Shipwrecks

History Fix Podcast
Jun 14
49 min read

Episodes 117 & 118: How Time Capsules of the Sea Have Provided Important Discoveries and Posed Difficult Questions

16th century illustration of Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose

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Part 1: It’s July 19th, 1545 and King Henry VIII sits aboard his flagship, the Mary Rose. He admires the intricate woodwork, the lavish decor of his private dining cabin. What an exquisite ship, he thinks, the pride of all of England. Suddenly there is shouting from the sailors and soldiers on deck. A man rushes into his cabin, Vice Admiral Sir George Carew. “You must leave the ship at once your majesty,” Carew informs him. Enemy French ships have entered the Solent, a narrow strait of water that runs between mainland England and the Isle of Wight. Henry disembarks and watches proudly from shore as his beloved Mary Rose heads out to defend her country from these invaders. He cheers as she lets loose a barrage of artillery, all of the guns on her starboard side are fired at once. Then he watches as the Mary Rose turns, catches a gust of wind, and promptly capsizes, sinking quickly beneath the water. Henry VIII stares at the place where his ship had just been in shock. Now, it was gone, sunk beneath the waves, carrying some 500 lives with it. This was a brutal blow for Henry, now foundering himself at the end of his life. The Mary Rose had been a symbol of the king’s power and ambition. This loss was personal. To resurrect the Mary Rose would be to resurrect the king’s reputation. Almost as soon as the Battle of the Solent ended, attempts were made to lift the ship from her watery grave, but all failed. In 1971 a team of divers happened upon the wreck, still in the Solent and covered in a layer of mud that helped to preserve as many as 19,000 artifacts on board. So what did they find on the Mary Rose? What have we found on other shipwrecks that have been discovered? And what should we do with it? Is a shipwreck merely treasure for the taking? Or is it a graveyard to be left in peace? Let’s fix that.

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. It’s just me this week. I know I’ve had a lot of guests lately, I hope you guys have enjoyed that. Just little old me this week talking about shipwrecks. Shipwrecks have always fascinated me. They’re often an integral part of adventure stories, right, Swiss Family Robinson style. But what I really love about them, about the idea of an old ship sunk to the bottom of the sea, undisturbed, is that they’re time capsules. Whatever was on that ship when it sank is still there until its rediscovery. And that’s not something we can say on land save for a few very rare cases, like the discovery of the tomb of Tutankamun and similar examples. On land, things get messed with, they get meddled with, they get looted. At the bottom of the ocean, good luck with that. It wasn’t until very recently, like within the last 50 years really, that we’ve had the technology required to locate and excavate shipwrecks like the Mary Rose. I’m going to touch on 4 different shipwrecks today, and then I’m going to pop back in next week with 4 more for you for a total of 8 wrecks. Yes, shipwrecks is a two parter. So today we have the wreck of the Antikythera, the Mary Rose, the Queen Anne’s’ Revenge, my personal favorite, and the HMS Victory. Next week, I’ll be back to talk about The Sultana, the Titanic, of course, The Endeavor, and the San Jose.

The first one I’m just going to touch on briefly because I actually already covered it in episode 68 about Lost Technology, the wreck of the Antikythera. This was an ancient Roman ship from around 70 to 60 BC and it’s by far the oldest shipwreck we’ll cover. I’m going in chronological order for the most part. This wreck was discovered by sponge divers off the tiny Greek island of Antikythera in 1900. And you’re like, what is a sponge diver, that’s someone who dives down and gets sponges like natural sea sponges and sells them for whatever someone might need a sponge for. I assume this is before artificial sponges were a thing. This find was super significant because the shipwreck was absolutely full of ancient artifacts and artwork including bronze statues, thirty-six marble sculptures, a bronze lyre which is a musical string instrument, several pieces of glasswork, coins, jewellery and even human remains. And we’re talking ancient Rome here so this stuff is like drool worthy. Also found amongst the wreckage were some bits of corroded bronze that, when reassembled, formed a device that became known as the Antikythera mechanism. And this was one of the lost technologies I talked about in episode 68. Here I’ll let myself tell you about it: One of the seemingly less impressive artifacts they recovered was just a lump of bronze and, you know, it’s covered in all these concretions which is this plaster like cement so it doesn’t look like much. But they take it back to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens with the other stuff and when they remove the concretions, they are blown away. What they have found is this set of intricate interlocking gears, something that was not thought to have existed when this ship sank in around 60 some BC. But further testing suggested that the mechanism itself was actually even older than the shipwreck, likely made around 200 BC. So immediately they’re like, “well what the heck is it, what does it do?” But over the next few decades, now removed from the sea, it started to basically fall apart into 82 different pieces which made it even harder to figure out what this thing was. But, long story short, it appears to be, in the words of Tony Freeth in a Scientific American article a quote “geared astronomical calculation machine of immense complexity,” end quote. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute describes it as quote “a complex set of interlocking gears capable of predicting the movement of the sun, moon, and several planets, as well as the timing of solar and lunar eclipses years into the future,” end quote. It’s a computer, basically. It’s a very early computer. It kind of reminds me of like a clock right, a mechanical clock, with all the gears and such. Except the first mechanical clocks like that weren’t invented until the early Renaissance in like the 1300s. So this thing was around a thousand years before we managed to make a clock that could like keep track of a single day and this thing is timing out astronomical events throughout time. It’s very impressive. The Woods Hole article concludes quote “The artifacts recovered from the Antikythera Wreck make it one of the most important finds in modern archaeology. The Antikythera Mechanism alone has changed our views of the limits of ancient technology, since it predates anything else approaching its level of sophistication by more than one thousand years,” end quote. Okay, back to current me, episode 117 me, the Antikythera wreck has, to this day, not been fully explored. It’s too deep for SCUBA divers but too shallow for submersibles so it’s in this like sweet spot where it’s really hard to access. Most of the ship’s hold, which is where the Antikythera mechanism was found, has not been explored. So, yeah, chills, thinking about what else could be in there.

Back to the Mary Rose next which was the subject of the opener. As I mentioned before, the Mary Rose was the flagship of King Henry VIII who ruled England between 1509 and 1547. Check out episodes 19 and 20 for more on this jerk. Not totally sure why it was called the Mary Rose. Henry had a sister named Mary and the rose was the symbol of the Tudor family so perhaps that’s why. He had another sister named Margaret and was also married to Catherine of Aragon at the time the Mary Rose was built in 1510 so not totally sure why it was named Mary. Yes he will go on to have a daughter named Mary but not until 6 years after the Mary Rose was built and named. Some think it was named after the virgin Mary, how ironically Catholic of him. But this ship was a big deal. It was his pride and joy, a symbol of his power. Henry took his ships very seriously. He’s credited as the founding father of the Royal Navy whose fleet of warships grew from just 5 at the start of his reign to 53 by the time he died 38 years later. But out of all of those, the Mary Rose was his favorite. And what I find interesting is that the life of the Mary Rose, of the ship, coincides almost perfectly with Henry’s reign. It was built right after he took the throne, a year after, and it sank two years before he died. The ship is like this weird metaphor for his own life, a sinking ship.

