Ever since a 17th century sailing vessel crashed on the reef 400 years ago disgorging Bermuda’s first settlers, the island’s history has been intertwined with shipwrecks.

The Sea Venture, which had been heading from Plymouth in England to the fledgling new world settlement in Virginia, was not the first ship to meet its end on the craggy wall of reef that surrounds the island. And it wasn’t the last.

If we were to pull an imaginary plug and drain the water around this volcanic seamount we would be able to look out across a desolate hillside littered with the shells of more than 500 boats.

The skeletons of Civil War blockade-runners, the coral crusted cannons of Spanish galleons — even the shattered remnants of a B29 bomber airplane, lie beneath the picture postcard waters. Each one has a story. And it is the lure of the tales that lie behind these twisted remains, as well as the chance to explore genuine fragments of history, that draws thousands of scuba divers to the ‘shipwreck capital of the Atlantic’ each year.

“There are very few places in the world where you can dive the whole spectrum of wrecks from the 16th century right through to today,” says Captain Graham Maddocks, an operator of Triangle Diving.

Among the most popular is the Cristobel Colon – a Spanish luxury liner that sank off the north shore in 1936. Only when the ship hit the reef did the authorities discover that the crew were harbouring revolutionaries from the Puerto Rican Civil War. They were deported to Spain to face the firing squad. Many of the furnishings from the Cristobel Colon can still be found in some of the old Bermudian homes today. It was stripped bare by locals before British and American bombers sank its empty shell by using it as target practice during the war.

Pillaging ships wrecked on the reef was nothing new in the 1930s. In fact it had been a virtual industry in Bermuda hundreds of years earlier. Some of the earliest shipwrecks were victims of bandits who lulled trusting skippers on to the reefs with flashing lanterns and then raided their stricken boats.

There were still plenty of rewards to be found on Bermuda’s wrecks when the pioneers of scuba diving began exploring the reef in the 1950s. Bermuda’s most famous wreck hunter, Teddy Tucker, found fame as the man who discovered more than 100 of the island’s shipwrecks. His most famous find was Spanish treasure ship the San Pedro, wrecked off Bermuda in 1596. After weeks of sifting through the sand Mr. Tucker unveiled a bounty of riches including an emerald studded gold crucifix, later stolen from the Dockyard Maritime Museum in one of the island’s most famous heists.

The romantic fairytale of finding buried treasure at the bottom of the sea is still sought by the next generation of divers in Bermuda. Experts believe there are many hundreds more wrecks to be discovered at depths that are only just beginning to be explored.

Even in the shallow reef there is always the possibility of untold riches hidden in the sand. Every hurricane sees the old wreck hunters combing their favourite spots on the ocean floor in the hope that the storm has churned up another piece of history.

The real treasure, though, lies in the experience. “The romance of exploring a wreck, the calling of the sea that we all have inside of it – that’s the beauty of it,” says Mr. Maddocks.