‘Outer Banks’ on Netflix: Is The Royal Merchant a Real Shipwreck? Is There Really Sunken Treasure?

Netflix steamy new teen drama Outer Banks follows four best friends as they embark on a daring treasure hunt off the coast of North Carolina. When the Pogues — John B. (Chase Stokes), JJ (Rudy Pankow), Pope (Jonathan Daviss), and Kiara (Madison Bailey) — discover a sunken boat in the marshes after a hurricane, they find themselves caught up in a life-or-death race to find the wreckage of The Royal Merchant and the $400 million worth of gold on board. Filmed with shockingly beautiful cinematography and featuring a cast of beautiful young things with outrageous chemistry, Outer Banks is immediately addictive.

But is The Royal Merchant treasure hunt real? Is there millions of dollars worth in gold sunk off the coast of North Carolina’s Outer Banks? Or did the creators of Outer Banks just make the whole story up? Here’s everything you need to know about The Royal Merchant on Outer Banks.

WHAT IS THE ROYAL MERCHANT ON OUTER BANKS? IS THE ROYAL MERCHANT TREASURE HUNT REAL?

As a helpful museum worker explains in the Outer Banks pilot, “The Royal Merchant sunk in the great storm of 1829 with $400 million of British government gold on board.” So it was a great big ship that sunk in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Carolina and has remained missing since then. Get it? Got it? Good.

Now, here’s the thing. There is a very famous ship called the Merchant Royal that sunk off the coast of Cornwall, England in 1641, and it is specifically famous because of the massive amount of gold and silver that was on board. There was about $1.5 billion worth of gold and $1 million in silver on board, and needless to say, people have been trying to find it for centuries.

However, The Royal Merchant as described in Outer Banks does not exist. It is not a real shipwreck, so don’t try to find it. In fact, I have a lot of questions about the ship described in Outer Banks. Like, why would the UK send that amount of money across the Atlantic, specifically in the path of North Carolina, in 1829? The US and UK basically had next to nothing to do with each other in 1829. You know, besides tense trading. Furthermore, if the Pogues get the gold, would it not just go back to the British government? It’s their gold! I question the logic of a steamy teen Netflix drama!

IS THERE REALLY SUNKEN TREASURE IN THE OUTER BANKS?

Even though The Royal Merchant is sadly not real, that doesn’t mean there aren’t real treasure hunters searching for millions of dollars of sunken treasure off the coast of the Outer Banks. In fact, the Outer Banks is kind of legendary for all the shipwrecks that happened during the golden age of piracy all the way up to debris from World War II-era training camps. The shifting sands in the area have given it a sort of legendary aura in treasure hunting communities. Everyone from local farmers to experienced pirates would be lose their buried valuables when the sand banks moved.

In fact, if you google “shipwrecks” and “treasure” and “Outer Banks,” you’re bound to find a laundry list of real discoveries and tall tales. There’s the story of three Spanish ships that sunk during a hurricane in 1750. In 2018, divers found gold coins, suggesting they had come close to locating the steamship Pulaski, a high-end cruise that sunk in 1838. And all the way back in 1996, The Virginian Pilot wrote a piece spotlighting folks who made it their obsession hunting for treasure in the area. (Note: if you find anything valuable on a state park, you can’t claim it!)

So while The Royal Merchant is a fabrication invented to spur the drama of Netflix’s Outer Banks, the area is known for its shipwrecks, buried treasure, and enthusiasts combing the beaches with metal detectors.

Watch Outer Banks on Netflix