Yahoo News What we know about hunt for 400-year-old ship with £4bn of gold near Cornwall
The search for the Merchant Royal ship, which sank off the coast of Cornwall in 1641 and was filled with treasure, will resume in April.
Marine experts are about to renew the hunt for a 400-year-old shipwreck off the UK coast that could be filled with £4bn worth of treasure.
Historians have long believed that the Merchant Royal, a 17th-century English ship, was laden down with gold when it sank off Land's End, Cornwall, in rough weather in 1641.
A number of attempts have been made to locate the shipwreck, known as The El Dorado of the Seas, but so far it has remained undiscovered along with its bounty.
But a Cornish marine exploration team with experience locating uncharted historical wreck sites hope that is all about to change when it starts a new search next month.
What we know
The Merchant Royal Galleon, a 157-foot-long ship weighing 700 tonnes, was built in Deptford Dockyard in London and launched in 1627.
It spent time trading with Spanish colonies in the West Indies between 1637 and 1640, and called into Cadiz, Spain, on its way home along with its sister ship, the Dover Merchant.
After a Spanish ship in Cadiz caught fire before it was due to carry treasure to pay Spain's soldiers in Flanders, the Merchant Royal's Captain John Limbrey volunteered to carry the loot to Antwerp on its way home.
However, the Merchant Royal started leaking after leaving Cadiz and eventually sank off the coast of Cornwall, somewhere between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly, on 23 September 1641 - 18 men drowned and Captain Limbrey and 40 of his crew were picked up by the Dover Merchant.
The treasure, said to be made up of at least 100,000 pounds of gold, 400 bars of Mexican silver and almost 500,000 pieces of eight, went down with the ship.
It was estimated to make up one-third of England's public funds, and King Charles I spoke of the event as the “greatest (loss) that was ever sustained in one ship”.
The US-based Odyssey Marine Exploration company has tried for several years to find the wreck without success, beginning in 2007 and again in 2009, when the effort was recorded for the Discovery Channel TV show Treasure Quest.
Todd Stevens, a treasure hunter on the Isle of Scilly, has also searched for the wreck to no avail.
In 2019, fishermen on The Spirited Lady boat hauled up a large anchor in their nets off the Cornwall coast, sparking speculation it belongs to the Merchant Royal.
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Cornish marine recovery experts Multibeam Services will work with local fishermen in the latest mission to find the ship, which could last the rest of the year and will use unmanned underwater vessels and the latest sonar technology to cover a 200 square-mile area of the English Channel.
The search will begin in April and will be filmed for a TV series presented by SAS: Who Dares Wins host Jason Fox.
The team will use two 10ft by 3ft autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which can travel up to 6,000m and use sonar tech to scan the sea bed.
What we don't know
The big mystery, of course, remains the shipwreck's location.
It is understood the Merchant Royal may have sank as much as 35 nautical miles off the coast of Cornwall, leaving a huge potential search area.
But Multibeam managing director Nigel Hodge is confident it will be located.
“We will definitely find it," he said. "We’ve found everything we’ve ever looked for and we’ve been in the business looking for 35 years.
“We are a team of marine exploration experts trained from working at sea as ex-commercial Cornish fishermen, so we have a knowledge of the local area.
“We’re committed to finally bringing this story to the surface."
The other big unanswered question is how much treasure is buried with the ship.
Various estimates of the treasure's value have been put forward over the years, ranging from £1bn upwards, but Multibeam believe the value to be as much as £4bn.
It is also unclear if the anchor discovered by fishermen in 2019 is that of the Merchant Royal, with Stevens claiming the anchor is Dutch in origin and dates from much later than the ship's ill-fated voyage.
