“You get to know whether you’re right or not,” Nigel Pickford said, of identifying wrecks.
“That doesn’t often happen with history.”
“That doesn’t often happen with history.”
In the course of the maritime researcher Nigel Pickford’s career, the business of prospecting for wealth in the world’s oceans has changed dramatically.
Thanks to advanced technology, now, with enough money and expertise, almost anything can be found.
Illustration by Owen Pomery
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure—without leaving dry land.
The wreck was like a bug on the wall, a jumbly shape splayed on the abyssal plain.
It was noticed by a team of autonomous-underwater-vehicle operators on board a subsea exploration vessel, working at an undisclosed location in the Atlantic Ocean, about a thousand miles from the nearest shore.
The analysts belonged to a small private company that specializes in deep-sea search operations; I have been asked not to name it.
They were looking for something else.
In the past decade, the company has helped to transform the exploration of the seabed by deploying fleets of A.U.V.s—underwater drones—which cruise in formation, mapping large areas of the ocean floor with high-definition imagery.
Mensun Bound
(image courtesy of FT)
“We find wrecks everywhere, just blunder into them,” Mensun Bound, a maritime archeologist who works frequently with the company, told me.
The pressures of time and money mean that it is usually not possible to stop.
(Top-of-the-line search vessels can cost about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day to charter.)
“Sometimes it’s heartbreaking,” Bound said.
A few years ago, he was with a team that stumbled across a wreck in the Indian Ocean.
They had a few hours to spare, so they brought a sodden box up to the surface.
It was full of books.
“That was the most exciting thing I’ve ever found in my life,” Bound said.
“But then the question becomes: What do we do with it?”
The pressures of time and money mean that it is usually not possible to stop.
(Top-of-the-line search vessels can cost about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day to charter.)
“Sometimes it’s heartbreaking,” Bound said.
A few years ago, he was with a team that stumbled across a wreck in the Indian Ocean.
They had a few hours to spare, so they brought a sodden box up to the surface.
It was full of books.
“That was the most exciting thing I’ve ever found in my life,” Bound said.
“But then the question becomes: What do we do with it?”
The seabed is a complicated, as well as an expensive, place to operate in.
So they put it back.
This Atlantic wreck was beguiling.
An R.O.V.—a remotely operated vehicle, connected by a cable to the exploration vessel—was sent down to take a closer look.
It was the remains of an old wooden sailing ship, stuffed with cargo, lying some six thousand metres below the surface—much deeper than the Titanic.
The contents seemed to be Asian in origin: intricate lacquered screens and bolts of cloth, thousands of slender rattan canes, and an extraordinary array of porcelain, all preserved in the darkness of the ocean.
“It was just cascading in these spills down around the slopes and undulations of the seabed,” Bound recalled.
“And there were barrels there, which hadn’t been opened.They were sitting there intact.”
There is something almost dangerously tantalizing about an undiscovered shipwreck.
It exists on the edge of the real, containing death and desire.
Lost ships are lost knowledge, waiting to be regained.
“It’s like popping the locks on an old suitcase and you lift the lid,” Bound told me.
Bound grew up on the Falkland Islands in the nineteen-fifties.
In 2022, he found the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s polar-exploration ship, under the ice of the Weddell Sea, off Antarctica.
“On a shipwreck, everything, in theory, that was there on that ship when it went down is still there,” he said.
“It’s all the product of one unpremeditated instant of time.”
What was the ship?
So they put it back.
This Atlantic wreck was beguiling.
An R.O.V.—a remotely operated vehicle, connected by a cable to the exploration vessel—was sent down to take a closer look.
It was the remains of an old wooden sailing ship, stuffed with cargo, lying some six thousand metres below the surface—much deeper than the Titanic.
The contents seemed to be Asian in origin: intricate lacquered screens and bolts of cloth, thousands of slender rattan canes, and an extraordinary array of porcelain, all preserved in the darkness of the ocean.
“It was just cascading in these spills down around the slopes and undulations of the seabed,” Bound recalled.
“And there were barrels there, which hadn’t been opened.They were sitting there intact.”
There is something almost dangerously tantalizing about an undiscovered shipwreck.
It exists on the edge of the real, containing death and desire.
Lost ships are lost knowledge, waiting to be regained.
“It’s like popping the locks on an old suitcase and you lift the lid,” Bound told me.
Bound grew up on the Falkland Islands in the nineteen-fifties.
In 2022, he found the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s polar-exploration ship, under the ice of the Weddell Sea, off Antarctica.
“On a shipwreck, everything, in theory, that was there on that ship when it went down is still there,” he said.
“It’s all the product of one unpremeditated instant of time.”
What was the ship?
There was an obvious person to ask.
In 1993, Bound had been searching for the remains of a nineteenth-century English trading vessel, the Caroline, in the Straits of Malacca, in Southeast Asia, when he and his colleagues pulled up a much older, bronze cannon instead.
The cannon was marked with a relief of a sailing ship, the name of the Dutch East India Company, and a date, 1604.
“I had no idea what it was doing there or anything,” Bound said.
But he had heard of a self-taught shipwreck researcher, based in England, who was said to have an unusually broad grasp of the world’s lost vessels.
Bound contacted the researcher, Nigel Pickford, by satellite phone from the ship.
In 1993, Bound had been searching for the remains of a nineteenth-century English trading vessel, the Caroline, in the Straits of Malacca, in Southeast Asia, when he and his colleagues pulled up a much older, bronze cannon instead.
The cannon was marked with a relief of a sailing ship, the name of the Dutch East India Company, and a date, 1604.
“I had no idea what it was doing there or anything,” Bound said.
But he had heard of a self-taught shipwreck researcher, based in England, who was said to have an unusually broad grasp of the world’s lost vessels.
Bound contacted the researcher, Nigel Pickford, by satellite phone from the ship.
The Atlas of shipwreck and treasure by Nigel Pickford
Within twenty-four hours, Pickford replied, saying that Bound and his team were on the site of the Battle of Cape Rachado, which was fought between Portuguese and Dutch fleets over several days in August, 1606.The cannon probably belonged to a ship called the Nassau.
“He said, ‘O.K., you found one wreck by itself,’ ” Bound recalled.
“ ‘There should be three wrecks nearby.’ And he even gave us a rough direction.”
Just over a kilometre away, Bound and his team found the wreck mounds of three more ships—another Dutch warship, the Middelburg, and two Portuguese vessels, the São Salvador and Dom Duarte de Guerra’s Galleon—which had become tangled together and sunk in flames.
“There they were, still tied together on the bottom of the Straits of Malacca, just as they’d gone down,” Bound said.
“You could see the violence.”
A Portuguese cannon was bent like an elbow, with fragments of a Dutch cannonball embedded inside it.
Two years later, Bound led an excavation of the site on behalf of the National Museum of Malaysia.
“Had it not been for Nigel, that would never have happened,” he said.
I asked Bound whether there were any other experts, comparable to Pickford, whom he could have called in that situation.
“I can’t think of anybody of his calibre,” he replied.
“I can think of one or two others. But they are more swashbuckling, let’s say.”
“Had it not been for Nigel, that would never have happened,” he said.
I asked Bound whether there were any other experts, comparable to Pickford, whom he could have called in that situation.
“I can’t think of anybody of his calibre,” he replied.
“I can think of one or two others. But they are more swashbuckling, let’s say.”
The shipwreck world swims with hucksters; Pickford deals in facts that you can use.
“He is a serious scholar,” Bound said.
“His approach, his attention to detail, his note-taking, the insight that he brings.”
News of the Atlantic discovery found its way to Pickford within a few days.
Earlier this year, he showed me images taken by the R.O.V. on his laptop, in a modern apartment decorated with contemporary art and Asian ceramics, overlooking the rooftops of Cambridge.
Pickford is seventy-eight, with white hair, crooked teeth, and a mild, understated manner that could be mistaken entirely for gentleness, or English politeness, but is also the mark of a lifetime spent among secrets.
“My things are not always well organized.
I’ve got so much bloody stuff,” Pickford muttered, clicking around on his desktop.
A bookshelf next to him held a seven-volume history of the Royal Navy and a copy of “Dictionary of Disasters at Sea During the Age of Steam.”
“He is a serious scholar,” Bound said.
“His approach, his attention to detail, his note-taking, the insight that he brings.”
News of the Atlantic discovery found its way to Pickford within a few days.
Earlier this year, he showed me images taken by the R.O.V. on his laptop, in a modern apartment decorated with contemporary art and Asian ceramics, overlooking the rooftops of Cambridge.
Pickford is seventy-eight, with white hair, crooked teeth, and a mild, understated manner that could be mistaken entirely for gentleness, or English politeness, but is also the mark of a lifetime spent among secrets.
“My things are not always well organized.
I’ve got so much bloody stuff,” Pickford muttered, clicking around on his desktop.
A bookshelf next to him held a seven-volume history of the Royal Navy and a copy of “Dictionary of Disasters at Sea During the Age of Steam.”
“I think it’s this one,” Pickford said.
The screen suddenly filled with barrels, china, and chests.
A ghostly sword lay on the ocean floor.
We stared for a few moments.
“It’s incredibly real, isn’t it?” he said.
Pickford is fascinated by the era of early colonial expansion and also, to be frank, by treasure.
“There are millions of shipwrecks going back millennia, obviously.
From an archeological point of view, I suppose they’re all of interest,” he told me.
“From a treasure-hunting point of view, about naught point naught one of them are of interest.”
The screen suddenly filled with barrels, china, and chests.
