We’re in the golden age of finding and recovering trillion-dollar shipwrecks. These high-stakes, highly dangerous expeditions have been supercharged thanks to revolutionary deep ocean technologies. But… it’s not just the good guys searching through sunken Spanish galleons for gold doubloons; the rush to be first can sometimes get you killed. Really, no really!
Jason and Peter became aware of this phenomenon when they read about an elderly Florida couple arrested after appearing on PBS’ Antiques Roadshow. Appraisers were stunned to see gold ingots recovered “by a friend” from a shipwreck. Seeing the artifacts, French authorities claimed the couple were trafficking national treasures belonging to France.
The old adage “finders’ keepers” seemingly doesn’t apply - EVEN after spending years researching where the ships might be, then spending millions on expeditions HOPEFULLY finding the ship... hopefully. It seems like a lot of trouble when the country that lost and forgot about the treasure - hundreds of years ago can suddenly demand it back!
To help us salvage what’s actually going on… we turned to the “Indiana Jones” of underwater archeology -- Marine Scientist and Oceanographer, David L. Mearns – who is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club – he’s located 29 major shipwrecks and holds five Guinness World Records - including the deepest shipwreck ever found.
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IN THIS EPISODE:
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FOLLOW DAVID MEARNS:
Website: Blue Water Recoveries
X: @davidlmearns
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Now Really, Really, Now Really Hello and welcome to Really No Really with Jason Alexander and Peter Tilden, who suggests that subscribing to the Really No Really podcast is like finding a hidden treasure to subscribe and claim that treasure is yours. And speaking of hidden treasures, did you know that we are in the golden age of finding and recovering trillion dollars shipwrecks. These high stakes, highly dangerous expeditions have been supercharged thanks to revolutionary deep ocean technologies. But it's not just the good guys searching through sunken Spanish galleons for gold to balloons. There are some pretty nefarious and fairly dangerous treasure hunters out there, and the rush to be first can sometimes get you killed.
Really No Really.
To help us salvage what's actually going on, we turned to the Indiana Jones of Underwater Archaeology, marine scientist and oceanographer David L. Merns, who's a fellow of the Ial Geographical Society and the Explorers Club. He's located twenty five major shipwrecks and holds five Guinness World records, including salvaging the deepest shipwreck ever found so let's welcome to you guys who are considered by some to be national treasures. And by some I mean themselves.
Here's Jason and Peters. Let's talk about what we need to talk about today.
Premise. Here's a premise. Give you a premise because you do it very well.
To people that.
Were on the antique road show and they're showing these gold ingots.
The beautiful gold beautiful gingers.
To this older couple who in the late seventies early eighties who were holding them from another guy friend who's gone from a friend.
It turns out it wat to hold these gold ingots for me. I'll be back.
That doesn't and they know the friend and he said, they know where it's from. He salvaged the ship.
That's the trick.
What they didn't realize was that that's illegal. And they went to change jail and.
They're in jail going, why what did we do? I didn't do anything. A guy gave me a thing.
So this is the golden age of finding shipwrecks, which are worth trillions of dollars because of sonar, submersibles.
All this stuff. Sure, there are people are fighting over this stuff.
Yeah, one guy is in jail for five years because he refuses to give the.
Gold back that's right to the country of origin. And I stand with that. Well, okay, and I do too.
That's why we have one of the most renowned shipwreck hunters, yes, an archaeologist in the world coming on in a minute.
That's my thought is this, And my question to you is how good could they bees? Coming on the wash?
Not everybody vets so so they figure SIGNFD.
What the hell? Who's the other guy? We know? Right? We don't know? All right? So radio, My.
Question is this, if I leave a sweatshirt and a diner for two hundred and fifty years.
Yeah, and I come back to the walk.
Into the booth two hundred and fifty years later, they go, hey, look at this.
I found a sweatshirt.
Yeah, and you've had it for two and fifty I haven't gotten Hey, that's my shirt, but no, it's my shirt for two hundred and fifty years.
What are you doing. I'm a treasure.
Yes, when I was five years old. One of the golden rules. There are two golden rules. One is treat others as you would have them treat you. That is the golden rule.
It's all because I don't know what the second one is.
The second is the second rule isn't every kindergartener knows it? Finders, keepers, losers, weepers.
I found it, you dropped it.
