Out of the Depths, page 15
Claude-Joseph Vernet, The Shipwreck, 1772, oil on canvas.
Winslow Homer, The Life Line, 1884, oil on canvas.
Reconstruction of Uluburun ship containing artefacts from the wreck, Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, Turkey.
Partial reconstruction of the stern of the Byzantine ship wrecked at Yassi Ada, 7th century, Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology.
Kyrenia shipwreck, in the museum of Kyrenia Castle, North Cyprus.
Stern view of the Vasa in its museum at Stockholm in 2017.
Reconstruction of a navis lusoria Roman ship (Mainz Type A) at the Museum of Ancient Seafaring, Mainz.
The Hansekogge, one of the reconstructions of the Bremen cog, at Warnemünde, 2009.
The remains of the Mary Rose in its museum at Portsmouth, 2019.
José Gartner de la Peña, Destruction of the Invincible Armada, 1892, oil on canvas.
Swedish ship Kronan blowing up, seen in Claus Møinichen, Battle of Öland, 1686, oil on canvas.
Henry Robins, The Wreck of the Eurydice, 1878, oil on canvas.
Captain Pierce and his daughters face death, seen in Thomas Stothard, Wreck of the Halsewell, Indiaman, 1786, oil on canvas.
Spanish ship San José blows up in action with Wager’s squadron, seen in Samuel Scott, Wagner’s Action off Cartegena, 28 May 1708, 1740s, oil on canvas.
François Musin, HMS Erebus in the Ice, 1846, 19th century, oil on canvas.
Conrad Wise Chapman, Submarine Torpedo Boat H. L. Hunley, 6 December 1863, 1864, oil on panel.
Blackbeard moved north along the eastern seaboard of North America in the following year and in May 1718 his pirate squadron blockaded Charleston, South Carolina, demanding ransom and supplies, including a medical chest. British authorities now offered pardons to pirates who would give up their evil ways and this offer appealed to Blackbeard. On 10 June 1718 his ship Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground when entering Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina. It seemed like an accident, but some historians have claimed it may have been deliberate. In this scenario, Blackbeard wrecked his own ship so that he could break up his pirate band, keep more of the loot for himself and then accept a pardon. Before the Queen Anne’s Revenge sank, Blackbeard moved much of its contents to another vessel and then sailed away and obtained his pardon. However, the lure of piracy was too strong and Blackbeard soon returned to his old ways. In November 1718 British warships found his pirate ship in Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina, and Blackbeard was killed in the ensuing battle.
In 1996 a private company, Intersal, was surveying waters off the coast of North Carolina looking for one of the Spanish treasure ships wrecked there in 1750. The searchers found a wreck, but it was not Spanish. It seemed more likely to be Blackbeard’s pirate ship Queen Anne’s Revenge, and over the next few years artefacts were brought up, including many cannons. In 1998 Intersal reached an agreement with the state of North Carolina about excavating and exploiting the wreck. Although there was still no definite identification of the wreck as Blackbeard’s ship, the wreck site was placed on the U.S. Register of Historic Places in 2004.
Thousands of artefacts have been brought up during the excavations. The wreck clearly has too many cannons for a merchant ship of its size, and depth markings on part of the stern seem to be made in French foot measurements, indicating the ship’s French origins. Other items such as coins and jewellery pieces dated from the period 1700–1715. The balance of probability is now that this is Blackbeard’s ship and in 2011 the state of North Carolina formally accepted that the wreck is indeed Queen Anne’s Revenge. Unfortunately legal disputes between the state and the salvage company caused recoveries to cease in 2015.
Both the Whydah Gally and the Queen Anne’s Revenge were captured slave ships that were turned into pirate vessels. Little evidence of their earlier slaving activities remained in the wrecks. So far only one shipwreck has been found that has yielded clear evidence of having transported African slaves. In 1972 divers working for Mel Fisher in his search for the Atocha galleon west of the Florida Keys came across the remains of an old shipwreck. Two anchors and a cannon were found on the first visit. The divers returned the following year and found other items, including bilboes, iron shackles that were used to restrain slaves. Once it was realized that this was a slave ship rather than a treasure ship, the finds were reburied and the divers left the site.