A ghostly sword lay on the ocean floor.
We stared for a few moments.
“It’s incredibly real, isn’t it?” he said.
Pickford is fascinated by the era of early colonial expansion and also, to be frank, by treasure.
“There are millions of shipwrecks going back millennia, obviously.
From an archeological point of view, I suppose they’re all of interest,” he told me.
“From a treasure-hunting point of view, about naught point naught one of them are of interest.”
Pickford nicknamed the unknown wreck Deep Pots and, without anybody ever formally asking him to, he set out to identify the vessel.
Pickford is the purveyor of a singular sort of information.
In the course of fifty years, his research has led to the discovery of dozens of shipwrecks, containing more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of recovered cargoes.
Clients—specialist salvage companies and their investors—tend to call him, rather than the other way around.
“I never really bother to look for people,” he said.
His work encompasses every ocean and a time span of roughly five centuries.
One day, when we were chatting, Pickford mentioned that he had been hired to investigate a couple of wrecks near the Comoro Islands, off the coast of Mozambique, in East Africa.
“I can’t tell you anything about them,” he said, affably enough.
Pickford works on a retainer or for between five and ten per cent of the proceeds of any treasure that is recovered.
Because of a medical condition, Mallory-Weiss syndrome, which can lead to severe internal bleeding if he vomits, he does not go to sea.
Instead, Pickford is a creature of libraries and maritime archives, which he returns to again and again, a missable figure in a tweed coat with elbow patches, standing aside to let you pass.
In 1994, Pickford published “The Atlas of Shipwrecks and Treasure,” which included a gazetteer of more than fourteen hundred shipwrecks and has become something of a reference work in the field.
“As well as greed, there has to be a love of gambling, a strong tendency to dream, a boundless optimism, a passion for quests, an enjoyment of physical risks, and a perverse desire to attempt that which is inherently difficult,” he wrote, of looking for vanished ships.
Pickford introduced the gazetteer with a quote from “The Tempest”: “O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish’d!” He dedicated the book to his father, Thomas, who was also a shipwreck researcher.
“He’s not an adventurer,” Pickford’s wife, Rosamund, told me.
“He’s a detective.” Other people involved in the shipwreck world—maritime archeologists, divers, treasure hunters—speak of the thrill and addiction of their discoveries.
But for Pickford these pangs of elation tend to be private, if not silent: opening an e-mail, taking a phone call, deciphering a centuries-old cargo manifest in a climate-controlled basement somewhere.
Pickford enjoys the binary outcomes of his work.
The diamonds are in the strong room, or they aren’t.
“You get to know whether you’re right or not,” he said.
“That doesn’t often happen with history.” The moment that Pickford craves is when the two realms collide—the archive and the artifact—and the years in between suddenly melt away.
“I think it’s something fairly embedded in our psyche, actually, this desire,” he said.
“It’s connecting with the past, really. It’s all about time.”
A porcelain expert who studied images from the Deep Pots wreck dated the pieces on the seabed to the last twenty years of the seventeenth century.
Pickford went to his files and tried to narrow down possible candidates for the vessel.
The wreck’s position, in the mid-Atlantic, suggested that he was looking for a ship that had been returning to Europe from Asia via the Caribbean when it sank—a relatively uncommon route.
“It was unusual,” Pickford said.
He thought of the Azie, a Dutch East India Company ship that sank in 1683 and which he had been curious about for years.
He hired a researcher to scour the company’s records, in The Hague, but these revealed that the Azie’s crew was rescued after a storm north of Cape Verde, a thousand miles from the wreck site.
For a time, Pickford considered the Oriflamme, a French trader that disappeared while crossing the Atlantic in 1691, on its way back from Siam.
But an account in the French colonial archives, in Aix-en-Provence, indicated that the Oriflamme could have made it as far as the Bay of Biscay.
Next, Pickford wondered about the Modena—a grand English ship named after Mary of Modena, the wife of King James II—which traded in Asia for the East India Company.
The last credible sighting of the Modena was on October 5, 1694, when passing seamen recognized pieces of her elaborate painted woodwork floating in the ocean after a violent storm.
The Modena had set sail for England from Barbados just over a month before.
I had assumed that Pickford would spend most of his time re-navigating old voyages, ruminating on lee shores and the direction of winds.
But treasure hunting begins and ends with cargo.
“You always start off with ‘What did it have on it?’ ” he told me.
“Did it really have that on it?” In the case of the Deep Pots wreck, the only way to offer a tentative identification would be to find a persuasive match between what was lying on the ocean floor and what was loaded onto the vessel when she sailed.
The Modena weighed somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand tons.
She was the largest ship in the East India Company’s fleet when she was built, in the Blackwall docks of East London, in 1685.
While much of her cargo was recorded in company correspondence, which Pickford could study at the British Library, a lot of it went undocumented, either by accident or as “private trade,” to avoid certain duties.
Colonial trading ships of the period were worlds unto themselves.
They went to sea for years at a time, their decks crammed with an improbable medley of people and things.
When the Modena left England for India, in February, 1692, she carried soldiers, lascars, sixteen company apprentices, and a group of Armenian merchants among her passengers.
Her holds contained lead, iron, a thousand pieces of woollen cloth, eight spare anchors, twenty barrels of tar, two hundred and fifty swords, thirteen chests of silver bars, medicine, and a consignment of unsold coral.
At first glance, the Modena’s likely cargo on her return from Asia didn’t tally with what was found at the Deep Pots site.
The most conspicuous objects on the seabed were porcelain and thousands of rattan canes, intended for use as walking sticks or in furniture-making.
The Modena’s final trading voyage lasted almost three years—and included stops in the Canary Islands, Cape Town, Ceylon, Bombay, and Persia.
But she didn’t visit anywhere known to export porcelain or canes in sizable quantities.
Fortunately for Pickford, however, much of her odyssey was witnessed by Edward Barlow, the chief mate on the Sampson (another ship in the same fleet), who kept a vivid journal.
Working from Barlow’s descriptions and the East India Company records, Pickford spent more than two years assembling the story of the Modena.
“It surprises me sometimes,” he said.
“Why do I enjoy digging around?” Pickford takes copious notes, with half an eye on information that could turn out to be useful on another wreck someday.
He circles back to documents that stay in his mind, and photographs them.
One day, about six months into his research, Pickford came across a letter that caught his attention.
A twenty-one-year-old apprentice sailing on the Modena missed the ship on its departure from the Canary Islands, in April, 1692, and was left behind.
His name was Samuel Causton.
When Causton’s father found out, he sent a letter, overland, to Surat, on the east coast of India, asking for his son’s possessions to be unloaded and held for his arrival on a later ship.
Causton’s baggage was not unusual for a young administrator of the period, a mixture of gifts and personal goods that might be traded.
Pickford wrote them down.
The list included two cases of brandy, a box of tobacco, three beaver hats (two white, one black), and two silver watches.
Later that year, Mensun Bound, the archeologist, directed a second survey of the Deep Pots site.
He worked from a laptop at the kitchen table of his home, a fifteenth-century manor outside Oxford, while an R.O.V.
probed some three and a half miles below the Atlantic.
At the far end of the site, among the scattered porcelain, there was a small chest—the kind that might have been used for someone’s luggage.
“The box was open,” Bound said.
Inside were some trinkets: two china bowls, beads and buttons, the compressed remains of what might have been leather hats, and two heavily corroded, but recognizably silver, watches.
Bound called Pickford.
It was as if he already knew they were there.
“Everything seemed to confirm his research,” Bound said.
At some point during the surveys of the wreck, a watch was brought up to the search ship and cleaned, revealing elaborate scrollwork, a jewelled interior, and its maker: Edward East, of London.
East was a clockmaker to King Charles I.
The King gave away one of his watches on the morning of his execution, in 1649.
At the time of the Modena’s disappearance, East still had a workshop, on Temple Bar, in the heart of the city.
An R.O.V. took the water-blackened watch—and its stopped time—back to the bottom of the sea.
In the course of Pickford’s career, the business of prospecting for wealth in the world’s oceans has changed dramatically.
When he started out, in the seventies, commercial salvage firms used explosives and steel claws to rip apart wrecks on the seabed, a technique known as “smash and grab.” Most recoveries were of large, nonferrous cargoes sunk during the First and Second World Wars—tin, copper, gold, and silver—and very few were lifted from more than a few hundred metres of water.
Now the most advanced operations, using technology developed for the oil-and-gas industry or subsea mining, deploy unmanned vehicles—with delicate instruments, suction cups, and laser-scanning capabilities—in waters fifteen times as deep.
In 2014, Pickford helped to locate the S.S.
Tilawa, a British merchant ship sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Indian Ocean in 1942.
Two hundred and eighty people died in the attack.
The Tilawa came to rest some four thousand metres below the surface.
R.O.V.s brought up all but twenty-seven of the twenty-three hundred and ninety-one silver bars that she was carrying—a recovery rate of 98.9 per cent.
(The bullion, which had been on its way to the South African mint, has a current value of about forty-five million dollars.)
With enough money and expertise, almost anything can be found.
As the technology has progressed, however, the rules governing shipwrecks have tightened considerably.
During the twentieth century, decades of looting by divers and unlicensed salvage companies stripped some seabeds clean.
“Once, we had man’s entire history as a seafarer, and everything else, literally spread out before us within easy diving depth around the Mediterranean and elsewhere,” Bound told me.
“And now, one by one, they’ve all been just picked out of existence.”
In response, nation-states have toughened laws in order to protect their territorial waters.
