, like next Monday, and the producer pulls you over and says, “Sorry, everyone in this building is fired because AI is taking over your jobs,” right?

CHAKRABARTI: Honestly, Sean it’s a daily fear these days.

KINGSLEY: But that’s essentially what happened. And the, the pirates, they were out of work.

They, they had no money. They had to put food on the table, and they were a little bit grumpy about it these, sorry, these sailors and for a lot of them were 20-somethings, high on testosterone. They knew the story about Henry Avery, the Pirate King, and the Caribbean. And also, they were aware that, you know, if you’re in the Royal Navy, you’re gonna get beaten up, whipped, bad food, kind of officers from Eton treating you very badly and a good chance of dying and never being paid. Whereas, if you go to the Caribbean and go on the account as a pirate, you could make 100 to 1000% more  than a regular sailor. So for a certain type of person who wasn’t chained down by family commitments, it was a bit of a no-brainer.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. Oh, so many questions to ask you, Sean. I promise that later in the show we’ll get into sort of the, the technical aspects of marine archeology, because those are equally fascinating. But I want to stick with sort of this golden age of piracy for, for a little while longer because, I mean, is this golden age part of the reason why there are, I guess that’s what you said earlier, that that’s why there’s so many wrecks in Nassau Harbor.

KINGSLEY: So, between, say, 1696 and 1720, 4,000 pirates did more damage to world trade  than the wars between England, France, and Spain and you know, I was in the Bahamas. I was collaborating with a team called Allen Exploration run by a philanthropist and an explorer called Carl Allen, who’d found a Spanish galleon called the Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas, the Lady of Wonders, and they were doing amazing science and finding pottery, gold jewelry, just incredible stuff.

And, and I transit back through Nassau back to England, and I go walking downtown Nassau, and I knew this was it. This was ground zero for Blackbeard and Anne Bonny and these larger-than-life cats that we see on the big screen in Hollywood. And I just thought, “Well, where, where are they?” You can buy some Blackbeard cake and get a rubbish T-shirt, but apart from that, there’s not one brick from a ruin.

And I asked a colleague of mine, Dr. Michael Pateman, who was the co-director on the New Providence Pirates Expedition with me, I said, “Hey, Michael, you know, what’s happened to all these shipwrecks? We know when Woodes Rogers, the great pirate hunter, came from England to Nassau in July 17, 18, he saw 700 pirates gnashing their teeth and waving their cutlasses on the shore, and the remains of 40 ships which the pirates have taken just becoming wrecks on the shoreline.

Where were they?”  And Michael said to me, “Well, you’re not gonna believe this. No one has ever gone looking before.” Well, if that wasn’t a kind of ingredient to go on an adventure, I don’t know what was.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow, okay. So we have about a minute before our first break, Sean. Again, I suppose since these stories were known, about the pirates, and as you said, they scuttled their ships because they, once they had plundered them, well, they’re not their ships.

Once they had plundered the ships they had pirated, they didn’t want them to be I guess, taken back or whatnot. Why hadn’t there been more formal archaeological investigation of what was under the water there?

KINGSLEY: Yes, so Nassau is quite a dangerous space. You’ve got 200,000 ton cruise ships entering and exiting. You’ve got all kinds of traffic going on. They don’t want kind of murky archaeologists sticking their nose and say, “Sorry, you, you can’t go on your cruise ship ’cause we’re doing really important science.” So that’s, that’s one of the real reasons. The other is a lot of people thought there was nothing left.

Huge parts of the harbor have been dredged to accommodate these mega cruise ships. So I think there was also a kind of a trust issue, an assumption that it’s all gone.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: And, Sean, I’m gonna play just another moment from your documentary, The Mystery of the Pirate King’s Treasure. And, you had talked earlier about the fact that it’s actually quite difficult to do archeological science, not just because it’s underwater in Nassau Harbor, but there’s those giant cruise ships.

The place has been dredged out and also it’s a highly, highly developed harbor. So here’s a clip from the documentary where you find evidence of a shipwreck underneath a modern marina construction. We’re gonna hear, your colleague, filmmaker, and diver Chris Atkins first.

CHRIS ATKINS [TAPE]: We went down there, and we found wood, and there were sort of- there were some clay pipes still and just, just a ton of evidence.