We have a We had a thing over my son Noah's bed when he was little, to help my oldest son, Gab was called the Toddler's Rules of Ownership. It was a brilliant list. It was things like, if I think it's mine, it's mine. If it was yours and I now have it, it's mine. If I think it's mine and you have it, it's still mine.
I mean, these were the top owner.
We should tell this guy. We should Maybe this will solve the whole shipwreck problem. And the amazing thing now, if you if you're listening and you're wondering, should I stay with the shipwreck? The number one rip shipwreck of all times, the Columbia. They kind of know where it is, and everybody wants it because it's supposed to be billions and billions of dollars. But my question to the shipwreck expert is, so I now have risked my life, I've raised money to do this. I've gone down to the shelves down there, I got squids.
God knows what's do.
Not a lot and my wife you know you're going again and leaving the kids right, all of that stuff. I finally bring up a golden gut after twenty years and Spain goes, oh, that's ours. They go, why didn't you go get Yeah?
So it just right to put it in the Yiddish phrase, kish mine took, it's yours.
There you go, which I think was also on your list.
That's written on the bar. Kish mind took this property of Spain.
It's a fascinating thing.
And our guests, our guests as a Guinness World Book of Records for finding shipwreck and I'm on. But he's also a professor and an archaeologist, so that the Indiana Jones Yes shipwreck, yes, absolutely, and.
One whip doesn't work as well underwater. I've known it's a lot say lower. If you see Jason Momoa, everything just just like so yeah, if I see yeah, that's that's the problem with those films.
You know what, he's a good actor. I just thought it's a decent actor. Underwork, he's even better. You sumers him. He's that much better of all.
The underwater actors. He's probably the best so shipwrecks. Yeah, let's say hello to our guest. Would you like to introduce David.
David Mearns is what a fascinating man. He's one of the world's most experienced in successful deep sea shipwreck hunters, having located twenty five.
I said, I don't We'll have to bleep that out. I think you said deep sea. It was a little flap of the lips.
And I know you didn't mean it. If I didn't, Laura checked the tapes on that. I heard a K, but there should have been an H if I didn't say it, Laurie, he definitely everybody just roll back the tapes on that. Would you like to try that one more time? Take too?
And I don't think I said that word, But here you go, one of the most successful deep sea shipwreck hunter.
There we go.
It was the K of reck and the h of hunters that melded in your previous take.
We're twenty five. Yeah, of the major shipwrecks. He awarded five Guinness World records, including the deepest shipwreck ever found. So he is Indiana Jones. He's a marine scientist who in a National Geographic Explorer's won prizes, et cetera.
And you'll love this.
He's from Jersey, he's calling from he's reaching us from England, but he's from Weehawk in Jersey, you bet. And when I talked to him last week to say thanks for coming on the show, he was so thrilled.
He didn't know you're in the New Jersey Hall of Fame. So let's welcome. It's the theme song, Laurie.
I'm trying to imagine what the New Jersey Hall of Fame theme song would be.
Big in Jersey. We gotta get out of this way, you know, something like that.
David Mearns, let's say, hi, welcome to Really, no, really, what have you found for us today?
I mean, you know, thank you? Are you currently?
I mean we're going to get into the whole, the whole everything that's going on in the in the world of this bounty hunter or archaeological explanation.
But what do you.
You are you engaged in a retrieval project or a discovery project right now as we speak.
There's always something going on.
These these projects that I do take sometimes many years to develop, so you always have some in various phases.
It could be the beginning phase. Which is your sort of research.
Then at some point you think you've got a project that's viable, and then you begin planning it, and then you begin raising money and and and then if you're lucky and you can or if you get hired, you go out to see and generally the ratio now is I probably spend six months for every one month.
That I actually go out to see. Yeah, earlier in my career is a lot more often.
But is that six months.
Is that mostly research and development or is that fundraising or some combination.
It's a combination.
Yeah.
I've spent in the past as much as two years researching something and then as much as four or five years raising the funds. That's kind of kind of the extreme, but they's sometimes it's gone even longer than that.
Yeah, why does it require not having really watched this?
I'm thinking, Okay, if you think you know where something is, roughly, you need the equipment to find it, you need the boats, you need some guys to go down in there get it.
But what makes it so ungodly expensive? What is the big cost of doing this?
Two things? Really.
