"November 1925" "Britains biggest most advanced submarine the M1 has vanished without trace" "Sixty-nine men are missing presumed dead" "An air of mystery surrounds the tragedy" "It was peace-time The M1 was on a routine exercise" "How could such a large powerful submarine just disappear" "For three-quarters of a century shes been missing her location unknown her loss unexplained" "But now at last she is ready to share her tragic secrets" "July 1999" "A small dive boat the Portree leaves Plymouth Harbour on a mission to solve the M1 mystery" "A storm is brewing in the English Channel but this is the one week of the year when the tides are ideal for diving" "On board is a highly experienced team at the cutting edge of diving technology" "They have just seven days in which to work out what happened to the sixty-nine men of the M1" "Theyll be guided and advised by expedition leader Richard Larne" "Hes Britains top shipwreck archivist and an ex-Navy diver himself" "Hes been searching for the M1 for the last fifteen years haunted by the tragedy" "I spend my entire life investigating shipwrecks nowadays and this is one that caught my imagination mainly because its such a large vessel it was lost in such strange circumstances" "No conclusive proof as to why she sank and its just something that has obsessed me if you like all these years" "I know its a long time ago and that the survivors of relatives of the M1 will now be in their 60s 70s 80s but nevertheless its important that I think that they know what happened to their loved ones" "The M1 was meant to be the ultimate weapon powerful enough to end the First World War at a stroke" "A submarine battleship a hundred metres long weighing two thousand tons and fitted with its own massive artillery gun" "But she took so long to build and equip that the war was already over by the time she finally came in to service" "Instead the Navy sent her on a peace-time tour of the Mediterranean to flaunt her mighty gun" "It was capable of shelling targets twenty miles away and although it never fired a shot in anger it had a powerful deterrent effect reminding friend and foe that Britannia still ruled the waves" "On the 12th November 1925 the M1 took part in a major naval exercise in the English Channel" "It was designed to test her effectiveness at hunting down enemy cruisers" "The exercise began at 7 oclock in the morning under grey skies off the Devon coast" "At 728 am the crew of the M1 reported sighting one of the cruisers and went in pursuit" "A minute later they slipped beneath the waves and were never seen again" "The M1 was last sighted about twenty miles south of Plymouth but her exact resting place has always been a mystery" "The areas a naval graveyard" "The English Channel has more shipwrecks per square mile than anywhere else in the world" "The only way to tell them apart is by sonar imaging" "Richard has spent fifteen years eliminating different wrecks and is now confident he knows the location of the M1" "But hes followed so many false leads he doesnt want to get his hopes up until he sees definitive proof" "Behind the boat a sonar tow-fish packed with electronics is bouncing signals off the sea-bed seventy metres below" "A visual trace appears on the screen and any unusual object will stand out" "But so far theres nothing" "Kevin Gerr is the dive leader on the Portree" "His first job is to locate the wreck and he needs the boat to steer a steady course for the sonar to find its target" "But up on the bridge the skipper is fighting the wind and sea" "The weather is deteriorating precise manoeuvring is impossible" "For three frustrating hours the boat makes pass after pass without success" "To make matters worse a trawler arrives and wants to fish on the same spot" "Fishermen are attracted to wrecks because where theres a wreck theres always fish" "But if there is a wreck below where exactly is it" "The tow-fish continues to hunt out its prey" "In desperation Kevin widens the search pattern and is finally rewarded with the picture hes been looking for" "Theres a large submerged object with a large sticking-up bit in the middle" "Thats right The conning tower" "Unless Im extremely mistaken thats a submarine" "Awesome" "Thats great Great Congratulations" "Its pretty good isnt it Youve got a nice trace on now Look at it" "Yeah Lovely" "There is definitely a submarine below" "But is it the M1" "The only way to be sure is by diving it" "But the search has run way over schedule and the weathers getting worse" "It would be too dangerous to enter the water in this swell" "The next morning brings gale-force winds" "For three long days the Portree can do nothing but stay in dock and wait for the storm to pass" "These are the hazards of wreck hunting in British waters" "Hello Hello good morning" "Could I speak to Mr Davis please Yes speaking" "Oh hello Mr Davis this is Richard Larne calling you from Plymouth" "Yes Just telling you that weve safely received the painting you sent on which is absolutely splendid and I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the background because I believe theres a story about it" "There is a story Word of Richards expedition has spread and new information is surfacing" "Hes been sent a picture of the submarine the only one in existence" "It seems it was painted by a member of the crew" "Indeed What do you know about the artist" "I dont know anything about the artist at all other than the fact that he is supposedly the man who left the ship on the morning it sailed on these exercises" "I see Well we have found a page of the Daily Mirror of the day and we have a picture of a number of the men who were lost on board but also there is a picture of the only survivor" "Yes Able seaman JW Sales" "And it says that he remained ashore on account of the death of his mother missing a trip for the first time in two and a half years" "So I guess that able Seaman Sales must have been the artist of your lovely painting Yes Actually as youre saying that I can really feel a shiver going up my spine" "Really Yeah well there we are" "Sales received the news about his mother just three hours before the M1 set out" "As he left the last thing he grabbed was his painting" "Its quite remarkable to think that this is probably the only surviving relic of the submarine the M1" "And of course had the seaman who was the artist received that telegram four five six hours later it may well have been all too late and this painting would have gone down with all hands" "Lets hope in fact that we find the submarine on the sea-bed and its looking something like that" "The weather has improved dramatically" "The English Channel looks more like the Caribbean" "Conditions are now perfect for diving" "But theres only three days left for the team to gather the vital evidence they need" "Back at the site they kit up" "Theyre each carrying a hundred and fifty pounds of equipment which will help them cope with the enormous pressures below" "Finally the three divers start their descent" "They have no idea what theyll find when they reach the sea-bed" "In 1925 the M1 was considered far too deep to dive" "But the Germans had a revolutionary suit that could work at such depths" "In a desperate bid to rescue the crew the suit and a team of divers were shipped to Plymouth" "Some officials were worried about the old enemy getting a close-up look at a state of the art British submarine" "But the German divers found nothing in the cold dark waters" "All hope of rescue was officially abandoned" "Today technology has moved on but at over seventy metres the wreck remains out of reach for most divers" "So Kevin and his team are using a sophisticated tri-mix system" "Instead of breathing compressed air they carry three different gases and mix them as they swim deeply" "Below forty metres oxygen and nitrogen become toxic" "But by increasing their intake of helium the divers can expand their lungs and go much deeper" "Its a dangerous process" "If they get the mix wrong theyll black out" "Finally out of the gloom emerges a ghostly site the decaying remains of a submarine a huge steel coffin seventy-four metres down unseen for seventy-four years" "Kevin and the team have arrived towards the back of the wreck and are making their way forward" "Theyre looking for clues filming anything that can positively identify this as the M1" "Theyre swimming against the clock" "Even with their tri-mix gases they have only twelve minutes on the wreck" "Theyd like to find the great gun but thats at least a hundred feet ahead of them and they won get that far" "But they do manage to reach the central control tower known as the conning-tower one of the most distinctive features on a submarine" "On the surface Richard can only wait" "Having been a diver for fifty-two odd years myself" "Id like to be down there with them but of course I was always a compressed air diver and never a mixed gas diver like these youngsters are" "Still if I was twenty years younger" "I suppose Id be diving rather than just sitting up here top-side waiting for them to come back and tell us what theyve seen" "After a lengthy decompression stop the divers return in high spirits" "For Richard its the moment of truth" "Hes about to find out if his long search for the M1 is finally over" "There it is" "See a lot of the outer casing is gone" "Oh the submarine is wide open See the" "Yeah thats the frames" "I was trying to get you to come up light on top" "Put a light in to the hole" "Off to the side a little bit I had to stop I was getting beaten by the current Yeah Thats good footage though" "Its lovely Youre going forward towards the conning-tower" "Kevin spools on to the end of the tape" "If theyre going to get a positive identification its most likely to come from the conning-tower" "Theres step holes there Theres the squares where the people step up in to it Thats one of the masts there" "Thats looking up Youve got that rake angle like that Thats the front there" "This is the back This steps down" "Youve got that step down like that" "So were actually-what we were doing we were looking up like this up on to there That shot there is like that now going up in to there So thats the rake rake of the tower yeah" "Come back a shade And theres-theres some foot steps over there you see Yeah" "And if you can freeze it in a minute when you get to the railings" "Weve got a photograph of the submarine Looking up at the conning-tower" "It doesnt-yes it does Does it not show it" "No it doesnt, Doesnt show it the same on there" "But then of course we dont know how we dont know how often the submarine had been modified" "Well weve got the step holes These three still get these three holes Theyre all there, Yeah" "Exactly the same Step holes There, There they are" "One two three Yeah Its the M1" "Theyre small but unique" "These three step holes are definitive proof that this really is the wreck of the M1" "Ive been looking for this submarine for fifteen odd years and now having finally seen evidence of it its a strange feeling Its the end of an era in a way" "The wreck is quite beautiful really eerie I suppose" "Now of course weve got to work out how on earth she sank and why she sank" "In the weeks following the tragedy the Admiralty set up a Board of Inquiry which took three months to prepare its report" "It focused on a Swedish cargo ship the SS Vidar which had been in the English Channel at the same time as the M1" "Her crew had reported hearing a couple of loud bangs but thought nothing of it and sailed on" "It was only when they docked and the ship was examined they realised they might have hit something big" "There was signs of collision damage to the ships bow and traces of the same naval issue paint used on the M1" "The official investigation came to the most obvious conclusion the M1 sank after colliding with the SS Vidar" "But serious doubts have always remained" "Seven years before a British war-ship had collided with a similar sized submarine" "Its bow had been virtually destroyed" "By comparison the damage to the SS Vidar was slight" "How could she have dealt such a devastating blow to the M1 without her crew even realising" "The investigators of 1925 couldnt answer this question because they couldnt examine the key piece ofevidence the wreck of the M1 itself" "Todays investigators have no such problems" "With the aid of modern diving technology they have all they need to survey the wreck" "Its hard work so they conserve energy when they can" "Its day six and the Portree has arrived back on site with two new passengers" "Keith Dickson is a senior marine accident investigator" "Its his job to work out exactly how and why ships sink" "Bill Ellison is a retired submarine commander drafted in by Richard to provide more technical expertise" "Time is running out and theres another problem" "The Portrees main line to the wreck has been cut by fishermen angry that the divers are disturbing their waters" "Hours of hard work have been undone by this act of vandalism" "The team now has to reset its moorings" "By the time the line is back in position and the Portree is over the wreck again the currents have increased and the tidal window for diving has passed" "The divers will have to wait another six hours for the next opportunity" "They amuse themselves as best they can" "I believe your shot is somewhere near the conning-tower area" "Is that right Should be, Yeah" "Well if you come up on to the conning-tower" "As the sun sets Richard briefs Kevin and the divers" "Shine the light in to it and then work your way along the centre line of the submarine" "Having identified the wreck as the M1 they now need to find evidence of a collision" "And then further along youve got a hatch which you are going to have to spend a little time on" "Well well try and shine down in all of those and video all of those Yeah" "If youve got time yeah Yeah" "The divers are hoping to cover more of the wreck this time" "Theyre carrying extra gas and they know their way around" "They go to the stern of the submarine and find the propellers still intact" "But they keep their distance from the lethal fishing nets" "They make their way forward searching for signs of damage" "The submarine is full of holes caused by corrosion to the thin outer casing" "But theyre looking for holes in the water-tight inner casing the pressure hold" "Moving on beyond the conning-tower for the first time they look for the great gun" "But theres nothing there" "The massive sixty ton structure that should be on the hull of the submarine is missing" "All thats left is the circular mounting ring on which it would have sat" "The divers look around for the gun housing and find it nearby on the sea-bed" "But the barrel of the gun is nowhere to be seen" "And this is the gun laying off it, Yes" "Thats the gun laying off it Thats the gun" "This is part of-part of it bent over" "Its almost like a separate little sort of bridge thats fallen" "Yes yes dropped down, Thats another" "Theres some more of that" "Thats the fabrication that held the gun in place" "Its quite clean there isnt it Yeah its rust" "And thats the curve of the hull Thats the hull" "Yeah I tried to get Thats the sea-bed down there" "Yeah the of the keel that side And theres the" "Theres the mounting ring Ah theres the mounting ring" "Wheres the rest of the framework Thats the mounting ring there" "Its twisted It is" "Its twisted off the port The port" "The centre spigot has created it to go off" "Is that so Yeah thats been really twisted off hard Yeah" "Its taken both frameworks" "This is the first real clue" "The gun hasnt just fallen off over time but has been violently wrenched from the hull" "As the Portree heads home for the night they discuss the implications of what theyve seen" "That whole area there is not there any more" "No Its somewhere away" "The rest of it is a gently decaying wreck" "Exactly Richard and I think youve just summed that up a gently decaying wreck all the way through" "Except for that evidence there" "That area there Thats right" "And if she-if this gun was hanging off dragging her off over on one side she could have gone to the sea-bed when the gun hit the sea-bed and took the weight off it she could have then just sort of settled upright again like that" "Possible I think again it would be... it would be excellent if we can persuade the divers to go and have another look tomorrow in that area" "Need to look at that gun just a little bit more closely" "Bill Bill as a submariner how would the skipper of this submarine have found himself if suddenly a fifty-eight ton gun had been dislodged off his deck and was hanging off on the" " On the side and he was now on the sea-bed as the divers have seen it today" "What-would that prevent him from blowing ballast and surfacing Yeah Well certainly" "This whole huge compartment here is the" " Is the heart of the submarine" "So lose that you lose pretty well everything especially in that" "So if we surmise then that the forward part of the submarine became flooded pinning it down there was no way of getting it up it could have been that life possibly survived in the rear end of the submarine" "With the expedition nearly over the mystery is beginning to unravel but they need to see more and time is running out" "In twenty-four hours the tides will change and diving will be impossible" "Tomorrows dive is critical to the investigation" "They wake to bizarre news" "All week the plankton levels have been unseasonably high" "Theyve now taken on epidemic proportions" "A huge bloom is drifting through the English Channel and its currently sitting over the site of the M1" "The divers test the water and their worst fears are confirmed" "The clear visibility of the past two days has gone leaving them struggling through a thick green soup" "Its too dangerous to return to the wreck until the plankton has died off but that could take days or weeks" "The team abandons the dive and with it their last chance to gather evidence" "Who would have believed that the conditions under-water could change so much from one day to the next" "Its a frustrating end to the expedition really" "Despite all this equipment weve been defeated by nothing more grand than plankton microscopic plankton" "Richard has reached a dead end" "He has found the M1 and is part way to explaining the tragedy" "But now hes run out of time and still has more questions than answers" "There does appear to have been a collision but there are no holes in the submarines pressure hull so why did she sink" "Whats happened to the gun barrel" "Was there any attempt to escape" "He reads and re-reads the files in the Naval archives searching for any new clues" "There were unofficial reports at the time that claim the submarine had been having serious handling problems" "What if she was already in trouble before the collision" "For the moment Richard can only speculate" "Then just as it seems the mystery will never be solved the team has a breakthrough" "Keith Dickson the accident investigator has got access to a survey vessel for one day and has returned to the site of the M1" "This time there are no divers on board just a remote operated vehicle" "For detailed survey work the ROV is essential because it can stay down for hours sending live video pictures back to the boat" "In the control room an operator directs its every movement providing Keith with the close-up forensic evidence he needs" "A smaller ROV detaches itself from the main unit and begins its work slowly exploring the wreck" "Re-examining the hull they see something the divers missed a V shaped gash" "This hasnt been caused by corrosion but by impact with a sharp object perhaps the bow of the SS Vidar" "It looks like an angle of about seventy seventy-five eighty degrees Id say" "About thirty degree indentation Yeah" "The gash is further evidence of a collision but it wouldnt have been enough to sink her" "Theres still no sign of a hole in the inner-pressure hull" "Well take a detailed look at the gun bay now I suppose" "Side to side" "Yeah I think well Oh" "What can we see down there" "Finally the discovery theyve been waiting for" "The mounting ring doesnt sit on top of the pressure hull as they thought but passes right through" "Once the gun had been knocked off water would have shot down through this hole and flooded the central part of the submarine" "But that would be flooding in to the magazine area" "Or the shell room as they call it yes" "And then afore and after that magazine youve got water-tight bulkheads and doors but we dont know if they were open or closed" "Keith is the first person in seventy-four years to look directly in to the heart of the M1" "But he wont go further as the wreck is a war grave" "And this is the telegram Yes that the Admiralty would have sent" "Yes The day after she was lost" "Thats it, Yeah" "It was splashed in the newspapers before it got" "As the survey continues at sea" "Richard pays a visit to Vera Jewell whose father died on the M1" "It wasnt very informative was it it just says No" "Morning stop letter following Admiralty Thats it" "Thats very heartless really isnt it" "Henry Jewell was an able seaman gunner" "The M1 was the first submarine hed served on" "And he was a worried man" "He told his wife he had grave concerns" "Shepperton man dies in M1 disaster" "It says of your father that he had no faith in the boat" "Yeah" "He had visited his home only the previous weekend from the Friday to the Monday" "Did he say anything much about the M1 when you last saw him when he was on leave" "He didnt say anything to mum but he said to his brother that he thought that was going to be his last weekend because theyd been on exercise and they just didnt think they were coming up again" "Really Yes Exactly" "He had that sort of premonition that he was possibly going to die" "Yeah And a number of the other crew had said the same thing" "They just didnt have any faith in her" "And did he say why they didnt why he thought it was unsafe" "It was the weight of the gun Really" "He said to his brother at the time that the weight of that gun was too great for the boat" "It still makes you very angry doesnt it" "It does It does" "Because well they were just it hasnt been said but to me they were just experimenting and lives didnt mean a thing" "Thats what it boils down to doesnt it" "Back on the boat theyve made a chilling discovery" "Yes youre right It looks as if there is a hatch in that area" "Looks like a metal hatch of some description" "So at some stage thats been opened up" "Behind the conning-tower theyve found a major access hatch which is open" "Its so heavy it could only have been opened from the inside" "Those that survived the initial flooding must have tried to escape" "Opening the hatch" "It could be an extended ladder to get through the casing" "Its quite a large hatch" "So I should imagine some mechanical means of opening it would be required" "Be pretty hefty to do it once youre in cold water and in a state of panic to open a bloody you know hatch weighing a quarter of a ton or something" "Thats right" "It would have been a desperate