(The shores of the United Kingdom alone are thought to hold more than fifty thousand shipwrecks.)
The open oceans are, in theory, regulated as well.
Since 2001, according to the unesco Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, which has been signed by seventy-eight countries, all wrecks more than a century old should be left alone and preserved in situ “as the first option.” Commercial exploitation is banned.
Parallel attempts to crack down on antiquities crimes and an increasing awareness of cultural theft mean that it is also harder to sell recovered booty once it comes to the surface.
The result is that Pickford and his clients operate in contested waters.
On the one hand, they have the skills and, often, the finances to recover spectacular things.
On the other hand, they are ever more likely to be challenged by states and archeologists over their right to do so.
(The salvage of the Tilawa led to a five-year legal dispute and a successful appeal by the South African government in the U.K.’s Supreme Court.)
When I suggested to Jessica Berry, the founder of the Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust, a British nonprofit that monitors unauthorized salvage operations, that it would be difficult for Pickford and some of his collaborators to start their careers today, she replied, “They would all be nicked.”
As a historian, it is possible for Pickford to stay apart from these matters, to some extent.
“The people he’s researching for, they’re the ones that are doing the stuff that’s either right or wrong,” Alex Hildred, the head of research for the Mary Rose Trust, a charity that cares for the remains of Henry VIII’s favorite warship, told me.
Others take a harder line.
“I absolutely respect the quality of the research that Nigel Pickford does,” another archeologist told me.
“I think that some of the people that he works with should not be allowed anywhere near historic wrecks.”
Spending time with Pickford, I couldn’t quite make up my mind.
In almost every way, he was a quintessential gentleman scholar: modest, shy, comfortable with silence.
Then, one day last January, I saw him crossing Sloane Square, in London, in jeans and with a bag slung over his shoulder, walking with a pair of salvage associates, and he suddenly resembled an aging safecracker, holding out for one last job.
Pickford does not disguise where his sympathies lie.
If a shipwreck is found, it is human nature to look inside.
He sees most archeologists as naïve and utopian.
“It’s like they live in this benign world, where everyone is good and, you know, nice to each other.
And no one’s at all acquisitive,” he said.
Searching for sunken treasure has never been like that.
“It’s all thorny questions.
It’s the most ridiculous business,” Pickford said.
“I don’t know why anyone would get involved.”
On a Sunday afternoon in early December, 1930, an Italian salvage vessel, the Artiglio, was stationed at the entrance of Quiberon Bay, off the coast of Brittany.
The Artiglio, whose name means “talon,” was a converted fishing trawler and the flagship of the Società Ricuperi Marittimi (sorima), a Genoese company that pioneered the modern salvage industry.
Old pictures of sorima at work look like stills from a Wes Anderson movie.
Divers were lowered in large white articulated shells, which were made in Germany.
They communicated with the surface by means of a telephone.
The Artiglio carried half a ton of macaroni in its hold, for sustenance, and detonators stuffed in its bunk-bed drawers.
When the crew struck gold, they celebrated by playing ballads on mandolins.
The leader of sorima was Commendatore Giovanni Quaglia, a.k.a. the Quail, who wore a jewelled tiepin in the shape of the bird.
No one had ever worked at such depths before.
That afternoon, the crew of the Artiglio was working on the remains of the Florence H., an American munitions ship that had caught fire and sunk in 1918.
Because of her volatile cargo, the salvage operation had been slow at first, and nothing had gone wrong.
Then, around 2 p.m., Alberto Gianni, sorima’s lead diver, fired six charges that had been laid under the Florence H.
to blow the stern apart.
The sea erupted.
Witnesses saw a crater open and a mushroom cloud rise.
The Artiglio disappeared.
Twelve of her nineteen crew members were killed.
A salvor is a risktaker.
Quaglia hired more divers and bought a new boat, the Artiglio II.
There were still fortunes to be found.
The shores of Europe were littered with wrecks from the First World War.
sorima collected “no cure, no pay” (the equivalent of “no win, no fee”) contracts from governments and insurers, seeking to recoup their losses.
In London, the company was represented by Count Giuseppe Buraggi, who lived in Mayfair.
Sometime in the thirties, Buraggi hired a young Englishman, Thomas Pickford, to work with him.
Nigel doesn’t know much about his father’s early life.
Thomas was born in East London in 1913.
He left school at thirteen and apprenticed, for a time, as a tea-maker.
But, after working with Buraggi, he was recruited by the Royal Navy.
During the Second World War, five salvage firms were appointed to retrieve precious cargoes sunk by the Germans and to keep Britain’s ports accessible.
The south coast was covered by Risdon Beazley Ltd., a firm named for its taciturn founder and based in Southampton.
Risdon Beazley vessels helped to keep the D Day landing beaches clear, and the firm went on to become the largest salvage company in the world.
After the war, Thomas, who was nicknamed the Commander for his time at the Admiralty, became Risdon Beazley’s shipwreck researcher.
Pickford grew up in a quiet, unhappy house near Richmond Park, in southwest London.
His father wore a bowler hat and went off to the City each day.
Sometimes he travelled overseas.
Pickford’s mother, Sylvia, drank and had affairs.
She left when he was a teen-ager.
Pickford wanted to be a writer.
He studied English at Cambridge, where he met Rosamund, who was still in high school.
They married when she turned eighteen.
Pickford trained to become a teacher, and, for a time, the young couple lived with Pickford’s father in London.
“You would never have guessed that there was any connection with shipwrecks if you went in the house,” Rosamund told me.
The rooms were crowded with glass-fronted display cabinets, full of antiques that Sylvia had bought and left behind.
Thomas didn’t talk much.
“He was an extremely private man, I suppose you’d say,” Nigel observed.
Rosamund found Thomas distant, rather than stern, and prone to getting lost in his thoughts—a trait that she has noticed in Pickford, too.
“Abstraction seems to run in that family,” she said.
In the seventies, the postwar salvage boom faded.
Metal prices were volatile.
The easy pickings were gone.
Risdon Beazley was acquired by Smit Tak, a Dutch rival, and the fleet was gradually depleted.
(Beazley died in 1979.)
Thomas was worn out.
When he was asked to conduct some research on wrecks in Asia, he handed off the work to his son.
There was no particular conversation about it.
“I don’t know why,” Pickford recalled.
“He suggested I might like to do it instead, rather than him, slightly out of the blue, and I thought, Well, why not?”
Pickford is the purveyor of a singular sort of information.
In the course of fifty years, his research has led to the discovery of dozens of shipwrecks, containing more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of recovered cargoes.
Clients—specialist salvage companies and their investors—tend to call him, rather than the other way around.
“I never really bother to look for people,” he said.
His work encompasses every ocean and a time span of roughly five centuries.
One day, when we were chatting, Pickford mentioned that he had been hired to investigate a couple of wrecks near the Comoro Islands, off the coast of Mozambique, in East Africa.
“I can’t tell you anything about them,” he said, affably enough.
Pickford works on a retainer or for between five and ten per cent of the proceeds of any treasure that is recovered.
Because of a medical condition, Mallory-Weiss syndrome, which can lead to severe internal bleeding if he vomits, he does not go to sea.
Instead, Pickford is a creature of libraries and maritime archives, which he returns to again and again, a missable figure in a tweed coat with elbow patches, standing aside to let you pass.
In 1994, Pickford published “The Atlas of Shipwrecks and Treasure,” which included a gazetteer of more than fourteen hundred shipwrecks and has become something of a reference work in the field.
“As well as greed, there has to be a love of gambling, a strong tendency to dream, a boundless optimism, a passion for quests, an enjoyment of physical risks, and a perverse desire to attempt that which is inherently difficult,” he wrote, of looking for vanished ships.
Pickford introduced the gazetteer with a quote from “The Tempest”: “O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish’d!” He dedicated the book to his father, Thomas, who was also a shipwreck researcher.
“He’s not an adventurer,” Pickford’s wife, Rosamund, told me.
“He’s a detective.” Other people involved in the shipwreck world—maritime archeologists, divers, treasure hunters—speak of the thrill and addiction of their discoveries.
But for Pickford these pangs of elation tend to be private, if not silent: opening an e-mail, taking a phone call, deciphering a centuries-old cargo manifest in a climate-controlled basement somewhere.
Pickford enjoys the binary outcomes of his work.
The diamonds are in the strong room, or they aren’t.
“You get to know whether you’re right or not,” he said.
“That doesn’t often happen with history.” The moment that Pickford craves is when the two realms collide—the archive and the artifact—and the years in between suddenly melt away.
“I think it’s something fairly embedded in our psyche, actually, this desire,” he said.
“It’s connecting with the past, really. It’s all about time.”
A porcelain expert who studied images from the Deep Pots wreck dated the pieces on the seabed to the last twenty years of the seventeenth century.
Pickford went to his files and tried to narrow down possible candidates for the vessel.
The wreck’s position, in the mid-Atlantic, suggested that he was looking for a ship that had been returning to Europe from Asia via the Caribbean when it sank—a relatively uncommon route.
“It was unusual,” Pickford said.
He thought of the Azie, a Dutch East India Company ship that sank in 1683 and which he had been curious about for years.
He hired a researcher to scour the company’s records, in The Hague, but these revealed that the Azie’s crew was rescued after a storm north of Cape Verde, a thousand miles from the wreck site.
For a time, Pickford considered the Oriflamme, a French trader that disappeared while crossing the Atlantic in 1691, on its way back from Siam.
But an account in the French colonial archives, in Aix-en-Provence, indicated that the Oriflamme could have made it as far as the Bay of Biscay.
