Lost in the Abyss

The bell had probably lain there on the bare slope for centuries. Now, 460m down in the South China Sea, it was illuminated by the searchlight of Franck Goddio’s submersible. Coated in a thin layer of silt and algae, it seemed as though the bell could topple into the abyss at any moment. It was one of those suspiciously perfect moments you rarely expect to encounter in real life – and for Goddio, it was the culmination of years of planning and investigation.

So what was it that had lured Goddio and his team to this lonely reef in the southern Philippines? He was, after all, the man who had captured the world’s imagination with his excavations around the Egyptian port of Alexandria. His interests, however, were not wholly dominated by Egyptology.

In this instance, his obsession with the history and seafaring activities of England’s Honourable East India Company (HEIC) sparked a search for the wreck of a merchantman called the Royal Captain, which had traded with China under the auspices of the Company. Back in the mid-Eighties, Goddio had carried out a research project on an East Indiaman, the Griffin, which sank in 1761 and was found buried under 6.5m of sand near the island of Kaludlud, near Jolo in the southern Philippines. But the wreck he really thirsted after was the Royal Captain. He had been searching for it since 1984, and succeeded in mapping out the shoal where the Royal Captain had gone down. Equipped with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), he returned to the site again in 1995 and investigated an area of submarine cliff where, it was calculated, the wreck was likely to be found.

About 200m down at the base of the cliff, the robot filmed an impressive cave, 35m wide and 18m high. It filmed briefly inside the cave, but just as the ROV was leaving, Goddio spotted a tiny white spot on the sand, and asked the pilot to move in a little closer. ‘Very skilfully, the ROV was directed towards the spot and the camera zoomed in on it,’ Goddio recalled. ‘It was a porcelain shard! A shard from a saucer with blue motifs of pagodas, boats and rivers. This piece was typical of the East India Company exports at the end of the 18th century. The wreck was getting closer.’

Goddio’s team located what was the tail end of the Royal Captain’s debris field, which seemed to peter out at around 450m. So the ROV was then sent up, following a trail of shards, bottles, iron pieces and cannons. About 100m further up the slope, Goddio noticed that the sediment, instead of being white in colour, was getting darker. This was a good sign: through personal experience, Goddio had learned that sediment near to a wreck is often mixed with organic elements which lend it a blackish colour. He asked the pilot to closely investigate the area, and 200m to the north, they discovered a big tumulus (an archaeological term for a heap of earth) scattered with intact porcelain pieces. Part of the Royal Captain had been prevented from sliding into the abyss by a huge rock that stopped it in its tracks.

Goddio’s team stopped to enjoy a unique scene: surrounded by nautilus shells, the porcelain treasures were gleaming under the ROV’s lights. It was incredible to see the cargo which had been lost after the disastrous events of 17 December 1773, when the Royal Captain had struck a reef during a fine, clear night. It was a history Goddio had studied in its minutiae. Built in 1770, the Royal Captain had three masts, a weight of 864 tonnes and a total length of 43.5m. She was built of English oak and had three decks. During this period, Indiamen were not built for speed. The maximum speed recorded in the Royal Captain’s logbook is five knots, so we can presume she was hardly cleaving through the sea on the night she ground into the reef.

By December of 1773, the Royal Captain was stocking up with exotic goods in Wampoa, the anchorage for Canton in China. It was calculated from log records and other sources that she was carrying more than 100,000 pieces of porcelain on her return journey. The log also records 4,039 tea chests and 100 half chests, of which 3,044 contained fine green tea. Bundles of silk were then added to the cargo and stored on top of the teas. The cargo also included several items to be delivered to the Company’s settlement in Balambagan, notably three chests of silver and several barrels of arrack – the sort of killer hooch that enables users to speak new languages within a few minutes of consumption.

The Royal Captain left Wampoa with fair weather on 13 December, taking a direct course towards Balambagan with the favourable winds of the northeast monsoon behind her. There was evidently some concern about navigating the area, as the first mate, James Quicke, carried out regular probes to test water depth. Nevertheless, the ship grounded itself on a rocky promontory at 2.30am, and the rest of the night was spent in vain attempts to get the ship back afloat. She was trapped on the northwest extremity of the shoal.

Centuries later, Goddio was able to appreciate just how dangerous the shoal was, because in fine weather no swell breaks over the rocks on which the ship foundered. At night, the difference in colour between the shallow lagoon and the deep water was imperceptible: the reef was invisible, and in an area that had never been mapped. During the day, several more attempts were made to haul the ship clear by dropping anchors and veering on hawsers. But the reef slope was so steep that the anchors were of little use. On several occasions, they partly succeeded in moving the ship off the rocks, but the breeze and current pushed her back on to the shoal. At low tide she started to strike very hard against the rocks, and began to take on water.

