What we know about the hunt for a 400-year-old ship with £4bn of gold off Cornwall

Marine experts are set to renew the hunt for a 400-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Britain that could be filled with £4 billion worth of treasure.

Historians have long believed that the Merchant Royal, a 17th-century English ship, was loaded with gold when it sank off Land’s End, Cornwall, in bad weather in 1641.

A number of attempts have been made to locate the wreck, known as the El Dorado of the Seas, but until now it has remained undiscovered along with its prizes.

But a Cornish marine exploration team with expertise in locating uncharted historic shipwrecks hopes that is all about to change when a new search begins next month.

What we know

The Merchant Royal Galleon, a ship 157 feet long and weighing 700 tons, was built in London’s Deptford Dockyard and launched in 1627.

She spent time trading with the Spanish colonies in the West Indies between 1637 and 1640 and called at Cadiz, Spain on her way home with her sister ship, the Dover Merchant.

After a Spanish ship in Cadiz caught fire before he had treasure to pay Spain’s soldiers in Flanders, Merchant Royal captain John Limbrey volunteered to take the booty to Antwerp on his way home.

However, the Merchant Royal began to leak after leaving Cadiz and eventually sank off the coast of Cornwall, somewhere between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, on 23 September 1641 – 18 men drowned and Captain Limbrey and 40 of her crew were picked up by the Merchant Dover.

The treasure, said to consist of at least 100,000 pounds of gold, 400 bars of Mexican silver, and nearly 500,000 pieces of eight, went down with the ship.

It was estimated to represent a third of England’s public funds, and King Charles I spoke of the event as “the greatest (loss) that was ever suffered by one ship”.

American company Odyssey Marine Exploration has tried for several years to find the wreck without success, starting in 2007 and again in 2009, when the effort was recorded for the Discovery Channel TV show Treasure Quest.

Todd Stevens, a treasure hunter from the Isle of Scilly, also searched for the wreck to no avail.

In 2019, fishermen on the boat The Spirited Lady picked up a large anchor in their nets off the coast of Cornwall, sparking speculation that it belonged to the Merchant Royal.

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Cornish marine recovery experts Multibeam Services will work with local fishermen on the latest mission to find the vessel, which could last the rest of the year and will use unmanned underwater vessels and the latest sonar technology to cover an area of ​​200 of English square miles. Canal.

The search will begin in April and will be filmed for a TV series presented by SAS: Who Dares Wins host Jason Fox.

The team will use two 10ft by 3ft autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that can travel up to 6,000m and use sonar technology to scan the seabed.

What we don’t know

The great mystery, of course, remains the location of the shipwreck.

The Merchant Royal is understood to have sunk up to 35 nautical miles off the coast of Cornwall, leaving a huge search area.

But Multibeam managing director Nigel Hodge is confident it will be located.

“We will certainly find him,” he said. “We’ve found everything we’ve ever looked for and we’ve been in business for 35 years.

“We are a team of marine exploration experts trained from working at sea as former Cornish commercial fishermen, so we have knowledge of the local area.

“We decided to finally bring this story to the surface.”

The other big unanswered question is how much treasure is buried with the ship.

Various estimates of the treasure’s value have been put forward over the years, ranging from £1 billion upwards, but Multibeam believes the value is up to £4 billion.

It is also unclear whether the anchor discovered by fishermen in 2019 is that of the Merchant Royal, with Stevens arguing that the anchor is of Dutch origin and dates much later than the ship’s ill-fated voyage.

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