A team of marine experts are set to start a treasure hunt for the most valuable shipwreck in history, which sank 400 years ago with £4 billion worth of gold on board. The Merchant Royal, a 17th-century English treasure ship known as "the El Dorado of the seas", sank near the Isles of Scilly in 1641 while carrying treasure from Mexico.
In 2019, a huge anchor was found off the coast of Cornwall, believed to be from the Merchant Royal. Now, a team from Cornish company Multibeam Services are joining forces with former local fishermen to find the wreck and its treasure.
They're starting their mission in April and believe they'll be the ones to find it using unmanned underwater vessels and new sonar tech. They plan to spend all of 2024 searching for the wreck in a 200 square mile area of the English Channel.
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The project will cost millions of pounds and is funded by the salvage treasure group. They said if they find the boat, they'll let the governing authorities know. 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 fishermen, so we have a knowledge of the local area."
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The project to find the Merchant Royal is set to start in April and Jason Fox, TV presenter, will host a show about it. Using two underwater drones, also known as AUVs, each measuring 10ft by 3ft, the team plans to search for the ship. These drones can dive up to 6,000 metres deep and they use special sound technology to scan the seabed.
Each underwater drone costs £3.5m and is loaded with advanced tech and sound scanning tools. Such drones have been used before to discover many shipwrecks, including the Titanic and a submarine that went missing last year. The navy has even used these underwater vessels in the past to find lost submarines.
Unlike older technology, these drones don't need to be dragged behind a ship. Instead, they're wirelessly controlled and need no crew. Nigel added: "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."
Back in 2007, a US company named Odyssey Marine Exploration claimed to have found the wreck. After a long legal battle, Odyssey was told to give back the coins they found from the wreck to Spain. This hinted that the ship might have been a Spanish frigate. The case became famous when it appeared in US diplomatic cables that were leaked on the WikiLeaks website.
Salvage companies have spent years searching for the wreck of Merchant Royal. This English ship sank near the Isles of Scilly in 1641 due to bad weather. Capt John Limbrey led a crew of 80 on the ship. The ship, owned by London merchants, reportedly had "£300,000 in silver, £100,000 in gold and as much again in jewel" in its hold.
The disappearance of the Merchant Royal was equal to one-third of the national treasury in the mid-1600s. Samuel Pepys wrote about the event in his diary and the House of Commons stopped their proceedings to hear the news.
King Charles I referred to the event as the "greatest loss ever sustained in one ship." Earlier estimates said that the ship could be worth $1.5bn. But Multibeam Services think it could be worth as much as £4bn.
