Can an incredible
underwater discovery in the arctic
tell us what happened to the ill-fated franklin expedition?
You feel like somebody or something
is over your shoulder.
Who knows what we're gonna find inside?
What is the secret behind the mystery craft
speeding towards the u.S. Coast?
And is there a new killer lurking in the depths?
It's not something that you can hear.
It's not something that you can see.
It's not something that you can smell.
Just like, "oh, my god.
I'm not getting in the water."
the underwater realm is another dimension.
It's a physically hostile place,
where dreams of promise can sink into darkness.
I'm jeremy wade.
I'm searching the world to bring you the most iconic
and baffling underwater mysteries known to science.
Shipwrecks can't just disappear.
Or can they?
It's a dangerous, unexplored frontier
that swallows evidence...
We know more about the face of mars
than we do our deepest oceans.
Where unknown is normal, and understanding is rare.
captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com
captions paid for by discovery communications
In my years of investigating underwater mysteries,
I've been to some pretty hostile places
and the frozen waters of the arctic
are some of the toughest I've ever experienced.
It's a place where the mind can play tricks on you.
Now, reports are surfacing
of locals claiming to have seen ghosts from the deep.
Could a dramatic new discovery
solve one of the greatest arctic mysteries of all time?
2014. The canadian arctic.
A team of marine archeologists find a warship
resting on the sea floor of king william island.
Finding it was extraordinary.
You could see this ghostly ship.
Then, a second ship is located.
It's as if the crew has just stepped out.
You could see shells inside and things still stacked up.
It's very exciting, but it's also a bit unnerving.
These are no ordinary shipwrecks.
They all the hms erebus and hms terror,
two ships from the ill-fated franklin expedition.
They've been missing for over 170 years.
They were not where anybody expected them to be.
Finding the ships is a remarkable discovery.
But what happened to their missing crew?
Out of the 129 crew members
that set out on the franklin expedition,
no one came back.
When the expedition sets out in 1845,
expectations are huge.
Sir john franklin and his crew
are on a mission through uncharted arctic waters
to find a navigable passage
between the atlantic and the pacific.
The northwest passage is a kind of a shortcut,
the holy grail of its time, in terms of exploration.
It's kind of like the space race of the 1960s...
Which nation will have pride of place?
Franklin is one of the most celebrated
naval commanders of the day.
Sir john franklin... He was an honored naval veteran.
He had fought with nelson at trafalgar.
He's referred to as king arthur in the british press.
That's the kind of reputation he had.
Franklin's team
has the most advanced technology available.
They had enough provisions to survive
a very long time out at sea without resupplying.
They actually even had heating systems within the ship
to keep the crew and the boat inside
warm enough during the expected arctic winters.
It was a very well-equipped expedition,
with very experienced men,
so there's no reason for them to expect to fail.
But they do fail.
And, for almost two centuries,
the fate of the expedition has remained a famous mystery.
The arctic waters have revealed very little evidence
of what happened.
In 1850, another expedition is sent to find them.
They located franklin's first winter camp
and, a few days later, walking along the beach,
they saw three graves of franklin's sailors.
Franklin's crew were not alone on the ice.
The canadian arctic is home to the netsilik inuit.
A group of inuit are later found
with items belonging to the crew.
Spoons; knives; forks; broken chronometers;
franklin's medal of knighthood itself,
which is seen in the photographs before he sailed.
It's not something you would just give
to the local people as a gift.
Then, 14 years after the expedition set off,
there's a breakthrough.
An official document is found,
with a handwritten explanation
of how the ships became locked in the frozen waters
for 19 months.
It indicated that they had abandoned the ships,
there were 105 survivors,
that franklin himself had died the summer before.
With franklin dead, on April 22, 1848,
the crew abandoned their ships and set out on foot.
Why did they decide to leave the ships when they did?
To leave the one spot that you know that is warm,
that has food and shelter, to set out on the ice,
you have to be extremely desperate.
Or maybe even a little bit crazy.
105 men leave the ships.
None are known to have survived
and fewer than 40 skeletons have ever been found.
