DUBLIN, IRELAND—Underwater archaeologist Connie Kelleher, now of the Ireland National Monuments Service, has been collecting information about the seventeenth-century pirates that were based in Munster, Ireland. She has examined two sets of stairs carved out of cliff rock, one near “Dutchman’s Cove” that also had niches for candles or lanterns, and one near “Gokane Point” that led to a subterranean cavern with a waterway. Pirates and smugglers would have been able to reach the sea in the dark with these staircases. Kelleher also wants to look for the pirate fleet destroyed by the Dutch in Crookhaven Harbor in 1614. “Certainly part of the lower hulls and its cargoes could be there—things that were in the hold of the [salvaged] ships. Similarly, if a ship exploded, then the material could be scattered, and we could be dealing with a wider archaeological site,” she told Live Science.
