Gold coins, diamonds, old champagne: Who gets to keep shipwreck treasure?

It was just after 7pm and the ship’s captain and a handful of passengers had finished dinner in the saloon when a shout came from above: “Land ahead, all hands on deck!”

The Netherby, a three-masted sailing vessel on a ponderous journey from London to Brisbane in 1866, was enduring her fourth month at sea. The weather had at times been dire: stiflingly hot at the equator, then gale-force winds and waves for a fortnight had kept everyone below, where the 400-plus emigrants shared their miserably cramped quarters with pigs, chickens and even a monkey bought from a passing Dutch vessel.

Thanks to weather damage and the suffering endured by all, the captain made what would prove a fateful decision. Instead of going the long, safe-ish way around the southern tip of Tasmania, they would thread the needle of Bass Strait. This night, there was just a gentle breeze, as hoped. They were making good time on their shortcut. But as they approached King Island, midway between Tasmania and the Australian mainland, thick fog descended. Only at the last minute did a sailor spot waves breaking onto … something.

It was about 7.30pm when the Netherby struck the reef. There was no crash, more a scrape and a shudder – but one that would quickly prove fatal to the ship. The passengers rushed on deck. All able-bodied men were sent back below to work the pumps. Worst of all, the ship’s surgeon later recalled, “being very foggy and dark at the time, we could not make out how far we were from land.” In those circumstances and in those times, sailors, many of whom could not even swim, considered such an event pretty much the end of the line.

Yet, the plight of the Netherby was not uncommon. Australia has some 8000 documented shipwreck sites, many from the Netherby’s era when navigation aids were rudimentary, charts sketchy and ships more at the mercy of the elements than today’s motorised vessels. Some of these wrecks are treasure troves for marine archaeologists; some harbour actual treasure. New ones continue to be discovered, such as a wreck just unearthed south of Stockholm that dates back to the 15th century.

Ancient or modern, grand or tiny, all have stories to tell. What can shipwrecks reveal about the past? How has technology made them easier to find? What happened to the 450 souls aboard the stricken Netherby?

Is it true we’re in an era of ‘peak shipwreck’?

Not that long ago, the quest to find and salvage the most famous wreck of all, the Titanic, seemed an impossible dream. First, you had to build a submersible vessel that could withstand the water pressure four kilometres beneath the surface (roughly the equivalent of more than 4000 tonnes applied on a square metre). Then you had to find the wreck, a task complicated by inaccurate records of its final SOS radio transmissions as it went down late one night in April 1912 in the North Atlantic, with more than 1500 lives lost. But that didn’t stop people coming up with cockamamie schemes such as somehow filling the ship with millions of ping-pong balls to refloat it (really!).

Over two hours, they descended to the ocean bed … where they peered at the ocean liner’s eerily preserved remains through a 35-centimetre porthole.

In 1960, the game changed. A research craft known as a bathyscaphe was piloted by Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh on a journey to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, the lowest point of any ocean at nearly 11 kilometres. The race was on. It took further advances in sonar and video technology and another 25 years before explorers Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel chanced on the Titanic’s final resting place (600 kilometres south-east of Newfoundland) during a US Navy search for two lost nuclear submarines. Over two hours, they descended to the ocean bed in their “deep submergence vehicle” called Alvin, where they peered at the ocean liner’s eerily preserved remains through a 35-centimetre porthole.

Today, the Titanic has been scoured for treasures and fought over in courts. It’s also a bucket-list destination for wealthy deep-sea tourists, even if some will have had second thoughts after the tragic implosion of the sightseeing submersible Titan in 2023.

Meanwhile, new generations of underwater craft and archeological methods have opened the way to finding and preserving deep-sea artefacts, from the cargos of Bronze Age merchant vessels to the flagships raised wholesale from the depths, now ghostly, world-famous museum exhibits: the Swedish galleon Vasa, which sank 18 minutes into its maiden voyage in Stockholm harbour in 1628; England’s Mary Rose, an oak carrack built for King Henry VIII and sunk after a skirmish with the French near Portsmouth in 1545; the Batavia, dashed on a reef off Western Australia in 1629. The New York Times has called this a “golden age” for shipwreck discovery.

