The EPIC Shipwreck that Sank an Ancient Greek Treasure

The EPIC Shipwreck that Sank an Ancient Greek Treasure

In 1802 a ship most people have never heard about, sank off the coast
of this Greek island, with a priceless ancient masterpiece inside it. It was a collection of sculptures
from the most famous of Greek temples, the Parthenon. The ship was named The Mentor, and it belonged to the infamous Lord Elgin. Lord Elgin was the British ambassador to the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and in the first years of the 1800s he took many sculptures
from the Parthenon for first personal collection. I made an entire video on Lord Elgin
and the controversy of the Parthenon Marbles. It’s considered by many as one of the greatest thefts of ancient art. This was obviously a complicated operation to organize for those times. He then needed to transport the sculptures to Britain,
which was a logistical nightmare. Athens, at the time, was a sleepy town of 10,000, centered around the Acropolis,
and 7 kilometers from the coast. Elgin had to transport the sculptures to Piraeus, the port of Athens,
and then find ships to carry this heavy cargo. He was able to find some ships to take the marbles, but most captains refused to take them because they knew
that such heavy cargoes would risk their ships in case of a storm. Many of the sculptures he took were the friezes, which are those long blocks of marble
with relief sculpture that sat on top of the Parthenon walls. And here they are displayed in the British Museum. These detailed and naturalistic sculptures were carved almost 2500 years
ago, under the direction of the master sculptor Phidias. A collection of true masterpieces. It was so difficult to ship them out of Athens, that Elgin just bought his own ship, The Mentor,
which came with its own captain and crew. On September 15th, 1802, loaded with some of the most important sculptures from the Parthenon, The Mentor set sail for Britain, via Malta,
which was under British control. Elgin was not on the ship, just the crew and the precious marbles. In fact, this captain also resisted taking such a heavy load,
but Elgin pressured him to take on as much as possible. The voyage started out fine, and favorable winds made the ship
get to the south tip of the Peloponnese in just two days. But then they started hitting bad weather. They dropped anchor for the night around Cape Tainaron. the southernmost tip of Greece. Early the next morning, the captain realized
the ship was leaking in water, so he decided to turn around and backtrack
towards the island of Kythira for safe harbor. But the weather kept getting worse and worse. They could have gone to a closer port on the Peloponnese,
but nobody on board was familiar with the territory. And considering it was all controlled by the Ottomans
and that they were carrying the Parthenon Marbles, It’s possible the captain felt nervous about docking at an Ottoman port. Kythira on the other hand, was more of a European territory. It had been controlled by Venice for 600 years, and at the turn of the 19th century, around Elgin’s time,
it was part of an island republic that was friendly to Britain. The Septinsular Republic, and it welcomed British ships. There was even a British consul on the island,
and that’s why the captain decided to go there. But this was a fatal mistake, because the storm kept getting stronger. They were heading to the small port of Avlemonas,
and they were so close to making it into Port. But the currents were too strong,
and pushed the ship straight into the rocks! And the priceless Parthenon Marbles, sank to the bottom of the sea. The crew did survive. A boat that was docked in the harbor of Avlemonas came to rescue them,
and they were taken into the village. But the ship went down quickly because of the heavy weight of the cargo. To be clear, the sculptures that went down with The Mentor were not the entire collection
that Elgin took from the Parthenon, just a portion of it. Today Avlemonas is a modern tourist spot, but back
then it was no more than a fishing village with some port facilities. Elgin’s Secretary, William Hamilton, who was on The Mentor,
drew a very helpful sketch of the area and the shipwreck site, knowing that it would be needed later for the salvage operation. His map is oriented south,
so we have to flip the Google Earth view in order to match them. You can see in the closeup where he marked mentor the shipwreck site,
and I like how he wrote sharp rocks, labeling what caused the crash. This is roughly the spot of the shipwreck,
and these are the sharp rocks it smashed against. The ship was only 10 meters off the shore, and 22 meters deep, so it was not impossible to get to the sculptures,