The Mary Rose fought in a couple of wars with France and then underwent a refit in the 1530s after Henry broke with the Catholic church. He had made a lot of enemies with this drastic action and so he shored up the Mary Rose with extra gunports. According to maryrose.org quote “Unfortunately, the new alterations to the Mary Rose may have affected her sailing capability. In April 1537, Vice-Admiral John Dudley reported that some of the ships were [quote] “unweatherly” and that [quote] “the ship that Mr Carew is in” was particularly bad. While it’s not clear which ship “Mr Carew” was on, George Carew was the captain of the Mary Rose when she sank eight years later; it is not impossible that the problematic ship was the Mary Rose,” end quote. That day in July of 1545, Henry was dining aboard the Mary Rose when the French fleet made a sudden appearance in the Solent. Maryrose.org writes quote “Before leaving ‘hurriedly’ for shore, the King had ‘secret talks’ with the Lord Admiral and Sir George Carew, and [quote] “took off his chain from his neck with a great whistle of gold pendent to the same, and did put it around the neck of the said Sir George, giving him also therewith many good and comfortable words.” Regrettably, we haven’t found the gold whistle,” end quote. Because soon after, the Mary Rose would come to rest at the bottom of the Solent claiming the life of Sir George Carew and some almost 500 others.

According to an eyewitness account coming from a Flemish soldier who was one of only around 35 people to survive the sinking, after firing at the French fleet, the Mary Rose turned suddenly, and a gust of wind caused it to tip, filling the still open gunports along the starboard with water which sank the ship. But there are a lot of theories about why it actually sank. We have suspicions that it wasn’t very sea worthy after Henry’s alterations, adding more gunports, throwing off the balance. Some blame human error. Many of the crew were not native English speakers which may have caused communication problems. It was also Sir George Carew’s first naval command so he was a bit of a noob. And, according to his cousin, which who knows if this is true, but apparently Carew’s cousin said that, according to Carew, his crew were quote “the sort of men that he could not rule.” And then there’s a theory that the French actually sank the Mary Rose which of course the English wouldn’t want to admit. Maryrose.org reports quote “A French cavalry officer present at the battle stated that the Mary Rose had been sunk by French guns. A cannonball low in the hull would enable water to flood in, making the ship unstable and leading to her sinking. Perhaps that was why the ship turned so suddenly. Was she aiming to reach the shallows at Spitbank only a few hundred metres away? A cannonball made of granite, similar to a type found in France, was found on the main gun deck of the Mary Rose – smoking gun evidence, surely? However, it was found in a shot locker, [which is like where they store cannon balls and whatnot on the ship] and the stone is also found in areas of the English West Country. [meaning the cannonball belonged to the English not the French. Were the French trying to justify their failed invasion attempt, which had seen two flagships damaged and the possible loss of a galley, by claiming to sink one of Henry VIII’s flagships?” end quote.

Who knows. All I know is, despite immediate efforts to raise the ship from the bottom of the Solent, it remained there for 426 more years. Because it wasn’t very deep at all. When it sank, its mast was still sticking out above the water. So they attempted to raise it back up and drag it to shallower water where the water would be pumped out and it would float again, that was the plan. But they only succeeded in snapping the mast and then giving up. They did have divers go down and recover anchors and especially guns which were quite valuable. In today’s money, the Mary Rose was carrying around 2.7 million dollars worth of guns when she sank. So they managed to salvage as many of those as they could and then they just sort gave up. The ship was not seen again by human eyes until 1836, almost 300 years later. Fishermen reported snagging their nets on something in the Solent which sparked the interest of a pub owner and diver named Henry Abbinett. Henry dives down and sees the wreck and word starts to spread. Soon two divers who are working nearby to raise guns from another shipwreck, John Deane and William Edwards, take over and start essentially looting the Mary Rose. I mean I guess technically they are excavating it, but it sure seems a lot more like looting because a lot of what they remove isn’t like preserved in museums, it’s just sold off. According to maryrose.org, the mast was chopped into pieces and turned into book covers, snuff boxes, and other trinkets for sale. We know human remains were removed from the ship at this time but we have no idea what happened to them. A few things made it into museums including a German stoneware jug featuring a bearded face that is now at the Victoria and Albert museum and some longbows. But for the most part they looted it in the 1800s, no archaeological integrity at that time unfortunately. And then they made plans to demolish what was left of the ship. And everyone thought they did demolish it. But turns out, they didn’t, they never did. And another 128 years went by with this rumor persisting.

However, there were documents that suggested the wreck had not been destroyed after all and someone started to catch on. In 1965, a journalist and amateur diver named Alexander McKee started something he called ‘Project Solent Ships’ to try to locate old shipwrecks in the Solent. He soon teamed up with a land archaeologist named Margaret Rule who was working at the site of an old Roman palace at the time. Underwater archaeology wasn’t quite a thing yet in the 1960s, it was just getting started as the technology emerged to even physically explore and excavate things like ship wrecks. But Alexander thought, you know, “hey, we’ll just take what you’re doing on land and we’ll do it underwater instead!” Easy peezy. In 1966 he discovered a map, a naval chart, from 1841, I love this already, that had the locations of three shipwrecks marked in the Solent. And one of those shipwrecks was the Mary Rose, how very Goonies. Maryrose.org explains what happened next quote “Between 1968 and 1971, a team of volunteer divers combed the area. Using dredgers, water jets and airlifts, they began to excavate and were encouraged by the appearance of stray pieces of timber. In 1970 a wrought iron gun of a 16th century style was found redefining the search area. The climax came when diver Percy Ackland found three or four frames of a ship on the 1st May 1971. By the end of the day a row of frames had been exposed over a length of about 30 metres with planking to one side. The tops were eroded, but clean sharp faces could be felt beneath the silt. The Mary Rose had been found,” end quote.

They discovered that two decks of the ship, the hull, had survived but that the bow, which is the front of the ship, was missing. So they decide they’re going to raise the whole thing, whatever is left of it, out of the water and put it in a museum. Which they do using, you know, modern technology, hydraulic jacks and whatnot, it’s complicated, I won’t bore you with the details. But they raise any artifacts they can find and then they raise what’s left of the ship itself on October 11, 1982, my birthday. It’s now on display at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth along with thousands of artifacts that were recovered along with it, cannons, dishes, a chamber pot, a wine flask, barrels with beef bones in them that once contained meat, a silver pendant, rings, syringes, a wooden bowl with the words Ny Coup Cook carved into it - Ny Cook was the cook on the ship who fed everyone, so so much stuff, I’ll link the complete list of over 19,000 artifacts in the description. But you want to know what they found a bunch of? The most commonly found personal item? Nit combs. They found 82 of them, most made of wood, some made of ivory. These were used mostly for removing nits from the hair, head lice, fleas, whatever pest was inhabiting these poor sailor’s heads. And actually quite a few of them still had nits in them. And now my head is itching, cool.

They also found human remains, of course, because hundreds of people died when the Mary Rose sank. Only around 30 something people onboard survived out of hundreds. So this wreck was essentially a graveyard. In the 1970s and 80s they recovered over 9,000 pieces of human skeletons and were able to reconstruct 98, what they call fairly complete skeletons or FCS. They’ve studied these people, these FCSs to learn about, for example where they grew up, any diseases they may have had, whatever DNA analysis can tell us. The most complete skeleton they found though was not human, it was a dog sadly who has been named “Hatch.” Hatch was around 12 to 18 months old and he appears to be most closely related to a modern Jack Russell Terrier. His DNA tells us he would have had brown fur. They found fish bones, cod bones from Newfoundland in Canada, which suggests the extent of Henry’s trade at the time. He’s importing fish from across the ocean. And remember, this is well before the first English colonization attempts in North America some 4 decades later. So that’s fairly revelatory. And then there’s the beef bones I mentioned a minute ago. There were also pork and deer bones all with butcher cut marks in them. So some clues there a to what they were eating aboard the Mary Rose in 1545.