So it’s nice to see that, that even though all the construction has happened, that there still is some remains of that shipwreck. And, yeah, what a, what an exciting find. What an exciting day.

KINGSLEY [TAPE]: Well, I’ll tell you something right here. Nobody has ever found pipes like these on a shipwreck. These are…First of all, these are really unique tobacco pipes. Yes, that’s great. You don’t find them very often.

MICHAEL [TAPE]: Well, Sean, those are stuff you globally demand not just in the Bahamas.

KINGSLEY [TAPE]: Yeah, yeah. Wow. Across the world- Really nice … nobody’s ever found these on a shipwreck.

CHAKRABARTI: So Sean, tell me, how once you got the permission, how did you go about kind of deciding the places to investigate first?

Because you’re not just sort of, you know, zigzagging across the harbor, I presume looking down and keeping your fingers crossed.

KINGSLEY: Yeah, no, there’s a little bit more method in the madness than that really. Well, we looked at, we looked at satellite photos, aerial images, and you could clearly see how, you know, the largest part of the anchorage where the harbor ships would, uh, where the pirate ships would have, would have been at anchor is completely gone.

In fact, scooped out to make an entire man-made island called Arawak Cay, which was a really big worry. The harbor looks tiny, you know, when you’re at la- Yeah … when you’re at home drinking your coffee and looking at maps, and then you get there, and you go, “Oh my goodness, this is huge.” You could spend a lifetime and find nothing.

If you want to find shipwrecks, one thing I’ve learned is go and talk to the fishermen. Because, you know, they spend so much time on the water. If it’s down there, they’ll know about it. Probably they won’t tell you because they protect, because shipwrecks become artificial reefs, and reefs attracts fish, and that’s what they’re after.

So we were very lucky. We joined up with some very good people, and a lot of that is due to Dr. Michael Pateman, who is a Bahamian, and is very well respected on the island. He’s now head of the Antiquities Corporation in The Bahamas.  So, you know, thanks to these people, we got some hotspots to go and dive.

And it was low tech. We needed to go there just with some scuba, take photos, record some material, and just try and ground proof whether the myth of the pirates w- was true or fantasy.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So by the way, the finds that you, that you make, the discoveries that you make, I presume they belong to the government of The Bahamas then?

KINGSLEY: Yeah, it’s a really good point, Meghna. The Bahamas is one of the kind of richest waters for underwater maritime traffic and shipwrecks in the world, largely because the Florida Strait was used by Spanish galleons and English traders as their highway, so a lot of traffic went through it.

It was really important to us when we put in the license the Bahamas have suffered terribly, terribly from treasure hunters who’ve gone and looted wrecks. So the Mara Vietes that Allen Exploration are working on was a lot of stuff had been taken by treasure hunters, legally, I will say, at the time and just ended up in auction houses and Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and we know nothing about it.

So, there’s a real sort of necessity to try and save this material. And we made it very clear to the government we want to work with Bahamian talent and we’re here as custodians of your heritage, and anything that we find will stay and belong to the people of the Bahamas.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I’m glad that you, that you mention that because this is always an issue, whether it’s marine or terrestrial archeology in terms of cultural heritage and, and ownership of finds, and also just the, the enriching of the cultural, the historical knowledge of the people who are living there now, and who gets to own that.

So, I presume, though, is it more complicated when we’re dealing with underwater archeology? Because maybe it’s straightforward in a place like Nassau Harbor, where that is, those are not international waters, right? They’re clearly under the ownership and jurisdiction of, of a nation. But unlike on land-based archeology, where you always kind of know who owns the patch of land that you’re digging on, most of the planet, most of our blue planet is international waters, right? I don’t even know if there are any rules that apply there to underwater sort of archeological investigation.

KINGSLEY: Yeah, that’s a real hot potato right there. Essentially anything that goes out from shore to 12 nautical miles was, is, is within state waters, and that belongs to the state.

And you’re right, once you get beyond that international waters, you’re in the bad lands of finders keepers, which is all good until the kind of ’80s or let’s say the ’90s, when it was safe and, and nobody can get as it. But there’s been a real kind of hyper-development of technology and robots and drones.

