Lost 300-year-old ship carrying £101,000,000 worth of treasure discovered
The Portuguese ship which is believed to be the Nossa Senhora do Cabo fell victim to pirates in 1721 off the coast of Madagascar.
It was transporting around 200 slaves and cargo from Goa, India, to Lisbon when it became involved in what is considered one of the most infamous pirate raids in history on the Portuguese empire.
But after 16 years of investigation, researchers at the Center for Historic Shipwreck Preservation found the wreck in Ambodifotatra Bay, near the island of Nosy Boraha.
More than 3,300 artefacts have since been pulled from the site, which includes religious icons, pearls and treasure chests.
An ivory plaque was also discovered with gold letters reading 'INRI', which is a Latin abbreviation for 'Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews'.
Researchers Brandon A. Clifford and Mark R. Agostini from Brown University who led the research said the haul is 'eyewatering treasure, even by pirate standards'.
The haul could be worth £108 million in today's currency.
Enslaved people who were forced to travel on the route were then made to work in ports and mines throughout the Portuguese Empire.
Ships through the key route between India and Europe were often prime targets for pirates.
Pirates would also sell enslaved people for a profit.
It comes after Captain Cook's missing ship, the HMS Endeavour, was found after 250 years.
For two centuries this ship has been lost, but now the wreck has been found in Newport Harbour, Rhode Island. The finding of the ship was announced in a report by the Australian National Maritime Museum.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
2 days ago
- Spectator
Romantic fantasies of the French in India
'The English cannot assimilate any nation,' declared the narrator of a French travelogue set in India and published in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857. 'They can only dominate with brutality, squeezing every last drop of blood from the veins of the oppressed.' Reduced to 'slaves' who 'tremble before the Englishman's whip', the Indians in this tale yearn for the 'heroic Dupleix and his deputy de Bussy'. Had Louis XV's jealous court not betrayed those two men, 'India would have been French, not British'. The book was a work of fiction. It had to be. In reality, scarcely anybody in India, barring a reactionary nawab here and an obscurantist sultan there, longed for French rule. The French were history's losers. They were latecomers to India, backed the wrong locals, were betrayed by their masters at home and, despite their ambition and resourcefulness, were outsmarted by their British rivals on the battlefield. But defeat produced a powerfully nostalgic reaction in them for what might have been, in the way that an unrequited romantic constructs fantasies about a failed relationship. Like the Dutch, Portuguese, Danes and British, the French had gone to India to plunder it. But that opportunity lost, they imagined themselves as tragically thwarted missionaries of liberty. A cottage industry of counterfactual history materialised in France to cater to a market mourning India's 'loss'. The actual history, as Robert Ivermee shows in his luminous Glorious Failure, was wretched. The French preached Christianity to Indians, pillaged their wealth and enslaved their bodies. The Mughals attempted to halt the last of these horrors, but the trafficking of abducted Indians on French vessels did not end until the 1830s. The French rose and expanded rapidly in India. By the time the Compagnie des Indes launched in 1664, the Portuguese had been present in India for 166 years and the British for more than six decades. But it took the French less than a century to emerge as Britain's chief adversary on the subcontinent. The credit for this belongs to Joseph-François Dupleix, the governor of French India, whose labours to build an Indian empire for France occupy a large chunk of this book. With some luck Dupleix might have ended up as the French Robert Clive. He was a more competent diplomat and a less avaricious administrator than his British counterpart. What he lacked was reliable support from Paris. In 1754, he was abruptly recalled home for having exhausted the Company's coffers in pursuit of his political vision. French decline in India thereafter was swift. The Seven Years' War, ending in 1763, confirmed France's diminished status: losing spectacularly to the British in southern (or peninsular) India, it was left with five trading posts, which eventually became colonies of the French crown. France never recovered its nerve. Indians who set their clocks by the French would find themselves ruinously disappointed. Tipu Sultan, despite being the most formidable challenger to British dominance in southern India, failed to extract support from the French even after sending embassies to Paris. Napoleon, who saw his invasion of Egypt in 1798 as a mere prelude to the conquest of India, retreated home once Tipu's kingdom fell to the British the following year. But France clung to its possessions in India until well after the British departed the subcontinent. In 1949, no longer able to control an increasingly restive population, it staged a referendum in one of its territories. The result was a decisive repudiation of the romantic fables of French rule fabricated by Parisian writers. Virtually the entire population chose unification with India. Under intensifying pressure from Delhi, which threatened to choke French India by imposing economic cordons around it, Paris ceded control to India of all its holdings by 1954 – though this transfer of power was only ratified by the National Assembly in 1962, following the end of French rule in Algeria. Ivermee begins his book with a counterfactual scenario in which Jawaharlal Nehru, India's inaugural prime minister, recites his 'freedom at midnight' address in French. Although the ideas that emanated from revolutionary France – of liberty, equality and fraternity – animated the spirit of the liberal constitution India gave itself, an India ruled directly by France would have lacked the ingredients that gave rise to its unique quest for national independence. There would have been no Gandhi in French India. British rule, with all its cruelties, is what quickened India's unification and rebirth in a republican democratic avatar. The experience of those exposed to other imperialisms can be instructive and clarifying. Consider the words of the late Tibetan writer Tsewang Yishey Pemba in 1974: 'If only Tibet had been annexed as a British colony she might today enjoy the same status as India.' To recall Pemba's words is not to exonerate imperial rule. It is to remind ourselves that there were infinitely worse forms of it than what India ultimately got.
