New technology could finally help solve the mystery.
A new team of searchers has pledged to spend the entirety of 2024 looking for the ‘El Dorado of the Seas’, a merchant shipwreck that has remain undiscovered in the English Channel for four centuries.
The wreck went down while on route to Dartmouth on September 23rd, 1641, from the Spanish port of Cadiz.
The ship’s journey originated in Mexico, and was said to be carrying payment for 30,000 soldiers based at Flanders in Belgium, as well as treasures from the ‘New World’ including 400 bars of Mexican silver and 500,000 pieces of eight.
The British Library currently has a report on display that estimates that the ship was carrying ‘300000 in ready boliogne and 100,000 pound in gold and as much value in jewels’.
All this cargo sank to the bottom of the sea, along with 18 crew members.
Forty men, including the ship’s Captain John Limbrey, were rescued by her sister ship in convoy, the Merchant Dover.
The loss at the time was so significant that proceedings in the House of Commons were brought to a halt. and King Charles I publicly described the event as the ‘greatest loss ever sustained in one ship.’
Previous attempts to find the 400-year-old ship have been unsuccessful, but in 2019, a fishing boat called the Spirited Lady hauled up an anchor thought to belong to the missing vessel.
Now a UK diving company is convinced they can do it, and former commercial fisherman Nigel Hodge will lead the team of eleven.
Multibeam Services specialises in locating lost wrecks, and is setting out on the search next month.
Using two underwater drones, also known as AUVs, each measuring 10ft by 3ft, the team plans to study special sound technology to scan the seabed.
Nigel says that the search will be difficult, though, with the stretch of water where it sank notoriously dangerous.
“There’s thousands of shipwrecks down there and the Merchant Royal is just one of them,” he told Cornwall Live.
“So we’ve got to literally pick through a lot of wrecks as we’re doing them and then identify them.
“It’s not straightforward. If it was straightforward, it would have been done,” he added.
Historians have gone back and forth in their estimations of what the rumoured treasure on board could be worth in today’s money.
The snag lies in the ambiguity around whether the 100,000 pounds of gold is meant in currency or weight.
Even at the lowest estimate, however, the treasure would be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Excitingly, Nigel Hodge and Multibeam Services’ search for the lucrative wreckage will be followed by a documentary crew led by former Royal Marine Commando and Celebrity SAS star Jason Fox.
His team will base themselves in the Isles of Scilly to avoid having to continually cross back from the mainland.
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