And so the skeletons, the human skeletons recovered, they’ve been studied, DNA analyzed and whatnot and now they are on display at the Mary Rose Museum alongside, you know, chamber pots and nit combs. And that raises an interesting ethical concern, one that we’ll discuss more as we keep diving into these shipwrecks. And that is, is it okay? Is it okay to essentially exhume these bodies from their graves and display them in a museum without their consent? I mean how different is it than digging up a body in a graveyard or taking one out of a crypt and displaying it? Should they be reburied? Do we toss them back into the Solent? Cremate them? Display them? Store them for future studies? Does it matter? Something to think about.

The next wreck is my personal favorite and if you listened all the way back to episode 2 then you’re somewhat familiar - the wreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Yes, this was Blackbeard’s ship, a legit pirate ship, and it was discovered in Beaufort Inlet, in North Carolina in 1996. But before we talk about the discovery, let’s get into the history a little bit. The Queen Anne’s Revenge was originally a French ship called La Concorde. It was mostly used for transporting enslaved people. And when the infamous pirate Blackbeard came upon it east of the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1717, it was super weighted down with people, enslaved people, and so it was slow. He was easily able to take the ship and he renamed it Queen Anne’s Revenge. And so you may be thinking, “oh well, Queen Anne must of been Queen at the time, how sweet.” No, no, she wasn’t. George I was actually king of England at the time, the first of the line of Hanovers, episode 96, who remember came from Germany. George I came immediately after Queen Anne, very very distantly related, because Anne has no children and so he was remarkably the next in line who wasn’t Catholic. Catholics had been strictly excluded from the line of succession. But George seemed like an outsider to the British. He was an outsider. He barely spoke any English at all and he spent almost all of his time in Hanover. So Blackbeard’s not naming his ship after Georgie, he names it Queen Anne’s Revenge, and I think that’s telling of how the British felt about the Hanovers taking the throne at that time. Leave it to a pirate to somehow manage to insult the monarchy in the name of his ship.

So Blackbeard has this big fancy new ship, he has other small ships too, this whole fleet, and he goes to Charleston, South Carolina and he does something rather ballsy. He sets up a blockade and he captures a passenger ship that has all these prominent people on board and he holds them hostage and makes demands from the governor, ransom. And you may be like “oh, what kinds of gold and riches did he get?” Well, actually, he mostly just asked for a chest of medical supplies. A lot of his crew was sick. And that’s what they needed, they needed medical supplies. He gets them, he lets the people go, but now he’s like public enemy number one. And he has this huge fleet remember, all these ships, all these men, he’s way too obvious, way too easy to catch, he can’t cruise up in any ports anywhere like this. So he concocts a plan to downsize. He orders his crew to run the Queen Anne’s Revenge aground in the shallow water near Beaufort Inlet. It’s too big. It’s too much of a liability. And then takes a smaller ship with some 40 or 50 of his most trusted crew members and he takes off, abandoning most of his men there. Now, Blackbeard would eventually be hunted down and killed off of Ocracoke Island about 5 months later. But he wasn’t on the Queen Anne’s Revenge at the time, he left it, run aground and sunk back at Beaufort Inlet where it remained, lost, for 278 years.

In 1996, a search team from a private research firm called Intersal Inc. decided to find the Queen Anne’s Revenge. They used surviving historical records to try to pinpoint whereabouts Blackbeard had it run aground and they ended up at Beaufort Inlet. Soon, they discover a cluster of cannons and anchors there, lying on the sea floor. Over the next 20 years or so they worked to recover some 400,000 artifacts from the ship, this research firm along with the state of North Carolina. They were pretty sure it was the Queen Anne’s Revenge mostly just because of where it was located and the size of it compared to historical records. But as they brought up more and more artifacts, they became more and more sure that they had found Blackbeard’s ship. They’ve raised anchors, cannons and cannonballs, part of the ship’s hull, tools, glass trade beads, a pewter platter, pieces of pottery, a sounding weight, an English blunderbuss barrel, a brass coin weight with the bust of Queen Anne on it, a bronze bell with the date 1705 on it, the stem of a wine glass decorated with diamonds and tiny embossed crowns that was made to commemorate the 1714 coronation of King George I, so much stuff. Just a time capsule. And some of it helped to identify the ship as the QAR. For example, there were way WAY more cannons and guns on this ship than would have been found on a typical ship and the cannons were left loaded which was a pirate thing to do. Also, depth markings on part of the stern that was recovered show that it was built using French measurements, French foot measurements. And we know that the QAR was originally a French ship, La Concorde. So, we have a French built ship turned pirate ship from the time and in the place where the Queen Anne’s Revenge was said to have been run aground. What else could it possibly be? I’ve actually seen some of the artifacts recovered from the ship at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, so cool. No treasure though, sorry guys, no, if Blackbeard had any gold, he wouldn’t have sunk it intentionally with his ship. He wasn’t dumb.

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding this one right now though. I actually discovered this a couple years ago, I had no idea. I was creating a resource about Blackbeard for teachers, it’s this really fun activity where students try to solve like a cold case basically to figure out where Blackbeard’s treasure might be if he even had any treasure at all and they have to look at primary sources and come up with theories and stuff. But I wanted to use a photo of one of the artifacts they pulled off the ship in this activity. So I reached out to the owner of the photograph for permission, it was like, I don’t know, some North Carolina department or something and they’re usually cool with it, I’ve found, when it’s just like some obscure photo of some historical thing, they’re like “yeah, whatever, teach kids about it.” But this response was not what I was expecting. Basically they were like “We’d love to give you permission to use this photo but unfortunately there is a major lawsuit going on about who actually owns the rights to the artifact in the picture and just the wreck in general. So until that’s resolved, no, sorry, you can’t use this or anything about like this about the Queen Anne’s Revenge.” So yeah, this happens sometimes, we will see more of this in part two. And this one is particularly messy. The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which must be who I talked to about the photo and Intersal, that private firm that originally found the wreck, have been just at each other’s throats over this for literally decades now. There has been lawsuit after lawsuit, it’s messy and ongoing and just sad honestly. I feel like we should be able to put this kind of stuff aside in the name of science and history. Right, like all of it is just kind of on hold. They stopped excavating in 2015 and it’s just like this messy custody battle, basically. I wasn’t even allowed to use the photo, which is a shame.