Next, Pickford wondered about the Modena—a grand English ship named after Mary of Modena, the wife of King James II—which traded in Asia for the East India Company.
The last credible sighting of the Modena was on October 5, 1694, when passing seamen recognized pieces of her elaborate painted woodwork floating in the ocean after a violent storm.
The Modena had set sail for England from Barbados just over a month before.
I had assumed that Pickford would spend most of his time re-navigating old voyages, ruminating on lee shores and the direction of winds.
But treasure hunting begins and ends with cargo.
“You always start off with ‘What did it have on it?’ ” he told me.
“Did it really have that on it?” In the case of the Deep Pots wreck, the only way to offer a tentative identification would be to find a persuasive match between what was lying on the ocean floor and what was loaded onto the vessel when she sailed.
The Modena weighed somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand tons.
She was the largest ship in the East India Company’s fleet when she was built, in the Blackwall docks of East London, in 1685.
While much of her cargo was recorded in company correspondence, which Pickford could study at the British Library, a lot of it went undocumented, either by accident or as “private trade,” to avoid certain duties.
Colonial trading ships of the period were worlds unto themselves.
They went to sea for years at a time, their decks crammed with an improbable medley of people and things.
When the Modena left England for India, in February, 1692, she carried soldiers, lascars, sixteen company apprentices, and a group of Armenian merchants among her passengers.
Her holds contained lead, iron, a thousand pieces of woollen cloth, eight spare anchors, twenty barrels of tar, two hundred and fifty swords, thirteen chests of silver bars, medicine, and a consignment of unsold coral.
At first glance, the Modena’s likely cargo on her return from Asia didn’t tally with what was found at the Deep Pots site.
The most conspicuous objects on the seabed were porcelain and thousands of rattan canes, intended for use as walking sticks or in furniture-making.
The Modena’s final trading voyage lasted almost three years—and included stops in the Canary Islands, Cape Town, Ceylon, Bombay, and Persia.
But she didn’t visit anywhere known to export porcelain or canes in sizable quantities.
Fortunately for Pickford, however, much of her odyssey was witnessed by Edward Barlow, the chief mate on the Sampson (another ship in the same fleet), who kept a vivid journal.
Working from Barlow’s descriptions and the East India Company records, Pickford spent more than two years assembling the story of the Modena.
“It surprises me sometimes,” he said.
“Why do I enjoy digging around?” Pickford takes copious notes, with half an eye on information that could turn out to be useful on another wreck someday.
He circles back to documents that stay in his mind, and photographs them.
One day, about six months into his research, Pickford came across a letter that caught his attention.
A twenty-one-year-old apprentice sailing on the Modena missed the ship on its departure from the Canary Islands, in April, 1692, and was left behind.
His name was Samuel Causton.
When Causton’s father found out, he sent a letter, overland, to Surat, on the east coast of India, asking for his son’s possessions to be unloaded and held for his arrival on a later ship.
Causton’s baggage was not unusual for a young administrator of the period, a mixture of gifts and personal goods that might be traded.
Pickford wrote them down.
The list included two cases of brandy, a box of tobacco, three beaver hats (two white, one black), and two silver watches.
Later that year, Mensun Bound, the archeologist, directed a second survey of the Deep Pots site.
He worked from a laptop at the kitchen table of his home, a fifteenth-century manor outside Oxford, while an R.O.V.
probed some three and a half miles below the Atlantic.
At the far end of the site, among the scattered porcelain, there was a small chest—the kind that might have been used for someone’s luggage.
“The box was open,” Bound said.
Inside were some trinkets: two china bowls, beads and buttons, the compressed remains of what might have been leather hats, and two heavily corroded, but recognizably silver, watches.
Bound called Pickford.
It was as if he already knew they were there.
“Everything seemed to confirm his research,” Bound said.
At some point during the surveys of the wreck, a watch was brought up to the search ship and cleaned, revealing elaborate scrollwork, a jewelled interior, and its maker: Edward East, of London.
East was a clockmaker to King Charles I.
The King gave away one of his watches on the morning of his execution, in 1649.
At the time of the Modena’s disappearance, East still had a workshop, on Temple Bar, in the heart of the city.
An R.O.V. took the water-blackened watch—and its stopped time—back to the bottom of the sea.
In the course of Pickford’s career, the business of prospecting for wealth in the world’s oceans has changed dramatically.
When he started out, in the seventies, commercial salvage firms used explosives and steel claws to rip apart wrecks on the seabed, a technique known as “smash and grab.” Most recoveries were of large, nonferrous cargoes sunk during the First and Second World Wars—tin, copper, gold, and silver—and very few were lifted from more than a few hundred metres of water.
Now the most advanced operations, using technology developed for the oil-and-gas industry or subsea mining, deploy unmanned vehicles—with delicate instruments, suction cups, and laser-scanning capabilities—in waters fifteen times as deep.
In 2014, Pickford helped to locate the S.S.
Tilawa, a British merchant ship sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Indian Ocean in 1942.
Two hundred and eighty people died in the attack.
The Tilawa came to rest some four thousand metres below the surface.
R.O.V.s brought up all but twenty-seven of the twenty-three hundred and ninety-one silver bars that she was carrying—a recovery rate of 98.9 per cent.
(The bullion, which had been on its way to the South African mint, has a current value of about forty-five million dollars.)
With enough money and expertise, almost anything can be found.
As the technology has progressed, however, the rules governing shipwrecks have tightened considerably.
During the twentieth century, decades of looting by divers and unlicensed salvage companies stripped some seabeds clean.
“Once, we had man’s entire history as a seafarer, and everything else, literally spread out before us within easy diving depth around the Mediterranean and elsewhere,” Bound told me.
“And now, one by one, they’ve all been just picked out of existence.”
In response, nation-states have toughened laws in order to protect their territorial waters.
(The shores of the United Kingdom alone are thought to hold more than fifty thousand shipwrecks.)
The open oceans are, in theory, regulated as well.
Since 2001, according to the unesco Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, which has been signed by seventy-eight countries, all wrecks more than a century old should be left alone and preserved in situ “as the first option.” Commercial exploitation is banned.
Parallel attempts to crack down on antiquities crimes and an increasing awareness of cultural theft mean that it is also harder to sell recovered booty once it comes to the surface.
The result is that Pickford and his clients operate in contested waters.
On the one hand, they have the skills and, often, the finances to recover spectacular things.
On the other hand, they are ever more likely to be challenged by states and archeologists over their right to do so.
(The salvage of the Tilawa led to a five-year legal dispute and a successful appeal by the South African government in the U.K.’s Supreme Court.)
When I suggested to Jessica Berry, the founder of the Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust, a British nonprofit that monitors unauthorized salvage operations, that it would be difficult for Pickford and some of his collaborators to start their careers today, she replied, “They would all be nicked.”
As a historian, it is possible for Pickford to stay apart from these matters, to some extent.
“The people he’s researching for, they’re the ones that are doing the stuff that’s either right or wrong,” Alex Hildred, the head of research for the Mary Rose Trust, a charity that cares for the remains of Henry VIII’s favorite warship, told me.
Others take a harder line.
“I absolutely respect the quality of the research that Nigel Pickford does,” another archeologist told me.
“I think that some of the people that he works with should not be allowed anywhere near historic wrecks.”
Spending time with Pickford, I couldn’t quite make up my mind.
In almost every way, he was a quintessential gentleman scholar: modest, shy, comfortable with silence.
Then, one day last January, I saw him crossing Sloane Square, in London, in jeans and with a bag slung over his shoulder, walking with a pair of salvage associates, and he suddenly resembled an aging safecracker, holding out for one last job.
Pickford does not disguise where his sympathies lie.
If a shipwreck is found, it is human nature to look inside.
He sees most archeologists as naïve and utopian.
“It’s like they live in this benign world, where everyone is good and, you know, nice to each other.
And no one’s at all acquisitive,” he said.
Searching for sunken treasure has never been like that.
“It’s all thorny questions.
It’s the most ridiculous business,” Pickford said.
“I don’t know why anyone would get involved.”
On a Sunday afternoon in early December, 1930, an Italian salvage vessel, the Artiglio, was stationed at the entrance of Quiberon Bay, off the coast of Brittany.
The Artiglio, whose name means “talon,” was a converted fishing trawler and the flagship of the Società Ricuperi Marittimi (sorima), a Genoese company that pioneered the modern salvage industry.
Old pictures of sorima at work look like stills from a Wes Anderson movie.
Divers were lowered in large white articulated shells, which were made in Germany.
They communicated with the surface by means of a telephone.
The Artiglio carried half a ton of macaroni in its hold, for sustenance, and detonators stuffed in its bunk-bed drawers.
When the crew struck gold, they celebrated by playing ballads on mandolins.
The leader of sorima was Commendatore Giovanni Quaglia, a.k.a. the Quail, who wore a jewelled tiepin in the shape of the bird.
No one had ever worked at such depths before.
That afternoon, the crew of the Artiglio was working on the remains of the Florence H., an American munitions ship that had caught fire and sunk in 1918.
Because of her volatile cargo, the salvage operation had been slow at first, and nothing had gone wrong.
Then, around 2 p.m., Alberto Gianni, sorima’s lead diver, fired six charges that had been laid under the Florence H.
to blow the stern apart.
The sea erupted.
Witnesses saw a crater open and a mushroom cloud rise.
The Artiglio disappeared.
Twelve of her nineteen crew members were killed.
A salvor is a risktaker.
Quaglia hired more divers and bought a new boat, the Artiglio II.
There were still fortunes to be found.
