The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  When I got back to the ship, I learned from the captain that strong crosswinds had caused the lift to be aborted and that the helicopter had been running low on fuel. A second attempt would be made two days hence, when the helicopter was again available, but we’d have to hope for lighter winds that day. The first thing I checked that morning when I woke was the winds. They had decreased to 5–10 knots: the lift was on. At exactly the agreed time, the helicopter came into view and settled into position above the foredeck of the Al Munassir, where the crew were waiting to secure the lift sling to the cargo net holding the compressor. The Al Munassir was unanchored this time, moving slowly ahead, which was a better arrangement for the pilots. I had made a landing zone for the compressor out of seaweed just a few metres from the water’s edge; the pilot came in low and hit it perfectly.

  There is a moment in every big project like this when everything is finally in place and the work can begin in earnest. Until that happens, you really can’t be sure what, if anything, will be accomplished. When the helicopter released the sling holding the compressor, that was the moment for me. Eight months of dedicated planning and preparation had gone into getting all the people, equipment and vessels together for this moment. It was way too early to celebrate; the next three weeks would determine whether the expedition would be a success or not. But as I stood on the beach with the sun beating down and watched the helicopter disappear, I could begin thinking about the artefacts the Portuguese had left behind five centuries ago.

  As soon as the archaeologists began excavating the site, we started finding more stone cannon balls. They ranged in size from small ones you could hold in the palm of your hand to large ones bigger than a bowling bowl, and were made of two different rock types. They were the first firm evidence that we were dealing with the remains of a warship well equipped for conflict. Sodré’s squadron had boasted the latest in European naval technology and ordnance, which the people of Calicut had been simply unable to defend against. When the Portuguese bombardment began, and these large stone shot started to rain down on them, crashing through the roofs and walls of their homes, they would have been shocked by the brutal effectiveness of this new form of warfare. The full extent of the weaponry became evident when the excavators reached the large concretion.

  The concretion was situated at the intersection of three gullies leading into Washing Machine Gully. When the upper layer of loose sand was removed, five bronze powder chambers were revealed welded into the rock-hard surface. These bronze chambers were what held the gunpowder used to fire the breech-loading guns on the ship. After a gun was fired, the used chamber would be taken out and a fresh one inserted with another shot to allow relatively rapid firing. They would have been valuable pieces of equipment, so it was surprising that the Portuguese had left them behind when you consider that, according to Pêro d’Ataíde’s letter to the king, they had salvaged at least some of the guns.

  Dave Parham and his team of archaeological divers took control of excavating the concretion, which was a laborious and tedious but ultimately satisfying job considering the number of exciting artefacts it produced. Before anything was touched, a photographic mosaic of the upper surface was made, and then the divers got to work with chisels, airlifts and, in the case of the most heavily concreted areas, pneumatic hammers. After eight days of intensive work, the 40m3 concretion was reduced down to the level of bedrock, but not before it had yielded in excess of 1,000 individual artefacts. Hundreds of lead, iron and stone shot had to be physically chiselled out, which caused the site to sound like a stonemason’s yard when all the hammers were going.

  As each team returned to the Al Munassir, the team standing by would help them unload their diving kit and crowd around to see what new objects had been recovered. An amazing array was retrieved from the concretion, including belt buckles, a beautiful set of eight spoons, a door lock, a ring made out of stone, trade beads, even peppercorns and cloves that had survived encased within the protective cocoon. There was rigging and other parts of the ship, but no timbers and only fragments of wood, which was unsurprising given the poor conditions for wood preservation. Ultimately the number of bronze breech chambers swelled from the five that were first seen to a remarkable nineteen, which surely represents the largest single collection of this type from a wreck site.

  We had become so used to seeing the divers return with common artefacts like ordnance or ceramic sherds that the first gold coin caught us completely by surprise. It was found by Jess and Ahmed Al-Siyabi, MHC’s most hard-working diver, as reward for excavating an area of Washing Machine Gully, and was the first of twelve gold cruzados we recovered, several of which had to be fished out of crevices in the bedrock after metres of sand and rock was removed. The coins were as shiny and crisp as the day they were struck. It is this remarkable characteristic of gold, that however long it is immersed in seawater it will re-emerge looking exactly like it did the day it was lost, that helps explain its universal allure and wonder. We did not treat the coins as treasure, although in archaeological terms they were exactly that given their value in helping to accurately date the shipwreck. However, with no numismatic experts on board I had to wait until returning home before learning about their age and significance, although they were clearly from the reign of Dom Manuel or his predecessor JoÃo II.

  After the area of the wreck site that produced the first seven coins was completely excavated, I thought no more would be found. I was personally on hand to film one coin being recovered, and detected a second with my metal detector to show the team where to dig, but I hadn’t recovered one myself until I got very, very lucky working an area of spoil adjacent to where the concretion once was. While the rest of the team got on with the heavy excavation work, I gave myself the job of scouting new areas or scanning spoil heaps for objects that might have been missed. The spoil heaps accumulated at the point where sand and rock was ejected out of the airlifts, and they generally contained small pieces of lead: nothing to get too excited about. That was exactly what I thought I had found at the start of one dive when my metal detector started ringing in my ear. I could tell by the strength of the signal that the object was close to the surface, and it only took a few waves of my hand to expose what at first looked like a clump of coal. I picked it up between my fingers and spun it around until the edge of a gold coin caught my eye. There wasn’t just one edge though: there were five!

