Dead Men's Silver: The Story of Australia's Greatest Shipwreck Hunter

CHAPTER ONE

Dead Men’s Silver

Like so many other small boys through the years, I encountered my first ‘pieces of eight’ in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island. Wide-eyed, I drank in the adrenalin flow of adventure surging through the pages. Never dreaming that one day I would find my own pieces of eight in a 17th-century shipwreck lying at the bottom of the sea.

I identified with the young hero Jim Hawkins. Sometimes I felt that I knew Treasure Island’s characters – like that roguish devil Long John Silver – better than some of the real flesh-and-blood people of my own acquaintance. I heard the tap-tap of his crutch – a deadly weapon when he was aroused – and saw the fluffed feathers of Cap’n Flint, the bright-eyed parrot clutching his shoulder, who was wont to lustily flap his wings and shriek ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’ at any provocation at all.

Stevenson’s story has become one of the best-loved British novels through the years since it was first published in 1881. It has become even more popular in modern times, with more than 50 film, television, stage, and musical adaptations, including the screen adventures of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Stevenson himself described the recipe:

Schooners, and islands, and maroons

And buccaneers and buried gold

And all the old romance re-told!

The final paragraph of Treasure Island has stayed in my own mind since I first read it. Young Jim Hawkins – much older in experience than when he first shipped aboard the Hispaniola – tells us:

The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all I know, where Flint buried them, and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’

When I read Treasure Island it was as a work of fiction. Certainly I never expected to find pieces of eight myself. But that would be changed forever as a diver one autumn day with a big sea rolling in from the Indian Ocean in the west. In that watery world, as my silver bubbles rose towards the surface and the surf pounded on the reef above like a roll of drums, it was as though the waves themselves were announcing, opera-style as in ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’, the start of a great new adventure. It might have been something coming straight from Stevenson’s own inspired pen. But what was happening here was real. The silver heavy in my hand confirmed the magic moment.

My breaths came quickly though the rubber mouthpiece gripped between my teeth. My first piece of treasure was as real as my own escalating heartbeat thudding beneath the breast of my wetsuit. And all the while my brain shouting, It can’t be!

But it was no dream. No trick of the imagination. Nor was it that occasionally reported phenomenon of diving, the ‘raptures of the deep’.

The diving site was south of the small fishing village of Ledge Point on the West Australian coast, in an underwater cave below the rocky ledge of a little-known reef. Local fishermen called the reef the Three Mile, and the old Dutch of old had named it Draeckensriff (Dragon Reef) after the Vergulde Draeck (Golden Dragon) ship which was wrecked there in 1656.

A legendary East Indiaman, she was lost 124 years before James Cook sighted Botany Bay from the poop deck of the barque Endeavour, and 174 years before the first European settlers arrived on the west coast.

The better part of a lifetime later I still recall the current threatening to tear my fins off my ankles while I struggled to hold onto the muzzle of one of the Draeck’s cannon, fighting to stay in one spot while the fizzing spiracles of foam from the breaking waves above came reaching down from the surface.

From below they looked like dead men’s crooked fingers!

A little higher on the reef face and up to the right I saw the dark mouth of the cave. I drifted into it, mouthpiece clenched between my teeth and trailing my silver hookah airline after me like an umbilical cord.

Sheltered from the washing-machine effect of the waves breaking on the reef above, it was a welcome place of refuge. The red and yellow gorgonia fans growing down from the roof swayed gracefully in the current like an underwater fairy garden.

As my trapped air bubbles made silver puddles like mercury on the roof of the cave I reached down towards a dark oblong lying on the sandy floor. It felt strangely heavy in my hand when I picked it up. As I rubbed with a red-gloved thumb, letters and figures began to appear:

PHILIPPUS IIII … REX HISPANIA … DG …

(Philip IV … King of Spain … Dei Gratia – by the Grace of God)

There was a date visible on the coin in elongated old-fashioned numbers – 1654 – two years before the Vergulde Draeck struck this reef.

By now my hand was trembling for I knew what I had found. The figure 8 alongside a coat of arms confirmed it – eight reales! Then the full realisation dawned on me … My God! It’s a piece of eight!

The Vergulde Draeck had carried ten chests of silver when she struck this reef in 1656. Two-thirds of her people drowned at this spot, their bodies washing onto the reef, then sinking to the sea floor, clothes billowing in the current. The silver falling beside them.