The shores of Europe were littered with wrecks from the First World War.
sorima collected “no cure, no pay” (the equivalent of “no win, no fee”) contracts from governments and insurers, seeking to recoup their losses.
In London, the company was represented by Count Giuseppe Buraggi, who lived in Mayfair.
Sometime in the thirties, Buraggi hired a young Englishman, Thomas Pickford, to work with him.
Nigel doesn’t know much about his father’s early life.
Thomas was born in East London in 1913.
He left school at thirteen and apprenticed, for a time, as a tea-maker.
But, after working with Buraggi, he was recruited by the Royal Navy.
During the Second World War, five salvage firms were appointed to retrieve precious cargoes sunk by the Germans and to keep Britain’s ports accessible.
The south coast was covered by Risdon Beazley Ltd., a firm named for its taciturn founder and based in Southampton.
Risdon Beazley vessels helped to keep the D Day landing beaches clear, and the firm went on to become the largest salvage company in the world.
After the war, Thomas, who was nicknamed the Commander for his time at the Admiralty, became Risdon Beazley’s shipwreck researcher.
Pickford grew up in a quiet, unhappy house near Richmond Park, in southwest London.
His father wore a bowler hat and went off to the City each day.
Sometimes he travelled overseas.
Pickford’s mother, Sylvia, drank and had affairs.
She left when he was a teen-ager.
Pickford wanted to be a writer.
He studied English at Cambridge, where he met Rosamund, who was still in high school.
They married when she turned eighteen.
Pickford trained to become a teacher, and, for a time, the young couple lived with Pickford’s father in London.
“You would never have guessed that there was any connection with shipwrecks if you went in the house,” Rosamund told me.
The rooms were crowded with glass-fronted display cabinets, full of antiques that Sylvia had bought and left behind.
Thomas didn’t talk much.
“He was an extremely private man, I suppose you’d say,” Nigel observed.
Rosamund found Thomas distant, rather than stern, and prone to getting lost in his thoughts—a trait that she has noticed in Pickford, too.
“Abstraction seems to run in that family,” she said.
In the seventies, the postwar salvage boom faded.
Metal prices were volatile.
The easy pickings were gone.
Risdon Beazley was acquired by Smit Tak, a Dutch rival, and the fleet was gradually depleted.
(Beazley died in 1979.)
Thomas was worn out.
When he was asked to conduct some research on wrecks in Asia, he handed off the work to his son.
There was no particular conversation about it.
“I don’t know why,” Pickford recalled.
“He suggested I might like to do it instead, rather than him, slightly out of the blue, and I thought, Well, why not?”
Pickford was working as an English teacher and helping out in a couple of youth clubs.
I asked whether Thomas had ever given him any advice.
“No. Just gave me a load of papers,” Pickford replied.
It was his father’s shipwreck archive.
“Lots of typed letters. Lots of handwriting,” Pickford said.
“Actually quite good handwriting.”
We were in his study in Cambridge.
Pickford and his wife had moved into the apartment last year and were still transferring all his files from another property, in Kent.
The top shelf of one cupboard was crammed with brown folders—his father’s papers.
The Risdon Beazley archive has a near-mythical status among treasure hunters and maritime historians alike.
The company’s records were broken up in the late seventies and scattered.
But no one did more research for the firm than the Commander, and many of his documents survive.
Pickford handed me a clutch of his father’s letters from 1954, relating to the sinking of the S.S. Juno in the English Channel, in 1917, and the location of its copper cargo (“bottom of No 2 hold, further quantity at bottom of No 3 hold”), as well as a note from Beazley himself.
In 1993, Pickford helped to find the R.M.S. Douro—a Victorian transatlantic liner that went down carrying twenty-eight thousand gold coins in 1882—because he was intrigued by a note of his father’s: “Douro (ph), 1882, 53,000 pounds, Bay of Biscay.” Thomas died a few years later.
I asked whether Thomas had ever given him any advice.
“No. Just gave me a load of papers,” Pickford replied.
It was his father’s shipwreck archive.
“Lots of typed letters. Lots of handwriting,” Pickford said.
“Actually quite good handwriting.”
We were in his study in Cambridge.
Pickford and his wife had moved into the apartment last year and were still transferring all his files from another property, in Kent.
The top shelf of one cupboard was crammed with brown folders—his father’s papers.
The Risdon Beazley archive has a near-mythical status among treasure hunters and maritime historians alike.
The company’s records were broken up in the late seventies and scattered.
But no one did more research for the firm than the Commander, and many of his documents survive.
Pickford handed me a clutch of his father’s letters from 1954, relating to the sinking of the S.S. Juno in the English Channel, in 1917, and the location of its copper cargo (“bottom of No 2 hold, further quantity at bottom of No 3 hold”), as well as a note from Beazley himself.
In 1993, Pickford helped to find the R.M.S. Douro—a Victorian transatlantic liner that went down carrying twenty-eight thousand gold coins in 1882—because he was intrigued by a note of his father’s: “Douro (ph), 1882, 53,000 pounds, Bay of Biscay.” Thomas died a few years later.
“You seem nice, but between work, sleep, and the eight hours a day mysteriously lost to my phone, I just don’t have time to date.”
Pickford came to know his father, in a way, by reading his files.
“I think I understood him much more,” he told me.
Thomas was both more romantic and more pedantic than his son had imagined.
“I guess I am as well, on some level,” Pickford said.
While his father focussed on twentieth-century wrecks, he also harbored dreams of finding the San José, a legendary Spanish treasure ship that sank off Cartagena in 1708.
(It was discovered, in 2015, by the Colombian Navy. Its location is now a state secret.)
“I think I understood him much more,” he told me.
Thomas was both more romantic and more pedantic than his son had imagined.
“I guess I am as well, on some level,” Pickford said.
While his father focussed on twentieth-century wrecks, he also harbored dreams of finding the San José, a legendary Spanish treasure ship that sank off Cartagena in 1708.
(It was discovered, in 2015, by the Colombian Navy. Its location is now a state secret.)
“He wasn’t as good as me, I have to say, on the old stuff,” Pickford observed.
Taken together, the research of the Pickfords, plus their share of the Risdon Beazley archive, may constitute one of the most valuable repositories of treasure information in the world.
The Deep Pots wreck reminded Pickford of another nameless ship that he identified, a quarter of a century before.
Back then, Captain Mike Hatcher, a British-born treasure hunter, was searching for a Portuguese galleon around the Maluku Islands of eastern Indonesia.
Hatcher began prospecting in the seventies, salvaging brass propellers from Second World War wrecks in a yacht that he sailed alone.
In the eighties, he found two fabulous porcelain cargoes that, between them, sold for more than seventeen million dollars at auction.
But in the spring of 1999 he was in the doldrums.
There was violence in East Timor; he had to give up on the Portuguese galleon.
“It was a pretty rough setup,” he said.
Hatcher had a permit to search in Indonesian waters, so he called Pickford from his motor yacht, the Restless M, and asked him whether he had any other targets to track down.
Taken together, the research of the Pickfords, plus their share of the Risdon Beazley archive, may constitute one of the most valuable repositories of treasure information in the world.
The Deep Pots wreck reminded Pickford of another nameless ship that he identified, a quarter of a century before.
Back then, Captain Mike Hatcher, a British-born treasure hunter, was searching for a Portuguese galleon around the Maluku Islands of eastern Indonesia.
Hatcher began prospecting in the seventies, salvaging brass propellers from Second World War wrecks in a yacht that he sailed alone.
In the eighties, he found two fabulous porcelain cargoes that, between them, sold for more than seventeen million dollars at auction.
But in the spring of 1999 he was in the doldrums.
There was violence in East Timor; he had to give up on the Portuguese galleon.
“It was a pretty rough setup,” he said.
Hatcher had a permit to search in Indonesian waters, so he called Pickford from his motor yacht, the Restless M, and asked him whether he had any other targets to track down.
In England, Pickford had recently been looking at the fifth edition of “Directions for Sailing to and from the East Indies,” published in 1843, by James Horsburgh, a Scottish sailor who became a hydrographer after being shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean.
(The first edition appeared in 1809.)
Horsburgh described the existence of a “large Chinese junk” on a reef in the Gaspar Strait, about two hundred and fifty miles north of Jakarta.
Pickford told Hatcher about it on the phone.
“I said, ‘Why don’t we go and look at this large Chinese junk?’ ”
On May 12th, after about a month of searching, two of Hatcher’s divers found three iron rings—each about a metre in diameter—spaced out evenly on the seafloor.
The rings would have strengthened the masts of a large oceangoing sailing ship.
Then the divers began to find porcelain, more than three hundred and fifty thousand pieces in all, many of them stacked in eerie columns, their wooden crates having rotted away.
Hatcher’s team spent the next five months excavating the site, while Pickford tried to figure out what they had found.
According to Horsburgh’s commentary, some of the junk’s passengers had been rescued by an English ship.
The wreck appeared in the book’s 1827 edition but not in the 1817 printing—giving Pickford a ten-year window to investigate.
(The first edition appeared in 1809.)
Horsburgh described the existence of a “large Chinese junk” on a reef in the Gaspar Strait, about two hundred and fifty miles north of Jakarta.
Pickford told Hatcher about it on the phone.
“I said, ‘Why don’t we go and look at this large Chinese junk?’ ”
On May 12th, after about a month of searching, two of Hatcher’s divers found three iron rings—each about a metre in diameter—spaced out evenly on the seafloor.
The rings would have strengthened the masts of a large oceangoing sailing ship.