So now it’s actually uncomplicated to go and dive down as far as you want, limitless, to go and look for material and still technically anything there is finders keepers. But laws are changes, and countries are trying to extend the UN Law of the Sea Convention, which caters for ownership of mineral rights, oil, gas, mining, et cetera,  to cultural remains as well.

And of course if it’s a sovereign ship, if it’s a warship, it still belongs to the original state. So, if an American submarine went down in the South China Sea with nukes on it, there’s bilateral treaty that says, nobody can touch that. It still belongs to America and weirdly someone in the act added to warships, submarines, spaceships, and airplane, wooden historical shipwrecks as if they kind of got black boxes or secrets on them.

This is a very strange phenomenon. But that’s where we find ourselves. The law is trying to catch up with the technology.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, that’s interesting. Okay. So let’s go back to, to The Bahamas. In sort of thinking about, about the waters there at a distance, I’m conjuring up the stereotypical postcard images in my mind, right?

Like just crystal clear blue waters, as you said, tropical, so  reefs, whether real or artificial. I mean, take us down into one of the places where you discovered a pirate wreck. What would we see through your, through your mask, through your goggles? What does it look like?

KINGSLEY: Yeah. You’re kind of right and kind of not so much because Nassau Harbor, it’s got all this traffic churning up the sediment and also it has very big riptides that flush the harbor, uh, twice a day. So really you’ve got to be in the sweet spot and dive when there’s none of that tide, otherwise you’ll go down and before you know it, you’re half a mile away with the currents.

And that means that the visibility oddly can be really quite poor, a bit more like the English Channel, however, the first clip that you showed when we went off to the east of Nassau, we got there and the water was a bit choppy and it was everything exactly as you say that you want in the Caribbean.

You know, beautiful skies not a building to be seen anywhere. We put on our gear, went down and bang, it was just infinite visibility. I mean, just, I kind of, you know, I’ve never dived really in those sort of waters. And, and despite, I was being kind of a, a little bit facetious at the beginning, I have hyperventilated underwater when I found a Greek war helmet of the 5th century BC, but actually I’m quite cerebral. I click in my mind straight away, these are the questions we’ve got, and we’ve got a tank’s worth of air to try and prove them. And that particular vessel, immediately we landed on two cannons, and we could see that one of them was a swivel gun, and a swivel gun was the weapon of choice for pirates because they put it on the upper deck.

It was a kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, anti-personnel weapon, where you could just rake incoming enemy and cause mayhem rather than sink a ship. And it was a very narrow ballast heap. It wasn’t, clearly wasn’t a merchant vessel. It looked like a sloop, which was again, the pirate ship of choice, small and very fast.

You know, it could get enemy ships, it could outrun English war, uh, man-of-war. And then Michael came up with a handful of lead musket shots. So what I love about sort of what we get to do as a privilege is I love that interplay between the past, history, and nature. You know, and that particularly wreck was really quite beautiful in that regard.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. You know, you said something a second ago which I hadn’t thought of, that unlike land-based archeology where, you know, you can have a team of, I don’t know, whether it’s a handful to dozens of people working all day long. You have a physical constraint  and when you’re, when you’re doing scuba based exploration, right?

And that is you’ve got to come up when the air runs out. Yeah, you can swap tanks and stuff, but it is much more time constrained. And so with that in mind, how do you try to get the most out of the limited time that you have on any particular day when you’re doing these dives?

KINGSLEY: Yeah. I mean, at the beginning it’s just ground truthing. Is there a wreck there? What is its character? Let’s get some visual coverage. And then, you know, we might burn through two tanks maximum, and then really, you’re done. So, you know, for some mortals that’ll be two hours, and for hyperventilators like me a little bit less. And then you, you make a plan.

You would sit with Chris and with Michael, and we come up with a plan. So the next thing when we went back to some sites is we’d take a, a photo mosaic. We’d fly over the top, for when I say fly with our fins and scuba vertically over the wreck, taking photos, which then back home we’d stitch together in software, and we can see a bird’s-eye view of what the ship looked like and what its layout of it was.

Michael found some of these lead musket balls, but apart from that we really weren’t doing any excavation. We didn’t have underwater vacuum cleaners called dredges to suck up the sediment. We did a lot more hand fanning when we found the wooden hull because, you know, we needed to ground truth and find out what the date of this thing was.