Among those who caught the shipwreck bug was Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, who spent millions in a quest to pinpoint the whereabouts of vanished wrecks from World War II before he died in 2018. His efforts unearthed dozens of lost vessels, including the formidable Japanese battleship Musashi, bombed and torpedoed in 1944 with 2399 sailors aboard; the US aircraft carrier Lexington, scuttled off Australia’s coast in the Coral Sea in 1942; and the USS Indianapolis, the cruiser infamous for leaving hundreds of sailors in shark-infested waters after falling prey to a Japanese submarine in 1945.

To date, the deepest wreck discovered is that of the “Sammy B”, the US destroyer Samuel B. Roberts, which plunged to 7000 metres in the Philippines in October 1944. It was found in 2022 by a team that included extreme expedition specialist Rob McCallum, a founding partner of the company EYOS Expeditions. In 2019, McCallum, an Australian-born New Zealander now based in the US, took the adventurer Victor Vescovo and his submersible, the Limiting Factor, on trips to the deepest points in each of the five oceans. Their eventual success in the “Five Deeps” not only gave Vescovo a unique record but showed that today, says McCallum, “There’s no shipwreck that can’t be reached.” (They also popped in to see the Titanic along the way.)

How do you find a shipwreck?

Searching for wrecks, particularly the deeper ones, is billionaire- or state-level expensive. You need ships with several kinds of sonar that shoot sound waves to or across the ocean floor to find shapes that might turn out to be man-made. You need submarines or autonomous submersibles. And you need human expertise. To narrow a search, Rob McCallum’s team deploys Bayesian theory, a statistical model named after 18th-century statistician Thomas Bayes, which can determine the probability of an event occurring.

Broadly, says McCallum, “You collect every little bit of evidence that you can, and then you give it a probability weighting, and then when you have enough pieces of evidence, and you lay it all out on the board, you can actually start to see where the probability starts to ramp up, and that’s where you start your search.” (Incidentally, the “Bayesian” was the name of the super yacht that sank off Sicily last year, taking the lives of its owner, technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch, his daughter and five others.)

In Australia, CSIRO’s ocean research vessel, the RV Investigator, part of the CSIRO Marine National Facility, has had some success recently seeking out long-lost sites, often as “piggyback” projects when surveying fisheries or mapping the seafloor. The Investigator has three advanced sonar mapping systems, called multibeam echo sounders, for mapping shallow inshore seabeds and all the way to full ocean depths, as well as cameras that can be dropped over the side for a closer look, up to six kilometres down.

During the search for MH370, two 19th-century sailing ships carrying coal were found off the coast of Western Australia.

Another bit of kit, a marine magnetometer, detects ferrous metals like iron, says Philippe Vandenbossche, a senior marine geophysical and hydrographic surveyor with the Investigator. “Most shipwrecks contain ferrous materials such as the hull, anchor or chain. This is a tool we use regularly on our voyages.”

In 2023, the Investigator helped to identify the wreck of the steamship SS Nemesis, lost in 1904 off NSW. In 2024, it confirmed the location of the coastal freighter MV Noongah, which sank with its cargo of steel in 1969 on its way from Newcastle to Townsville. Identifying the Blythe Star, which was lost off Tasmania in 1973, was a piece of detective work with thrilling results, says Vandenbossche.“It was one of our final drop camera shots of the bow section that provided the definitive proof – a faint but discernible ‘STAR’ visible on the hull.”