Then the divers began to find porcelain, more than three hundred and fifty thousand pieces in all, many of them stacked in eerie columns, their wooden crates having rotted away.
Hatcher’s team spent the next five months excavating the site, while Pickford tried to figure out what they had found.
According to Horsburgh’s commentary, some of the junk’s passengers had been rescued by an English ship.
The wreck appeared in the book’s 1827 edition but not in the 1817 printing—giving Pickford a ten-year window to investigate.
By chance, while reading up on the mast rings in “Chinese Junks,” a multivolume work by Louis Audemard, a French navigator known for his exploration of the Yangtze River, Pickford came across a reference to the loss of a large junk in 1822 and a rescue attempt by a ship named the Pearl.
Audemard had the rescue ship’s name wrong: it was actually called the Indiana.
(The captain was James Pearl.)
But Pickford had the clue he needed.
In Dutch colonial archives in The Hague, he learned that the junk was called the Tek Sing.
It may have been carrying as many as eighteen hundred people—mostly Chinese migrants—when it hit the reef.
Some two hundred survived.
Part of the junk’s ballast had been provided by granite gravestones, brought by the migrants from China for use at the end of their lives.
The Tek Sing is, to date, the largest Chinese wooden sailing vessel ever discovered.
In the fall of 2000, Nagel Auctions, a German auction house, took the best of the porcelain on a five-city tour, with stops in New York and London.
A replica of the Tek Sing went on display at the railway station in Stuttgart, where the auction took place.
The weeklong sale brought in slightly more than ten million dollars.
Both Hatcher and Pickford consider the Tek Sing to be a positive example of their work.
They used their wits and gumption to find an extraordinary shipwreck; they made some money and added to the historical record.
The British Museum holds fifteen objects from the Tek Sing, including a porcelain urinal.
“You go to the British Museum ... and there it is, ‘Salvaged by Captain Hatcher,’ ” Hatcher told me.
“Most museums in the world have got Hatcher collections, or pieces of Hatcher.... Well, that’s pieces from Nigel and Hatcher. And it wouldn’t be there unless we did it.”
Not everyone sees it that way.
In 2000, the Indonesian authorities tried to stop the Tek Sing sale from happening.
(Seven containers of porcelain were intercepted by Australian customs officials, but the rest made it to Germany.)
In Dutch colonial archives in The Hague, he learned that the junk was called the Tek Sing.
It may have been carrying as many as eighteen hundred people—mostly Chinese migrants—when it hit the reef.
Some two hundred survived.
Part of the junk’s ballast had been provided by granite gravestones, brought by the migrants from China for use at the end of their lives.
The Tek Sing is, to date, the largest Chinese wooden sailing vessel ever discovered.
In the fall of 2000, Nagel Auctions, a German auction house, took the best of the porcelain on a five-city tour, with stops in New York and London.
A replica of the Tek Sing went on display at the railway station in Stuttgart, where the auction took place.
The weeklong sale brought in slightly more than ten million dollars.
Both Hatcher and Pickford consider the Tek Sing to be a positive example of their work.
They used their wits and gumption to find an extraordinary shipwreck; they made some money and added to the historical record.
The British Museum holds fifteen objects from the Tek Sing, including a porcelain urinal.
“You go to the British Museum ... and there it is, ‘Salvaged by Captain Hatcher,’ ” Hatcher told me.
“Most museums in the world have got Hatcher collections, or pieces of Hatcher.... Well, that’s pieces from Nigel and Hatcher. And it wouldn’t be there unless we did it.”
Not everyone sees it that way.
In 2000, the Indonesian authorities tried to stop the Tek Sing sale from happening.
(Seven containers of porcelain were intercepted by Australian customs officials, but the rest made it to Germany.)
Ten years later, Hatcher was declared persona non grata in Thailand after he tried to salvage a wreck in its territorial waters.
When we spoke, he did not deny skirting the edges of the law.
“You can’t tell the truth anymore,” Hatcher said.
“You can make a deal with the government, Navy people, and pay them off,” he said.
“They close their eyes to it.”
Hatcher’s exploits in Southeast Asia in the eighties and nineties are now held up by conservationists as case studies of cultural theft and the careless destruction of historical sites.
An archeology professor who has worked with the British government on its handling of wrecks said that what most often gets lost in treasure-hunting expeditions is a fragile archeological record of seafaring: the details of ship construction, ephemeral traces of life and death at sea, which can’t be polished and sold.
“You don’t know what you’ve lost,” the professor said.
There are days when Pickford wonders whether the salvage business that he has known is coming to an end.
One afternoon, in his study, I asked him how many viable shipwreck targets he had in his files.
“Viable is the key word you’ve used there,” Pickford replied.
“There’s all sorts of pressures that we shouldn’t be doing it at all.”
Pickford’s status as a freelance researcher makes him vulnerable to being marginalized by sniffy academics or unscrupulous clients, or both.
We first met in the summer of 2022, in a café at the back of the British Library, where I often work.
A few weeks earlier, the University of East Anglia had announced the discovery of the Gloucester, a three-hundred-and-seventy-year-old royal warship, which had been found, half buried, near a sandbank in the North Sea.
When we spoke, he did not deny skirting the edges of the law.
“You can’t tell the truth anymore,” Hatcher said.
“You can make a deal with the government, Navy people, and pay them off,” he said.
“They close their eyes to it.”
Hatcher’s exploits in Southeast Asia in the eighties and nineties are now held up by conservationists as case studies of cultural theft and the careless destruction of historical sites.
An archeology professor who has worked with the British government on its handling of wrecks said that what most often gets lost in treasure-hunting expeditions is a fragile archeological record of seafaring: the details of ship construction, ephemeral traces of life and death at sea, which can’t be polished and sold.
“You don’t know what you’ve lost,” the professor said.
There are days when Pickford wonders whether the salvage business that he has known is coming to an end.
One afternoon, in his study, I asked him how many viable shipwreck targets he had in his files.
“Viable is the key word you’ve used there,” Pickford replied.
“There’s all sorts of pressures that we shouldn’t be doing it at all.”
Pickford’s status as a freelance researcher makes him vulnerable to being marginalized by sniffy academics or unscrupulous clients, or both.
We first met in the summer of 2022, in a café at the back of the British Library, where I often work.
A few weeks earlier, the University of East Anglia had announced the discovery of the Gloucester, a three-hundred-and-seventy-year-old royal warship, which had been found, half buried, near a sandbank in the North Sea.
This footage, filmed last summer by experienced divers and brothers Julian and Lincoln Barnwell, shows some of the remains of the Gloucester, which sank off the Norfolk coast in 1682 while carrying the future King of England and Scotland James Stuart, then the Duke of York.
While the Duke survived, hundreds of passengers and crew lost their lives.
The ship is split down the keel and the remains of the hull are submerged in sand, but items including an anchor, rope and cannon are visible in the film, along with glass bottles.
Also visible are fishing nets that have been lost over the years, which the team says highlights the ongoing vulnerability of the site.
After running aground on a sandbank on May 6, 1682, no-one knew the Gloucester’s exact whereabouts until it was found in 2007 by the Barnwells and their friend, retired ex-Royal Navy submariner and diver James Little.
The ship’s identity was confirmed in 2012 and its discovery was made public in June 2022.
The story made international headlines.
Claire Jowitt, a history professor at U.E.A. who was researching the find, compared the wreck to the Mary Rose, which was raised from the bottom of the Solent, at fantastic expense, in 1982.
The Gloucester holds a notable place in British history because it was carrying a future king, James II of England, who escaped through the window of his cabin while as many as two hundred sailors, servants, musicians, and courtiers perished.
John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough and an ancestor of Winston’s, drew his sword to protect the prince from the panicking crowd, and Samuel Pepys, the celebrated diarist and Royal Navy administrator, witnessed the sinking.
The tale of the finding of the Gloucester was picturesque, too.
It was said to be the triumph, after years of fruitless searching, of Lincoln and Julian Barnwell, a pair of hobbyist divers who ran a family-owned printing company in Aylsham, a town in north Norfolk.
In a promotional film, made by the university, Lincoln recalled how he decided to search for the Gloucester after spotting the name in the “Shipwreck Index of the British Isles” and details of its supposed remains.
“The word ‘cannon’ just appeared,” Lincoln said.
“I picked the phone up, literally that night, and said to my brother, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat.’ ” Then, after four years, crisscrossing five thousand nautical miles of the North Sea, the Barnwells got lucky.
“The visibility was excellent. Lovely white sand, and right in front me,” Lincoln recounted, raising his hands in wonder: “cannon.”
But there were unexplained aspects to the story.
The Barnwells said that they had found the Gloucester in 2007, some fifteen years earlier, but kept it secret.
The BBC reported that the wreck’s existence had been concealed for “security reasons.”
Hundreds of items—including a cannonball, spectacles, a pewter bowl, and twenty-six unopened bottles of wine—had already been excavated.
But the Royal Navy, which claims sovereign immunity over its lost ships, had not given permission for any of this to happen.
After the news broke, I received an e-mail from a historian, suggesting that I speak to Pickford.
In 2021, Pickford had published “Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester,” a book that had discussed the finding of the wreck, in somewhat cryptic terms, though his account had largely gone unnoticed.
But the Royal Navy, which claims sovereign immunity over its lost ships, had not given permission for any of this to happen.
After the news broke, I received an e-mail from a historian, suggesting that I speak to Pickford.
In 2021, Pickford had published “Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester,” a book that had discussed the finding of the wreck, in somewhat cryptic terms, though his account had largely gone unnoticed.
