Has King Charles I’s Sunken Treasure Really Been Found?
Estimated to be carrying more than $25 million worth of gold, silver, and royal artifacts when it was lost, the legendary baggage ferry has eluded Scotland’s underwater treasure hunters for nearly 400 years.
A fortune in gold, silver, and priceless royal trappings that belonged to King Charles I may lie on the floor of Scotland's Firth of Forth estuary, just north of Edinburgh. That’s where, according to historic accounts, a wooden ferry from the port town of Burntisland carrying the king’s treasure capsized in a storm and sank in 1633.
A flurry of recent news reports in the U.K. suggests that after more than 30 years of searching, a Scottish heritage group has found the shipwreck, known as the Blessing of Burntisland. But the local man leading the search says many of the details reported in the media are incorrect, and maritime archaeologists not involved with the work are skeptical about the claims
Ian Archibald, a retired cartographer and the convener of the Burntisland Heritage Trust who leads the search, tells National Geographic that the organization’s plans have been improperly publicized. He adds that the trust, a volunteer history group based in Burntisland on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, will make a formal statement about their search in a few months or next year, but has nothing further to say at this time.
Experts not involved in the search efforts also warn there is little evidence the king's sunken treasure even exists, and that any quest to locate it could prove fruitless.
“Many teams have flocked to the mythical treasure site over 30 years,” but no evidence of the ship has ever been found there, says Sean Kingsley, a maritime archaeologist and the editor of Wreckwatch magazine. “The supposed discovery of the wreck of the Blessing of Burntisland has left the scientific community scratching its head.”
Skepticism about the shipwreck story aside, the search is also complicated because the estuary floor is murky, filled with silt, and cluttered with the remains of an estimated 500 other wrecks, including those of a World War I naval tugboat and a World War II Hurricane fighter aircraft.
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Lost At Sea
Charles was crowned King of England in 1626, but his Scottish coronation did not take place until 1633 (he was the hereditary monarch of both kingdoms, which were not formally united until 1707).
Historian Lucy Dean of Scotland's University of the Highlands and Islands says the Scottish coronation was delayed while its details were worked out—Charles was the first King of England to become King of Scotland, “so all involved were navigating new territory,” she says.
The king toured parts of England by carriage on his way to Edinburgh and parts of Scotland after his coronation there, Dean says. The southwards crossing of the Firth of Forth, about five miles long, was the last leg of his return journey.
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But as the story goes, the Blessing of Burntisland was hit by a sudden summer storm during the crossing and sank while Charles watched from another ship. In addition to the vast sums of gold and silver that kings traveled with in those days, fancy dinnerware that had belonged to King Henry VIII, and clothes from the royal wardrobe were also supposedly swallowed by the seas.
The treasure was worth about 100,000 pounds at the time, according to the Telegraph, an amount estimated to be more than $25 million today. But the historic value of the dinner set and the royal clothes, if they can be recovered, would effectively make them priceless.
Charles was distraught at the loss, and he blamed the sudden storm on witchcraft. Records indicate that 19 people were accused of causing it, and, according to the Burntisland Heritage Trust, up to ten of them were executed by strangulation or burning.
Sunken Treasure?
The Burntisland Heritage Trust has tried to find the wreck of the sunken ferry since 1997. The recent reports of their discovery are based on sonar anomalies detected in the thick silt on the estuary floor in the 1990s. The trust has long championed the idea that the anomalies indicate that the remains of the sunken ferry are located there.
According to the Telegraph, the trust now proposes to verify whether the sonar anomalies are from the Blessing of Burntisland—the identity of the supposed wreck has never been confirmed. But Archibald says the latest reports are based on “feasibility studies” the trust recently submitted to the local government that, he adds, had been “leaked” to news outlets.
Scottish authorities seem to have once believed that the wreck could be found, however. The location on the estuary floor was legally protected as a suspected wreck site in 1999, and the trust was granted a license to carry out investigations there by diving.
But in 2004, the government heritage agency Historic Scotland (now Historic Environment Scotland) contracted a commercial archaeology firm to conduct its own investigations. Following the contractor's report, Historic Scotland decided that the location was not a wreck site at all—and in 2013, Scotland's government revoked its legal protection.
The Burntisland Heritage Trust disputed the decision, alleging that the contractors had searched in the wrong place. The trust now hopes to use a different legal framework to protect the site, and to claim a salvage reward from the government for anything discovered there.
Archibald told the Telegraph that divers at the site found timber from a shipwreck, and that the next stage of the project would be to carbon-date the wood to see if it matched the age of the Blessing of Burntisland. Underwater recovery of the wreck at the site—and presumably any sunken treasure—is "imminent," the newspaper reports.
But Kingsley, an active underwater archaeologist, is skeptical and cautions that the search for the famous hoard may fail.
He says that the 2004 investigation seemed to confirm the findings of a 1999 investigation by a maritime archaeology team from St Andrew's University in Scotland, which found no magnetic anomalies indicating a shipwreck at the site. “There is no compelling proof that the ship lost in the Firth of Forth has come to light—no artifacts, no hull, no cultural remains,” he says.
And Kingsley notes there is no mention of such an immense loss in royal records from the time: historical sources suggest only “two trunks” of the king's silver vessels were lost in a sinking in 1633, rather than the 20 cartloads of treasure described in some accounts.
As a result, Kingsley fears the famous story of the sunken treasure may have grown much larger in retellings than it actually was, and that searching for the wreck may be a mistake: "Based on what’s been published, the unbelievable discovery of a royal cargo of treasure, regrettably, seems to be just that—unbelievable, the stuff of dreams.”
