At the bottom of the Arabian Sea, a 500-year-old shipwreck from the fleet of Vasco da Gama
Source: Washington Post
But in the end, Mearns announced Tuesday at a press conference in Muscat, the archaeologists did find what they were looking for. The wreck uncovered off the coast of Al Hallaniyah is almost certainly da Gama’s ship Esmeralda, which sank with its captain and da Gama’s uncle, the swashbuckling, rapacious Vincente Sodré, on board in 1503.
A report on the find published in the journal Nautical Archaeology is still considered “interim” — thousands of artifacts dug up from the wreck site have yet to be analyzed. But, if Mearns’s conclusion is borne out, the Esmeralda will be the oldest ship from the Age of Exploration ever to be excavated.
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She’d been part of a massive armada led by da Gama in order to conduct trade — and in many cases, wage war — in India. The fleet followed the route famously pioneered by da Gama four years earlier: a circuitous, 24,000-mile voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and up Africa’s eastern coast that took the better part of a year and killed the better part of da Gama’s crew. Nevertheless, his carreira da India provided the first link between Europe and the spices of the East that didn’t depend on overland routes controlled by Arab traders and Venetian merchants. To 15th century Portugal, eager for trade riches and finally some flavor in their food, da Gama’s new route was a very big deal.
That first successful voyage was a turning point in world history: the beginning of the ages of exploration, imperialism and globalization, with all their change and brutality. And what happened on da Gama’s second voyage, including the demise of the Esmeralda, was a grim harbinger of the violent centuries that lay ahead — for both the colonized and the colonizers.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/16/at-the-bottom-of-the-arabian-sea-a-500-year-old-shipwreck-from-the-fleet-of-vasco-da-gama/
The 'interim' report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1095-9270.12175/epdf
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Some of the wrecks found from the 1500s are full of cargo like porcelain plates, so much pottery, cargo holds were stuffed, a lot comes up for sale similar to this plate from the Hoi An hoard. I collected one with barnacles on it (not pristine) for $25.
