The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  When the winds came, as the Arab fishermen had accurately predicted, they were sudden and furious and were accompanied by a powerful swell that tore the Sodré brothers’ ships from their moorings and drove them hard against the rocky shoreline, smashing their wooden hulls and breaking their masts. Brás Sodré’s ship, the Sao Pedro, was driven sideways onto the shore, allowing many of the men not killed by the falling rigging to scramble to safety over the collapsed masts. Vicente’s ship, the Esmeralda, however, sank with its sails to seaward, causing everyone to be lost including Vicente himself. Although Bras initially survived the wrecking of his ship, he later died of unknown causes, though not before he had his two Arab pilots killed – including one who was the best pilot in all of India, left to him by his nephew da Gama – in misplaced revenge for the death of his brother.

  After burying their dead on the island, the surviving Portuguese salvaged everything they could from the wrecks – even the nails – before setting fire to the hulls. Pêro de Ataide, the captain of the third nau, took command of the three remaining ships and sailed them back to India, where he met Francisco de Albuquerque, a more senior captain from the fifth armada, and handed over seventeen cannons and two barrels of gunpowder that they had salvaged. Albuquerque took command of the two patrol caravels and sailed to Cochin, which, without the protection of Sodré’s squadron, was under attack from a large army from Calicut. Ataide was allowed to return to Lisbon in his nau, but succumbed to illness and died in early 1504 after his ship was wrecked near Mozambique. Shortly before he died, he wrote a five-page letter to Dom Manuel describing the loss of the two naus and the irresponsible behaviour of the Sodré brothers.

  The carelessness and greed of Vicente and Bras Sodré came at a considerable cost to the Portuguese Crown and the reputation of Vasco da Gama. Two valuable ships full of cargo were lost and the Zamorin siege of Cochin disrupted the nascent Portuguese spice trade along the Malabar coast. Da Gama’s relationship with Dom Manuel suffered, and he was shunted aside in favour of other advisers when it came to Indian affairs. In fact he was no longer a welcome figure at court and had to wait sixteen years before Don Manuel conveyed upon him the feudal title of Count of Vidigueira. Even that honour only came because of his threats to defect to the Spanish court, which Dom Manuel could not allow under any circumstances.

  As for the Sodré brothers, their actions received general condemnation when news of what had happened finally reached Portugal. Pêro de Ataide’s original letter, which survived the great earthquake and fire of 1755 that destroyed much of Lisbon and the country’s historical documents, ensured that at least one first-hand account could be relied upon for the basic facts. Ataide placed the blame for the wrecking of the São Pedro and the Esmeralda squarely at the feet of Vicente Sodré for his arrogance in refusing to heed the warnings about the impending storm. Because of the connections to Vasco da Gama, the unhappy account of this tragedy also featured in the history of Portugal’s maritime explorations by several sixteenth-century chroniclers. The story has since been told and retold multiple times over the centuries by historians writing in other languages.

  With such a famous and well-documented story about two very important shipwrecks from one of the earliest Portuguese armadas to India, you might expect that somewhere along the line a group would have tried to locate the wreck site. Maritime archaeologists in Portugal take great pride in documenting their underwater cultural heritage, and for the 1998 Expo held in Lisbon commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of da Gama’s arrival in India, the government even financed the excavation of an early-seventeenth-century shipwreck (the ‘Pepper Wreck’ of 1606) from the Tagus River. Even though Blue Water Recoveries had no practical archaeological experience and no archaeologists on our staff, we realized that such early shipwrecks, if found, could contain rare artefacts of a type never before seen, and fill a gap in the knowledge about how the Portuguese conducted maritime trade and warfare at the turn of the sixteenth century. In late 1997, when we decided to switch our focus away from twentieth-century shipwrecks and to work in Oman, where we knew we could obtain the necessary permissions, finding the Sao Pedro and the Esmeralda was at the top of our list.

  Our research understandably began in Lisbon, at the Biblioteca Nacional and the Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, but over the space of five months we discovered important related documents in England, Venice and Rome. Including Pêro de Ataíde’s letter and the sixteenth-century accounts written by the Portuguese chroniclers Gaspar Correa, JoÃo de Barros, Fernam Lopez de Castanheda and DamiÃo de Góis, we were able to compile a rich collection of more than thirty accounts on which to base a decision about where to search for the wrecks. The main analytic work involved a careful deconstruction, and line-by-line comparison of the details provided in Atathe details provided inde’s letter against the four chroniclers’ accounts. As with all our wreck searches, our aim was to extract the key pieces of information – basically geographical clues – that pointed to the precise location in which the two ships sank.

  Of my small team, Peter Cope, an ex Royal Navy submariner and keen sailor, was given the primary responsibility for this research project. Peter and I had a similar approach to the way we incorporated the rigorous analysis of information and sources into the decision-making process of where to search. For example, with the four Portuguese chroniclers, who all wrote their versions of the story years after it took place, we wanted to understand as much as possible about their relationships to the royal court and other key figures like Francisco de Albuquerque, and most importantly, the access they might have had to survivors from the Sodré squadron and/or to original documents that have since been destroyed.

