Before an executioner’s ax separated King Charles I from his head in 1649, another catastrophe, unrecorded by history books, befell the monarch near this ancient Scottish port.
On July 10, 1633, a ferry carrying some of the most valuable treasures of Charles’ court capsized and sank in a sudden storm after sailing from Burntisland across the Firth of Forth, the estuary separating Edinburgh from the land to the north.
The king’s entire collection of banqueting silver went down on the ferry Blessing of Burntisland. So, apparently, did gifts presented to him by Scots noblemen during a tour of Scotland.
For 361 years the treasure has rested on the bottom of the 5-mile-wide Firth of Forth, about 100 feet down and maybe a mile or so offshore. Until just over three years ago, no one even knew it was there.
But now an ambitious project is under way to recover a treasure that Scottish archeologist Howard Murray describes as “Britain’s Tutankhamen”-equivalent in importance to the treasure-laden tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh that was discovered in Upper Egypt in 1922.
Philippa Glanville, curator of metalwork, silver and jewelry at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, said: “If this treasure is found, it will be without parallel in terms of discovery of a very obscure period of English decorative art. We know very little of the court art of Charles I. This could be a capsule of the most refined decorative art of a court that was noted for its taste.”
A group of Scots who uncovered the story of the shipwreck through a painstaking piece of historical detective work have enlisted Barry Clifford, 48, an experienced American treasure hunter, to help them find the treasure, with the use of modern technology, and bring it to the surface.
Clifford gained fame among shipwreck enthusiasts in 1984 when he recovered the pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod. After raids on 52 other ships, the Whydah carried a cargo whose value has been estimated as high as $400 million, and Clifford brought it all to the surface.
He said he hoped Charles’ ship could be found as early as this summer. “If not, we’ll come back next year,” he said. “The wreck is there, and we will find it.”
The silver plate alone was valued in Charles’ time at 100,000 pounds-the equivalent today of $13 million. But the historical value of the ship and its cargo, according to experts, is impossible to calculate.
Glanville said it was likely that Charles did not entrust his personal silver to the ferry but carried it on his own ship, the man-of-war Dreadnought, which survived the storm. But she said the ferry undoubtedly carried the silver Charles brought with him to Scotland for entertaining guests, as well as the personal silver of noblemen who accompanied him.
She said it also may have carried silver objects used in Charles’ second coronation, a ceremony the Scots insisted on before they would accept his authority.
Besides silver, she said, the cargo probably would have included textiles, jewelry and jewel caskets. “This was a very elegant and gracious court, and these are the kinds of objects Charles would have taken to impress his Scottish subjects,” she said.
Glanville said it would be interesting to see if forks are found in the wreck. Forks were introduced into England from Spain only a few years before the ferry went down. Before that, the English used only knives and spoons at their meals.
Clifford and his Scottish partners are not after the treasure for its immediate monetary value. They want to raise the ship from the sea floor and place it in a purpose-built museum, probably in Edinburgh. They would like to take the artifacts they recover on a world tour before placing them on permanent display here.
Thus their project would be similar to the one carried out after the recovery of King Henry VIII’s 16th Century flagship, the Mary Rose, off Portsmouth in the 1980s. It is now in a Portsmouth museum and draws 300,000 visitors a year. Murray was conservation manager for the recovery of the Mary Rose.
Stroke of luck
Charles I was born in Scotland in 1600 and assumed the throne of Great Britain in 1625. In 1633 he went to Scotland, which then had its own Parliament and operated as a separate state.
Until recently, historians hadn’t been aware that Charles went to Scotland for a second coronation, at the Scots’ insistence. Another purpose of the visit was to reform the Scottish Prayer Book, which reflected a Protestant outlook at variance with the Church of England, and bring it closer to the Anglican book.
Because many of the Scottish castles that Charles visited during his 60-day trip were unfurnished, he had to bring everything with him-including his silver and even his chamber pot. Thus the ship that went down carried tons of baggage as well as carts that had been used to transport it.
That the trip ended in disaster was indicative of the way things were to develop for Charles during the rest of his reign. Years of conflict between the monarch and the Puritans who controlled the House of Commons led in 1642 to the English Civil War, in which his forces were defeated with the help of rebellious Scots. He was convicted of treason and beheaded in 1649.
Murray and Martin Rhydderch, an expert in conservation work, learned about Charles’ trip to Scotland almost by chance. They were having a drink in a pub with Robert Brydon, a historical researcher who had been working with them, and he happened to mention that he had read about the trip during his research. “I’ve lost all my notes, but I am sure it would be interesting to you,” he said.
Murray and Rhydderch began investigating, and they found that Charles’ trip to Scotland, for which he spent five years preparing, had been dismissed with no more than a paragraph in histories of his reign.
But in the library of St. Andrews University, they came across diaries that told of the trip and of the loss of the ship.
Missing silver
Their research eventually carried them to the town of Taunton in southwest England. Henry Mildmay, the keeper of the Jewel House at the Tower of London during Charles’ reign, had come from Taunton, and his papers were deposited there after he died.
Rhydderch, who has relatives in Taunton, went there to spend Christmas in 1992, and on Christmas Eve he found the key documents for which he had been searching. Mildmay’s records revealed that the king’s silver plate had been taken from the Tower and not returned. Mildmay listed several people to whom the silver had been entrusted, and noted that all of them were dead.
