By Jacob Fehr
THEY SAY that dead men tell no tales, but filmmaker Chris Atkins of Port Dover hopes to share some of the stories lost to time around Nassau, The Bahamas, the city once known as a pirate republic, as he films Mystery of the Pirate King’s Treasure.
The documentary will cover an investigation of the former freebooter stronghold and nearby waters, conducted by the New Providence Pirates Expedition, revealing historical facts about the city, its inhabitants, and their activities.
A focus of the investigation will be searching for the wreck of the Fancy, a 46-gun frigate captained by Henry Avery, known as the pirate king, which he used to plunder a Grand Mughal fleet for loot worth more than $100-million today. Experts believe Avery scuttled the ship off Nassau in 1696, likely to cover his crimes.
To film the documentary, Mr. Atkins will join researchers as they look high and low, on land and in water, for traces of the truth behind famous legends.
“My role with this project is, as the filmmaker, I’m going to be documenting our experience and our adventures,” he said.
Once complete, the documentary will be released through Wreckwatch TV. Wreckwatch TV is a YouTube channel where Mr. Atkins produces videos about shipwrecks and adjacent topics with Dr. Sean Kingsley, a historian, marine archaeologist, and shipwreck expert.
Mr. Atkins has experience diving and filming underwater, but for this documentary, he said he’s “not sure what to expect yet.” One reason is that he’s never dived in the Caribbean before, which he suspects will have clearer water than he’s used to, depending on the conditions.
Another factor is that the New Providence Pirates Expedition is the first project to receive permission from the Antiquities, Monuments, and Museums Corporation of The Bahamas “to do an official search” in the waters around Nassau for the Fancy.
That means when Mr. Atkins is underwater, he’ll search while he films rather than following someone else or exploring an already discovered wreck.
“[It’s] not something that I get to do often,” he said.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he’ll be searching blindly. He said they “have to identify a target first, then dive to confirm.”
As the Fancy has been submerged for 329 years, Mr. Atkins said it and other wrecks they may find could be hidden or full of aquatic lifeforms. They might not even look like ships anymore.
“A ship that old, the wood could be gone,” he said. “It’s not like in the movies where you see this ship you’re going to swim inside… it’ll most likely be covered in coral and other debris, if it’s even above the seabed where we can see it.”
He explained that he’s keen to produce Mystery of the Pirate King’s Treasure because he wants to elucidate the history of piracy in Nassau as it was rather than as we know it.
“I think it’s really exciting and really important, because while in movies and novels and TV we think of The Bahamas and we think of Pirates of the Caribbean and Jack Sparrow, there is a real history there. And I think with the New Providence Pirates Expedition we can tell the true stories of The Bahamas without all the extra stuff that say, Hollywood, would put [into] it,” he said.
“I think just historically and culturally, it brings these stories to the forefront.”
He added that the region’s real history is “not often spoken about,” and he’s received thanks from a native Bahamian for trying to bring it to light. Some storytellers prefer to leave the ghastly aspects of piracy in the shadows.
“There’s some pretty awful stuff that people endured,” he said of crimes pirates were known to commit.
Mr. Atkins is no stranger to presenting grim realities and the accounts of people who have experienced tragedy and horror. He was in Israel on October 7, 2023, the day of Hamas’ attacks on Israel that launched the recent Gaza war, and has since directed a documentary about it, Dying to Live: The October 7th Massacre, which was selected for the 2025 Beverly Hills Film Festival and screened at TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
One of his past films, Freedom Fighter, is about religious persecution, following the story of Majed El Shafie, who was tortured and sentenced to death for his beliefs. Mr. Atkins also wrote
Following in Felix’s Footsteps: A Hero of the Holocaust, a film about Felix Opatowski’s experience joining an uprising in Auschwitz during WW2.
“It’s interesting when I think about it, that most of my career I’m telling these kinds of stories… but for some strange reason, if it happened 300 years ago, it’s exciting, it’s adventurous, and you love the horror of what these people faced… I’m not sure why that is.”
He believes that capturing these kinds of stories on film with “the living people telling us what they went through” makes them more real for viewers than the historical horrors one reads about or finds buried under Hollywood glam. Viewers take tragedy more seriously when it’s presented to them firsthand and fresh rather than removed and romanticized.
