Search begins for historic shipwreck carrying $5B worth of gold

By Natasha Leake via SWNS

A team of marine experts are to begin hunting for the most valuable shipwreck in history, which sank 400 years ago carrying $5B worth of gold.

The Merchant Royal, a 17th-century English treasure ship known as “the El Dorado of the seas” sank in bad weather near the Isles of Scilly in 1641.

It was returning to Dartmouth laden with treasure from Mexico - at least 100,000 pounds of gold, 400 bars of Mexican silver and 500,000 pieces of eight.

In 2019, a massive anchor was brought up in the nets of The Spirited Lady off the coast Cornwall, and experts speculated it belonged to the Merchant Royal.

So now a team of marine cargo recovery experts from Cornish-based company Multibeam Services are working with former local fishermen in a mission to find the wreck - and its treasure.

They are starting their mission in April and think they will be the team to find it using unmanned underwater vessels and new sonar tech.

They plan to spend all of 2024 looking for the wreck, covering a 200 square mile area of the English Channel.

The project will cost millions of pounds and is funded by the salvage treasure group. They say if they find the boat, the governing authorities will be notified.

Nigel Hodge, from Multibeam Services who leads the on-water team, said: "We’ve got state of the art technology, and one of the best dive teams in the world.

“We will definitely find it - we’ve found everything we’ve ever looked for and we’ve been in the business looking for 35 years.

“We are a team of marine exploration experts trained from working at sea as ex-commercial Cornish fisherman, so we have a knowledge of the local area."

The project to find the Merchant Royal will begin in April and will be televised in a series hosted by TV presenter Jason Fox.

They plan to use two 10ft by 3ft unmanned underwater vessels - known as AUVs - to find the ship.

They can run up to 6,000 meters unmanned and use acoustic sonar technology to scan the seabed.

Each underwater vessel costs £3.5m and is rammed full of technology and sonar equipment.

They have been used to find multiple shipwrecks, including the Titanic and the submarine which disappeared last year.

The vessels have also been used by the navy to locate missing submarines in the past.

Unlike technology previously used, these vessels do not need to be towed behind a ship.

Instead they are unmanned and controlled by a wireless system.

Nigel said: "We have the advances in underwater technology at our fingertips, world-class marine historians and archaeologists, extraordinary dive teams and surface support crews with unsurpassed local knowledge of the Cornish waters.

“We’re committed to finally bringing this story to the surface."

In 2007, the wreck was apparently found by the US company Odyssey Marine Exploration.

But after lengthy legal wranglings, Odyssey was ordered to hand over coins recovered from the wreck to Spain - suggesting that the ship was really a Spanish frigate.

The case became notorious when it popped up in leaked US diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks website.

Salvage companies have spent years looking for the wreck of Merchant Royal, an English which sank in bad weather near the Isles of Scilly in 1641.

Carrying a crew of 80 under the command of Capt John Limbrey, the ship - owned by a group of London merchants - reportedly had "£300,000 in silver, £100,000 in gold and as much again in jewel" lying in its hold.

The Merchant Royal’s disappearance was the equivalent to one-third of the national exchequer in the mid 1600s.

Samuel Pepys referred to the event in his diary, proceedings in the House of Commons were halted to hear the news, and King Charles I spoke of the event as the “greatest loss ever sustained in one ship.”

Previous estimates said that the ship was worth $1.5 BILLION, but Multibeam Services say they think it could be worth as much as £4 billion.