So that was a slightly different situation. Yeah. But yeah, you’re right, you know, very limited. It was a three-week project, but we did exceed expectations.

CHAKRABARTI: I understand that a lot of the techniques used on, land-based archeology, some of them are, are also used on marine archeology where, you know, you might even, like string out a grid, right?

In order to sort of to be sure you locate precisely where every single thing that you discover is relative to other objects o- on, on the wreck. That might seem familiar to people. But also like with land-based archeology, I feel like technology has utterly transformed what you can do in a non-destructive way, right?

I mean, people have heard of how LIDAR, on land, has been used to, you know, uncover the fact that there may be tens of thousands of undiscovered buildings, say, still in the South American jungles. So you have similar technology for marine archeology? I mean, you talked about robots and drones. Do, are they equipped with, uh, the capability of say, you know, sort of flying or, or swimming around wrecks and then using, I don’t know if it’s LIDAR, but some kind of technology to create a really detailed map that which then you can, through computer technology, kind of almost do virtual fly-throughs?

KINGSLEY: Yeah, absolutely. Geophysics is a game changer. So if we didn’t have inside information about where some of these wrecks are and we were kind of working blind, we would have had to bring in first side scan sonar, which bounces sound off the seabed and looks for anomalies.

Very effective, basic tool of underwater archeology. Then we’d wanna bring in a magnetometer just to see what kind of magnetic spike is it. Is it an oil can or could it be, I don’t know, cannon or a big ballast heap? There’s also multibeam, which is very cool, very effective, makes a very quickly a 3D map of the seabed showing the topography and it has, it has such resolution that you can pick out cannon and small objects on the seabed. And we’ve also got ground-penetrating imaging, technology, which gives you an idea of how deep any cultural remains have. Now, we didn’t bring any of that in. We went, you know I’ve spent, oh, the last 15 years working with very sophisticated robots down to 5,000 meters.

And it was really nice actually to come back to my roots and do, you know, get my hands dirty and prove that I can still scuba tank and do underwater archeology in shallow water. But what you’re talking about,  we need now when we go back to go from low tech to high tech, and bring in the big guns to map the rest of the harbor and see what’s still down there.

CHAKRABARTI: So that would be sort of macro scale mapping using technology. I’m wondering if there’s a smaller scale technology that you use on a site itself once you’ve discovered that there’s a wreck there.

KINGSLEY: It depends really what is the depth of the sediment. You know, if the sediment is quite shallow, it’s quite, you can use a dredge and you can suck up that sand and as you say, put your grid over it.

Context is key. Everything is about context. On land, you know, what, what is this pot? What are these finds in relation to a wall? It’s exactly the same underwater. What part of the ship are we in? Okay, we’re in the bows, actually want to work in the stern because that’s where the kitchen and the galley and the captain’s locker would have been, and that’s where all these great artifacts are, which will give us a real kind of social indication of what the origin and nationality of the crew were.

CHAKRABARTI: So what about the actual remnants of the ships themselves? For artifacts, as we, as you just talked about, they can be and are removed for further research. But as you said, the ships are frequently now artificial reefs, which have become part of the marine ecosystem there or the I guess the remnants of the hulls. Do those stay underwater?

KINGSLEY: Yeah. I mean, recovering actual wooden hulls, you’ve got to have a really, really good reason to do it because it’s, one, it’s super expensive to do the lift. Two, you’ve got to build a museum and three, you’ve got to get curators. And, and once you’ve brought up something and you put polyethylene glycol in polyethylene glyceryl to sort of stabilize it’s really not stable. It needs ongoing maintenance. So there are points in time where really a lot of countries for sort of nationalistic reasons have wanted to recover ships. I’m thinking about the Vasa in Sweden, King Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, in England, the so-called Jesus Ship in the Sea of Galilee in Israel.

You know, if there’s any billionaires out there who would like to lift the potential and fancy and study it, you know, it can be done. It’s all about money. The Chinese are recovering Song and Qing dynasty ships in their entirety. They’re lifting the entire ships, building museums around them, and then excavating them as if they’re on land.

