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Ep. 117 Shipwrecks Part 1: How Time Capsules of the Sea Have Provided Important Discoveries and Posed Difficult Questions

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 117

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This week, we'll uncover the stories of four different shipwrecks. I'll start with an ancient Roman ship found near the Greek island of Antikythera which sank around 60 to 70 BC with mind blowing treasures on board. Next, I'll talk about the sinking of King Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose, in 1545 and it's rediscovery twice in the 400 years since. Then we'll move on to my personal favorite, the Queen Anne's Revenge, which was intentionally run aground by the infamous pirate Blackbeard in 1718 and rediscovered in 1996. Finally, the HMS Victory which sank in the English Channel in 1744, one of the largest and most mysterious naval tragedies in British history. We'll take a closer look at the artifacts that came off of these wrecks and what they can teach us about the people once onboard. And, we'll dive into some difficult ethical questions. What is a shipwreck really? A museum? A treasure chest? A graveyard? And should that affect how we handle these discoveries?

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 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.