Despite that underwater acoustic channels are well known to contain various interferences, research on interference mitigation in underwater acoustic communications has been very limited. In this paper, we deal with a wideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission in the presence of an external interference which occupies partially the signal band and whose time duration is shorter than the OFDM block. We parameterize the unknown interference waveform by a number of parameters assuming prior knowledge of its frequency band and time duration, and develop an iterative receiver, which couples interference detection via a generalized likelihood-ratio-test (GLRT), interference reconstruction and cancellation, channel estimation, and data detection. In addition to simulation results, we verify the receiver performance using data sets collected from two experiments. In both time-invariant and time-varying channels, the proposed iterative receiver achieves robust performance in the presence of unknown interference.