Over the years, there have been
many different theories about what happened to them.
Scurvy, of course, would've been a factor.
The inuit encountered them.
They talked about men with black gums,
from frostbite and scurvy, probably.
You start out with scurvy.
Then, you've got tuberculosis.
These are the two big killers of the era.
The extreme conditions would have been physically tough
and long periods trapped in the arctic sea
can also cause something psychological
called winter-over syndrome.
Just nothing but ice, nothing but snow.
For months and months, you can see nothing.
You know nothing about what's going off around you.
You become very isolated.
You become very disorientated
and you start behaving in a very bizarre way.
This could explain one mysterious account.
An intuit group report trying to help some of the crew
by building an igloo and supplying seal meat.
But, later, they find the igloo abandoned
and the meat untouched.
The inuit tribes out there were equipped
to survive in these kind of conditions.
They offered help and the crew rejected it completely,
which is quite strange, when you're so desperate.
That they would reject food is even more surprising,
in the light of a troubling story that emerges,
suggesting that the crew turn on each other
in order to survive.
The inuit accounts of bones that had been sawed
or broken open to get at the marrow.
Similarly, skulls that had been broken open.
There is hard archeological evidence of cannibalism.
When they started analyzing these bones,
they had cut marks.
Not scratches from wounds, but butchering marks.
That indicates that there could be
some kind of cannibalism taking place.
What would've caused this well-supplied crew
to resort to cannibalism?
For almost 200 years,
any evidence discovered about the franklin expedition
has raised more questions than answers.
Can we use new science and technological tools
to help us answer that question?
Bodies from the three graves found at the first winter camp
are exhumed.
They are eerily well-preserved by the ice
and analysis reveals something unusual.
They were subjected to on-site autopsies, x-rays,
chemical tests, and so forth,
and a conclusion was that lead might, in fact,
have been the overall culprit of the expedition.
Lead poisoning in the middle of an arctic wilderness
sounds unlikely,
but could it have come from something on their ships?
One of the new technologies the expedition carried
was tinned food.
Over 8,000 cans of it.
We knew that the ships were supplied with tinned food
and it was shown also that the tinned food
was prepared in a great hurry.
And tins had a very thick layer of lead inside.
They would use lead to seal the tops.
High concentrations of lead can be deadly.
It can lead to a debilitating mental state.
It decreases brain functionality.
Lead poisoning seems to stack up,
but the evidence is not conclusive.
Could an innovative type of x-ray technology
tell us more?
X-ray fluoroscopy shoots x-rays at things
and looks at their fluorescence.
This allows scientists
to look at the micro structure of the skeletal remains.
We're trying to just really get a much more detailed map
of lead in the bone and that's the technology
that has given us that high-resolution image.
Unlike a conventional x-ray, fluoroscopy can tell us
how much land is in the bones and exactly when it got there.
Can separate new growth from old growth.
We can color-code that growth by lead levels
and we can see what's the difference in the new growth,
as opposed to the old growth within the bone.
High lead levels in new bone would mean
the men were exposed to it just before they died.
Could this finally solve a mystery
that's remain trapped in these frozen waters for centuries?
The franklin expedition is one
of the most baffling mysteries I've ever come across.
129 experienced men armed with the latest technology
and three years worth of food set out across the arctic sea
to discover the fabled northwest passage.
None of them come back
and no one knows what happened to them.
To find out, scientists are testing
the well-preserved bodies of three of the crew.
Were franklin's men poisoned by the tinned food
that was meant to keep them alive?
This new analysis suggests not.
The shocking discovery is
that what we had thought was the explanation
is not really the explanation anymore.
There weren't higher levels of lead
in people who had been presumably exposed to it longer
and, indeed, that the lead probably did not come
from exposure experienced during the expedition.
X-ray fluoroscopy reveals that the high lead levels were
in older bone growth,
suggesting the men were exposed to it
via industrial pollution before they left home.
It doesn't look like lead poisoning is the smoking gun.
So, if it wasn't lead that killed them, what was it?
