After lying undisturbed on the seabed for centuries, the ‘El Dorado of the Seas’ may finally reveal its secrets.
The Merchant Royal’s shipwreck is somewhere off the coast of Cornwall, but has never been found despite carrying up to £4 billion of gold and other precious metals.
Whoever finds it could get their hands on more treasure than Long John Silver, but unfortunately there is no X to mark the spot.
Previous attempts to find the 400-year-old ship have come back with nothing, but now a UK company is convinced they can do it.
Former commercial fisherman and diver Nigel Hodge heads a team of 11 at Multibeam Services, a company specialising in locating lost wrecks, and is setting out on the search next month.
He plans to spend all of 2024 looking for the wreck, covering a 200 square mile area of the English Channel.
It’s ‘not a gold rush’ though, Nigel told Metro.co.uk, even though he believes the wreck could be worth billions.
Due to strict laws on who owns any treasure discovered, ‘the days of people finding a big pile of gold and becoming rich overnight are well and truly gone.’
He says the lure for him lies in finding answers, with any precious cargo set to become heritage artifacts.
New technology could help solve the mystery, as the company has unmanned underwater vessels worth 3.5 million each capable of going 6,000 metres – deeper than the deepest part of the search area – as well as new sonar tech.
Nigel says that the search will be difficult, though, with the stretch of water where it sank notoriously dangerous.
‘There’s thousands of shipwrecks down there and the Merchant Royal is just one of them,’ he said. ‘So we’ve got to literally pick through a lot of wrecks as we’re doing them and then identify them.
‘It’s not straightforward. If it was straightforward, it would have been done.’
Based in Redruth and employing several other ex-fishermen, he believes his company is well placed to succeed where others failed due to their local knowledge of the waters as well as the advancements in tech.
The wreck went down on its way to Dartmouth on September 23, 1641, after stopping off in the Spanish port of Cadiz where it was repaired and took on more cargo on its way back from Mexico and the Caribbean.
It was carrying payment for 30,000 soldiers based at Flanders, as well as treasures from the ‘New World’ including 400 bars of Mexican silver and 500,000 pieces of eight.
A report about the wreck from 1641 held in the British Library says it was carrying ‘300000 in ready boliogne and 100,000 pound in gold and as much value in jewels’.
Historians have not agreed on a figure for how much treasure might be on board, with some debate around whether the 100,000 pounds of gold meant in currency or in weight.
But at the very lowest estimate, the treasure on board would still be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
All this cargo sank to the bottom of the sea, along with 18 crew members. Forty men, including the ship’s Captain John Limbrey, were rescued by her sister ship in convoy, the Merchant Dover.
The loss at the time was so significant that 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.’
Although it has been lost for 400 years, the search heated up in 2019 after a fishing boat the Spirited Lady hauled up an anchor thought to belong to the missing vessel.
But if the wreck is found, it may not look as you’d expect, as in those days ships were made from wood which would have long since rotted away.
All you could see would be metal parts such as cannons, the anchor – which may now be on land already – and the treasure itself, if it hasn’t already been secretly taken and not declared.
Multibeam Services has already found lost wrecks, and even found a sunken pirate ship loaded with treasure last year – though Nigel says we’ll have to wait for the documentary for all the details.
His effort to find one of the world’s most famous and beguiling wrecks will be followed by a documentary crew from next month hosted by former special forces soldier and commando Jason Fox.
‘Some will say it’s a needle in a haystack,’ Nigel said. ‘I wouldn’t say it’s quite that but it is a large area and we’ve got the elements to deal with. We need to wait for certain conditions to be able to use the equipment.’
His team will base themselves in the Isles of Scilly to avoid having to continually cross back from the mainland.
If they find it, Nigel is realistic that it won’t be a story of ‘marine archeologists buying a Lamborghini’ – but if there’s really £4 billion on board, no doubt he’ll at least get a generous finders’ fee.
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