measure" "Without breathing apparatus the chances of survival were nil" "We understand Vera that the M1 probably didnt have any escape apparatus on board" "You dont know if your father ever mentioned anything that was provided to help them in anyway" "He said they were given tablets" "Given tablets What sort of tablets" "To swallow Tablets to swallow" "What sort of tablets were these" "I presume they were poison arsenic" "Really Yeah" "My word thats quite dramatic Thats it" "Ive never heard that story before" "Well I suppose it was a quicker way of death than the oxygen being exhausted" "Right" "I mean really its offering the men a chance to commit suicide isnt it Yes Yeah" "Is that what you mean Thats it Yeah" "Really Yeah" "Thats quite remarkable Yeah" "The ROV is being hauled out of the water" "Keith has all the clues he needs" "Its time to piece together the evidence and work out exactly what happened to the M1 and her crew" "The hydrodynamic test centre at Gosport is where all new Naval submarines and ships are tested for seaworthiness" "Scale models are used to replicate the movement of a vessel through water" "What we think now is that the Vidar made contact in this area came in contact above the pressure hull" "The test centre is where Keith does much of his work" "Today he has been joined by Richard and Bil as they finally lay the mystery of the M1 to rest" "Gun support over to the port side" "And the gun mounted And then as it went out the kingpin which is under here went with the gun" "From there you would get serious flooding" "It was not really a serious collision" "No it was the effects after the collision that were serious" "It was a glancing glancing blow just on the very very high point of the-of the ship" "And we know that the damage was right at the forefoot the very front bottom part of the keel of the Vidar which meant that that was her maximum depth in the water" "The people trapped in the engine may or may not have had any communication but the first thing they would probably have done would have been to shut down the motors" "Indeed" "They would then I would have imagined stayed inside the submarine hoping for rescue" "Yes Thats right" "So I would imagine if these men had any idea of how deep they were on the sea-bed they might quickly have realised that they didnt have a hope in hell of ever getting out" "But Indeed" "But they surely would have stayed there for a day or two days or three days until they got desperate" "And of course the great gun whilst it was its strength it was also a weakness Indeed" "After a long debate" "Richard Keith and Bill are in agreement" "Seventy-four years on the full story of her final moments can now be told" "At 729 the submarine dived for the last time" "The enormous weight of the gun made her top heavy and prone to overbalance" "She was in relatively shallow water for such a large vessel" "So her crew would have had to blow their ballast tanks to force out water and bring her back to the surface" "But unknown to them the SS Vidar was bearing down on them at speed" "It was only a matter of seconds" "The Vidar hit the M1 twice" "One of the blows was to the gun barrel which would have knocked the whole gun mechanism off its mounting" "The submarine was in free-fall with its gun hanging off to one side and the barrel already detached" "They couldnt blow ballast as there was no air left in the tanks" "By the time she hit the sea-bed the nerve centre of the submarine was crippled" "Men in the aft sections were still alive but without power light or communications" "In a desperate bid to escape they allowed water through the bulkhead equalised the pressure and opened the access hatch" "Their bodies were never found" "The Submariners Association isholding its annual reunion" "Three hundred veterans have gathered at the historic naval base in Gosport for an open air service" "Submariners are a special breed brave or foolhardy enough to spend months together under water in the most cramped conditions" "They call themselves a family and like any family they remember their dead" "After all the technicalities of recounting this ceremony today really brings it home that the whole thing is all about people" "To realise that those men made a genuine abortive fatal attempt to open the hatches to let the sea in and die in the attempt to me is just so sad So so sad" "As long as the M1 remained undiscovered on the sea-bed there was no real knowledge as to how she was lost" "Weve been able to write that final chapter and I think we have laid a great many ghosts to rest" "She was the greatest submarine of her age the most awesome weapon ever to have been sent to sea" "And yet she was powerless to save herself from the freak accident which destroyed her" "The motto of the submarine service is They Come Unseen" "The tragedy for the crew of the M1 was to die unseen" "The plaque left by the dive team sits on top of the hull a testament to the sixty-nine men who can now rest in peace" "September 1999." "On the East coast of America," "Hurricane Floyd thunders over a shipwreck that had lain undiscovered for nearly 300 years." "The discovery of this wreck could open a window on to the most notorious pirate in history." "Blackbeard." "For over 300 years, the twisted coastline of North Carolina has echoed with the tales of pirates that once plundered the trade routes of the American colonies." "One legend in particular lives on to this day." "The story of Blackbeard, hell raiser of the high seas." "The scant information available about Blackbeard's life, suggests he was English, possibly from Bristol." "A book written a few years after his death in 1718, portrays him as a devil, his face almost obscured by his beard which was twisted in to braids." "He was heavily armed, and he wore smoking fuses in his hair to invoke a vision of hell." "The image he created for himself struck fear in to those who crossed him." "Blackbeard is the one pirate whose myth has survived the centuries." "But now, the myth is becoming a reality." "Wreck hunter, Phil Masters, first came to North Carolina nine years ago, and heard stories about Blackbeard's fabled ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge." "With the Queen Anne's Revenge, he was the major Naval power in the new world." "She was the dominant ship in the Americas, and nobody could defy her." "Nobody could threaten her." "Nobody could come to battle with her, including the Royal Navy." "With the Queen Anne's Revenge under his control," "Blackbeard was almost invincible." "But records state that on the 10th June 1718, the ship went down at Beaufort Inlet." "The area is vast, and Phil Masters had no idea where to start looking." "An 18th Century eyewitness report, made by a pirate called David Herriot, provided a vital clue to the wreck's location." "Herriot had joined forces with Blackbeard after his boat was captured by the pirate." "He had seen exactly where the Queen Anne's Revenge was lost." "He claimed she had run aground on the sand-bar at the mouth of Beaufort Inlet." "And I knew immediately that I had found what I was looking for in terms of being able to narrow down, and pinpoint the search for Queen Anne's Revenge." "It was a eureka moment." "The search for the wreck then shifted to the area of shallow water over the sand-bar." "Using a magnetometer," "Phil started out by looking for large metal objects like cannon, or anchors lying on the sea floor." "He searched for nine years, until he noticed something was wrong." "We came to realise we had been magging in the wrong area." "We had a series of historical charts, starting with the 1738 Wimble map, this is a copy of the Wimble, showing where the sand-bars had been in those days." "We came to realise we shouldn't be looking where the sand-bars are now, we should be looking where the sand-bars were in 1718." "And we started looking in this area, and 11 days after he started looking, right there, we found Queen Anne's revenge." "20 feet below the surface, lies a chaotic mass of anchors, ballast stones and cannon." "The problem was, how could Phil prove this was the remains of Blackbeard's flagship?" "Answering that question has led him on an extraordinary voyage of discovery." "A team of underwater archaeologists and historians have come to Beaufort to join forces with Phil." "They have just two weeks to see if they can find clues that will identify the wreck." "Time is against them, and the ever present threat of hurricanes is posing some serious problems for project leader, Mark Ramsing." "...test the equipment out." "But mainly, and it's going to be the top priority, is looking at the condition of the site, and we're going to have a lot of deciding what we might have to bring up now, and how we're going to protect it" "for the next few months." "And I don't know that some of that structure is going to take another hurricane." "With these concerns foremost in their minds, the team sets out early on their first dive day." "Expertise is not the only thing that binds them together." "They also share an admiration for Blackbeard, the man." "We get this-this picture of a man who was basically larger than life." "That he demanded respect, and commanded men very easily." "I respect him for his intelligence, I respect him for his ability to put forth an image that allowed him to accomplish what he did accomplish in a short period of time." "It's the first dive, and they're all anxious." "No-one knows what damage the hurricane will have done to the wreck." "I'm concerned." "You're always concerned when you've got something as fragile as a wooden hull structure that's been exposed to the elements, like we have the past month." "So, it's going to be interesting." "Once in the water, the divers face their first problem" "The recent hurricane has dumped a layer of fine mud over the site." "Visibility is down to zero." "Nathan, is there anything we can do to help you?" "You could clear up the visibility a little bit, that would help a lot." "Are you the one I'm feeling?" "No!" "You're er... feeling Dave!" "Er... oh-kay.!" "Okay, you said, you're working on the south side and have located some new wood structure." "Over." "I'm not sure if it's new or not." "Looks like there was some..." "On the dive boat, project leader, Mark Ramsing waits anxiously for news from below." "...but I believe we're on the south side." "We seem to be working back around the..." "Over." "Okay, roger that." "If you come up on the anchor or cannons, let me know." "Yeah." "Ten four." "As soon as I can find it." "The divers soon discover that Hurricane Floyd has blown away tons of sand that was protecting the ship's hull." "If this battered structure is the remains of the Queen Anne's Revenge, it started out life under a very different name." "The ship was originally French, and called the Concord." "She was transporting 500 African slaves to the Caribbean, when on the 28th November 1717," "Blackbeard captured her off the island of Martinique." "Well, we have a number of different documents that kind of give us the background of how Blackbeard came in to possession of the Concord." "The crew was weakened by dysentery, and they had just a few hands available to fight." "They had just completed a transatlantic voyage, and so probably were not in the mood to fight off a bunch of pirates." "The ship stayed under Blackbeard's command for less than a year before wrecking on the sandy shores of North Carolina." "The area is known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, and with so many wrecks littering the sea-floor, the team have to be sure that what they've found is the Queen Anne's Revenge." "We do believe that the ship that was captured and became Queen Anne's" "Revenge was 200,250 tons, which would put it around 90 feet in length." "We think it was a three masted ship." "The overall site dimensions that we have here run roughly 90 to 100 feet, so it looks very good in that regard." "The length of the anchors, the size of the anchors correspond with a ship of that tonnage, so what we have here, from what we've seen, fits very closely with the historical records of the Concord." "One of the clues that will help prove the identity of the wreck is the number of cannon found on the site." "So far,18 have been uncovered." "If this is Blackbeard's ship, there should be more." "People that encountered Blackbeard say that he had 22,28." "Finally, you see this figure 40 thrown out a lot, but it may be people just repeating the same story." "If we don't find any more than 18," "I don't think that's going to cause us to say, well, this can't be Queen Anne's Revenge, but the more guns we find, the better it will look." "But it is certainly important, Because a vessel this well armed is likely to be a navy vessel, a naval vessel that is reported." "You don't just lose navy vessels out in the ocean and not know where they are." "So I think that that's important to remember, that this is a heavily armed vessel, and we have no records of any heavily armed vessels in that area, except for Queen Anne's Revenge." "The search for more cannon is a vital part of the project, and with less than two weeks to go, time is precious." "The following morning, Richard Lawrence unveils a new piece of equipment that he hopes will reveal any new cannon hidden under the sand." "This is an instrument called a gradiometer, which is actually two magnetometer sensors, one up on top and one down below, and what it does is, like any magnetometer, it measures the earth's magnetic field," "but it takes these two readings and subtracts from each other, so you're getting a very localised reading." "And that's what we're looking for, because we're looking for very localised changes in the bottom magnetic readings, that will show us large things like cannons, but also small objects." "The extraordinary sensitivity of the gradiometer means it can't be towed behind the boat like a magnetometer." "The survey team will have to carry it by hand, and carefully position it on the sea floor." "Magnetic readings will have to be taken every two and a half feet across the entire site, if they're going to spot any new cannon." "The survey covers an area of over 13,000 square metres." "The sheer number of cannon aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge, and the three other small boats in his fleet, made Blackbeard a force to be reckoned with." "But he seldom had to use his fire power." "His flag was enough to strike terror in to his victims, causing them to surrender without a fight." "It portrayed a skeleton of the devil holding a spear and an hour glass." "The message was clear, surrender now, your time is up." "For seven months, Blackbeard sailed the coast from the Caribbean to North Carolina, amassing a fortune." "He took over 23 ships and robbed them of anything that had any value." "During his reign of terror, nobody could stop him, not even the Royal Navy, who had a mere ten ships defending the entire American coastline." "In the end, firepower alone couldn't protect the Queen Anne's Revenge." "Eyewitness testimony reveals that on the 10th June 1718, she struck a submerged sand-bar, and was unable to free herself." "Abandoned to the elements, she gradually fell apart, spilling her contents on to the sea-floor." "This is all that remains today." "Most of the timber has rotted away, but parts of the hull lie exposed." "Their position suggests that she keeled over on to her left side." "The archaeologists will need to look at every fragment of evidence over the entire site if they are going to shed more light on to" "Blackbeard's story." "In an area that has been mapped and re-mapped," "Wayne Lusardi, the project conservator, has discovered something new, uncovered by the recent hurricane." "It's a folded up pewter platter, the seventh to have been brought up from the site, and each one has provided vital clues." "We're not real sure if these platters were being used on the ship, or if they were plunder taken from other ships, or even if they were left over trade goods destined for the African market when Concord was still a slaver." "Several of the platters we found impressions of fabric along the rim, suggesting that they were in storage, and wrapped up in some type of material." "And none of them have extensive cut marks, anything other than abrasive marks that were formed on the bottom." "So it doesn't look like any of them were used, so it certainly suggests they were in storage." "Cleaning the platter is a priority." "The other six were all found to have letters stamped in to the surface." "Some are manufacturer's marks, which have been traced back to London in the early part of the 18th Century, precisely the right period if the ship is the Queen Anne's Revenge." "Other marks may provide even more positive proof." "These letters BSA, are probably a monogram, unique to an individual and can potentially be traced." "If you could somehow tie that to a captain or a ship that was captured by him." "Or a wealthy passenger." "Or a wealthy passenger, something like that I think would." "Something that is very specific, very definite to one ship." "Another advantage we have, potentially, at some point, is knowing all of the men who sailed on the Concord, all the officers, all the men and their names." "And at some point we could find anything, a ring, medallion, anything that had a monogram, or actually name insized or etched or whatever, on something like that, then track it back to the original crew of the Concord" "before it was even captured." "The platters were not the only stolen pewter wear that Blackbeard left behind." "Pewter was the plastic of the 18th Century, cheap and malleable, it could be made in to almost anything, and this battered object would have been a vital edition to life aboard a pirate ship." "Syringes like this were used for typically for the treatment of venereal diseases." "They were filled with mercury and that was injected." "Doesn't sound very pleasant." "Syringes in general were pretty common in medicine chests on board ship, especially on transatlantic vessels." "But there is quite a few rumours that Blackbeard's crews were engaged in all sorts of extra-curricular activities." "Many of his men purportedly had - came down with venereal diseases and he needed medicines for that those treatment." "Medical supplies would have been a valuable prize in a pirate raid, and the syringe certainly dates from Blackbeard's period, but it's not enough to prove it was his." "The historians know his ship went down in 1718." "If this is the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge, everything found on the site has to come from before that date." "If we were to locate anything out there on the site that would post-date 1718." "If we were to find a coin or something else with a date etched in it,1719 or later, it would basically be back to the drawing board." "Each artefact they find has the potential to throw the project in to disarray, and so far, only one item brought up from the site is actually date marked." "Perhaps the most important artefact that has come from the site actually had a date on it, and that was a bell, about 14 inches tall, that is not French, it's not English." "It appears to be Spanish with the inscription Anno Dei 1709 or year of 1709, around the bottom of the waste of the bell." "Why it's Spanish?" "Was it plunder, captured and taken off of an earlier prize, we just do not know." "But, nonetheless, the important element on the bell is that date 1709." "Every time an object is recovered, the archaeologists try to date it." "Despite the destruction caused to the site by hurricanes, a delicate glass wine bottle has been found, perfectly preserved by a layer of sand." "Wine bottles like these have a highly distinctive shape and are easily dated." "The design involved, over time and by comparing it to others, they can tell this bottle was made in about 1712, six years before the Queen Anne's Revenge went down." "But there's another object in the lab that might threaten the whole project." "It appears to be dated 12 years after she sank." "This cannon, brought up two years ago, has been sitting in a tank being cleaned." "As the centuries of encrustation have fallen away, marks etched on to the surface have gradually been revealed, a series of numbers that have got the team worried." "Between these two reinforcement bands, there's a series of numbers, and if you shut the lights off I can show you, with a shadow, here it goes." "Right here is the first number, one, and then following on there is a 7." "Let's see here." "And then a 3." "Then over here, a smaller zero, or possibly a zero." "You have 1730." "As everyone knows, the Queen Anne's Revenge went down in 1718, so we're hoping that this does not represent 1730 date, otherwise we're going to have to find a new project for it." "What it likely represents is the weight of the gun in hundred weights." "It was very important to know the weight of guns so that you can ballast the ship properly." "So we have the 17 and a 3 and a possibly zero." "And if you turn the lights back on..." "During this time they would weigh these in hundred weights and quarter weights, and a hundred weight at the time is a 112Ibs, a quarter weight was 28." "So if you do the maths, by multiplying 17 x112, and then add that to 3x28, come up with 1988Ibs." "What we're going to do is we're going to weigh this gun and see how favourably it compares with what these markings are." "Doesn't weigh anything." "Zero, we were wrong." "What's the weight?" "It's between 1800 and 1900Ibs." "That's what those numbers say there." "Yeah." "I'd say it's a weight." "I'd say it's a pretty close match." "It's not exact." "It's not exactly 1988Ibs, but it's very close." "So the cannon may still date from before 1718." "The theory that the wreck is the Queen Anne's Revenge remains intact." "Day five, and the hunt for more cannon continues." "Data from the gradiometer survey looks intriguing, but only 800 readings have been taken so far." "There's another 1300 to go." "122 metres to the south of the survey area, the divers have made an amazing discovery." "The find is completely unexpected and may reveal exactly what happened the day Blackbeard lost his flagship." "It's an anchor, but it had a very specific use." "When we first saw it, all we saw was a fluke sticking up out of the sand." "We dredged out around it and discovered that the wooden stock on the anchor is in excellent condition." "Finding a wooden stock was the key to linking this anchor to the main wreck site." "When the wood was dated, it matched precisely to Blackbeard's time." "The anchor is a long way from the ship, and the reason for this could force the team to completely rethink the events of June 10th,1718." "The wrecking of the Queen Anne's Revenge is described in the deposition signed by David Herriot." "Herriot claims that the disaster was not an accident." "He insisted that Blackbeard had intentionally run his own flagship aground." "It was his testimony that Blackbeard had, indeed, run the ships aground on purpose