Between 1983 and 1985 Henry Taylor, working as a subcontractor for Fisher’s company, excavated the wreck site with the assistance of the archaeologist David Moore. The lost ship was identified when a bronze ship’s bell inscribed ‘The Henrietta Marie 1699’ was found. The date on the bell probably represents a refitting of the ship, since it is known to have made a voyage from England to West Africa, then to Barbados and back to England, in 1697–8. In 1699 the ship set out on its second triangular voyage, going first to New Calabar on the Guinea coast of West Africa. Although it was a ship of only around 120 tons, the Henrietta Marie loaded around two hundred slaves. The slaves were sold at Jamaica in May 1700 and then a cargo such as sugar, cotton and dyewoods was loaded for the return voyage to England. After passing through the Yucatán Channel to round the western end of Cuba, the ship was then wrecked on New Ground Reef near the Marquesas Keys, approximately 35 miles (56 km) west of Key West, Florida. There were no survivors.
The wreck of the Henrietta Marie has yielded more than 7,000 objects and more than 30,000 glass beads, the largest collection of artefacts known from a slave ship. Parts for more than eighty bilboes were found, and since each set restrained two slaves, that means at least 160 Africans were held on board. Items found included trade goods, such as the beads, left over from bargaining for captives; items acquired in Africa other than slaves, including an elephant tusk; and gear belonging to the ship and crew. Some parts of the ship’s hull have survived. Two copper cauldrons were found on the wreck site. The largest was probably used to prepare a mush or gruel to feed the slaves. Since it was not needed on the voyage back to England, it was being used to store chains. The smaller cauldron was divided into two chambers and was probably used to prepare food for the crew.
In 1993 the National Association of Black Scuba Divers left a memorial plaque on the wreck site to commemorate the sufferings of the African victims of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1995 the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West prepared an exhibition about the slave ship and the slave trade, which toured the USA for a decade. A new exhibition went on tour in 2019.
If Spanish treasure ships remained one target for those looking to recover riches from the bottom of the sea, East Indiamen also continued to attract treasure hunters. However, these salvors were now usually acting under contract to the companies that owned the lost ships and could expect only a negotiated share of the spoils. Diving bells continued to be a popular means of carrying out salvage operations, but in the first half of the eighteenth century so-called barrel divers enjoyed a period of popularity. These were men who literally went underwater inside strengthened barrels, with a glass vision slit near the top and holes through which their arms protruded so they could gather up salvaged items. The air inside the barrel would usually only last 30 minutes. After that the diver would have to return to the surface to put fresh air inside his barrel. Barrel divers could rarely go more than 60 feet (18 m) deep. Nevertheless, they were to enjoy some success.
In 1715 John Lethbridge invented a barrel-diving apparatus. In 1720 he met Captain Jacob Rowe, who had patented a somewhat similar apparatus made of metal rather than wood. Rowe secured a contract from England’s East India Company to salvage its ship Vansittart, which had been wrecked on the island of Maio in the Cape Verde Islands in 1719. The ship had been outward bound on its maiden voyage, carrying silver bars and coins worth £40,000. Rowe apparently took Lethbridge on the salvage expedition in 1721 and they enjoyed considerable success in their operations. Half of the silver was recovered, along with 868 slabs of lead, 64 iron guns and 11 anchors. In all, goods worth over £20,000 were brought back to England. Although this was less than a tenth of the fortune Phips had recovered from the Concepción in 1687, it was much more than any English treasure-hunting expedition had recovered from a wreck in the intervening 35 years.
After this success, Rowe and Lethbridge had a disagreement and went their separate ways. Lethbridge went to work for the Dutch East India Company, the VOC. In the early eighteenth century this company sent twice as many ships east as the English East India Company and six or seven times as many as the French company. In 1724 the VOC dispatched the Slot ter Hooge on a voyage from the Netherlands to Batavia in Java. The ship carried 4 tons of silver ingots and four chests of silver coins. Its voyage proved to be short, with the ship being wrecked on the small island of Porto Santo, some 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Madeira. Only 33 of the 254 people on board survived. Lethbridge carried out salvage work on the wreck in 1725 and 1726, recovering half the treasure. This was despite the fact that the wreck lay in 60 feet (18 m) of water, at the outer limit for barrel divers.