First off, the majority of what I do is in deep water, and I mean deep water to the point you can't dive. You can't use scuba divers or technical divers or anything. In my career, I've only been involved with one or two projects that literally I could get in the water myself and work on. Everything else is deeper, so that means robotics, that means deep toe sonars, that's expensive ships. So you're looking at projects that go to the hundreds of thousands to the low millions to actually go out there and find something, So it's expensive.
The other part of it.
Is you said, we know where it is, where it is, ok, we know where to search. So there's a high risk involved of you actually going out there looking for something and not finding it. You know, if you fail for some reason in my industry, you don't come back with a seventy percent or an eighty percent result.
You come back with zero.
So people are risking hundreds of thousands to millions on either all or nothing better, and that's just to find the wreck. Then you know, if your project is based on the financials of actually recovering something and selling something, then the risks are even higher.
So it is a very risky, very speculative industry.
Can you give us David before we get specific on some of them, like the Columbia, which is out there now that people are fighting over because there's so much a lad valuable cargo. Can you just give us a view of your world. How many guys are doing this? Who's the I saw a guy with an ipatch, He's got a TV show and he's raising money. It's like it's like swash buggling. There's pirates, there's people dying, there's people raising money, and then of course there's the countries that go, wait a minute, this is ours.
Yeah, you're right. It has a lot of different characters in it. I consider myself a professional at one end of the spectrum, and then it goes you know, you have archaeologists, you have treasure hunters, you have all sorts of characters, some who've never found anything in their careers, but they raise money off of it and tried to do it. And then you also have quite a lot of amateurs out there. And I think this is really the biggest change in the last twenty years. It's somewhat cool. I look at it as almost a democratization of wreck hunting. And what is really allowed that to happen is the availability of technology that is more affordable to amateur groups that can go out there as a group of individuals set their sights on a target, they either hire or get a.
Sonar or an RV and go out and find things.
And that is now happening almost on a weekly basis, and that's really quite exciting. I think that it's not just left to professionals like me.
There's a whole history.
Winnership goes down to why it went down, who the people were on that ship, how they lived, what they were, what they did. One of the people here as are their movie traps on the rooms that are where the gold is, like you see in every Indiana Jones movie where you move the one thing and you go, oh crap. I don't know what you find as an archaeologist when you dig this stuff up the cemetery of history.
Yeah, well, each shipwreck has a different story. You're referring to some of these Spanish ships, mainly Spanish vessels in the Atlantic that are coming back from the New World to Europe, like the off of Colombia, which is just loaded with with with.
That is pure treasure, that is separate pressure.
Now there's two points of views on that one is an economic view, which is the treasure hunting view, which is all about maximizing profit finding these things and being able to sell it. And then the other view with an archaeological view, which is that the monetary value of the treasure that could be literally gold coins or gold bars or silver bars or jewels or whatever, it's almost immaterial to the important of the historical importance archaeological importance of of the rex side itself. So you know, one pile of gold is no more important than say some spices that it was carrying, because those spices organic materials, if they survive, they tell more about the cultural history of society.
At that time than the goal does.
Arguably so, and there's a battle between the archaeological community and what I would call the treasure hunting community over who has the rights to it, who controls it. And the San Jose is a good example because that wreck was initially found by people who had a treasure hunting mentality, but now it's actually been controlled by the government and they're trying to do it on a pure archaeological basis, where no monetary value is extracted out of the billions and billions of cargo that may ultimately be lifted from the wreck site.
But I think I may just be missing it.
I don't understand it from a historical point of view, because I mean I do understand, Oh my god, there's one hundred million dollars worth of valuable goods down there if we can retrieve them. But without trying to sound snarky, how am I advanced by knowing? In sixteen ninety one the Spaniards used cilantro? I mean, is it something that only physically understanding the wreck itself is going to reveal what could be part of that site itself that would educate me in a way that knowing where it left from, what it was carrying, what the conditions were that sunk it. Why do I need to go down there for a salvage or an exploration? What would I get from an archaeological point of view.
Well, it'll tell you about It'll tell you about all sorts of things.
It'll tell you about shipbuilding.