I knew that the Draeck was a vessel of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the great Dutch East India Company, better known to the world by its three initials ‘VOC’.

Those letters were inscribed on all the company’s possessions, from cannons to candlesticks and navigation instruments. They were incised into the deck beams of the ships, flown proudly on pennants at the masthead. They were cut into the gates of forts and factories throughout the East Indies.

The VOC was one of the greatest commercial empires the world has ever known. Jesus Christ is great! the Dutch had said smilingly. But trade is better!

The Draeck was a part of that vast trading enterprise, a monopoly which stretched east from the Cape of Good Hope across the Indian Ocean to the Indonesian archipelago and north into the South China Sea and to China and Japan.

We knew that the Vergulde Draeck had been carrying a massive treasure when she struck this reef in 1656, when the undercut limestone edge tore her oak timbers apart. Iron-bound chests containing 78,680 guilders’ value of silver coin had gone bubbling down in green water in that disaster long ago.

The euphoria of the ship’s discovery had been somewhat dampened by divergent opinions about the question of whether the silver coin could have survived the chemical action of salt water over three centuries. Some scientific people who were supposed to know about such things, had said that the chemical reaction with salt water would likely mean the silver was dissolved or, at the very least, corroded beyond recognition.

Or perhaps when the iron-bound wooden chests disintegrated, the pieces of silver would have been scattered in the strong current like flower petals blown away in a strong wind. Either way, the experts suggested, there might be little or nothing for a 20th-century treasure salvor to find.

But here was proof in the hand – one piece of eight at least.

This  silver had been minted in Mexico 309 years before. The ore was torn from the red earth of the South Americas by Indian slaves under the whips of Spanish overseers. The masters were manic to get more and more silver out of the ground and the lives of the unfortunate native Indians were considered of no consequence.

The Jerusalem Cross of Spain was stamped on one side, and the coat of arms of Philip IV, King of Spain, was stamped on the obverse. The coin in my hand had been struck at a time when Philip held dominion not only over his own Iberian provinces of Leon and Castille, Aragon and Granada, but also Portugal, Naples, Sicily, Belgium and the twin continents of North and South America. King Philip at the time this ship sailed was the most powerful man in all the world.

But powerful as he was at the time, there were men who insulted the King of Spain and his kingdom from afar, and made rude middle-finger gestures at the yellow and red flag of Hispania.

Old Pus and Blood! they called it.

The Protestant privateers shot holes in the wooden sides and canvas sails of the king’s great galleons on the high seas.

Increasing in boldness, the Brethren of the Coast led by the Englishman Francis Drake (El Draeck), sacked Spanish colonial towns on the Isthmus of Panama and outrageously robbed the king of his gold and silver. Drake, Frobisher, Morgan, Anson and the Dutchman Piet Heyn were each in his turn a pestilence, an abomination, to the King of Spain.

The silver caused a fever. A seaborne madness of lust and greed among the pirates, the buccaneers, the privateers. They were men whose ships flew the infamous black flag with its skull and crossbones. Their battle cry was ‘A gold chain or a wooden leg!’ and their ambitions focused on the acquisition of as many of those pieces of eight as they could lay their hands on.

The buccaneers kissed the Jerusalem Cross with bearded lips and sent peals of laughter ringing skywards as they drank their captured Spanish wine and Jamaican rum and toasted to ‘A short life and a merry one!’

And here in my hand was one of those pieces of eight!

More bubbles flowed to the roof of the cave. More silver puddles of trapped air surreally reflecting my face behind the mask and my coin below like a submarine ceiling mirror.

Long John Silver’s parrot screeched at me down the years: Pieces of eight! … Pieces of eight!

I spoke the name of the old ship softly into my mouthpiece. ‘The Vergulde Draeck … the Gilt, the Golden Dragon …’

At this place, in the darkness 307 years before, the East Indiaman had crashed her red lion figurehead into the rocks with a force that brought her masts tumbling down and sent cannon bursting through their ports out into the foam. I remembered the lines from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy Father lies

Of his bones are coral made.

Those are pearls that were his eyes …

There were no coral-crusted bones among the seaweed fronds that I could see from my cave. But one hundred and eighteen people had been sucked below the foam here in the darkness. Hearing the roar of the waves above me I was surprised that there had been any survivors at all. But if the 75 desperate souls who reached the beach – including the captain, Pieter Albertsz – rejoiced in their apparent good fortune, they would only prolong their lives for a short time as castaways on a desolate desert shore.

