17th-century pirate 'corsair' shipwreck discovered off Morocco's Barbary Coast

Wreck-hunters have discovered the remains of a small 17th-century pirate ship, known as a Barbary corsair, in deep water between Spain and Morocco.

The wreck is "the first Algiers corsair found in the Barbary heartland," maritime archaeologist Sean Kingsley, the editor-in-chief of Wreckwatch magazine and a researcher on the find, told Live Science.

The vessel was heavily armed and may have been heading to the Spanish coast to capture and enslave people when it sank, its discoverers said.

But it was carrying a cargo of pots and pans made in the North African city of Algiers, probably so that it could masquerade as a trading vessel.

Florida-based company Odyssey Marine Exploration (OME) located the shipwreck in 2005 during a search for the remains of the 80-gun English warship HMS Sussex, which was lost in the area in 1694.

"As so often happens in searching for a specific shipwreck we found a lot of sites never seen before," Greg Stemm, the founder of OME and the expedition leader, told Live Science in an email.

Related: 10 of the most notorious pirates in History