Archaeologists loved to study the ship structures itself to be able to understand how they were built, how the Spanish ships different from the Dutch ships, different from the English ships, where the wood came from, how it was financed, how it was maintained. All of this stuff adds to our knowledge of history about how people operated four or five hundred years ago. If you look at the cargo, what trade relationships were happening at the time. This most of what would be carried on as San Jose came from originated from other countries, not Columbia. Maybe it came from Peru. And ultimately we're trying to learn about human history four or five hundred years ago, and these ships are literally time capsules. There is nowhere in the world that you're going to find that accumulation of objects that can tell this history other than at the bottom of the ocean in these shipwrecks. And that's why they're so rare and so important, and that's why they're fought over to a very high degree between various constituencies that practice in this field.
So speaking of those fights, I would really love to get your take on this, because we were Peter and I were.
Having fun with this notion in our introduction.
But if if you get the investors, and you do the work, and you make the discovery, and you make the salvage, and you reclaim these goods and.
Somebody goes uh uh uh, that's ours.
No, you know what, why didn't you diving next to me?
What I have was raising? What is your take on? Who's these things.
Really do belong to our who should benefit from them?
Okay?
Well, the difference and why you find it hard to understand is becoming it because it all comes down to the law of the sea, which is a different field of law, different history to it.
Laurie, you're the recorder and the pan flute. We're going to get a sea story, okay.
And the law, the law of the sea is unique.
Just because the ship sinks, you don't lose the rights of ownership. And as long as you can trace back the rights of ownership through history, even succeeding going from one family to the next, those rights remain with the original owner. So if somebody comes along and finds it and tries the salvage it, they have to operate under what we call the law of salvage, not the law of finds.
The law of finds is losers. How do we used to say when.
Yeah, that doesn't work in the ocean, it's you have to go back to the original owner.
So for example, again it's a very good shipwreck. To look at this.
San Jose in Columbia. The Spanish government will make a claim on that because at that time the country was controlled by Spain. But on the other hand, where did all the gold and silver and the jewels come from, Not from Columbia, that came from different countries in South America. And that's where you have this patrimonial aspect of it. Where did it originate? So there will be various arguments, and these things have on different shipwrecks have been tested out in court and argued, and then things get really complicated because every country almost has a different set of rules despite their being an international basis. And this understanding of the law of sea and salvage law, which by the way dates back five thousand years five thousand years to Rodean times. That's when this concept that something that is lost in the ocean that has an original owner, you don't lose those ownership rights. They extend in perpetuity and if somebody comes along to salvage it, well, they have a claim against it. It's not a claim of ownership, it's a claim of salvage that they will be rewarded reimbursed for their efforts.
For recovering and salvaging that material.
I've learned two things, Peter. One, no statue of the limitations if it's in the water. Two anything you and I discard from now on, just freg it in the world in the water in case it comes up. One hundred years of my parts, those are my pedroid genes. We're out of style. But you know what, if they're back, those are mine.
So yeah, who was so in your world? Are there pirates? Is their murder? Is their deception? Is there all kinds of because I mean, who has those rights? Because Jason I thought.
I mean, I'm sure there are people who plunder these some of these wrecks and just take the gold and don't tell anybody. I don't know how hard it is to sell it on eBay or anywhere, because then people can identify it and go, oh, that's from the SSS sch Minitser or whatever it is, and you go, who's the guy who did it? And they track it back, which is how the people from Antiques Roadshow got in trouble, because they traced it to who had it, who got it, where it went, and then all of a sudden you're in jail.
Is that world. Have you run across that?
Oh yeah, yeah, I've I've I've been through it all?
Is that world? Have you run across that?
Oh yeah, yeah, I've, I've been through it all.
I mean one of the I remember one of the first jobs I did off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, and I went out to see looking with these guys. I was the sona operator and they were looking for some Spanish ship I did.
They didn't tell us what it was, but.
I remember that they they were all joining the ship at the last moment, and it turned out we went out in a very bad storm.
So half of them were seasick.
But they all were wearing Rolexes and one had a plane rolex, one had one with diamonds, one had one with rubies. And we didn't even know these guys' names. We'd just say which one is that with the rubies with the diamonds, And they were just useless at sea, and they all got sick, and.
I don't think they ever found anything.
But I've I've had those pipes, and so yes, we do have still today, even though there's been crackdowns and the laws are changing, the archeological community has been very good about getting an international agreement for the protection of underwater cultural heritage in place that across the world, in about sixty countries or more, that is the law of the day. There are people still finding shipwrecks, secretly recovering the cargoes and selling it on the black market. And mainly that's happening in the Far East. It happens a lot in the Philippines, it happens in China. When that happens, nothing is learned by society. A ship with say a huge cargo of ming porcelain, thousands of pieces, would all be dispersed around the world, never recorded, never photographed, never, We don't learn anything.