in order to break up the company." "They had anywhere from 3 to 400 men in that command and four ships, and it appears that Blackbeard was, indeed, attempting to downsize his crew for any number of different reasons." "According to the testimony," "losing the Queen Anne's Revenge was part of Blackbeard's plan to get rid of some of his men, including the resentful Herriot." "But close examination of the south anchor seems to tell a different story." "Dredging away the sand, the archaeologists uncovered the anchor ring and found it was stretched out." "This position suggests a completely different sequence of events." "When QAR got stuck, they sent a small boat out with the south anchor." "They dropped it far enough away so they could pull on the anchor to perhaps pull themselves off of the sand." "In the process of doing that, when you use a kedge anchor, you cause a stress on the rope and the anchor, the anchor will swing around so that its shaft points directly to the direction it's being pulled from." "So when we found it, the first thing we checked to see was which way the shaft was pointing, and the shaft is pointing directly at QAR." "This would mean that although Blackbeard was a highly skilled navigator, and knew the treacherous coast of North Carolina well, it's possible that he was caught unawares by the sand-bar." "My impression is that he would have not intentionally grounded Queen Anne's Revenge." "She was the instrument of his power, and I believe it was an accident, and once it happened, he did the best he could to make the best of a bad situation, but that was not an intentional act." "With the ship lost," "Herriot's testimony explains that Blackbeard marooned his unwanted crew on a barren island." "He then sailed away on one of his smaller boats, taking their share of the treasure with him." "With no way of escaping, the men would have died if a ship hadn't passed by a few days later." "By treating his men cruelly," "Blackbeard maintained his fearsome image." "His often ruthless outbursts were designed for maximum effect." "One night, he suddenly turned on Israel Hands, one of his most trusted men." "In a moment of sheer devilry, he slipped his pistols from his bandoleer, without pausing to explain, he shot the man through the knee." "When asked why he had done such a thing, he answered," ""if I did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who I was"" "Although life was harsh in Blackbeard's fleet, there existed a strange kind of democracy, which meant his crew could have voted him from his command, had he tried to rule by terror alone." "He remained their leader for as long as he was successful in making them rich." "Back at the site, buried in the heart of the wreck," "Wayne Lusardi has spotted evidence of the treasures the Queen's Anne Revenge would once have carried." "Hidden in the silt lie small, but tantalising clues." "It was just luck." "It was just I was looking in the right spot at the right time, and something caught my eye." "I just picked it up and it was a small gold grain." "I wouldn't even call it a nugget, because these things are just tiny." "And over the course of the next few weeks or so, I found about seventy of them on the bottom." "The fact that the gold is so small has provided Wayne with another piece of the jigsaw." "There are several historical accounts that actually place gold-dust, not gold coins, not gold bars, not gold jewellery or anything like that, but gold dust on board the Concord when she was captured by Blackbeard." "And then we didn't find jewellery or coins or bars, we found gold dust." "And so that it's a bit of circumstantial evidence that supports the identity of the shipwreck, along with all of the historical accounts that place it in this area and the other artefacts that date the ship to the right time period." "When Blackbeard captured the slaveship, Concord, and transformed it in to the Queen Anne's Revenge, he found 20Ibs of gold-dust on board." "A year later, when the ship hit the sand-bar, he would have had plenty of time to remove any gold before abandoning her." "The question for the team's geologist, Jim Craig, is why was any gold left behind?" "We believe that the gold that was found probably was unknown to the pirates." "Probably, it was from someone who was on the Corcord before it was captured by Blackbeard." "You can imagine that if they have word that the pirates are coming, that you could hide your gold, and probably the gold was hidden up behind a plank somewhere below decks." "Then, of course, once the ship had foundered, of course, that gold would have been in some kind of a small pouch, probably a small leather pouch." "And then, of course, when thatdeteriorated, that gold would have fallen to the bottom in a relatively small area, where it has been recovered." "Jim Craig is working on ways of testing this theory." "If the gold-dust did belong to the crew of the Concord, it probably came with them from West Africa." "His analysis shows that this is placer gold, the type found by panning in rivers and streams." "We do know it's placer." "We do know it had to be placer gold that was accessible before 1718, and it had to be gold, probably somewhere from the route that they would have travelled." "What we're trying to do now, though, is to examine the potential places," "West Africa, the Caribbean," "Northern South America, where gold with the same kind of composition and rim structure have been known to occur." "Blackbeard's story lies in the fine details emerging from the wreck." "But the bad visibility means there's a limit to what can be done under water." "With rough weather forecast, the archaeologists have decided to bring up a large mass they have found towards the centre of the wreck." "The team are convinced there's something entombed within it." "They have named the object after a chocolate bar, a Baby Ruth." "They won't know what it is until they get it back to the lab." "Early in the morning, the team make the mile long journey back out to the site." "It's going to be a tense day." "The dive boats have some added muscle." "The RV, Dan Moore, is equipped with a five ton lifting hoist." "But it's not going to be easy." "Unless the lifting straps balance the weight of the mystery object exactly, it could snap in half." "The divers hope that two bags pumped full of air will be able to lift the 1100Ib weight." "Nathan, this is topside." "We're standing by up here." "How are things going?" "Topside, Nathan is beginning to fill the bag, over." "Okay, roger that." "You keep us posted please, Rick." "Dan Moore, this is Sea Hawk." "Sea Hawk, this is Dan Moore, over." "Just want to let you know the divers are on the bottom." "They're hooking up the bags, and it should be a matter of a few minutes here." "Okay." "Roger that, and we'll be standing by and waiting instructions." "Over." "Okay, topside, the Baby Ruth is starting to bounce-stand-by." "Alright." "Okay, she's up off the bottom, just a little bit, getting ready to go." "Roger that." "Okay, topside, they're coming up, they're coming up." "Safely at the surface, the divers swim the object over to the crane." "They now get their first glimpse of the underside." "Nathan, that looks like a gun under there." "Yeah, it's definitely a cylindrical iron object." "Are you guys saying it looks ...looking good for a gun like object, over?" "It's a sawn off cannon, man." "Sawn off cannon, alright." "Topside, we're ready for them to lower down that shackle for us." "We also seem to be losing a little air out of one of our bags." "We need to get them hooks down here as soon as we can." "Okay, the hook is on the way." "Nathan's got the hook." "Once attached to the hoist, the Baby Ruth begins to swing dangerously." "The object weighs over a 1,000Ibs, and the divers are getting nervous." "It's a frustrating moment for Mark, the project's leader." "He's stranded on another boat, desperate to see what's beneath the cluster of stones." "I can't tell what it is." "It looks like a Baby Ruth..." "As the object is swung on to the deck, the team get their first detailed look at the under-side." "It's like a cannon." "It's now clear what they've found." "Hold on." "Alright." "Roger, Sea Hawk, when the concretion came out of the water, we could see the underneath side, it's very clearly a gun, much smaller than the ones we've seen or recovered so far," "probably like a 1 Iber, but you could see the trunnions and the outline of the tube, so we definitely have another cannon up here, over." "Hot dog." "If there is a cannon entombed within the lump, it might well be marked with a date." "Before they can find out, they need to remove centuries of encrustation." "Wayne Lusardi has perfected a unique method." "I'm going to take a 3Ib sledge hammer and start beating on it." "Starting to get stage fright." "It may look like a brutal way of treating a 300 year old object, but hitting it with just the right force sends shockwaves through the concretion, and bit by bit, pieces sheer off." "That's the cannon surface right there." "Three hours in to the procedure, and the cannon is beginning to appear." "He's also found some identifying marks." "And there's a single line here, maybe an I or a 1 or something like that." "And then what looks like a B maybe, or an E, here." "And possibly another letter here." "A letter round the trunnion often signified the foundry where the gun was cast." "The cannon is much smaller than the 18 found so far, which is good news for the team." "Blackbeard would have taken cannon from any ship he sees, and the archaeologists were hoping they'd find many different types on the site." "What they need now, is more cannon, and it looks like the hard work on the underwater survey may have paid off." "The magnetic highs and lows of the whole site have now been mapped out." "Individual cannon that are already known to the team show up like bar magnets, with a high reading in red at one end, and a low at the other end in dark green or blue." "But, in one corner of the site, there is a patch of sand which hasn't been excavated." "It looks like it might be hiding another cannon." "The more they find, the more likely it is that they can identify the wreck as Blackbeard's flagship." "We're really excited about the potential of this gradiometer survey, and I think what we've done out here is something that no-one's really tried before." "And what we want to do today, we're setting up a grid square that will encompass this area right here, will excavate down, and see if there is a cannon or maybe more than one cannon located in there that will help confirm the" "results of the gradiometer survey." "It's the last day of operations, and the crew have one final chance to find more cannon." "If the survey is wrong, they leave the site empty handed." "Let's get this baby going." "We're in a virgin area that's never been dug, so that's another thing, in uncovering this cannon, we may uncover some other artefacts, which will be exciting." "It's always fun to find new things, to me." "The bad visibility which has been dogging the team over the past fortnight refuses to let up." "Finding the right area to dredge is proving difficult." "Okay." "Then we need to go West, young man." "Pump is still running, right?" "Yes." "Okay, we're pumping sand." "That's what I want to hear." "I think we lost our vis." "Curious about the letters on the cannon, Wayne refers to a book, which has the information he needs." "These two trunnions illustrated in the book here have the initials IEC on them, and this is identical to the trunnion that we exposed on the small cannon from the Baby Ruth concretion." "IEC stands for a man by the name of Yaspur Erin Croytz, who was the founder of a cannon works in Sweden, in 1689, which operated to 1750." "The two guns here that are illustrated, both have date marks, and it's" " It's a very strong possibility that date occurs on the opposite trunnion." "20 feet down, the divers have found what they were hoping for." "Despite the appalling visibility, they can feel the unmistakable shape of another cannon." "With each new cannon discovered, the team are getting closer to matching the 40 cannon that" "Blackbeard was supposed to have had on board the Queen Anne's Revenge." "Delighted with the results, the divers returned to the conservation lab." "Wayne has spent the whole day cleaning up Baby Ruth, and he has a surprise for them." "Hidden under the stones is another small cannon." "we didn't even know there was a cannon there until we saw it come up, and saw the underneath side of it, and just assumed everything else on there was ballast stone." "It is looking good." "That's too cool, yeah." "We do have our 21 gun salute already." "After 10 long hours," "Wayne has finally uncovered the one area of the cannon that could be marked with a date." "And it's marked." "What appears to be a 7, a 1 and a 3.1713." "And that's very good news." "It fits within its foundry mark." "It doesn't post-date our wreck." "So there's nothing bad about that." "Just heard 1713,which is - which is very good." "We have the bell at 1709, but this puts it in a little bit closer to the 1718 date." "We didn't expect it to be any later, of course, and, of course, if it had been, that would have been bad." "But everything, not just the cannon, just not the-that date, but all the artefacts seem to date to the right period." "When you look at the makers marks on the pewter the cannons, it's people that are making artefacts from that time period." "So we just" " It's got to be Queen Anne's Revenge." "The archaeologists are now convinced they've finally identified the shipwreck as the Queen Anne's Revenge." "But Blackbeard's own story doesn't end here." "After he lost his ship," "Blackbeard sailed away with his remaining crew." "By the beginning of winter they sought shelter on the island of Ocracoke." "On November 21 st,1718, they came ashore at Springer's Point." "Amongst these gnarled oak trees, legend has it that they met with other pirates and drank the night away." "Nobody saw the two Royal Navy boats laying in ambush around the point." "As dawn broke the following morning, the Navy moved in to attack." "Declaring that he would never surrender, Blackbeard launched in to the fray and fought like a devil." "He was shot five times and suffered 20 cuts." "The final cut sliced off his head." "With his death, the golden age of piracy passed in to legend." "Just as the archaeologists have begun to open this small window on to Blackbeard's life and times, it seems the sea wants to reclaim its notorious son." "Two days after the team left the area, the fourth hurricane of the season raged over the site of the Queen Anne's Revenge." "On the edge of Australias Great Barrier Reef divers are investigating the remains of an extraordinary ship" "HMS Pandora" "Over 200 years ago she was sent to the other side of the world to hunt down the infamous mutineers from the Bounty" "Having captured fourteen of them the Pandora was on her way back to England when disaster struck" "This is the story of her incredible voyage" "Journeys to the Bottom of the Sea" "Pandoras Secrets" "Pandoras Secrets 65 nautical miles off the coast of" "Northern Australia maritime archaeologist Peter Gesner and his team are about to excavate the wreck of the Pandora" "She lies over 100 feet below them" "How she got there is one of the greatest untold stories of naval history" "Its part of a very big event that was happening at the time in" "Europe Europeans were becoming very interested in faraway places they were becoming very interested in foreign exotic cultures they were exploring and this is this is a ship that represents that that whole theme if you will of the inquiry of exploration" "The added bonus I suppose the cream on the cake is the fact that it was associated with Mutiny of the Bounty and that is probably the greatest and romanticised sea story of all time" "Peter hopes that buried in the sands below will be clues to the Pandoras ill-fated voyage" "She had sailed here from Portsmouth on the other side of the world" "She was only the fifteenth vessel to have done so since Captain Cooks Endeavour 12 years before" "Having crossed the uncharted and unpredictable South Pacific the Pandora was on her way home" "Her mission had been a success" "On board in chains were fourteen of the mutineers from the Bounty" "Only the Great Barrier Reef stood between them and a triumphant return" "The fear of being in the water and sort of descending its almost like swimming through a trap door to the past and I have a tremendous affinity with the people that actually sort of walked the planks and walked the decks" "Peters team have just four weeks in which to uncover the secrets" "Pandoras crew left behind over 200 years ago" "Detailed research has already revealed the essential facts it was the evening of the 29th August 1792" "Whilst searching for a safe passage through the reefs a violent storm blew up" "The Pandora was forced onto a reef where she smashed first her bow and then her stern" "As the swell subsided she drifted over it and out into deeper water where she eventually keeled over and sank intact" "As she settled onto the bottom two processes began" "Over time the bottom 12 feet of the ship became buried whilst the masts the upper-deck and the focksail rotted away" "Where these two processes met is what the archaeologists see today" "Peter and the team have already uncovered some extraordinary finds" "Beautifully preserved for over 200 years they form a vivid picture of naval life in the 18th Century" "This soup tureen once graced the captains table" "And this ornate pocket-watch once belonged to the ships surgeon" "Its hands frozen at ten-past eleven" "A few hours after the ship sank" "Today the Pandora is almost completely covered by sand" "Peters team will excavate down into the lieutenants and the captains storerooms and into the front of the ship where the ordinary sailors lived" "They are looking for personal items that will help them shed light on this ill-fated mission" "The Pandora left Portsmouth with a crew of 126 men on the morning of November 7th 1790" "She was heading for the Bountys last known destination the island of Tahiti" "Her captain was Edward Edwards an unimaginative man who many thought would fail" "On board with him was a young midshipman called George Reynolds with his eye on a long overdue promotion he was quick to leave his sweetheart behind" "For ships doctor George Hamilton the voyage offered the chance to make his fortune" "Missions like this were rare and he planned to publish a book about his adventures" "His first observations were about the cramped conditions on board" "Like weevils we had to eat a hole in our bread before we had a place to lay down in Every cabin the captains not excepted being filled with provisions and stores" "The ship was carrying enough food and provisions to last over a year" "To add to the crush she was also carrying extra equipment in order to bring home HMS Bounty when and if they found her" "Even today lack of space is still the biggest problem at sea" "Weve got twenty-two people on board here who live actually living here" "And its amazing how on a ship not very much bigger than this there were 126 people" "Im six foot four and the deck-head height on the Pandora would have come up to about my chest especially where the seamen had their hammocks stowed and everything For the officers it would have been a bit more spacious" "But certainly below decks it would have been tight" "Apart from the conditions on board" "Captain Edwards biggest problem was navigation" "One of the things Peters looking for is the tools he used to get this far" "A huge coral-like lump has been found near the captains store-room and it seems theres something buried within it" "It could be a spare compass binnacle similar to the one we found last year" "I mean it makes sense for it to be there if its the officers store you know they keep sextants anything to do with navigation keep it there But will it be easy to bring up" "Well yes I mean we have to break it off into quite manageable chunks and try to keep the artefacts together or keep them so they keep their integrity I think the danger is of trying to bring it up as one piece that you could break parts of it" "you could break artefacts and at least we can see what were doing down there and do it carefully" "Breaking up the huge lump is risky" "But its too big to be raised intact" "Whatevers inside has long been entombed within a hard coating called concretion" "It forms a protective layer preserving metal objects for centuries" "Using an X-ray to penetrate the coating they can see the lump is actually a sextant" "And after 200 years its still intact" "Once the concretion is removed the instrument is almost perfect" "Even the original markings survive" "Buried alongside the sextant is what appears to be a telescope perhaps used by midshipman George Reynolds to keep sight of land" "Deep within the wreck the team has made an extraordinary discovery human bones a rare find which has amazed the archaeologists" "Peter has gone back to the records to see if he can find out who the bones belong to and why they were inside the wreck" "The question for Peter and his team is: who were they and what were they doing there" "The bones have been sent for analysis to Damon Steptoe and Doctor Wally Wood at Brisbane University" "There were three distinct human individuals which we named Tom Dick and Harry" "Tom would have been a very solid individual looking at his lower-jaw for example its very robust" "His whole skeleton is very robust" "If we look at Toms ulna here sitting here in his arm you can see that this muscular ridging here is relatively marked which indicates that his forearm muscles may have been fairly strong" "He wasnt very old because hes died at roughly the age of 17" "Looking at Toms right tibia we can see that theres an unnatural curvature there" "Its probably rickets because the youngsters didn't get enough exposure to sunlight particularly or eat enough fresh fruit and vegetables and things" "If they dont have enough vitamin D the bones become soft and they bend and so they can end up with sort of bow-leggedness" "In contrast Dick was a weaker man" "His bones are smaller than Toms" "But theres no sign of any illnesses or hard labour" "This is an important clue" "Its been suggested that because his general health was a lot better than say Tom or even perhaps Harrys that he may have been slightly upper-class on board the ship for example an officer" "After hours of research Peter thinks he may have found evidence to explain why Tom and Dick were found within the ship" "Hed found a survivors account which explains how two men were killed shortly before the ship sank" "One was hit by a falling mast and the other was crushed by a cannon" "Now in the interests of keeping up morale obviously these two men wouldn't have just been left lying around on the deck they would have been taken down below" "to be disposed of in the correct later on once theyd saved