Pleased with Lethbridge’s success, the VOC next sent him to South Africa. In 1722 a storm had sunk eleven ships in Table Bay, six of which belonged to the VOC. Lethbridge worked on some of the wreck sites between 1727 and 1729, but after some initial recoveries of silver bars and coins, finds became less common. In the mid-1730s Lethbridge went to the Cape Verde Islands to work on another VOC wreck and since he was in the area, he did further work on the Vansittart. Much to his delight and that of the English East India Company, Lethbridge brought up more silver from the wreck.
In 1736 Lethbridge had a plaque made with an inscription which said that during the past twenty years he had dived on the wrecks of four English men-of-war, an English East Indiaman, two Dutch men-of-war, five Dutch East Indiamen, two Spanish galleons and two London galleys, ‘on many of them with good success’. In 1743 the VOC lured Lethbridge out of retirement to try to recover treasure from the Hollandia, one of their ships, which had recently been lost on the Isles of Scilly. Lethbridge mounted a salvage operation, but was unsuccessful. When the wreck was found in 1971, it lay at least 100 feet (30 m) down, too deep for a barrel diver.
After his split with Lethbridge, Captain Rowe had gone to the Caribbean in 1722–3 looking for wrecks, probably the ships lost in the 1715 Spanish fleet disaster on the coast of Florida. He had no success and gave up treasure hunting for a few years. In 1727 Rowe was hired to look for the supposed treasure in the Spanish Armada ship that was wrecked on Fair Isle, north of Scotland. He worked on the wreck site in the summer of 1728 but found nothing of value. Then he received an offer to work on a VOC ship that had recently been wrecked off western Scotland.
Some VOC ships sailed outwards via the English Channel, but others used the route that passed north of the British Isles. One such was the Adelaar, but it ran into a storm and in March 1728 was wrecked on the island of Barra at the southern end of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. None of the more than two hundred people on board survived. Like most outward-bound East Indiamen, the Adelaar had been carrying silver bars and coins, which a Scottish syndicate now sought to recover. Rowe was hired to dive on the wreck, and in just four days in September 1728 his associate William Evans and another diver brought up £20,000 worth of silver. In the end most of the treasure was recovered. However, the VOC had sued in the Scottish courts for the return of its treasure and won a favourable judgement in 1729. The silver was not finally returned until 1732, with payment for the salvage work deducted.
In the summer of 1729 Rowe had set out on a new treasure hunt in Scotland, this time searching for the supposed riches in the Spanish Armada wreck at Tobermory on the island of Mull. He spent two years on a very thorough, and destructive, excavation of the wreck’s hull, but found little of value. Despite this, fantasies about the Tobermory treasure would lure other salvors to the wreck site for the next 250 years. After 1731 Rowe seems to have given up barrel diving, although he may have been approached to work on the Princess Louisa, an East Indiaman wrecked on the island of Maio in the Cape Verde Islands in 1743. If so, he did not win the contract, while the English salvage firm that did so failed to achieve much on the wreck site. Only in the 1990s was the lost ship found and excavated by the Portuguese company Arqueonautas, which recovered 60,000 silver coins, twenty cannons, three anchors, bars of iron and lead, and some ivory tusks.
Barrel diving seems to have died out after 1750, with more efficient diving bells being preferred for underwater salvage. The Braithwaite family, London pump manufacturers, found a more efficient way to pump air into diving bells and decided to undertake salvage work in the 1780s. After recovering a few cannons from the wreck of HMS Royal George, lost off Portsmouth in 1782, the Braithwaites moved on to Gibraltar. During the siege that had taken place in the recent American war, Spanish floating batteries had been sent against the fortress of Gibraltar in 1782, only to be destroyed by the defenders. The Braithwaites sent down diving bells onto the wreck sites and recovered a large number of cannons. Some went to the local British authorities, who passed them on as gifts to appease the rulers of the Barbary corsair states in North Africa.
