Students Find Pirate Ships Lost 300 Years in Jamaica

For years, archaeologist AJ Van Slyke chased two pieces of paper: a 1722 letter from a pirate hunter and a 1724 chart of a drowned city. This March, that paper trail led him and two college students to the seafloor of Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, where history had been waiting for 300 years.

Van Slyke, a visiting lecturer at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, guided students Tom Laufenberg and Faith Johnson through the murky waters of Port Royal. They were searching for the long-lost ships of Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts, whose fleet vanished after a hurricane struck in 1722.

Port Royal itself is legendary. The infamous pirate city partially sank during an earthquake in 1692, becoming one of the world's largest underwater archaeological sites. In 2025, UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site.

Before anyone dove in, the team spent days aboard a survey boat scanning Kingston Harbour with sonar and marine magnetometers. Laufenberg compared it to an Easter egg hunt where every foot covered could reveal something they'd spent months researching.

Then it happened. Wrecks appeared on the sonar screen.

"When it came across the screen, I had that sense of 'I'm doing it, I'm really doing it,' way before I ever thought I would," said Laufenberg, who was about to start his senior year. These were the first shipwrecks he'd ever discovered.

The team surveyed roughly 21 acres over the sunken city and more than 140 acres near Salt Pan Hill. Discovery Channel's "Expedition Unknown" captured the entire expedition, which premiered in July 2026.

One discovery surprised everyone. The team identified HMS Aboukir, a British warship that exploded in 1881 and hadn't been located since. "It's all part of the one large story that Port Royal has," Laufenberg said.

The Ripple Effect

The expedition brought together archaeologists, students, and volunteers from the United States and Jamaica under a permit from the Jamaica National Heritage Trust. Students learned professional underwater archaeology techniques at UTC's Maritime Archaeological Field School before heading to Jamaica.

Hunter Whitehead, a UTC instructor and photogrammetry specialist, created detailed 3D models of the wrecks by stitching together hundreds of underwater photographs. These digital maps give researchers an accurate record to study for years to come.

Van Slyke's work with the Maritime Legacy Project: Jamaica includes searching for Christopher Columbus' final shipwrecks in St. Ann's Bay. "We're getting to discover and touch history for the first time and really prove a story that was only written down in a couple of sentences centuries ago," he said.

Only three confirmed pirate ships have ever been found, making this discovery potentially historic for maritime archaeology and our understanding of the Golden Age of Piracy.