- A sunken ship laden with a maharajah's treasures has
been discovered in what is expected to be one of the richest recoveries
in maritime history.
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- Alec Crawford, 52, and his wife Moya, 42, of Fife, say
they have located the Royal Mail steamship that was sunk by a German torpedo
in the Mediterranean in 1916 around 3000 metres beneath the sea after an
exhaustive search.
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- On board was the Maharajah of Kapurthala's cargo of precious
gems, believed to be worth tens of millions of pounds.
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- It is believed the vessel, which the couple have codenamed
Britannia, also holds a bounty of Egyptian coins and a bullion room containing
gold and silver bars worth around £20m.
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- If all the cargo can be recovered, it could be worth
more than the £50m in gold salvaged from HMS Edinburgh in the Barents
Sea in the eighties, and will reinforce the couple's reputation as one
of the leading deep salvage specialists in the world.
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- Their company, Deep Water Recovery and Exploration, won
the salvage rights to the wreck more than two years ago and will be conducting
the delicate removal operation of its cargo for the vessel's London insurance
company by the end of the year.
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- Details of the operation have been shrouded in secrecy
for fear of piracy, but the couple have been searching for the wreck since
February 1999 using sonar and underwater cameras.
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- It is unclear at this stage how much the operation will
be worth to the couple, who received £1m in 1997 when they broke
the deep water salvage record by raising 1000 tonnes of copper from the
French ship Francois Vieljeux in 1250 metres off the Spanish coast.
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- One expert said last night that no-one could tell the
true condition of the gems until they are raised. The nearest equivalent
was the state of the artefacts on the Titanic, which sank only four years
earlier.
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- Chemical reactions caused problems at that depth. There
was not much oxidation but there were other reactions because of the chlorides
in the seawater.
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- Mr Crawford has been largely based in the Mediterranean
on the ship Redeemer during the operation, with Mrs Crawford co-ordinating
from their farm at Newport-on-Tay.
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- She said the project has been agonising and dangerous
and that most of their efforts had been taken up by painstaking, almost
inch-by-inch, examination of the sea bed. The real work began now in the
recovery.
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