At the bottom of the Arabian Sea, a 500-year-old Vasco da Gama fleet shipwreck

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-arabian-sea-shipwreck-vasco-da-gama-20160316-story.html

Standing atop the rugged, barren peak of Al Hallaniyah Island, eyeing the blue-gray Arabian Sea as it lashed the rocky coast below, David Mearns tried to transport himself back 500 years.

The sky was dark with storm clouds, the sea a raging, surging maelstrom. Two ships, heedlessly anchored on the exposed northern side of the island, were whipped about by the winds and waves, stretching their moorings to the breaking point. Once adrift, the wooden vessels were driven shoreward and bashed against the rocks. One got close enough to the beach for its crew to escape before it broke apart completely. The other splintered and sank in deep water, dragging everyone on board, including its captain, to the bottom of the sea.

Mearns had spent half a year reading accounts of that disaster, which doomed part of a fleet led by the legendary Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama. He'd internalized everything he could find about the weather, the vessels, the island, the perils of the Arabian Sea during the "Golden Age of Exploration" half a millennium ago. And he knew that at least one unparalleled example of a ship from that time lay somewhere within his reach. If only he could find it.

"Our team stood at the top of the island and watched the waves come in, and put themselves in the place of the Portuguese, where they would have anchored and where the storm would have dashed them along the coastline," Mearns told National Geographic. But the initial search didn't take much more time than the visualization: "Then they snorkeled around and in 20 minutes started seeing cannonballs that were obviously from a European ship."

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