Did they see the ships offshore that failed to find them? How long did they survive in a hostile land on barrels of food washed in from the wreck of their vessel? Did some of the strongest and most determined join the Aborigines?

Looking down I saw the edge of another coin showing through the sand. I took off my glove and raked my fingers through the sand and found another, and yet another. The sandy floor was full of them, like raisins in a Christmas pudding!

Digging further I was astonished to find that the floor of the cave was studded with salt-blackened silver! There were similarly stamped smaller pieces of four, and two silver reales, or royals, which was the Spanish name for ‘king’s money’.

I stuffed my pieces of Old World silver down the sleeves of my neoprene rubber suit until they began falling out from sheer weight. Then I filled up first one glove and then the other, and found still more silver!

While I was wondering where I could put the surplus there came a peremptory tug on the airline. Then four tugs, clear and defined. It was the diver’s signal: Come back at once! I knew it well.

There was no need to guess the reason. The surface weather, bad enough before we started the dive, would have worsened. Reluctantly I slid out of the cave and followed the airline back to the boat.

The sea had risen and our boat, the old shark long-liner Dorothy, was being thrown and tossed on her beam ends in the swell, her mast swinging in wild arcs across the sky.

It was difficult getting back aboard and I finally fell onto the deck over the gunwale with a whoop and an undignified and uncaring clatter of old silver coins. One of the other divers had been thrown on the reef by a wave, and lost skin and blood, but all of them had an expression on their faces I had never seen before, but would certainly see again.

The grins were wide, ivory, from ear to ear, and there was a strange light in their eyes as they showed each other the coins that they had found in different parts of the wreck. There were also two brass candlesticks and one or two Bellarmine jugs with beardman faces and – most dramatic of all – two great yellow elephant tusks carried from some African plain long, long ago.

As the Dorothy headed back towards the anchorage, buffeting her way through the wind-whipped waves, the spray flying across the decks, a bottle of Bundaberg rum from the ‘medical kit’ was passed around. Gulping the fiery spirit we became hoarse shouting toasts to ‘Pieces of eight!’ and the Dragon treasure over the noise of the diesel engine. It was a wonderful time.

Later George Brenzi – big George with the liquid Italian eyes – brought out a bottle of Marsala. And why not? It was one of those days which demanded a celebration.

Only Maurie Hammond, the cameraman, did not smile. He shook his head and said three words I can still hear today, ‘Dead Men’s Silver!’, and reached out for the bottle.

Philip IV, King of Spain, in the portrait painted by Diego Velasquez in 1656, the year the Vergulde Draeck fatally struck the reef.

CHAPTER TWO

Under the Silver Skin

My career as an underwater diver began on the day I purchased an ex-military gasmask from an army disposals store. It was the early summer of 1946, and I was 13 years old at the time.

The shop was typical of the disposals stores which had sprung up pedalling the left-over wares of the Second World War. The walls were lined with Australian and British service uniforms draped on wire hangers. Though some still carried their insignia of rank, ranging from lieutenants’ pips to sergeants’ and corporals’ stripes, to me they appeared forlorn. They no longer had any useful purpose in life. No more pack drill, no more stentorian commands bellowed on parade, no more whispered orders (heads down) as the bullets whined. Though I examined them with a critical gaze I could see no bloodstains or bullet holes. Small boys look for such things.

There were other pieces of equipment on the shelves, including gasmasks in varying stages of repair. While there had never been a gas attack in the Second World War, the gasmasks in their khaki bags had been universal equipment for every Allied soldier, sailor and airman. They were hung on pegs in barracks and bivouacs and HQ administration centres. Carried in trucks and vehicles. Sometimes they were used as door props or pillows, in fact for many odd-job roles except their original purpose.

The gasmasks, still in their original khaki bags with carry-straps, looked distinctly less smart now than when they were first issued from the quartermaster’s store. I pointed to one and it was passed to me over the counter. The bag was scuffed and worn, but when I took the mask out it had a nice rubbery smell, and was pristine and black as a crow’s wing. It had bright shiny eyepieces and a crinkly khaki-yellow hose which appealed to me at once. It was love at first sight.