We see a similar controversy play out in a big way with our final shipwreck this week - the wreck of the HMS Victory. Now, don’t get confused, there were actually two HMS Victorys. We’re talking about the first one, the original which sank in 1744. There was another one built around 20 years later with the same name and this HMS Victory is actually more well known because it was used by the famous Lord Nelson against Napoleon, yada yada, it survived, it’s on display at the Portsmouth Historic dockyard. The one we’re talking about, the one that came before that one, is at the bottom of the English channel. This ship was a massive 100 gun British naval ship. In its day, it was the most powerful warship in the Royal Navy. She fancy. For some time context, it was built and sank during the reign of King George II, so the second Hanoverian monarch, and the grandfather of King George III who was king during the American Revolution, the crazy one, farmer George. So this is the Georgian period. And in the 1740s when the HMS Victory sank, Great Britain was involved in the War of Austrian Succession. They sided with Austria’s Hapsburg empire against France and some other countries. So, in 1744, the HMS Victory was sent to relieve some British ships that were being trapped by a French blockade in Portugal, you know, just like war stuff. The ship’s commander at the time was Admiral Sir John Balchin, a 75 year old war hero who had actually been taken out of retirement to command the ship. So he was very experienced and very knowledgeable. But, surprisingly, the ship was separated from the rest of the fleet and sank on the way home near the Channel Islands. It reportedly sank near the Casquets which is like this outcropping of rocks in the channel. So everyone sort of assumed that they ran aground on those rocks and sank. And this was a huge tragedy. I mean this is the pride and joy of the Royal Navy for one with this renowned war hero commanding. But also, 1,100 men were on board when the ship sank, that’s how big this ship was, and there were no survivors. So we’re talking about tremendous loss of life, all these soldiers this poor commander who really just wanted to retire. And there were also some sons of some of the most prestigious British families on board who had quote “signed on for the merchant adventure,” according to Lisa Abend writing for Time Magazine. So, you know, these rich kids just out trying to have an adventure cause they have literally nothing standing in their way. They’re like “let’s go have some fun on the sea lads!” Well, sorry my dudes, but the ocean does not care about your privilege.

So it sank, everyone died. I’m sure it was terrible. I’m sure the whole country mourned the loss and then just kind of forgot about it, moved on. Another HMS Victory was built, it was a smash hit, everyone sort of forgot about the original one that had failed. Now, when underwater archaeology and shipwreck hunting started trending in the 1960s and 70s, some folks did start to look for the HMS Victory. And they went to that outcropping of rocks, the Casquets where it was said to have run aground. But, no dice. Divers couldn’t find a shipwreck there. It wasn’t until 2009 that a Florida based shipwreck salvage company called Odyssey Marine Exploration finally found it, not at all where people thought it was, where it was supposed to be. They found it around 62 miles away from those rocks, the Casquets. And this changed our entire understanding of what happened to the HMS Victory on that day in 1744. Odyssey president Greg Stemm explains in that Time Magazine article by Lisa Abend quote “If it had run aground on the Casquets, as historians have believed for over 250 years, it would have been because of a navigation error because the Casquets were far south of where the ship should have been. Since it obviously foundered in deep water, with a very experienced crew — it was almost certainly the construction of the ship that caused the loss,” end quote. So they think it was actually struck by a violent storm, one that it should have been able to weather, but some defect about the ship caused it to sink. BBC suggests a top heavy design, gun crowded upper decks, and the possibility that it was built using rotten timbers. And I think this realization is significant because it sort of pardons poor Sir John Balchin, the ship's commander, of any fault on his part. This guy was a legend, he was a war hero, he was a super experienced admiral and commander, and, you know, thinking that he made a navigational error and accidentally ran the ship aground sort of tarnishes his reputation. But that doesn’t appear to be what happened, we realized, once we actually found the ship.

At the time of the discovery in 2009, Odyssey president Greg Stemm said quote “This is the most significant shipwreck discovery in history. It’s the solution to one of the most intriguing naval mysteries in history, it went down with the most famous admiral of his time, it has the largest collection of bronze cannon in the world onboard and research suggests that it has one of the largest shipments of gold and silver that will likely ever be found on a shipwreck,” end quote. That’s right, there are rumors of a massive treasure onboard worth over a billion dollars. But there’s really no proof of that and many historians have come to doubt it. I think the claims are just based on speculation. Abend says that warships like the HMS Victory quote “acted as the Brinks armored trucks of their day.” If you’re going to be carrying gold and silver over open water, you’re going to want to put it in the biggest strongest most heavily defended ship you have, which, at the time, was the HMS Victory. I don’t think there is any actual contemporary documentation of that kind of treasure on board, though. And, they haven’t found any gold or anything like that while excavating the wreck.

So what have they found? Well there’s probably a lot down there, but all that’s been taken off of the wreck is a massive 42 pound cannon bearing the crest of King George I and a smaller 12 pound cannon with the royal arms of George II. The larger cannon, the 42 pounder is part of how they were able to identify the wreck as the HMS Victory. There was no other ship from that time in that general area that would have been carrying a gun of that size. But that’s really all they’ve taken, those two cannons. Everything else is still down there and everything is sort of halted. Just like with the Queen Anne’s Revenge, a controversy arose between Odyssey Marine Exploration, this private salvage company from Florida that found the wreck and the British government’s Ministry of Defense. Odyssey is basically saying, we should pull everything up off of the wreck and put it in museums and, hey maybe also sell some of it to pay for the excavation so that burden isn’t on taxpayers. That’s kind of their stance, if we have to sell some of the artifacts to fund the whole thing then it’s worth it because it’s better than not being able to salvage it and learn from it and put whatever we can into museums. In regards to an earlier wreck find in 2002, the HMS Sussex Odyssey president Stemm had said quote “Selling these coins to pay for the archaeology and to save these shipwrecks from destruction is much better than asking taxpayers to foot the bill,” end quote. He basically says, you know, if we find 100 coins, we put one of them in the museum, they’re all the same, put one in the museum, sell the rest to fund the salvage itself.

Now, the government doesn’t agree. And the latest decision made was to leave the wreck alone. Just leave it down there untouched. Don’t mess with it. And this is backed by UNESCO guidelines that say no items should be removed from the ship, everything should be left in situ, heritage sites should remain intact. But it’s in a busy shipping lane, and some fear that it will eventually be destroyed by all the traffic that goes through there. And then there’s all the bodies complicating things further. When Odyssey’s robotic diver uncovered skeletal remains, they just buried them back beneath the seafloor. Which is different from what happened with the Mary Rose back in the 1980s when they brought the bones up and analyzed and displayed them. So this continuing question of what to do with the bodies. What do we do with the bodies? Leave them there like Odyssey chose to do? Bring them up and do what with them? Sir Robert Balchin who is a direct descendant of the ship’s commander Sir John Balchin said in the Time Magazine article quote “My own view is that the human remains should be brought up and properly buried on land. I think it’s what John Balchin would have wanted,” end quote. He also adds quote “Of course, if they wanted to give me a small bit of wood from the hull, I should be thrilled,” end quote. I mean you can see this controversy playing out in this one man alone, in the descendant of the ship’s commander. There is value in what’s down there on that ship, and I don’t even mean just monetary value, I mean educational value, for Sir Robert, sentimental value. Do we leave it alone, down there forgotten where we can see it, can’t study it, learn from it, remember and honor it? Or do we pull it up and put it on display, maybe even sell some of it off to fund the whole thing? And what about the bodies? Robert Yorke, chairman of Britain’s Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee says in a BBC article by Rob Byrne quote “"This is basically a grave - this is the last resting place of 1,100 British sailors and it should not be disturbed lightly. You don't go into a local churchyard and start digging them up hoping you're going to find some gold underneath the bodies," end quote. No you certainly don’t. So is a shipwreck any different?

We’ll see this controversy continue in part 2 next week when we dive into four more shipwrecks: the Sultana, the Titanic, the Endeavor, and the San Jose. Because what is a shipwreck really? An archaeological site? A time capsule? A treasure chest? A graveyard? Join me next week to continue the discussion.