In the library, Pickford told me that he had signed a contract to locate the Gloucester some twenty years earlier and that his analysis had led to the discovery of the wreck.
“Very lengthy business,” he said, over a cup of tea.
Since the sixties, Pickford explained, divers had been searching for the wreck off the wrong sandbank.
Starting about twenty-five miles off the northeastern coast of Norfolk, there are six named sandbanks that run parallel to one another.
The Leman and Ower Banks are the closest to shore.
Treasure hunters looking for the Gloucester had mostly relied on the account of its captain, John Berry, who wrote, “We run ashore upon the west part of the Lemon [sic] ....
Whilst our rudder held, we bore away West,” of the ship’s grounding, early in the morning of May 6, 1682.
“Very lengthy business,” he said, over a cup of tea.
Since the sixties, Pickford explained, divers had been searching for the wreck off the wrong sandbank.
Starting about twenty-five miles off the northeastern coast of Norfolk, there are six named sandbanks that run parallel to one another.
The Leman and Ower Banks are the closest to shore.
Treasure hunters looking for the Gloucester had mostly relied on the account of its captain, John Berry, who wrote, “We run ashore upon the west part of the Lemon [sic] ....
Whilst our rudder held, we bore away West,” of the ship’s grounding, early in the morning of May 6, 1682.
Pickford started looking at the case in the eighties.
He noticed in contemporaneous accounts that many seventeenth-century mariners did not distinguish accurately between the sandbanks, if they distinguished between them at all.
He consulted “The English Pilot,” a set of charts published by John Seller, the king’s hydrographer, in the sixteen-seventies, and found them hopelessly muddled.
Moreover, the logbooks of eyewitnesses in the royal fleet suggested that the Gloucester hit the Ower, rather than the Leman.
After considering the tide height, the draft of the Gloucester, and the generally acknowledged fact that the ship “beat along the sand” before sinking, Pickford sketched a twenty-square-mile box around the Gloucester’s likely resting place.
The target area was “very tiny” in the context of shipwreck research, he said.
In 2003, Pickford entered into an agreement with John Rose, a rakish businessman and treasure hunter from Great Yarmouth who wanted to find the Gloucester.
Pickford introduced Rose to an acquaintance who had carried out a magnetometer survey of Pickford’s search area—to detect submerged metal—a few years earlier.
The survey had indicated the presence of a wreck.
“Bob’s your uncle, for want of a better word,” Rose quipped, when we spoke.
“Not that I have got an uncle.”
In the summer of 2005, according to Pickford, the Barnwells got involved.
They were younger, fitter divers, with access to a fast boat that could get them out to the Ower Bank in an hour or two.
Rose shared Pickford’s search box and the magnetometer survey with them.
“I saw something about how they had spent years going up and down looking for it,” Rose said, of the Barnwells’ supposed quest.
“It’s ridiculous.”
He noticed in contemporaneous accounts that many seventeenth-century mariners did not distinguish accurately between the sandbanks, if they distinguished between them at all.
He consulted “The English Pilot,” a set of charts published by John Seller, the king’s hydrographer, in the sixteen-seventies, and found them hopelessly muddled.
Moreover, the logbooks of eyewitnesses in the royal fleet suggested that the Gloucester hit the Ower, rather than the Leman.
After considering the tide height, the draft of the Gloucester, and the generally acknowledged fact that the ship “beat along the sand” before sinking, Pickford sketched a twenty-square-mile box around the Gloucester’s likely resting place.
The target area was “very tiny” in the context of shipwreck research, he said.
In 2003, Pickford entered into an agreement with John Rose, a rakish businessman and treasure hunter from Great Yarmouth who wanted to find the Gloucester.
Pickford introduced Rose to an acquaintance who had carried out a magnetometer survey of Pickford’s search area—to detect submerged metal—a few years earlier.
The survey had indicated the presence of a wreck.
“Bob’s your uncle, for want of a better word,” Rose quipped, when we spoke.
“Not that I have got an uncle.”
In the summer of 2005, according to Pickford, the Barnwells got involved.
They were younger, fitter divers, with access to a fast boat that could get them out to the Ower Bank in an hour or two.
Rose shared Pickford’s search box and the magnetometer survey with them.
“I saw something about how they had spent years going up and down looking for it,” Rose said, of the Barnwells’ supposed quest.
“It’s ridiculous.”
In 2007, when the wreck was found, the group was ecstatic.
Not long afterward, in the manner of all good treasure-hunting stories, the gang fell apart.
Rose ran into money trouble.
The Barnwells took charge.
Pickford told me that he parted company with the Barnwells after he was asked to sign an N.D.A., which would have stopped him from publishing his book, and when he suspected that they were making plans behind his back.
“They want fame,” he said.
“They’ve got that. They want control. And I suspect they want payback as well.”
Shipwrecks go weird.
They fester.
They do strange things to people’s minds.
Pickford also feared that his archival work was being superseded.
In 2021, Jowitt, at U.E.A., was awarded a £324,028 academic grant to research the history of the Gloucester—work that Pickford thought he had already done in his book.
On June 10, 2022, the same day that the find was announced to the world, Jowitt published an article in The English Historical Review about the sinking, in which she accused Pickford of making transcription errors and coming to “spurious conclusions about what happened and why.”
Not long afterward, in the manner of all good treasure-hunting stories, the gang fell apart.
Rose ran into money trouble.
The Barnwells took charge.
Pickford told me that he parted company with the Barnwells after he was asked to sign an N.D.A., which would have stopped him from publishing his book, and when he suspected that they were making plans behind his back.
“They want fame,” he said.
“They’ve got that. They want control. And I suspect they want payback as well.”
Shipwrecks go weird.
They fester.
They do strange things to people’s minds.
Pickford also feared that his archival work was being superseded.
In 2021, Jowitt, at U.E.A., was awarded a £324,028 academic grant to research the history of the Gloucester—work that Pickford thought he had already done in his book.
On June 10, 2022, the same day that the find was announced to the world, Jowitt published an article in The English Historical Review about the sinking, in which she accused Pickford of making transcription errors and coming to “spurious conclusions about what happened and why.”
Neither Jowitt nor U.E.A. has ever acknowledged Pickford’s contribution to the ship’s discovery.
“I feel I’ve been completely deleted from the historical record,” Pickford said.
People who admire Pickford’s work think that he should have been a professor of maritime history.
“That was his proper calling,” Bound said.
Others blame him for working as a gun for hire.
“His background of dealing with some very, very shady people ... has meant he’s never been really seen as a serious individual,” the professor who has advised the U.K. government said.
“That’s not to say his research is bad. I think he produces the goods.”
The search for the Gloucester is a case in point.
It was a treasure quest from the start.
According to the accounts of Augurship 320, the commercial entity set up to salvage the wreck, the company borrowed hundreds of thousands of pounds from investors, in the hope of selling off the Gloucester’s wine, treasure, and other antiquities.
A document shared by Julian Barnwell estimated that an auction of the Gloucester treasure could raise twenty million pounds.
(Pickford’s cut was put at just over five hundred thousand.)
A separate presentation, circulated by Rose and offering a “low risk, high reward and fun” business opportunity, stated, optimistically, that the crown jewels might have been on board.
Treasure hunting is rife with dubious schemes that don’t go anywhere and, ultimately, ruin wreck sites.
Seventeen years after the Gloucester was found, the identity of the wreck has still not been conclusively verified by archeologists, and the Receiver of Wreck, the official body that adjudicates salvage cases in the U.K., has yet to make a decision about what to do with the objects recovered by the Barnwells.
“In the meantime, H.M.S. Gloucester and her artifacts should remain undisturbed,” a Royal Navy spokesperson told me.
The project appears stuck.
The Barnwells, the Gloucester 1682 Trust—which is raising money for the preservation of the wreck—and Jowitt, at U.E.A., all declined to comment on Pickford’s version of events.
“It’s a mess,” the archeology professor told me.
“It’s an absolute mess.”
The silver watches played on Pickford’s mind.
At the very least, they suggested that the Deep Pots wreck could be an English ship.
But the coincidence with the details of Samuel Causton’s baggage was too striking to ignore.
“The watches were the critical point, where it just seemed, Oh, it’s got to be,” Pickford said.
And yet what he had actually found in the archives were instructions to take Causton’s possessions off the Modena in India—not to send them back home.
“You waver a bit,” Pickford said.
“Other days, you think, No, it’s not one hundred per cent.”
“I feel I’ve been completely deleted from the historical record,” Pickford said.
People who admire Pickford’s work think that he should have been a professor of maritime history.
“That was his proper calling,” Bound said.
Others blame him for working as a gun for hire.
“His background of dealing with some very, very shady people ... has meant he’s never been really seen as a serious individual,” the professor who has advised the U.K. government said.
“That’s not to say his research is bad. I think he produces the goods.”
The search for the Gloucester is a case in point.
It was a treasure quest from the start.
According to the accounts of Augurship 320, the commercial entity set up to salvage the wreck, the company borrowed hundreds of thousands of pounds from investors, in the hope of selling off the Gloucester’s wine, treasure, and other antiquities.
A document shared by Julian Barnwell estimated that an auction of the Gloucester treasure could raise twenty million pounds.
(Pickford’s cut was put at just over five hundred thousand.)
A separate presentation, circulated by Rose and offering a “low risk, high reward and fun” business opportunity, stated, optimistically, that the crown jewels might have been on board.
Treasure hunting is rife with dubious schemes that don’t go anywhere and, ultimately, ruin wreck sites.
