In all, during a short search of rocky gullies on the shallow seabed near the shore, his two-man team found more than 20 stone shot of the type that would have been fired from Portuguese ships’ weapons of the time.Ī larger team returned in November 1998 to carry out a more detailed survey, but the site would not be fully examined for another 15 years, partly because of “the logistical difficulty of supporting such a complex operation in this remote location”, but also because Mearns and Bluewater Recoveries had bigger fish to catch. The two men, both experienced sailors, sat on a hill overlooking the bay, watching the wave patterns, trying to put themselves in the mind of the Portuguese who had lost their lives here 500 years earlier and figuring out where the Esmeralda might have been wrecked.Īgreeing on a likely spot, they snorkelled across the potential site “and in 20 minutes, just looking down from the surface, found the first cannonball”, says Mearns. The loss of the Esmeralda and the Saõ Pedro, documented in a contemporary account by an eyewitness, has long been known to historians, but for more than 500 years, the precise location of the wreck site remained a mystery.Īt this point, says Mearns, it came down to “a question of seamanship”.
Pepper – and the vast wealth that could be made by trading it in Europe – was also the lure that in May 1503, led to the destruction of two of da Gama’s ships on a remote island off the coast of Oman. It was the lure of pepper and other valuable spices that in 1498 drove Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama to open up the Carreira da India, a sea route from Europe around the bottom of Africa and across the Indian Ocean to southern India. In the end, among all the cannonballs, weapons, ceramics, coins and even a ship’s bell recovered from the 500-year-old watery grave, it was a few humble grains of pepper, remarkably preserved inside a fused mass of rocks, sand and corroded metalwork, that told the most poignant story. After years of hunting for clues, researchers have finally found out what really happened to the Esmeralda, one of the most important ship losses endured by the Portuguese in their exploration of the Indian ocean.
0 kommentar(er)
