“Few” is an understatement. To date, only two Golden Age pirate ships have been found and positively identified, the Whydah (in 1984) and the Golden Fleece (in 2009). Claims have been made on a few others, such as Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge and Kidd’s Quedagh Merchant, but definitive proof of those wrecks’ identities remains elusive.

There are a few major reasons it’s so hard to find a pirate ship. The first comes down to sheer numbers.

Even during the Golden Age of piracy, between 1650 and 1720, pirates were rare. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but according to British historian Peter Earle, in the period around 1700, “it seems unlikely that they ever had much more than twenty ships at any one time and less than two thousand men.” By contrast, there might have been as many as 80,000 sailors and navy men working on legitimate ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean at the time. It’s difficult to say how many pirate ships in total might have sailed during the seventy-year Golden Age, but the number, in any case, would have been small, perhaps a few thousand.

So, you have just a few thousand pirate ships. But remember, not all of them were lost or sunk. Some were captured by authorities; others were sold or traded by the pirates and put to lawful uses. So, the number of lost pirate ships is just a fraction of those that ever sailed.

The second reason it’s so hard to find a pirate ship lies in the shadowy nature of crime itself.

Stealth was the lifeblood of a pirate ship. To survive, she had to be invisible and anonymous. Pirate captains didn’t publish crew lists or file sailing plans, and they didn’t paint names on the hulls of their ships. Whenever possible, they sailed in secrecy. These measures helped pirates evade the forces that hunted them, but it also meant that when their ships sank, they didn’t just settle to the bottom; they disappeared from existence. No government went looking for them because the pirates belonged to no country. Witnesses to a sinking couldn’t have described the location precisely in any case, as measures of longitude were unreliable during the era. And if any pirates survived the ship’s demise, they weren’t going to report the loss to authorities.

The third reason it’s so hard to find a pirate ship is nature herself. These wooden ships almost always sank in a saltwater environment. It might take just a few years for mud and sand to bury a shipwreck completely.

Finally, the architecture of ship itself makes identification tough. Many pirate ships were stolen merchant ships, similar or identical to those that sailed honestly. Even if a person today were lucky enough to find or stumble across a sunken pirate ship (and even its treasure), it would be near impossible to prove it was a pirate ship rather than an ordinary merchant. Both pirates and merchant vessels carried cannons, weapons, coins, and similar artifacts. And while pirates did raise ominous and terrifying flags when they set upon prey, those would have been among the first artifacts to disappear, like pirates themselves, into time.

EDIT: I wrote about finding the Golden Fleece in [Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship] (http://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Hunters-Treasure-Obsession-Legendary/dp/1400063361).