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.

Information used in this episode was sourced Scientific American, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Royal Museums Greenwich, maryrose.org, Museum Crush, the Queen Anne’s Revenge Project, Wikipedia, BBC, the Guardian, and Time Magazine. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.

Sources:

Part 2: On April 15th, 1865, Captain James Cass Mason nearly spit out his morning coffee aboard his steamboat, the Sultana. He was staring at the front page of the morning newspaper and he simply could not believe the words printed there. “President Lincoln Dead” it read. Stunned, he quickly decided that he must be the one to spread this news down the Mississippi. The Sultana was headed to New Orleans and, knowing telegraphs to the south had been nearly completely cut off due the recently ended Civil War, Mason figured it was up to him to alert the southern states of the president's assassination. He grabbed an armload of newspapers and set off. Upon reaching Vicksburg, Mississippi, a Confederate stronghold now harboring thousands of Union prisoners of war waiting to go home, Mason was approached by Captain Reuben Hatch, chief quartermaster of Vicksburg. Hatch had hatched a devious plot to earn a little extra money but he needed Mason in on it. The US government would pay $2.75 for the transport of each Union soldier back to the north and $8 for each union officer. Hatch promised Mason that he could provide him with around 1,000 prisoners of war for transport back to the north aboard the Sultana, if Mason would give him a cut of the profits. Mason, quickly abandoning his previous mission to take on this new one, agreed. But there were several serious problems with this plan. Number one, the Sultana was only designed to hold 376 people. Number two, while Hatch had promised 1,000 soldiers, Mason actually ended up with around 2,000 in addition to the crew and fare-paying cabin passengers already on the ship. And number three, hastily repaired leaking boilers had turned the ship into a literal ticking time bomb. All of this would soon coalesce into the deadliest maritime disaster in US history. And yet most people know nothing about it. Overshadowed by the news of Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War, the Sultana tragedy went mostly untold. Let’s fix that.

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I am back this week with four more shipwrecks for you in this part two episode. I also released a mini fix this past Wednesday called “what does a pirate read?” Here’s a quick preview:

Pirates aren’t exactly thought of as intellectuals. They’re rough and mean, barbaric, they’re criminals. When you think pirate, you don’t typically think well read. I mean could pirates even read? How educated were they really? Well, it certainly depends on the pirate, but evidence uncovered on the wreck of Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, certainly suggests that at least some pirates enjoyed kicking back with a good book. Let’s fix that.

Listen to the full mini fix episode at patreon.com/historyfixpodcast. It’s just $5 a month to subscribe or you can just purchase a particularly interesting mini fix for $3 if you aren’t the subscription type. All of that goes to ensuring that I can justify continuing to pour hours and hours and hours into creating this podcast and is so incredibly appreciated, more than I can even express.

In last week’s part one episode, we talked about four shipwrecks, the Antikythera, the Mary Rose, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and the HMS Victory. And I promised you that I would be back this week with four more shipwrecks to round out this two parter. This week I have for you the Sultana, the Titanic, the Endeavor, and the San Jose. So let's start with the wreck of the Sultana which was the topic of the opener. Now, we talked a lot about how shipwrecks were really cool because they were kind of like time capsules and in most cases that’s true. We learned a lot about Tudor England, for example, under the reign of Henry VIII by examining the wreck of his flag ship, the Mary Rose. We learned a lot about pirates of the golden age of piracy, with the excavation of Blackbeard’s ship the Queen Anne’s Revenge. This next wreck, the Sultana, is a bit different. And if you’re watching on YouTube or Patreon, there are images popping up of these ships and people and whatnot so don’t forget to check that out in the video version if that would add to your enjoyment of the show. But the Sultana was a bit different because there really wasn’t much left of it and what was left is actually thought to be buried underground now, not underwater. This shipwreck was bananas. Let’s get into it.

As I already said, the Sultana was a steamboat captained by a guy named James Cass Mason and Mason was spreading the word of Lincoln’s assassination down the Mississippi river when he was approached by Captain Reuben Hatch stationed at Vicksburg. Vicksburg was essentially a Confederate fortress in Mississippi during the Civil War and after the war ended in early April of 1865, thousands of Union prisoners of war from surrounding prisoner of war camps had been brought to a parole camp at Vicksburg to await being sent back to the north. Hatch wants Mason to transport a bunch of these Union soldiers back north on the Sultana in order to get the money for it. The US government was willing to pay per head for the transport of these troops back home. And Hatch and Mason are going to split the money. Hatch promises him 1,000 troops which is already way over the limit for how many people the Sultana could carry which was only 376. And they already had 85 crew members and 70 fare-paying passengers on board. So this is a really stupid plan from the start. Mason is like “hmm well we’ve only got room for 220ish more people, so, sure, we’ll take 1,000.”

To make matters worse, just before returning to Vicksburg from New Orleans to pick up the promised Union soldiers, the Sultana’s four boilers sprang a leak. But, no matter, they get a mechanic on board the check things out in Vicksburg as the soldiers are heading towards the ship. The mechanic is like “eh, it’s not looking good. This seam right here is ruptured. We need to cut it out and replace it.” And Mason is like “how long is that gonna take?” A few days. Well that’s no good. That’s too long. He doesn’t have a few days. If he waits a few days, the 1,000 Union soldiers will be piled onto other ships north and he’ll lose his government pay out. So he convinces the mechanic to just patch the boilers, a temporary fix. Instead of cutting out the ruptured seam and replacing it, he just rivets a patch over top of it. And while he’s doing this, while he’s making this hasty repairs, the soldiers are already piling onto the ship. And there aren’t just 1,000 of them. According to Wikipedia quote “Although Hatch had suggested that Mason might get as many as 1,000 released Union prisoners, a mix-up with the parole camp books and suspicion of bribery from other steamboat captains caused the Union officer in charge of the loading, Captain George Augustus Williams, to place every man at the parole camp on board Sultana,” end quote. This ended up being something like 1,950 paroled prisoners. We’ll call it 2,000.

So the ship was severely overloaded to the point where the decks began to sag and they tried to shore them up with wooden beams. After about 2 days of traveling up the river, making a couple of stops, disaster struck. It was around 2 am on April 27, 1865 about 7 miles north of Memphis, Tennessee when suddenly 3 of the 4 badly repaired boilers aboard the Sultana violently exploded, blowing apart the center of the boat and lighting the rest on fire. Many were killed immediately, some managed to jump off of the boat and into the water but still many of those drowned or died of hypothermia or of burn injuries from the fire. Bodies continued to be found down river for months after the explosion and many were never found. In all, the estimated death toll sits at around 1,195, making it the deadliest maritime disaster in US history.

According to a New York Times article from July 1982, a lot of the pieces of the ship that were left, I mean this thing literally exploded, a lot of the pieces were recovered soon after, within six months of the tragedy. But, in 1982, when this article was published, it reported that researchers had located the rest of the ship. It was not underwater, not under the Mississippi River. It was actually underground, under a soybean field northwest of Mound City, Arkansas just across the Mississippi River from Memphis. The author writes quote “The river has shifted its course frequently over the years, often leaving old wrecks buried in silt far from the river's present course,” end quote. In 1982, blackened wooden deck planks and timbers were found buried about 32 feet below this soybean field. So they’ve found this evidence but they haven’t actually excavated it. It’s still there. And that’s partly due to the difficulty of excavating it because of how deep it is and its proximity to the river. And also because a lot of people don’t want it dug up, including the descendents of those who died who view it as hallowed ground, essentially a graveyard that should not be disturbed.