Spectator
24-07-2025
- Spectator
The secrets of the Palm House at Kew
The news that the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, will begin a £60 million, five-year renovation in 2027 brought back to me a slew of memories from 1978, when I worked there for several months. The extraordinary fame and innovative nature of this unique Victorian building, with its curvilinear, cruciform shape, designed by Decimus Burton and constructed by Richard Turner, seemed to confer a kind of grandeur and significance on an otherwise pretty lowly and scruffy horticultural student. The special treat was the periodic 'weekend duty' when, after turning the enormous iron key in the door at eight o'clock on a weekend morning, for two blissful hours I had the entire building to myself, before the visitors began to wander in. Alone, that is, apart from the sparrows chattering high up in the palms and the menacing cockroaches that lived underneath the floor and came up through the vents to get at the bananas before we could. The temperature in the Palm House is kept at 21°C all year round, and my first task was to increase humidity by damping down the floors and spraying the leaves of tall palms, creating my own personal tropical rainstorm with a heavy-duty hosepipe. I wore the black leather clogs, with metal rails nailed to the wooden soles, that I had been issued on my first day at Kew, since they were much more comfortable and less slippery than wellington boots. The rest of the day was spent sweeping paths, 'picking over' dead leaves and watering pots on the staging – dull work enlivened by the presence of 1,000 plant species, from cocoa and rubber to jade vine and Madagascar periwinkle. The unpronounceable Latin name on the label protected the coca plants from theft. My only anxiety was that my inexpert watering might see off the oldest plant at Kew, an enormous cycad, Encephalartos altensteinii, from the Eastern Cape that had been collected in 1775 and lived in a crate in the Palm House since its opening. Every time I visit the Palm House, I give its leaning trunk an affectionate pat. One of the aims of the renovation is to change the heating system from gas boilers to air and water source pumps, in a drive to achieve carbon neutrality. That's a far cry from the original 12 coal-fired boilers, situated deep below the house, the smoke from which emerged from the Italian Romanesque campanile near the Victoria Gate. During the second world war, Kew's position close to the River Thames – a landmark used by Luftwaffe bombers to navigate on moonlit nights – resulted, on more than one occasion, in high explosive bombs falling on the gardens. One night, many of the panes in the Palm House were blown out, and the nearby Waterlily House (which is also to be renovated) was badly damaged. It must have been the devil's own job in wartime to source replacement curved panes of glass. Eighty years later, the 16,500 panes will be made of 'high-performance sealed glazing' to help confound the contemporary enemy, global warming. Things felt rather simpler in 1978.
Daily Mirror
21-07-2025
- Daily Mirror
Prince Harry issues urgent statement about heartbreak after solo trip without Meghan
Prince Harry followed in the footsteps of his late mother, Princess Diana, on a trip to a minefield in Angola with the Halo Trust - and now he has spoken out about his heartbreak after the visit Prince Harry has spoken of his heartbreak for children in a statement issued after a solo trip without Meghan Markle. The Duke of Sussex made the trip to Angola to visit a minefield 28 years after his mother's famous visit to the same country. Harry, as a patron of landmine clearance charity the Halo Trust, spoke to families in a remote village near Africa's largest minefield. He gave children in Cuito Cuanavale advice on avoiding detonating mines, telling them in Portuguese: "Stop, go back and tell your elders." Following his trip, the official website of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex featured comments from Harry about the visit, which was described as honouring his mother, Princess Diana's "powerful legacy" and bringing "global attention" to the dangers of landmines. And after visiting the remote village of Mawano, he said: "As a father to young children, it breaks my heart to see innocent children still living and playing next to minefields. "All of us have a duty to protect children and future generations from the harms of war, both present and past." He continued: "I urge all donors to stand with Angola in fighting the job. This is not just about landmines, it's about healing the last wounds of war and giving future generations the peace they deserve." It is estimated that at least 60,000 people have been killed or injured by landmines in Angola since 2008, the Halo Trust said. The trust has cleared more than 120,000 landmines and 100,000 bombs from the country. However, in the past five years, the devices have killed at least 80 Angolans and more than 1,000 minefields are yet to be cleared. In 1997, months before she died in a car crash, Diana, wearing a protective visor and vest, walked through a minefield being cleared by the Halo Trust. She strode through a cleared path in a Huambo minefield, and the images of her in body armour and a mask gave the anti-landmine campaign global recognition. Harry's trip to Angola came just days after it emerged that top aides for him and his estranged father, King Charles, had met in London - leading many to believe it was the first tentative step in them reconciling after Harry revealed earlier this year that they are no longer on speaking terms. The Duke of Sussex has levelled a series of accusations against his family, and in his controversial memoir, Spare, said his brother, Prince William, had physically attacked him and that the King put his own interests above Harry's and was jealous of Meghan. Meredith Maines, Harry's chief communications officer, and Liam Maguire, who runs Harry and Meghan's UK public relations team, met the King's communications secretary, Tobyn Andreae, at the Royal Over-Seas League in London last week. The private members' club is located right by Clarence House, Charles's London residence.