For almost two centuries, there's been little to go on.
We wonder how, given the diligence of the search
over more than a century and a half,
we've found so little.
Why isn't there more?
But the recent discovery of franklin's ships,
preserved beneath the ice,
should prove a major breakthrough.
Many of us who've been studying this for years
thought the odds of actually finding one
of these ships are low.
We imagined they were probably just
smashed to pieces in the ice.
Surely, now, all the questions can be answered.
No one has set eyes on these ships in almost two centuries.
Now, a team of marine archeologists is surveying them.
The terror is eerily intact.
Who knows what we're gonna find inside?
The conditions for preservation are very good
because you have depth and you have less light
than you would at shallower depths
and the cold temperature of the water really helps.
But not everyone is happy
about the underwater investigation.
Within two weeks of the team diving on the wrecks,
six people in the local inuit town die.
In a small community, that's a lot of deaths
to happen in a short period of time,
so, some people began to speak of a curse of franklin.
Some believe the spirits of franklin's men
have been released from their watery grave.
The local tribes even speak of shadowy figure
walking the beaches and the ice where the ships once were.
I think there is still a kind of
a spectral feeling to the arctic.
Local superstition is not the only factor
making investigation difficult.
The freezing underwater conditions and the location
limit the divers' season to just three weeks a year.
Remote cameras have to be used to explore inside the ships,
so investigators can see, but they can't touch.
But could these submerged ships finally unlock the mystery
of what happened to franklin's expedition?
It may well be that there'll be records,
of some way, shape, or form that have survived on the ship,
which will give us some insight.
Drawers, they're dark.
There's no oxygen content in there.
There's no marine life and there is every chance
that we'll actually get written records of what happened.
There's captain crozier's desk,
still sitting there, a bit of silt on top of it,
looking as though you could just open one of the drawers
and find the answer to all of the mysteries.
It could still take years, but, hopefully, one day,
we can open that drawer and finally discover the truth.
July 4th weekend, 2019.
A man goes into the ocean off a popular tourist beach
on florida's emerald coast and comes out feeling fine.
48 hours later, he's dead.
Was it something in the water
and, if so, can forensic science
help us track down this killer on the coast?
Our beaches are where we go to relax and have fun,
but what if there's an invisible killer lurking just offshore?
There's something out there
that people don't even know is out there.
You can't smell it.
You can't see it.
You can't taste it.
It's terrifying.
Doctors are initially mystified
by the death of the florida man.
But laboratory tests finally reveal the killer's identity.
Not a stealthy new predator,
but a microscopic, deadly bacteria.
Once inside,
this starts devouring and eating human tissue.
If it's not stopped in time,
the only course of action is amputation.
If we can't get it out, it can also lead to death.
The idea of contracting a flesh-eating bacteria
in water that you swim in is the stuff of horror movies.
Where did this flesh-eater come from,
has it risen from the hidden depths of the ocean,
and can we stop it before it's too late?
Evidence suggests there could be
a new killer lurking in our oceans,
a deadly bacteria that eats its way
through flesh and internal organs.
What can be done to stop it spreading?
Can this new bacteria be stopped?
Are we gonna end up shutting down our beaches?
Science has some of the answers.
This particular bacteria likes low salinity,
warm bodies of water,
often found near coastal regions where humans frequent.
A deadly waterborne bacteria
that hangs out in the same place as we do
is a frightening thought.
And this one has a name...
Vibrio vulnificus.
Research suggests it's transmitted to humans
through open wounds or by eating shellfish,
and it's particularly dangerous
to those with a compromised immune system.
The problem is is that, when it mutates
and becomes harmful or active to humans,
it can cause sepsis.
Sepsis is when the body's immune system
overreacts to an infection
and starts to attack its own tissues and organs.
It can quickly prove life-threatening.
The centers for disease control
estimates that about 80,000 people per year
are stricken with this illness.
People get out of the water
and they feel fine for a few days
and then, all of a sudden, your leg starts to swell up
and, within hours or days, it's cut off.
And it may not just be affecting all beaches.
