DetectingWales.com

By Simon Tomlinson for MailOnline     15 April 2015
 
A hoard of silver coins worth £34million that was sunk by the Nazis on board a steamship has been salvaged by a British-led team at a record depth of 5,150m (17,000ft).
 
The SS City of Cairo was travelling from Bombay to England in 1942 when it was torpedoed by a U-boat 480 miles south of St Helena, taking 100 tons of rupees with it to the bottom of the ocean.
 
It was long assumed that the vessel's cargo, belonging to the UK Treasury, would be lost forever such was the complexity of the task facing salvage experts.

Underwater company Deep Ocean Search used powerful sonar to locate the vessel on the sea floor
 
That was until a team led by British expert John Kingsford used pioneering techniques to track down the ship with powerful sonar and robotics.
 
Underwater company Deep Ocean Search (DOS), which included 20 French oceanographers, was then contracted by the UK Ministry of Transport to recover the coins from a record depth of 17,000ft - some 4,500ft deeper than the Titanic.
 
A spokesman for DOS said: 'This was to be a difficult search as the water depth would exceed 5,000m, the weather, swell and currents were known to be challenging and the presumed site was some 1,000 miles from the nearest land in the foothills of the mid-Atlantic ridge.'
 
When the ship was finally discovered, they said it was 'broken in two and buried deep in the seafloor silt', adding that 'parts of the ship had metres of mud heaped upon it.'

The rupees, belonging to the UK Treasury, were being transported from India to England when the ship sunk
 
Underwater company Deep Ocean Search, which included 20 French oceanographers, was contracted by the UK Ministry of Transport to recover the coins from a record depth of 17,000ft - 4,500ft deeper than the Titanic
 
Keeping it under wraps: The recovery took place in 2013, but has only now been made public
 

'SORRY FOR SINKING YOU': U-BOAT CAPTAIN'S APOLOGY AS CITY OF CAIRO VICTIMS ABANDONED SHIP
 
The SS City of Cairo was travelling from Bombay to England, via Cape Town and Recife, Brazil, when it was attacked by a Nazi U-Boat on November 6, 1942.
 
The U-68 hit the vessel with one torpedo, but waited a further 20 minutes before firing the second.
 
That crucial delay gave 296 of the ship's 302 passengers and crew time to escape in lifeboats.
 
Famously, the German captain, Karl-Friedrich Merten, approached the lifeboats and told the survivors: 'Goodnight, sorry for sinking you.'

The victims were eventually rescued three weeks later, but 104 had died.

Maeva Onda, one of the oceanographers on board the salvage ship, SV John Lethbridge, said the search submarine was successful on its first dive.
 
'After two hours of underwater descent, the robot transmitted the first images of the wreck. It was incredible,' she told Le Figaro, as cited by the Daily Telegraph.
 
The find was confirmed when the robot brought up coins stamped with the Crown, but the team suffered 'serious' problems trying to recover the bulk of the hoard because of the depths involved.
 
The spokesman for DOS said: 'The team quickly found that operating at this depth caused serious technical difficulties which were new to us and which had to be resolved, quickly.
 
'The combination of pressure, temperature, repeated dives at this depth and other issues resulted in multiple breakdowns of systems such as we had not experienced before when working in 3000m to 4000m depths.'
 
The recovery took place in 2013, but has only now been made public.
 
DOS has left a plaque commemorating their find on the sea bed.

It's when you hear about projects like this you realise that there will always be something for the treasure hunter to find. Even if it's hundreds of years into the future when the land masses have shifted and, once again, sea becomes land and land becomes sea.

How many cargo ships have been sunk over the decades. How many hoards and family heirlooms buried.

Just be nice to find one. Interesting post again Neil.

Val

Great, thanks for posting :)

An interesting post. Rupees to the UK???

An aside from the treasure is that after the war the survivors of the sinking of the Cairo had a reunion to which they invited Capt Merten and they agreed that  "We couldn't have been sunk by a nicer man". ;D

Wasn't the SS City ofCairo classed as a war grave?

I doubt it as only two died in the sinking.