Whoever finds it could get their hands on more treasure than Long John Silver (Picture: Todd Stevens/SWNS)
The ‘El Dorado of the Seas’ has been missing for 400 years and may finally reveal its secrets.
The mysterious Merchant Royal’s shipwreck is somewhere off the coast of Cornwall, but has left people baffled because to this day it has still never been found.
This is despite it carrying up to £4 billion of gold and other precious metals.
So whoever finds it could get their hands on more treasure than Long John Silver, it is just going to be a little bit difficult for them to find it.
Previous attempts to find the 400-year-old ship have come back with nothing, but now a UK company is convinced they can do it.
Former commercial fisherman and diver Nigel Hodge heads a team of 11 at Multibeam Services, a company specialising in locating lost wrecks.
He plans to spend all of the rest of this year looking for the wreck, covering a 200 square mile area of the English Channel.
It’s ‘not a gold rush’ though, Nigel told Metro.co.uk, even though he believes the wreck could be worth billions.
The wreck lies somewhere off the coast of Cornwall (Picture: Metro.co.uk)
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Due to strict laws on who owns any treasure discovered, ‘the days of people finding a big pile of gold and becoming rich overnight are well and truly gone.’
He says the lure for him lies in finding answers, with any precious cargo set to become heritage artifacts.
New technology could help solve the mystery, as the company has unmanned underwater vessels worth 3.5 million each capable of going 6,000 metres – deeper than the deepest part of the search area – as well as new sonar tech.
Nigel says that the search will be difficult, though, with the stretch of water where it sank notoriously dangerous.
‘There’s thousands of shipwrecks down there and the Merchant Royal is just one of them,’ he said. ‘So we’ve got to literally pick through a lot of wrecks as we’re doing them and then identify them.
‘It’s not straightforward. If it was straightforward, it would have been done.’
Based in Redruth and employing several other ex-fishermen, he believes his company is well placed to succeed where others failed due to their local knowledge of the waters as well as the advancements in tech.
The wreck went down on its way to Dartmouth on September 23, 1641, after stopping off in the Spanish port of Cadiz where it was repaired and took on more cargo on its way back from Mexico and the Caribbean.
The anchor brought up in 2019 is thought to belong to lost wreck the Merchant Royal (Picture: Brackan Pearce/SWNS)
It was carrying payment for 30,000 soldiers based at Flanders, as well as treasures from the ‘New World’ including 400 bars of Mexican silver and 500,000 pieces of eight.
A report about the wreck from 1641 …read more
Source:: Metro
