The performance of conventional direction of arrival (DOA) methods is susceptible to the uncertainty of acoustic velocity in the underwater environment. To solve this problem, an underwater DOA estimation method with L-shaped array for wide-band signals under unknown acoustic velocity is proposed in this paper. The proposed method refers to the idea of incoherent signal subspace method and Root-MUSIC to obtain two sets of average roots corresponding to the subarray of the L-shaped array. And the geometric relationship between two vertical linear arrays is employed to derive the expression of DOA estimation with respect to the two average roots. The acoustic velocity variable in the DOA estimation expression can be eliminated in the proposed method. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is more accurate and robust than other methods in an unknown acoustic velocity environment.