In May 1787 the East Indiaman Hartwell left England bound for China, but Captain Edward Fiott soon found himself facing a mutiny among the crew. This was suppressed, but Fiott decided to stop off in the Cape Verde Islands to land the principal mutineers. However, owing to a navigational error, the Hartwell was wrecked on the island of Boa Vista in Cape Verde. Most of those on board were saved, but silver worth £53,000 went down with the ship. The East India Company made a contract with William Braithwaite to recover the lost treasure, but the first salvage efforts in 1787 and 1788 brought up only small amounts of silver dollars. The 1789 season was more successful, with silver coins worth around £20,000 brought up in only two months. These salvage operations became well known in the Atlantic maritime community and pirate salvors came from as far away as the West Indies to try to get some of the loot. Usually the Braithwaites were escorted by a British warship during their operations, but in 1790 the warship was slow to appear, leading to the Braithwaite salvage ship having to drive off a pirate salvage vessel in an exchange of cannon fire. Although some pirate salvors did manage to raise treasure from the wreck site, the Braithwaites recovered 5,000 silver dollars, 2,000 pigs of lead and 47 blocks of tin during their operations in 1790.
After their successful salvage of the Hartwell, the Braithwaites seem to have left the salvage business. However, after the East Indiaman Earl of Abergavenny was wrecked near Portland on the south coast of England in 1805, John Braithwaite sent a bid to the East India Company to salvage the ship and his tender was accepted. In the spring of 1806 Braithwaite recovered all the silver, valued at £70,000, from the wreck, and then went on to recover cannons and cargo, a process that went on into 1807. It was a successful and thorough salvage operation that has left modern scuba divers little to find on the wreck site.
Treasure was the lure for salvors of East Indiamen, but the stories of such wrecks which lived on in the popular imagination did not involve lost silver. In his short story ‘The Long Voyage’, published in 1853, Charles Dickens mentioned a number of shipwrecks, of which two involved East Indiamen. Both wrecks took place in the 1780s, yet they were still remembered more than half a century later.
The first was the wreck of the Grosvenor, which was returning from India when it was wrecked on the coast of Pondoland, South Africa. On 2 August 1782 the ship was thought to be at least 200 miles (320 km) off the South African coast, but Captain John Coxon was guilty of serious navigational errors. In fact the Grosvenor was near land and soon ran aground before being driven ashore and broken into pieces. The survivors, seventeen passengers and seventy crew, looked to Coxon to lead them to safety, but his navigation was no better on land than it was at sea. Believing the Dutch settlement at Cape Town was only 250 miles (400 km) away, he led the survivors on a trek towards it. In fact Cape Town was 400 miles (650 km) away. Most of the survivors died of starvation and only eighteen reached Cape Town. Several sailors had taken refuge with local tribal groups and survived. Europeans were uneasy that some white women from the wreck had also taken refuge with the tribes and several years later a Dutch expedition found three white women in an African settlement, two of whom were alleged to have come from the Grosvenor. Despite the usual stories, modern divers have found no treasure on the wreck site of the Grosvenor.
The other wreck mentioned by Dickens was that of the Halsewell. In late 1785 the ship, commanded by Captain Pierce, sailed from London with more than 240 passengers, troops and crew on board. Among the passengers were Captain Pierce’s two daughters, and the captain intended to retire after this voyage. In early January 1786 the ship entered the English Channel at the start of its voyage to India, but almost immediately ran into bad weather. It began to take on water and several masts went over the side. On the evening of 5 January the Halsewell was being driven towards the southern coast of England, with St Alban’s Head on the coast of Dorset in sight. Anchors were put down, but they did not hold for long. Early on the morning of 6 January the ship was wrecked between Peveril Point and St Alban’s Head. Captain Pierce remained with his daughters and they were drowned along with most of the officers and passengers. There were 74 survivors, mostly sailors and soldiers. King George III later came to visit the site of the wreck. This pathetic tale of self-sacrifice was quickly immortalized in a number of paintings and prints; even in Victorian times the story of the lost captain and his daughters had an appeal that transcended thoughts of treasure.