  Once we were certain the correct location of the wreck site was in the Khuriya Muriya Islands of Oman, and not the Yemen, where a different group was apparently prepared to search, it boiled down to what part of Al Hallaniyah — the only one of the five islands ever to be populated — best matched the various geographical clues we had extracted from the documents. Collectively, the clues described a very specific geographic location that included a large cove sheltered from the west winds; good holding for anchors; a beach suitable for careening a caravel; a steeply banked shoreline; a well for drinking water to support the indigenous population; and an anchorage exposed to storm winds from the north. We were able to narrow the possible location even further after finding a UK Admiralty chart produced in 1837 that showed two anchorages and nearby wells situated on opposite ends of the northern coast of Ai Hallaniyah.

  We began making plans for a reconnaissance search of the island, which unfortunately included finding a replacement for me, as I had a rather important event to attend in May of 1998. Because the south-west monsoon starts in June, we decided to conduct the search in May, which happened to be the same month I was to be married to my fiancée Sarah. As much as I wanted to direct the search as I had directed the research phase of the project, I wasn’t about to put off our wedding date, and accepted that someone other than me would be enjoying this adventure with Peter. That person turned out to be Alex Double. Alex was working as a supply teacher in the UK when he first came to be interviewed at BWR, but what really interested us about his background was his long experience as a skipper and dive instructor on live-aboard diving vessels in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. I doubt we could have found anyone more perfect for the role, so he was quickly signed up and arrangements were made for the two of them to fly out to Oman in mid May.

  The basic plan for the two-week expedition was for the team to conduct visual and metal-detector searches at the first location, an anchorage on the north-west coast of the island where the current village was based, before moving over to the second anchorage in Ghubbat ar Rahib Bay if further searching was necessary. We had excellent contacts in Oman, in part because the main investor in BWR had a close connection with Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said, which ensured that whatever permissions and logistical support the team needed were arranged straight a
way. It was fairly evident that without such government support you would be unable to operate in the remote location of the islands, which probably explains why no one had ever mounted a similar search before us.

  The next time I heard from Peter it was via a fax forwarded from our office. Sarah and I were on our honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, but I had left instructions with the office to contact me if something urgent came up. BWR was a close-knit company and my secretary Carole, who was also part of our research team, knew whether something was important enough to merit disturbing me. This news certainly was. After finding nothing but modern rubbish at the first anchorage, Peter and Alex had hiked over to the other side of the island and, standing on a hilltop above Ghubbat ar Rahib Bay, immediately saw that the anchorage there matched the geographical clues to a T. Although the sea was almost flat calm, they watched as a slight swell was funnelled into one location and broke as a three-foot wave, and figured that would be the most likely spot for a ship to be driven on to the rocky shoreline in the midst of a raging storm from the north.

  After convincing the wali of the island to let them borrow one of his fishing boats, they came back to the bay the next day with their diving gear, and chose to swim along a compass course that brought them to the suspect location in about five metres of water. They had been diving for less than twenty minutes when Alex spotted something he knew was not a natural feature. It was a perfectly smooth, round rock poking just a few centimetres above the sand. The two of them dug around the rock to extricate it and saw it was a large stone cannon ball with the letters VS neatly chiselled into the surface. They checked the letters again, several times, by tracing their fingers over the carving. Peter had zero archaeological training, so calling him an amateur would be being generous. But he had spent the past seven months reading everything he could find about Vicente Sodré, so he wrote on his slate the obvious thing that popped into his mind to show Alex: ‘VS – Vicente Sodré.’

  Peter told me afterwards that they did a little celebratory dance underwater once they realized what they had found. I knew exactly how excited they must have felt, especially after finding the wreck site so quickly where their intuition told them it would be. As further confirmation that this actually was a wreck site, and not an isolated artefact, they went on to find sixteen more of the large cannon balls and numerous smaller ones lying on the surface or partly buried in the sand. Before leaving the site, they also found an iron ship’s nail on the beach, which fitted with the story of the Portuguese salvaging everything they could before setting fire to the hulls.

  As soon as Alex and Peter returned to the UK with a handful of the cannon balls for analysis, we started planning a larger expedition to map the site, conduct trial excavations and search for possible wreckage in deeper water. The expedition took place in October and November of 1998 with the team expanded to five, including a Portuguese maritime archaeologist named Antonio Camãrao who had been helping us in Lisbon with the historical research. All our divers received basic training in archaeological survey methods and we shipped out our own rigid inflatable boat to serve as the survey and diving vessel. For the second time I missed out, even though I was chiefly responsible for the survey, as we had another project in America that was in crisis and my co-directors decided I needed to be there to solve that problem.

  Peter came back from the second expedition with hundreds of photos of the island and wreck site, which I appreciated from a technical point of view but which also made me sick with envy. The location was stunning. From the deep blue expanse of the L-shaped bay to the bare limestone and granitic cliffs eroded by wind and weather, it appealed to me on so many different levels as a marine scientist. Add to that the adventure of working in an incredibly remote and pristine environment, and the excitement of being the first to uncover and hold 500-year-old artefacts from an important sixteenth-century shipwreck, and I felt I’d been cheated out of the experience of a lifetime. My deep personal disappointment at not being part of the 1998 expeditions was tempered by the fact that they were so successful. More artefacts were recovered from the trial excavations (mainly lead-covered iron shot), indicating that much more cultural material was buried there and that everything was of the right age to support our growing belief that we had found the place where the Sodré ships had been wrecked.