This one is truly heartbreaking for a lot of reasons. I think about those nearly 2,000 Union soldiers who were heading home. They were heading home you guys. They spent God knows how long in a prisoner of war camp, they made that sacrifice, it worked, they won the war, and they were finally heading home to be reunited with their families, triumphantly, to be welcomed home as heroes. I imagine them boarding the Sultana just full of relief and joy, and then disaster strikes. And it wasn’t like a freak accident. This was egregious behavior on the part of the men involved in this plot to make money off packing the Sultana with way way way too many people. This was greed that caused this tragedy. They should have repaired the boilers properly. They should have separated the men onto various ships so as not to overload any of them. But they didn’t because of greed. Because they wanted to make more money. It’s really sad and there’s really a very important lesson to be learned here.

The next shipwreck is one I’ve already talked about extensively in episode 7, the Titanic. Now, I want to point out, the Titanic did get a lot of attention, it was all over the newspapers, it was all anyone was talking about, this horrible tragedy aboard the Titanic. The Sultana did not. It didn’t get much press at all. No one really knew about it. It took a long time for the news to sort of trickle out and that’s because of what else was going on at the time. Okay so April 9th, the Civil War ended, April 15th President Abraham Lincoln died, April 27 the Sultana exploded. It was just, there were just too many other big news stories already that overshadowed it. But the Titanic, no. This was probably one of the most widely reported on shipwrecks ever. And I’m not going to go too deep into the story of how it sank because I already did that in episode 7. It is super interesting so definitely go back and revisit that one if you missed it. Long story short, the Titanic was traveling from England to New York City in April of 1912 when it struck an iceberg just before midnight on April 14th and sank, killing around 1,500 people. And, as I talk about in episode 7, it was really this perfect storm that came together to make the wreck of the Titanic the extreme tragedy that it was, this perfect storm of circumstances - the subpar quality of the steel used to build the ship, budget cuts, competition with another ship, Titanic’s “unsinkable” reputation, inaccessible binoculars, weird atmospheric conditions limiting visibility, poor communication, and nowhere near enough life boats.

And so the Titanic went down in the North Atlantic where it remained until its discovery in 1985. I’m going to let my episode 7 self tell you the story “Immediately after it sank people wanted to find the wreck. But the ship drifted quite a bit between the time it sent out its last distress call with coordinates and the time it actually sank to the bottom of the ocean. This narrowed it down to an area of hundreds of miles and the technology just did not exist to find the wreck for a long time.

By the mid 1980’s the technology exists but it’s still out of reach. Oceanographer Robert Ballard requests the help of the US Navy to fund the development of an unmanned camera that could be dragged behind a ship at depths of up to 20,000 feet. Ballard wants to use this camera to find Titanic but the Navy is like, “uh, no, why would we fund that?” But then they reconsider, they're like “actually, wait, there could be something in it for us.” They make a deal with Ballard. They’ll fund the camera as long as Ballard uses it to locate and survey the wrecks of two nuclear submarines that sank in the 1960s. This is super top secret though because of the cold war. This plan doesn’t get declassified until the year 2000, after the movie Titanic came out so this bit about the nuclear submarines and the deal with the navy - not in the movie.

Ballard does it, the camera is awesome, he finds the submarines for the navy. But after that, he only has 12 days left to find Titanic which is all he really wanted to do anyway. 12 days. That’s a tight timeline. But, Ballard noticed something while surveying the submarines. He noticed that, as they sank to the bottom, the current created a trail of debris. He realizes, instead of looking for the Titanic itself, he should look for this much larger debris trail and then follow it to the wreck.

And that’s exactly what he does. After combing the seafloor for more than a week, something finally enters the live video feed. It’s unmistakably one of Titanic’s boilers. They’ve found it. Ballard and his crew start cheering and applauding, someone busts out champagne and then they realize… it’s 2:20 am… the exact time Titanic sank 73 years ago. A hush falls over the room as the gravity of that hits them. Ballard later told 60 minutes “We were embarrassed we were celebrating and all of a sudden we realized that we should not be dancing on someone’s grave.”

They followed the debris trail and sure enough, Titanic’s bow came into view with the stern some 400 meters away. Debris littered the ocean floor - china plates, furniture, an unopened case of champagne, and leather shoes. Any bodies that had sunk with the ship were long gone. But their shoes remained, scattered on the sand.

REMOVE Bad weather forced Ballard and his crew to abandon the find a few days later but he returned the next summer and explored the wreck in person using a submersible, like a tiny submarine called Alvin. Actually never before seen footage from Alvin was just released a couple months ago on YouTube. I’ll post a link to that video in the description.

Since its discovery in 1985, Ballard has been adamant that the wreck not be disturbed. In his words “The Titanic lies now in 13,000 feet of water on a gently sloping alpine-like countryside overlooking a small canyon below. There is no light at this great depth and little life can be found. It is a quiet and peaceful place—and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. Forever may it remain that way.”

Back to episode 118 me. So the Titanic is still there. Most of you are probably familiar with the second tragedy involving the Titanic that occurred a couple years ago in June of 2023. That actually happened after I did episode 7 so it’s not mentioned in that episode. That was of course when a small submersible called Titan that was going to get a glimpse of the Titanic wreck imploded killing all five people on board. Super sad, I know a lot of people made light of it at the time because it was like these rich guys you know just looking for adventure or whatever and they had paid this company OceanGate Expeditions all this money to do this and serves them right or whatever but, like, does it? Does it serve them right? These were real people. There was a 19 year old on board. It’s a tragedy not a joke. They left behind loved ones. Can you imagine seeing the memes of people poking fun at your dead son who died in this really horrible way. Enough of that.

Now, the Titanic wreck has been in the news again recently because of a really cool thing National Geographic is doing called Titanic: the Digital Resurrection where they’ve used these super advanced underwater scans to digitally recreate perfectly accurate images of the wreck. There’s a documentary you can watch, I haven’t yet but I’ve seen some clips. National Geographic wrote in a press release about it quote “Using exclusive access to cutting-edge underwater scanning technology, including 715,000 digitally captured images, the special unveils the most precise model of the Titanic ever created: a full-scale, 1:1 digital twin, accurate down to the rivet,” end quote. And I think this is so cool because it’s kind of a work around to the issue that keeps coming up with all these shipwrecks. This ethical moral issue of, do we dig up these wrecks and pull stuff up to study and display in museums, or is this a graveyard that should be left undisturbed, in peace as the final resting place of all these victims. What National Geographic is doing here is kind of both in this really neat way. Because it is being left undisturbed, as Robert Ballard wanted, but we’re also sort of getting to see it and I mean down to like the tiny details, personal items like pocket watches, purses, that kind of thing. It’s all left in place but it’s been scanned and digitally recreated in a way that sort of bridges the gap of this moral shipwreck dilemma we keep having. I really need to watch this special now. Not a sponsor, unfortunately, just probably really cool to see. National Geographic hit me up if you want to sponsor History Fix. I’ll talk about the doc all day long.