Many wrecks turn up by accident. During the search for missing plane MH370 in 2015, two 19th-century sailing ships carrying coal were found 2300 kilometres off the coast of Western Australia, significant finds for archaeologists studying the historic Roaring 40s trade route, those prevailing winds that propelled ships across the Indian Ocean. Or wrecks are stumbled on by fishermen – “it’s not uncommon,” says Matt Kimber of CSIRO’s Marine National Facility, “where they’ve had snags on their nets or maybe even little pings off their fish finders, which are less sophisticated sonar systems.”

The oldest wreck in the Asia-Pacific region, the Godawaya, dating to possibly the second century BC, was discovered by two Sri Lankan conch divers in 2003 near a once-major harbour on the maritime silk road. Later, from the late 15th to 17th centuries, trading routes for shipping goods – spices, porcelain, silk – from Asia to Europe were fought over by the Portuguese, Dutch and British. Traders were routinely wrecked off what’s now called Australia on their way to Indonesia from the 1600s onwards because, lacking any means of determining longitude, they had to estimate when to make their turn north, and some guessed wrong. The earliest such shipwreck on record is that of the English East India Company’s ship Trial, which hit a reef off northern WA in 1622, with more than 100 men drowned.

The most infamous wreck in Australia is that of the Batavia, a Dutch East India Company (VOC) vessel that came to grief in 1629 on a tiny group of islands, the Houtman Abrolhos, off WA, with some 330 people aboard. While some drowned or died of thirst while marooned, others were murdered after the captain had set off for help, leaving in charge Jeronimus Cornelisz, a merchant with the VOC, who famously led a mutiny that lasted several months (and who was eventually executed for his crimes).

‘How did they die? How were they treated after death? Were they murdered?’

Alistair Paterson, University of Western Australia

Centuries later, in 1963, the Batavia was recovered when a fisherman found cannons and anchors. “It’s a fascinating part of Australia’s history from a European perspective,” says Alistair Paterson, Chair of Archaeology at the University of Western Australia and an expert on some of Australia’s earliest shipwrecks. His team is examining human remains excavated on Beacon Island, where the mutineers camped. “There’s the story of the shipwreck,” he says. “How did they die? How were they treated after death? Were they murdered? Or were they perhaps some of the at least 40 people who died of dehydration soon after the shipwreck? That’s part of it.”

The team is also using isotope and DNA analyses and artefact studies to better understand who these people were and their place in the Dutch East India Company. “The other thing is, how do they fit into the story of the Dutch in the wider world? What we’re seeing from the isotopes is that many of these people weren’t just from the Low Countries (the Netherlands) but wider parts of Europe as well. So we’re really interested in the global story of labour and the place of Europeans in our part of the world.”

Who gets to keep treasure?

In 1987, a dive team recovered a bag on the ocean bed near the Titanic. Back at the surface, they opened it to reveal Edwardian-era diamond and sapphire rings, brooches, necklaces, cuff links and a gold pocket watch. Today, a company called RMS Titanic Inc has the right to retrieve Titanic artefacts and has salvaged thousands of souvenirs, including silverware and a piece of the hull, but its operations were curtailed in 2010 when an international treaty protecting the wreck itself went into effect. In 2020, the US government took RMS Titanic Inc to court to stop it from retrieving the Marconi radio set that sent the historic distress call because removing it would have damaged the site.

Divers salvaged treasure of a different kind from a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea near Finland in 2010: 168 bottles of cham­pagne preserved in dark, oxygen-poor waters and, apparently, very drinkable. A single bottle of 1841 Veuve Clicquot subsequently fetched $50,000 at auction. In 2016, another dive team recovered an equally interesting but probably less valuable prize from a Swedish warship wrecked in the 1600s: a sealed tin of cheese, which they described as looking like Roquefort but which they, understandably, declined to taste.

The Loch Ard, wrecked off Warrnambool in Victoria in 1878, yielded lead bars, the ship’s bell and, famously, a ceramic peacock specially commissioned to go on display at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Buildings. “It would have been in a wooden crate and was probably packed with either sawdust or horse hair or a combination to protect it,” says Andrew Barry from Flagstaff Hill Museum, where it now takes pride of place. “We do know that it floated free of the wreck, and we do know that it floated ashore.”