In June 2019,
there's a new case reported.
An experienced water sports guide
is paddling across an inland florida lake.
And, later on in the day, he noticed
that his arm had swelled up significantly
and, as the day went on, it got even worse.
He's not immersed in the water.
It's not in his eyes.
It's not in his ears.
Could it now be possible
to get infected by the bacteria
without even getting in the water?
Scientists are now more concerned with it
because it seems to be mutating
and it seems to actually be more common.
It's finding new ways to infect.
Significantly, the paddleboarder had been on the lake
many times before without any problems.
The worrisome thing is that people are starting
to get infected where we haven't had cases of this before.
It's out there.
It's spreading.
Is this a result of global warming?
Is it issues with pollution in the water?
What are the issues that are creating it?
New infection sites are being discovered all the time.
Rising sea temperatures mean more and more coastal regions
are now potential breeding grounds for the bacteria.
The warmer the ocean,
the better the conditions for bacteria.
Most bacteria don't travel across large bodies of water
because colder currents kill them off,
but a new insight suggests
human activity could be responsible
for transporting this underwater killer worldwide.
Over 90% of everything in our homes comes to us by sea
and vast cargo ships don't just transport our global goods.
They may also carry flesh-eating bacteria.
Large ships now take on water as ballast.
They suck up water in this port
and then, when they get to another port,
they empty the ballast tanks whilst they're offloading.
So this means there is a constant flow of water
being carried around the world on our global shipping network.
A never-ending flow of ships
carrying tons of water from country to country.
If this is how the vibrio bacteria is being spread,
it may already be too late.
This invasive bacteria has the potential
to become a global health crisis.
The vibrio bacteria can be treated with antibiotics,
if administered quickly,
so medical teams need to be alerted and prepared.
But with 70% of the world covered by water,
it's almost impossible to know
where this invisible killer will strike next.
Perhaps we can use the tools of science and technology
to better predict where these outbreaks might occur.
There is one pioneering technology
that could help us stay a step ahead.
Computer modeling can be used to create simulations
of where the vibrio bacteria might appear next.
Scientists are using satellite technology
to track salinity,
ocean currents, and temperature.
To try and map global trade and global currents
and see where they're gonna come,
so they can move the resources to be there.
Will these new, predictive techniques be enough
to help us defeat an invisible killer
or are we heading towards a world
where it's no longer safe to go into the water?
In pirate stories of old, finding buried treasure
is always about a map where x marks the spot.
In the deep water realm, however,
things are rarely that simple.
But could new underwater technology
do away with treasure charts and help to locate
what's possibly the greatest pirate's haul in history?
Could the treasure have been right under our noses
the whole time?
The mystery starts
with an infamous caribbean pirate
called captain henry morgan.
Captain morgan is not just a rum bottle.
He is actually a real person
and he's a real living legend, in his own time.
In 1671,
morgan sets out with 36 ships
to raid the spanish-controlled city of panama
and steal its gold.
Panama was one of the richest cities
in south america at that time.
It's the biggest heist of the age.
He carried off 134 horse-loads of gold and silver.
But then, something unusual happens.
According to one account,
morgan, unbeknownst to most of his men,
sneaks back on board
and leaves panama with just three ships.
It is possible that he may have beat a hasty retreat
because he had a ship full of treasure
that he wanted to keep for himself.
When morgan arrives back home, in port royal, jamaica,
he has only one ship,
and a fraction of the loot.
What happened to the rest of the treasure?
Did captain morgan make away with a lotta loot
and, if he did, where did he stash it?
There were all sorts of rumors about where the treasure
had been placed, what he'd done with it.
For over 300 years, people have put forward theories
for the possible location of morgan's missing treasure.
But, now, a team of underwater archeologists
have discovered a shipwreck near panama,
and it's on the route morgan would have sailed.
It was associated with morgan's adventure
because the material on the ship dated to that period.
Could this mystery shipwreck be the underwater hiding place
for captain morgan's missing treasure?
Infamous pirate captain morgan makes off
with a fortune in silver and gold.