But today there’s a kind of, it’s disproved of to do really sort of actually excavation and recovery underwater. There’s a sort of feeling that we’ve disturbed the ocean so much that we should leave it in situ for future generations.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: And let’s continue our conversation with Sean Kingsley. He’s a marine archeologist and historian. We have a little bit more of the documentary he and his team are working on. It’s called The Mystery of the Pirate King’s Treasure, and here’s a clip of Sean talking about what he’s seen underwater just as he’s hauling himself up out and back onto the boat.

KINGSLEY [TAPE]: There’s a shipwreck there. It’s definitely old. It’s definitely slightly peculiar. I’m not sure how big it is. Not sure how old it is, but it could easily be 18th century. There’s, uh, iron concretions down there, and the first thing I see when I go down there, two iron concretions. X marks the spot, seriously. Two cannons. I’ve taken dimensions. Larger cannon, 226 centimeters facing southeast. And then small cannon, 107 centimeters. 107 centimeters is a deck gun, a swivel gun, and that is exactly what pirates used.

CHAKRABARTI: Sean, you’re also the founder of WreckWatch Magazine and co-founder of WreckWatch TV. We’ll, we’ll have links to both of those, by the way, at our website, onpointradio.org. But I understand that at one time in your past you were actually afraid of swimming? Is that right?

KINGSLEY: I was wondering where you were going there for a minute, Meghna.  I was a hopeless romantic when I was a kid, and our parents would always take us round castles, and I was always looking at the ground, seeing if I could find something. I loved discoveries and when I found about shipwrecks, you know, obviously you’re gonna have to get wet and go underwater. But yeah, I was that kid even in swimming pools, where I was swimming around. I kind of had this unreal sensation that maybe a shark would bite my foot off in a swimming pool. But, I’m still here and telling the tale.

CHAKRABARTI: Not an unreasonable fear. I mean, in terms of water. Maybe the swimming pool is a step too far, but I’m glad that did not inhibit you in the long run.

KINGSLEY: I was very young. I was very young.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, but that actually brings up a really important point because, the ocean is mighty, right? And we are just tiny, tiny creatures in the face of talking about riptides that you have to deal with, and reduced visibility, and all of … I’m not, I’m not saying that you’re gonna get eaten by a shark when you’re on these digs but it’s not I’m just trying to think how do I describe the awe that the oceans inspire in me? I mean, it’s not, they’re not locations to be taken, to be taken lightly. And so there are considerable dangers, or aren’t there when you’re actually doing these explorations?

CHAKRABRTI: I think you’re right. It’s incredibly humbling to work in the sea, and you’re aware of your own mortality and a, a kind of a splinter on an entire plank in terms of importance and, and magnitude. But you’ve got to minimize risk. A and we were very fortunate in The Bahamas, all those things that you said, including the real risk of sharks, which of course we, we respected. We were going into their domain.  But you have safety divers, and the safety divers were great.

They had our back. And I suppose I’ve been quite lucky in the last sort of 10, 15 years working with robots. You’re, you’re on a research ship, so the worst that can happen is you lose a multimillion dollar robot, which, you know, investors aren’t gonna be so happy about. But I remember being on the English Channel on a, on a pirate wreck, a French corsair wreck of the mid-18th century.

We’re waiting for the sediment to clear. This seven-ton robot was parked on the seabed waiting to see what this wreck was, and suddenly over the radio the captain said “Incoming plane in attack formation. “So you never know what you’re gonna get, in the bad lands of the ocean, so preparation, preparation, preparation.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. How many shipwrecks do you think are out there planet-wide?

KINGSLEY: It is said, and this is the kind of the conformity figure, three million shipwrecks, and I would say that less than 3% have been found so far.

CHAKRABARTI: I understand that you’ve explored, uh, more than 350 so far, so you just need 10,000 more lifetimes, Sean.

KINGSLYE: It’s a bit of a fake figure because a lot of them are going to be modern steel shipwrecks and every wreck that’s down there we know so little. It’s like a new planet. And some of those finds could be incredibly important. So for instance, we know of hundreds of Roman shipwrecks with amphoras on them.