the ship cos that was their first priority" "And that explains for instance why we found human remains deep inside inside the ship" "But it doesnt explain who the third skeleton belongs to" "Harry was found in the captains cabin surrounded by silver buttons and a buckle" "Most of his bones are missing but his skull is in perfect condition" "Peters hoping forensic anatomist Mayer Sutisno will flesh out the mystery" "Mayer is more used to putting a face to modern day skulls" "Well its gonna be the first time that I'm actually going to reconstruct a 200 year old skull" "Its very Caucasian the nose" "Mayer has made a perfect copy of Harrys skull and added markers to represent the thickness of his flesh" "Now these tissue depth markers they represent the thickness of soft tissue for a Caucasian male" "You know when they say beauty is skin deep it isn't beauty reaches far down to the bone" "Because you can even tell for example see his nose lets focus on his nasal area its so obvious to me that when in life he had a nose thats more leaning to one side and like as if hes been in a fight or something" "Why Because the nasal bone the way it grows see its so smooth on this side but on this side its sort of like protruding out" "Its like its been pushed to one side" "Now that only indicates that the outward appearance of the nose would be that way too and how the nose is going to project" "First of all what I will do is start replacing the cranial facial muscles back onto the skull like all the muscles of the face and the head" "The blue represents the deeper stronger facial muscles whilst the green represents the muscles used for facial expression" "One man who could have helped" "Mayers identification was the Pandoras midshipman George Reynolds" "But over 200 years later his descendants are revisiting the past in an effort to learn more about their ancestor" "Im named after the man" "He went through a very interesting experience which I didnt learn about-really learn about until quite late in life" "So the more I can find out now the better" "My Uncle John in fact is the you know the great source of information within the family much of it I think is still in his head" "Its not-its not recorded" "And I think it would be very useful to have a formal you know a written record a history that can pass on from my generation to the next to the next and so on into the future" "A midshipman was you know it was a very very lowly rank" " I mean like being an officer cadet" "A tough life And rotten rations rotten food" "Its not very appealing in many ways" "And to go out to Australia or the South Pacific islands I mean fantastic" "I mean in those days it must have been a huge adventure" "England in the 1700s was a highly strict and deeply religious society" "The young George Reynolds would have been completely unprepared for a life free of the strictures of original sin that he was to find when he arrived in Tahiti" "After the hell of life on board" "Pandoras crew were presented with a vision of paradise" "They had no idea what kind of reception they would receive" "They did know that nearly two years earlier" "Fletcher Christian had returned here in the Bounty after inciting a mutiny and casting Captain Bligh and eighteen others adrift" "On the look-out the Pandora cruised the coastline before weighing anchor in Matavai Bay on the north side of the island" "Almost immediately she was met by a canoe" "A local told Captain Edwards that Fletcher Christian had long since sailed away in the Bounty but that fourteen mutineers were still on the island" "When ashore Captain Edwards was met by several of the Bountys crew desperate to plead their innocence With no space left on Blighs boat they had been forced to stay with the mutineers" "Captain Bligh noted their reluctance at the time and two years later those that remained thought the Pandora had come to rescue them" "But Captain Edwards had them all put in irons anyway" "Six mutineers anxious to stay in paradise fled into the mountains" "Edwards dispatched his best soldiers to hunt them down" "It took eighteen days to round them all up" "All fourteen of the prisoners guilty and innocent alike were then caged in a specially built eleven foot wooden cell on the top deck known as Pandoras Box" "It was like a sauna with two tiny iron gratings supplying the only air-flow" "For the next twenty-nine days the crew set about resupplying the ship" "The island was a paradise and the sailors quickly succumbed to the charms of South Sea life" "They soon discovered that the price of a night with Venus was just one iron nail" "The ships Doctor Hamilton also sampled the local pleasures and made notes of what he saw" "Two ladies fancifully dressed were introduced after a little ceremony" "Something resembling a turkey cocks feather and stuck on their rumps in a kind of fan fashion had a very good effect on us whilst the ladies kept their faces to us" "But when in a bending attitude they presented their rumps the effect is better conceived than desired" "All good things have to come to an end and so on the 9th May the Pandora left Tahiti to continue the hunt for Fletcher Christian and the others" "Whilst their captain relentlessly pursued his mission life for the ordinary sailors was looking up" "Their journey took them to many beautiful islands where they were able to trade trinkets for local treasures" "Back home these treasures such as war clubs and ornate fishing-hooks were seen as highly exotic and would fetch a high price" "The proceeds from just one of these huge conch shells would be enough for a man to retire" "And theyd take them back to Europe back to England and they could get quite a bit of money for these particular items" "And the purser Bentham was known historically known to be had been connected to Joseph Banks who had toured the South Pacific earlier with Cook" "So you know this one could have been his it could have been another one of the sailors We have no idea" "But going probably destined for Europe for a collection somewhere a private collection" "Everybody from what weve found up in the bow the ordinary people were also collecting the same sorts of things as the officers were collecting" "So you know if anybody would have thought that its only because of a certain status that you had access to them that that doesnt that doesn't follow" "Down on the sea floor work continues" "Every object even this tiny piece of a once giant war club will tell them something about what life was like in the Pacific over 200 years ago" "As well as the sailors souvenirs" "Peter and his team are interested in the objects they took with them from England" "Every tiny piece found has to be examined" "Objects can be confused with pieces of coral" "These musket-balls are a chilling reminder that the Pandora was a warship prepared to use force to achieve her aims" "The team dives in relay" "Their work time strictly limited because of the dangers of working so deep" "The biggest danger the divers face is the painful and often life threatening condition known as the bends" "At depths divers absorb high levels of nitrogen they must flush it out of their system before returning to the surface" "They do this here on a platform 30 feet under the boat" "But somethings gone wrong" "They were decompressing on air instead of on oxygen because apparently the oxygen ran out while they were on the deco-seat" "Its every divers nightmare" "If they arent treated quickly they'll get the bends" "You've got to get them in there and you know you've got a certain time window to get them in there you've got to get them back down to a depth within seven minutes" "So you know you cant just loll about go and have a cup of tea" "The divers are hurried into the decompression chamber" "Ships doctor Stuart Lavender stands anxiously by" "With the chamber in use the doctor shuts all other diving down" "The expedition costs $18000 a day so this is a problem they could all do without" "To make matters worse the ships oxygen cylinders are leaking and although there is over a weeks supply left they have no idea if they can get more" "We have done everything that we can to ensure that this problem doesnt arise And" "Peters frantically negotiating delivery of replacement gas" "But the companys refusing to deliver it free as agreed but thats what I was told thats whats been noted in all our on all our day books and we made a decision on that basis" "If we pull the plug and we turn back to Townsall were going to have to tell the people in Townsall why weve done that and the only reason that weve done it is because we do not have sufficient O2" "Its that simple" "Weve lost him" "Its the last thing Peter needs" "Doctor Lavender is having better luck" "To the teams relief after two and a half hours in the chamber the divers show no symptoms of the bends and can be released" "200 years ago the ships doctor on the Pandora George Hamilton had to rely on little more than his wits and a few trusted instruments" "So how did he manage" "In terms of equipment he was carrying he would have had devices to allow him to blood-let" "He had tourniquets" "This would be for use for amputations" "We've seen a pestle which is a pestle and mortar and he presumably would have would have used that for making up and grinding up various herbs and bits and pieces to make up potions and lotions" "I have to say all mine come already made up in boxes and bottles" "And I dont make up too much on board" "At one time in their lives over 40% of the Pandoras crew would have had some kind of venereal disease" "The remedies that were employed included things such as instilling mercury into the bladder through the penis" "Fairly ineffectual I might add" "The saying was that you had one night with Venus and six with Mercury" "Hamilton wrote about the various cures he used in his book" "Some like tea and sugar are still in use today" "This being the first time it has been employed in His Majestys service" "When sickness takes a loathing of all animal foods follows" "And tea becomes their only existence" "Historical research into Hamiltons account can only reveal so much" "Mayers work is able to bring us closer" "She has completed the foundation for Harrys face and is now working on his principle features" "They say Caucasians nostrils they're about five millimetres to each side of the nasal opening" "Everything she had done so far is confirming her original predictions" "His battered face is beginning to take shape" "Back at the excavation there are more surprises" "Several other bones have been uncovered" "For the moment the team is baffled" "The ships doctor has been brought in to help them identify exactly what they have found" "This looks like a metatarsal or a metacarpal in which case far from being small its enormous" "I don't think you know look at my hand or my foot" "This is again I think I'd say almost certainly its a bone from cattle I would imagine" "One I need to identify the bone if you could if possible but two just bring out just point out to you those little even striations on there that look to me sort of like a knife mark or a butchering mark" "I think you need a vet not a doctor" "Were looking at the last meal of the Spare ribs of the sailors on the Pandora" "As well as finding evidence of the last meal they're finding the tableware they would have used" "Weve got everything from bread and butter plates to soup tureens to large platters smaller dishes things like that and its just" "a lovely little aside to life in the 18th Century especially in the Navy" "And we were dredging along this way and found just a couple of bricks ballast bricks in this area and weve got a good metal tray like Metal" "Yeah Looks metal Rectangular tray With sort of a wide rim two handles maybe about that deep" "Its hard to tell whether its one single tray or whether it might be two because of that double rim and there might be something inside of it" "But theres certainly other objects and things attached" "Closer examination shows there are two trays of the kind that would have been used to cook meat or carry food to the table" "Hundreds of beautiful pieces of tableware have been found protected by the sand and silt at the bottom of the ocean their state of preservation is extraordinary even after 200 years" "But the archaeologists have been lucky:" "due to the rough weather and rolling of the ship the china would have been tightly packed and stored securely down on the lower decks" "It would have been the only way to ensure they survived the rough journey" "One thing that hasnt changed since the Pandora sailed these waters is the unpredictable tropical storms on the Great Barrier Reef" "The weather genie has popped out of its jar and it doesnt like us" "And were right sort of there" "Sort of at the edge the edge of an intensifying low" "Thats actually the cyclone thats down South at the moment thats down in Cairns and that only looks a small distance but it actually is 400 miles" "On the 29th August 1791 a storm was brewing as the Pandora approached this part of the reef" "Captain Edwards and the crew were in high spirits their missionhad been a success and they were heading for home" "But their luck was about to run out" "Back on deck the bad weather is threatening the dive" "As the Pandora got closer to the reef the storm was getting worse" "They knew there was a way through but it was dangerous" "To play it safe" "Captain Edwards stopped her just a few miles from where the expedition boat is anchored today and sent out Lieutenant Corner in a launch to find a way through" "The launch returned and it was late in the afternoon and Edwards was actually being very careful because hed already lost two boats with some crew and he didnt want to lose a third one" "So he actually came in to the passage or he was pushed into the passage so that he could pick up the boat before nightfall and not lose it" "As the crew struggled to get Lieutenant Corner back on board the Pandora began to drift" "With a ghastly ripping and splintering of wood she hit an isolated outcrop of reef" "The carpenter reported that within five minutes she had 18 inches of water in the hold" "Fifteen minutes later this had risen to 9 feet" "Just before daybreak the officers finally decided the Pandora was lost" "The fourteen terrified prisoners begged to be released" "Only as the waters rushed over the deck did Edwards give the order" "Thirty-five lives were lost that night" "Tom Dick and Harry went down with the ship" "Their crewmates floated off into the wild Pacific storm" "The survivors including Edwards the captain Hamilton and Reynolds managed to clamber into the tenders and struggled to the nearest piece of land" "We know from the accounts and the eye-witness accounts the survivor accounts that after the Pandora was wrecked they went to a sand cay about four miles away from the wreck" "We know that they built some shelters on here with the sails although the mutineers the people who had actually been in the box they were shunted off to one side of the island and all they could do to get shelter was to bury themselves in the sand" "It must have been horrendous just baking in the sun without any shelter whatsoever because theres not a skerrick of vegetation around" "Midshipman Reynolds objected strongly to the way Edwards treated the mutineers" "His descendant echoes his views" "He had spare sail sheeting that he could have covered them with kept them manacled fair enough but he could have covered them so they werent sunburnt" "Instead of which they were left naked and they had to bury themselves in the sand to stop themselves from being burned to death" "I mean that is not a kind man" "I think Edwards is very much maligned and everyone says hes such a bastard and hes such a cruel man but he was just following his orders and he was doing what any prudent captain would do and he just was unlucky" "Most of the crews personal possessions went down with the ship" "But George Reynolds managed to% save a treasured item" "It would later inspire him to verse" "Its as you see a glove which belonged to one of George Reynoldss girlfriends" "Its certainly not his wifes because she wasnt around at the time of the sinking of Pandora" "This appears to refer to the wreck" "I dont know whether you can read it" "All round the world the gallant ship on rock was cast a pledge of faithful womans love remembered trifles of the past" "After two days in the baking sand cay the survivors clambered into four open boats and Edwards successfully navigated them across open seas for a thousand miles" "On board their supplies consisted of just two ounces of biscuit and two wine glasses of water per man per day" "They made it to Timor in Indonesia" "But on arrival the Dutch Governor had a surprise in store for them" "He said oh you people are British you're shipwreck sailors" "I've got another group of people here who claim that they're shipwreck sailors too" "And Edwards would have sat up and thought oh maybe they're part of the Bounty crew" "So it turned out they were escaped convicts from New South Wales" "The Dutch people said to them look these people are British" "Your problem You take them" "For Edwards things were going from bad to worse" "His mission had nearly failed" "Hed lost his ship and thirty-five men" "Now he had extra prisoners to deal with" "He set off back to England knowing full well he would be court-martialled for the loss of his ship" "Back at the excavation are looking up the long-awaited oxygen has arrived" "This barge that you see in the distance has come in from Thursday Island with forty G-cylinders to replenish our supply" "It means we can keep working" "And just in time because the divers have discovered something intriguing" "Its a large Italian earthenware storage jar found towards Pandoras bows" "But why is it here where the ordinary sailors stored their belongings" "Desperate to take a look inside they're going to bring it up" "The jar weighs well over 100Ibs so moving it is a risky business" "The divers carefully add air to the bag which will lift the jar" "Too little and it wont rise too much and it will shoot out of control" "But just below the surface something goes wrong" "No one knows what's happened" "As the jar is unwrapped its clear its broken" "An air bubble has expanded and shattered the jar" "But whats inside proves to have been worth the risk" "Oh you can smell the did you smell the aroma of a sort of rotting hide rotting leather things like that So it gives us a bit of an idea" "It looks like a tool-box of some sort" "From its contents they can tell that it wouldn't have been a sailors more likely a sail-maker whose job relied on having spare tacks and fabric to repair the Pandoras twenty massive sails" "It could be a home rivet kit" "I think theyre rivets" "Theyre rivets Look at you can see to one side its got an incision" "Looks as if its made to snap off" "I think theyre home-made rivets for riveting system" "Tacks and rivets" "With this new evidence they may be able to pinpoint the original owner" "There were few sail-makers aboard and this is a large tool-box so it could have belonged to a senior sail-maker like Alexander Arbutnot one of the thirty-five men who died on the Pandora" "Could Harry have been this sail-maker" "In order to find out" "Peters travelled to Sydney to see if dentist" "Professor Chris Griffiths can help identify how old Harry was when he died" "This knowledge will help narrow the field to perhaps a handful of people" "Hes had a fairly rugged life especially around his head some major injuries to his face in an early time where hes had this section around the eye here pushed in and its different from the other side" "Hes got this great overgrowth of bone around the nose here where hes had this fracturing of the nose" "And its really affected his top jaw or his topis very very narrow compared to a normal adult say here Theres the width of the palate there so its about twice twice the width" "And in fact normally your teeth upper teeth bite outside your lower teeth but in this case his upper teeth there bite inside his lower teeth" "So in fact we shouldn't call him Harry at all we should call him Fred the ferret" "This bloke would have had a very nasty toothache at some stage" "He's got a great big hole in one of these teeth here in this molar here on the left side" "And in fact the abscess you could see on the inside of the the lower jaw actually blew a hole right through the pus had blown a hole through the inside of the jaw and drained that way" "So he had bad breath" "Hes what late twenties or" "Can take an X-ray there" "But his wisdom teeth have closed so he's definitely over 21" "Looking at the wear on the teeth the amount of periodontal disease he's got or pyorrhea the calculus or tartar deposits" "I'd say hes probably in his thirties" "Oh a great result a really good result" "Im very pleased with it" "Now that we really know that hes an older person 28 29 30 31 that can eliminate a lot of names" "I'd say that obviously the teenagers and the early twenties will be eliminated" "And I think we can probably reduce it down to about five or six people" "It's the moment Peter has been waiting for" "Mayer has finished the reconstruction of Harry and they're about to come face to face" "I don't think he has any idea what the face is going to look like There he is" "I've finally finished" "Yeah" "Are you ready to see him" "Im very curious" "Okay Very curious indeed" "Well Peter Gesner now meet Harry" "Meet Harry" "My word he looks almost like Boris Karlof" "Gee Look at that" "Harry My gosh" "I didn't expect him to have such a such a funny nose" "A funny nose" "Yeah" "Finally Peter is able to stare into the face of a man who sailed on the Pandora" "The question is who was he" "He was found in the captains store room and you know I have a theory that he might have just been a very confused person and he knew he was going to die and he just went down in the captains store-room" "to get roaring drunk because he was going to die anyway" "There was a guy called Arbutnot for instance Wow" "Or a guy called Robert Bowler" "So he might be one of them" "There are just Were they all the sailors there or" "Yeah They were older people more experienced and they would have had certain specialisations and he's probably one of those" "Yeah" "And if he is Robert Bowler he would have had a legitimate reason for being down there" "So its quite possible that he's then Robert Bowler" "I mean and that fits with the age" "Because Bowler was probably an older man" "So its almost I'll probably dream about him you know tonight He's probably his eyes will open and he'll say" "I'm not Robert Bowler or something like that" "If he is Robert Bowler then he was the pursers steward the man who paid the Pandoras crew their wages" "Back in England after an epic journey of nearly 30000 miles" "Captain Edwards was court-martialled for the loss of his ship and eventually cleared of any blame" "Doctor George Hamilton published his book 200 years later its still in print" "George Reynolds eventually got his