It’s because he’s interested in raw reality, warts and all, that he sees the search for Avery’s Fancy as “more of a true crime investigation” than a simple shipwreck dive.
“He could be one of the only successful pirates because he was never caught, so there’s a real mystery about him as a person, as a legend, and his treasure [from] the biggest heist ever pulled on the high seas,” he said.
It remains to be seen what Mr. Atkins’ camera may cover or discover in Nassau or beneath the waves of the surrounding Atlantic Ocean, but he said it’s “the first of what we hope will be many searches” in the area.
o o o
“Go wherever people want to send you”
Port Dover connection
CHRIS Atkins said he’s always lived in the area and grew up between Simcoe and Delhi. Following 14 years in Townsend, his family moved to Port Dover nine years ago.
“We were at that point where our daughters were fully grown up, and we wanted something different. We wanted to move to an area that was more of a town than Townsend,” he said. He explained that since his family often spent time around Port Dover, it made sense to move here.
“We love it in Dover.”
Mr. Atkins wasn’t sure what he wanted to do after finishing high school, but he had an apprenticeship with Dean Johnston at Video Business Strategies. Around that time, local diver Mike Fletcher discovered the wreck of the Atlantic in Lake Erie and enlisted Mr. Johnston to help him cover it, who brought Mr. Atkins to assist.
“That was my very first camera job,” he said, adding that the experience inspired him to get a diving license not long after.
“It was that first day I went out on Mike Fletcher’s boat and I was filming him diving into the water I realized this is what I want to do with the rest of my life.”
It took him some time to find his footing as a professional, as “it wasn’t so easy” finding work initially. He filmed weddings on weekends and worked at Sobeys and Fernlea Flowers. But he remained open to opportunities presented to him.
“I find when people ask me how to go about it, I say, ‘Get a camera and go wherever people want to send you.’”
His flexibility eventually paid off when a group asked him to travel to Siberia to document Indigenous peoples’ travels on the tundra by reindeer sleigh. While cutting his teeth in the industry, he functioned as a “service provider,” someone who would “often wear many hats,” doing writing, filming, photography, and anything else asked of him.
After Siberia, he travelled to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and India to document religious persecution. He’s written and directed multiple documentaries on the topic.
Over the past 20 years, he’s spent considerable time working in Israel. While there, a mutual friend, Dr. Kurt Raveh, suggested he contact Dr. Sean Kingsley, with whom he would go on to start Wreckwatch TV. Mr. Atkins said he liked Dr. Kingsley’s Wreckwatch magazine, and the duo quickly formed a fruitful partnership, making videos.
“We found that our audience really likes the actual adventures… people really seem to respond to us going out on expeditions and dives that they can follow us on,” he said.
Today, he sees himself as a filmmaker and can freely choose his projects. Whereas projects he’s previously worked on were managed by networks with control over the final product, Wreckwatch TV gives him and Dr. Kingsley the freedom to “tell the stories we find interesting and tell them how we think they should be told.”
To pay for the production of Mystery of the Pirate King’s Treasure, Wreckwatch TV has started its first crowdfunding campaign. Mr. Atkins said he and Dr. Kingsley hope their audience will help support them so they can tell the story “without someone over our shoulders telling us what to do.” If the initiative succeeds, they may do more like it.
Decades after starting his career, Mr. Atkins remains passionate about his work.
“It’s an interesting way for me to get out there and be part of the history of all this. And I love sharing stories,” he said. “I feel like, hopefully, I’m contributing something for people to think about.”
“There’s real value in knowing and understanding our past and seeing the different viewpoints of people socially, culturally, politically, religiously, and trying to understand.”
For more information about Wreckwatch magazine and Wreckwatch TV, go to www.wreckwatchmag.com; for Wreckwatch TV videos, visit www.youtube.com/@wreckwatchtv. To learn more about or support the crowdfunding campaign behind Mystery of the Pirate King’s Treasure, see www.indiegogo.com/projects/mystery-of-the-pirate-king-s-treasure#/.
—
Originally published August 6, 2025