It's just dispersed and sold on the black market.
In terms of piracy, the piracy we have today is just the basic piracy of going to see are there a couple of hotspots around the world where you have to be prepared for pirates. So I've had personal bodyguards, I've been transferred to whole ships are covered with razor wire and you're getting on board and they say to you, if anybody attacks us, you go down into the citadel of the ship, and then they have armed people on board. So I've been through all of that, but I've never, luckily it never had an incident.
Wow, Peter, watch his face. I'm going to say something. Watch his face. See if he reacts.
Look at me. Look at me. I am the captain. Now I am thet He's looking at you with pathetically.
You went there, Yeah, they hey, get on the boat with the razor wire.
That told the razor Paul Allen. The Paul Allen boat you were on, Was that with the razor wire? No, Christ, No, they wouldn't. They wouldn't dare put razor wire on octopus.
But I when I was with all one time we were in the Philippines in an area that was a bit questionable, and I had my own I had to go on land to actually interview somebody who we were searching for a World War two shipwreck, and there was somebody who's still alive who was actually alive when he saw this shipping attack, so he may have had some information. So I was verried asured to actually interview him. And I had my own personal bodyguard on that trip.
So I like that.
But again nothing happened.
The guy by the way that he interviewed. The bigger memory from him was I met what is it like hanging with the guy who created Microsoft.
Well, Paul was a you know, a great person in our industry because he did so much in a short period of time, and sadly he's left a fantastic legacy. But sadly, you know, he didn't get to see the fruits of what would have gone on for a very long time at a time he was passionately interested in the sea. He was very interested in World War two specifically, he found so many, so many wrecks and very important ones. It was a real privilege to work for him, work with his team of people and to go to see One of the highlights of working with Octopus was that we were able to recover the bell of HMS Hood. And Hood was the battle cruiser, the British battle cruiser that was sunk by the Bismarck in nineteen forty one during the war. It's the largest single loss in British maritime history. Four hundred and fifteen men were killed, only three survived. And so everybody in England, if you talk to families, almost invariably you'll meet somebody, Oh, I had a great uncle on Hood, I had a relative on Hood. So it is the most important, probably single British casualty during the war. It's the one time people say of that age, I was really frightened that we could lose the war when Hood was sunk. It was a very bad month in forty one. And after I found the wreck in two thousand and one and then hooked up with Paul Allen, he said, you know, we'd like to if we can, like to be able to recover the bell. It was a very very unique opportunity where we were given special permission because this is a massive war grave, the biggest of all time massive war grave from the British perspective, that we were allowed to go down and on very special permission recover that bell, not from where anybody was entombed. We don't see any bodies, there's nothing like that. The bell was outside the main wreckage in an open area, but we saw it, we recovered it. It's now been conserved. It's in a memorial here in Portsmouth at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, and it's literally a touchdowne. For the first years that it was on display, people would come and touch it and connect themselves to their relative in some tangible physical way. And I've seen that happen many many times, and people still write to me about how important that was, so gorgeous and for Paul to have been able to do that for my country here was a very special thing that's gorgeous.
As we wrap up, can I ask you about the Titan submersible, because there's new information, for instance, about we heard it when immediately we didn't know what happened, Then we heard it went it was an immediate event, then we heard maybe not. The latest is maybe it wasn't an immediate event. Do you have a take on that since you've worked with some mercibles and I know if you know the people who were doing it tight.
To the people on board were friends of mine, Phnrsala and Hamish Harding. So that was one of the worst weeks ever last year when when we found out what was going on.
And listen, that needs to be investigated.
At that depth of water, when you have a catastrophic implosion like what happened based on what you could see of the wreckage, it happens instantaneously, in microseconds. Now, this submersible was built in a way that it had sensors in the hull that could actually tell you it had some problems. Also, apparently, based on previous eyes, the hull actually made noise. All of these things, frankly, are ridiculously bad things to know that your hull is making this noise, or that it has to be built with sensors in it to give you an idea of when it's going to implode. These things should be built that there's never ever a chance of imploding. And that's the way, up until this incident, our industry is practiced because for fact, no other submersible, deep diving submersible has ever felt like this in history, because this one was built completely against all rules.
