Diamond hunters find 15th century treasure galley

Published on Friday 2 May 2008 23:37

LADEN with tonnes of copper ingots, elephant tusks, gold coins and cannons to fend off pirates, the European ship was headed home after a particularly successful trading trip.

But it had nothing to protect it from the fierce weather off a particularly bleak stretch of African coastline and it sank 500 years ago. Now it has been rediscovered, stumbled upon by geologists prospecting for diamonds off Namibia.

"If you're mining on the coast, sooner or later you'll find a wreck," said the archaeologist Dieter Noli in an interview this week.

Namdeb Diamond, a joint venture of the government of Namibia and the mining giant De Beers had cleared and drained a stretch of seabed, building an earthen wall to keep the water out so that geologists could work. Dr Noli said that one of the geologists saw a few ingots, but had no idea what they were. Then the team found what looked like cannon barrels.

The geologists stopped the brutal earth-moving work of searching for diamonds and sent photographs to Dr Noli, who has undertaken research in the Namibian desert since the mid-1980s and has advised De Beers since 1996 on the archaeological impact of its operations in the country. The find "was what I'd been waiting for for 20 years", Dr Noli said. "Understandably, I was pretty excited. I still am."

His original specialty was the desert, but because of Namdeb's offshore explorations he had been preparing for the possibility of a wreck being found and had even learned to dive.

"The site yielded a wealth of objects, including six bronze cannons, several tonnes of copper, more than 50 elephant tusks, pewter tableware, navigational instruments, weapons and thousands of Spanish and Portuguese gold coins, minted in the late 1400s and early 1500s," said Hilifa Mbako, a spokesman for Namdeb.

Bruno Werz, an expert in the field, was brought in to help research the wreck. Dr Noli has studied maritime artefacts with Mr Werz, who was one of his instructors at the University of Cape Town.

Judging from the notables depicted on the hoard of Spanish and Portuguese coins, and the type of cannons and navigational equipment, the ship went down in the late 1400s or early 1500s, around the time Vasco de Gama and Columbus were plying the waters of the New World.

"Based on the goods they were carrying, it's almost certain that it dates from that time," said John Broadwater, the chief archaeologist at the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"This find is very exciting because very few vessels from that period have been discovered," he said, adding that many early ships were thought to have been wrecked in that area.

Human remains and ornaments linked to royalty found on board the ship raised speculation that it might be the caravel of the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, which went missing off the Cape of Good Hope in 1500. Dias, a nobleman from the Portuguese royal family, was the first European navigator to sail around the Cape of Good Hope – in 1488 – thereby opening up a lucrative trading route with the Far East.

It was, Dr Noli said, "a period when Africa was just being opened up, when the whole world was being opened up." He compared the remnants – ingots, ivory, coins, coffin-sized timber fragments – to evidence at a crime scene.

"The surf would have pounded that wreck to smithereens," he said. "It's not like Pirates of the Caribbean, with a ship more or less intact."

He and Mr Werz are trying to fit the pieces into a story. They divide their time between making an inventory of the find in Namibia and carrying out research in museums and libraries in Cape Town, South Africa.

Eventually, they will go to Portugal or Spain to search for records of a vessel with similar cargo that went missing. "You don't turn a skipper loose with a cargo of that value and have no record of it," Dr Noli said.

The wealth on board is intriguing. Dr Noli said that the large amount of copper might mean that the ship had been sent by a government looking for material to build cannons.

Trade in ivory was usually controlled by royal families, another indication the ship was on official business.

On the other hand, why did the captain have so many coins? Shouldn't they have been traded for the ivory and copper?

"Either he did a very, very good deal, or he was a pirate," Dr Noli said. "I'm convinced we'll find out what the ship was and who the captain was."

What brought the vessel down may remain a mystery, however. But Dr Noli has theories, noting that the stretch of coast where the wreck was found was notorious for fierce storms and disorienting fogs.

In later years, sailors with sophisticated navigational tools avoided it. The only tools found on the wreck were astrolabes, which can be used to determine only how far north or south you have sailed.

"Sending a ship toward Africa in that period, that was venture capital in the extreme," Dr Noli said. "These chaps were very much on the edge as far as navigation. It was still very difficult for them to know where they were."

Dr Noli has found signs that worms were at work on the ship's timber, and sheets of lead used to patch holes, indications the ship was old when it went down.

Imagine a leaky, overladen ship caught in a storm. The copper ingots, shaped like sections of a sphere, would have sat snug, he said. But the tusks could have shifted, tipping the ship. "And down you go," Dr Noli said, "weighed down by your treasure."

EXPLORER WHO GAVE HOPE FOR TRADE LINKS

BARTOLOMEU Dias was one of Portugal's great explorers and seamen, as Master of the man-of-war Sao Cristovao.

Starting in 1481, he made several trips down the eastern coast of Africa and in 1486 was tasked with rounding the southern tip of the continent by King John II of Portugal.

In January 1488, Dias unknowingly sailed around the cape through a terrible storm. He called it Cabo Tormentosa – the Cape of Storms. He got a good distance going east along the coast of what is now South Africa, and realised he had accomplished his task.

Upon his return, the king declared it should be called the Cape of Good Hope, because of the opening of a route to the east.

It was significant because, for the first time, Europeans could trade with India and the other parts of Asia, bypassing the overland route with its expensive middlemen.