promotion" "He married and raised four children" "The surviving mutineers weren't so lucky" "They were tried at Portsmouth" "Six were found guilty and three were publicly hung" "The remainder were acquitted or pardoned and one even finished his career as a respected captain" "The fate of Fletcher Christian and the other mutineers wasn't discovered for another sixteen years" "They had settled on Pitcairn Island just two days sail from the Pandoras route" "With the expedition at an end it is now time to fit the pieces of Pandoras enormous puzzle together" "What they have discovered so far forms the basis of one of the most detailed studies of a shipwreck ever undertaken" "Having been lost for over 200 years the Pandora will never be lost again" "Along with the memories of Edwards Reynolds Hamilton and the pursers steward Robert Bowler the Pandora still holds many secrets that wait silently beneath the shifting sands of the Great Barrier Reef" "In the summer of 1653 Oliver Cromwell was plotting to crush the Royalist uprising in Scotland by striking at the heart of their power" "Six heavily armed warships were sent north" "300 years later one man's obsession has revealed the tragic consequences of Cromwell's mission" "For most of the year maverick archaeologist Doctor Colin Martin contents himself with the cloistered routine of a lecturer in maritime history at St Andrew's University" "But his real passion lies a 140 miles away buried beneath the shifting silt in the Sound of Mull" "I want to look today at a case study" "I want to look at a single ship wreck off Duart Point on the Island of Mull in the West of Scotland" "And I'm looking at it not just for its own story which I think is quite interesting in its own right but rather in its example of how a ship is a kind of microcosm of its time" "I often tell my students that there's very little we do in archaeology that couldn't be done much better by quarter of an hour in the pub with one of the people whose lives we're trying to reconstruct from the past" "It's the investigation it's the thrill of the chase" "You're pulling these broken fragments of other people's lives together" "You're trying to make sense of them and through doing that you're trying to make some kind of real contact with the people who went before" "And I think that's a very fundamental human need" "I had no formal qualifications of a general educational nature" "I did very badly at school I was bone idle" "My parents despaired of me and they didn't know what would happen to me and I wasn't very sure myself" "However when I was in the Army I learnt to dive and I was lucky enough to be posted to Cyprus and I got a taste for archaeology because you couldn't you couldn't miss it there it was all over the place" "After all that I became a photo journalist until in 1968 a remarkable man called Sid Wignall got together an expedition to look for a Spanish Armada shipwreck off the South West coast of Ireland" "And I went over there and when I arrived first night in the pub he found out that not only was I a diver but also an archaeologist very much on an amateur level in both disciplines and I find myself the archaeologist on this project" "And I literally have taken it from there" "Having started out as a keen amateur" "Colin is now one of the world's leading maritime archaeologists" "He has devoted the last seven years to a ship that sank on the rocks of Mull in 1653" "She was sent here to seize Duart Castle a Royalist stronghold in the aftermath of the Civil Wars" "For nine bitter and bloody years" "Cromwell's Army slowly tightened their grip on power fighting against King Charles's battleworn troops" "By 1649 the King was dead and Cromwell had consolidated his power" "But in Scotland's Western Isles the Royalists continued their struggle and Cromwellwas forced to act" "With few surviving records" "Colin has to gather the evidence from the seabed" "His task is made more urgent by the constant threat to the wreck from the increasing volume of large ships churning up the waters" "Every summer Colin and his small team take the ferry to the Isle of Mull for a season's diving" "He has no high tech equipment and has to raise the funds for these annual expeditions himself" "The team under his command comes largely from his own family his two sons Ed and Pete and exstudent Philip Robertson" "They're joined by fellow archaeologist Graham Scott" "Colin's wife Paula is the team's historian and has worked on his projects for 20 years" "We don't get a holiday but this is not a bad place to be" "It's what he wants to do" "He would be very unhappy sitting on a beach in the sunshine" "So you know if he's happy then that's fine" "It's day one and the family gather in the shadow of Duart Castle to hear their mission" "Well morning everybody" "Briefing for the start of the 1999 season which is the culmination of seven years of previous work" "Just to remind you the site's location very close in shore just adjacent to the rocks of Duart Point and in the background a couple of hundred metres away" "Duart Castle itself" "The main site area is enclosed within this grid which is about 35 metres by 17 metres" "That's the area in which we know wreckage has occurred and we believe that the bulk of the wreck is within that in that area" "This is a survey of that square" "So it's a very classic shipwreck in many ways" "Ballast stones pinning down fragments of the ship's structural remains and a scatter of heavy artefacts the canons the anchor and so forth" "Okay great to see you all here for the season which I'm sure it's going to be fun and very productive" "Welcome to Graham who's the new member on the team and we'll see Philip the site supervisor over on the site when we get there this afternoon" "Most divers would have hung up their flippers long ago but not Colin He's still very much in charge" "I suppose I'm working with one of the greats in the field so I can't help but learn a great deal" "He's very easy to work with but at the same time it is quite demanding" "The work has to be done the work has to be done at the required standards so obviously" "I've always got to keep up with that" "You know considering he's now 60 he's got boundless energy really I mean I hope I'm like that when I'm 60" "He didn't expect to be still diving at 60 but he is enjoying it He is enjoying having a the first project he has had complete control over" "and he wants to do it slowly steadily and right" "And he has much more opportunity to do that because he is in total control" "Looking after Colin's safety from a makeshift cabin on the rocks is his former student Philip" "If I imagine my own father at 60 climbing up the rocks I'd be quite concerned" "And it does worry me But we try as much as possible to take some of the load off him" "He saysquite openly that getting kitted up aged 60 in to his diving gear is quite hard going and that's why he's got two dressers" "Dressers and allpurpose assistants" "Colin's sons Pete and Ed have been helping their father since childhood" "I mean they're not archaeologists and they don't want to be but one has developed photographic skills and one has got drawing skills which are extremely useful and they're very happy to make themselves useful It's a much better holiday job for them" "than you know working in a restaurant or something" "It was only by chance that the wreck was first discovered" "In 1979 a naval diver happened to be exploring the coastline" "His name was John Dadd" "I'd only been in the water I suppose about three or four minutes" "Got down on to the bottom" "My face mask got water in so I cleared it and as I floated off the bottom" "I looked down and what I thought was a rock was the outline of a canon" "All sorts of things start to go through your mind obviously and I'm no different to anybody else" "I thought you know here it is the jackpot" "And I swum on a bit more and I and pinned underneath the canon I there was a copper cauldron" "And that was quite obvious what that was so I thought well you know I'd better take this and get it away So I actually lifted the front end of the canon up dug out the copper cauldron and recovered it" "And for the last 20 years you know that has sat in my shed at home" "John Dadd and fellow divers raised other trophies too including this pistol plate" "It dated the wreck to the middle of the 17th Century around the time of the Civil Wars" "But to John's untrained eye nothing he found could shed light on the identity or the significance of the wreck he had stumbled upon" "I came to realise that this was just something that was too big for me" "It needs to have experts on it to do research conservation and all the other things And I contacted Colin Martin" "Colin had precisely the skills and experience that John knew he lacked" "Only a trained archaeologist could map photograph and identify the site" "But first he recognised how vulnerable the exposed parts of the wreck were" "Something happened at the stability of the seabed which had protected this particular wreck and started to expose material which was wonderfully well preserved but incredibly fragile" "Quite literally you know within days it would have been washed away" "And that's what triggered this whole project" "Colin had to shore up the wreck with sandbags to stabilise the site before any retrieval work could begin" "His other problem was the lack of information about the Civil War period" "How could he identify the ship and tell her story when so many records of the time had been lost" "It's rather like piecing together the scattered remains of an aviation disaster a plane that's crashed and is spread all over a wide area of landscape" "The job of reconstruction was going to be immensely difficult" "To a trained eye this jumble of planks is actually the fragile remains of a small gun carriage" "A model reveals what the piece may have looked like" "The carriage steps used to elevate the gun are clearly visible" "But excavation is made no easier by Colin's rigorous working methods" "It would be very easy just to lift it We could rip it away from the concretion stick a lifting bag ten minutes work we could have that thing on the surface with all its bits and pieces dislodged broken and the whole thing would be greatly diminished" "and we're not going to do that" "If it is going to be lifted it's going to require a great deal of thought it's going to require new techniques a special container We're going to have to think through how we're going to remove it from the concretions" "which are binding it to the mass of other objects surrounding it" "If we are ever going to lift it we're going to need time to sort all that out get it right and if it comes up and if it's anything to do with me it's going to come up the right way" "that doesn't damage either it or the evidence of its surroundings" "We want to continue in the way we've started regarding this as a precious resource and we want to absolutely maximise all the information we extract from this site or leave it alone for a future generation" "To help him safeguard the site Colin has had it designated a protected wreck surrounded by an exclusion zone" "But not everyone has got the message" "Some personal policing of the site is often needed" "Ahoy you're very close to or probably inside a protected area a designated historic shipwreck" "Are you aware of that It's designated as a historic shipwreck and it should be marked on your charts as restricted from anchoring" "So we'd very much appreciate it if you would move" "We've got a lot of delicate archaeological material under here and we're pretty frightened that your anchor could damage it" "This time the trespassers are hapless tourists who take their leave without protest" "Sports divers or treasure hunters would be a much more serious threat" "It's the second week of the season and to his surprise Colin has uncovered some human bones" "Only when they're measured and photographed will Colin lift them from their 300 year old resting place" "This is a human shoulder bone and may offer vital new information about the ship's crew" "This large wooden piece is much less willing to leave the seabed" "It's the top of a ship's lantern which would have been the crew's only source of light deep below deck" "The lantern is putting up a fight and with his two hours permitted dive time running out this is one battle that Colin is not going to win" "His tug of war will have to resume another day" "Among the pieces retrieved from the wreck are fragile wooden carvings" "Colin has been trying to piece together from fragments like this a bigger picture of what the ship and its crew would have looked like" "Helping him is illustrator John Bowen" "In his studio near Worcester he is working on a series of reconstructions inspired by Colin's discoveries" "Colin sent me these and as you can see there's some wonderful carvings here" "And this one in particular interests me because it's a helmeted warrior but not all the helmet's there so it gives me the opportunity to do some reconstruction" "So what I've done is I've reconstructed the top half of the helmet as you can see it's a classical type helmet with a great plume of featherage at the back here" "And I really want to put this in the picture" "The initial drawing is based on a Dutch ship of the same sort of period called a Flute" "And this was the main difference was the Flute had a round back end at the stern as opposed to Colin's premise which would have had a flat stern or a flat back" "Before excavations began the biggest mystery Colin had to solve was the identity of the ship" "In the archives Paula discovered a letter sent to" "Oliver Cromwell from his Scottish commander Robert Lilburn" "It reveals the fate of the expeditionary force sent to Mull to subdue the Royalist Scots" "While our men stayed on this island the 13th instant there happened a most violent storm which continued for 16 or 18 hours together in which we lost a small Man of Warre called the Swan that came from Eire and Martha and Margaret of Ipswich" "But that which was most sad was the loss of the Speedwell of Lynne where all the men that were in her being twentythree seamen and soldiers except one were drowned" "So Colin's wreck must have been of the three vessels sunk near Duart Castle" "The Speedwell the Martha and Margaret or the Swan" "But which" "A wooden carving raised from the wreck was to provide a vital clue" "This piece here has got a coronet three upright features and parts of a scrolled inscription with the letters IC and that's just the beginning of an H there" "And on the other side DIEN" "And this is part of the very familiar coronet and ostrich feathers with the Ich Dien motto which in fact is the badge of the heir apparent to the English throne" "This means that Colin's ship must have started life in the King's service and been captured by Cromwell's men before being sent back in to battle" "With this crucial discovery Paul had returned to the archives" "Only one of these three ships described by Robert Lilburn had been taken by Cromwell's forces" "It was a ship built in 1641" "Four years later while their captain was away the crew did a deal with the Parliamentarians" "In a ritual handover they surrendered their arms in a pledge of support for Cromwell" "Their new masters ceremonially returned their weapons and the crew sailed the ship under her new colours" "That ship was called the Swan and Colin is convinced that it is her remains that now lie in the Sound of Mull" "Braving the bad weather that has set in" "Colin is determined to find conclusive proof that this is the Swan" "Whilst he dives six days a week his family remain on standby enduring the drizzle and mist" "Colin's latest discovery is a number of coins that may help him date the wreck" "Graham's excavating one of the coins and he's plotting it in and he's going to recover it in to the find's tray" "Colin's filming him doing the work Seems to be quite good" "I don't think the visibility's very good but" "Colin and Graham can't make out the all important markings on the coin" "Despite his eagerness to examine it further" "Colin insists everything is measured and photographed first" "Right Well this is the first relatively legible coin we've found which is nice" "Have we got the coin book there" "Let's see if we can identify it" "It's fairly worn it's silver" "But it is very legible There is a crowned horseman on one side and it says" "Carus Charles I by the grace of god King of Great Britain" "France he was claiming everything and Ireland" "So that's a very characteristic Charles I coin with the horseman" "Yes See a lot of them here have that" "Yes With have the horseman" "Its mint mark looks like a little spiky sun that's on the horseman's side" "That should tell us where it was struck and when It hasn't actually got a date marked on it That's the sun mark which indicates that it was struc in 1645 or 1646 and I think the sun mark is associated with Exeter" "a big stronghold of the Royalist cause" "So I think this is Charles I 1645 or 1646 and probably struck at Exeter" "Well that certainly fits the wreck nicely" "It does doesn't it It's a relief" "So Colin's theory is intact" "A discovery as tiny as a coin has helped place the wreck in to the exact historical period" "Just as important is the Civil War weaponry found on the wreck" "Under 300 years worth of encrustation the outline of a sword or sabre is clearly visible" "It's so fragile that Colin has to bandage it on to a wooden stretcher before raising it to the surface" "The sabre suggests that soldiers were on board the Swan and that at least one of them died when she went down" "What is it Edward A sabre Amazing" "It's got the scabbard and everything" "It's complete Yeah The basket's there" "Yeah It's got the wee bits to hold it on like that" "And stuff" "This concretion is funny stuff because it's terribly coarse and nobly and yet you can see an awful lot of shapes in it" "And whatever that is there's a raised line right the way down until it seems to split at that point" "But oh it's great It makes a change from soggy wood as well" "The Civil War was a time of vicious battles when new tools of war were invented and used for the first time" "Like the rest of Cromwell's Army the men on board the Swan would have been highly disciplined and well equipped to fight" "One particularly lethal weapon has come to light this summer" "It's of special interest to Graham" "Now case shot is a form of early artillery ammunition and it would have been fired out of the canon in much the same way as shot gun cartridge" "These four segments and you can see they would form a hollow cylinder when fitted together" "and would have been filled with scrap metal or musket balls like these here" "And when they were fired this case would have disintegrated and the musket balls or the scrap metal would have come out like shotgun pellets" "The idea is not to hole or blow up the other ship it's simply to kill and maim as many soldiers and sailors on the decks of the ship as possible" "To make the musket balls even more devastating the shot was roughened a Civil War version of the dumbdumb bullet" "The crew of the Swan would have been preparing to aim this firepower at their target the Royalist stronghold of Duart Castle" "The clan leaders had defended their formidable position for centuries and so far they had refused to yield to Cromwell's forces" "This castle's been the seat of the great clan MacLean for more than 700 years and it's dominated the narrow entrance to the Sound of Mull and so has controlled the seaways of the whole of this part of the Western Coast of Scotland" "These castles on the seaways of Scotland are medieval" "They would have withstood anything that a medieval army could have thrown at them so their dominant position overlooking the sea allowed them to control these waterways" "That all changed with the age of artillery and their very positions on the edge of the sea rendered them immensely vulnerable to ships with guns" "The MacLeans did lose the castle to Cromwell's seaborn army but they've since reestablished themselves" "The remnants of battle have now been consigned to history by the current clan chief Sir Lachlan McLean" "These these old cannonballs when Sir Fritzroy my great grandfather restored the castle these were actually found in the walls" "And we don't know who they were fired at" "That one I've always thought looks as if it's got a sort of little face on it sort of two eyes a nose and a mouth" "But they were found in the walls" "But none of them we think ever got through" "We'd always been part of a structure that had a king or a leading person" "And I think it's probably tradition" "And I mean the King called us out we came out" "The English were very frightened of the people who lived in these parts of the world Indeed they equated that all the people of the Western seaboards of Britain as the Irish They called the Scots up here the wild Irish" "They were a different culture altogether" "They lived by the clan system they were fiercely independent and they had a warrior culture" "I always think it's quite interesting because the chief at that stage was nine or ten and to think that a nine or ten year old is actually a thorn in the side of Cromwell sounds slightly strange But I mean we were" "we were an irritant to them" "A very different expedition is now camped at the castle gates" "It's halfway through the dive season and Colin is taking stock of the team's progress" "Is the captain down there do you know" "Well I think we're we're certainly in some important person's cabin because of the Have you found any human remains" "Yes there are bones there there are quite a few human bones" "Whether or not it's all from one individual we can't say yet" "They're not articulated it's not a complete skeleton" "There's a bone here and a bone there" "So far we've got a few ribs we've got half of a pelvis and today we found another piece which is probably a scapular shoulder bone" "And bits of bits of vertebra" "Are there any signs of any clothing of an individual" "Not not yet Well footwear Footwear right" "Shoes are there" "Without any bones inside though" "Well we haven't actually looked that far yet" "I mean there could be a foot inside" "Slowly the pieces of the jigsaw are coming together from the disparate and sometimes confusing remains more clues are emerging to help Colin conjure up a picture of the ship and her company" "Colin's finding ever more delicate objects fragments of shoes and scraps of leather which he's securing with tiny sandbags" "The sandbags are lovingly handstitched by Paula who's struggling to keep up with demand" "The difficulty is trying to analyse these remnants which have been buried in the mud for over 300 years" "Right Edward this is the interesting one but it's again it's very fragile I think this is a bit of a leather jerkin" "There are various bits and pieces in this" "I think that looks like a bit of a clay pipe and there's a couple of bits of bone couple of bits of vertebra" "And that's in amongst it" "I reckon this