Falling steel containers, get the sea 'temple' ghost ship full of treasure

The risk of losing the steel containers in a storm, the search team was off to sea by a lost ancient ghost ship 500 years.

The Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency has just announced a discovery similar to Aesop's famous "Three Ax" fables. During a storm in January, the merchant ship MSC Zoe risked dropping many steel containers into North Holland waters . As a result, the search team was "compensated" by the sea with a 500-year-old ship full of ancient coins and copper goods.

The search team used sonar, which can be interpreted as " reflected sound waves" , a technique that applies the spread of sound that salvaged teams - rescue or use to search for drifting ships or objects or immersed in water.

Finally, they found an unusual sonar signal at the shipwreck. Thinking that one of the containers had been identified, they sent devices to salvage. However, it was not a steel container but a very old wooden and copper object.

Traces of "ghost ship" appeared when the Dutch used sonar to search for steel containers that fell into the sea - (photo: DUTCH CULTURAL HERITAGE AGENCY).

The recovered pieces of wood showed that it belonged to a "ghost ship" that had slept for nearly five centuries on the ocean floor. The ship is very large, up to 30 meters long and has been built since 1540. It is built in an intermediate style between traditional Dutch and carvel trains, a Mediterranean shipbuilding style.

According to Martijn Manders, head of the international maritime archeology program of the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency, this is the oldest shipwreck found in the North Holland Sea.

And yet, the ship also contained 4.7 tons of goods and coins in copper. Stamps on copper pieces showed that they were cast by the wealthy Fugger family of Germany and metal testing showed that they were identical to the first coin used in the Netherlands. With the voyage from the Baltic Sea to Antwerp (now in Belgium but in the early 1500s of the Netherlands), it could be one of the first copper transports from Europe to the Netherlands, marking the presence of dong replaces the inconvenient gold and silver payment.

With the above date and historical value, the ship and the salvaged goods are an invaluable treasure. The ship is preserved by the sea in very good condition. Most of the wrecks are still being preserved at the bottom of the sea and archaeologists plan to make the first diving expedition this summer.

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