But when he arrives back in port,
most of the loot has mysteriously disappeared.
Where is captain morgan's missing treasure?
New underwater investigation techniques
could finally uncover its hiding place.
The question is, did captain morgan
make away with a lot of loot?
And if he did, where did he stash it?
Some archeologists believe that a shipwreck found near panama
could be one of morgan's fleet.
They found cannons and chests.
But after further analysis, they actually figured out
that this was more likely a spanish ship.
So, while these new ships
and new evidence comes to light,
really all it's doing is it's furthering the mystery.
So if the treasure's not on this shipwreck,
where could it be?
An interesting detail and accounts all the time
could give us a new lead.
Captain morgan takes several weeks
to get from panama city back to port royal,
much longer than expected.
Could morgan have stopped on his way back
to port royal?
Because he's a pirate, he doesn't have access
to normal ports, so he would have to be
very careful where he's gonna make his stops.
There is one possible location.
On the route back from panama city to port royal,
you have this island called san andrés.
San andrés is a small coral island in the middle
of the caribbean sea,
reputed to be a favorite of morgan's,
speculated that he might have unloaded some of his cargo
and spoils there.
Given the strength of the winds,
they may have had time to stop and unload a ship.
San andrés is strewn with sea caves,
making it an ideal place to hide treasure.
There are all sorts of rumors that he managed
to find a very deep cave
and stored all the gold down in there.
And that has been a site of many treasure hunts
for many years ever since.
Despite many searches over the years,
no sign of morgan's missing treasure has ever been found.
Perhaps the solution lies closer to home.
Another theory that has always been present
is that actually captain morgan kept the treasure with him,
and it came back to port royal with him.
If you lived in jamaica
and you wanted to spend your money,
you'd keep it somewhere nearby.
You know, you don't want to have your closest atm
1,000 miles away.
It just doesn't make sense.
Port royal was really the pirate haven of the caribbean.
And really, it's the setting for the modern-day view.
We have of what pirate life was like.
Morgan lived out the rest of his days in port royal,
where he was buried,
taking the secret of the missing treasure to his grave.
Then, four years later, a natural disaster
engulfed the city.
It actually sunk into the sea
after an earthquake and a tsunami hit the region.
Did morgan's treasure end up under the sea?
The potential could be that morgan hid it
somewhere around the city.
And once that disappeared beneath the waves,
so too did the treasure.
Now a team of marine archeologists has begun to map
the underwater remains of the sunken city.
There more or less intact is an archeological site
to be investigated properly.
Perhaps this new research will finally
locate captain morgan's hidden treasure.
One of the techniques being used is photographer.
Photogrammetry is a survey technique,
a remote-sensing technique.
You go and take photos of an area or an object
and you kind of go around it.
And it's an algorithm essentially
that meshes all these photos together
and creates a 3-d object.
It's only recently been developed
to map underwater sites.
The team can create a 3-d picture
of what the city looked like
when it disappeared under the waves
three centuries ago.
It lets you reach out and touch history.
It's pretty cool.
If we can accurately create a map
of captain morgan's period,
then that gives us an idea of where such treasures
might have been hidden.
It's early days, but when the map is finished,
it should be possible to pinpoint where morgan lived.
Could the hiding place of his famous missing treasure
be uncovered at last?
In the underwater ruins of port royal?
This isn't like finding a pirate ship.
It's finding a whole pirate city.
So who knows what you can find?
The pacific ocean
is the largest and deepest ocean on earth.
It's a place I've come back to time and again
to investigate the mysteries beneath our waters
because it's the perfect place to hide.
June 18th, 2019,
the u.S. Coast guard are in pursuit of a mystery craft
heading north off the coast of ecuador.
It's sitting low in the water,
barely visible above the waves, and moving fast.
The coast guard has been tracking it for 12 hours.
Could it be a new military prototype?
But whose?
And why is it here in the pacific ocean?
The sub's crew don't seem to realize
that they're being chased.
The operator of this vessel is looking forward.
He can only see one 100 yards in front of him.