After a brief appraisal I handed over a couple of shillings saved up from my pocket money. A fraction of its original cost of manufacture. The man who sold it to me didn’t ask me why I wanted it. Though if he had been told he would probably have been surprised, not to say astonished.

During the Second World War we had been inspired by films of frogmen commandos in breathing apparatus riding underwater chariots into Axis harbours. There were also books about them like James Benson’s Above Us the Waves, but it was the movies that we small boys really devoured.

It seemed to my critical junior appraisal that the masks the charioteers wore in their watery raids into enemy territory were much the same as the pig-faced ARP gasmasks commonplace during the war. Single-minded even at that age, I bought the mask, and took it home on the trolley bus. I waited until my mother was in another room before I tried it on. Satisfied, I took the chemical canister off the end of the crinkly hose, inserted the end of my mother’s laundry hose, and – presto! – I was a frogman! What my mother was going to do without the hose while I was at Rottnest Island, staying with my friend Bruce Lawson’s family, was something which hadn’t crossed my thoughts. I was looking at a bigger picture.

The mask was essentially an improvisation and would be considered dangerous by any modern scuba instructor, but we had been swimming like fishes since we were five years old and had no fear of the water. When the time finally came for the saltwater test it was a bright blue-sky day, the sea smooth as glass. Perfect for a crucial event.

At Rottnest we had chosen the site for the test at what was known as the Diving Pool just around the headland from the popular swimming place The Basin. I pulled the gasmask on over my face, making a few adjustments to the straps. Then – with the end of the hose grasped in my left hand and held above the surface – I launched myself into the water. There was a moment when everything was obscured by the bubbles of entry. Then I was totally amazed by what I saw.

Nothing could have prepared me for the number of fish that I could see now in their own element with the glass eye-pieces of the gasmask between my face and the water. Everything came into focus, sharp and clear, as though I were a fish myself.

‘There’s fish here! Millions of ’em!’ I shouted through the hose. Then cough, choke, splutter, as the end of the hose went underwater. ‘You should see!’ cough, cough, ‘What I can see!’

‘Here – let me have a go!’ Bruce reached out a hand.

But with the water blown out of my mother’s hose like a spouting whale I was unheeding and already swimming out into the deeper water. It was a view of life which the designer and manufacturer of the gasmask had never intended, but I was right in my original assessment – if the gasmask could keep out mustard gas it could also hold back salt water!

There seemed to be fish everywhere – all sizes and shapes. Some were as bright and colourful as the rosella parrots we saw ashore. The fish which were swiftly moving were all silver, swimming around me anti-clockwise in a continual stream. I recognised silver drummer, skipjack and herring, from seeing the  species brought up on the end of fishing lines. A fish in trouble, like a human in the same fix, is a pathetic sight. These were quite different. They swam around me boldly and confidently, assessing this strange goggle-eyed being which had appeared among them. Some of them were quite large.

My chief recollection is of eyes, dozens of eyes, some yellow, bright and gleaming, and all looking at me. There was a movement on the bottom. Another pair of eyes was looking up at me, goat’s eyes with elongated pupils. An octopus camouflaged against the seaweed broke cover and slithered under a rock. More eyes, this time in the sand in the centre of the pool.

A small stingray shook the sand off its back and I backed away knowing it had a barb on its tail that could inflict a painful wound. I had seen dead stingrays ashore and thought them hideously ugly, but this one, an eagle ray with brown and black markings, now flew birdlike underwater on slender wings and I thought it was really quite beautiful.

Looking past the fish I saw seaweed swaying in the current as though in the breeze, and some bright pink corals. But what would be the most enduring memory of that day was the surface – or at least the underside of the surface. It looked like a silver skin, a molten sky, a metallic ceiling, to the underwater world. It occurred to me that I was actually Under the Silver Skin! – my own secret view of the surface from below the waves.

I swam back to the shore, exhausted by effort and excitement, to give Bruce his overdue turn with the apparatus. He was soon out in the centre of the pool trumpeting the same ecstatic hoots through the hose that had punctuated my own swim.

We had hoped that we would be able to breathe as deep as the length of the hose, which was six feet in the old measurement, and were puzzled to find that we could not breathe even a couple of feet below the surface.

Water pressure, of course, meant that we couldn’t take in air at surface pressure when we were deeper down. Later, using compressed air equipment, we would learn that pressure on the human body under water increases in proportion to the depth. At nine metres (30 feet) it is twice the surface pressure, and three times at 33 metres (100 feet). Our 100-foot scuba dives were still some distance in the future.