Having lost all four anchors and all their hawsers in vain, it was decided at sunset to evacuate the crew and sail for Balambagan. The ship’s longboat took 72 men, the cutter took 20 and the jolly boat carried 13 men. Needless to say, they took the three chests of Company silver and the ship’s log with them. Three seamen were left behind on the Royal Captain: they were, according to the log ‘so intoxicated with liquor that they could not get them away’. All the boats safely reached Balambagan at noon on 19 December, but bad weather forced the cancellation of an expedition to salvage the Royal Captain. At some point, the stricken Indiaman must have toppled over the reef, perhaps taking the drunken crewmen with her. In the event, no one heard anything more of the ill-fated Royal Captain, nor the three drinkers who had remained on board. The misfortune lived on only in the dusty pages of a few forgotten manuscripts, and a name listed on pilot charts of the South China Sea for a reef located at a latitude of 9º03’N, longitude 116º40E: Royal Captain Shoal. In the spring of March 1999, Goddio returned once again to that fateful reef, this time with the sort of backup that would make even Bob Ballard do a double take. Goddio’s support vessel was the 60m research ship Ocean Voyager, home to 46 people including the crew, Goddio’s team and members of the National Museum of the Philippines. They had the most sophisticated equipment available, including two Deep Rovers – new-generation submersibles, each capable of taking two people to a depth of 1,000m (they were named Jules and Jim).

‘Our aim was to perform a very detailed excavation over a limited area and leave the rest of the remains of the Royal Captain intact,’ Goddio said after the expedition. ‘Our main purpose was not the recovery of the artefacts, but a study of the wreck as a whole. We decided to concentrate our efforts and restrict our work to the remains of the ship that were trapped behind the huge rock at a depth of 350m.’

Once the site had been found again, the team had to work out the practicalities of carrying out an excavation at 300m. Its first task was to install a hoist to transport the porcelain pieces to the surface. A metal platform was lowered to the sea bed near the wreck to support the two-tonne lead counterweight used by the elevator system. This in turn used a large buoy which consisted of 60 spherical buoys, each capable of resisting a pressure of 100 atmospheres.

Using the submersibles, archaeologists studied the naval architecture of the remains of the Royal Captain. The parts were numbered, using labels made from a special type of foam, each held down with small lead weights. Next, a large mesh grid was placed over the wreck, making it possible to specify the original position of an artefact with great precision.

Inside the sphere, the silence was broken only by some radio communications at the beginning of the descent. Then one of the submersibles quietly glided into the dark, using the 400m cables of the elevator system as a visual guide. At 100m, the computer and electronics of the photographic system were booted up, so that the sub was well prepared to begin its assignments. For archaeological photographs, the team had to minimize the amount of disturbance. So the second submersible descended after the photo-sub, or worked elsewhere on the vast field of artefacts. On the few occasions when the Deep Rovers worked together, the crews could see each other clearly. Sometimes, the subs approached each other so closely that they almost touched.

The process of gingerly removing fragile artefacts and stowing them on the elevator’s nets was a real test of the pilots’ skill. For this, a super-accurate depth meter was attached to the submersible’s arm so that the position of the objects recovered could be precisely recorded. The sub’s arm was then extended towards the object and a tiny pressurized jet of water was squirted at the artefact to ‘isolate’ it from the surrounding sediment. The pressure was then reversed to create the suction required to gently lift the object into a collecting cup. Among the items recovered was a fully intact blue porcelain bidet. It was richly decorated on the inside with a river landscape, while floral motifs coloured the outside. From the position where the sub found it in the corner of the reef, it looked as if it had gently come to rest, with the smaller porcelain objects that had been packed inside it still in place.

‘All the equipment worked well and we made steady progress,’ Goddio said. ‘Every day that passed enabled us to hone our skills and use our equipment with greater dexterity. We soon mastered the art of manipulating the robotic arms and could use them as if they were our own hands. Naturally, it took a long time to launch the submersible and bring it back to the surface, but the fact that four people could stay on the site of the excavation for an eight-hour stretch every day meant that our work was highly efficient.’

And what about that bell? Needless to say, they couldn’t just leave it teetering on the edge of the slope, so it was decided to try to bring it to the surface. Initially, it was brought up on the arm of one of the submersibles. It was then transferred by waiting divers into a net so that it could be hoisted safely on board the support vessel. Alarmingly, the bell was engraved with the name of a different ship ‘The York, 1760’, but a little detective work later showed that it did belong to the Royal Captain. Goddio found written evidence from the Royal Captain’s logbook that proved she was supplied with equipment taken from The York. ‘This was a good example of how archives and archaeological excavation can be very complementary,’ Goddio commented.

By the end of the operation, Goddio’s team had excavated just five per cent of the wreck, but that small area yielded 1,847 artefacts and samples. The rest of the Royal Captain was left untouched. ‘Our adventure, started 15 years previously, is still not over,’ Goddio said. ‘Although the problems of underwater archaeology in very deep waters are different to those of standard excavation, this experimental expedition proved that archaeological excavations performed at great depths could be just as meticulous as those conducted on land.’

Story by Simon Rogerson