He's not even aware that the u.S. Coast guard
has surrounded him.
It's gonna be hard to get on.
To solve this minisub mystery,
they're going to have to jump onto the moving craft.
June, 2019.
The u.S. Coast guard is tracking an unidentified vessel
traveling at speed through the pacific ocean.
It looks to be heading for the u.S. Coast.
Could it be some kind of secret weapon
or something else?
Coast guard officers have been trying to stop the craft
with no success.
So finally, two marines jump on board.
As well as its frightened crew of five,
the vessel contains cocaine with a street value
of $232 million.
The mystery craft is what's known as a narco sub.
Narco sub is a pretty rudimentary submarine
built by drug cartels
to smuggle drugs from south america to north america.
The business of trafficking billions of dollars
of illegal drugs to the u.S. Has gone underwater.
The coast guard have stopped this one.
But how many more of these homemade subs
could be making their way undetected to u.S. Shores?
The ocean is lawless.
There are no borders at sea.
It's so vast, it's just impossible to police.
And these subs are designed
to be incredibly hard to spot in open water.
It's a mostly submerged craft that sits just at the waterline,
so it's very difficult to detect along the horizon of the water.
On conventional radar, it might not show up
as anything other than another wave on the ocean.
So really, you have to have a visual on it to identify it.
Few of these vessels have been caught in the act
because many have a built-in failsafe
that helps them disappear without trace.
The idea behind the submarines
is that they're pretty easy to dispose of.
If you're about to get caught,
you can scuttle the ship really quickly and get off.
Yeah, it sinks, it's lost.
Where's the evidence?
We don't know how many of these might be lying on the bottom
full of drugs, cash, guns.
Put where are these subs coming from?
One possibility is the rivers of colombia,
a country that, as I know well,
has many areas that are remote and almost impenetrable.
We have no idea in terms of how many narco subs there have been.
We don't know how many have been successful.
The estimates still run to as much as 1/3 or even 1/2
of all the drugs which gets to united states
come via these submarines.
That means it's still a hell of a lot getting through.
And could the narco sub phenomenon be behind
one of the great unsolved mysteries of the drug world?
It was one of the most infamous drug lords of all time
who first took the narcotics battle under water in the 1990s.
Pablo escobar helped to invent this new method
of delivering cocaine to america.
He was the first one to try to use these narco subs
to transport narcotics in a whole new way.
Escobar was killed in a shootout in 1993,
but many believe some of his fortune is still hidden away.
Could his missing millions be under the ocean?
I've heard that some of the vast escobar fortune
lies at the bottom in a narco sub.
It's quite possible.
It probably would've been in the form of money
wrapped in plastic.
Drug cartels have been getting away with it for decades.
But state-of-the-art technology is changing the game.
To catch this sub, the coast guard used
surveillance gear developed for the u.S. Military.
The aircraft which had been most affective so far
is the p-3 orion,
which has a magnetic anomaly detector on its tail.
The aircraft's magnetic anomaly detector
works in a similar way to a metal detector.
Its sensor can pick out minute variations
in the earth's magnetic field caused by metal objects.
They can detect a magnetic anomaly in the ocean.
That's working on the subs that are built of steel.
So if there's something like a submersible near the surface,
these planes can zero in on them.
Magnetic detection technology has given the authorities
an edge for now,
but this high-stakes game of hide and seek
is changing all the time.
You move to fiberglass or other non-magnetic materials,
and you can defeat the magnetometers
that may be able to find.
A fiberglass narco sub
would be almost impossible to detect
with the coast guard's current technology.
It's like a game of underwater cat and mouse.
It's going to be a constant battle of technology,
and it's gonna be a constant war of one-upmanship
of who has the most tech.
We've only discovered a fraction
of what's beneath our oceans.
They hold secrets of our present and our past,
and they rarely give up those secrets easily.
But every now and then,
we stumble upon something truly mystifying.
In 1980, the remnants of an ancient vessel
are discovered beneath the shallow waters of the java sea.
Its timbers are completely rotted away.
This is a seriously old shipwreck.
