A  Portuguese trading vessel, carrying large amount of gold and ivory was bound for a port on the coast of India in the 16th-century. It was blown far off its original route by a fierce storm when it was sailing round the southern coast of Africa. Days later, the ship was swept to the shore battered and broken due to the storm. It was only discovered last year in April 2008, in Sperrgebiet, the Forbidden Zone which is strictly off -limits De Beers diamond-mining lease near the mouth of the Orange River on Namibia’s southern coast. It was the company’s geologist that came across a half round sphere of rock which was a copper ingot, with a trident shaped mark on its surface, which is the hallmark of Anton Fugger, one of Europe’s wealthiest financiers. It was trades for spices in India in the first half of 16^th century.

Archaeologists later found almost 22 tons of these ingots beneath the sand, as well as cannon and swords, ivory and astrolabes, muskets and chain mail—thousands of artefacts in all. They also found more than 2,000 beautiful, heavy gold coins which were mainly Spanish and also a small amount of Venetian, Moorish, French, and other coinage. It is the oldest and richest shipwreck ever found on the sub coast of Africa, which has lain untouched and unsuspected in the sands for nearly 500 years. This is the second ship ever to be excavated by the archaeologists, while the other ones were looted by treasure hunters.  Archaeologist Francisco Alves says, “This is a priceless opportunity”.  There is no chance for the treasure hunters to plunder into these treasures, since they are in the middle of the world's most jealously guarded diamond mines. Sperrgebiet—means "forbidden zone" in German. Officials at De Beers and the Namibian government work the lease as a joint venture called Namdeb.

It will take many years for the scholars to study the wealth of material that was gathered from the Diamond Shipwreck, as it is called. Castro the Portuguese born coordinator for archaeology program at TexasA&MUniversity has been studying about Portuguese trading vessels for more than ten years. He believes that this wreck will give them new details about hull design, rigging, and how these ships evolved. It will also give them a greater idea about day-to-day things as to how they cooked meals on board and what people brought with them on these great journeys. Some research on rare manuscripts and royal archives in Lisbon, have contributed enough to tell the story of this forgotten voyage and a vanished ship.

What actually happened is…..

It is a beautiful spring day in Lisbon, the 7^th of March 1533. That year’s India fleet sail in their Portuguese vessel, down the Tagus river into the Atlantic ocean to bring back a fortune in pepper and spices from other distant continents. The ships were sturdy and capable; two of them were brand-new and owned by the king. One of these vessels was the Bom Jesus (the Good Jesus) and Dom Francisco de Noronha was the captain. It carried around 300 sailors, soldiers, merchants, priests, nobles, and slaves.

Although the Spanish Empire left lots of paperwork, a catastrophic earthquake, tsunami, and fire in November 1755 brought Lisbon to a devastating condition and Casa da India, which is  the building that contained the  precious maps, charts, and shipping records, was dragged into the Tagus River. So to find out the truth behind a five centuries old Portuguese ship wreck will take up a lot of research and investigation. Alexandre Monteiro, who is an archaeologist and researcher in the Portuguese ministry of culture, says that it left a huge hole in the Portuguese history. There were no Indian archives left either, so one had to go back to more imaginative ways of finding information.

The coins found on the wreck were identified as rare Portuguese’s of King Joao III. These coins were minted for only a few years, from 1525 to 1538, and then after they were melted down and never reissued after that. This is an indication that the wreck took place in this frame of 13 years. Also the wreck had loads of copper ingots, which were used for trading spices, which explains to us, that the ship was on its outward journey to India, rather than returning. Apart from the records that were gone with Casa da India, small pieces of information were found in libraries and archives that survived the 1755 earthquake. Among those is a narrative of the fleets called Relações das Armadas, which shows that 21 ships were lost on their way to India between the years 1525 and 1600. The Bom Jesus is believed to be the only ship which went down near Namibia and it sailed in 1533 and it got lost on the turn of the Cape of Good Hope.  Another proof that the ship is The Bom Jesus is, a letter from the royal archives, dated February 13, 1533 which reveals that King Joao had sent a knight to Seville to pick up 20000 crusadoes worth of gold from a syndicate of businessmen who had invested in the fleet (the fleet that included the Bom Jesus) that was about to sail for India. There were also huge amounts of Spanish coins found among the wreckage.

A rare 16^th century book “Memória das Armadas” contains illustrations of all the fleets that sailed to India each year after Vasco Da Gama found the route in 1497. Among the pictures for 1533 is a sketch of two rigged masts under full sail, disappearing into the waves and the words "Bom Jesus" together with a simple epitaph: perdid, which means lost.

So what actually happened……..?

The details are just sketchy.  Four months after its departure from Lisbon in 1533, the first fleet was struck and scattered by a huge storm. Details of the voyage by the fleet commander Captain Dom João Pereira have been lost. What remains is a clerk’s acknowledgement. It says, report was received that the Bom Jesus disappeared in the wild weather somewhere off the cape. So it lets us visualise that the ship was caught in powerful winds and currents along the south west coast of Africa and was driven towards the north for hundreds of miles. When the Namib desert came into view, the vessel struck a rock 150 yards from shore, breaking off a big chunk from the vessel and spilling tons of copper ingots into the sea, leading to the death of Bom Jesus.

Now after 500 years, a group of researchers are excavating a sunken ship that rests 20 feet  below the sea level in a place where the Atlantic ocean is held back by massive earthen retaining wall. CCTV cameras monitor everyone’s movements around the site, since this place is a diamond mine, where loose diamonds can be well mingled in the sands the archaeologists are brushing away. Bruno Werz , the director of South African Institute of Maritime Archaeology says, that five centuries of storms and waves would have washed everything away, if it had not been for those copper ingots that weigh everything down.  Researchers have been concentrating over the wreckage, measuring, photographing, scanning, trying to put together the ship’s final moments. Mine workers also found a huge wooden rigging block three miles farther up the coast.

What would have happened to Dom Francisco and the rest of people on board…..?

Dieter Noli, a resident archaeologist of the mine and also has worked and lived along this part of Namib desert for more than 10 years, says, that a winter storm along that particular joke is something that has to be taken really seriously. Winds of over 80 miles an hour speed, and foggy days would have made people getting ashore impossible. Human toe bones were found in a shoe under a mass of timbers, which reveals that at least one person did not survive. A few personal possessions found reveal that many people made it to the land.

So what happened then….?

It is an un inhabited wasteland of sand and scrub which stretches for hundreds of miles. The wreck has taken place in winter, which would have left the survivors cold and wet, exhausted and sad. There was no hope that someone would rescue them, since nobody knew that they were alive, and any other ship that was likely to pass that way were far away from the trade routes.

But according to Noli, he believes things need not have to necessarily end bad for the ship wrecked people, because the orange river lies 16 miles south of the wreck, which has plenty of fresh water and food like shellfish, seabird eggs and desert land snails. They could have even met local survival experts. Also in winter, hunters ventured along this shore to find carcasses of whales that often wash ashore. Noli says, it all depends on the way how the Portuguese fared inn these encounters.

Whatever was the final fate of the survivors of Bom Jesus, they had started off that great voyage in search of riches by praying for their success. But they were in this land which is a 185 mile stretch of desert, very rich in high quality diamonds, delivering their unimaginable wealth on the shore. 

For ages together, this great river has been washing millions and billions of diamonds down from the deposits, which are as far as 1700 miles in the land. Only the hardest and brilliant gem quality stones weighing hundreds of carats survived the journey . they spilled into the Atlantic at the mouth of the river and were washed up the coast, by the same cold current that one day swept Bom Jesus to its death.