credit – Center for Historic Shipwreck Preservation © supplied to GNN
From the coast of Madagascar springs a story of pirates and sunken treasure, as an American research team believe they have identified a famous shipwreck.
Nossa Senhora do Cabo (Our Lady of the Cape) was a 700-ton Portuguese warship captured by an infamous French pirate while returning to Lisbon in 1721.
In the hold, a massive pile of treasure, destined for the crowns and courts of Portugal, was taken along with 200 slaves from Madagascar, where the shipwreck was found.
Little of the treasure remains, but when cross-referenced with historical documents, the artifacts that were recovered seem to point only to Nossa Senhora, which was one of the largest pirate prizes ever taken and seismic in its notoriety; not least because multiple literate witnesses survived.
Marine archaeological surveys with sonar and dive teams were conducted by the Center for Historic Shipwreck Preservation in Massachusetts. Their target was a cluster of shipwrecks around an island to the North of Madagascar called Nosy Boraha, known at the time period as Sainte-Marie.
The island was a notorious pirate stronghold during the Golden Age of Piracy, and it appears that the Portuguese ship was taken here after being attacked near the Reunion Islands, a French colonized possession in the Indian Ocean.
It would have been returning from Goa, a Portuguese imperial possession in India, where it had filled the cargo hold with Chinese porcelain, nutmeg, gold coins, silver bars, silks, religious figurines and other carvings in wood and ivory, and a $100 million fortune in today’s money of precious stones. An Goan viceroy, a Portuguese nobleman, the Archbishop of Goa, and 200 slaves were also on board.
Nosy Boraha – credit, M worm retrieved from Wikimedia Commons
Historical documents record the pirates Olivier “The Buzzard” Levasseur and John Taylor were behind the attack on 72-gun Nossa Senhora, which was damaged in a storm and had laid up near the Reunions to repair.
Born in Calais during the Nine Year’s War to a wealthy family, Levasseur was the quintessential pirate. Participating in two of the biggest pirate raids of the time, he buried a massive treasure, left an encrypted message as to its location, and was eventually hanged around the age of 40 while living large along the Equator.
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Between the treasure value and the ransom money, the haul would have been an “eye-watering treasure, even by pirate standards,” according to two authors on a scientific paper describing the surveys of the wreck.
The Center for Historic Shipwreck Preservation had conducted studies in the area around Nosy Boraha for 16 years, and describe it as a place where prize ships were commonly taken to be scuttled following their capture. Many other wrecks—all likely dating to the same time period—were identified in the area, and the authors highlight it as a bountiful place for future research.
Interviews and photographs detailing the surveys, excavations, and research on Nossa Senhora were also published in the brilliant Wreckwatch Magazine, the premier source for news about sunken treasure worldwide.
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