I’ve always been fascinated by shipwrecks. A shipwreck can add a lot of information to our history. It is amazing how old some of these things can be. There are some differences of opinion as to which shipwreck is the oldest ever found. Most believe it is the Dokos shipwreck which is believed to be from the time period 2700 to 2200 BC. It is amazing to think we could find anything from that long ago. It got its name, because it was found near the island of Dokos in the Aegean Sea. The truth is there was nothing left of the ship but its cargo laying on the floor of the sea. Hundreds of clay vessels were found along with other ceramics which archaeologists determined were in the hold of the ship. The pottery was said to have been dated back to 2200 BC, but some believe it could be several hundred years older. Another ancient shipwreck known as the Uluburun shipwreck was also discovered. It was found off the coast of Turkey and has been dated to the 14th century BC. In this wreck some of the wood was found along with copper ingots scattered on the ocean floor. One of the interesting finds was a unique Golden scarab engraved with the name of Nefertiti which helped in dating the ship.

There is something about a ship, even one which is not a shipwreck which instills awe in us. Perhaps it has to do with the sheer size of the ship or is it more than that? When we look at ships which are several hundred years old many of us find it hard to believe people of those days could have built something that big. An example of what I am talking about is the HMS Victory. It is still in commission and is serving in the British Navy. It has a length of 226 feet and held 104. Today it sits in Portsmouth in England and it’s a Museum. In 1564 a Swedish warship was built which was 162 feet long and held 107 guns. It sank after a battle that same year. Throughout history there have been claims of even bigger ships being built. One which was said to have been built in 200 BC was the Tessarakonteres, built by the Greeks. Here is the incredible part, the ship was said to be 420 feet long and 58 feet wide and was built to hold 40 rows of oarsmen.

There are lists of incredibly large ancient ships, but unfortunately many of them may not have existed, except in the minds of other people. On the other hand at least some of them could have, we just don’t have enough evidence either way. It has even been said the great Archimedes designed a Greek ship which was named the Syracusia and was over 360 feet long. It was said to have been built in 240 BC and was the largest transport ship in antiquity. When we think of the ancients using small wooden boats, we probably couldn’t be more wrong. Some of their ship building techniques were quite advanced for their time. Ships were very important in ancient times. They were  important for trading and important for defense and some of the ancient fleets were quite large. One example was a fleet which was launched against the Romans in 268 A.D. Several tribes had banded together and pooled their resources and were able to create a fleet of over 2000 ships, which they used for raiding. Along with the ships they had an army of 325,000 men. The Roman Emperor Claudius II defeated them at the battle of Naissus.

Every year ships land up at the bottom of the ocean and shipwrecks are quite common. During wartime the amount of shipwrecks increases dramatically. Pieces of the Spanish Armada are still being found. We are talking about more than 400 years ago when the Spanish Armada attacked England and other British possessions. Recently bronze cannons and other relics from a Spanish warship were found off the coast of Ireland. Apparently what happened to the ship was it hit the rocky coast and sunk. Archaeologists are also looking for two other ships from the Armada to have also sunk the same way. The British fleet had driven the Spanish Armada into the North Sea where the fleet was forced to take the long way home going around the tip of Scotland south along Ireland’s perilous Atlantic coast. It is believed over 24 ships went to the bottom of the sea as they smashed into rocks along the coast of Ireland due to fierce storms. At the time over 500 bodies were found strewn along 300 miles of Irish coastline. In 1985 the wreck of the La Juliana was found. It was formally a merchant ship when King Philip II of Spain ordered it outfitted with 32 guns and sent out with the Armada.

The ship called San Francisco’s deadliest ship wreck was found recently. The researchers used high definition sonar and found the SS City of Rio de Janeiro. The ship was a steamship which also had sails. It set out on 1901 on a very foggy day, but ran aground and quickly sank. It went down in a location near where the Golden Gate Bridge stands today. The ship had 210 passengers and crew members and only 82 survived. It is also known as the “Titanic of the Golden Gate.” Most of the victims on the ship were Chinese and Japanese immigrants. A two-year project had been launched to discover and map shipwrecks in the Bay Area. The ship was built in 1878 and was 345 feet long. In 1890 it had been involved in a collision and suffered damage. Five years later it hit a coral reef off the coast of Japan, in 1897 it was caught in a vicious typhoon, but it never lost a single passenger before. Unfortunately there was a passenger on board named Rounsevelle Wildman who was a top US diplomat based in Hong Kong. The story goes he pressured the captain into taking the ship out in the fog, because he didn’t want to miss President McKinley’s inauguration.

Recently the wreck of a submarine was found off the coast of Scotland. It was an early U-boat from World War I. The crew of the ship had stated they were attacked by a sea monster and quickly abandoned the boat. They describe the beast as having large eyes set in a horny skull with teeth glistening in the light. The captain of the boat agreed with this assessment. History does not agree with the boat’s occupants however. It is said the submarine was sunk by HMS Coreopsis in 1918. A historian had this to say, “The submarine was caught on the surface at night, recharging its batteries. It saw the patrol ship coming. It attempted to do a crash dive to get away. Once the submarine was under water, it rapidly started flooding from above so they had no option, but to blow all the compressed air they had, bring the submarine to the surface at which point all they could do was surrender.”

As you can see finding an important shipwreck is only half of the puzzle, the rest is the story which is attached to it. Without the story we are missing key parts of history.