At Rottnest Island that summer we used the gasmask and hose for all they were worth, mastering various problems as they arose. The eyepieces often misted up. But we found that rubbing a slice of cut potato over the glass corrected the problem. Sometimes they gave us two ranges of focus at once so that it seemed we had gone cross-eyed. Solution: shut one eye. We found we could dive on one breath as long as we kept a thumb over the end of the laundry hose.

We were thrilled by the sight of our first shark. It was a wobbegong, or carpet shark, lying immobile – as wobbegongs do – on the bottom. It had a complicated pattern of mottled brown and khaki colouring (hence the name carpet shark) and a set of weird whiskers at its mouth.

We made daring passes in its vicinity while the shark watched us with its little pig eyes in apparent disdain. Moving its whiskers so that it looked as though it was muttering to itself. Maybe it was.

‘Bloody tourists – no respect!’

When I went to sleep on the night of the first day my dreams were of silver fishes under the sea and the new and wonderful underwater world I had discovered. Under the Silver Skin … I liked the sound and the remembered sight of it so much.

Today, a lifetime later, the memory can still make me catch my breath, just as it did when I was 13 years old.

It was the beginning of the great adventure – my first dive!

A gasmask was my window to the underwater world.

Author’s collection

CHAPTER THREE

Diver Below

The wreck hunter’s role, which I would grow into, is sometimes one of bizarre contrasts. The prize may be attained conventionally by dedicated science – basically historical research combined with well-planned fieldwork – or it may be simply a matter of luck.

You can spend weeks, months, even years in libraries and other institutions, looking through documents. Risking your eyesight by rolling microfilm of flecked and hazy images of old newspapers and records. Researching everything ever written about a particular vessel – as we did with the 1629 Batavia – but despite your best efforts the object of the search may still remain elusive.

Then Pop Martin, pipe in mouth, picks up a shovel and goes out with no other object than setting up a post for a new clothesline. He selects a spot at the back of Bill Bevilaqua’s fishing shack at the Abrolhos Islands and begins to dig. A few moments into the job he steps backwards in shock as he finds a human skeleton emerging under the blade of his spade. One of the victims of the 1629 Batavia mutineers is lying there before him. The poor bones tell of a story of horror and the savagery of a death long ago. Mute evidence of the bloody massacres which saw men and women hacked down in blood on this tiny coral cay three centuries earlier.

As a result of Pop’s macabre discovery, the wreck itself, with its bronze cannon, navigation instruments and silver coin would be dramatically discovered on nearby Morning Reef, confounding all the theories held since the 1840s which had misread the position of the wreck and placed it on islands 30 nautical miles further south.

Pop’s find would be an important piece in solving the puzzle.

Further north up the West Australian coast, on a dirty day in 1976, spearfishermen Frank and Barry Paxman, prevented by weather from going to their favourite fishing spot, randomly anchored on the Ningaloo Reef. It was a place which would not normally be a second or even third choice, but it would prove to be a famous decision.

When they dropped over the side of their boat with their spearguns they found that their anchor had gone down into the wreck of a large ship lost there in a previous century. Adding to their astonishment was a pattern of concretion-covered disks lying below them, scattered amongst the weed on the seabed. ‘They looked like black biscuits,’ Barry Paxman recalled later.

On examination, when the crust of corrosion was knocked off, they proved to be Spanish silver dollars with dates ranging from 1785 to 1805. There were literally hundreds of them – part of a cargo of 225,000 Pillar dollars (for the Pillars of Hercules emblem on the coins) carried by the American China clipper Rapid. She had run aground at that remote spot in 1811 on a voyage to Canton. Her skipper took the desperate step of setting the wreck afire to prevent anyone else finding the silver. He planned to return with divers to salvage it.

The Paxmans’ discovery was an extraordinary piece of luck, but they were not alone in that regard. Others had been similarly blessed by good fortune before them.

A party of spearfishermen south of Ledge Point on the West Australian coast, at Easter time in 1963, had set out in search of a promising spot for jewfish. Like the later Paxmans they quickly lost all interest in fishing when they found cannon and the yellow curves of elephant tusks lying on the reef. Their accidental discovery was the remains of the Vergulde Draeck, or Gilt Dragon, lost there in 1656.

