A Mysterious Shipwreck Rests Just 20 Feet Below the Surface. It May Be Connected to Vasco da Gama’s Final Voyage

A shipwreck found off the coast of Kenya may have been connected to Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese navigator who sailed around Africa to reach India in the late 1400s and early 1500s.

The wreckage was discovered near the city of Malindi in 2013. Caesar Bita, an underwater archaeologist at the National Museums of Kenya, explored the site after receiving a tip from local fishermen, as Artnet’s Verity Babbs reports. He recovered elephant tusks and copper ingots from the wreckage in the years that followed. Last March, Bita invited Filipe Castro, a maritime archaeologist at Portugal’s University of Coimbra, to examine the site.

Castro, Bita and their fellow researchers recently published an analysis of the wreck in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology. They write that the vessel may be the São Jorge, a galleon from da Gama’s final voyage that sank in 1524.

“I think this is a unique shipwreck,” Castro tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. “It is a treasure.”

The vessel is located about 1,600 feet offshore, where it rests only 20 feet below the surface. Per Live Science, it’s one of eight known Portuguese shipwrecks from this period that have been found in the region.

“It is larger than what we imagined for an early 16th-century ship,” Castro tells Artnet. “It is enormous. The first feeling you get when you look at it is that it is going to take time to dig it. Carefully, minding the details.”

In 1497, the king of Portugal commissioned da Gama to find a naval route from Europe to Asia, which led him to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. His voyage enabled sea travel between Europe and India, triggering a golden age of trade for Portugal. Da Gama led two more multi-ship voyages to India in 1502 and 1524, and that final voyage’s 20-ship fleet included the São Jorge. The navigator would not return home from the third voyage: He got sick and died in India on December 24, 1524.

If the shipwreck in question is the São Jorge, it could be one of the Indian Ocean’s oldest European shipwrecks—but “we don’t know for sure,” Castro tells Live Science. The researchers hope to confirm their suspicions by conducting an archaeological survey of the surrounding coral reefs. The wreck is mostly covered by coral, but Castro and other divers have been able to excavate timbers from the ship’s hull and frame by digging trenches.

“We are far from understanding the site,” Castro tells Artnet. “This phase of the excavations, when we don’t know exactly where we are, is really exciting. Is it the stern? Is it the bow? Is this a portion of the upper works?”

If the wrecked ship isn’t the São Jorge, the researchers think it could be the Nossa Senhora da Graça, another Portuguese vessel that sank in 1544. (It wasn’t associated with da Gama, who died two decades earlier.) But if it is the São Jorge, it holds “significant historical and symbolic value as physical testimony to the presence of Vasco da Gama’s third armada in Kenyan waters,” per an April statement from the University of Coimbra.

As Sean Kingsley, a maritime archaeologist and the editor of Wreckwatch magazine, tells Live Science, identifying the preserved wreckage of the São Jorge would be “archaeological stardust.”

“Kenya was a staging post for tapping into the dazzling wonders of the Indies,” making any early European shipwrecks found there “hot property,” adds Kingsley, who wasn’t involved with the research. “This is one wreck that screams out for protection, respect and care” before its history is lost to time.

Eventually, the researchers hope that the site will become an underwater museum, where visitors and tourists could learn about the doomed vessel and da Gama’s travels in the region, according to Malindikenya.net’s Freddie del Curatolo.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.