Seventeen years after the Gloucester was found, the identity of the wreck has still not been conclusively verified by archeologists, and the Receiver of Wreck, the official body that adjudicates salvage cases in the U.K., has yet to make a decision about what to do with the objects recovered by the Barnwells.
“In the meantime, H.M.S. Gloucester and her artifacts should remain undisturbed,” a Royal Navy spokesperson told me.
The project appears stuck.
The Barnwells, the Gloucester 1682 Trust—which is raising money for the preservation of the wreck—and Jowitt, at U.E.A., all declined to comment on Pickford’s version of events.
“It’s a mess,” the archeology professor told me.
“It’s an absolute mess.”
The silver watches played on Pickford’s mind.
At the very least, they suggested that the Deep Pots wreck could be an English ship.
But the coincidence with the details of Samuel Causton’s baggage was too striking to ignore.
“The watches were the critical point, where it just seemed, Oh, it’s got to be,” Pickford said.
And yet what he had actually found in the archives were instructions to take Causton’s possessions off the Modena in India—not to send them back home.
“You waver a bit,” Pickford said.
“Other days, you think, No, it’s not one hundred per cent.”
There were other problems to solve, too, not least how the bulk of the Deep Pots cargo—the porcelain and the canes on the seafloor—could have been carried by the Modena.
Pickford began to pay more attention to an incident that occurred on the Modena’s outward voyage, in the summer of 1692.
The Modena reached Cape Town in July, a little over a month after another English ship, the Orange, had foundered on rocks nearby, in Table Bay.
The Orange had been on its way back to England from Madras.
Three of her crew had drowned, but much of her cargo had been saved.
Divers were sent down for the rest.
“We made such shifts that we took up out of the bottom of her ten bales of goods,” Barlow recorded in his journal.
It was an early salvage operation.
Most of the recovered merchandise was transferred to the Modena.
Pickford had known about the Orange for years.
But he had been unaware of the fate of her cargo.
About a year into his Deep Pots research, the rest of the puzzle seemed to fall into place.
To his delight, Pickford found a letter ordering Causton’s possessions—the hats, the watches, etc.—to be put back on the Modena, after all.
Poor Causton had died, and his family asked for his goods to be sent home.
“If you wanted a eureka moment, it was those watches going back on the ship,” Pickford told me.
He also learned that the ill-fated Orange had been carrying separate consignments of porcelain and canes.
The Orange had been loaded in an unusual way.
She had arrived in Madras, a booming English colony, with her holds partially empty after an unsuccessful trading mission.
Her chief cargo was rattan canes, from the island of Sumatra.
The governor of the settlement at the time was Elihu Yale, one of the East India Company’s richest and most influential officials.
Yale was born in Boston but left New England when he was three and spent his childhood in London.
He had been working out of Madras for twenty years.
A prominent diamond dealer, slave trader, and alleged poisoner of troublesome opponents, he knew an opportunity when he saw one.
Yale ordered the Orange’s empty holds to be filled with private cargoes from the colony’s merchants—including “China goods”: porcelain, lacquer, and textiles—a rare relaxation of the East India Company’s rules.
According to Pickford’s calculations, the Orange had space for up to a hundred tons of China goods.
Yale himself stood to profit.
In the previous two years, he and his brother, Thomas, had run a pair of trading missions to Canton and were looking for a way to get their goods to Europe.
Yale consigned other valuables, too.
Pickford uncovered a letter to Yale from a passenger who survived the sinking of the Orange, describing “thirty-seven bulses”—purses—of diamonds that had been saved from the wreck.
The Orange left Madras in February, 1692.
Later that year, Yale was removed from his role, on charges of corruption.
He returned to England in 1699.
He spent the rest of his life in increasing seclusion, dividing his time between houses in London and Wales, ensconced in his wealth and collections.
Pickford began to pay more attention to an incident that occurred on the Modena’s outward voyage, in the summer of 1692.
The Modena reached Cape Town in July, a little over a month after another English ship, the Orange, had foundered on rocks nearby, in Table Bay.
The Orange had been on its way back to England from Madras.
Three of her crew had drowned, but much of her cargo had been saved.
Divers were sent down for the rest.
“We made such shifts that we took up out of the bottom of her ten bales of goods,” Barlow recorded in his journal.
It was an early salvage operation.
Most of the recovered merchandise was transferred to the Modena.
Pickford had known about the Orange for years.
But he had been unaware of the fate of her cargo.
About a year into his Deep Pots research, the rest of the puzzle seemed to fall into place.
To his delight, Pickford found a letter ordering Causton’s possessions—the hats, the watches, etc.—to be put back on the Modena, after all.
Poor Causton had died, and his family asked for his goods to be sent home.
“If you wanted a eureka moment, it was those watches going back on the ship,” Pickford told me.
He also learned that the ill-fated Orange had been carrying separate consignments of porcelain and canes.
The Orange had been loaded in an unusual way.
She had arrived in Madras, a booming English colony, with her holds partially empty after an unsuccessful trading mission.
Her chief cargo was rattan canes, from the island of Sumatra.
The governor of the settlement at the time was Elihu Yale, one of the East India Company’s richest and most influential officials.
Yale was born in Boston but left New England when he was three and spent his childhood in London.
He had been working out of Madras for twenty years.
A prominent diamond dealer, slave trader, and alleged poisoner of troublesome opponents, he knew an opportunity when he saw one.
Yale ordered the Orange’s empty holds to be filled with private cargoes from the colony’s merchants—including “China goods”: porcelain, lacquer, and textiles—a rare relaxation of the East India Company’s rules.
According to Pickford’s calculations, the Orange had space for up to a hundred tons of China goods.
Yale himself stood to profit.
In the previous two years, he and his brother, Thomas, had run a pair of trading missions to Canton and were looking for a way to get their goods to Europe.
Yale consigned other valuables, too.
Pickford uncovered a letter to Yale from a passenger who survived the sinking of the Orange, describing “thirty-seven bulses”—purses—of diamonds that had been saved from the wreck.
The Orange left Madras in February, 1692.
Later that year, Yale was removed from his role, on charges of corruption.
He returned to England in 1699.
He spent the rest of his life in increasing seclusion, dividing his time between houses in London and Wales, ensconced in his wealth and collections.
“To my wicked wife ...” he wrote, leaving a memorable blank space in his will.
In 1718, three years before his death, he was asked to make a donation to the Collegiate School of Connecticut, in New Haven, which was training young men to work for the Church and the state.
He sent nine bales of goods, which were sold for five hundred and sixty-two pounds, along with four hundred and seventeen books and a portrait of King George I.
The school became Yale.
Pickford wrote up his research on the Deep Pots wreck.
In June, he sent me a manuscript called “Lost Worlds.”
In 1718, three years before his death, he was asked to make a donation to the Collegiate School of Connecticut, in New Haven, which was training young men to work for the Church and the state.
He sent nine bales of goods, which were sold for five hundred and sixty-two pounds, along with four hundred and seventeen books and a portrait of King George I.
The school became Yale.
Pickford wrote up his research on the Deep Pots wreck.
In June, he sent me a manuscript called “Lost Worlds.”
It was three hundred and twenty-six pages of closely typed history, a forensic accounting of broken bowsprits, sudden hurricanes, scurvy outbreaks, and Yale’s missing diamonds.
“There’s still a big question mark about those diamonds and where the hell they are,” Pickford said.
He was ninety-per-cent sure that the wreck was the Modena.
“That final nailing would only happen with some sort of excavation,” he said.
In the two years in which we had talked, there were meetings among investors about a possible salvage attempt in the Atlantic.
But nothing ever materialized.
The wreck was too deep, the rewards too uncertain, the ethics unclear.
The lacquer, the porcelain, the swords, the silver watches are all still there, strewn on the ocean floor.
The diamonds, too?
“There’s still a big question mark about those diamonds and where the hell they are,” Pickford said.
He was ninety-per-cent sure that the wreck was the Modena.
“That final nailing would only happen with some sort of excavation,” he said.
In the two years in which we had talked, there were meetings among investors about a possible salvage attempt in the Atlantic.
But nothing ever materialized.
The wreck was too deep, the rewards too uncertain, the ethics unclear.
The lacquer, the porcelain, the swords, the silver watches are all still there, strewn on the ocean floor.
The diamonds, too?
I asked Pickford once whether he would be content if the wreck were left alone.
Wasn’t the satisfaction of his work, ultimately, to solve the puzzle, to uncover the secrets of the perish’d souls?
Wasn’t the satisfaction of his work, ultimately, to solve the puzzle, to uncover the secrets of the perish’d souls?
“Not entirely, no,” Pickford said, correcting me gently.
“I don’t think for my work that is entirely the point.”
“I don’t think for my work that is entirely the point.”
I was forgetting the treasure, which he never does.
Links :
- RMG : The sinking of HMS Gloucester
- National Geographic : The Endurance disappeared over a century ago. Here's how explorers found the famous ship.
- The Guardian : ‘I had found gold before, but not like this’: four of the most splendid treasures salvaged from shipwrecks
- FT : The maritime archaeologist who discovered Shackleton’s Endurance / Maritime archaeologist Mensun Bound delves into 30 years of underwater adventures
- New Staeman : Mensun Bound Q&A: “We’re flying blind, all fuses lit”
- Amazon : Treasures of the Deep: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Captain Mike Hatcher
- GeoGarage blog : A $10 billion battle is brewing over ownership rights to a ... / Spanish galleon may contain biggest treasure haul ever found ... / Hedge fund tycoon Anthony Clake doubles as world's top ...
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