but it would be very difficult. Elgin was in Constantinople when the ship sank, and when he heard
of the terrible news, he scrambled to organize a salvage operation. William Hamilton was now onn Kythira, and was instructed by Elgin
to organize this operation. He contracted sponge divers from the islands of Kalymnos
and Symi, on the other side of the Aegean, because they were known to have the best free divers in Greece. It’s incredible, how such complicated logistical operations with multiple locations were organized back then, when all communication was done through letters
that could take weeks. In one of those letters, Elgin wrote to that British consul
that I mentioned earlier, seeking his help in mobilizing the operation. But Elgin wasn’t transparent about what was really down there. He wrote: “she had on board a quantity of boxes with stones
of no value of themselves, but of great consequence for me to secure.” So he basically underplayed the value of the cargo, and made it seem like they were just worthless rocks,
only important to him personally for some sentimental reason. And he didn’t mention that they came from the Parthenon. Elgin obviously wanted to prevent rumors from spreading, so that anyone
who had the capability wouldn’t get to them before he did. And it appears that the secret was kept. Those involved in the operation for sure knew that the cargo contained
ancient sculptures, but based on what I read, it’s possible that nobody found out that they came from the Parthenon. We ourselves don’t know which specific sculptures were down there. We actually have the manifest of the ship’s
cargo, listing 17 crates of sculptures. But it’s a bit generic and doesn’t specify
which exact pieces were on it. All we know is that it was mostly the friezes,
those long blocks of sculpture from the walls of the Parthenon. As heavy as these friezes are, originally
they were even bigger and heavier. Elgin had his men saw them in half. In order to remove all that marble in the back and reduce the weight. And still most captains refused to take them. Clearly they understood the risks. We also know that the ship carried friezes
from the small temple of Athena Nike. The mentor sank in September 1802,
so only a couple of months before the winter storms. They called for two ships to come and try to lift her
while she was still whole and intact. But one ship didn’t show up because of a miscommunication. The ship that was there tried lifting by itself, but one wasn’t enough. So the cable snapped and The Mentor fell back down.
That was the one chance they had. Winter was coming and the storms would break her apart. So it would be impossible to try this again. And she was doomed to stay at the bottom forever. The only solution left was the sponge divers. These were specialists in free
diving and extracting sea sponges from the seafloor. An ancient tradition in Greece. They managed to rescue four crates before the winter,
but then had to leave everything down there until spring. Elgin completed his embassy posting in Constantinople
that winter, exactly four months after the disaster, and took a ship with his family to Malta. The ship briefly stopped in Kythira, so Elgin could get a sense
of the situation and take one sad look at the shipwreck site. From Malta, they traveled to Rome, then overland to France,
and just then the Napoleonic Wars broke out between France and Britain, and they were detained in France
as prisoners of war because Elgin was a British ambassador. He was under arrest for three years, and all this time, while
he was in France, the salvage operation was taking place on Kythira. After the first winter had passed, the divers came back in the spring of 1803. They now had a full diving season ahead of them,
and they would manage to salvage five more crates that year. For a free diver to go down 22 meters and hold his breath seems crazy. It’s like the height of a seven storey building. What’s even more crazy is that they had to spend
a lot of time down there, breaking open the wooden deck of the ship, in order to access the crates inside the hull. They were paid a lot of money for their expertise,
but only for the crates that would be retrieved successfully. If they failed, they wouldn’t be paid. It’s also possible that they had some kind of tube and mask, giving them
air from the surface so they could spend more time down there. But this is my own speculation, not something I read. Once the deck was broken open,
they could access the crates, and they gradually broke it more and more. This I also haven’t read,
but it makes sense to me that they would dive into the hole, tie ropes around the crates,
then boats on the surface would hoist them up with pulleys and cranes. Being submerged