Our seventh shipwreck, counting the four last week, is the Endeavor, not to be confused with the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s ship which came up organically a couple weeks ago when I was chatting with Gary Arndt, episode 116 about UNESCO. I literally, I don’t know what happened but for like until right now in the episode thought I was doing Shackleton’s ship and then was like wait no, Endeavor not Endurance. Wait, what even is the Endeavor? I got so confused. I am going to talk about the Endeavor, not the Endurance although that is another interesting shipwreck story. I have plans to do a full episode about Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance so I’m going to save that one and we’re going to do the Endeavor instead. To make things even more confusing, these two famous shipwrecks were discovered about a month apart in February and March of 2022. The Endeavor was discovered off of Rhode Island in February of 2022 and no it was not Shackleton’s ship it was another famous dude we’ve talked about before’s ship, Captain James Cook. He actually came up in my mini fix I put out just a few days ago. And guys this is how turned around I got, I literally thought I was talking about Shackleton’s ship until I saw that it was found off Rhode Island and I was like “wait, Shackleton wasn’t anywhere near Rhode Island, he was in Antarctica, what the heck is going on here.” No, no, this was Captain James Cook’s ship.

So who was Captain Cook? Why is he such a big deal? Well, he was a British Navy officer, explorer, and cartographer best known for his three voyages to the Pacific and Southern Oceans between 1768 and 1779. He is the first known European to have visited Australia and the Hawaiian Islands. He is also credited as the first person to have circumnavigated New Zealand but something tells me that’s probably wrong considering how skilled Pacific islanders were as navigators and seamen. I feel like someone else definitely did that first. it just wasn’t recorded in writing for us to refer back to in the way that Cook’s expeditions were. So, Captain James Cooks is sort of touted as a hero. He’s this heroic historical figure, this important explorer. But of course there’s a whole lot more to his story than that. Of course there’s a dark side to Captain Cook just like there was a dark side, a very dark side to Christopher Columbus. Both of their voyages, their expeditions, led directly to the displacement and subjugation, oppression of indigenous people in the lands that they stumbled upon. I’m not going to get into all that now because I mostly want to focus on the ship. But, yeah, I’ll have to do a future episode on Captain Cook for sure.

So the ship that Cook captained to Australia and whatnot during his first voyage was called the HMS Endeavor. It returned to England in 1771 after having been at sea for around 3 years exploring Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand. Cook took another ship altogether for his second and third voyages of exploration. So it gets docked back in England in 1771. In 1775, the Endeavor was sold into private hands and renamed Lord Sandwich after the Earl of Sandwich who is believed to be the inventor of the actual sandwich but, once again, not buying that. Dude lived in like the mid to late 1700s. You cannot convince that someone else somewhere in the world didn’t come up with the concept of a sandwich before that. There’s just no way the ancient Egyptians whoever didn’t dabble in sandwiches, put something between two slices of bread, there’s no way that didn’t happen. This guy just happened to be rich and white and so he got the credit. Anyway, unrelated. The Endeavor leaves the Navy, gets renamed Lord Sandwich and is used commercially starting in 1775.

Now, something else significant that happens in 1775, Great Britain’s American colonies sign the Declaration of Independence and the American war for independence the Revolutionary War begins. Starting then, the Endeavor AKA Lord Sandwich was rehired by the British Navy, they were like “woops, nevermind,” to transport British troops to the colonies to fight in the war. After a few years of doing this, in 1778, they needed the Endeavor for another purpose. They needed to use it to blockade Newport Harbor in Rhode Island. The French were involved now, the French were helping the Americans and they needed to get into this harbor and the British were not going to let that happen. So they sank the Endeavor along with some other ships, scuttled it, it’s called scuttling apparently when you intentionally sink a ship to blockade a port or whatever. So they scuttled it to block the harbor so French ships couldn’t get through. And that was that, they sank it and there it remained.

So it really had nothing to do with Captain James Cook at the time that it was scuttled, sunk. He hadn’t had anything to do with it for around 7 years and he actually died the year after the Endeavor was sunk in 1779 after being injured in a confrontation with indigenous Hawaiians. He kind of deserved it. I talk about that more in episode 59 about Hawaii. But, the Endeavor’s stint as Captain James Cook’s ship during his first voyage of exploration when he landed in Australia was a big enough deal to Australians that they wanted to find the ship, to white Australians I should say. Aboriginal Australians probably feel very differently about Captain James Cook and the Endeavor. But, between 2018 and 2021 the Australian National Maritime Museum’s archaeology team began looking for the wreck of the Endeavor. Because, I mean, we kind of knew where it was. We knew the British sank it and we knew the general area in which they sank it, Newport Harbor Rode Island. So the Australian archaeologists teamed up with the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project to investigate a wreck known as RI 2394 that had been discovered in the late 90s and was just sort of a John Doe of a shipwreck.

In February of 2022 they were able to use various pieces of evidence from the RI 2394 wreck to link it to the Endeavor of Captain Cook fame. Because they have detailed plans, like blueprints, of the Endeavor from when it was acquired by the British Navy in 1768 and so they were able to confirm the type of wood that was used, white oak, the size of the ship. They were able to superimpose images of the wreck on top of the blueprints and it all lines up perfectly. The bilge pump in particular was a dead ringer. They were also able to identify places where the ship had been repaired that matched known repairs the Endeavour underwent, documented repairs, Cook recorded these in his journal. And they also found evidence of scuttling, intentionally sinking the ship to blockade the port. So when a ship is scuttled, they usually try to leave the possibility open of salvaging the ship at some point, bringing it back up and fixing it to use again. So they would just make a series of small holes in the hull of the ship below the water line to let enough water in to sink it without actually destroying the whole ship. And this is what they found on the wreck, holes low in the hull that appeared to have been intentionally made with tools like axes or crowbars, some of them had evidence of intentional cutmarks around the edges. So someone intentionally put these holes in the ship to scuttle it.

So this was the theory proposed by the Australians back in February of 2022 but there was still some debate, some pushback. The Rhode Island Archaeology guys were like “eh, I don’t know, they sank a lot of ships like this, we might need more to confirm it.” It wasn’t until like a week ago actually that this find was sort of confirmed. According to a Guardian article from June 4th, quote “On Wednesday, the museum’s director, Daryl Karp, said it stood by its 2022 conclusions – the culmination of 25 years of research,” end quote. That is the Australian National Maritime Museum. So they didn’t like find a smoking gun or anything, they just sort of sat on their theory for three more years and were like “it’s good enough, confirmed.” There are no plans to like pull the wreck up or anything like that. There wouldn’t be much of anything left on it because it was intentionally sunk. But the Australians would like plans put in place to protect the wreck from shipworms and gribbles which are eating the wood. Gribbles are apparently a type of wood eating crustacean. So, yeah, shipworms and gribbles, yikes. But of course it’s in American waters not Australian so that complicates things I’m sure. And then, you know, when you factor in what this ship was used for, transporting foreign invaders to Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, lands that were already inhabited, populations that would be decimated, ways of life destroyed by these outsiders and then again during the Revolutionary war, it was used to try to keep the American colonies oppressed, to continue to subjugate and abuse the Americans who so badly yearned for freedom and independence. There’s a lot of people who might prefer to see the Endeavor go to the shipworms and gribbles. Let the gribbles have it y’all.