What about salvaging the lot? Unless a wreck is protected (Australia has blanket protection on historic wrecks; other nations might list historic sites individually), who can do what to it largely depends on where it sank, whose flag it was flying, who claims to own the rights, and the ancient provision that allows recovery specialists to salvage a wreck or cargo and then split the proceeds with the owner – a grey area that can easily wind up in court.

Another Spanish galleon sank with more than 500,000 silver coins aboard, alongside two gold tobacco boxes and other treasures.

The San Jose was a Spanish galleon that sank near the Colombian city of Cartagena in 1708, carrying gemstones and 7 million gold pesos, which today have a value of around $27 billion. Ownership was contested between the Spanish government, under whose flag the vessel had sailed; the Colombian government, in whose waters it sank; an international salvage company that claimed to have found the wreck in 1982; and indigenous peoples such as the Bolivian Qhara Qhara, who asserted the treasure had been plundered from their land in colonial times. Another Spanish galleon, the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, sank off the coast of Portugal in 1804 with more than 500,000 silver coins aboard, alongside two gold tobacco boxes and other treasures, which are now the property of the Spanish government.

“At the very least, the flag state itself has an interest in the cargo and has the legal entitlement to be represented in terms of the ship and the cargo,” explains Dale Stephens, a former Navy lawyer who’s now director of the Research Unit on Military Law and Ethics at the University of Adelaide. “But even in the middle of the high sea, you can’t find a wreck and go, ‘Oh, hooray, I’m going to grab all of this, and that’s mine.’ There are many other states and private entities that have an interest and would challenge any claim that you would make.”

Not everybody is entirely scrupulous, of course, as Kieran Hosty and James Hunter observed in their 2018 analysis of the systematic looting of the WWII Australian cruiser HMAS Perth, sunk in Indonesian waters in 1942. Of 681 aboard, 328 survived the sinking, and 324 were detained as Japanese prisoners of war. Scuba divers arrived first, but then large-scale commercial salvage activities started to remove significant parts of the wreck, apparently for its scrap metal value. “Illegal or unsanctioned salvage of pre-1945 military shipwreck sites is not a new phenomenon,” they write in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. “But the scale on which such activities are now occurring worldwide is both catastrophic and unparalleled.” Large WWII warships can be a valuable resource for the manufacture of scientific and medical instruments as their metals have been insulated from radioactive particles floating in the atmosphere ever since atomic testing began in July 1945. Even today, metal produced in modern foundries can be affected by these remnant particles.

What remains to be found in the deep?

While 8000 wrecks are accounted for in Australian waters, the whereabouts of many remain unknown. In the Kimberley, for example, of some 350 vessels known to be lost, many of them pearling luggers and ketches, we know the wreck sites of only 15. For many shipwreck enthusiasts, the quest is not for loot but for something equally valuable: a chance to solve a mystery from the past. James Hunter, who grew up in shipwreck-rich Florida, caught the bug from his father, who had been inspired to try scuba diving by a TV show called Sea Hunt, which featured exotic locales and fights with giant octopuses. “Completely ridiculous, but my father was completely captivated,” says Hunter, who got his own diving licence at age 10 and went on to study underwater and maritime archaeology.

Now the acting manager of Maritime Archaeology at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, Hunter spends much of his time offshore, either searching for wrecks or unearthing their buried remnants. Among his current projects is the wreck of a Dutch ship called the Koning Willem de Tweede, which ran aground in Robe, South Australia, after safely transporting 400 Chinese miners en route to the Victorian goldfields in 1857 (although 16 crew, including two ship’s boys, subsequently drowned). He’s sure of its location after finding buried metal fragments using a magnetometer, basically a “glorified metal detector” towed behind a boat. What he doesn’t know is how deeply it is buried under the seabed or what might remain after suffering Robe’s notoriously rough seas for nearly two centuries.

