yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[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.

More Articles

View All
How The Ultra Rich Travel The World
Once you get to a certain level of wealth, the way you operate changes. Security, privacy, and convenience take the place of wanderlust and going wherever the road takes you. Because look, you’ve got places to be, meetings to attend, and you gotta be on t…
How Far Away is the Moon? (The Scale of the Universe)
This is uh representing the earth. And this represents, what do you think? The moon? Yes. Now our first challenge is how far apart are they? Like, roughly? Like, roughly, about that much? Okay. Uh… I guess maybe about that far? Maybe? About that far? Yeah…
How to Make a Kurzgesagt Video in 1200 Hours
For years, people have asked how we make our videos. So, let’s finally talk about it. How to Make a Kurzgesagt Video in 1,200 Hours or More (Kurzgesagt intro) Kurzgesagt in a Nutshell. But first things first, we need a topic. Our potential topic list is…
How Nothing Founder Carl Pei Built A Multi-Million Dollar Smartphone Brand In Just 2 Years
Today, on the main function, we’re hanging out with Carl, the founder of Nothing. He built a smartphone company that launched two years ago, and in those two years, they’ve gotten to $600 million in annualized revenue. So we’re going to talk about that an…
Convergence on macro scale | GDP: Measuring national income | Macroeconomics | Khan Academy
We’ve talked about things that might drive inequality, things that Thomas Piketty refers to as forces of divergence. But now, let’s think about, or at least some of what he cites as forces of convergence. So, forces of convergence are things that might ma…
The Crisis of Credit Visualized - HD
The crisis of credit visualized. What is the credit crisis? It’s a worldwide financial fiasco involving terms you’ve probably heard, like subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, frozen credit markets, and credit default swaps. Who’s affected?…