Our final shipwreck is that of the San Jose. I was going to go in chronological order but I don’t know what happened. We went chronologically up to the Titanic and then we started going backwards again. Just sort of happened that way. The San Jose was a Spanish galleon that sank in 1708 off of Columbia and it has been called the holy grail of shipwrecks. It’s also highly highly controversial. And that’s because it carried a load of gold, silver, and emeralds worth an estimated 17 billion dollars in today’s money when it sank, holy grail indeed. Now, if you’re like me, you think Harry Potter when you hear the word galleon, right, a galleon is the largest denomination of coin, wizard money, in the Harry Potter series. It’s a big gold coin. But in this context, the San Jose being a Spanish galleon, that was a type of sailing vessel used by Spain in mostly the 15, 16, and 1700s. But even just the word galleon brings to mind gold, gold coins because the Spanish were known to transport riches like this in their ships. Spain was a very very wealthy country during this period of history. The San Jose and its twin ship, its brother San Joaquin, were part of the Spanish treasure fleet that operated between 1566 and 1790. Spain was raking it in. You have to be raking it in to have a designated treasure fleet. Specifically, the San Jose operated during the Spanish War of Succession in the early 1700s. This was a conflict over who would take the Spanish throne after the death of the childless King Charles II. He was the real funky looking one with the Hapsburg jaw, which is a sign of inbreeding. My video watchers are seeing his lovely portrait on the screen now.

In 1708, the San Jose was carrying a bunch of riches, gold, silver, emeralds, jewelery etc. from South America back to Spain to fund the king’s war effort when it encountered an enemy British warship off the coast of Columbia. The British wanted to seize the ship including its treasure but accidentally fired a cannon into the powder magazine where they stored the gun powder. It detonated, exploded, sinking the ship including any treasure it was carrying and killing all but 11 of the 600 men on board. The British massively screwed that one up. They really blew it. So how do we know how much the riches aboard the San Jose were worth? The number 17 billion dollars is thrown around a lot. Well we don’t really. That’s speculation based on what we know the San Jose’s twin ship, the San Joaquin was carrying at the time. We’re assuming the San Jose was carrying a similar treasure haul. So, eh, but promising enough to prompt major treasure hunting efforts.

This began in the 1980s, according to a BBC article by Gideon Long. In the 80s, a US salvage company called Glocca Mora claimed to have located the shipwreck and tried to persuade the Colombian government to go in it with them, help them raise the treasure and they would split it. But, of course, the two parties immediately disagreed over who should get what theoretical share and it all got locked in a legal battle that kept the whole thing at a stand still. In 2015, so like 30 some years later, the Columbian government was like “whoa, we found this shipwreck, the San Jose. We found it. It had nothing to do with the Americans, Glocca Mora. We found it in a completely different place than where they said it even was.” And so Columbia started to argue that Glocca Mora, now called Sea Search Armada, has no right to the wreck or any of the treasure. But others argue, neither does Columbia. Spain, for example, has staked a claim. I mean it was a Spanish government ship. They say that treasure was the property of Spain and still is. But then the indigenous people of South America disagree, of course, specifically the people of Bolivia and Peru. They argue that Spain plundered those riches from mines in the Andes mountains, stolen goods.

So while Columbia has released what Long calls tantalizing videos of the wreck taken with submersible cameras that show quote “the prow of a wooden ship, encrusted with marine life, a few bronze cannons scattered across the sand, and blue-and-white porcelain and gold coins shining on the ocean floor,” end quote, all of these factions are at a legal standstill once more over what to do with the wreck and who owns the rights to the treasure. Columbia, the American salvage company, Spain, and the indigenous people of Peru and Bolivia have all staked a claim. I’m honestly surprised Britain hasn’t jumped into the mix to be like “well, actually we sank the ship, sooo…” It’s messy and it really brings the shipwreck controversy to light. Because there aren’t really any clear cut laws over what to do with shipwrecks and who, if anyone, has rights to them. And, you know, shipwrecks are international, they’re all over the place and so it has to be some sort of international law, international agreement and that, of course, is very hard to pull off.

And then, we have to factor in, of course, the reality that many of these wrecks are actually graveyards. Taking treasure off of a shipwreck is really no different than taking treasure out of someone’s grave or tomb. It’s graverobbery. For many, including archaeologists concerned about the historical value of these wrecks, they should be left in peace, undisturbed. Shipwreck explorer Rodrigo Pacheco Ruiz says in that BBC article quote “if you just go down and take lots of artefacts and bring them to the surface, you just have a pile of stuff. There’s no story to tell… You can just count coins, you can count porcelain, but there is no ‘why was this on board? Who was the owner? Where was it going?’ – the human story behind it,” end quote. Colombian maritime archaeologist Juan Guillermo Martín adds quote “The treasure of the San José should remain at the bottom of the sea, along with the human remains of the 600 crew members who died there. The treasure is part of the archaeological context, and as such has no commercial value. Its value is strictly scientific,” end quote.

The human story matters. The historical context matters. This is really cool stuff that they’ve recovered from some of these shipwrecks but once they recover it, once they haul it up out of the water and put it in a museum, it’s just old crappy stuff. It really only matters as part of the shipwreck, within that context. And is it really worth disturbing the sanctity of a burial ground, a graveyard, to get it? Especially if your motives are financial. Columbia, the United States, Spain, Peru, and Bolivia - they aren’t arguing over the San Jose because they all want to have the coolest museum ever. They’re arguing over it because of money. They all want the treasure and that’s not right. That’s disrespectful. These sites, these shipwrecks, this is hallowed ground. These were tragedies, immense tragedies some of them and to profit, even now, from those tragedies… it’s just not right. So I think, after all this, I’m leaning more in the direction of leave it. Leave them there. Let them be at peace. But, document what you can, preserve what you can in situ, for scientific and historical, educational purposes. I can’t stop thinking about the National Geographic Titanic special, I promise they really aren’t a sponsor. But that technology they’re using where they do these high tech scans and then they are able to recreate a digital exact life size replica of the wreck and everything on it, all the debris. It really is the perfect solution to the leave it but also learn from it conundrum.

1,500 people died when the Titanic sank. Only 340 of those bodies were recovered from the water meaning there’s something like 1,160 bodies down there with that ship. That’s heavy and it commands respect. And yet, up to 6,500 artifacts have been taken from the wreck. Submersibles have landed on it, damaging what’s left of the ship. In 2001, a New York couple was married in a submersible perched on the ship’s deck, leading to outrage that they were insulting the dead. Don’t do this guys. Don’t get married on a shipwreck, a plantation. Plantation weddings are a thing here in the American South. Just, don’t. It’s so disrespectful to have a party, a celebration in a place where so much suffering took place. I’m reminded of the moment Robert Ballard and his team first laid eyes on the wreck of the Titanic. After searching and searching, they’re running out of time, and the boilers come into view and they know they’ve finally found it. They are cheering, champagne comes out, this is a huge moment, success, and then they realize, this sobering realization, they’ve found it. They’ve found the final resting place of over 1,000 people and this is no cause for celebration. “We were embarrassed,” Ballard said, “we were celebrating and all of a sudden we realized that we should not be dancing on someone’s grave.”

Information used in this episode was sourced from American Battlefield Trust, the New York Times, Live Science, National Geographic, The Times, Wikipedia, the Australian National Maritime Museum, the Guardian, and BBC. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.

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Shipwrecks

Episodes 117 & 118: How Time Capsules of the Sea Have Provided Important Discoveries and Posed Difficult Questions

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