  I could see enough of the coins to tell that what I had found was five cruzados like the other seven that we had already recovered. I knew immediately that this clump had been sucked up the airlift and that I was incredibly fortunate to have gone back over this particular spoil heap. In fact missing it altogether would have been just as easy as finding it. The black clusters attached to both sides of the stack of cruzados were curious. As I studied them, I could see that they too had the shape of coins and realized they must be made of silver. The silver had completely oxidized, hence the black colour, but it hadn’t obliterated the face of the largest coin on one end. Turning the coin one way, then the other, I could just about make out a large central cross that looked like the same cross I had seen on Manueline buildings throughout Portugal.

  With each recovery we made, the physical evidence confirming the wreck site as one of the Sodré ships was mounting. The cruzados were the most definitive proof pointing to a Portuguese origin, but an object I found two days before the expedition’s end topped everything. Once again I was scouting a new area with my trusty metal detector to find the most promising place for the excavators to work next. I was close to where Jess had found the bell when the probe I was using detected something and began to ring. This object was buried deeper so I had to pass the probe over the spot several times to see exactly where the signal was strongest. Fortunately the sand was very clean and loose, so it was easy to fan it away. I had been fanning for several minutes, with the pit getting deeper and wider, but it seemed I was no closer to whatever was down there. I had been finding a lot of modern fish
ing weights made of lead on the site, which were always deeply buried, and thought this was yet another one when a disc started to appear. It was lying flat and was quite heavy, so I was able to gently slide it out from the sand without any trouble.

  I immediately knew this was an extremely important object, and that if it was able to speak to me it would be shouting ‘I am Portuguese.’ On either side of a central reinforced hole were two of the most important national symbols in the reign of Dom Manuel, which still grace the Portuguese flag to this day. At the top of the disc, close to what I recognized as the remnants of a suspension ring, was the Portuguese royal coat of arms. At its bottom was the legendary esfera armilar (armillary sphere), a personal emblem chosen by Dom Manuel that became an iconic symbol of the Portuguese maritime empire during the Age of Discovery. Dom Manuel disseminated the esfera armilar by integrating it in royal orders, religious architecture and important objects of a permanent nature. Whatever the identity and function of this rare disc made of copper alloy, the inclusion of the esfera armilar marked it as an object of high status that was probably handled by only select figures on the ship, such as the commander, captain and master pilots.

  Although the coins and the copper disc were the most sensational discoveries made during the 2014 expedition, it was the archaeological and scientific analysis of more than 2,800 artefacts, including those recovered in 2013 (and in 2015, when the final large-scale excavation was conducted), that allowed us to confirm that they came from one of the Sodré shipwrecks: in all probability Vicente’s Esmeralda. We decided to announce our discovery to the world by way of an academic article in one of the most respected peer-review journals in the field of nautical archaeology: the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology (IINA). I hoped the project would get good coverage by the media, but I wanted that coverage to be off the back of an academic paper subjected to independent peer review. Had we announced the discovery earlier, for example after the bell was discovered, I have no doubt we would have been roundly criticized for making empty claims without having them independently verified.

  As a non-archaeologist directing a project of this magnitude, I knew that some academics would be lining up to slam me if I put a foot wrong. I had recently seen what had happened to Barry Clifford, an American shipwreck hunter famous for finding the pirate ship Whydah, and took this as a lesson about what not to do. In the space of one year Clifford made high-profile announcements that he had found Christopher Columbus’s long-lost Santa Maria off the coast of Haiti and silver treasure from the pirate William Kidd’s Adventure Galley off Madagascar, only to have both discoveries debunked as false by a UNESCO team of archaeological experts called in to investigate his claims. It is hard to tell why Clifford decided to go public on the strength, or weakness, of such flimsy findings. Whatever his reasons, he was swiftly condemned by UNESCO and paid a serious price in terms of damage to his credibility and legacy. It was a mistake I was not about to repeat.

  In advance of the IINA paper, I had decided to build a scientific case for the origin and age of the shipwreck through a number of analytical studies on the artefacts. Some objects were easy to assess: with the bell, it was a matter of just having it professionally cleaned and conserved to reveal the date hidden behind the layers of corrosion. As foretold by the CT scans, the partial date on the bell was shown to be 498, and a letter M was also revealed. Although the M was in the right position to have possibly spelled a version of Esmeralda, the other letters were completely worn away and no amount of technology could bring them back. Still, we had the date and it confirmed that the shipwreck was chronologically correct with Sodré’s squadron leaving Lisbon in early 1502.