is part of the chap that's wearing the thing" "Here it is" "You see the three stitch holes there quite clearly and the seams generally" "The bones do seem to be incorporated with the leather particularly the near one because you can see that it is actually trapped between these quite complex folds really squashed in and it's difficult to see how that could have happened" "unless it was the owner wearing it when it went down" "So I think this probably is the jerkin with part of the individual inside it" "It certainly is a garment rather than a shoe" "The macabre theory prompts Pete to hazard a drawing of the poor soldier who Colin believes drowned wearing his uniform" "Could you tell if the jacket's decorated at all or is it just" "Well it doesn't look like it and we wouldn't expect it" "I mean it's pretty plain utilitarian stuff" "These guys were very sort of you know fundamentalist and there's no frippery you know" "Well they were puritans weren't they" "Yeah yeah Yeah" "And maybe the arm seams here would be much more pronounced almost like a little" "Right This big thick bit of leather" "Yeah that's right" "And that's I think that's the bit we've got on the on the fragment" "Yeah" "Because I mean what we have caught up so far we've got a bit of a jacket and we've got some some shoes haven't we" "The shoes yes the shoes with the nice high heels and the square toes that's very characteristic Very Civil Warish" "Right" "Well that's coming on really nicely" "That's giving us an idea of how he might have looked" "But would the bones tell the same story" "The jacket which" "Colin believes holds pieces of vertebra are boxed up and sent with the other remains to the Scottish National Museum to be assembled and examined by bone specialist Doctor Sue Black" "Unquestionably I think we're looking at a male" "This is going to be somebody between the ages of about 23 and 25 years of age" "When you come down in to his upper limb this is all we have of his upper limb which is his shoulder blade and his ulna which is the bone here on the inside of the upper the part of the lower upper limb" "You can see that most of it has got damaged" "That's not surprising because this is a very very thin plate of bone and you even find in more recent cases this doesn't tend to survive" "So to find something as intact as this and something of such antiquity is phenomenal absolutely phenomenal" "It's a beautiful specimen" "What you can see is for example there's a huge bar of bone" "I can hold the bone by this and there's a muscle attaches on there which is called subscapularis it's in the back and it's the muscle that's involved in pushing and in turning of the upper limb" "And it's a real forceful volume muscle" "So whatever he was doing he was doing forcefully with his upper limb" "And that's born out as well when we look at the ulna" "And particularly in this area around here" "This is the site of attachment of a muscle called brachialis" "And what it does is it allows you forcibly to flex at the elbow" "So there's a lot of powerful movement at his shoulder" "There's a lot of powerful movement at his elbow" "Whatever he was doing required a lot of power in his upper body so that I can envisage for example a sailor hauling on the ropes pulling down with the muscles in his shoulder pulling down with the muscles on his arms" "Not the result Colin was expecting" "An even bigger surprise awaits him in the lab of conservator" "Theo Skinner who has succeeded in detaching the bones from what Colin thought was a soldier's jacket" "Well Colin I'm glad you've turned up" "Would you like the good news first or the good news" "Oh let's have the good news" "Well the good news is that these bones according to the bone specialist appear to come from the same skeleton as all the other bones" "Now that's well that's for the bad news and" "I'm afraid that this is not a jacket" "It turns out to be pieces of a shoe" "The bones had got caught in them" "What precisely made you think it was the jacket" "Was is just the vertebra" "It was largely that and not seeing fully how they as we see now the sole coming round here" "It was all sort of folded over in on itself" "It just looked like thick pieces of leather with the vertebra sort of caught up with them and I thought perhaps it was a fragment of a buff coat with part of the owner still inside" "But clearly that's not the case" "Theo's analysis forces Colin in to a change of heart" "The dead man is not a soldier but a sailor" "He's disappointed but not surprised" "Each new revelation brings him closer to the truth" "Now I'm going down to England to see John Bowen who's the graphic illustrator who we've been giving a range of information from our historical sources from our archaeological sources expert advice from a number of people who know about ships of this period" "And what John has been doing is pulling all these elements together to make as close a reconstruction a hypothesis of how the Swan may have looked in 1653" "I know that Colin found some leaded glass and the only place that this would have been would be up at the stern in the captain's cabin" "So I've drawn a little" "I've put a little window in there just above the small gunports and I've given it the sort of baroque surround with lots of curly cues and what have you" "It would have been quite ornamental and not too dissimilar to the sort of decoration that would have been on the stern of the boat" "So you're really looking forward to seeing this reconstruction Colin" "Well I am because it's going to pull all the strands together isn't it if all the research that quite a lot of people have been doing now yourself not least" "So this is a big moment" "Are you ready" "What does it look like" "Are you ready" "Yes I am" "Now oh wow" "Do you like it" "I think that's the nearest we're going to get to visualising what the scene must have been before the storm blew up" "This reconstruction helps Colin to complete his picture of the ship's fate" "The Swan arrived in/ Mull on the 5th September 1653" "The Royalists had already fled so Duart Castle put up no resistance" "Eight days later with the Swan quietly anchored in the bay the sky darkened and ominous storm clouds gathered" "While our men stayed on this island the 13th Instant there happened a most violent storm which continued for sixteen or eighteen hours together in which we lost a small Man of" "Warre called the Swan that came from Eire" "And all this in the sight of the men at land who saw their friends drowning and heard them crying for help but could not save them" "The storm tore the ship free from her anchor and the wind forced her towards the shore" "She was driven repeatedly against the rocks" "Unable to withstand such a pounding she sank" "Over time her shattered remains slipped beneath the silt her name and her memory lost for 300 years" "How many men perished the night she sank is still unknown" "With the ship thumping up and down and that gulf of raging water in between would be very difficult for any individual to make it across even if he could swim and most people at that time as indeed most sailors" "in later periods just don't learn to swim" "They've got a superstition about it" "When John Dadd first discovered the wreck he had no idea what he'd found" "But now he is returning to the site full of remorse" "Treasure" "The thought of treasure went through my mind" "I thought this is it this is the jackpot" "It is so easy to go in there and just grab what you can and go and that's not the way to do it" "And of course as a layman I knew absolutely nothing about conservation or anything so the one or two items that we" "I broke open to have a look what was inside unfortunately were lost" "In one last surprise for Colin John has decided to atone for his past mistakes by returning one of the archaeological pieces he removed from the site" "John it's great to see you" "Colin" "Welcome to Duart again" "How are you I'm very well" "How long now Well" "Ten years Ten years something like that" "Yeah Well Yeah yeah" "And it's 20 years ago since you found the wreck" "Absolutely yeah Well well well" "Time flies doesn't it So it's going to be" "Oh I'm so looking forward to this" "Hello Chris hi You haven't met my wife" "Hello Very nice to meet you And you After all this time" "And this is the man the expert" "This is the man Oh I've been looking for" "It's very very interesting to compare notes" "I don't know if you can remember but I've got something I want to show you actually that I've brought with me" "Yeah to return to the rightful Well not the rightful owners but to put it with the rest of the things that you've" "Oh wow" "That I've had this" "Good gracious believe it or not and you know it's over 300 years of age" "Good gracious" "But it's been in my shed for 20 years" "I think that has to be the cauldron that hung over the galley the galley fire" "Yeah This would be the cook pot then would it" "This would be the cook pot" "Yeah" "I would think so" "For a ship this size because she's quite a small ship" "Yes she'd normally just have you know perhaps 40 people on board and you know porridge or soup" "Yeah yeah everything went in there" "You'd get 40 servings out of that wouldn't you" "Oh absolutely Oh crickey yeah" "I think that's what it is Yeah" "Here it is Hey" "John's diving days are over so Colin has set up a monitor linked to his underwater camera enabling" "John to see again the wreck he stumbled on all those years ago" "We're just going to the anchor" "Here it is now Good grief the size of it" "The anchor just seems huge" "Just explaining that the sandbagging that he does over the exposed timbers to preserve those from erosion with the tide" "Obviously very successful because there's a lot of timber exposed there" "I've been a seafaring man all my life and I can just you know" "I just get a feeling for the whole thing" "It's absolutely brilliant" "As the season comes to an end the arduous daily dives seem to be taking their toll on Colin" "After yet another two hours underwater in weightless conditions dragging himself on to dry land isn't getting any easier" "Even with his 60th birthday party awaiting him" "The thing about Colin that I admire is that he has continued with this wreck now for a number of years" "He has himself raised the funds to do it" "Organised the whole thing whether it be coming in the winter to make sure his caravan hasn't been blown away to diving in the winter to see that the sandbags haven't moved off the wreck" "And when one talks to him about that wreck you are actually it is coming alive" "He's very happy to do everything himself if necessary" "Perhaps he's too much of a loner sometimes but that's just the way he is" "But it does mean tha t he is prepared to work very hard to get where he wants" "He wants to be there now actually working at the cliff face so to speak" "Don't know I think he'll probably be going on for quite a while" "Colin's labour of love has ensured that Cromwell's forgotten wreck has taken its place in the history of the Civil Wars" "For Colin archaeology is a passion to be shared" "Each summer he invites amateur divers to see the work in progress" "He has prepared a tour of his underwater museum that allows the divers to view the exhibits in their natural environment and reflect on the fate of the Swan and those who died on her" "I think marine archaeology is worthwhile" "I think it's demonstrated that on many occasions we have people behind us in the past and we hope we're going to have further generations in the future" "We're just part of a continuum and archaeology is trying to make some sense of that to pick up the strands that have been left behind and weave them in to some sort of coherent picture that allows us almost to talk to our ancestors" "Underwater explorer Barry Clifford struggles for his life in what is turning out to be one of the toughest dives of his long career" "I could feel the edges of panic sort of starting to surround me a little bit" "We were really caught in the current The danger got scarier and scarier" "Barry Clifford has come to search the treacherous waters around the Caribbean Island of Las Aves" "He is looking for evidence of a three hundred year old tragedy when thirteen French war ships and their crews were ship wrecked on the reef" "You can imagine the feeling of these you know sailors hearing the breakers on you know on Las Aves and feeling their anchor scrape along the bottom and then [bangs table] you know smashed to smithereens" "One hundred miles off the coast of Venezuela surrounded by an ancient reef lies the island of Las Aves" "In 1678 the reef lay in the path of a large fleet of French warships on their way to strike a mortal blow against the last remaining Dutch colony" "Curacao So important was their mission that Vice Admiral Jean D'Estrees was entrusted with France's final glory" "In his eagerness to start the battle the admiral ignored local knowledge and at 8 pm on the" "11 th May his ships ran aground on the notorious reefs" "Five hundred sailors drowned and over one thousand were marooned who's flag ship literally shattered beneath him" "So serious was the loss that the Admiral one of the few who was rescued drew up a map so he could return and salvage the fleet's 250 valuable bronze cannons" "Today a copy of this map is kept in the French naval museum in Paris but the original has vanished and it's authenticity is open to question But Barry is determined to prove the accuracy of the map and wants to discover what evidence is left of the lost fleet" "The map marks the site of large French Warships and also small ships called Filibustiers the French term for pirates" "Barry has been fascinated by pirates for years and he's famous for discovering and salvaging the Wyddah the only authenticated pirate wreck bringing silver coins and a host of other artefacts to the surface" "In his apartment overlooking Province" "Town Harbour in the United States" "Barry starts to brief the expert diving team he's selected to help him search the reef" "There's Carl Tiska a Lieutenant" "Commander in the elite US Navy Seals" "Chris McCourt a young trusted diver from past expeditions" "Todd Murphy a highly trained Special Forces Reserve Officer and a Scottish underwater archaeologist Catherine Harker" "They'll all travel with him to the island" "The expedition is being organised from Caracas the Venezuelan capital by a well known explorer Charles Brewer" "He first told Barry about the wrecks after he and some friends found an old French cannon" "We use to go and fish spear fishing and one of the places we went to fish was thatreef on Las Aves Very far about 100 miles off the coast" "Recently a friend of mine found a royal canon" "Before they can start their expedition Charles has to lobby various government departments for permission to explore the reef" "The islands are now in a military Area and the Venezuelan government" "Is taking a very keen interest in their plans" "The minister of tourism warns them" "Not to remove anything from the reef" "We want to preserve any wrecks to show them to the" "Venezuelan people and to visitors in the same condition as they were found by people lucky enough to discover them" "Having agreed to these conditions" "Barry Charles and the rest of the team fly to the archipelago of" "Las Roches the nearest inhabited island to Las Aves" "We have been eh we have been working then with" "Even at this late stage Barry and Charles are debating how they will work together" "From a small landing strip the expedition prepares to board a diving cruiser the Antares which will take them the 40 miles to the island of Las Aves" "Normally the Antares stays closer to Shore the island of Las Aves is remote and the reefs and tides have a fearsome reputation" "However once aboard the captain Ronald Hoogenstein seems confident about what he and what his boat can do" "And eh thinks the dive is gonna be close to the breakers and I" "I don't believe we're gonna have any problem with the sharks but if we are diving at the thirty feet which is about the same place where we dive over here that's that's the place where we see the sharks eh" "Bet they get tigers up here as well eh" "Yeah Yeah we do Nasty ones And eh solo eh hammer heads" "No one that's cool There's no problem when you you know were there alone the solo ones then eh you should be concerned about that" "Early next morning they start the day long voyage to Las Aves" "The captain privately is apprehensive about what might lie ahead" "This is completely new for us for me for my crew for this boat Kind of challenges also for us to see how well we will behave in an area which we normally don't operate" "Word of the expedition's plans have leaked out and as well as the danger from sharks and the unfamiliar sea's" "there is also the threat of unscrupulous treasure hunters getting there first" "Sure enough as they near" "Las Aves another dive boat appears on the horizon" "Do you know who that is" "We just heard by radio though that that boat was navy" "I think that eh it's also poss' it's coming here for dive I don't know who they are but they" "Have you s' have you seen that boat before" "Do you want to take a look" "I want to take a look Not that I can recognise from here" "This is a treasure boat a treasure diving boat I believe" "That's the other guys that have the concession but we have a permit right" "Em is it It might" "Barry is anxious their presence is a threat to the operation" "They're treasure hunters" "As Barry and the Antares arrive the treasure hunters beat a hasty retreat" "Probably better keep it for eh" "Beautiful" "The Antares passes the seaward side of the island into the lagoon" "Past a coast guard outpost and anchors inside the reef" "To the west is a modern ship wreck abandoned in the shallows and to the south is the island where the sailors from the lost fleet spent their last days" "For the hundreds of unfortunate French sailors that were left behind on Las Aves there was no fresh water only countless barrels of wine and salted meats pulled off the wrecks" "It wasn't long before their merriment gave way to despair and eventually death" "Planning the first days diving the team" "look at some aerial photographs taken by Charles on a survey a few months ago" "They reveal a narrow channel that will allow the divers to cross over the reef to where they think the wrecks are located" "But it will take some skilled navigating" "Next morning it is clear that Barry and Charles haven'tagreed about the aims of the expedition" "Barry wants to prove the validity of D'Estree's map" "But Charles wants to make a detailed study of just one wreck site" "I propose to make another research in order to see we can have a choice" "Two three choices" "And then of those three possible sites choose one for making the study because we will not have a time to make study in each of them but at least to get a lay out That's that will be my idea" "Let's take D'Estrees map em as an accurate document until it is proven otherwise and to test D'Estree's map and that should tell us really where each one of these wrecks is" "I think that the old map is not accurate at all" "Barry is sceptical of anything coming of Charles' plan" "But they decide to start by searching for the cannon that was found on the earlier fishing trip" "They head out on a small dive boat it is light and can easily avoid the reef's" "Finally the expedition is underway" "The old pilot sits in the prow giving directions to negotiate this shallow passage over the reef" "It's difficult but greatly shortens the journey to where the wrecks should be" "It is obvious to everyone on board the terrible effect the reef would have had on the French Fleet" "According to one intelligence report at the time the French were lured onto the reefs by 3 Dutch ships" "As Admiral D'Estree's ship hit the rocks he ordered the cannons fired in warning to those behind" "Thinking their Admiral was under" "Attack the others rallied to his aid and quickly realised their mistake as their hulls were ripped out from beneath them" "Today the sea is unusually calm with no surf breaking on the reef Once on the seaward side" "Charles hopes that he has found the" "Spot where the cannon was discovered" "Anybody's guess" "After over 300 years what is left of the ships will be hard to see" "The divers search the reef" "But nothing is seen of the wrecks" "Their first dive is unsuccessful" "Back the Antares after the disappointment of the first dive Charles goes back to re-examine the maps" "while Barry returns to his own thoughts" "It's clear that Barry will have to follow his instincts and trust the Admiral's old map" "Next day another more pressing problem presents itself in the form of the Venezuelan coast guard" "Whatever Charles did in Caracas about permits it didn't satisfy the ministry of the interior" "The coastguards say there is a problem with them and exploration must stop" "But the team have come so far and they're unwilling to stop now" "Ronald captain of the Antares thinks they can continue as long as they stay well clear of the coastguard" "Barry is determined to prove the validity of Admiral D'Estrees map and discreetly examines a 1940's aerial photograph of the reef comparing it to the old map" "two objects anomolies that are in the shape of ships" "And that's precisely whatCount" "D'Estrees positions these two ships One larger than the other" "Taking the small dinghy Barry and the captain heads to where they think" "D'Estree's map indicates a buccaneer wreck should be" "The very first ship of the fleet north of the tip of the island" "See that point there That over there" "That's pretty much the area we shouldstart looking at" "Judging that they are the right distance from the point of land they scan the sea floor to see if they can find any obvious signs of a wreck" "If they find nothing now Barry's theories about the accuracy of D'Estrees map will have to be abandoned" "Looks like we're getting eh this is about where the area is" "This is about wouldn't you say Ron" "Yeah we are we are very close to the area now It shall be a little more than half mile from the land if they're here" "Try over in this area right over here" "What do you thinkput the anchor over here" "Barry takes his metal detector and with an underwater communications system fitted to his mask he scours the sea bed searching for any indicationthat he is right about the old map" "These are really beautiful pieces of coral over here Just look down in this little cavity down below here and see what we've got" "Over centuries the corals will have covered any visible remains" "So Barry is looking for concreations lumps of what look like coral but is in fact where metals have corroded and distorted almost beyond recognition" "I'm starting to get a reading here" "At first it isn't clear just what Barry has found" "These are barrels Look at this" "There are three old coral encrusted barrels in one group and a short distance away two more all containing some type of metal" "Look at this The way they are lined up" "They are fairly large