In 1966 I had my own moment of wide-eyed astonishment when I found an elephant tusk under my fins in shallow water. It was lying inside the Half Moon Reef in the Southern Group of the Abrolhos Islands. Like the unexpected finds already mentioned, this discovery was also made while spearfishing and without any thought that a shipwreck might lie nearby. As in the case of the Paxmans at Ningaloo, our party had gone to the particular location only because the sea was too rough that day to dive in our preferred hunting grounds outside the reefs.

I was last man into the water, and since it was my boat it was my responsibility to make sure that the anchor flukes had a firm hold, with no possibility of dragging or drifting. After checking the line and chain I was startled to find the tusk in waist-deep water. The others had swum past it as they were looking for fish. Who would expect to find an elephant tusk at that spot when the nearest living pachyderm was in Africa 3000 sea miles to the west?

But I had seen similar tusks on the Vergulde Draeck, though I would never have expected to find one at this location. I picked up the curve of the ivory, feeling its solid weight in my grasp. My first thought was that the tusk must have been brought here across the Indian Ocean by ship. Presumably she had been wrecked and surely, since ivory does not float, her remains might not be not too far away?

The Half Moon Reef (Het Halve Maan’s Rif) – the name given it by stranded Dutch sailors long ago – is a 20-kilometre coral rampart on the western side of the Southern Group of the Abrolhos Islands. It is a protective sea wall, the surface of which sometimes dries out at low tide. The high reef was not much more than 70 metres wide at the place where I stood looking out to sea that day, holding the tusk in cold fingers.

It seemed to me that, if there were a wreck, it would most likely be on the other side of the reef, opposite where I stood in the green coral shallows of the sheltered waters, perhaps less than 100 metres away. But the proof of that would have to wait, for on the ocean side of the reef the surf was rolling in mast-high. It was also the last day of our holiday, so there would be no other chances at that time.

But I remembered the tusk. It nagged at me in the following months. Two years later in 1968, on a rare calm day, I would find an opportunity to cross that reef and discover the main wreck of the 1727 Dutch East Indiaman Zeewyk as a result of that ivory pointer!

In 1963 I first began looking for another wreck, a ghost ship. She was a Dutch East Indiaman with three tons of silver, also known to be somewhere in the Abrolhos Islands. As I write this I note wryly that the search began 48 years ago and we are still looking for her today!

In wreck hunting you need to be at the right place, at the right time, and most importantly with the right people. And you still need Lady Luck on your side. The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger, described it well 2000 years ago: ‘Luck,’ he said ‘is what occurs when preparedness meets opportunity!’

Silver dollars on the sea floor do generate an excitement of their own, but there is far more to a shipwreck than coins with the faces of long-dead kings and princes. The story of each sunken vessel is also the story of the people who sailed aboard her, even though there may be a gap of centuries between disaster and discovery. Let me give you an example.

On the 1629 Batavia wreck many of the artefacts which we found were trapped in a black organic concretion, which smelled heavily of gunpowder when brought to the surface. It was composed of pitch, sand, and coral, and there was probably also a fair amount of human excreta from the bilges in the mixture, and it had set hard as concrete.

On one of our expeditions Neville Willsea and I managed to break some large pieces of concretion off and hoist them – with great difficulty – over the side of my 18-foot (5.4-metre) diving tender. When we broke up the concretion we found some extraordinary objects. Among them were two large copper bowls with semicircular cut-outs in their sides. They looked a bit like the tin hats worn by British and Australian troops in the two World Wars. Were these copper objects also helmets? If so, why the indentations?

‘Moorish fruit bowls?’ Marilyn Georgeff suggested.

A few days later Max Cramer came to visit us. He tucked one of the bowls into his neck.

‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Soup bowls for sloppy eaters!’

The penny dropped. ‘Shaving bowls!’ I exclaimed. And they were indeed barber’s bowls. But the indentations were for more than shaving convenience. In the 17th century barbers were also surgeons, and the bowls – whose indentations fitted neatly into the curve of the arm where the veins stood out purple against the skin – were for letting blood.

Maistre Frans Jansz of Hoorn was the master barber-surgeon on the Batavia’s fatal voyage. Blood-letting, or bleeding patients by opening a vein, was a remedy for hundreds of years for relieving adverse humours thought to be responsible for sickness. A tourniquet was applied to the arm or leg, the area was warmed and massaged and unguents applied, and the vein was opened with a sharp instrument.

