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How
lucky 13 struck gold off Salcombe
For
three years a team of divers has been slipping away to a
site off Prawle Point in Devon,
sworn to secrecy about the astonishing treasure they have
been uncovering. But now it's time to go public, and Kendall
McDonald has the full story.
It
was near freezing in the boat, and no better in the water.
Ron Howell, complete with measuring tape and clipboard,
sank reluctantly down the shot line into the 20m-deep gloom
around the four cannon. Only at his third attempt did he
succeed in tying the measuring tape firmly to the cascabel of one of the cannon. The struggle had let water
into his mask. As he tilted his head back to clear it and
vision returned, something glittered close to him in the
wall of the gully. His forefinger probed into a crack. A
moment later, and he was staring at a gleaming gold coin.
Small, but definitely gold! Then, as he looked closely at
the rocks around him, he saw another golden spot and another.
When his air ran out and he made a near-free ascent back
to the RIB, which was bucking in the swell over the cannon,
Ron had four coins so tightly gripped in one hand that their
imprint was not to fade from his flesh for some time! He
managed to get aboard without opening his clenched fist.
When he did, a boatload of divers of the South-West Maritime
Archaeological Group, who had earlier been extremely reluctant
to dive, all seemed to leave the boat in five seconds flat!
However, this severe attack of gold fever was soon over.
By the next dive, archaeological discipline had been restored!
Those four coins were the start of a huge treasure find,
the first of more than 550 gold coins, gold jewellery and little gold ingots to be raised from a
wreck near Salcombe, South
Devon. Today they are valued by experts at over
£500,000. They were not easily raised. It took three years,
3800 dives and almost as many hours underwater for the divers
to tease the coins from the cracks in the rocks or to fan
the sand off more gold on the floor of the gullies. It was
always cold work, and often so dark that the divers had
to use torches. But it was diving time well spent, because
British Museum
coin experts say this is the finest "assemblage"
of such gold coins ever found in Europe.
First dives to survey the cannon site were made by Mick
Palmer of Northampton, local archaeologist-divers Neville
Oldham and Stephen George,
and Staffordshire divers Mike Williams and his wife Julie.
They soon found that there were few obvious signs of a wreck,
apart from more iron cannon spread out in other shallow
gullies. There are 11 heavily encrusted cannon in all. Most
of the guns are seven-footers, with the longest 8ft 6in.
Two are small swivel guns. Two ancient anchors lie nearby.
Many of the team who worked the Salcombe cannon site had earlier been fully occupied further
to the west on a sensational discovery in the mouth of the
River Erme - the wreck of a Bronze Age ship and her cargo of crudely
shaped ingots of pure tin. Their archaeological survey of
the site won them the respect of the nautical archaeological
world, and the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Medal. What little
diving time they had to spare was spent on a survey of another
famous West Country shipwreck - that of the Gossamer, a
fully rigged China
tea-clipper wrecked in a gale in December 1868 near Prawle
Point. The only time these archaeological divers would move
away from these important sites was when they were blown
off by south-easterly winds. Then they would head for the
cannon site and work on the pre-disturbance survey. It was
on one such "blown-off" day that they made the
first gold strike. The South-West Maritime Archaeological
Group has as its diving advisers Mike Kingston and Mick
Kightley, of Northampton,
and Neville Oldham, of Stoke Fleming, all members of the
tin ingot wreck team. The Salcombe
cannon group members are Mick Palmer, Andy Elliott, Dave
Dunkley and Mike Evans of Northampton; Jim Tyson of Market
Harborough; Richard Boon, now
in South Africa; Stephen George,
Ron Howell and Dave Illingworth
of South Devon; and Mike Williams of Staffordshire. Nine
of the 13 are members of Northampton BSAC, Branch 13. Who
said the number was unlucky? The group is committed to an
arduous pattern of diving on the Salcombe
site. Those members who come from the Northampton
area tow their RIBs to Devon
on a Friday night and stay on a farm near Salcombe,
from where they launch into the estuary. Saturday and Sunday
are devoted to diving, three dives a day each. The first
dive takes an hour with decompression, followed by two hours
in the boat, then another hour's diving, then two more hours
in the boat before the third and last dive of the day -
another hour. After the last dive on Sunday, the boats go
back on to the trailers and the four-hour tow home begins.