in water would have made it much easier to lift them than on land. They had to come back for a third season
in the spring of 1804, to salvage the final eight crates. So the entire operation unfolded over two years,
divided into three working seasons. For it to take so much time to salvage
17 crates shows how difficult this operation was. That’s about an average of one crate a month. Although I did read that the divers kept
getting drunk, which wasted a lot of time. Once on the surface, they left the crates on the beach and just covered them up with seaweed, beechwood
and rocks in order to protect them from the weather. They stationed meant to guard the crates
and prohibited anyone from opening them. Elgin, who was broke by now,
had to request for a British Navy ship to come get them. And that ship was sent on the orders of Admiral Nelson himself,
who Elgin knew personally. Nelson was Britain’s most legendary admiral. If we look at this historical list of all the ships
that took the sculptures to Britain, this was The Mentor journey that ended in disaster. And this is the British Navy ship that Nelson sent to pick them up
in the winter of 1805, two and a half years after it sank. Kythira is mentioned as Cerigo, which was the name
the Venetians called the island when they controlled it. And during Elgin’s time it was still called Cerigo. To the best of our knowledge, All the Parthenon sculptures lost in the shipwreck were recovered,
but it cost Elgin 5,000 pounds, which was a fortune at the time. I ran these numbers in the inflation calculator on the Bank of England’s
official website, which is available to the public, and 5,000 pounds in 1804, is equivalent to 425,000 pounds today. So over half a million dollars. And that was just part of his costs, together
with the massive cost of taking them from the Parthenon, he spent 75,000 pounds on everything, which is 6.3 million pounds today. After all this, he was bankrupt and in debt. He later sold into the British government
and got less than half of what he spent on everything. All the money went to his creditors, and he was still in debt. And the sculptures have remained in the British Museum ever since, which is a whole other discussion, one that I covered in another video. Since 2009, Greek underwater archeologists
have been excavating the shipwreck to see what was left behind. They found many interesting objects
belonging to the ship, and personal belongings of the crew, and of course, the wooden skeleton of The Mentor itself. Some of the items found include jewelry, the ship’s navigation instruments, coins of the period, a drinking cup, glassware, a wooden pulley for the ship’s ropes, a shoe insole, a belt buckle, a personal compass, even a pistol. And other objects like a pipe, a ring, a seal, a personal watch,
and an ancient Greek coin with a hole in it. Perhaps used as a charm on a necklace, but no trace of any Parthenon sculpture was found, suggesting that Elgin’s operation was indeed successful
and that his sponge divers managed to salvage everything. When the great master sculptor Phidias created these sculptures
in the fifth century B.C., I don’t think he could have ever imagined that his masterpieces would have ended up at the bottom of the sea,
200km from Athens, and over 2000 years into his future.

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In 1802, a violent storm sank a ship that was carrying sculptures from the Parthenon. This is the incredible, harrowing story of Lord Elgin’s ship, the Mentor, and the desperate, years-long struggle to recover these ancient treasures from the bottom of the sea. It was a logistical nightmare, carried out in treacherous weather, and the divers who risked their lives to go deep down and rescue the sculptures. This is a tale of how a team of treasure hunters, sponge divers, and colonial explorers too these masterpiece from the Parthenon, lost them, then recovered them.
The Parthenon Marbles, otherwise known as the Elgin Marbles have a long and controversial history, and this anecdote is the most dramatic part of their story.

Sources Used:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRAqHutnHLs4WPooCfDkWuLA6TRxK74PACicb1e5z3w-R00b9e00R2PPqdyqnCg9Femt45q5xOmchp8/pub

The ship model was created by the Maritime Museum of Finland project “Historia eläväksi digitaalisella tarinankerronnalla” by Zoan Oy and is part of Smoke on the Waves experience at Maritime Centre Vellamo. https://kohtalonaruotsinsalmi.fi/
It is used in this video under a Creative Commons License CC BY 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

0:00 – Chapter 1
5:09 – Paid Advert
6:39 – Chapter 2
11:52 – Chapter 3

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