History of Diving
on the Wreck

Early Salvage

Early the next day, February 4th, as the storm was subsiding, the pilot vessel Mercurius investigated the site and reported that although broken, the ship's masts were above the water. The following April a special enquiry was held into the circumstances of such a considerable loss of the Company's assets. The Commissioners blamed the disaster on bad piloting and of Captain van der Horst's decision to sail out of the port of Rammekens in poor conditions. Later, to prevent further accidents, the Zeeland Chamber ordered new buoys to be placed in the Deurloo Channel and an accurate chart to be published which included all bouyage. This chart was prepared a few years later by the famous cartographer, Johannes van Keulen, in a printed form with two pages of description of all the buoys in the channel.

As was the practice of the day, the V.O.C. pursued the recovery of wrecked cargoes. They contacted high skilled English barrel divers, offering them generous shares of the recovered property in return for their labour. James Bushell from Essex was the first to be contracted. He asked for a chart to be prepared for him to find the wreck. The Company's cartographer, Abraham Arias, undertook this. Bushell never dived the wreck, but in 1736 Captain William Evans, a veteran diver who had worked before with the English and Swedish East India Companys, successfully found the site. Using a wooden barrel with viewing and hand ports, he recovered four bronze guns, 856 bottles of wine and four silver ducatons. He found the visibility so poor and the conditions so difficult that he did not return to the site. No other documented attempts to salvage the wreck are known.

Bell divers at work.

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