So while they.
May have been aware that maybe they heard this cracking, maybe these sensors did sound an alarm, nobody's ever going to know that because the only people whould know that are the five people who are on board who are now dead. And I can assure you when that moment came, it was so instantaneous they would have never known about it. And for me personally, who knowing two of these people, I'm relieved by that, and I and I hope the families realize that as well.
Yeah are our condolences.
We're so sorry, for the loss of everyone on the Titan submersible, including your friends. I want to ask you what's still out.
There that you dream about.
What's what's what's the great white whale that you love to find?
My children say, Daddy, you can't stop until you find this ship. It's called the Empire Windrush. It's a British vessel that was used by the Department for Transport. It sank in nineteen fifty four because of a fire while it was transiting the Western Mediterranean, with very large passengers of British servicemen and their families coming home favaris to England. But the real historical importance of the wind Rush was that it was the first ship that brought the first wave of Afro Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica and the Caribbean to the UK in nineteen forty eight, and from that moment all the way up until the early seventies, about a half a million Afro Caribbean immigrants came to England, and frankly, they weren't even immigrants. They were Commonwealth citizens that were encouraged to repatriate back or come to England to rebuild the country after the war.
They were needed.
They were needed as nurses, they were needed as bus drivers, they were needed mainly working class jobs to rebuild the country. You could look at that day in the summer of nineteen forty eight when that ship arrived and literally that is a milestone.
It's a historical marker.
That changed England for it to becoming a true multicultural society. If any of your listeners type into Google Empire wind Rush, a picture will appear. I can guarantee it.
It's the first picture.
It's of the ship. It's the stern of the ship. It says Empire wind Rush, it says London underneath, and you have a bunch of men on the railings, all with their hands up. And what that symbolizes these people coming to a new country, starting a new life. And in the center of that image is an anchor. What we plan on doing is finding the wind Rush recovery, bring that anchor, conserving it and making it the centerpiece of a national monument to the contributions that Windrush generation have made to this country. Because they have been overlooked, they have been treated very poorly, and that historical milestone needs to be recognized and acknowledged and celebrated.
And give it relevance.
And if I can do anything else in my career, I've found twenty nine major shipwrecks.
If that's the thirtieth and I find no more, I'm happy.
Bravo. We well hopefully you find it all right.
Well, thank you so much. Thanks for what you're doing, David. What a fascinating world. Man.
Be safe and we'll talk to you when you find that shipwreck. When you find that would be thrilling. If you find it with the first stop, first stop, right, first.
Stop in Los Angeles, I'll tell you that Jersey.
I'll meet you back in Jersey. So much. Hey, thank you so much for joining us. What a pleasure. Take care. Yeah, that was I knew it would be interesting. I didn't know if that movement.
I mean, you know, it's the difference between what you think of as as a bounty hunter, you know, which doesn't really have an emotional component to it, to.
A guy like that who goes I want to I want.
I got very moved when he said people come to touch that bell because that is their connection to people that they loved and lost. That is extraordinary to give somebody the gift of that connection.
And this thing, this thing that we do, which is pretty interesting. You and I talked about this a lot. Why do we do it? Why are we doing this whatever? It always sneaks up on it a lot of times. Yeah, the guy who had the Forgiveness Institute and and things that guy bringing back to Williams and.
Why and even things that we think are going to be relatively silly, like you know, the teaching the dogs to push the push buttons, but then hearing at least what seems to be the.
Expression of emotions and feelings the dog that new twelve hundred different works in this one.
It just makes you if anything we do just makes you look at these things with a little more of a oh, you know my assumption of what this was, it's different, isn't right? Even if it just makes us think from now and again, we're not that smart.
Also, that's the really no really for me where you go wow, really no really. As I started researching this, I got to the ha and pirates and submercibles and stuff, and then you go to the point that it's a graveyard that thousands of people are down there. They have families and this is their final resting place. And there was one event and they knew it was happening, and then they went down with their stuff. And when he says, you can find out from what they carried in their pockets, they found jars with urine specimens. They found the Titanic has a museum. They found jars with your jars with your encamples. And I don't know how bad was ahead. I think they call it. I don't think there was a hatch. I don't think there was a head. And we never asked why it.
Wasn't a sample it was. I don't want to. I think be on the floor. I'll go in this jar.
