Shipwreck From Explorer Vasco da Gama's Fleet Discovered | National Geographic

[Music] [Music] A storm from the north wrecked two of the ships, the Soj brothers' vessels, onto a reef. We were the first people to discover this shipwreck, and the reason being because it was such a remote part of the world. It's an island in the Indian Ocean, 25 miles off the coast of Oman.

We went back into the Portuguese archives and we found a letter from one of the captains of one of the five ships. A letter to the king explaining how the ships actually sank and where they [Music] sank.

Since then, the actual excavation has been a very major expedition between ourselves and the Oman government. The starting team was about 10 persons in 2013. The last time we went out, at the end of 2015, we had 54 people on board. So it built up to be a very large expedition itself.

I've had archaeologists, professional divers, anthropologists, people who could operate magnetometers, people who were very detailed in terms of our GPS positioning of where everything is, cameramen, photographers, aerial photographs. But beyond that, there's another layer of scientists and specialists who've helped us actually confirm the provenance, the age, and the identity of this shipwreck, and that's the key to the science that we've completed.

Whether it's the 20th century or the early 18th century, a shipwreck site is a scene of tragedy. It's a scene of great death, so it's a place that you treat with respect because many people died there. This is a very shallow water site, so we're talking 2 meters to 6 meters.

So we're using handheld magnetometers, metal detectors; all of our positioning was done with differential GPS. That's a very precise method. The excavation was done using an airlift system driven by an air compressor, and that was one of the logistically most difficult things to do. We had to use a heavy lift helicopter from the Royal Omani Air Force to be able to position that on site.

That's our precious air compressor that the courtesy of the Royal Omani Air Force put in a lovely position for us. We're very early into the archaeological assessment of the 2,800 individual artifacts. For the first time, we're seeing some very rare African ceramics. We have Asian ceramics from the Ming Dynasty, so these are the sorts of details that the archaeologists over the next several years are going to be teasing out from this collection.

While I have felt confident a long time ago, you know, nearly 18 years, the captain of one of these ships was called Vente Sodre. It really has been very satisfying and fulfilling to do all this scientific analysis, and that has been a necessary exercise. But it's been an enjoyable one as well: hard but enjoyable.