as well They are perfectly in tact" "I'd better go look around the area here and see what else I see" "The search is hotting up A short distance away he finds an old anchor heavily encrusted with coral" "You know I'd estimate this anchor to be approximately eight to nine feet long about approximately six feet for the anchor fits in with the date of D'Estrees wrecks" "His air exhausted he dives again using a snorkel and finds a second anchor just under the surface very close to the surf line" "The two small anchors and the barrels are an indication to Barry that he's found the site of a small ship" "One of the wrecks marked is a pirate ship on the map" "Jubilant Barry returns to the Antares and tells Charles that he was right about the map" "We went to this spot on D'Estrees map" "We actually took a modern map and we measured the distance" "We used this 1940's black and white photograph we went to the spot and we found two anchors and five barrels like this" "We used D'Estreesmap and it's accurate" "Catherine the teams archaeologist now has to make an accurate record of the finds Nothing is going to be taken from the wreck site The only evidence of any discoveries will be the drawings that Catherine will produce" "She sets up a global positioning system GPS that uses signals from satellites to give an accurate location on the earth's surface" "It's accura' actually accurate to about forty centimetres which is excellent That's about as good as you can get working in in this type of environment" "First we get eh a em establish a datum point which is our our centralised point where we measure everything from so that we know exactly how far the objects are from each other on the sea bottom" "On the boat heading for the wreck site" "Chris and Todd discuss how they're going to begin mapping the site" "You know five barrels and a chest and and eh and a couple of anchors and this is" "That wont take long shouldn't really take shouldn't take that long to do" "Sure and then eh we want to do a survey with the metal detectors" "Yeah yea" "Absolutely" "The shapes of the anchors especially and and eh those are gonna have to all be measured to everything" "Once over the reef it's noticeable that the sea is getting rougher" "But it won't stop Todd and Chris who are used to working together in extreme conditions" "One of the most important parts of of our job under water is is being able to communicate with each other accurately and quickly" "Em so we always set up a plan before we go in the water" "You know who's gonna hold what end of the tape and where we're gonna go first and things like that so that we're not juggling things around down there and em we're all pretty pretty well experienced in what we're doing" "Eh Catherine it looks like probably just using a ring on this large anchor would be eh it's certainly prominent and would eh it's definitely the same place we could get back to Eh what do you think about this for our datum over" "Yes that's sounds like a plan" "Eh can you give us a eh holler" "Catherine when you're ready to tape measure and stuff over" "Yeah will do" "Do you have the tape measure Catherine" "Yes I have the tape measure" "Roger that Come and get the tape measure we've got it ready for you" "Surface to divers one and two The two there are two other barrels directly to the south of the three barrels that are fairly prominent" "They're within thirty feet of the three barrels that you've located" "The datum is setis on the rings of this large anchor over" "Yeah copy that There are rings on the large anchor" "The objects are measured thoroughly" "The anchors made of iron are over three hundred years old" "Unable to get a grip on the hard coral" "I think it the anchor is eleven feet three three inches over" "The dimensions and co-ordinates are radioed back to Catherine on the dive boat" "While Chris produces draft illustrations from direct observation under water" "Anchors shake eh length eleven feet three inches over" "Todd and Karl's measurements are meticulous" "The width of the fluke at the widest point is 18 inches over" "Catherine The width of the fluke on the second anchor is 19 inches" "The circumference of the shaft is 17 inches over" "So they've they've measured out they've got three barrels and two anchors so far" "They've measured out the northern most barrel and the two anchors the distance between barrel one and barrel two is three feet eight inches" "Three feet eight inches Barrel one and barrel two" "After several hours work" "Catherine produces detailed scaled drawings" "Charles has at last found a wreck Site and persuades them to move north" "As the days progress more and more wreck sites are discovered and measured" "Changing two hundred and seventy degrees east" "The wooden hulls of the lost fleet rotted away centuries ago" "Canons anchors and other metal objects remain Preserved by a layer of protective coral" "The largest ship that went aground the flag ship Terrible carried sixty-six cannons some of the these would have been bronze D'Estrees returned to salvage the bronze canons but the iron one's were left behind this This is ballast spot right here" "Ballast stones used to stabilise the ships are all that is left of the wooden hulls" "By the end of the week Catherine'srecords show the location of five ON MAP identifiable sites" "Despite the odds Barry and Catherine are pleased with the way the search is going" "We've done pretty well Em looking at the the map that we had that was drawn at the time by Des' D'Estrees eh he was actually pretty accurate in what he drew" "What's most interesting to me is that I think we may I'm almost positive that we've found the pirate ship" "And it was the furthest ship to the south We used em" "Count D'Estrees map measured in you know where he'd put you know where he'd placed the wreck on the map went to that spot bingo there it was" "So some of the doubts about the map appear to have been resolved" "But the question remains just how accurate is it" "Can all of the thirteen wrecks that have been marked on the old map be identified by the dive team" "It seems that there should be a major concentration of wrecks due east of where the Antares is anchored" "Keeping a look out as always for the coast guard they head out to explore the area" "However a modern wreck a freighter which had suffered the same fate as the lost fleet fifteen years ago occupies the site" "The team hope to find evidence of another pirate wreck beneath it" "Pirates or buccaneers were the 17th century equivalent of mercenaries Hiring themselves to any country that could promise great riches" "Admiral D'Estrees target the island of Curacao would have been a tempting prize to most of them" "Many were deserters fleeing the poor pay and brutal discipline of naval life" "Piracy offered freedom and wealth but few lived to spend their ill gotten gains" "They would die in battle be taken by disease or drown like their comrades from the lost fleet" "Here there are pockets of lead shot left just the canvas sacksthat would have contained them rotted away over the way over the years" "Lead cannon balls lie forgotten in the sand" "In slightly deeper water is an" "Enormous anchor clearly from a major vessel Perhaps Le Terrible" "It's just a wreck site it's amazing" "It's just totally it's completely covered with material" "There's em some incredible amounts of musket balls all in little pockets" "Yeah the way you're talking it sounds great" "Sounds outstanding" "It's really totally just material everywhere" "A metal anchor chain snakes away leading the divers towards the wave battered hull of the freighter they realise that this twentieth century ship wreck has probably obscured much of what remains from some several ship wrecks of Admiral" "Modern steel girders lie in ruins on top of seventeenth century cannons" "As the sea eats away at the ruptured hull of the freighter it's a graphic reminder to the divers that they're exploring the remains of an awful disaster" "and the bitter fate of a thousand French sailors" "You can see some of the anchors are bent and broken and their fluke's are facing off shore but there was nothing for the nothing for the anchors to dig into they just dragged across the coral they couldn't get" "a bite you know It must have been very terrifying for them to through their anchor out and feel it dragging along in the coral" "It's two and a half to in weight the anchor" "About two automobiles would weight is one of those anchors Just in weight Imagine" "Then further up the coast is a really extraordinary and dramatic find" "An enormous pile of old iron cannons and anchors" "The total number of cannon in the pile at the first count is unbelievable" "how many" "We've eh located what we think is a pile of forty cannons or more" "Eh mixed in with that pile em we've heard maybe there's a bell It's an isolated site which is gonna tell us a lot about em the location on these maps you know If this is completely isolated we can take" "measurements and head north and we think there is you know two or three more wrecks to the north of this site" "So this is em um we're actually much further ahead than I expected Charles We've been we've" "Yes got more wrecks than we know what to do with now" "Much more and eh we might be finding more" "When the word got out about the tragedy of the Lost Fleet buccaneers from all over tried to salvage what they could from the wrecks" "Perhaps this pile is all that is left from a failed attempt" "Every evening in the saloon of the" "Antares notes are written up and measurements are discussed" "They have been diving for 10 days now but there is a long stretch of reef still to explore" "If the map is correct other wrecks should be located to the north" "Barry gives explicit instructions to the crew on the chase boat in mind that there's one wreck one is' that one isolated wreck is directly east of Whitehouse Is'Island" "If we can pinpoint that it would be great because that's the northern most wreck" "Ronald takes Todd Chris and Karl outside the reef to do a high speed survey of the whole of the rest of the reef right up to the northern most point" "As they get out into deep water the wind has picked up and the seas are getting stronger" "The plan is to tow a diver behind the boat using a hydroplane so that a visual search can be made of the sea bed to spot any obvious remains of an old wreck" "It is the quickest most economical way of searching a reef that is over four miles long" "Meanwhile Barry back on the Antares decides that he will once more explore in the south where D'Estrees map indicates another pirates wreck should be" "Barry takes the dinghy and heads out to a point just north of where the first pirate wreck was found" "Barry's experience of previously finding the only authentic pirate wreck has taught him to trust his instincts" "After a brief look around he finds evidence of another wreck" "These canons are pirate cannons on the second wreck we've located" "It's the second wreck that Count D'Estrees showed on his map" "These are not the big huge cannons that we saw on you know to the north" "They are much more what you would expect to find on a smaller ship like a pirate ship Then again and that's exactly where Count D'Estree said it was on his map Of course they'll have to be a lot" "more documentation done to to prove this but eh but how far feel like confident that these wrecks are pirate" "Barry's discovery is unknown to the rest of the team who are still hydroplaning north along the reef" "They've been doing it for hours" "Each of the divers taking turns at the exhausting task of being pulled through the sea" "The dive team returns from the long journey around the reef they found nothing Ronald the Captain of the Antares is disappointed with their search" "Nothing" "Really" "Nothing" "Not a single thing Nothing" "I've found a pirate wreck" "But Barry's overjoyed about his latest find" "Got another pirate wreck Cannons and a big ballast pile just north of the other one" "We just came acrosswe just went to the exact spot on D'Estrees map where em it was north of the first pirate wreck and bingo right on the spot cannons and ballast pile" "How did you guys make out" "Two grouper" "We didn't find anything to the north" "Hardly compensation but at least the two grouper will be used for dinner tonight" "The following morning the weather has got worse with rough seas and high winds" "Despite the danger there are other wreck sites to be found and mapped" "Our main problem is that wind has picked up a lot" "Main channel where we were using to go through the other side with a boat as you know is a very narrow space we're to go through With the wind eh it makes almost impossible to go there with a boat" "The captain would like to move the" "Antares closer to the western end of the island making the journey to the wreck sites easier but that means being in full view of the coast guard who are still watching the expedition for breaches of the diving ban" "If we anchor Antares here you know in the pointwhere the coast guard is they will be watching us closely" "I mean it's gonna be easier for them to spot what we are doing" "It's a dilemma if it isn't possible to use the channel today they will attempt the difficult swim over the reef" "Ronald and Karl have gone ahead in the dinghy to see if the channel is useable" "Looks like they couldn't get through he news is not good" "Can we get in this We get out in this" "It will not be possible" "Too rough for both boats or just for this one" "What's it look like Karl" "Well this boat would have a hell of a Time making it through the channel" "It's rough" "Yeah you've got waves spiking right there in the channel" "The divers will have to swim off the reef" "Both boats head towards it to make" "The Divers journey as short as possible" "As well as negotiating the razor sharp coral it will be much more difficult for a diver to return to a boat if they start running out of air" "It's getting dangerous" "Be packing again" "They search the seas on the other side of the reef" "They're looking for the buoy that marks the site of the last wreck that they need to survey but it's nowhere to be seen" "We are very far from what they say" "They say they were there Why we what are we doing here" "It's too far out Too far out" "Is eh three hundred metres yeah in their direction" "In three hundred metres we'll be there" "I'll get everything out" "Oh yeah another hundred metres in that direction" "Finally Karl plunges in to search and discovers to his alarm the seas have become so rough that the buoy has broken loose by it's weight and has been washed away over the reef" "He's just waved so he's on it" "Okay" "Let's go" "Not healthy at all you know Barry" "The w' waves there is not healthy" "Taking a bearing they head for where the wreck should be" "Okay I've got it right there Alright I've got we'll go" "As they climb into the water they realise how shallow the seas on the reef are" "It's not very deep" "No not very deep at all" "But the joke wears thin as they get into deeper water" "days have problems that" "Barry and the other team members face are becoming severe" "The are against them It's a reminder of the fate that befell the wretched sailors of" "CLEARING D'Estrees fleet Few of the sailors in the 17th Century could swim at all So they would of drowned in the surf and be torn to shreds on the sharp cora" "Negotiating the banks of the stinging fire coral in the breaking waves pulling themselves hand over hand along the reef makes for painfully slow progress and leaves them dangerously short of air" "They are close to the last wreck site" "Can they succeed in measuring it Fixing an accurate" "location Completing the task that the expedition set out to do" "Finally they make it to the wreck site and despite being tossed around by the surf they struggle to complete the measurements and drawings" "If the team is to verify their findings accurate measurement is vital" "But despite the conditions they do succeed and finish the job" "At one point we eh measured one long distance in We we were only about sixty feet away but there was probably about two hundred feet of tape measure out all tied up wrapped round every piece of coral that could be founddown there so em but we worked around it" "I'm going to head back to the boat I've got about a thousand pounds of air left I do not want to get caught in here" "Barry's very low on air and knows that he has to get back to the dive boat" "He is caught by the current and struggles desperately to reach safety" "I could feel the edges of panic starting to surround me a little bit" "We were really caught in the current It it started started to get a little" "Scary We shouldn't spend a lot more time working in this spot" "You know I think it's let's call it a day" "When the team returns to the dive boat Barry decides to call a halt to anymore diving" "Very rough Felt like we were stuck in the spin cycle at the laundry matt" "Yeah Just like swish very very rough" "It's too too rough to work in there safely I think" "With the expedition prematurely over only seven of the thirteen wrecks marked on" "Admiral D'Estrees map have been accurately positioned and measured" "But Barry feels they have gone along way to proving his theory" "One of the things that I really wanted to prove here because it would help us with the whole you know to understand all of the ship wrecks on Las Aves was to prove the accuracy of D'Estrees map" "But I wanted to take D'Estrees map and use it to see if I could find a ship wreck" "Even Charles has changed his mind and agrees that the map drawn by D'Estrees over three hundred years ago is remarkably accurate" "Actually what it is outstanding is" "That we've finally found out that the shape that it was drawn was extraordinarily similar to the shape of the island where we are now because before it was thought of many other islands possible of the site of the wreck" "Now we know that this is the the place" "It's been a highly highly successful trip for us and em and I think I've I think it's changed me as well" "I think at the end of the trip realised that you know I could never" "I could never salvage these ship wrecks" "Didn't think I'd ever hear myself say that It's like it's been I've been brought up in the salvage business" "But eh I think this is a very very fragile place and these wrecks have provided a habitat for this incredible reef life" "For centuries the exact location of" "Admiral D'Estrees lost fleet has remained a mystery but perhaps now Barry Clifford and his team have finally unlocked the secret of an old map and brought a forgotten piece of history back to life" "Theres more sunken gold and silver in the waters of the Philippines than anywhere else on earth" "Centuries of trade have littered the sea-bed with treasure" "And I can see at least forty boxes of gold" "This is a story of tragedies of the past and one mans journey in search of his fortune" "Youve got to keep going and going you never quit" "If youre a quitter dont apply for a job in this game" "Steve Sargison a commercial diver from Sheffield has packed in his business and put his house on the line" "Hes leaving behind a 25 year career as a salvage expert for a shot at the big time" "Hes going to the Philippines to search for one of the greatest treasure ships that ever sailed" "Its a fair trek but it is a place where there is more opportunities to find sunken vessels old sailing ships clippers schooners Manila galleons" " Its all there" "Weve already found a couple of targets" "Were going straight" " All the way from England" " Straight onto a target then well be into the really enjoyable bit which is locating all the things and recovering all the artefacts" "Steves first destination is the tiny Philippine atoll of the Panagatan Cays" "In this remote spot hell join a team on the hunt for the Esperanza a ship which sank in 1806 on her way to Mexico" "Its believed she carried a cargo of almost unimaginable wealth" "Ten years ago the discovery of valuable porcelain by a seaweed fisherman came to the attention of ex-US Navy officer Dempsey Pagan" "His research suggested that forty-four Manila galleons had been lost in Philippine waters during the time of the Spanish Empire and that the Esperanza had sunk near the island" "Oh weve got some more pieces here of the porcelain that weve been picking up for the last ten years off that reef" "And its amazing theres still a lot of it left I tell you" "It was a major discovery to tell you the truth" "That told us now that definitely there was a big shipwreck here somewhere and the age of the porcelain is of the same era of the Esperanza" "which meant that this could be cargo from the Esperanza so I was excited Very excited" "Inspired by the discovery Dempsey has now gathered together an international team of adventurers determined to find the Esperanza" "Not far from where the porcelain lay a meticulous search is being led by oil man Daniel Jason" "The Esperanza herself was carrying approximately we believe somewhere in the order of 450 to US$500 million worth of cargo and some of that was certainly spices and silks but the majority of it would have been bullion being shipped out to Acapulco in Mexico" "A ship like this would have carried exquisite gold jewellery;" "huge amounts of fine Chinese porcelain;" "silver coins and the finest silver tableware" "It was the most lucrative trade in the world" "The team have hired the Vasco an old KGB spy ship from Vietnam" "Fitted to this relic of the Cold War is some of the most advanced American scanning equipment" "This caesium gas magnetometer recently declassified by the Pentagon is only one of a handful in the world;" "and it will detect any iron debris on the sea-bed" "In a few weeks these waters will be among the best mapped in the world" "The magnetometer has found metal in a shallow site" "Two of the team decide to investigate" "5 metres down the sea-bed is strewn with dead coral" "Fishermen have dynamited it in the search for food" "Through the gloom the divers scour the debris for any sign of a wreck" "After a few minutes the first sign of something manmade" "A piece of metallic sheeting encrusted with coral" "A short distance away the divers find a massive iron anchor from a large ship" "Could it have been dropped by the" "Esperanza as she struggled on the reef 193 years ago" "A promising wreck site and just in time" "Now that Steve Sargisons finally arrived after a battering voyage" "Itll be his first priority" "This is the closest ship design and structure to the one were actually" "looking for at the moment" "The Esperanza started life as a Portuguese frigate before being bought by Manila merchants in 1806" "Steve is anxious that everyone knows what to look for" "Just to give you an idea on the huge area of sail that well be" "looking at even for a small vessel like this so youve got the masts there they would be huge I mean they would be made of several trees clamped and bolted together" "But Im just trying to work in comparative scale with the guys in the bottom left-hand corner