I'm guessing four hundred years ago there were no flush toilets. I think you guess you hung here, you know what, over the railing or whatever. So so yeah, all right, so yeah, David, So let's go to what your thoughts, mister googen Hut.
Yeah, before we go in, before we find it. By the way, you're in Florida.
If there's gotta beam, it's good stuff around you.
Yes, take take it.
Take a shovel and a and a pail and get out there.
Shovel and a pail.
He takes its good swimming every week it gets hit by a piece of driftbood from a shipwreck.
He's getting hit. He's got to hit with a capitalisting.
If you let it wash up on the sand, yeah, all is well, let it dry off, Let it dry off. It's your right if it's if it's my feet in the water, you know, if somebody walks by in trips and it falls in the water, all kinds of international trips Spain.
I actually have a closet I've written on it by Benendez and that's where I put all the bars.
I got it. I got it.
And by the way, Hoovers does not have gold bars in the clothes. I know for the gold exactly. They're just so heavy.
Yes, the genesis and the date on the head on a ship.
Really all right?
So just what was the genesis of the head, ladies and gentlemen here on?
Really?
No, really the genesis and there's probably a stone in the head, is my guess.
Because you say one.
We're talking if you suck hard, not say it one more time, clearly, because this is going viral.
The term head, of course, refers to a ship's toilet.
It dates backed with least seventeen oh eight.
So when you were on a ship back then, what would you have to do to use that set head? It was typically placed at the head of the ship.
Sure, near the base of the bow spread.
Sure, we're splashing waters to naturally clean the toilet area.
Oh that's lovey.
So why isn't it called the bow spit equally grotesque?
And yeah, I don't know, get to point something out.
Yeah, so if you're going to the bathroom in the bows, yeah, it's cleansed by the splashing of water.
I'm just now going back. I'm also guessing why you're sitting there doing your business. You're also being cleansed by whatever.
By the way, it also means someone in the rear of the boat is going Is someone in the head?
Oh my god? Did you see it floated by the window? Someone's in the head? How it is soaking wet? What happened? Went to the bath it's a natural bedett it is? You're with the ocean.
Well, thank god we got that out of the beautiful I saved the bell.
People have closure. We now know we lost out. He went, I went to the bathroom. Happened? Rogue ware? All right, thank you, David.
So as a piece of trivia BEFO where we go out. The elderly couple that was arrested is also famous because they were on the first cruise ship to be quarantined for COVID and several thousand people got second next ship and several hundred died, So they were on that ship too, and and and.
I think they would learn to stay away from the water.
No more inland, Let's go inland. Well, thank you for being with us here for another episode of Really No Really, and we will see you next time with God's help hopefully.
Hello, No really, Hello, and.
There nothing fone boy.
That's another episode of Really No Really.
He comes to a close.
I know you're wondering, what are the most lucrative shipwrecks ever discovered? Well, that treasure will be revealed in a moment, but first, thank our guest David Mearns. You can follow David on x where he is at David L. Merns, or check in on him at his website Bluewater Recoveries or Bluewater dot uk dot com. Find all pertinent links in our show notes, our little show hangs out on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and threads at Really No Really Podcasts and of course you can share your thoughts and feedback with us online at reallynoreally dot com. If you have a really some amazing factor story that boggles your mind, share it with us and if we use it, we will send you a little gift. Nothing life changing, obviously, but it's the thought that counts. Check out our full episodes on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and take that bell so you're updated when we release new videos and episodes.
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So listen and follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
And now the answer to the question what are.
The most lucrative shipwrecks ever discovered? Easily the most famous the RMS Tight the recoverable items from the Titanic netted a worth of two hundred and eighteen million dollars. In nineteen forty one, German submarines torpedoed the SS Gersappa, a British merchant vessel transporting seven million ounces of silver from Kolkatta to London. In twenty thirteen, the ship was salvaged and its valuable cargo netted two hundred and ten million dollars and topping them all the San Jose.
As discussed on this episode.
This ship is the subject of international controversy. The ship lies nearly two thousand feet under the surface, but research shows that its bounty remains in pristine condition. It is easy to see why the vessel's ownership rights are in dispute, as the contents of the wreck are estimated to be valued at seventeen to twenty billion dollars, all of which makes me think maybe a boat and some sonar are a good investment. Actually, so I'm setting sail really. Noreally's production of iHeartRadio and Plase Entertainer