![]() ![]() The outbound ships that sailed down the Tagus River in 1533 were sturdy and capable two of them were brand-new and owned by the king himself. Goa, Cochin, Sofala, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Ternate: Storied places that once had been as remote as the stars were now familiar ports of call, part of the Portuguese vernacular, thanks to Portuguese ingenuity and cutting-edge technology. These were the pride of Portugal, the space shuttles of their day, off on a 15-month odyssey to bring back a fortune in pepper and spices from distant continents. The story begins on a fresh spring day in Lisbon-Friday, the seventh of March, 1533, to be exact-when the great naus of that year's India fleet sailed grandly down the Tagus River and out into the broad Atlantic, flags and pennants flying and colorful silks and velvets draped from their towering castles. "This wreck will give us new insights into everything from hull design, rigging, and how these ships evolved, to little day-to-day things such as how they cooked meals on board and what people brought with them on these great journeys."Īlready, some inspired detective work among the rare manuscripts and royal archives in Lisbon has cobbled together enough bits and pieces to tell the tale of a long-forgotten voyage and a vanished ship that turned out to be as rich in irony and allegory as it was in gold. Castro has spent more than ten years studying Portuguese trading vessels, ornaus, lately developing computer models based on the slender archaeological pickings available. "So much is unknown," says Filipe Vieira de Castro, the Portuguese-born coordinator of the nautical archaeology program at Texas A&M University. It will take scholars years to study the wealth of material gleaned from the Diamond Shipwreck, as it has come to be called. Far from plundering, officials at De Beers and in the Namibian government, who work the lease as a joint venture called Namdeb, suspended their operations around the wreck site, called in a team of archaeologists, and for a few gloriously diverting weeks mined history instead of diamonds. Treasure hunters are never going to be a problem here, not in the middle of one of the world's most jealously guarded diamond mines, on a coast whose very name-Sperrgebiet-means "forbidden zone" in German. All the others were plundered by treasure hunters." This is only the second one ever excavated by archaeologists. "We know so little about these great old ships. "This is a priceless opportunity," says Francisco Alves, the doyen of Portuguese maritime archaeologists and the head of nautical archaeology under the Ministry of Culture. Its dollar value is anyone's guess, but none of its treasures have fired the imaginations of the world's archaeologists as much as the wreck itself: a Portuguese East Indiaman from the 1530s, the heart of the age of discovery, with its cargo of treasure and trade goods intact, having lain untouched and unsuspected in these sands for nearly 500 years. It is by far the oldest shipwreck ever found on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa, and the richest. ![]() And gold, of course, fistfuls of gold: more than 2,000 beautiful, heavy coins-mainly Spanish excelentes bearing the likenesses of Ferdinand and Isabella, but also a smattering of Venetian, Moorish, French, and other coinage, as well as exquisite portugueses with the coat of arms of King João III. The ingot was the type traded for spices in the Indies in the first half of the 16th century.Īrchaeologists would later find a staggering 22 tons of these ingots beneath the sand, as well as cannon and swords, ivory and astrolabes, muskets and chain mail-thousands of artifacts in all. A strange trident-shaped mark on its weathered surface turned out to be the hallmark of Anton Fugger, one of Renaissance Europe's wealthiest financiers. Curious, he picked it up and immediately realized it was a copper ingot. A company geologist working in mining area U-60 came across what at first he took to be a perfectly round half sphere of rock. This improbable yarn would have been lost forever had it not been for the astonishing discovery in April 2008 of a shipwreck in the beach sands of the Sperrgebiet-the fabulously rich and famously off -limits De Beers diamond-mining lease near the mouth of the Orange River on Namibia's southern coast. Days later, battered and broken, the ship founders on a mysterious, fogbound coast sprinkled with more than a hundred million carats of diamonds, a cruel mockery of the sailors' dreams of riches. ![]() But consider this: A 16th-century Portuguese trading vessel, carrying a fortune in gold and ivory and bound for a famed spice port on the coast of India, is blown far off course by a fierce storm while trying to round the southern tip of Africa. This story appears in the October 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine. ![]()
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