Hunter is also involved with another famous ship, HMB Endeavour, which ferried Lieutenant James Cook to Australia in 1770. Endeavour is believed to have eventually been sunk in Newport Harbour, Rhode Island, under the name Lord Sandwich, which has made definitive identification troublesome. Hunter and his colleagues are confident that while no smoking gun has turned up – a ship’s bell, name board, or an artefact bearing the name of a crewman, passenger or prisoner known to be aboard at some time or other – there is a “preponderance of evidence” that the wreck has been correctly identified from original drawings, some unusual hull design features and the age and origin of its timbers. While US experts initially cast doubt on the conclusions, “We remain confident of our data and findings,” Hunter tells us today.

There was no issue confirming the stunning find in 2022 of the Endurance, the ship carrying Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton and his expedition team that was slowly crushed by ice in Antarctica and sank in 1915: photos from nearly four kilometres deep show its name clear as day on the stern, beautifully preserved in near-freezing waters, dotted with sea anemones but devoid of the usual wood-eating marine worms.

A conservation plan (approved by countries such as Australia that are members of the Antarctic Treaty) proposes a 1500-metre protected zone around the Endurance. “Although the wreck is a designated historic monument and its remote location in the Weddell Sea serves as a protective factor,” says the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, “with warming temperatures and sea ice loss, it could become increasingly vulnerable.” To what? Damage from underwater drones, high-tech submersibles, commercial fishing vessels and looters. Still, other new technology, such as 3D scanning, is giving the public detailed views of the wreck, in a National Geographic documentary.

So, what happened to the Netherby’s passengers?

At first, most of the Netherby’s lifeboats were swamped or dashed to pieces. Then, a brave soul swam to King Island with a line to which they tethered two remaining lifeboats to ferry passengers to safety. Miraculously, not a single life was lost; a baby was even born safely on the beach. They raided the vessel’s hold for supplies while a small party set off in a rowing boat from a whaling station to raise the alarm. Finally, after nine days, the steamship Victoria arrived from Melbourne. Safe on board, a woman said, “Thank God” and fainted, according to a journalist who had travelled with the rescuers.

Unsurprisingly, few passengers wished to continue their voyage by sea to Brisbane. Most settled in Victoria, where many of their descendants now live. Sue Gibson, great-granddaughter of Reginald Evans, who was 21 when he set sail, has been to the cove near the wreck site and unearthed her ancestor’s journey. Reginald stayed in Melbourne, she tells us, where he landed a job as an apprentice plasterer. “Reginald was one of the modellers in the old Exhibition Buildings who did all the fancy plasterwork.”

Cass Turner’s great-great-grandfather, Robert Nally, was aboard. “The fact that no lives were lost is extraordinary,” she says. “The knowledge that they had to survive during winter on King Island before being rescued is amazing. My ancestors had to leave their country of Ireland just to find work in England, then emigrated to Australia with no knowledge of what that might behold. They faced hunger, upheaval, shipwreck and a physically hard life full of uncertainty in Australia. They chose that for themselves and their family. There was no counselling, therapy or aid of any sort. They survived and prospered. I also appreciate that if the shipwreck had not occurred, my ancestors would have ended up in the original destination of Queensland, and I would not exist!”

Kelli Rerden, whose husband David is descended from passengers James and Eleanor Rerden, has a water-stained bible. “It had been left on board, and they went back to the shipwreck on the next day to collect it,” she says. Chris Mead is the granddaughter of Edward Pinnuck, who emigrated with his older brother David and later settled in Shepparton. “He was only 22 when he came out,” Mead tells us. He just got on the ship as his brother was coming out with his family and two boys.” Glenn Pinnuck, a descendant of the other brother, helped to organise a 150-year reunion on King Island for families of the survivors. Fittingly, the island turned on quite a storm that week, he recalls. “Quite symbolic.”

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