Inside are over a 100,000 pieces
of priceless ceramics, many still intact.
Divers have discovered an ancient shipwreck
full of thousands of pieces of priceless pottery
which have lain undiscovered for centuries.
But where did this ship come from?
And how did it end up at the bottom of the java sea?
This shipwreck was special.
It was an old asian design,
and it is full of pottery.
We're talking huge quantities of pottery.
With no ship left, with the wood all gone,
it's really difficult to identify its age.
But from the size of the debris field,
we can estimate that the ship was about 90 feet long
and 25 feet wide.
Perhaps forensic analysis can tell us more
about this mystery ship.
It's been underwater so long, there's barely anything left.
But the research team catch a lucky break.
You sometimes find organic material,
some of the original cargo, still in them,
which is unbelievable.
In this case, they found a piece of resin
that they use to radiocarbon date the wreck.
Carbon dating allows us to put a time clock
on artifacts that contain carbon.
It turns out that carbon has this isotope
that has a specific decay rate on it,
and if we use that decay rate, we can backtrack time
for how old a specific artifact might be.
Initial analysis has shown that it might've been
a chinese trading vessel from the 13th century.
It's a huge step forward,
but if anything, it only deepens the mystery
because the ship's design and contents
connect it to one of the great mysteries of the ancient world.
For over 4,000 years,
our seas have played a vital role in how we trade.
The oceans have always been the original superhighway,
the original internet.
But unlike land routes,
they leave very few traces of our trading past.
We know a very small portion
of what was happening on the seas even 800 years ago.
Understanding how the trade flows
and seeing where the trade flows is honestly a way
of charting development of humanity
and how we've grown.
Can the precious cargo that sat for centuries on the seabed
give us more pieces of the puzzle?
Pottery is actually a very useful tool in dating shipwrecks
because once clay is fired,
it becomes nearly indestructible.
One of the ceramic pieces carries a maker's mark...
The ancient equivalent of a "made in china" stamp...
And this one is from a chinese province
which only used that name for a short period of time,
which gives them a date range
that could even be in the 12th century.
We're talking about a shipwreck here
that is not long after the age of the vikings.
This is an immense find
in the condition that it was in.
It's a remarkably rare find.
But can a new kind of radiation technology tell us more?
Scientists developed this x-ray gun
that can use x-ray beams
to detect the chemical composition of the ceramics.
We can look at the composition of the materials
that makes up the pot itself,
and we can date that against a database
of soils and clays from around the world
and be able to get an idea of where the pottery was made.
X-ray analysis of the pottery reveals something remarkable.
The ceramics had come from different places in china,
hundreds of miles apart.
So what these x-ray signatures have told us
is that this ship first loaded and porcelain
in fuzhou and then made its way to quanzhou
and loaded another load
before heading down towards indonesia.
This is a very big economic undertaking.
This is not a ship doing a single port to single port
because there'd be no way it would carry such a cargo
focused on just one thing
because it wouldn't be economically viable.
And this tells us the trade network
wasn't a series of small bombs
but actually was big
and constant voyages.
It's the equivalent of a modern cargo ship,
but 800 years ago,
and it had a traveled an incredible distance
when it went down.
The ship sank 2,000 miles
from where it originally unloaded cargo.
In the 12th century, that is a huge distance.
That's like going across the atlantic.
It showed us something we didn't know existed,
which is this long-range trading network from china.
This is a huge breakthrough,
something that we didn't know before.
But the more we discover about this mysterious ship,
the more we realize how much there is still to learn about it
and the world it came from.
Who were these traders in southeast asia
putting these networks together?
We may know the age and where this cargo was made.
We don't necessarily know where it was headed
or even where it was loaded,
so there are a lot of questions yet to be answered.
Some people say never look back,
but I believe it's only by understanding
where we've come from
that we can truly look forward.
There's still so much we don't know
about what lies beneath our vast oceans.
But perhaps the technology of the future
will finally answer some of our remaining questions
about the past.
Subtitles Diego Moraes(oakislandtk) www.opensubtitles.org