Twenty-three carts from the king’s kitchen also were listed as missing after having been signed out.
The records also showed that a fresh supply of silver was issued to the kitchens in 1634. It consisted of 13,000 ounces of silver, apparently an entire dinner service.
It has long been known that Charles sold or melted down some of his silver to help pay his troops, and that Oliver Cromwell, whose forces defeated Charles in the civil war, melted down much of the rest after the war. Historians have assumed this was the silver Charles owned when he went to Scotland.
But Murray and Rhydderch concluded that the silver melted down after the civil war was that issued in 1634, not the earlier silver, which was in fact lost at sea.
Charles had planned to stay in Scotland two more weeks, but he hastily returned to London on horseback after the loss of his ship, apparently to dispel rumors there that he was dead. He had watched the sinking from the Dreadnought, and a contemporary account that Murray and Rhydderch uncovered said at one point the king himself “was in grate jeopardy of his lyffe.”
To cover the political embarrassment of a disastrous end to his trip, Charles blamed the sinking on witches. Murray and Rhydderch found state papers from May 16, 1634, about a trial of 20 or so “witches” taking place in Lancashire. They were accused of other crimes, but to their charge sheet was added the accusation that they had caused the storm that sank the ship. They were executed for trying to “drowne his Majestie in the Sea.”
Finding backing
“The value of the silver was equivalent to one-sixth of the Exchequer’s revenues at that time,” Rhydderch said. “It’s understandable why the king would want to keep the loss of the silver quiet and find scapegoats for it.”
Having completed their research, Murray and Rhydderch lacked the resources to carry the quest further. But through a Scottish diver, Ronnie Morrison, they met an ebullient Scottish businessman named Alex Kilgour.
Kilgour had been one of the first British businessmen into Russia after its opening to the West. He was hired as marketing manager for the Bolshoi Ballet and the Soviet rugby team, and spent five years off and on in Moscow.
He was immediately enthusiastic about the story of the shipwreck, even deciding to invest his own money in the project to find it. He then set out to find sponsorship and direct investment.
Kilgour persuaded the Forth Ports Authority to provide a survey ship free, and got British Gas to come through with the loan of sophisticated survey equipment that had been developed for use in the North Sea oil and gas industry. A Norwegian company, Bentech, donated the use of its sonar system.
An extensive survey was carried out in August 1992, and it identified about 200 targets. In the next stage, divers were supposed to go down to narrow the targets. But by then the group had exhausted its money.
They decided to put together a venture-capital proposal to raise $450,000. This attracted the attention of a number of Arab and South African investors, but Kilgour said it was clear they were only interested in selling off the silver and other artifacts for a profit. The Scots were not prepared to let that happen.
Clifford to the rescue
In June 1993, Kilgour was in his office, pondering what to do next, when one of his secretaries, Trish Thomson, came in and asked him if he had seen the May edition of Reader’s Digest. In it was a long article about Clifford’s discovery of the Whydah. Kilgour got on the phone and eventually tracked down Clifford.
Clifford, describing that first contact, said he almost hung up on Kilgour several times. “I hear a story about once a month from someone like Alex, so I feel I’ve heard all the treasure stories,” he said. “And I couldn’t understand Alex’s accent at first. But he kept me hooked. He said a few things that started to get my attention.”
By the time the conversation was finished, Clifford had agreed to fly to Scotland the next day. “There are a lot of things out there in the oceans, but you don’t come across a king’s treasure every day,” he said.
Clifford, who raised $8 million from investors to finance his search for the Whydah, contacted two friends to obtain the initial financing for the Scottish project: Hall Hutchison, 36, who trained as an archeologist but worked in Hollywood the last 10 years on special visual effects for the movie industry, and his brother Clay, 34, a free-lance photographer and property developer.
Clifford carried out a preliminary survey last summer that identified several possible targets. The Royal Navy base at nearby Rosyth recently made available a minehunter vessel to assist in the search, using advanced sonar imaging.
The minehunter located the rib of a wooden ship sticking out of the sand on the bottom of the estuary. But it won’t be known if that was the Blessing of Burntisland ferry until divers begin going into the Firth of Forth in April or May.
The treasure hunters will have the use of a remote vehicle, a kind of unmanned mini-submarine, that can take pictures under water. Visibility in the firth is only about 5 feet.
“I think we will find a lot of ships,” Clifford said. “I expect we will come up with 100 targets, and perhaps a dozen really good ones.”
He said the ferry undoubtedly is buried in sand, but some part of it probably is sticking up into the water.
Bigger things ahead?
Clifford estimates it will take up to $5 million to finance the project.
Kilgour said some of the biggest names in Scottish business and finance have become interested, and all the money could be raised here if necessary. But he said he would prefer that it be a joint American-Scottish undertaking.
“We want the project to prove that you can have a successful marriage of business and archeology,” Rhydderch said. “In Europe, there is no funding for archeology anymore.”
Clifford said the recovery of ancient wrecks at sea is still in its infancy, and he hopes to launch a global exploration effort when this project is completed.
“There are some incredible things out there that have not been found yet,” he said. “We are sort of at Kitty Hawk in this field. In the South China Sea, they may lose up to 1,000 ships in a typhoon, but there has never been an underwater recovery in China. That’s just one example of what may be out there.”
