The wreck was like a bug on the wall, a jumbly shape splayed on the abyssal plain. It was noticed by a team of autonomous-underwater-vehicle operators on board a subsea exploration vessel, working at an undisclosed location in the Atlantic Ocean, about a thousand miles from the nearest shore. The analysts belonged to a small private company that specializes in deep-sea search operations; I have been asked not to name it. They were looking for something else. In the past decade, the company has helped to transform the exploration of the seabed by deploying fleets of A.U.V.s—underwater drones—which cruise in formation, mapping large areas of the ocean floor with high-definition imagery.
“We find wrecks everywhere, just blunder into them,” Mensun Bound, a maritime archeologist who works frequently with the company, told me. The pressures of time and money mean that it is usually not possible to stop. (Top-of-the-line search vessels can cost about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a day to charter.) “Sometimes it’s heartbreaking,” Bound said. A few years ago, he was with a team that stumbled across a wreck in the Indian Ocean. They had a few hours to spare, so they brought a sodden box up to the surface. It was full of books. “That was the most exciting thing I’ve ever found in my life,” Bound said. “But then the question becomes: What do we do with it?” The seabed is a complicated, as well as an expensive, place to operate in. So they put it back.
This Atlantic wreck was beguiling. An R.O.V.—a remotely operated vehicle, connected by a cable to the exploration vessel—was sent down to take a closer look. It was the remains of an old wooden sailing ship, stuffed with cargo, lying some six thousand metres below the surface—much deeper than the Titanic. The contents seemed to be Asian in origin: intricate lacquered screens and bolts of cloth, thousands of slender rattan canes, and an extraordinary array of porcelain, all preserved in the darkness of the ocean. “It was just cascading in these spills down around the slopes and undulations of the seabed,” Bound recalled. “And there were barrels there, which hadn’t been opened. They were sitting there intact.”
There is something almost dangerously tantalizing about an undiscovered shipwreck. It exists on the edge of the real, containing death and desire. Lost ships are lost knowledge, waiting to be regained. “It’s like popping the locks on an old suitcase and you lift the lid,” Bound told me. Bound grew up on the Falkland Islands in the nineteen-fifties. In 2022, he found the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s polar-exploration ship, under the ice of the Weddell Sea, off Antarctica. “On a shipwreck, everything, in theory, that was there on that ship when it went down is still there,” he said. “It’s all the product of one unpremeditated instant of time.”
What was the ship? There was an obvious person to ask. In 1993, Bound had been searching for the remains of a nineteenth-century English trading vessel, the Caroline, in the Straits of Malacca, in Southeast Asia, when he and his colleagues pulled up a much older, bronze cannon instead. The cannon was marked with a relief of a sailing ship, the name of the Dutch East India Company, and a date, 1604. “I had no idea what it was doing there or anything,” Bound said. But he had heard of a self-taught shipwreck researcher, based in England, who was said to have an unusually broad grasp of the world’s lost vessels. Bound contacted the researcher, Nigel Pickford, by satellite phone from the ship.
Within twenty-four hours, Pickford replied, saying that Bound and his team were on the site of the Battle of Cape Rachado, which was fought between Portuguese and Dutch fleets over several days in August, 1606. The cannon probably belonged to a ship called the Nassau. “He said, ‘O.K., you found one wreck by itself,’ ” Bound recalled. “ ‘There should be three wrecks nearby.’ And he even gave us a rough direction.”
Just over a kilometre away, Bound and his team found the wreck mounds of three more ships—another Dutch warship, the Middelburg, and two Portuguese vessels, the São Salvador and Dom Duarte de Guerra’s Galleon—which had become tangled together and sunk in flames. “There they were, still tied together on the bottom of the Straits of Malacca, just as they’d gone down,” Bound said. “You could see the violence.” A Portuguese cannon was bent like an elbow, with fragments of a Dutch cannonball embedded inside it.
“I came, I saw, I didn’t know anybody.”
Cartoon by Roland High
Two years later, Bound led an excavation of the site on behalf of the National Museum of Malaysia. “Had it not been for Nigel, that would never have happened,” he said. I asked Bound whether there were any other experts, comparable to Pickford, whom he could have called in that situation. “I can’t think of anybody of his calibre,” he replied. “I can think of one or two others. But they are more swashbuckling, let’s say.” The shipwreck world swims with hucksters; Pickford deals in facts that you can use. “He is a serious scholar,” Bound said. “His approach, his attention to detail, his note-taking, the insight that he brings.”
News of the Atlantic discovery found its way to Pickford within a few days. Earlier this year, he showed me images taken by the R.O.V. on his laptop, in a modern apartment decorated with contemporary art and Asian ceramics, overlooking the rooftops of Cambridge. Pickford is seventy-eight, with white hair, crooked teeth, and a mild, understated manner that could be mistaken entirely for gentleness, or English politeness, but is also the mark of a lifetime spent among secrets.