We really don’t need to know much more about the trade in Spanish oil across the Mediterranean. But there are other subjects like the slave trade and piracy where we’re just scratching the surface.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I want to get to more to, about piracy and definitely about the slave trade because you wrote a book about that. But, sticking with how little we actually know about these, these wrecks, this is one thing about our planet’s oceans that will always just kind of strike me into silence, right? Because there’s two things that all life on Earth rely on, and that’s the sun, right, and our oceans. And yet you, I’m sure you’re familiar with that fact, Sean, that we know less about what’s going on under the surface of the water than we do about the surface of the moon. And so I wonder if that kind if that’s one of the things that continues to inspire you, that you could, every single discovery that you make, it’s likely that maybe no one has ever seen it before because we know so little about what’s happening on the sea floor.

KINGSLEY: This is one of my sort of pet subjects, and it’s one that’s gonna get me in trouble, I’m afraid. Let’s just hope Elon Musk isn’t listening, right?

CHAKRABARTI: [LAUGHS]

KINGSLY: It does bug me. It does bug me. I call it the little green man test. I mean, we go up into space, and I appreciate it’s not an either/or situation. We go up into space, and we meet an alien, a little green man, and shake their hand. What are we actually going to learn from that? And you think about the billions and billions and billions that goes into space exploration, and it’s awesome, and it’s wonderful. Yet here we are. We’ve got one planet that we live on.

71% of the planet is ocean, as, as you sort of pointed out, and we know less about it than the surface of the moon. Yet I think about, one doesn’t wanna be a bit too preachy, right? But, Sigmund Freud used to say, “To understand the adult, you have to study the child.” And I would say, “Well, if you want to understand the here and now, you’ve got to study the infancy of humanity, you know, where we came from.”

And I think of ships like the Titanic, 1912, the most famous ship in the world, you know. People think of it about this kind of playground of the rich and famous, the Titan sub that went down there with billionaires on it, and very tragically never came back. And the 8,000 cigars that were packed onto the Titanic in its last voyage, and the, the mirrored room that looked more like something from the Palace of Versailles.

But actually, they forget that that was part of the American Dream. You know, in 1912, the year when Titanic sank, 2 million people, immigrants went across to America. Now- There’s all of that. And I would say, you know, we have a necessity to study these things while they’re there. And Titanic is falling apart. It’s being eaten by microbes. And if you can see a wreck, it is falling apart.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

KINGSLEY: On Titanic, there are these things called rusticles, which are these huge nine-meter-long chunks of, uh, corroded iron that are falling off the ship, and basically microbes eating the steel and creating a new bacteria waste, which studies have found actually have antibiotic microbes.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

KINGSLEY: They’ve even suspected that the microbes, for whatever reason, the unique microbes that we know nothing about so far, endangered species, new species rather could have cancer-healing properties. So I would say not only should we study the sunken past, we have a obligation to do so.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I’m a fan of space exploration, but you will get no pushback from me on the broader point that you’re making, actually, Sean.

KINGSLEY: Listen, my wife wants to go and live on Mars and take my kid with her. I have pointed out there’s no Wi-Fi up there.

CHAKRABARTI: But honestly,  my take is that one form of human exploration need not be pitted against the other.

What we should stop doing is wasting billions of dollars on things like illegal wars.

KINGSLEY: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: And instead, imagine if that, all that money went into both improving the quality of life for your average person and also funding more marine archeology and space exploration.

KINGSLEY: I just put my cap out because we, compared to space, we are stuck, marine archeology, the bottom of the marine sciences food chain.

CHAKRABARTI: For now. But hopefully not forever.

KNGSLEY: It’s true.No, you’re right. It’s a really exciting time for what we do.

CHAKRABARTI: I mean, it just seems also just fundamentally cool, right? Like, if you like to be out on the oceans, if you have any interest in anything that’s happening underwater, what a fantastic career to actually have. But do you know, I’m looking at the clock, and I only have about seven minutes-ish left with you, Sean, and there’s another aspect of your previous explorations I do want to talk to you about, because you had mentioned it, and that is you have done dives on sunken slave ships. In fact, in 2022, you co-authored a book called Enslaved: The Sunken History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Can you talk to me about that?

KINGSLEY: Yeah. So I was on a project with a team from Florida called Odyssey Marine Exploration. They found about 200 shipwrecks in the English Channel.  And one of them, a few of them were really exciting, but one of them had a large cluster of cannon on it, and elephant tusks and what are called copper manilla bracelets.

