A 19th-century shipwreck was uncovered in good condition loaded with champagne bottles in the deep Baltic Sea. The discovery was made by a team of Polish divers off the south coast of Sweden.
The ancient sailing ship was, “loaded to the sides with champagne, wine, mineral water and porcelain,” according to the statement by the Baltictech team, who made the discovery.
“I have been diving for 40 years, and it often happens that there is one bottle or two… but to discover a wreck with so much cargo, it’s a first for me,” Tomasz Stachura, the leader of the diving team that discovered the wreck told CNN.
When the divers first discovered the wreck on the sonar, they thought it to be a fishing boat. But when two of their divers were gone for almost two hours for what was supposed to be a quick dive, they knew they had found something interesting.
The team encountered over 100 bottles of champagne and clay bottles of mineral water. While the champagne seemed more valuable, it was the mineral water that was more precious according to Baltictech.
“Its value was so precious that transports were escorted by the police,” the statement by Baltictech said.
In older days, mineral water only reached the royals and was almost treated like medicine. The water bottles had the seal of Selters, a highly regarded German brand in those days which still exists today. The water comes from a mineral spring in the town of Selters, in Hesse, a central German state and has been bottled for more than 800 years.
“Thanks to the shape of the stamp and with historians’ help, we know that our shipment was produced between 1850-1867. Interestingly, the pottery factory into which the water was bottled also exists, and we are in contact with them to find out more details,” said Stachura.
The divers have informed the Swedish authorities about their finds, located about 20 nautical miles south of Öland, a Swedish island. However, Stachura said that the extraction of the bottles could take some time due to administrative restrictions.
“It had been lying there for 170 years, so let it lie there for one more year, and we will have time to better prepare for the operation,” he said.
Stachura told the BBC that the shipment could have been transported to Tsar Nicholas I, the Russian emperor, who is reported to have lost a ship in the same area during that time.
(With inputs from agencies)