500-year-old shipwreck, treasure found
Diamond prospectors made discovery
by Donna Bryson - May. 4, 2008
Associated Press
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The ship
was laden with tons of copper ingots,
elephant tusks, gold coins - and cannons
to fend off pirates.
But it had nothing to protect it from the
fierce weather off a particularly bleak
stretch of inhospitable African coast,
and it sank 500 years ago.
Now it has been found, stumbled upon
by De Beers geologists prospecting for
diamonds off Namibia.
"If you're mining on the coast, sooner or
later you'll find a wreck," archaeologist
Dieter Noli said Thursday.
Namdeb Diamond Corp., a joint venture
of the government of Namibia and De
Beers, first reported the find in a state-
ment last week, and planned a news
conference in the Namibian capital this week.
The company had cleared and drained
a stretch of seabed, building an earthen
wall to keep the water out so geologists
could work. Noli said one of the them saw
a few ingots, but had no idea what they
were. Then the team found what looked
like cannon barrels.
The geologists stopped the brutal earth-
moving work of searching for diamonds
and sent photos to Noli, who had done
research in the Namibian desert since
the mid-1980s & has advised De Beers
since 1996.
The find "was what I'd been waiting for,
for 20 years," Noli said. "Understandably,
I was pretty excited. I still am."
Noli's original specialty was the desert,
but because of Namdeb's offshore
explorations, he had been preparing for
the possibility of a wreck.
After the discovery, he brought in Bruno
Werz, an expert in the field, to help
research the wreck. Judging from the
notables depicted on the hoard of
Spanish and Portuguese coins, and the
type of cannons and navigational equip-
ment, the ship went down in the late
1400s or early 1500s, around the time
Vasco de Gama and Columbus were
plying the waters of the New World.
It was, Noli said, "a period when Africa
was just being opened up, when the
whole world was being opened up."
He compared the remnants - ingots,
ivory, coins, coffin-sized timber fragments -
to evidence at a crime scene.
"The surf would have pounded that
wreck to smithereens," he said. "It's
not like Pirates of the Caribbean, with
a ship more or less intact."
He and Werz are trying to fit the pieces
into a story. They divide their time
between inventorying the find in Namibia
and doing research in museums and
libraries in Cape Town, South Africa,
from where Noli spoke by phone Thursday.
Eventually, they will go to Portugal or
Spain to search for records of a vessel
with similar cargo that went missing.
"You don't turn a skipper loose with a
cargo of that value and have no record
of it," Noli said.
The wealth on board is intriguing. Noli
said the large amount of copper could
mean the ship had been sent by a
government looking for material to build
cannons. Trade in ivory was usually
controlled by royal families, another
indication the ship was on official business.
On the other hand, why did the captain
have so many coins? Shouldn't they
have been traded?
"Either he did a very, very good deal,
or he was a pirate," Noli said. "I'm
convinced we'll find out what the ship
was and who the captain was."
What brought the vessel down may
remain a mystery. But Noli has theories,
noting the stretch of coast was notorious
for fierce storms and disorienting fogs.
In later years, sailors with sophisticated
navigational tools avoided it. The only
tools found on the wreck were astrolabes,
which can be used to determine only
how far north or south you have sailed.
"Sending a ship toward Africa in that
period, that was venture capital in the
extreme," Noli said. "These chaps were
very much on the edge as far as navigation.
It was still very difficult for them to know
where they were."
Noli has found signs that worms were
at work on the ship's timber and sheets
of lead were used to patch holes -
indications the ship was old when it went down.
Imagine a leaky, overladen ship caught
in a storm.
"And down you go," Noli said, "weighed
down by your treasure."
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