Culture

Billion Dollar Wreck Found

by LotusFlower | February 2, 2009 at 09:48 am

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The British Government have given an American salvage company permission to explore and recover artifacts including an estimated billion dollars in gold from a shipwreck found in the English Channel.

The ship is the Victory, not Nelson's Victory but the warship that sank in 1744.

The salvage team are not only likely to find treasure but also the bones of the 1,000 men that went down with the ship - that's around 206,000 individual bones though most will have now gone after such a long time undersea.

A shipwreck believed to contain more than a billion dollars of gold has been discovered at the bottom of the English Channel.

HMS Victory, the legendary British warship which was the predecessor to Lord Nelson's Victory, sank during a storm in 1744, taking more than 1,000 sailors to their deaths.

The ship's location remained a mystery despite numerous searches, until Odyssey Marine Exploration discovered the wreck in May 2008.

The Florida-based firm found the site 330ft under the English Channel, nearly 100km from where the ship was historically believed to have been wrecked, near the Channel Islands.

Jason Williams, executive producer of JMW Productions, which filmed the discovery, said: "Reports from the time say that the ship was carrying four tonnes of gold, around £400,000 sterling, which it picked up from Lisbon on its way to Gibraltar. Today this has a bullion value of £125 million, but that is just its raw weight. That means it is worth about a billion dollars."