Musket balls and a burnt hull: evidence of real pirates of the Caribbean found in Bahamas

The film-maker Chris Atkins with the charred wooden hull of an 18th-century shipwreck. Photograph: Wreckwatch TV

The first shipwrecks linked to the real pirates of the Caribbean in the Bahamas have been discovered by an international team co-directed by a British marine archaeologist.

Blackbeard and Calico Jack Rackham were among pirates who, between the 1690s and 1720s, turned Nassau on the island of New Providence into a hideout where they plotted their next heists on the high seas and divided up their plunder.