Shipwreck mystery solved after nearly 140 years
Diver Dominic Robinson, a British former army officer and military helicopter pilot, captured incredible footage of a wreckage off the coast of Plymouth, England.
He set sail with skipper James, crew member Liz and explorers Rick and Andy for the dive.
They carefully examined the site of the wreck and discovered a plate with the Cunard Steamship Company logo.
This clue led Mr Robinson to discover the wreckage was of the SS Nantes, which tragically collided with a German sailing vessel, the Theodor Ruger, in November 1888.
'The Nantes was built in 1874, in Glasgow, and very sadly lasted a mere 14 years before it was sunk,' Mr Robinson said.
'It was, when it was sunk, on passage from Liverpool to La Havre in France carrying cargo of coal.
'Sadly, pretty much everybody who was on board the Nantes died.
'There were only three survivors, two guys who jumped on to the Theodor Ruger and then another guy who stayed on the Nantes and was part of the team that sort of tried to keep it afloat.
'Unfortunately, the Nantes went down about ten hours later in the early hours of the morning and he was the only person who was picked up from that.
'It's quite a sad story.'
After the ship went down, it became lost until Mr Robinson and his team discovered it.
Mr Robinson, who has been diving for around 35 years, heard about the unidentified shipwreck from the UK Hydrographic Office.
Afterwards the 'wreck was essentially lost, obviously you're dealing in a period with no satellite navigation'.
He added while the crew tried to save the ship it 'drifted for several hours, before it finally made its way to the bottom, sadly, with many of its crewmen on board'.
He said the wreck was lost until a local dive team identified it in 2024.
'We've got the size (of this wreck) from the information on the UK Hydrographic Office,' Mr Robinson said.
'We know it's about 78 or 79 metres long.
'We know that there's a Cunard plate from it – so, basically what we're looking for, and we know it's old as well.
'So what you do is you try to find a list of all the Cunard ships that were sunk.
'You then try and narrow them down to, to a relatively small one, and an old one.
'We obviously know where it sank, so if you can find information about the sinking and the wreck that aligns all those things up, then it's fairly straightforward to identify it.'
The Cunard plate Mr Robinson found was crucial in the ship's identification.
He said: 'Even though the wreck had been dived before, it was never identified and this small piece of broken plate allowed us to do exactly that.
'The more eagle eyed among you may already have noticed the logo from the famous Cunard shipping line.
'And not surprisingly, this is what gave us the most significant clue.'
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