  It was clear the wreck site had enormous potential and that we had only scratched the surface in terms of what other fascinating artefacts could be buried there. However, we had also reached a point where to proceed with a full excavation we would need a bigger team of qualified and trained archaeologists, a bigger ship to support the operations, and therefore a bigger budget. The driving factor was that the majority of artefacts were bound within a very large concretion that needed to be carefully broken down to extract potentially delicate objects without causing them any harm, something for which our team didn’t have the necessary skills. We had done a very good job with our research and in finding the correct site, but we would risk all that if we handled the full excavation badly. Part of our rationale in taking on the project was that we wanted to see whether it was viable for a commercially orientated company like BWR to work on historic shipwrecks within the ethical boundaries of the archaeological community. We always expected that at some point we would need partners in the archaeological community, and that time had come.

  Perhaps I was too close to the project and overly enamoured with its importance and potential, but I fully expected that in reaching out to the archaeological community, especially in Portugal, we would get a favourable reaction from interested partners. Boy, was I mistaken. There was the odd lukewarm response, but half our letters went unanswered and the rest turned us down outright. I could accept that funding in Portugal was very tight, but we even struggled to get people from academic circles in the UK to show any interest. Had we overestimated the historical and archaeological importance of these shipwrecks? I didn’t believe so, but the lack of interest in our pleas for help with the project was telling.

  I was disappointed for our company and for everyone who had worked to make the two expeditions a success. It seemed such a waste of good work that what we had started couldn’t be finished. On a personal level I was gutted that I’d never get to visit the island or dive on the wreck site. I would never close my mind to a future opportunity for the project to be resurrected, but for the time being I had to let the Sodré shipwrecks and Ghubbat ar Rahib Bay slip away from my imagination.

  After the termination of the Oman project, I had plenty of things to occupy my time. For four years BWR ran an offshore vessel used to survey undersea routes for telecommunication cables, which saw me travel around the world winning contracts that resulted in the vessel working in the Gulf of Mexico, the Bahamas and the Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. I worked as a consultant managing a number of the shipwreck searches covered elsewhere in this book. And in our personal lives Sarah and I had what can only be described as a head-spinning start to family life, going from no children to three in less than a year. At the end of 2008, there was also a major change in the ownership of BWR. The original owner had died suddenly the previous year, resulting in the company being transferred into my name. As a director/employee I had had a limited say in the type of projects we pursued. Now the pressure was squarely on my shoulders to run the business as I saw fit.

  It took me a few years to build up a cash reserve, but as soon as I could devote some free time to it, I began thinking about how I could resurrect the Sodré shipwrecks project. People needed to see my passion and the potential for the project themselves, so I decided to rely on personal visits as opposed to letters and phone calls, which hadn’t worked the first time. This involved multiple flights to Oman, Washington DC and California throughout 2012, but by January the following year I had an agreement with Oman’s Ministry of Heritage and Culture (MHC) to co-manage the project with them on a collaborative basis; $30,000 in grant funding from National Geographic’s exped
itions council and the Waitt Foundation to help pay for expedition costs; a fully equipped live-aboard dive vessel that I’d hired for a two-week reconnaissance survey; and a crack team of professional archaeologists and surveyors lined up to join the project.

  Because of the long gap in time since the 1998 expeditions, I decided to start with a repeat reconnaissance survey to map the shallow-water wreck site with greater precision, and a high-resolution search of the anchorage in Ghubbat ar Rahib Bay using the best quality side-scan sonar, magnetometer and GPS positioning equipment operated by industry professionals. I was fortunate to recruit Dave Parham, an associate professor from Bournemouth University, to be the archaeological director of the project, and Dr Bruno Frohlich, a forensic anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institute, to lead the investigation of possible burial sites on the island. I was also delighted that Alex Double was available to join my ten-man team as a guide and photographer and to provide diving instruction to the two MHC staff from their newly established underwater archaeology programme who would be working alongside us.

  We boarded the Saman Explorer in the small coastal town of Mirbat, southern Oman, before making the overnight transit across Khuriya Muriya Bay to Al Hallaniyah Island. I had hired the 34-metre dive vessel on an exclusive basis for the last two weeks in May, along with a second ten-metre boat to be used for the geophysical survey, which was towed behind the larger vessel. Our small convoy, including two Zodiacs, arrived in Ghubbat ar Rahib Bay in the early hours of the morning and promptly anchored up to the wreck of the City of Winchester, a British cargo steamer that had been captured by a German raider and scuttled in the bay on 12 August 1914, making it the first vessel to be lost in World War I. Winchester’s position placed us squarely in the centre of the bay, facing the rocky shoreline where the Sodré ships were wrecked and with the impressive Ra’s al Hallaniyah, a 500-metre-high wind-eroded limestone bluff, off to our starboard side.