The barber’s bowls raised an interesting question for us. Did these bowls, which we were now handling, once contain the blood of Francisco Pelsart, Commandeur of the Batavia, taken when he lay ill for many days crossing the Indian Ocean?

Jansz’s title of Maistre on the Batavia’s passenger list indicates a position both of authority and respect. His professional equipment, tortoiseshell combs, jars of unguents, and a pair of leather shoes were nestling in his barber’s bowls when we found them. All perfectly preserved in the mass of concretion.

Maistre Jansz’s possessions may have lasted out the centuries, but the master surgeon himself survived the shipwreck for only a depressingly short time. We learned of his melancholy fate from the surviving Batavia journals. The records were written down by Commandeur Francisco Pelsart when he returned with the rescue ship Sardam to the wreck scene where the Batavia mutineers were eventually captured and brought to trial for their heinous crimes.

The original journals are still preserved in The Hague, in Holland. Pelsart wrote on an improvised wreck-wood desk, in a wreck-sail tent on a coral cay scarcely bigger than a modern football ground. It was the island which the survivors had given the macabre name Bataviae’s Kerkhof (Batavia’s Graveyard) and which was named Beacon Island in modern times. It was also the island which would be our base when we made our first dives on the Batavia wreck in 1963.

On that island Francisco Pelsart recorded with a heavy heart that on Sunday 5 August 1629 Maistre Frans Jansz was taken by the hulking David Zeevanck and some others of the mutineers’ Blood Council to East Wallabi Island. They used the pretext that the party was to go hunting seals and invited him to join them. But the hunt would be sport of another nature and Jansz was unaware that he would be the unwitting quarry in a manhunt.

Pelsart wrote that first a mutineer named Lenert Michielsz stabbed him with a pike ‘right through the body’. Another villain, Hans Jacobs, smote him on the head with a morning-star club – a cruel weapon, weighted with lead and studded with finger-length iron spikes – ‘so that he fell down’. As if that were not enough, Mattys Beer ‘cleft his head with a sword. Lucas Gillisz has also stabbed Maistre Frans in the body with a pike. Which gruesomness he could just as well have omitted,’ Pelsart wrote with indignation, ‘because the man was already so hacked and stabbed.’

There were other finds besides the barber’s bowls in our piece of concretion. I passed over something that to me appeared to be simply a grubby piece of string. But Marilyn, with a woman’s eye, accorded it more importance. Careful excavation showed it to be a fragment of lace. It was blackened, discoloured, but unmistakably a piece of Italian bobbin lace, dirty but intact and strong to the touch. Later it would be restored to a pristine white colour, in perfect condition, in the conservation laboratory of the Fremantle Maritime Museum – a miracle of survival and modern techniques after 341 years under the sea.

I remembered that in the pictures of Rembrandt and the other Dutch masters the wealthy merchants in their portraits all had bunches of similar lace at their cuffs and collars. Could the lace have belonged to Pelsart, the Batavia’s Commandeur? Or was it from the luggage of Lucretia van der Mylen, the only woman aboard wealthy enough to have a maidservant?

The Batavia women had such a terrible time, murdered cruelly by the mutineers or forced into prostitution under threat of having their throats cut. Could one of the combs we found also have belonged to the beautiful Lucretia whom all men desired, and who was raped in the end, a victim of the mutineer leader, Jeronimus Cornelisz?

There were other objects which had connections. On our 1963 expedition to the Batavia I found a brass mariner’s astrolabe. It was a calibrated circular heavy brass object, round as a large dinner plate, with a movable arm carrying eye-pieces like rifle sights, which could be adjusted to read the angles of the sun and stars. A forerunner of the sextant it was used for determining latitude – the ship’s position north or south of the equator – which was generally calculated from the angle of the sun at midday. It would certainly have been used by the disgraced skipper of the Batavia, Ariaen Jacobsz.

There was also an ornate lead writing stand with ink wells and pen holders that may well have been the property of Francisco Pelsart himself. But the most interesting piece of all was a bell-shaped apothecary’s mortar bearing the inscription Amor Vincit Omnia, in which drugs and spices would be ground with a pestle. The man with an apothecary’s background on the Batavia was none other than the undermerchant Jeronimus Cornelisz. He was the evil genius of the mutiny, the Captain General of the mutineers, inciting them in a dark process which led to the violent deaths of