treasure

By Andy Corbley - Good News Network

Not far off the Kenyan coast, maritime archaeologists believe they have found the wreckage of a galleon belonging to Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese navigator who found the route to India around Africa.

While the true provenance of the vessel is unclear, the discovery would be of monumental importance to the study of maritime archaeology, and the history of European exploration.

It was originally identified near the city of Malindi in 2013 by Caesar Bita, an underwater archaeologist at the National Museums of Kenya who received a tip from a local fisherman.

Commissioned in 1497 to find a route to “the Indies,” da Gama was the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope, before proceeding to sail north along the coast of Zanzibar to reach India. It was the first route to India by sea, and it changed European and world civilization forever.

On his third, multi-ship voyage in 1524, one of the Portuguese galleons, the São Jorge, sank somewhere off East Africa, but da Gama died of an illness en route, and a precise location for the ship was never provided.

After years of documentation, Bita invited the Portuguese nautical archaeologist Filipe Castro from the Center for Functional Ecology at the University of Coimbra to investigate the wreck.

Full story...