there" "Just look at the huge sail area" "All that is down there somewhere" "And it just depends on whether youre lucky that its all sunk in one piece or whether shes been smashed and scattered" "But somewhere on the sea-bed whether its within 50 metres 100 metres or or miles its down there somewhere and it can be located" "At the nearby port of San Jose" "Steve is taking on a team of fifteen" "Filipino divers" "For the next few weeks theyll work with him on an intensive archaeological excavation" "Apart from the anchors the wreck is entirely buried beneath sand and coral" "But before they can start digging up the sea-bed every inch of the site must be mapped" "If it is the Esperanza it could take years to excavate completely" "According to the archives it was a clear December night in 1806 as the richly laden Esperanza began the yearly run across the Pacific across to Mexico" "Unusually she had orders to detour through the poorly charted Sulu Sea" "At 3 oclock in the morning with a strong wind in her sails the watch sighted water breaking on a reef directly ahead" "The crew struggled to turn the ship away but it was too late and the Esperanza ran aground" "The survivors took refuge on the bleak volcanic island of Panagatan" "But when morning broke the Esperanza has vanished" "Using an air-lift a basic tool of maritime archaeology Steve is now ready to start uncovering the wreck" "When youre air-lifting youre always expecting that any second now somethings gonna produce and it could be absolutely packed with beautiful porcelain silverware gold jewellery its just completely the unknown" "This particular site we only got some basic indications as to what it may be we dont know whether its English Spanish Portuguese" "We dont know whats on it" "As they excavate fragments of charred planking begin to emerge from the site a suggestion of a violent end" "Surprisingly even some of the rigging has survived" "Back on the Vasco each artefact will be painstakingly recorded" "So were logging everything in a digital photograph form" "Oh this is actually we believe part of a sail" "Yeah so what do you reckon it was all wine or" "Larry Alba an archaeologist from the National Museum thinks there may be a clue in the glassware similar dark green glass bottles from an 18th Century" "English shipwreck" "So this is a heavy boom" "So this is obviously the wooden stock here theres the barrel its like" "Muskets Military hardware will almost certainly help identify who was on this ship the underside and that may be the cleaner" "Then another tantalising clue" "Steve finds a piece of coral with an impression of a cannon-ball" "But theres no sign of a cannon" "Looks to be a rifle sight" "And on the other hand yeah looks like yeah looks like a badge of buckle buckle-piece" "Yeah Could always be the signature of some description" "The divers are now bringing up military badges and a variety of musket parts" "Evidence that this ship carried troops" "The question is were they Spanish" "Many of the artefacts have been bent by force again suggesting a violent wreck" "What tragedy befell these people" "And who exactly were they" "Right Were sending these pieces back now to the UK back to some experts so presumably weve got some interesting pieces that may bring information side-Iocks of the firearms weve got the trigger guards off the firearms they might be able to give us some glean of information" "But this is what Im most pleased about finding Were almost certain theyre gonna find information out about the wreck from this" "There must be somewhere information relating to the regiment that this cap badge was designed for" "On the other side of the world in London two leading authorities on military artefacts attempt to identify the wreck" "With so little to go on its quite a challenge for historians David" "Harding and Doctor DeWitt Bailey" "David owns a collection of muskets originally used by the private armies of the British East India" "Company during the last century" "The pieces from the wreck match exactly" "This musket is one made specifically for the East India Company in London known as Bakers Pattern because the gun-maker most involved in developing the design was called Izikhil Baker" "It was first manufactured for the East India Company in 1819 and last in 1839" "So this wreck cant be before 1819" "So the wreck cant be the Esperanza" "The muskets were made at least 13 years after she sank" "Its a disappointment for Steve and the team" "While the experts try to work out what the British were doing here the search for the Esperanza must now move to the next target" "But theres more bad news a typhoon is heading their way" "At the moment the divers are just tidying up the site" "The weathers on the turn" "Weve got a typhoon warning coming in" "This particular areas gonna get quite lively over the next few days and also weve been shown another site around to the north which looks extremely promising" "Site two is on the other side of the reef near the main island" "Its another intriguing target and fits in with the Esperanzas likely route from Manila" "The typhoon rumbles on" "A costly hold-up for the project" "Back in the milder climate of England one mystery has at last been solved" "Well the good news is that weve had a positive identification on these waist-belt buckles that there have been several examples recovered from the wreck and it appears that they were worn by the Madras Native" "Infantry regiments just at the period of this wreck" "The British Empire in Asia depended on mercenary soldiers like these fighting for British interests" "And theres another clue on a tiny fragment of rifle butt the letters" "GR -short for grenadier and the top half of the number 37" "Its unmistakable" "And this ties in perfectly with the 37th Madras Native Infantry who were one of the regiments sent to China in 1840" "The British Library archives reveal that the 37th Grenadiers sailed from" "Madras on the 20th August 1840" "On board a ship called the Golcondah 500 men were on their way to attack" "China to protect Britains highly profitable trade in opium" "It was a war the Empire would win easily" "But a shameful chapter in British history" "Before the Golcondah reached China a fierce typhoon blew up and the ship was never seen again" "It now seems that she was blown off course and ended up on the remote" "Panagatan Cays" "Lost for 160 years the Golcondah has finally been found" "Two weeks later the hunt for the" "Esperanza moves north to site two" "The new site is close to a much deeper target picked up by the survey" "They could both be part of the same wreck" "The position of the anchors fits with the theory that the Esperanza first hit the reef then drifted out and sank in deep water" "Dempsey is checking the data again" "There appears to be a trail of debris leading out from the site to a large object 120 metres down" "In the wake of the typhoon the sea is still rough and work is slow adding to the projects mounting costs" "Every single man dive at the moment is costing US $700 per man per dive" "So at the moment every time you guys put a bottle on your back thats 700 bucks down the blue" "We have to get that figure down" "It should be more like US 200/250 per dive Yeah" "And at the end of the day if we don't become more efficient then obviously as you already heard the whole thing will be off" "So its in your own interests weve got to make the effort" "Desperate for new evidence the team decide to investigate a report that the locals have already found artefacts from the site" "Its not very much at all actually" "Whats the first letter" " C" "G G G" "G G G" "A A" "I think this is a Z for zebra" "Zebra" "Its cast in one single piece with definitely some gear wheel relief here" "Okay Weve got something called" "Galbraith and something that looks like Dundee So its not Portuguese" "These look suspiciously like maybe boiler doors" "In which case maybe weve got an iron-clad vessel or certainly after the Esperanza Interesting" "And another mystery" "Its a mystery" "When they return from the island the divers have some interesting news" "Alright anything new" "Surprisingly we found a plank of wood near where the encrusted with" "Evidence of a wooden ship could mean there are wrecks from two different periods on the same site" "How wide did you get to work so far" "We did somehow about roughly 75 centimetres" "Oh fantastic" "Cos Im gonna get my outfit and Im gonna go diving" "Okay Good" "Have I still got my dive gear there" "Oh they dont have my dive gear" "Anyway you guys go ahead" "The Philippines leading maritime archaeologist Doctor Eusabio Dezon has now joined the project and is keen to see the new find" "He is here to safeguard the interests of the Philippine government and to check that the work is done correctly" "That planking is about 3 to 4 metres long and about 2 metresabout 1 metres wide" "It could be a part of a keelson" "Sure enough there is a sizeable section of planking" "It seems possible that this could be part of the Esperanzas keel the area which would have been struck first as she smashed onto the reef" "Theres a large wooden structure about that wide and about 3 metres long something like that" "That is the keelson" "I think you might be right" "She broke her back do you remember" "Yeah" "She broke her back" "That could beand that one curves in so that could be like a bow part that comes in" "I am 95% now its Esperanza" "No longer 90% now its 95%" "Its a promising sight with the woods and now some metals" "Yeah We were disappointed when we saw the rivets in a steal plate but then" "That could be from another boat I think" "Yeah Yes" "It may not be a part of these wooden parts" "No No" "They must now follow the debris trail into the deep But in order to excavate at a depth of 120 metres theyll need a sophisticated Remote Operated Vehicle at a cost of $15000 a day" "We are now first week of August the projects been running since the last week of March effectively so a long long haul into the project" "Weve expended to date about US $800000 out of a total budget of 185 million for this phase" "At the moment we have two vessels here both of which are operating at an efficiency of less than 50% and some fairly serious decisions have got to be made" "Were going to probably end up downsizing the diving operations" "As I say the money to bring in the ROV to do the deep water excavation" "The financial situation doesnt improve" "In September the entire operation is suspended" "Steve and all of the divers are released" "Daniel and Dempsey will go back to their day jobs and try to raise the $800000 needed to investigate the deep targets" "But what of Steve Sargison" "Far from home he must now try to find a lucrative wreck of his own" "We actually packed our entire business in as a commercial diving company and everything to come here" "We have no other income" "We have to be successful of what we do because moneys draining arterially from my account and we need to find something to keep my bank managers sense of humour" "Steve has information about a wrecked Manila galleon on the other side of the Philippines" "But the search permit wont be available for four months" "He urgently needs to find something now" "Locals tell of an unusual wreck from World War II" "In the early 1940s as war engulfed the Philippines the Japanese were transporting huge amounts of stolen allied gold to the islands" "One of these ships-the Cudamaru was bombed by American planes and sank in deep water off the island of Cebu" "There were no survivors" "A few years ago three local divers were killed as they tried to recover the gold from the wreck" "Steve needs more information so" "Henry Kamara a friend of the dead divers is taking him to visit a man who saw the ship sink" "As a little boy Damshu Kolonya stood petrified on this beach while the fierce battle raged overhead" "So Henry your friend was actually here and saw everything happen" "Yeah" "So if you can just ask him just to explain in his own words the story of what he saw and how the ship came down and everything" "The Japanese ship was disguised as an island with trees on its deck" "But the American plane saw it and dropped a bomb" "There was a huge explosion" "Then two other American planes started machine-gunning" "The ship began to sink as it made for the shore" "Japanese soldiers tried to escape but the Americans shot them all down" "The sea turned red with blood" "In less than twenty minutes the ship had sunk" "But this is the Philippines" "And Steve cant dive on any wreck that he wants to" "He must now travel to Manila to begin the long process of obtaining permits" "Its January 2000" "After months of waiting Discovery is at last under way" "Steve and a new band of hopefuls now have the go ahead to dive on what they believe to be the Cudamaru" "But if there is gold on the wreck why did the locals share the secret with Steve" "Well although the locals are quite good divers and quite tenacious this one is just a little bit too deep for them to get at and the story is that a Chinese man financed an operation here and they got fifty bars of gold off" "And the day before one of the local guys died on this wreck he turned round to all of them and he said were all millionaires Ive just opened the door and its full of boxes" "And he smashed a box open and inside out of one box came ten 65 kilo bars" "Its US $650000 a box" "And they can see at least forty boxes of gold" "One bar would just do nicely now" "And the rest like a millionaire friend of mine said" "The first couple of millions are okay the rest is just for show" "Henry will help Steve to manoeuvre" "Discovery directly over the wreck" "Steve has all the government paperwork he needs" "But before he starts bringing up gold bars he must ensure that the local police are on his side" "Otherwise he could lose the lot" "Armed with his permit he must convince them everything is legitimate" "Perhaps a little grudgingly the paperwork is accepted" "Later at a local bar Steve takes the opportunity to grill the policeman for more information about the Cudamaru" "then he draw the name of the boat" "Cudamaru" "This boat was loaded with hundred boxes of gold" "It would be a fantastic haul if its true" "But theres another reason why the locals are frightened of the wreck divers or superstition about the ghosts of the Japanese soldiers" "Yes yes yes" "The Japanese soldiers told us that because there are many people there are many ghosts watching them that is why they are making request because there are many ghosts of the Japanese because that boat there were many all Japanese crew was" "The locals are terrified of the ghosts of the Cudamaru" "Either way with the wreck lying over 70 metres below them diving will be dangerous" "So first Steve must send down a Remote Operated Vehicle or ROV" "Its camera should send back the first pictures of the Cudamaru for 58 years" "So lets see whats down the rope shall we chaps" "Oh see the wreck down below" "See it Okay slack on the umbilical" "The final resting place of the" "Cudamaru is a forbidding one" "The ships mangled remains graphically retell a violent end" "Oooh big explosion" "Slack away All stop" "The bomb from the American aircraft has left a gaping hole behind the bridge blown off the ships funnel and burnt out the entire rear end of the wreck leaving just a frame" "But most sinister were the ropes and rubber tubes festooning the wreck it seems they belonged to the Filipino divers that died here a few years ago" "So one pipe goes to the bow and the other pipe goes to the stern" "The divers who died were never recovered so it is quite possible that at the end of this you might find the remains of the divers" "Steve is using the ROV to search for a box or a bag left here by the divers" "If the story is true it could contain ten gold bars" "With great precision Steve attempts to get the ROV inside a doorway" "One wrong move could leave it trapped in the wreck" "The silt here is like talcum powder even the gentlest touch" "Once the silt is cleared plates and bottles suggest hes found the ships galley" "But there are no boxes" "Steve is now forced to explore deeper into the sunken hulk" "In the dark of the hold the ROV drops below 80 metres" "Ah its looking very boxy to me boys" "What say you" "Looks like a box" "Now I can go on here only once" "Would you believe that" "Its been lashed on and tied on ready to be sent up so its a box that the other people who recovered the fifty bars have obviously deemed worthy enough to lash up to send up" "An exciting discovery" "But at a depth of 84 metres they now face a real challenge to bring the mystery box to the surface" "Tomorrow Steve himself will attempt to retrieve the box" "But tonight he must be vigilant" "In the part of the world were in there is a considerable problem with pirates and all the people along this area know that this ship that were sat on has got gold on it" "So they have no idea whether weve recovered anything or not at the moment but just the thoughts of the fact that we possibly have got a bar of gold or a dozen bars of gold or a thousand bars of gold is enough to cause us a problem" "So we have to take these preventative measures to defend ourselves" "After a trouble-free night the team prepare to dive down to the wreck" "The plan is that Steve will attempt to reach the bottom of the hold roll the box into a sack and send it to the surface using an inflatable lift-bag" "The other divers will work from above the hold" "They will try to do the whole job breathing just air" "Even for an experienced commercial diver this is very risky" "I quite like deep diving because of the challenge but you know sometimes when you get narcosis bad it dont matter who you are how experienced you are how many thousands of youve done once you get gripped by a narcosis thats it its game over and up you come" "Air consists mainly of oxygen and nitrogen" "Below 40 metres nitrogen becomes a narcotic and can send the mind into a trance" "Below 66 metres oxygen becomes poisonous and can disable the body" "To most divers the idea of going to 84 metres on air is madness" "But for Steve its a calculated risk" "Back on Discovery the stand-by diver uses the ROV camera to watch for any sign of Steve" "Limited by the amount of air they can carry the divers will have only 12 minutes on the bottom" "So they must work fast" "While Steve approaches the hold the other divers must prepare the lift-bag above the wreck" "But somethings gone wrong" "Visibility has deteriorated badly and the lift-bag has been abandoned" "It looks like the mission has been aborted" "After two long hours waiting for the divers to decompress they will soon find out what went wrong" "If the divers were to come up too quickly they could get the bends" "Classic nightmare dive Too dangerous really" "My torch jacked which is just what you want when youve got blackness and zero visibility I put me torch on and nothing" "The bad visibility has led to one of Steves worst nightmares coming true" "Ive now started having problems cos I was speeding around everywhere breathing really heavily the narcosis effect started to come on and which is especially like prone to zero visibility and then I started having trouble with me hands" "I couldnt actually press me inflation and I tried to get off the bottom and I couldnt get off the bottom cos I was over-heavy and I couldnt grip the rope to haul myself back up" "So in the end I had to sort of just use both hands to press the inflation-button to get myself off the bottom" "Steves narcosis is a chilling reminder to the team of the men who died 5 years before" "He decides to call for a group of Filipino technical divers who worked with him on the wreck of the Golcondah" "Theyll be using helium to reduce the risks of deep water diving" "Steve runs over the plan Because they cant rely on the old rope thats already round the box theyll have to push it into a sack and attach that to a lift-bag" "Heather Steves wife has now joined the boat" "If they find the gold today their house in Devon will at last be secure" "Mixing the helium with oxygen and nitrogen should give the divers up to 25 minutes on the wreck" "Despite the helium the dive is extremely dangerous" "They hope the prize will be worth the risk" "In the light of the ROV two divers prepare to venture deep into the hold of the Cudamaru" "Theyre following the string right down so thats good" "From above the wreck all the can be seen through the haunting blackness is the faint glow of the divers torches" "Theyre now slowly ascending out of the hold so it looks like theyve" "done it Thats the rope that theyve got for the actual box in their hands see" "Thats the one" "If this turns out to be a machinery part thisll be the most expensive machinery part ever lifted" "Its now time to inflate the lift-bag" "Thats the first sniff of air going in there" "Has it gone" "Oh its going Somethings happening" "Thats a bluel cant see" "Im going up very fa Oh stop oh stop on everything" "The ROV is climbing rapidly Steve has lost control" "Now why am I still going up I think Im stuck to the lift-bag" "The lift-bag has shot straight to the surface but has it brought the box with it" "Come on Come on Double double double quick on everything we do Knife Come on double quick" "Everything" "Steve needs to secure the box but the stand-by divers already in the water and out of contact" "Where the fhas Daryl got to" "The box that were after is there Suspended" "Its not in the bag And the support divers in the water and I cant tell him what the hells happening" "The operation has gone badly wrong" "Steves fortune now hangs on the end of an old piece of rope that could break at any moment" "The only diver available to bring in the box had taken the day off sick But now duty calls" "Together the divers bundle the box into the sack" "Remarkably the old rope has held" "This is the bit where nobody dares" "look in in case its a large bar of Cadburys Dairy Milk" "What we need is that sack" "Im gonna pick it up with this but whilst its on the fast craft okay" "With all the divers safely back on board its time to open the box" "Choose your weapon sir" "What we need to do is to try and separate maybe down there" "If you see there look see the steel and then wood on the outside" "Its a reinforced banding all the way round it so we presume that it was you know something thats well protected" "and a public valuable because the box is quite unusual being metal and timber" "No gold" "Well it certainly looks like its a lighting unit of some description" "But thats the only penetration into the top of the lid" "So maybe it was some sort of paraffin lamp" "There you go" "That may be one copper lamp each for the collection" "For now the ghosts of the Cudamaru will hang on to their riches" "As for Steve Sargison after five months of waiting he was at last awarded a permit to dive on a Manila galleon twice the size of the Esperanza" "Hes also planning a second more intensive search of the Cudamaru" "Perhaps the genie of the Japanese lamps will finally grant him his wish"