“My things are not always well organized. I’ve got so much bloody stuff,” Pickford muttered, clicking around on his desktop. A bookshelf next to him held a seven-volume history of the Royal Navy and a copy of “Dictionary of Disasters at Sea During the Age of Steam.” “I think it’s this one,” Pickford said. The screen suddenly filled with barrels, china, and chests. A ghostly sword lay on the ocean floor. We stared for a few moments. “It’s incredibly real, isn’t it?” he said.
Pickford is fascinated by the era of early colonial expansion and also, to be frank, by treasure. “There are millions of shipwrecks going back millennia, obviously. From an archeological point of view, I suppose they’re all of interest,” he told me. “From a treasure-hunting point of view, about naught point naught one of them are of interest.” Pickford nicknamed the unknown wreck Deep Pots and, without anybody ever formally asking him to, he set out to identify the vessel.
Pickford is the purveyor of a singular sort of information. In the course of fifty years, his research has led to the discovery of dozens of shipwrecks, containing more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of recovered cargoes. Clients—specialist salvage companies and their investors—tend to call him, rather than the other way around. “I never really bother to look for people,” he said. His work encompasses every ocean and a time span of roughly five centuries. One day, when we were chatting, Pickford mentioned that he had been hired to investigate a couple of wrecks near the Comoro Islands, off the coast of Mozambique, in East Africa. “I can’t tell you anything about them,” he said, affably enough.
Pickford works on a retainer or for between five and ten per cent of the proceeds of any treasure that is recovered. Because of a medical condition, Mallory-Weiss syndrome, which can lead to severe internal bleeding if he vomits, he does not go to sea. Instead, Pickford is a creature of libraries and maritime archives, which he returns to again and again, a missable figure in a tweed coat with elbow patches, standing aside to let you pass.
In 1994, Pickford published “The Atlas of Shipwrecks and Treasure,” which included a gazetteer of more than fourteen hundred shipwrecks and has become something of a reference work in the field. “As well as greed, there has to be a love of gambling, a strong tendency to dream, a boundless optimism, a passion for quests, an enjoyment of physical risks, and a perverse desire to attempt that which is inherently difficult,” he wrote, of looking for vanished ships. Pickford introduced the gazetteer with a quote from “The Tempest”: “O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish’d!” He dedicated the book to his father, Thomas, who was also a shipwreck researcher.
“He’s not an adventurer,” Pickford’s wife, Rosamund, told me. “He’s a detective.” Other people involved in the shipwreck world—maritime archeologists, divers, treasure hunters—speak of the thrill and addiction of their discoveries. But for Pickford these pangs of elation tend to be private, if not silent: opening an e-mail, taking a phone call, deciphering a centuries-old cargo manifest in a climate-controlled basement somewhere. Pickford enjoys the binary outcomes of his work. The diamonds are in the strong room, or they aren’t. “You get to know whether you’re right or not,” he said. “That doesn’t often happen with history.” The moment that Pickford craves is when the two realms collide—the archive and the artifact—and the years in between suddenly melt away. “I think it’s something fairly embedded in our psyche, actually, this desire,” he said. “It’s connecting with the past, really. It’s all about time.”
A porcelain expert who studied images from the Deep Pots wreck dated the pieces on the seabed to the last twenty years of the seventeenth century. Pickford went to his files and tried to narrow down possible candidates for the vessel. The wreck’s position, in the mid-Atlantic, suggested that he was looking for a ship that had been returning to Europe from Asia via the Caribbean when it sank—a relatively uncommon route. “It was unusual,” Pickford said. He thought of the Azie, a Dutch East India Company ship that sank in 1683 and which he had been curious about for years. He hired a researcher to scour the company’s records, in The Hague, but these revealed that the Azie’s crew was rescued after a storm north of Cape Verde, a thousand miles from the wreck site.
For a time, Pickford considered the Oriflamme, a French trader that disappeared while crossing the Atlantic in 1691, on its way back from Siam. But an account in the French colonial archives, in Aix-en-Provence, indicated that the Oriflamme could have made it as far as the Bay of Biscay. Next, Pickford wondered about the Modena—a grand English ship named after Mary of Modena, the wife of King James II—which traded in Asia for the East India Company. The last credible sighting of the Modena was on October 5, 1694, when passing seamen recognized pieces of her elaborate painted woodwork floating in the ocean after a violent storm. The Modena had set sail for England from Barbados just over a month before.
I had assumed that Pickford would spend most of his time re-navigating old voyages, ruminating on lee shores and the direction of winds. But treasure hunting begins and ends with cargo. “You always start off with ‘What did it have on it?’ ” he told me. “Did it really have that on it?” In the case of the Deep Pots wreck, the only way to offer a tentative identification would be to find a persuasive match between what was lying on the ocean floor and what was loaded onto the vessel when she sailed.