And copper manilla bracelets are a kind of exchange that we use to barter for all sorts of goods in West Africa including human beings. So in 1500, Portuguese traders would exchange 20 of these copper chunks for a human being. So I was immediately aware of how important this wreck was and what we might do with it.

And fast-forward, I was introduced to Simcha Jacobovici, who was the, the brains and director before Enslaved with Samuel L. Jackson. And he asked me to get involved, which, you know, was a really interesting experience. You know, bear in mind that we were writing this book when the Black Lives Matter movement was erupting and statues of Edward Colston being thrown down and put into the water.

So it was really interesting to be able to bring that ship back to life.

CHAKRABARTI: I was wondering if, is this a case in which the place that you’re doing the exploration is also a grave site? Because does that happen in some of your, your marine digs for these ships?

KINGSLEY: I think you’ve got to approach every wreck as if it is a kind of grave site.

Something awful, tragedy happened when all the crew were lost to this site. But when you’re dealing with ships linked to the slave trade, your mind automatically goes to the 12.5 million West Africans who were trafficked, the 1.7 million men, women, and children who died in the Middle Passage going to plantations in the Americas to produce sugar, tobacco, coffee, for the West.

So you’re, you’re aware of all of that. But the reality is you don’t find human remains very often underwater because of general pressures and things with gases that they do to the human body.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. That brings to mind the fact that in some other of your other explorations you’ve done, I think you found some rather surprising things because it makes total sense to me that you would find on a shipwreck things made of stone, metals, et cetera.

But I understand that are, there are some wrecks that you’ve explored where you’ve actually found things like letters and photographs or pictures?

KINGSLEY: Yeah, you got to remember that before the modern day, the only way to move objects and ideas was by ship. It was the World Wide Web, web and social media and text all rolled into one.

CHAKRABARTI: I guess I’m wondering how they were preserved. That’s what I’m curious about.

KINGSLEY: Yeah. So I was part of a team off Ireland that found the SS Gairsoppa of 4,700 meters deep. And that went down with 2,700 Indian bars of silver on it. It was the biggest loss of silver in World War II. But they also found some sludge, and they said, “Sean, you’re an archeologist.

Deal with the sludge.” And they paid for it to be conserved, and it turned out to be 700 letters written from India in December 1940 by Maharajas, teachers, and, and all kinds of people, which we preserved, transcribed, and wrote a book about. And people go, “Yeah, how can this be preserved?” Well, at that kind of depth, it’s like putting something in a fridge freezer.

There’s no oxygen. Hmm. There’s no light, and it’s covered by ton upon ton of objects and silt which kind of seal it in place. And that is one of the miracles of what we do. Metals and organics so brilliantly preserved.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so it really depends on the depth and the, I mean, you were saying mud, right? So, like, what, what the ship actually sinks into. Really, really interesting. So we have a couple minutes left, Sean, and you had mentioned this before, but I’d like to hear you say more about why you think it is so critical for us to, discover, explore, understand the part of the human, or parts of the human story that are to be told by these three million wrecks that are, that are under the water. What can they tell us that other forms of history and archeology can’t?

KINGSLEY: I think it’s really just, just the tangibility.  Every wreck, as I said, is kind of like a new planet. There’s a tendency today sort of being pursued by UNESCO that we should look at these wrecks and leave bubbles.

But you know I just think it’s kind of counterintuitive to the human spirit. You know, surely we’re here to boldly go where no man or woman has gone before and, and push the knowledge of humanity. And I think that the slave wrecks are, are a case in point. You know, those kind of figures, 12.5 million people trafficked, 1.7 million people died, you can’t compute that.

I mean, how many, how many football stadiums of people is that? At some point the brain kind of fries. But when you’re touching these objects and we saw that with quite a lot of the Black divers on this project, they started actually kind of, you know, rather than sort of having a history lesson, sort of really getting, “Okay, this is where my ancestors came from, and this is what happened to them.” And in a sense it almost sort of gives a sort of an ability to heal, you know, one of our, one of our Black contributors said. History doesn’t repeat itself, but there’s an awful lot of lessons down there that we can learn from. And I’m thinking about the pirates again, where Henry Avery picked up all his treasure was at the Bab el-Mandeb, at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, the Gateway of Tears, and history repeats itself. That’s exactly where the Houthi rebels are operating today, one of these great checkpoints. So I’m not surprised.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.