This pattern is repeated every weekend the weather allows
- rain or shine. All this diving has produced other artifacts
as well as more coins, jewellery
and ingots - short pewter spoons from Elizabethan times;
an unusual sounding lead in the shape of a fish; a roll
of lead; a Bellamine jar, or rather part of it; German pottery;
a brass seal with the initials M and R entwined under a
diamond shape. And the same initials, but the other way
round, are found on the base of a pewter bowl, 15cm across
and 7.5cm high. The divers thought the initials were bound
to identify the ship, or at least the seal's owner. But
despite intensive research they have no clue to the ship's
name. You will not be surprised to learn that the line marked
"G" on the survey plan runs down a gully, which
was the main source of the gold. The coins found here were
widely spread. The average on most dives was eight, but
one exceptional dive produced more than 100 coins. This
bonanza was found by using a metal detector over the sandy
floor, close to the gully wall and near
a lonely cannon. All the coins were in good condition.
The ones with faint inscriptions were like that not as a
result of the wear of the sea, but of poor striking at the
time they were minted. Only one of the gold coins was found
in concretion, and that was right beside the cannon. What
makes these coins so valuable is their rarity. They are
quarter-dinars, half-dinars and dinars from Morocco.
They bear the name of Sheikh Ahmed al Masour
and represent four dynasties. In the whole of their national
collections, Britain has only six similar pieces, the French
have 12 and Morocco won't say, though it is believed to
have very few. The British
Museum is expected
to make a realistic offer to buy the collection for the
nation, but if it cannot find the money, the collection
could be bought by a museum abroad and taken out of Britain.
The proceeds of any such sale will be shared equally among
the divers. The value of the Devon
hoard is greatly increased y the fact that the vast majority
of the coins date from the late 1500s to 1632. This was
the period when European ships suffered most from the attacks
of Barbary pirates, who emerged from
the Mediterranean and attacked English
shipping even in the Channel around Plymouth
and Dartmouth
in search of loot and slaves. Was this a pirate ship? Was
she a privateer coming home with loot? The ship may never
be named, but the fact that the gold coins recovered by
the divers cover such a long period, and also that the gold
jewellery - earrings, torques,
brooches and bracelets - is without any precious stones
in the settings and sometimes cut, almost chopped into pieces,
suggests that this is Barbary pirates' gold, more important
for the weight of the gold than its looks. The discovery
of the ingots suggests other jewellery
had already been melted down. The shape of the gold 'finger'
ingots is explained by their name. A scrape was made in
earth with a finger and molten gold poured into the depression.
The vandalism of the jewelry is made worse by the harm done
to the artistic work that went into its creation. One piece
now slashed in two and minus the fine stone that would have
been its centerpiece, is almost identical to a brooch hanging
from the neck of Mary, Queen of Scots, in a famous portrait
of her with James I when he was six. Among the artifacts,
too, is an apothecary's jar believed to have come originally
from Somerset.
Seeds or pills stuck to the bottom of the pot are being
analysed. Small objects in concretion
close to where the pot was found turned out to be broad
beans of the 17th century. Kew
Gardens says
they are genetically akin to the broad beans we grow in
our gardens today. Broad beans in oil were a delicacy in
the Middle East of those days, but
they were also used as a diuretic, which might place them
in the medicine chest of the gold ship's doctor. Almost
as incredible as its discovery is the fact that the secret
of the discovery of the gold has been kept for three whole
years. All was revealed last month when a press conference
was held by the divers, the British Museum and the Receiver
of Wreck, shortly after the Government listing of the site
as that of a protected historic wreck at 50* 12.696N; 03*
44.679W and 250m around it. This well-kept secret should
be an encouragement to all divers to report their finds
- from Day One the coins and gold were declared to the Receiver
of Wreck and the wreck reported to the Archaeological Diving
Unit, which came to inspect the site. The site was not officially
declared as protected at that time as the ADU found that
the divers, under the guidance of local archaeological diver
Neville Oldham, were carrying out a proper archaeological
survey and logging the gold coins in position, as they did
every other artifact! The divers were also anxious to avoid
early designation, as they had found during their work on
the Erme tin ingot site that immediately
after publication of the protection dive boats appeared
in the area. All valuable material, including coins, has
now been cleared from the site, and the archaeological excavations
are underway. All the divers are full of praise for the
help given to them by Veronica Robbins, the Receiver of
Wreck, and the members of the Archaeological Diving Unit.
Without that help, they believe that tales of pirate gold
would simply have attracted pirates from all over the world!
Appeared
in DIVER - November 1997
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