  The next thing I looked at was whether it was possible to determine the origin of some of the raw materials used in making the artefacts, on the presumption that in preparing their ships for the voyage, the Portuguese would have mainly relied on materials sourced locally, as opposed to trying to obtain them en route to India. We had lots of objects made of lead, for example, a material that can be traced back to the ore deposit where it was mined by comparing isotopic ratios that are specific to each ore deposit. Pioneers in the field of lead provenancing, like Dr Zofia Stos-Gale, formerly of Oxford University, had been building a large database of isotopic ratios specific to more than 6,000 lead and copper ore deposits around the world, and using that information to help archaeologists study the ancient use and trade in lead.

  Luckily for me, Zofia happened to live about ten miles from my office, and after meeting me and hearing about our project happily agreed to help me with the study. I had arranged for pure lead samples to be extracted from fifteen of the artefacts we had undergoing conservation in the UK and sent them off to a top laboratory at Durham University for the analysis. Zofia was careful to explain that her interpretation of the data could not be used to say with absolute certainty that the lead came from a specific mine, in part because not every possible ore deposit in the world was included in the existing database. What she could say, however, was that the lead used in making the fifteen objects I had sampled was consistent, to a very high degree of analytical error, with ancient ore deposits in Spain, Portugal and England. Knowing the source of the lead was another piece of corroborating evidence for the origin of the ship, but I still wanted something more specific and turned my attention to the stone cannon balls.

  Based on the considerable number we recovered (157 of all sizes) and the range in size, the mere presence of the cannon balls proved that the wreck site was that of a warship. However, could the stone used in making the balls tell me more about the origin of the ship? Having a basic background in geology, I felt on more solid ground investigating the source of the stone, but the final analysis would still rely on the advice of a number of geological experts I was able to recruit in Portugal. Once again samples were chosen and sent off for analysis at various labs to test for age, geochemical and trace element compositions. Most of the balls we recovered were made from a meta-igneous rock that upon first examination could have come from a number of locations in central and southern Portugal. At one point I even visited some quarries with a local geologist to see if we could pin down the source. The real breakthrough came when I had one of the cannon ball rocks dated and the age came back as 550 million years, which geologically narrowed it down to an area of central Portugal called Abrantes.

  In addition to being a precise match for the rock, Abrantes ticked a lot of boxes from a practical point of view. For one, the Tagus River running right through the centre of the region would have been the ideal way to transport the cannon balls 140 kilometres downriver to the waiting ships in Lisbon. Abrantes was also a well-populated area at the time, where stonemasons and other associated workers would have been in plentiful supply. Even Dom Manuel based his court in Abrantes for a considerable period, with two of his children being born there.

  I was beginning to feel I had enough archaeological and scientifically sound evidence to prove my case, what with the date of the bell, the disc marked with the esfera armilar and the Portuguese/European origin of the raw materials used in equipping the ship. Even the fact that we found no cannons on the site fitted with what was known about the Sodré wrecks: that all the guns were eventually recovered in two documented salvages. I still had the coins, though, and was curious what story they would tell, so I contacted a Portuguese numismatist and sent him photographs of the gold cruzados for his expert opinion. The first thing I learned was that in the reign of Dom Manuel, silver coins were actually a much better tool for dating than gold ones because more information existed about when new specimens were created. As the only silver coin in the clump that could be made out was the large one with the cross, I sent him the best photo I had. His reply was like something from the script of a Hollywood movie:

  Dear Mr Mearns,

  You are about to make an outstanding discovery, one that will put your name in the annals of Portuguese numismatics: the lost silver coin of King Emanuel I, called �
�INDIO’ (the Indian), struck in 1499 after the return of da Gama’s first voyage to India.

  I was sitting at my kitchen table when this email arrived and was so struck by its contents that I told my wife, ‘You need to read what this says because emails this good don’t arrive every day.’ In fact I can’t remember ever getting one with a more memorable opening line.

  As it turned out, this identification of Dom Manuel’s fabled silver coin, the indio, was indeed correct, although more than a year would pass before it could be confirmed by another expert, Joao Vieira, sent by the Bank of Portugal to the UK to help me identify all the silver coins. In that time I asked the same conservator who had worked on the bell to separate the five gold cruzados from the silver clumps. This resulted in three coin clumps and better exposed one side of the indio as well as one side of an older coin made in 1475 known as the real grosso. With the coins separated, Jay Warnett was able to get high-quality X-ray images of all three with his CT scanner, and these were the images that Joao Vieira helped me analyse using Jay’s powerful computer software.

  Other than the two coin faces that were now visible, no other coins could be seen. In fact, the other two clumps looked like amorphous pieces of molten metal: there was no way of knowing the tremendous history hidden deep inside them. Only the power of Jay’s computer allowed us to peer into them and reveal every delicate face. Starting at one end of a clump and moving methodically through to the other, we were able to examine each slice of the X-ray image, including taking extremely precise measurements. It was intensive and painstaking work, but an amazing privilege to unpick history this way using twenty-first-century technology. In the end we were able to confidently identify all twenty-four coins in the three clumps, which collectively provided the strongest evidence of all that the artefacts were from a ship that sank in 1503.